VOTD 01/16/2025

 David Lynch etc: Eraserhead OST (IRS)

Purchased decades ago, used, somewhere.

An anecdote I shared on Facebook already, which I'll repeat here:

Some years ago, by wife posed the question of what was the first movie was saw in a theater together. I believed it to have been Fantasia. She thought it was Eraserhead. She admitted I was probably right about that one.

I wanted to see Eraserhead badly. I didn't know what I was in for when we went. I asked several people what it was about, and nobody could or would tell me. I understand that in part now. I remember sitting in the balcony with her, a combination of transfixed, horrified, confused, and more than a little embarrassed that I had taken my new girlfriend to this film. It wouldn't be the last time regarding the latter.

More recently: a few summers back during one of my family visits to Portland, OR, I was in Movie Madness. It's one of the last remaining video rental stores, surviving due to the fact that it became conjoined with the Hollywood Theatre, a nonprofit. Movie Madness is not only incredible for its collection of rental films, but they're a small museum of movie memorabilia. Among the items in the collection is the ear from Blue Velvet. 

On this particular visit, I was perusing the collection, and what I thought was some beautiful noise/sound music started playing through their speaker system. I thought, what is that? When I looked at their TV screen, sure enough it was the opening to Eraserhead. I should have guessed.

Sound and music is an important element in most cinema experiences. In the case of this film, it's critical. Listening to this pressing of the soundtrack (released by the new wave label IRS 1982), this sounds a bit flat and I wonder if subsequent issues have done a better job. This would get occasional spins back in the day on WRCT, though it's difficult to pick out anything besides "In Heaven". The Fats Waller organ pieces are blended with low level noise, and sound (intentionally) distant. (Note my blog post from a few days ago.)

The sound design is admirable here: original, bleak, but also beautiful. It's easy to say this soundtrack presages more recent "dark ambient" albums, ambient music with a noise element to it. Maybe it's true. It wouldn't surprise me if the sound of this film was influential on quite a few sound artists. Clearly David Lynch paid a great deal of attention to making sure this film sounded right, in addition to its beautiful appearance. 

And I do think it's a beautiful film, despite being in black and white and scenery that sometimes looks old, industrial, thoroughly used.

When I think of Martin Scorsese, I think of Taxi Driver. I don't know that it's his best film, I just know it's the one that comes to mind for me first and foremost. John Waters: Female Trouble. Jim Jarmusch: Down By Law.  George Romero: Night of the Living Dead. 

David Lynch to me will always be the person who brought Eraserhead into the world. Maybe there are better films he's made. I couldn't help but identify with Henry with his crazed hair, nervous, unsettled, unsure of himself and his future. 

VOTD 01/14/2025

 Fabio Frizzi: Manhattan Baby OST (Sub Ost)

Purchased at Double Decker Records in Allentown, PA

Here's where I am: It's a Tuesday afternoon, 23 degrees F outside and lightly snowing. My spring semester classes began yesterday. I'm writing again for the discipline of writing, unsure if I've essentially run out of things to say.

Soundtrack recordings have been a major component of the running narrative of this blog. I think Fabio Frizzi has produced two especially good (if similar) soundtracks, for Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead (AKA Gates of Hell) and The Beyond (AKA Seven Doors of Death). Fulci's films are a guilty pleasure of mine; you don't go in for the story, that's for sure. I suppose he directed a wide variety of genre films, including Westerns, some comedies, Giallo thrillers. He's best known for his horror films, particularly Zombie (AKA Zombi AKA Zombie Flesh Eaters), House by the Cemetery, The New York Ripper, A Cat in the Brain, and those mentioned above. They're marked by extreme gruesomeness. Even some of his less violent films, such as The Psychic (AKA Seven Notes in Black) and Don't Torture a Duckling have at least one really graphic effect in them. The latter shows a face being ripped off; obviously fake but still rather shocking.

Manhattan Baby (AKA Eye of the Evil Dead) is a terrible title. It's a lesser Fulci effort among trashy, disreputable movies anyway. It's mostly a possession tale with a tiny smattering of Raiders of the Lost Ark thrown in. I guess the title is meant to play on Rosemary's Baby, released more than a decade before this. It's not bloody enough to satisfy the real gorehounds, not creepy or interesting enough for anyone else. 

I feel like I've seen enough Italian horror movies that I can recognize one on sight, whether I know the director or not. Is it that Fulci reflects what other directs do, or is there a definable Italian aesthetic? Manhattan Baby is recognizably Italian, despite the location. It's just not a particularly good example.

So too the music is ho hum, and repeats itself more than other Frizzi efforts I've heard. His music has been mistaken for that of Goblin, more Italians making music for Italian horror movies. They in the same neighborhood, although Goblin's music tends to be louder and more intense. 

Once in a while there are solo tenor saxophone breaks. They're processed in an early-80s kind of way, subtle, but not to my liking. 

I bought this at Double Decker Records in Allentown, during one of my visits to my parents in eastern Pennsylvania before they relocated permanently to Portland, OR. Double Decker has since gone out of business and I guess sold out their stock to a store in New Kensington, so I must pay that a visit soon.

VOTD 01/10/2025

 Carlo Gesualdo da Venoas: Sacred Music, Volume 1 (MHS)

Purchased at Jerry's Records from the Duquesne University collection

I've made a blog post about Gesualdo before, so no doubt I've shared the more salacious story of murdering his wife and her lover. I probably stated something about how these things mean less over long periods of time, seeing as there's nobody alive to recall firsthand what he did over four hundred years ago.

I was instead thinking about the purpose of music. I didn't want to put something on heavy, again looking for music that was smoother, less barbed I suppose. The local classical radio station would promote itself by telling the listener how "soothing" it is. The cellist I used to play with would get incensed about this: "Classical music isn't soothing! It's EXCITING!" Likewise, someone in my past, probably a teacher, said with self-assurance that the purpose of music was not to relax or fall asleep to it. 

I will ceaselessly push again anyone making such definitive statements. Of course you can fall asleep to music. My sleep aid for some months now has been to bring up a drone or ambient streaming radio station on my phone and play if quietly next to me in bed. 

A college professor once said that the purpose of music was expression. Well, no, I don't agree with that, or at least that's not the complete story. If anything, I sometimes push against performers trying to be expressive. Maybe I want the notes, the sounds, to lie flat so to speak. To just breathe, not to "express" anything. 

I guess it's fair to say Gesualdo is considered to be one of the "weirder" Renaissance composers. Some could be highly chromatic; Orlando di Lassus went through a dramatically chromatic era. At times here, Gesualdo sounds like a standard period composer, with an occasional glimpse of that unpredictable chromaticism that marks his music. 

Truth is, all Renaissance vocal music sounds strange to me. I don't find Gesualdo any more or less radical or unpredictable than many other composers of the general era. I think the issue of whether he "knew what he was doing" or not is old and boring. Accept him or don't, as one might accept Satie or not. 

But I admit, even at its most radical, I still find this music calming.

1975

 I read some album or another was having its fiftieth anniversary this year. I decided to look up albums released in 1975. This would have been a year or two before I started buying records for myself.

The results surprised me. Here are albums from 1975 that I have in some format or another (many of them inexpensive used CDs) in my personal collection, presently. Not even things I might have sold off over the years.

Bob Dylan: Blood on the Tracks

Led Zeppelin: Physical Graffiti

Parliament: Mothership Connection; Chocolate City

Frank Zappa: One Size Fits All

Lou Reed: Metal Machine Music

Brian Eno: Discreet Music

Fripp & Eno: Evening Star

Keith Jarrett: The Köln Concert

Tangerine Dream: Rubycon

Tom Waits: Nighthawks at the Diner

Henry Cow: In Praise of Learning

Zappa/Beefheart: Bongo Fury

Funkadelic: Let’s Take It to the Stage

Anthony Braxton: New York, Fall 1974; Five Pieces 1975; Dona Lee; Trio and Duet

King Crimson: USA

Robert Wyatt: Ruth is Stranger Than Richard

Charles Mingus: Change One; Changes Two; Mingus at Carnegie Hall

Kansas: Song for America

Area: Crac!; Are(A)zone

Slapp Happy/Henry Cow: Desperate Straits

Le Mysterie Des Voix Bulgares: Le Mysterie Des Voix Bulgares

Yes: Yesterdays

Felt Kuti & Africa 70: Everything Scatter

Arnold Schoenberg: Piano Music (Nonesuch)

Rudy Ray Moore: Dolemite soundtrack

Mike Mantler/Carla Bley: 13, 3/4

Monty Python’s Flying Circus: The Album of the Soundtrack of Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Chick Corea: Circling In

Krzysztof Penderecki: Magnificat

Alan Braufman: Valley of Search

Derek Bailey: Improvisation

Paul Bley/John Gilmore/Paul Motian/Gary Peacock: Turning Point

Leo Ornstein: Quintette/Three Moods

I'm sure that says a lot about me, including all the time I've spent in used record stores hunting down interesting finds. What does it say about the state of music fifty years ago? Seems like a pretty adventurous time, and this was pre-punk rock and the independent label boom of the early 80s.

VOTD 01/08/2025

 Sun Ra/Merzbow: Strange City (Cold Spring)

Purchased at The Attic

I have a several stated reasons I've been writing to this blog, such as the discipline of sitting down and writing regularly, and increasing in small measure my digital footprint and body of work. There's a minor ulterior motive that I haven't stated: I wanted to know that, if I had something to write about, I could sit down and write a book.

I think I'm reasonably knowledgeable about certain things, a broad understanding of music in general and a greater depth of knowledge on particular topics. I know that writing to a blog isn't quite the same; there is no degree of research on my part, for example. The collected blog postings here would probably amount to the size of a short book. I don't have a topic on which to write a book and I'll be satisfied with having accomplished what I have.

And who needs me to write a book anyway? What purpose would it serve? I know a good deal about Anthony Braxton's music, but there are several good books devoted to him already. Likewise Sun Ra. I can see the need for a good book in English about Bernd Alois Zimmermann, but he and his music are a topic I don't think I'd ever be qualified to write about, even with many hours of research.

And what is it that I'm doing here anyway? Part opinion, part autobiography, some minor music analysis. It's low intensity, amuses or engages a few friends, and maybe it will add to the assessment of my body of work once I'm gone. Which I hope is no time soon.

What am I to make of this particular album? The notes on the back cover read, "Music by Masami Akita. A deformed mix of Sun Ra's Strange Strings + The Magic City + Merzbow materials". The cover lists it as Sun Ra/Merzbow, but it really should be reversed. There's thick, dense layering of sounds which are clearly mostly Merzbow electronics, with Sun Ra sometimes mixed in. At times it sounds as if there's some sampling and manipulation, but mostly is sounds like Strange Strings bubbles to the surface in the mire of other sounds/noise.

Some notes on those particular Sun Ra albums. They both come from a time in Sun Ra's most "experimental" phase. I don't write that word lightly, because I consider it to be broadly overused. Strange Strings  is surely among the strangest albums ever recorded, created six decades before one can download several hundred dense noise albums from Bandcamp. The band as a whole were given electric string instruments they didn't know how to play, and recorded the results. In doing so, Sun Ra removes the possibility of virtuosity in his band. It's so singular in this respect (at least for the mid-1960s), it was probably wise he didn't pursue this approach beyond that session.

The Magic City is one of the Arkestra's most epic sessions of the time. The showcase was "The Shadow World" a piece Sun Ra would play for years in concert. It might be included in this Merzbow remix somewhere, but if so I don't hear it. 

Sun Ra embraced noise. I don't only mean Strange Strings. There's an organ/Moog solo on Live at Montreux that I think rivals many so-called power electronics recordings. In Sun Ra's case, it was an element of what he did, not the definition. So how would he feel about Merzbow? Sun Ra delighted in sounds that bothered other people. He wanted to shake things up. Would this be too much for him though? Not "too much" in the sense of not being able to handle it, but how would he have reacted to its unrelenting nature. I'm not convinced he would have been happy about it, but that is idle speculation at best.

I have recalled listening to Botztoutai with Memorial Gadgets, one of the (if not the) first LPs of Merzbow released in the US, by RRRecords. On one listening, I'm certain I heard a little bit of Stockhausen blended into the mix. It was was brief, but recognizably one of the early electronic works, most likely Telemusik. I later mentioned it to Ron Lessard, who released the record. He laughed and was delighted by that; I said that I thought it was kind of cheating, using someone else's electronic sounds mixed with your own.

I think there's something of a lost opportunity here. I don't know what exactly he would have done, but it doesn't seem like an interesting use of the source material to have bits of it playing in the background while what amounts to another Merzbow noise session plays over top. I think it would have been more interesting to transform the recordings in some way, perhaps even overlay more tracks modeled after the Strange Strings  approach.

I have a couple of Merzbow LPs, and I think a couple is all you probably ever need. I'll add this to the small stack.

The CD issue has completely different tracks listed. I wonder if they're included in the digital download included with this LP. I guess I'll find out. 

CDOTD 01/06/2025

 Charles Ives: Universe Symphony/Orchestral Set No. 2/The Unanswered Question (Centaur)

Probably purchased used at Jerry's Records

Like any self-respecting/self-loathing 61-year old urban liberal, much of my terrestrial radio listening time is devoted to the local NPR affiliate. In this case it's WESA, the former WDUQ. There's some jazz programming on the weekends (local and syndicated) but mostly their airwaves are taken up by various non-local news/news-talk shows.

Sometimes they feature spots and interviews with musicians. Generally it's a current "independent" (whatever that means these days) pop singer of some sort, very broadly defined.

I'll defer to my father, who commented to me that nearly all of the music featured on these shows is, I think the word he used was "terrible." I'm probably more sympathetic to some of them than he is, but I think he's by and large on the nose. They're almost always boring interviews, and I rarely hear anything featured that I believe to be especially interesting. Or even good.

So it was refreshing to hear a feature spot a week or two ago regarding Charles Ives. I forget which show, perhaps All Things Considered? Or 1A? It doesn't matter. 

Part of the reason was due to the sesquicentennial of Ives' birth. They played a recording of him singing and playing piano (I think the host said "so-called singing"). There were the general facts about Ives, making his money in insurance, not getting most of his performances until after he retired from composing. I don't remember mention of his father, who is supposed to have taught Charles and his sister to do things like sing pieces in two different keys at once. Special mention was made of the Concord Sonata and its difficulties.

The story, the music excerpts, were far more interesting than anything more current I've heard featured on the same programming. In addition to his interest in Emerson and Thoreau, they referred to him as a good-old fashioned New England abolitionist, a fact I found to be very encouraging. (Supposedly he was not so tolerant of Henry Cowell's homosexuality. We're all of our times I guess, and if I'm wrong about that I will happily wipe out this text.) The story also mentioned that more attention is being paid in Europe to Ives' birth anniversary, something that doesn't surprise me in the least. There's far more money to be made in America for orchestras to play programs of video game music than anything by Ives.

Universe Symphony was Ives' last huge unfinished work. He was concerned enough with it to have left notes prior to his passing. The task was taken up by composer Larry Austin some two decades later, or more accurately that's whose reconstruction is recorded here. It's set for multiple orchestras, so the recording must be a pale experience compared to sitting in the middle of this sound created by Ives and his editors. It starts slowly, very slowly, for a good long while, with bubbles of activity popping up here and there. It's a continuous work defined by sections "about" past, present, and future. It's worth a listen, even if I can't be certain of how it compares to Ives' own vision of the work.

The first and third movements of Orchestral Set No. 2 are among favorites in the Ives canon. The first is a bit of an uneven dirge based on a minor third, with various familiar melodies interwoven. For example, I clearly recognized "Yes, Jesus Loves Me" in the mix. The third, "From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voices of the People Again Arose". While that may seem needlessly wordy, the piece was inspired by a real life event witnessed by Ives: a train station of people raising their voices together in hymn upon hearing the news of the sinking of the Lusitania. It captures the feeling remarkably, and was supposed to have been one of Ives' favorites among his works. 

Then of course the CD ends with that old favorite, "The Unanswered Question". It brings to mind for me the second-to-last paper I wrote as a graduate student, taking on the question of polymensural, polymetric, and polytemporal music. (It's the earliest example of the latter I could cite.)

I'm going to have to put on more Ives in the near future, including the LP box set that includes his singing that bothered that stuckup NPR host. 

VOTD 01/05/2025

 Iannis Xenakis: Music Today Album 2: Akrata - Achorripsis - Polla Ta Dhina - ST/10 (Angel)

Purchased used at the Record Graveyard in 1981

I don't think I'm someone especially touched strongly by nostalgia. I've been teaching at Carnegie Mellon University since 2005. Prior to that, I entered CMU as a freshman in 1981, and bombed out by the end of my second year.

Classes begin in a week and I've started prepping. My current classroom is in a building that wasn't part of the music department when I was a student. While on campus, I wandered the buildings where I took classes as a student. I tried to remember how I felt being in those places for the first time, but I couldn't remember specifically. I know I was initially excited and nervous. It's such a long time ago. I had a few specific memories, such as watching from a distance as George Romero directed part of Creepshow, but little about those very first days as a music student. 

Where did that 18 year old go?

The first guest speaker on campus my first year was Iannis Xenakis, in a series of speakers regarding computers and music. The CMU School of Music was (and to a lesser extent still is) a pretty conservative institution overall, in both faculty and student body. It took a joint effort of the music and computer science departments to get a "computers and music" lecture series happening. I think this was in part due to Roger Dannenberg's efforts, who was at CMU earning his doctorate at the time. (Roger recently went into retirement.)

I've shared this story many times, so forgive me if this is familiar territory, even on this blog. Xenakis spoke to the music school largely about his UPIC system, a device that looked like an electronic drafting table where you could draw images that the computer would translate into sound. Prior to that however, he gave a broader lecture about his music (and computer music in general) in the then new Science Building, now Wean Hall. I attended out of curiosity, coming in mid-way due to my class schedule. 

During this lecture, he spoke about his early orchestral works "Metastaseis" and "Pithoprakta". He projected images of the graphs on which the sounds were derived while playing recordings of the pieces. 

I've seen both works performed years later by the CMU Philharmonic, and they're surprisingly quiet pieces. Each instrument has a completely individual part with respect to all other players, so the strings aren't building sound through reinforcement. 

During the lecture in 1981, he played them loud. And I do mean LOUD, jarringly loud, headache inducing loud, and I was sitting in the back of the lecture hall.

What did my 18 year old self make of this? I hadn't heard anything like it before and it in some ways seemed like a bad joke. Nonetheless, some weeks later when I noticed this used Xenakis LP for $3, I bought it on sight. Despite a not-entirely-pleasant introduction to Xenakis' music, I guess I was intrigued.

The Record Graveyard was a block or so off campus, just shy of Craig St and diagonal from the Carnegie Museum. I think I had lunch with my parents on Craig my first day there and noticed the record store, because later that day or the next I walked there and bought Henry Cow's In Praise of Learning. That's another record I still have. 

The standout on this album to me is the opening piece, "Polla Ta Dhina", a work for children's chorus and orchestra. He pulls this off by having the chorus sing the text in a unison A-440 while the sort of rolling, controlled chaos you'd expect from a Xenakis piece happens in the orchestra. It gives the work an identity and focus I find to not be so true of the other works on this collection. 

The remaining three works find Xenakis in more formalist mode, working through various forms of higher mathematics to derive his musical ideas. They're drier works. "ST/10" (excuse me, full title "ST/10=1-080262") is one of his early computer-derived compositions. Unlike the current developments in generative AI, Xenakis isn't trying to get the computer to "create" a musical composition. It's an exercise in algorithmic composition. I generally find the three "ST" works to be more interesting in principle than execution. That said, the Jack Quartet staked their claim in the new music world by playing the "ST/4" by memory. I've heard a recording they made, and they breathed some life into the work.

I have a copy of the score for "Achorripsis". It came from the collection of Easley Blackwood, a composer who taught at the University of Chicago for many years. The university's library sold off his collection of scores when Easley went into a care facility, and my friend Rob Pleshar grabbed this in addition to many other interesting works. The price pencilled on the first page was $21- (yikes, how long ago?). Also pencilled in Easley's hand: "Incredible that this 'composer' was ever taken seriously." I guess there just isn't pleasing everyone. Here I am, more than forty years later, still trying to figure these things out.