CDOTD 02/12/2025

VA: Beat at Cinecittà (Crippled Dick Hot Wax!)

Purchased used at Jerry's Records Future Zone

This blog isn't serious music journalism, criticism, nor musicology, so maybe I shouldn't apologize for making the narrative about me much of the time. As recently as yesterday I posted question about whether I had anything left to offer in this forum, yet here I am again.

Hardly a week goes by when I don't pay a visit to at least one of our local record and CD shops around Pittsburgh, and often more. You wouldn't know it to see my studio/mancave at home, but I go home empty handed more often than not. I didn't walk into Jerry's today intending to find anything in particular; that's probably not how Jerry's works anyway. If you're lucky, something you want or looks interesting turns up. Good stuff, even if the prices have largely increased since the time Jerry sold off the business, tends to move quickly. 

During those recent years, the 78 room was cleared out to make space for other non-LP media: CDs mostly, DVDs, laserdiscs, VHS tapes, cassettes, books, and other odds and ends. New CD adds are closest to the door.

You just don't know what will turn up. I recognized the tiny blimp on the spine of this disc for the Crippled Dick Hot Wax! label. This takes me back to a time when I worked for Borders for two or three years in the 1990s, the apex of compact discs as a popular medium, VHS just on its way out with DVDs just starting to quickly take over. Several items on that label turned up at the store which I probably bought with my employee discount (40% off for part time employees!). I don't remember this one in particular but we did have Jerry Van Rooyen's At 250 Miles per Hour, Gert Wilden's Schulmädchen Report, and particularly Manfred Hübler/Siegfried Schwab's Vampyros Lesbos: Sexadelic Dance Party. All European soundtrack collections.

I've seen Jess Franco's Vampyros Lesbos. The most memorable thing about it is the music cue used as the opening cut on the CD collection. Oh of their were beautiful nude women who I guess were vampires. There was also a scene with those Aurora monster models in it. Franco's not known for his tight plotting. Still, with a title like Vampyros Lesbos, you ought to come up with something memorable.

The subtitle to this particular collection reads: "A sensual homage to the most raunchy, erotic filmmusic of the Italian 60s & 70s cinema." That's a lot to live up to. Like I've quoted David F. Friedman before, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." A number of these pieces, if you were to ask me the country of origin, I'd probably guess Italy. There's a certain sound to them, similar to how Italian films have a certain look to them. I've seen enough Italian horror movies that I feel I can guess if something's Italian by its look and production, and not just the clearly dubbed voices. 

What makes them sound Italian? There's the era for one thing, the swingin' 60s and 70s, with lounge-y blues-rock. Certain uses of guitar, especially as a trebly twangy lead instrument. And definitely the wordless vocals, scattered throughout these excerpts. Only one track is a song with lyrics, all other voices are vocalise. It's possible this overall Italian sound originates with Ennio Morricone's pop orchestrations, but I don't know enough on the topic to say that definitively. Morricone is nowhere to be found on this collection, but a single Bruno Nicolai piece is. Often on Morricone soundtracks, you'll see Bruno listed as the conductor. 

It's Riz Ortolani who appears most often here. Riz might be best known for his soundtrack for Mondo Cane, but the work I know better is Cannibal Holocaust. There's another example of me having listened to the soundtrack without ever having seen the film. (And I don't need to see it. It just looks gross and cruel. I don't feel like sitting through Hostel either.) The opening theme for CH is pure vocalise Italian pop, followed by a really grimy, ugly minimal synthesizer cue. Very strange. 

I guess part of my personal attraction to sitting down with these soundtracks and collections is the weirdness of them when they're separated from the visuals. Plus it's a different era, and a country besides the US, it all contributes to it feeling alien to my experience in 2025. That's a good thing. If Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Taylor Swift are the state of popular music these days, I'll gladly stay in the past.

The woman at the register was enthusiastic when she saw I was buying this, and said there were more sold off by the same person to be put out. I guess I know where I'm going Tuesday when they put more stock in the new bins.

VOTD 02/11/2025

Matching Mole: Matching Mole's Little Red Record (CBS)

I don't remember where I bought this.

I suppose one of the pleasures of a sizable collection of LPs and CDs is not remembering that I owned something. Have I bought duplicates of anything unintentionally? Not many things, but it's true. There are some records that come in series, such as the Spectrum series on Nonesuch, that have covers similar enough that I don't always remember if I have a particular issue. I've learned, yes I probably do have a copy, and even if I don't, don't spend the money unless it seems essential.

I knew this record from my college radio days. I can't recall if I was told or read about it, or if I came across it in my thorough hunting through the WRCT record library. The attraction would have been Robert Wyatt's name primarily. 

It's poignant that I think Robert's best work is after he became a paraplegic. He drunkenly fell out of a building, losing the use of his legs. If he sounds like he has the saddest voice ever heard, he's certainly earned it.

If you didn't know, Matching Moles is a play on the name of his former band Soft Machine (I mean itself a direct WS Burroughs reference). In French, the name is "machine molle." There's no hiding their political leaning, both the title and the blatantly Maoist cover painting of the band. This in itself seems amazing given the current times politically. Not that this music could attract the attention of even a minor subsidiary of a major label now, but the blatantly Communist images would have been a non-starter. I mean, you could find some way to get it released in this form, but my guess is you'd be on your own.

Somewhat similar to Soft Machine, the music sits in a place somewhere between Canterbury-scene prog leanings and jazz-rock. It's a good record but I get the sense that CD length might have done them well on this. A little more room to stretch might have done the music some good, but who knows? Maybe the LP length reeled them in from going too excessive, kept the results tighter. The group only lasted as long as two LPs before disbanding, Robert's accident happening later.

There are some odd touches to this that says it's a studio project and not simply a document of the band playing, specifically quiet voices speaking in spots in groups. Brian Eno makes a synth appearance on side two. There's an odd, slight pitch shift and what sounds like a loop near the end of side two that's a studio creation for sure. The pieces run together and are generally not discreet songs, making identification difficult. At moments, when Robert's singing, the music wouldn't have been out of place on Rock Bottom. 

I don't recall if I noticed that Robert Fripp is credited as producer. This would have come at an interesting time for him too, in that general time frame when the Boz Burrell/Mel Collins/Ian Wallace band was winding down, and the Wetton/Cross/Bruford/Muir lineup was forming. 

Robert Wyatt is an excellent drummer, by the way. I'm not fond of how the drums are recorded/produced here, they sometimes sound flat and almost muted at times. Maybe it's an accurate capture of his sound. I can't strike it up to the state of the art of recording though; Bill Bruford's drum set always sounded amazing on Yes records: tight and snapping. I even believe the first problem with Tales From Topographic Oceans is Alan White's dead and thuddy-sounding kit. 

I am starting to wonder again if I'm running out of steam on this blog, whether I really have anything to say and it's not just an empty exercise. However, if it meant I picked out this record for a good re-listen, then at least there's that.

VOTD 02/10/2025

 Emil Beaulieau: Abusing the Little Ones (Self Abuse)

I can't recall where I bought this. I note this under the title because at one time I could told you where I bought most of my individual records, but no longer.

If one of the basic tenets of punk rock was to learning to play an instrument by forming a band first, where does that put noise artists? To go from unrepentant instrumental primitivism to no discernable skill whatsoever?

I feel like this is something I've covered in previous blog postings, so I'll avoid prattling on too long on this subject now. 

The most interesting "noisicians" have skills, but they're necessarily in any way traditional. Some of it might have to do with synth patching, audio editing, or at least new and creative ways to put together sound-generating electronics. And even if their intention is to annoy or even crush the listener with sound, there has to be an ear for getting interesting results.

Unfortunately, sometimes the imagery or subtext these people use is reprehensible. I know there's an argument to be made for unsettling imagery to accompany unsettling music, but often find that too easy. I don't need to see autopsy or medical atrocity photos, and that's assuming the person involved isn't flirting with fascist or even blatant Nazi imagery. I mean seriously, I think it's fair to assume Hitler would not have approved of your recordings, if his regime banned jazz and too many syncopated rhythms. And really, think about that: a government agency banning a musical rhythm. Those Nazis sure were fussy.

Okay, while Nazis of any era are thoroughly worthy of ridicule, I also don't want to treat the subject too lightly either. 

Emil Beaulieau: AKA Ron Lessard of RRRecords out of Lowell, Mass. It's no secret that one is the other. Ron told me that Emil was actually the mayor of the small town in New Hampshire where he grew up. And who was going to know or complain?

Abusing the Little Ones is definitely intended as a provocative title, but it refers to Ron manipulating and reworking of a series of 7" records on the same Self Abuse label. Of the eight noise bands worked over, only the names Atrax Morgue and Crawl Unit are familiar to me, the latter being a generally noisy drone project.

I know the intention of some of these....what do I call them? Musicians? Broadly stated it's true, but I'm sure some would bristle at the description. "Noise artists", even if I've used it above, seems clinical. But whatever you call them, bludgeoning the listener with sound seems to be a frequent objective. That requires volume. But ironically, I sometimes enjoying listening to records like this at a relatively low volume and find them relaxing. Maybe it's a similar thing to people who listen to white or pink noise generators at a low volume aid with sleeping.

A detail about this record I like: side one ends with a lock groove. Turn the record over, the audio on side two begins with the same passage. Renaldo and the Loaf's Songs for Swinging Larvae does something similar. Another reason I continue to like vinyl records.

02/09/2025

 The Monkees: Head OST (Rhino)

Purchased used at Vinyl Remains

Superbowl, Superbowl, Superbowl. The closest I come to caring is that I'd rather see Philadelphia win than Kansas City, for no particularly good reason. That's about as much passion I can muster. I like to say that my general distaste for American football originates with having watched five seasons of my high school's generally bad team from the band bleachers. To be fair to them, they played teams from generally much larger schools. And to be fair to myself, I probably wouldn't care too much about football anyway. 

So, put on a record, blog some thoughts, possibly finish the Dune book I'm reading (#3). Looking for something to put on, I was unsure if I had listened to this one completely. 

I think it was Michael Weldon (Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film) suggested watching Head to see The Monkees perform "careericide." I suppose the plotless, trippy feature would endear them to a certain audience in the long run, but this wasn't the cute quasi-sitcom from network TV that I'm sure many expected at the time.

I've seen I think two of those made for TV documentaries about The Monkees. The creation of impresario Don Kirshner, he specifically wanted a 100% image band that he could control completely. So what happens when the band rebels and decides to go their own path? What happens when a manufactured band becomes a real band?

I'm naturally inclined to side with them over Kirshner, but as with most things in life, the truth is a little more nuanced. They did sign up to be part of a television program playing a fictitious rock band. The instigator is acknowledged to be Mike Nesmith, who was starting to establish himself as songwriter outside of The Monkees. He'd later pen The Stone Poneys hit "Different Drum". In one of the docs, Don said he rued the day he met Mike Nesmith. 

But you know, what did he expect? They were talented singers (mostly), it was an era of questioning authority, it comes as little surprise that they'd want to be treated like adults and artists. Kirshner would later score a 100% image band by co-creating The Archies. 

What of the music, this record? It starts strangely enough with a musique concrète edit of clips from the film, not the way to start a pop album in the least. Even The Beatles put "Revolution #9" in the middle of the album. Of the six proper songs on the album, two were written by Peter Tork, one Mike Nesmith. Tork's "Do I Have To Do This All Over Again" is a fairly strong 60s rocker, as is Nesmith's "Circle Sky". "Daddy's Song", written by Harry Nilsson, is an okay song but always kind of struck me as a take on Paul McCartney's "Your Mother Should Know" from Magical Mystery Tour.

I find the standout is the opening/closing song for the film, "Porpoise Song" cowritten by Carole King. There's a demo recording of her singing the song, probably on Youtube somewhere. It's slow and dreamy, interesting chord progression, with an orchestral arrangement that again recalls what George Martin did with The Beatles. In this case I don't consider it a knock, I like the orchestration.

I guess the question with The Monkees, or any music for that matter, is: if you like it, does the source matter? It's easy to look down on their early recordings as prefab, but some of the songs are quite good. They had excellent songwriters working for the show. Ironically, in this age of the mega pop star, those vocalists all seem manufactured to me. I don't know one voice from another, and the vocals are so thoroughly processed that I don't think it matters. The songwriting is often by committee. It's as though they're trying to be a package the way that The Monkees were intended to be, whereas The Monkees strived to break out of that box. 

VOTD 02/06/2025

 Anthony Braxton: Creative Music Orchestra 1976 (Arista)

Purchased used decades ago

Back to Braxtonia.

Forgive me for namedropping Anthony yet again. After I worked with him in 2008, I returned to graduate school. I was flush with excitement from the experience, and devoted at least one of my assigned papers to his work. 

There was an interview I read in my research I intended to paraphrase in my previous blog post, but failed to do so. (These missives are largely unplanned and come close to an improvisation in themselves.) What he said was effectively that there was an essential challenge considered by some creative musicians of his era. The push in jazz was that the music had grown increasingly fiery. Once you get to Coltrane (and Shepp and Sanders), how much more fiery could you really go? Instead, some of his early work goes in the opposite direction: small, intimate, pointillist. Consider his debut LP on Delmark with a lineup of Leroy Jenkins, Wadada Leo Smith, and Muhal Richard Abrams, as well as his two BYG LPs, one can see this idea played out. It must have also been confounding to some people; where's the jazz?

Point being: For Trio (Composition 76) definitely is an extension of this idea. However, if you know his mid-70s quartet recordings though, there's fire aplenty. The quartets with Dave Holland, Barry Altschul, and either Kenny Wheeler or George Lewis, could blow flames with the best of them. I recommend Quartet (Dortmund) 1976 (unreleased until 1991) for a particularly good example.

Then there's this album. I guess at one time, similar to Ornette a generation or so earlier and John Zorn a few years later, there was the lingering question of whether Anthony actually knew what he was doing. If you wanted to provide evidence to the prove he did, it was probably this session. Braxton in his personal lexicon eschewed the term "big band" in favor of "creative music orchestra." The instrumentation is more-or-less similar to a big band throughout, even if track two (Comp. 56) includes clarinets, contrabass clarinet, soprano saxophone, timpani, and no standard drum set. 

The music itself covers a wide range of expression. It's programmed with every other work being either upbeat or more pointillist/textural. Atonal bop - - chorale and points - - march - - more points with group voicings - - more atonal bop - - long tones with and textures and yes, more points.

It's fair to say that the standout piece ends side one, his Sousa-inspired march. It starts almost shockingly straight forward, but heads into more Braxton-ish territory for solos, with a rousing (and again traditional) closing.

I've always loved this piece dearly. It's as openly funny as Braxton gets, but there's no doubting that he enjoys marches. I managed to get my hands on an arrangement of the score and played the piece with OPEK twice; the first (and better) time is posted to Youtube.

He shared with me one anecdote from that session. The percussionist wasn't playing the bass drum part correctly. Frustrated, pianist Fred Rzewski took the mallet and read the part down, enabling the ensemble to get through that tough passage. 

In the liner notes of the Creative Orchestra (Köln) 1978, the liner notes refer to the march as "the greatest closer ever." I'd love to play it again but it would require more rehearsal. Really, a dream show of mine would be to play this album in its entirety, plus maybe add one or two more recent creative music orchestra pieces into the mix. But such a show would cost a lot of time and money, and if I'm going to throw money at a vanity performance, I'll make it my own music. 

But no question, if I did stage such a show, we'd end with the march.

VOTD 02/04/2025

 Anthony Braxton: For Trio (Arista)

Purchased from Jerry's Records

I've been taking advantage of the university's robust interlibrary loan system to access some scores unavailable to me in the general Pittsburgh area. The public library has its own ILL, but the school has one portal that allows me to search specific libraries and select request with a single mouse click. Very convenient. Specifically, I've been using this to access scores by Stockhausen and Braxton. Perhaps I'll think of others, but there isn't much that comes to mind that I can't already access locally that I want to view.

The published Braxton scores are a more recent development and extension of the Tri-Centric Foundation, the non-profit devoted to Braxton's work. There isn't a long list of published scores, and some of them I already had copied. When I worked with Anthony in 2008 (! time rushes by) he invited me to make copies of anything we used for myself. I made a point of printing up everything. 

One of the scores I ordered was the basis of this recording, Composition 76 in his opus list. The pictographic title is represented on the cover. No mention of the instrumentation appears on the cover, which I suspect was intentional. It's a different lineup on each side with no rhythm section in either case, only reed players. In addition to Anthony, side one has Henry Threadgill and Douglas Ewart, side two Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman. All AACM-associated players, the latter two of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.

Putting on the record I thought, hey! I can follow the score! The score begins with an identical passage for all three players, and side one begins completely differently. Okay, maybe the record labels are switched. Side two: no, same story. Returning to side one, I made no attempt to locate where they might be in the score, which is probably how one should listen to it anyway.

Is either side a complete realization of the work? I suspect not. I speculate that there could have been a complete reading by both ensembles edited to LP length. It would be easy to achieve. Both performances are pockets of activity separated by significant silences; excising material would be simple. It is in keeping with Braxton's stated aesthetic that the piece could begin anywhere and end anywhere, or fold back onto the start. The Threadgill/Ewart side is more spare, pointillist, fragmentary, probably with longer silences. On the Mitchell/Jarman side, the ensemble sounds as though it comes together for group passages more often and clearly, most notably a loud bass/contrabass saxophone passage.

The description on the score reads "twenty-six pages of three dimensional notation.' It's all printed on flat paper, though some staves lean up, down, expand, contract, and connect in ways that are meant to suggest three dimensions. Could there be a holographic rendering of the score that would make this happen?

It's amazing enough that Anthony would have been signed to a major label. If he didn't use the opportunity to release decidedly non-commercial recordings like this, would he have had a longer contract with Arista? I suspect not. He was never going to make money for the label, and a producer's faith and stock in an artist can only go so far. Even his most jazz-like sessions, New York, Fall 1974; Five Pieces 1975; Creative Music Orchestra 1976; The Berlin/Montreux Concerts are never completely in the free-jazz mode entirely. And as the joke goes, there's a reason they call it free jazz, because nobody can sell it. It's when he veered into entire LPs of improvisational chamber music with this and the Composition 95 for Two Pianos (performed by Fred Rzewski and Ursula Oppens, no less) or the sprawling three-LP For Four Orchestras that he challenged what a major label could release from a so-called jazz artist. The multi-orchestra work probably bankrupted him, likely not for the first or last time.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not a fan of the multi-orchestra piece, but I'll be damned if I don't admire it. In the notes he suggested there'd be works for orchestras on three planets by 1988, five planets by 1990, different star systems by 1995, and different galaxies by 2000. It's a beautiful thought, I wish I could muster that level of optimism. 

VOTD 02/03/2025

 Mauricio Kagel: Match Für 3 Spieler/Musik Für Renaissance-Instrumente (Avant Garde)

Purchased at Preserving Records

I was contemplating why I, as a musician and listener, have taken such particular interest in particular composers and performers, and have ignored or neglected others. I was about to write "we" but it seems to me I can only speak for my own experience.

There are the obvious reasons: something about the person's work appeals to us personally. That composer (and I'll just stick to that term specifically) has a particular voice or even body of work that resonates with me in some way. I've written about Morton Feldman and Olivier Messiaen on this blog multiple times, and there's something about each man's work that just....does it for me. Each are highly different, each are in many of their works immediately identifiable. And their music doesn't affect mine in any sort of direct way; if anything, I know enough to know that if I tried to draw directly on their music, I'd only sound like a pale or even bad version of what they do. And I don't like every work that either composer has written, which in itself I think is a good thing. It means that in some respect they didn't write the same work over and over.

Something else occurred to me. There are so many composers and musicians whose work is worthy of my time and attention, that I can't possibly pay attention to everyone. That's a case where a recording on a particular label can be very helpful, because I will notice anything that's on DG's Avant Garde imprint 

I know the name Mauricio Kagel. I know very little about him, and have only one or two other recordings of his music. Coincidentally, I had been studying one of his scores prior to purchasing this LP a few weeks. Well, studying is maybe too strong a word. I looked over a copy Acoustica at our university library, for loudspeakers and unusual acoustical sources. I was interested in its non-linearity, of a composition not defined by beginning-middle-end, but as a set of resources for constructing a performance. 

Match (1964) for cello and two percussionists comes off as a disjunct, post-War and possibly Darmstadt-style composition. I don't say that as a critique, I like some of that generation of European avant garde composers. I imagine it must be lively to see performed (and I wonder who might perform such as this in this era) and there's a sense on the recording of it having a bit of an absurd side. Aggressive cello playing (the score must be crazy) but also a vocal shout, a policeman's whistle, in addition to the more standard percussives and marimba. 

Musik (1965/66) opens with a ghostly chord played by the all pre-Baroque instrumental ensemble. It sounds like an effective use of instruments that largely lack the richness of more modern instruments. Both works are textural as opposed to melodic. I did take the time to look up the score online through school, and as I suspected it's thoroughly written out on staves, unlike Acoustica. There are also many instructions. Not only on the pages of introduction leading into the score, but also in the score itself. I don't really need to read through them.

It reminds me of an observation a student once shared with me regarding Stockhausen's music. He said that Karlheinz would make the circumstances of performance so difficult, that it probably meant his works get played less frequently than they might. I think any composer has the right to define or ask for anything they want, but it does get to be pretty ridiculous in scores such as these.

I like the latter work in particular. It's a kind of rolling, escalating/deescalating sound world. The question is, do I now dive deeper into Kagel's work? Maybe casually, but I don't expect a shelf full of Kagel recordings alongside the masses of Feldman, Ligeti, Messiaen, and Cage recordings I've acquired.

VOTD 02/02/2025

 VA: The Best of Doris Wishman (Modern Harmonic)

I think I bought this new at The Attic

In the spirit of my previous post, I pulled this out. Doris Wishman, what a character. In a sense I think she's something of a feminist hero. The exploitation film world was highly dominated by men to put it mildly. But there was Doris, an independent operator, riding the trends as she was able from the early 60s into the 1970s and beyond. She started in nudist movies, moving into lurid roughies, and then...weirder territory. She's probably best know for her two features starring Chesty Morgan, Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73. I guess Doris went where the work went and directed a few porn features under pseudonyms in the 70s. I'm not making excuses when I write that I've never seen any of those. The tracks collected here (conveniently) overlook those movies.

I almost had the chance to meet Doris. The Warhol Museum scheduled her movie Bad Girls Go To Hell, with Doris flying up from Florida to make a personal appearance. Unfortunately, there was a major hurricane that grounded her, and she couldn't come. I wrote a brief piece dedicated to her, recorded on the second Water Shed 5tet CD; I wanted to present her with a copy. I was later able to get copies to Doris' biographer Michael Bowen; in return, I got an autographed promotional still from that same film. nice! It hangs framed in a powder room in my basement, alongside autographs of Herschell Gordon Lewis, Ray Dennis Steckler, Mink Stole, and John Agar. 

The Warhol showed the movie regardless. I took my wife, and told her one of Doris' techniques to keep her movies cheap. She'd film without sync sound, and voices were dubbed into reaction shots. In other words, you'd see the back of someone's head as he's speaking to someone who's facing the camera, and then it switches when the response is spoken. It gives Doris' movies an additional level of "wrongness." Pretty quickly there's an all-reaction shot conversation in the movie, and my wife started going into a serious giggle fit. She couldn't stop laughing, almost howling. I wouldn't have cared, were we not in a full theater with friends around. I eventually managed to help her calm down. It was funny though.

The better part of this LP are the audio from various Wishman film trailers. "You! You! You! Do you know that....bad girls go to HELL?" As fellow exploitationeer David Friedman would say, "Sell the sizzle, not the steak." Side one is taken up with her nudist pictures, the craziest one being Nude on the Moon. Astronauts land on the Moon to find it's inhabited by a race of alien nudists! And conveniently, they communicate telepathically! Do they return to Earth or decide to stay! Watch it and find out!

For as barebones cheap as Doris would go, there are original songs in some of these pictures. Five on are side one, all written by Judith Kushner (not a Wishman pseudonym, I looked) three sung by the syrupy-voiced Ralph Young. I know it's such faint praise to say the song aren't awful, maybe even not bad. It's some post-50s schmaltz to be sure. The small studio backup band is professional, slicker than some of the original music examples on side two. The music on the trailers is clearly library music, at least some of the time.

Side two is centered on her 1970s pictures. Selling the "healthiness" of the nudist lifestyle is replaced with grittier, nastier titles and themes. "Another day, another man!" The music starts to sound more rocking, more far out! 

In some respects, we live in a pretty amazing time. You can make a feature film on an iPhone; someone made a feature using Zoom and it's supposed to be really good. The material costs of film have been potentially reduced to nearly nothing. The cost of a hard drive.

And yet, what a time Doris lived in. She was able to produce, direct, shoot, and edit her own feature films and get them into some sort of theater or another, and largely from Florida. The drive in circuit was a viable place to get your movie played, if it was fun or entertaining or shocking enough. yes, Doris' movies can be difficult to watch sometimes. But there's a great spirit to them, and she lived in a cinema world that no longer exists. For all of our advances, sometimes I think we've lost a lot too. 

CDOTD 01/30/2025

 VA: Sex, Sleaze and Soul (Nice Treat)

I don't recall where I bought this, possibly mail order.

I like movies. (Well, who doesn't?) I like movie trailers, largely. I like radio. I like movie ad spots for radio.

I don't know if I knew exactly what I was getting when I bought this, but I've gotten my money's worth and then some. 41 tracks, all but twelve being radio ad spots for exploitation, Blaxploitation, Gaysploitation (? if that's a thing) Kung Fu, and other generally disreputable films. 

And I love it. Often the theatrical trailers are better than the full length films, and the radio ads crank up the sales pitch even more. "The naughty stewardesses, they're a piece of class." I know, a shade misogynist there, but I can partly laugh it off due to the era. 1970s, some possibly some dating back to the 60s. 

These ads were often distributed to radio stations as 7" records, some 12", some reel to reels. I don't have any original examples and I don't really want to start throwing money at this sub-sub-set of vinyl oddities. There closest I have is a six minute one side 12" to be played in the lobby for Brainstorm and The Woman Who Wouldn't Die, "special lobby fear-delity." I know nothing about those films, nor many on this collection. But it's the sales pitch, the energy, the earnestness that I enjoy.

The remaining cuts are mostly music cues  and themes from Blaxploitation movies, and they're great. No credits are given, but I'm reminded I should seek out a couple of them. I need to look up the availability of Johnny Pate's Bucktown soundtrack. Even Rudy Ray Moore paid for a solid band for his super-cheap, independently-financed The Human Tornado. 

The label, Nice Treat, has only this collection to its credit as far as I can tell. No return address. Thrown together graphics on the package. Clearly fly-by-night, which seems appropriate for the subject matter. Still, I don't understand why I can't locate more collections such as this. I'd gladly buy more. Older movie radio spots, more recent, horror, sci fi, monster, mainstream films or fiercely independent, they'd get my business. As long as they sell it.

CDOTD 01/27/2025

 Hijokaidan: Romance (Alchemy)

Purchased used, probably at Eide's

It's a Monday afternoon, my wife's out of the house. It's not as though I need to fear putting something on down in my studio/man cave (I prefer the former, she calls it the latter) but it's easier sometimes not having to explain it. She walked past recently when I put on a Rusty Warren LP (famous for Knockers Up!). It's pretty tame by more current standards, but she found it strange that I'd put something like that on. It wasn't the content she wondered about so much as the what sounded like a Las Vegas show. Which I guess is partly true. 

It's easier not to have to explain this one either, considering it's a full CD length track of blistering, unrelenting noise. There are three people involved: JoJo (Hiroshige) on guitar, Junko (Hiroshige) on voice, and T(oshi) Mikawa on...the Mikawa. Presumably some sort of electronics. 

What sounds originate from whom? Sometimes I can tell, but it's such a wall of noise that it's not always possible. And does it matter? Just when I think a high long sound might be the voice, I hear something else that sounds like distorted vocals under it in the mix. I suspect the majority of the sound mass originates from the guitar.

Really, what does it matter? How is possible to judge this? I guess you either accept it or you don't. There's no way to criticize this; what, it's not extreme and offputting enough? A friend once said that it's hard to tell one of these hardcore noise/power electronics groups apart from each other, particularly if there are no vocals. I think there's more to it than that, certain groups do have a particular sound or aesthetic. That said, there's vocals here and I'm still not sure.

I've been looking over the discogs.com page for the label, Alchemy Records. It's a larger catalog than I imagined, with over four hundred releases dating from 1984 to last year. I only really know them from some of their noise releases (Merzbow, Incapacitants, Masonna) but I see the catalog is broader than that. The ones that I have mostly turned up in the used shelves. I mean, who's distributing Alchemy Records releases new in Pittsburgh? I suspect I know who may have bought and later dumped the ones I found, but I'm not naming names. Is it possible I've come across the psychedelic and progressive rock CDs that Alchemy has released and just didn't pay attention to them?

The packaging on some of the Alcheny releases seem almost non-sequitor with respect to the sound. They're not like some industrial/noise artists who make things look dark, or illicit, or hint at fascism. You can see from the image below that the front cover here is a sunset over Greek ruins, with an inside image of what I guess is a desert fox of some sort. I like that intentional disconnection. It's easy to make things seem dark and shocking (a complaint I've always had with Marilyn Manson); it's more interesting to do something actually extreme and present it in a way that makes it look "normal." Maybe that's part of the essence of Surrealism.

The recording fades out just past the hour and seventeen minute mark, pretty much the entire length of a standard CD. They kept going? Cred for energy, and they certain have created a group identity, even if it's applied towards an extended chuck of distortion.

CDOTD 01/24/2025

 György Ligeti: Etudes Books I and II (1-14a) (Naxos)

Bought from my neighbor at a yard sale

There was an elderly couple who lived next door to us for a few years. They had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina, and I think it was family ties that eventually brought them to Pittsburgh. The husband was also a Holocaust survivor.

They had a pleasant wine and cheese gathering for the closest neighbors. The couple were active concertgoers, and particularly fans of opera. The wife (Naomi) said they'd hold informal chamber opera readings in their former living room, just an accompanying pianist and several vocalists reading through Mozart as an example. While I'm not generally a fan of opera, I found it impressive that they were so involved.

During our little party, the husband (Gabriel) said that they'd recently gone to see Imani Winds perform, a (then) all African American woodwind quintet. (Bassoonist Monica Ellis came from Pittsburgh and I think attended CAPA High School, where I once taught as well.) He said that they had performed a work by a composer who he had known in his youth, clearly thinking that nobody would recognize the name. I asked, who was that? "Oh," he said, "György Ligeti."

"You knew Ligeti as a kid????" I asked in near disbelief. "Of course I know about Ligeti!" My wife added, "Ben doesn't get that excited about anything." Gabriel clarified, "György was good friends with my younger brother. I knew him from around, but we weren't close."

Another neighbor asked of me, "Could you sing one of his melodies?" I said, "His music isn't like that."

I view artists such as Ligeti from a distance, only familiar with his work. I really know very little about him personally. It's funny to find this connection land so close to me. 

Gabriel was already in his 80s when they moved in. Within a few years, he suffered a very fast decline from dementia. Naomi said she knew something was wrong when he stopped listening and singing music around the house, which before he did all the time. She would tell us later that after moving him to a care facility, he didn't last very long.

They had a big house sale when they moved out. I basically took his collection of Ligeti CDs, probably about eight releases including his opera.

A friend (someone different) told me that Stockhausen claimed that Ligeti wrote the same piece too often. I'm certain that 100% of the comments and "facts" I've written to this blog probably aren't accurate. So I take that comment with a grain of salt and only mention it because I don't agree. There is a certain sort of piece I associate with Ligeti, specifically the more sound-mass style works such as Requiem, Atmosphères, Lontano. 

These piano etudes are appropriately named, they have the dazzle of virtuosic piano music. At times they sound quite post-Romantic, almost suggesting tonality but never quite crossing that line. There's another CD I bought from that collection of "transcendental etudes" which go back and forth between Ligeti and Liszt. Some selections are clearly one composer or the other, some pieces are not so clear if you aren't paying close attention. 

While Ligeti can't marshal the forces on the piano to produce those micro-polyphonies that he's known for (as in Requiem, for example), he's also clearly not trying. These etudes sound nothing like Boulez, Stockhausen, or Barraqué. There was a brief moment in the first book that could have been taken from Messiaen, whose piano music is more similar to this than those other composers. I'm sure there are pitch formulas and modes that Ligeti uses, but he doesn't seem as as intensely mode-oriented as Messiaen. Nor does he lapse into a major chord or open fifth like Olivier. These pieces seem to exist in a space that's neither Romantic nor Modernist, while drawing on the language of both. I'm okay with such ambiguities. I find the pieces engaging and not a dour slog of a listen, as some modernists can be. 

V & CDOTD 01/23/2025

 L.O.S.D.: Organic 23 (LAB)

I don't recalled where I bought this.

I used to have a turntable in my classroom. I enjoyed it. For that matter, I used to have a CD player and computers that had disc drives built in, also useful. I've sometimes lectured on a brief history of audio recording and playback media, and having a turntable on hand to demonstrate vinyl record playback was useful. That, and not everything has been posted to Youtube. (Some of this time was also before Spotify.) Wendy Carlos' Switched On Bach* has generally been difficult to find online (a situation that may have changed) but I had my $1 copy there, if I wanted to talk about analog modular synth patching.

Once during these lectures, a student asked if the needle went from the outer edge to the inner, or vice versa. He had never dropped a stylus onto a vinyl record album. This was not a dumb kid either, he was a double music composition and computer programming major. I felt old in that moment. That was over ten years ago.

I'd talk about the various creative ways people have used vinyl records as a creative medium. That is, things like multi-colored vinyl, picture discs, concentric grooves, lock grooves.** I appear on the RRR-100 7" all lock-groove record, fifty artists on each side. I'm the second groove so it's easy to find my contribution. It's an almost unidentifiable as a saxophone, a brief moment of shifting multiphonics. That was fun to play for confused students.

I don't hate CDs the way I suppose some people do. I've also never lost my love of vinyl records, and and there are so many more things that can be done with the medium creatively.

I've been reorganizing my CD collection the past several days. With as many discs as I have, that means I've come across things I didn't remember I had. I don't recall where I got this package, but it was most likely in a bargain bin at The Exchange. (A chain of new and used CDs/DVDs/vinyl/etc, based out of Ohio.) L.O.S.D = Laboratory of Sonic Discovery. That sounds pretty pretentious, and a lot to live up to.

Thankfully I looked it over to discover that it's both a CD and a 5" record, the latter having a total of 23 lock grooves on it. Sold! To the best of my memory, this is the only 5" record I own, but not the first I know about. Squeeze released a "squeezed" 5" single in 1980, two years before 5" compact discs became commercially available.

The idea behind this L.O.S.D. release is that you are meant to layer and perform the lock groove record while simultaneously running in the three long pieces on the CD. The lock grooves are focused on higher frequencies, the CD lower. I can confirm this, there was some combination of low frequencies on the first track that made my speakers rattle. 

I like the idea. Lock groove records are inherently performative; you're forced as the listener to pick up the needle and place it on another location. Most people don't have the capability of playing both at the same time though, and I listened to each separately on my stereo system. I suppose I could make the simultaneous playback happen, if I put in the effort. Another time perhaps.

The CD tracks are ambient sounding works that generally leave out the higher frequency range. I'm happy to keep them on as ambient listening. They aren't completely static and there are cycles of events that shift and change, but there's nothing in the sound aggregate that draws attention to itself. The pieces would fit in with the ambient drone streaming radio stations I've found on Radio Garden***, maybe even better than some of what I've heard there.

I've toyed with getting back on the air at WRCT, since I am faculty at the university and have the right to do so. It could be fun trying to combine the analog and digital elements together live on the air.

* Generally I've written off Switched On Bach as kitsch. I know that the truth is more nuanced. The Moog modular patch design on the project is at times amazing; "Air on a G String" has a surprisingly convincing oboe-sounding patch, for example. All the sounds are on a monophonic instrument, so chords are built through multitracking, all pre-MIDI and digital editing. That is pretty amazing. (I still think it's kitsch though.)

** I used to show off Christian Marclay's Record Without a Cover to my classes. Notes etched on one side of the record, grooves on the other. I kept it in an unlocked cabinet. That is, until I noticed on discogs.com that a copy had sold for over $300. Back home you go.

*** https://radio.garden/listen/soma-fm-drone-zone/kpP1NuqX

https://radio.garden/listen/mrg-fm/Rh5AvFLg

https://radio.garden/listen/a-m-ambient/4_aQkxd6

CDOTD 01/21/2025

 Frank Zappa: You Can't Do That On Sage Anymore Vol. 2: The Helsinki Concert (Rykodisc)

Purchased used at Preserving Records, New Kensington

Holy heck I have a lot of CDs. I don't even have as many as some people I know. As I've announced no fewer than two times on this blog in the past I'm again trying to pick up and organize around my space. I'm a chronic slob to the surprise of probably nobody. I brought home some discs I had at school (it wasn't serving any purpose having them there) and I'm looking for new ways to find a space for them. Duquesne had sliding drawers that were really convenient, and I'm wondering about that.

And in spite all of this, I intend to release two more CDs soon, at least in limited numbers. I still like to have a physical product. And also, I bought two double CD packages on my first visit to Preserving in New Kensington: the Nurse With Wound album mentioned yesterday, and this Zappa package.

Why add to the stack? I am trying to be more selective about these purchases.

I've been a big fan of the original Mothers of Invention since high school. It's still my favorite of Frank's work. I like the sometimes greasy, grungy quality of the music, which can be attributed to both the bandleader and the players. It's an interesting crew.

This isn't that band. The original Mothers were disbanded by 1970 to be replaced by the...I'm trying to remember the nickname, the Broadway Band? The one with Flo and Eddie, AKA Howie and Mark from The Turtles. That band came to a screeching halt when a fan attacked and seriously injured Frank in December of 1971. 

After a couple of years of more jazz-influenced studio projects, this group with some variations emerged in the mid-1970s. The bandleader being a workaholic to put other workaholics to shame, you can sometimes define certain period in his career by a matter of a couple of years. (That and his short life span, his health no doubt exacerbated by chronic heavy smoking.) Napoleon Murphy Brock on reeds and vocals, George Duke on keyboards and vocals, Ruth Underwood on percussion, Tom Fowler on bass, Chester Thompson on drums. There'd be some variations on this core band from 1973-1975; this recording dates to Sept. 22, 1974.

Many of Zappa's albums, especially later in the 1970s on, are drawn from live recordings which were thoroughly edited and overdubbed. Frank rehearsed his increasingly bionic bands to the extent that that might as well use live recordings instead of heading to the studio. His mobile recording studio was legendary.

One of Frank's more interesting ideas was "xenochrony." Take a guitar solo from one recording, in a different key, tempo, possibly even meter, and layer it onto the rhythm section of a different piece. I like this in principle, though what I read from Barry Miles' biography was that Frank would still edit the solos thoroughly rather than just letting them play out. The approach was less experimental than it sounds. 

There's none of that here. He announces in the liner notes: ABSOLUTELY NO OVER-DUBS. You're getting a complete, unvarnished concert from a well-oiled road band. 

GOOD. He needed to do that more, in my opinion. Are there are edits here? I guess I'll never know. He stops one song twice on stage and it's left in.

My opinion is that this was the last band Frank had with general personality. There were certain musicians in late groups that had charisma and personality too, Terry Bozzio and Adrian Belew coming to mind. But there's some sense of play on stage here, particularly on the part of George Duke. If an "oom-pah-pah" pattern fits something in the moment, here's right there with it.

There's a good case for considering Ruth Underwood the best musician even in Frank's bands. There's probably an equal case for both Ruth and her former husband Ian Underwood. Ruth blazes through Frank's ridiculous marimba lines, flawlessly to my ears. And what's not to like about a band with a strong emphasis on marimba?

Frank's desire for complete perfection led him in part to the Synclavier, an unfortunately antiquated piece of equipment now. It doesn't run on a MIDI standard, so if there's any Synclavier work he did that's unreleased, it's probably lost to the world now. To my ears currently, those works sound sterile, mechanical. It dates them. This live band could breathe and it's so much more interesting.

When I was in high school, growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, there was a record store in Doylestown, PA that always had a huge collection of bootleg live LPs. Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and especially Frank Zappa. They were always a bit expensive and you just didn't know what you were going to get, so I never bit. While I can't necessarily condone those releases, perhaps they were doing a service by presenting those bands as they actually sounded. Who knows how many amazing individual concert recordings are stored in the Zappa archive? I say release more in their complete, imperfect form.

CDOTD 01/20/2025

 Nurse With Wound: The Surveillance Lounge (United Dirter)

Purchased new at Preserving Records, New Kensington

I used to take part in a listening group. We'd meet (semi-)regularly, bring recordings for us to listen together, talk about them. Often the recordings would skew to the unusual and obscure, because of the people involved. I stated at one of these meetings that I have to guard against the idea that I like something due to its relative weirdness or obscurity, or dislike it due to its popularity. A friend confirmed this, that he didn't want to fall into the same trap.

I write this because I was thinking about which artists take up the most space in my personal collection of albums, not to mention what someone might think of me if they looked over my collection and noticed. I definitely have a lot of Sun Ra albums and have generally cooled in looking for more, unless I think it offers compositions I haven't heard before. There's a lot of Anthony Braxton here. Miles Davis (easy when one buys a couple of those Columbia box sets). Thelonious Monk. Charles Mingus. Morton Feldman, in part because many of his single compositions take the length of two or more CDs. There's a good chuck of Xenakis recordings here. Even more Messiaen. And a big stack of Frank Zappa. 

I was also just noticing that I have quite a few Nurse With Wound albums. Part of this was that I caught the bug for NWW albums in the 80s, an active and fertile time for them. And by "them", I mean Steven Stapleton and whoever he's working with at the time. In recent years, it's been Steven with specifically Andrew Liles, but there's been a long list of collaborators and guests over the years. 

During that time, I bought everything they released. This was the last big gasp for vinyl, and in late 80s/early 90s, compact discs became the medium of choice. I bought a few NWW recordings at the time, and then, I just kind of stopped for many years. 

Why? Even though there is no typical NWW album, I started to feel like I had heard it all already, and felt a little burned out on their albums. This period was also seeing a change from analog to digital production methods, and I found I didn't care so much for what sounded to me like their digitally-produced albums. Surely it must have made the production of those albums far less laborious. Not having to splice actual recording tape, that's a huge innovation which has possibly gone unrecognized.

Similar to The Residents, the more NWW sounded digital, the less I tended to like it. Perhaps I'm not being fair or possibly am fooling myself, but it didn't sound like it had the same "sweat" on them the way the earlier recordings did. 

I've started to come around again in recent years. Once in a while, a used CD or LP would turn up, and I'd almost always snag it. I've joined a NWW Facebook fan group, which has kept me more in touch with current releases and happenings.

Today is inauguration day. For my own mental health, I am avoiding coverage of it as much as I can. I mean, what's the point in upsetting myself? I know what the motherfucker's going to say, I know what he has in mind. There's time to resist when he actually tries to do those things. I say, his oxygen is attention, and I want to deprive him just that tiny bit that I can.

With this in mind, a dark soundscape by Nurse With Wound titled The Surveillance Lounge seemed like the right call for my listening today. That, and I just bought the thing, so it's time to give the CD a whirl. 

"Expect the unexpected" is a big cliche but applicable. The easy connection is to Surrealism, and there's little question of that. That connection is deepened by Stapleton's visuals, in which case black and white collage imagery. I find these records to also be cinematic, or at least evocative of cinema. Instruments play traditionally musical sounds but are abruptly cut off. Voices are altered, slowed or made wobbly, and speak in languages I don't understand. There are long passages on this album of spare, minimal, elongated sounds. There's an air of mystery. But then near the end of the album that relative serenity is interrupted by a very loud, noisy, rapidly-moving collage and it's unnerving. And follow that would something that almost sounds like lounge music. 

Once again, I knew nothing about what this would sound like, while simultaneously knowing exactly what it would be about. 

If you're reading this and it's Jan. 20, stay away from broadcast news of all sorts. Put on something that will surround you instead.

VOTD 01/19/2025

 Michel Legrand/Morton Stevens: Slapstick of Another Kind OST (Varese Sarabande)

Purchased in the $2 room at Preserving Record Shop, New Kensington

The only Kurt Vonnegut I read in high school was his book Slapstick. It definitely wasn't the best introduction to his work. I read years later he rated his own novels, and he gave this one a D. I only recall some parts of it from reading a Wikipedia page about it yesterday. The page also mentioned the book received poor reviews from a variety of periodicals.

I remember seeing Siskel & Ebert talk about this movie on their weekly program, probably At the Movies at the time. They lambasted it, calling it appalling, cruel, unfunny, cheaply made and shockingly bad. I don't remember it playing any local theater near me (I could be wrong), and I've never in the past encountered it even on late night cable TV.

Having read the book and being generally interested in misguided celluloid atrocities (a term I'm borrowing from John Waters, who knows what he's talking about in that respect), I've always had a nagging curiosity about the movie. As of this writing, I still haven't seen it. Seeing the soundtrack in the $2 room during my first visit to the New Kensington store, I figured it was all the money.

The book generally had to do with a weird pair of fraternal twins, who together were hyper-intelligent, but to the outside world appeared to be severely mentally disabled. Reading a summation online, each is effectively a hemisphere of one super brain; the sister the right brain, the brother the left.

In the film adaptation, they're supposed to have been implanted by aliens (kind of like Village of the Damned), are weirdly hideous, and their purpose is to save the planet. Not terribly faithful to the source material. It is said to be, based on comments I read on the film's Wikipedia page, a terrible and crass adaption of what I can confirm is one of Vonnegut's worst books. 

The cast, oh the cast. Playing both the twins and their parents were Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn, with Marty Feldman, Jim Backus, Sam Fuller (!), Merv Griffin, and Pat Morita included in the cast. Jerry received a Razzie nomination for Worst Actor, to be beaten out by Sylvester Stallone for Rhinestone. Sly most likely won out due to the huge bomb that film was, compared to this film just being farted out.

The title is exploitative if you hadn't noticed: it's meant to play on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which probably had multiple theatrical runs and would have still been known in the public sphere. Even the font on the cover of this album suggests the Spielberg classic. Now that's exploitation!

The music adds to the wonder of this critical and financial bomb-of-bombs. The music on the B side of the LP (Legrand) was from the original cut and release of the film. Another edit with new music (Stevens) was subsequently made, and who in the world knows why. I mean, the music itself is perfectly serviceable but unremarkable instrumental soundtrack music. Library music would have sufficed just as well. Legrand's take is a little wackier and more jazz-tinged; Stevens tries to sound something like John Williams (I suppose) but with more Moog solos. 

Why recut this dog? Why commission a new score? Why release any of it as an LP? Why why why?

I see on discogs.com that the Milan issue of this LP added a sticker to the front cover reading, "The last picture of Marty Feldman." How ignoble.

I nonetheless wonder if it's streaming anywhere. I refuse to pay a penny for it though. But then, having just seen the documentary From Darkness to Light, I am very curious and hopeful to one day see Jerry Lewis' The Day the Clown Cried, knowing full well how hideous it must be. Celluloid atrocity, indeed.

VOTD 01/17/2025

 Deadbody: The Requiem (Closed Casket Activities)

Purchased used at The Attic

Ahem. Why the hell did I buy this? Any interest I have in metal and its many manifestations has more to do with the testing of musical extremes I suppose.

But why this one? I guess I got pulled in by the title, The Requiem. If I've had a general interest in requiems in general for the past few years, how does it manifest here?

And maybe I was at The Attic with money in my pocket and was buying one or two other things. Throw it into the pile. 

Of course it's nothing like a requiem in the sense of Mozart or Britten, or even Ligeti. Killing Joke opened their first album with "Requiem", a highly memorable song.

In this case, I don't know. It feels cheap for them to call a song "The Requiem" with the lyrics beginning: "Maggots feast upon your carcass." Yeah, okay, not that you can understand a single word of the vocalist's low, growly vocals. I often think of these bands as in the two categories of high, screechy screaming and low, gutteral shouting.

Deadbody certainly play up being dark and severe. There are hints here of something I'd find more interesting: an opening noise loop whose source I can't identify; a pitchless, percussive pounding on guitars and drums at the end of side one ("Joy of Torture", delightful) that starts to suggest Glenn Branca's guitar-orchestra-as-percussion noise. 

But when they hit the more straight forward heavy riffage, it plays into conventions. Do they know they're quoting King Crimson at the start of "Horrors of the Malformed"? To me it's obvious, yet I guess there's only so much you can do without quoting someone else, intentionally or not. 

I'm not certain which words you use as descriptors: death metal certainly, maybe at times speedcore? The entire LP clocks in under 22 minutes, with six of the eight pieces clocking in under three minutes each. And as I commented on Behold...The Arctopus a few blog posts back, there's a very rapid turnover of material and ideas, few pieces really settle into anything memorable. 

I get the desire for severity. The purpose here is to hit hard, bludgeon the listener. I don't want to sound like a snobby white liberal, but this band looks pretty much like what you'd expect: four white guys (well, one Hispanic), black tees, black jeans, no smiles. I know there are women in metal, but I wonder if there are any all-female bands that sound anything like this? This is such a male-dominated world, it would be refreshing to see and hear a female band play something even vaguely resembling this music. But then, if the band was all female, would it sound like this at all?

I'm sure there must be some group out there like that. I'm not going to spend a lot of time looking for them though. It reminds me of how impressed I've been with Pharmakon, a one-woman industrial-bordering on power electronics-band. I've seen her do it all solo and it's impressive, and here intense shrieking vocals overwhelm this band's low, male utterances.

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.