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.

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.

VOTD 01/02/2025

 Ennio Morricone: 4 Mosche Di Velluto Grigio (Cinevox)

Purchased used at The Government Center, I think

Seeing as it's the new year, many people have been drawing up their best of/worst of 2024 lists and creating more online chatter. Some of those might be useful eventually, if I'm to hold up my resolution to check out new album releases.

I've hardly seen most of the films making top 10 lists, nor will I have seen most that will undoubtably be nominated for the top Oscar prize this year. I have a sense that it's been a weak year for films. The best film I saw in 2024 was Ennio, the documentary about Ennio Morricone. Imdb.com lists the date on the film as being 2021, I don't know the story of why it was playing at a local theater in 2024. At 2.5 hours, it's a film that amazingly felt too short. Not that there wasn't room for some trimming; of the many talking heads presented, I had no need to hear from Bruce Springsteen, the bassist for The Clash, the guy from Metallica nor the guy from Faith No More. Thankfully, the great majority of those interviewed were those who worked with Morricone directly. If you haven't seen it, I can't recommend it highly enough. 

There's some mention of the three soundtracks Morricone did for early films of Dario Argento, The Bird With the Crystal Plumage, The Cat o' Nine Tails, and this, translated to Four flies on Grey Velvet. (The Italians have a way with interesting and evocative titles, no?) Being from 1971, this work falls several years after Morricone's immense success with his Sergio Leone soundtracks, most famously The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. (Another great title, but let's be honest: none of the characters are especially good, all are levels of bad, and varying degrees of ugly.) There was a comment mentioned in documentary, I think made by Dario's father, that Morricone's music sounded alike in all three films. The composer himself insisted he was trying new ideas in each. Did this end the relationship between Ennio and Dario? I don't know. (Assuming I'm recalling all of those details correctly to begin with.) Ennio certainly didn't slow down after this work, and Dario would soon go on to work with his most famous musical collaborators, Goblin/Claudio Simonetti. 

There's a lot of what you'd expect from a 1971 Morricone Giallo score: some sweet Italian pop with wordless vocals by Edda dell'Orso, some instrumental blues-rock, some string tone clusters. The second particularly features some frantic free-jazz drumming. It's not as funky as my favorite, Lizard in a Woman's Skin, but it's still an interesting work. 

I think the only thing you can expect from a Morricone soundtrack of this era is that you don't know what the next thing coming will be, even if many of the tracks and the overall form seem familiar. But then he didn't compose it as a discreet listening experience, but to serve the purposes of the film.

VOTD 01/01/2025

 Fats Waller: Young Fats at the Organ 1926-1927 - Volume 1 (RCA)

Purchased decades ago at a yard sale for possibly 50¢

A new year, a blog post. The concept of New Year's Day as a holiday seems strange to me, disconnected from any religious or cultural meaning besides the changing of a number on the calendar. It's a time to consider renewal and the future, as we're approaching the bleakest point of the year for weather. That and partying, for some people. 

So too the future is on my mind. There are things I anticipate happening in the next year that I'm not yet prepared to express publicly. As for resolutions, I've decided that I should probably spring for a new album more often, in whatever format that might be. Most of the new releases I've bought in recent years are reissues (such as the Ralph Records retrospective mentioned in an earlier post) or things like newly issued live recordings of John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk. I'll still snoop for interesting old used vinyl, but I'm reminding myself just how much I already have. Make use of that. 

I am again posting here again as much out of an act of self-discipline as anything else, a continuing resolution. Creating and maintaining disciplined routines outside of my job are becoming increasingly important to me. Maybe somebody reading will find what I have to say interesting, I don't know. I suppose today I'm in autobiographical mode more than musical analysis. 

For the first day of the new year, I suppose I wanted to put on something that would calm my mind. So much of what I like in music has to do with energy, intensity, contrasts, brisk motion. It's not easy to find something in my personal library that is more laid back and relaxed. I considered putting on some Morton Feldman again, even though that music can have a quiet but firm intensity to it. But no, something else. I have a stack of recently purchased LPs I continue to intend to get to, but nothing in that stack. Perusing through my collected vinyl, somehow I came to the decision that Fats Waller on organ was what I wanted.

On the surface, this music might sound cute. It can't help but evoke a sense of the past and nostalgia, through no fault of its own. Listening to the opening track, "Soothin' Syrup Stomp" (maybe my favorite track on this collection), I've almost certainly heard this recording used as a bed for online streams of silent movies. It's also impossible for me to disconnect these recordings with their appearance in the film Eraserhead. What was David Lynch's purpose in using them? Nothing in the film was done by accident. The hotel lobby, the small studio apartment with its radiator, seems to come out of the past, as does this music.

As I write this, my wife is upstairs catching more news about the horrible mass murder in New Orleans while I'm downstairs quietly listening to Fats. Escapism? Psychic self-defense? I don't know. I think I've always identified with Henry from Eraserhead to some extent*, and maybe his choice of listening is the right call.

It seems silly and redundant to state how great Fats' playing is. You either know, or you don't know his music at all.  There's an added bit of a novelty to hearing him on a pipe organ rather than his more native piano (I assume that, at least). Most jazz organ playing is done on something like a Hammond B3, an instrument that wouldn't be invented for about a decade after these recordings. The pipe organ, and probably the early recording technology, give these sessions a very different character than later jazz organ albums. Again, it sounds like it's from that past, reaching out for renewed attention. 

Alberta Hunter joins in, singing two songs including the old standard "Sugar" (not the Stanley Turrentine tune familiar to Pittsburgh jazz audiences). She sounds on mark but, me being me, I prefer Fats by himself. 

If you've read this far (and even if you haven't), I wish you a good, healthy, positive year to come. I think we all deserve it. 

* I had an Eraserhead t-shirt at one time, and somebody once asked me if it was me in the image. It wasn't a photo image of Henry, but come on, my hair isn't like that.