VOTD 1/17/2024

 VA: Tallin 67 (Melodya)

Purchased used at Jerry's Records, I think

What is this? I guess it must be a festival recording, an audience can sometimes be heard. I don't know any of the artists. Some of the notes in discogs.com don't translate from the Cyrillic, so I can't read them.

Should I approach listening to more records like this? Not knowing anything? I'm not a big fan of streaming services to listen to albums, but it could be one reason to bring things up on my phone. I think I've mentioned before I don't engage with Spotify. I like the library-based Hoopla app, I even brought up the latest Rolling Stones album on it. (Didn't like it much but it gets better towards the end; the mix seemed weird and antithetical to the Stones, but maybe I should judge a non-mp3-based rendering.)

So what is this? A jazz festival from behind the Iron Curtain? If so, the musicians seem to have ingested at least 1950s jazz, even touching the 60s. Alto saxophonist Zbigniew Namysłowsi sounds a bit on the boppish side of Eric Dolphy while blow on "Summertime", one of the familiar tunes here. The band kicks into a funky backbeat on part of it, something I'm certain I could have done without. There's a Qunicy Jones tune (don't ask me the title) and a quirky version of "Oleo" by the V. Zakarhov Quintet, their only credit I can find on discogs. 

Is this a Soviet-era festival? Does that say something about jazz, in that era as well as now? Is it an international music, or was it already by that time designated as something polite and inoffensive? 

I sometimes think about the legendary first Stravinsky/Nijinsky performance of Le Sacre du Printemps, where reportedly people were tearing the chairs out of the floor. Now the piece, at least in concert form, is a staple of college-level orchestras. What could we do now to rile anybody that much without being blatantly and outrageously offensive? 

Am I even asking the right questions? Given the door-smashing and chair-throwing of Jan. 6 2021, perhaps there are other questions to be asked, other directions to take. Not that I'm equating that with Stravinsky. I seem to be posing more questions than answers.

The record's not bad, by the way. 

Recent book

 Erik Bauer: Had to Be There; A Visual History of the Explosive Pittsburgh Underground (1979-1994)

Purchased at Fungus Books and Records

I have a confession to make, which I'll mention from the start. I would have bought this book anyway, but I looked through it quickly on purchase to see if I was in it. I am not. The closest I come is having Watershed mentioned in the back of the book, my band from 1990-2000. I won't go into the story about the minor name changes from Watershed to Water Shed to Water Shed 5tet. It's not interesting and ultimately I wish I had pushed harder to change the name entirely.

Twice in the writing this blog, the artist whose record I mentioned has responded in some way. Most recently it was concerning Orchid Spangiafora, as recent postings will note. My posting on Microwaves was also discovered by members of the band. I didn't expect that but it also didn't come as too much of a surprise. (I have occasionally played with Microwaves and appear on their previous LP.)

I write this because here's this book about the local scene in a particular time period, and there's a good chance someone involved might come across what I've written. If so, I probably know them in some respect. I think I have nothing damaging or mean to say, I don't intend insult, but I reserve the right to criticize too.

Erik Bauer is someone I only knew from the edges of my circle of friends. Someone I knew to say hello to, probably chatted with a few times. I remember that there was something written about him somewhere about being a serious collector, having for example a copy of the Throbbing Gristle 24 Hours suitcase of cassettes. Last time I ran into Erik was, well, I was going to say 8-9 years ago, but it was 2009. He came to see Thoth Trio play the main branch at the public library, but dashed as soon as we finished. He later told me via email he wanted to see the Yes Men at CMU later that afternoon.

Erik was never a musician himself (as far as I know) but was a common fixture in the local scene, with camera in hand. This book collects the heat of the moment of gigs throughout Pittsburgh of the local music scene. Some of the groups are better remembered, in part because there's actually recordings of their music: The Five, Cardboards, Carsickness, The Cynics. Some, I don't know at all: The Usss, The Beach Bunnies, The Trend. 

The book, visually, traces some changes and developments in the local scene through the years. The weirder, more No-Wavish groups giving way to hardcore punk rock, and then however the scene developed from there. There are collected setlists, and the scenes remind someone like me of venues long gone. I don't know that any location here is still a place to see shows.

Each gig or setting is given two to six pages. Many photos take up an entire page, or in some cases two. That would be a criticism: while some of the big splash pages are great and even necessary, I would have loved to have seen more. Some pages with collections of smaller images, to fit in more content. The title itself comes from a Dress Up As Natives song, yet there's not images of them in this book.

But then, I don't know what's available. I know that what I want or expect isn't the reality of this book. What is true is that it's a small miracle it exists at all. Some scenes are very well documented, both in recordings and photographically: New York, LA, San Francisco, DC. Not so with Pittsburgh, and there was a viable and lively scene there. There are some records, but many in their original issues command serious money. There's Stephanie Beroes' Debt Begins at 20, the semifictional short film valuable for showing live basement performances from 1980. There were things happening in this country between the two coasts.

I'd hate to think such things were lost to time. So for whatever I might have wanted to see in this book, I'm grateful for what it is.

And seriously, I don't mind that I'm not in it. It might even be better that I'm not.

VOTD 1/6/2024

 Jean Barraqué: Séquence/Chants Après Chant (Musical Heritage Society)

Purchased used at Jerry's Records

First vinyl purchase of the year, and it's an old record of old-style post-War avant garde.

We're moving out of that season in which many people have been posting their year-end lists to social media: top Spotify playlists, top ten-to-fifty releases of the year, and other top of the tops. Regarding the former: I don't largely engage with Spotify. I understand its convenience, but I don't own a smart speaker and don't have my laptop setup for general listening; that's what I have two stereo systems for. I also consider Spotify to be a parasite on musical artists, with only the likes of multi-million selling artists being able to make even a small amount of money from it while the Spotify owners rake in billions. To hell that. I did engage with Spotify a single time, when Jenny from Homewood Cemetery asked me to assemble a playlist for walking through the ground. I put together a list of jazz pieces that I thought were meditative without largely being very slow. What I really wanted to do was put together a list of horror movie cues, but I was told a hard "no" on that. (It would have been great: pieces from City of the Living Dead, Suspiria, Phantasm, just off the top of my head.)

As for my list of top releases of 2023, I'm trying to think if I actually bought anything newly issued. I bought a 4-CD collection of The Pyramids, but it's music from the 70s, and released in 2022. 

And here I am, sitting on two CDs of Thoth Trio recordings, soon to be asking others to buy my new recordings, not doing the same myself.

In my early adulthood, I followed independently released music with a passion. Admittedly there was generally much less to follow, but OP and later Sound Choice and Option magazines helped keep one on top of things. As I've previous written, I could look  at more album covers and know if it was of some interest. Now I often struggle to so much as locate the artist's name on the cover. 

Which brings me back to this old record, recorded in 1970 for the Valois label but reissued on two others. The composer's year of death (1975) is not listed on the cover. 

Barraqué's total compositional output, the works he chose not to destroy, takes up a 3 CD set. Varèse's complete output I think was released on two CDs. It didn't help that he died at age 45, and was beset by difficulties such as an apartment fire, car accident, and poor health in general. Then of course was the drug-fueled S&M relationship he apparently had with philosopher Michel Foucalt. I hear in my head the voice of Homer from an old Simpsons episode saying, "Now that's interesting!" 

So what do we have in this release? Two works, one just under and one a little over twenty minutes in length. (Morton Feldman had something to say about this in general, that the marker of then current works was to create something twenty minutes long. I must speculate that the influence of the long playing record album was a factor.) Both are examples of post-War atonal vocal composition, a single voice with instrumental ensemble. Emphasis in the latter is on percussion and piano.

I've already stated my general lack of enthusiasm for modernist vocal writing. I'll admit it has to do with my general lack of enthusiasm for vocalists in general, though that's putting it a little broadly. I've previously admitted that I've already preferred the instruments over the voices, going back as far as when I really started listening to music intensely in my youth. 

If you have to have a voice in this setting though, the delivery here is how it should be. That is, what I especially don't like is Romantic opera voice delivery on atonal music. I know some of that is practical, that the projection of the voice pre-amplification was critical for the success of grand opera. Broad vocal vibrato though? No thank you. It works especially poorly for modernist opera. Thankfully here, the delivery on voice is more direct, without Romantic heaviness or inclination to be too expressive.

Music such as this is long on texture, short on memorability. It doesn't help that the vinyl record experience is several steps removed from that of live performance; I'm sure seeing this in the room real time would be more potent. 

My own take is, I'm sympathetic to post-War atonalism and like it from time to time. But even as a casual fan so to speak, I can't really recall much of what happened now that the record is over. Should music stick in your ear more? 

Nonetheless, maybe these composers effectively created works in this respect: they seem timeless, or at least not grounded in current realities. While this music might have been political at one time, that element seems distant now. It's sounds, sounds passing through time, no connection to modern politics, no connection to problems in the world. Escapism or retreat from troubles? Or something else?

VOTD 1/3/24

 Joe Delia: Ms. 45 OST (Death Waltz Recording Co.)

I think I purchased this mail order from Death Waltz

It's pretty amazing that small, independent film productions often have original soundtracks. I forget where the information came up, probably online article, but Gerard Damiano insisted what was going to put Deep Throat over the top was to budget for original music. I would speculate in the case of that movie, it didn't make much of a difference. For all its significance, I've never watched Deep Throat but have listened to the music, which is pretty dreadful. I wouldn't say the same about The Devil in Miss Jones, though. And consider the hyper-cheap productions of Herschel Gordon Lewis and David F. Friedman; Blood Feast has a weirdly compelling score performed with whatever instruments and skills the director and producer had at hand. Russ Meyer always insisted on original scores for his films. 

Here's this soundtrack by Joe Delia. I know nothing about him. It's for a gritty NYC 70s production by director Abel Ferrara. I have yet to see the film. It's ostensibly an "exploitation" feature the way that his earlier The Driller Killer was, though Ferrara's films in general are about desperate people in the jungle that is New York City. Manhattan is a much different place now than when this was made. 

The instrumentation is keyboards (dominating the first side of the LP) with saxophones, electric bass, and drums. As with listening to most film soundtracks as an independent statement, I find that sometimes cues are cut short just when they're good, or run longer than interest holds. But that's part of what interests me when I put one of these on: how does the music hold up apart from the film?

It's not bad. The mood is more somber in the first half, but picks up later when the saxophones and rhythm section are used more. The credits are incomplete; Max Kaplan is credited with tenor saxophone, but there's some baritone in there too. There's an odd a cappella vocal piece that ends side one of the album (overdubbed?). No vocals are credited. 

I won't rave about the work, nor will I put it down. It's good, worthy of a listen. I just think that even such a work exists is wonderful. 

PS: when we were coming out of the strict COVID lockdown and things were starting to reopen, one of the first places to start up (with serious social distancing policies) was the Tull Theater in Sewickley, PA (now the Lindsey). Early on they showed a recent Abel Ferrara documentary, The Projectionist. It concerns an immigrant who wound up running several cinemas in the 70s and 80s, including several straight and gay XXX theaters. The subject didn't seem to draw a distinction between those and mainstream films, he just loved showing films. Anyway, the point of this is, something I had been waiting for years to happen, happened: my wife and I were the only two people in attendance. I made the comment online that maybe the solution to social distancing in theaters is to screen movies that only three people want to attend.

VOTD 1/2/24

 Herbie Hancock, The Yardbirds: Blow Up OST (MGM)

purchased used at Eide's

A new year, and back to the blog. To and from a New Year's Eve party at Ben Hartlage's, I was listening to a Gilbert Gottfried rerun podcast on the ridiculous topic of real bands appearing on old TV programs. The Standells turn up quite a few times.

I thought of this soundtrack, even though it's not exactly on the same topic. I don't think I ever got around to listening to it completely, nor have I seen the film I'm sorry to say. Come to think of it, I don't think I've seen any Antonioni film to completion. I remember sitting through one and being bored and frustrated. Call me immature. 

The Yardbirds' appearance is only a single song. My copy (a 1977 reissue I've come to figure out) has a message on the front of in a large yellow circle: Featuring "The Yardbirds" Singing "Stroll On". I guess even in 1977 The Yardbirds still sold more records than the artist on the rest of the album, Herbie Hancock.

Another reason this soundtrack came up in conversation recently was the bassline for the piece "Bring Down the Birds" was the basis of (sampled for?) Dee-Lite's "Groove Is In the Heart". Paul Thompson mentioned this, who has become a noted authority on sampled lines and bassline analysis. https://www.youtube.com/@pdbass

Herbie does his job as a film soundtrack composer here. When the pieces are interesting, I wanted to hear more of them. I'd have to strike that up in general to the limitations of the LP format; I don't know how long the recordings went in session. Some of it is straightforward jazz and blues playing, some more like his Blue Note albums, and there's even some down the line 60s groove organ instrumentals.

As for The Yardbirds, well....if you know Aerosmith's "Train Kept A-Rollin", that's the song with different lyrics, more or less. I don't remember who Aerosmith credited the song to; I recall Shockabilly credited it to "traditional". The Yardbirds sound grungy, with a helping of feedback, that works to their advantage. 

I'll be seeing Herbie Hancock play in March. I figured I would regret it if I didn't. I don't want to mention how expensive the tickets were though. Ugh. With all of his other accomplishments, it's easy to forget that he composed a number of film soundtracks, including Death Wish, Colors, and the non-standards music in "Round Midnight. I've mentioned the subject on this blog previously about wanting to do an all film music performance with OPEK, and there's material here that I could have definitely mined. 

By they way, I played with the aforementioned Ben Hartlage in the band Coal Train back more than twenty years ago. (Ugh again.) I brought my clarinet to the party (which I haven't played in months) and we a stumbled through few songs from that long ago. It was fun. There were a couple of people going crazy and even hanging on me in ways that I never enjoy, but I resisted the urge to be an old crank about it.

A response

 I've tried to notice when people have responded to my blog posts. There are two friends who have written responses, neither of whom use their birth names for online purposes when possible, so I won't either. 

Today however, I received an email from one Robert Carey of (or really, is) Orchid Spangiafora. The link for my original posting is at the top of the pasted message.

He wrote that Blogspot wasn't permitting him to respond to my posting. (I assume it's my fault, some setting I probably need to change.) Because this is the primary source, the genuine article, I thought I'd include his email as a separate posting and not just paste it into the responses myself. 

Something I mentioned to him when writing back: I wrote to him once before, asking if he knew anything about the Conglomerate Records tape collection. Like everyone else I asked, the answer was no. If you have no idea what I'm referring to, I'll write more in a future message.

Re: http://benopie.blogspot.com/2023/10/votd-10252023.html

Thanks for the review! It is very cool to be able to read people’s takes on FPAE.  I remember thinking when I made the record I would never get to hear people’s reactions to it.  The web has changed that. 

I have a few comments.

I am certain she is the reason WRCT bought the Orchid Spangiafora LP. "It's really good" as she would say in her quiet manner. Curiously, the original album was released on Twin/Tone Records. Twin/Tone was a Minnesota indie that released the likes of The Replacements, Soul Asylum, The Mekons, Yo La Tengo: guitar-driven stripped-down new wave bands. Yet, somehow in 1979, the Orchid Spangiafora LP was released. 

I forgot Yo La Tango was on Twin/Tone.  Georgia was in elementary school at Friends Seminary when I was in high school.  I got to know her and Ira better in the late 1970s when I was seeing Georgia’s sister Emily and Ira was working at NY Rocker.  Before Flee Past’s Ape Elf I made a 7” record of Dime Operation.  My college roommate, Chris Osgood, was in a band called The Suicide Commandos and they put out some EPs via Paul Stark, who founded Twin/Tone.  So my record came out on PS records.  Later Chris worked for Twin/Tone and he proposed an Orchid Spangiafora album to the other guys there.

So what is it? Musique concrète, audio cut-ups, Plunderphonics before such a word existed. (I assume, I think John Oswald would create the word some years later.) 

I always thought of it as Concrète, but historically that genre typically emphasized found sounds other than voice.  It has a little in common with Come Out by Steve Reich, but it is not as formal, and I think it owes more to Burroughs and Gysin.  I first heard of Plunderphonics when Byron Coley played me the record with Michael Jackson on the cover - particular the track based on Trout Mask Replica.  I think that was in the late 1980s.   Plunderphonics to me is more about repurposing selections of existing music to create a new piece that sounds like it could have been assembled by the original artist.  Somewhere in between you find things like 448 Deathless Days by Steve Fisk (which I highly recommend.)

The emphasis is on voices, particularly found voices; the first work, "Dime Operation", is a furious collage of voices that sound like they were recorded off of television. (I recognized Monte Hall's voice in there.) 

“I had so much fun with those dolphins.”  Yep, a lot of television and radio combined with friends’ voices and anything else that happened along.   The first one was Coarse Fish.  I came into the Hampshire College electronic music studio in 1973 to find that John Kilgore had left me a huge pile of loose recording tape on the table with a note on top saying, “Robbie, knock yourself out.”  It was recordings of a nature show about the ocean.  It became Coarse Fish.

One phrase stood out, from two speakers edited one after the other: "Fashioned to a device behind a tree." This would become the title of a Nurse With Wound piece, first appearing on a Come Org compilation in 1982.

Stapleton misheard that.  It actually says, “Fastened to a device - behind a tree.”  Not that it really matters at all.

The reissue comes with a second LP of unreleased (at least to vinyl) works. The first side is different, more of a low-tech electronic work, but again with some emphasis on editing. The second side though, it's all voices. One after another after another after another, cut/cut/cut/cut/cut. It's listed as four pieces, but it runs continuously and I'll be damned if I can hear where one ends and the next starts.

I did Asafoetida in October 1972.  The studio at Hampshire had an Arp 2500 synthesizer which was a great teaching machine but somewhat noisy.   A lot, but far from all, of the sounds in that piece come from the Arp, but nearly all of the composition was done with loops and edits on the tape decks and combining tracks with the mixer.  There are many many tracks layered in that piece.  Unfortunately it is a little muddy because it was, in fact, somewhat muddy to begin with due to certain constraints of the studio but mostly due to my inexperience.  Also the original tape was lost long ago, and the recording on the album is from a not-very-carefully made dub.  Secondhand Smoke was done on a computer when storage and processor speed was just barely up to it.  Hold Everything was done after Hampshire in my parents’ apartment on a cheap Akai tape recorder.  There is more Orchid material from feeding tube if you are interested.  Visit https://feedingtuberecords.com/.  There are also some odds and ends on bandcamp.

*Regarding Boyd Rice: Hoo boy. I guess he still has his defenders, it's not a scene that I've followed closely. 

Boyd sent me some records by Non in the late 70s or early 80s.  They were interesting.  He had drilled alternative spindle holes in them so you could play them off center.  I met him when he did a performance at Hurrah in NYC.  The performance was good.  I found him interesting but somewhat hostile.  I recently bought a book by him called “No,” but I have not given it the attention it deserves. Beyond that I do not know much about him.  I believe you can find more personal notes about him in Drugs Are Nice by Lisa Carver, another book that is sitting unread on my shelf.  I should get around to it.

Bonus post!

It's been a few days over a year that I starting blogging regularly, then not so regularly, here. As I wrote recently, it was an intended discipline to give purpose to my record and CD collection: write my thoughts on my current listening, and give a reason for pulling out records from my archive. Ultimately, I find I'm writing about myself more than the music itself (such as in this very instance). I'll probably continue now and then, once again for myself than any intended audience. I feel like I've reached a point where I'm starting to repeat my own anecdotes. I might be repeated the comment below.

I have a friend, who for simplicity's sake I'll refer to the masculine "he." (I don't need a discussion regarding pronouns, please.) This is someone I've known for decades, but haven't seen in person for years. We are Facebook contacts. When he responds to a posting by me or others that I see, it inevitably comes in the form of, "I saw that band in 1984" or "My band opened for them" or "I drove around that musician one weekend" or other comments that almost invariably come back to "I" or "me." He's even taken credit for things I didn't believe he should, and I've called him out on it.

This is my long-winded example of the hesitance I feel just writing about myself. I, I, I, me, me, me. And if I do write about myself, maybe I should focus that energy into documenting more of my work? I don't consider myself to be all that interesting or with a unique point of view. 

Yet I once again sit at my laptop, writing about myself. Our lives are not without contradictions.

And I find myself facing contradictions and conflicts  more and more as I age. What will my legacy be? Why should I care, if I'm gone anyway? What do I do now that I know I have fewer years ahead of me than behind me? Why am I not working on my music at this very moment? Will it matter? What does "matter" even mean? 

Truth is, I'm in too deep to back away now. And I am grateful for the fact that playing music continues to give me purpose. 

I've kept track of the artist recordings I've posted here. I'll post below. Draw what you will from the list, and it's hardly everything I've had on in the past year. It's surprisingly lacking in so-called jazz artists, but I don't know what that word means sometimes.

I'll probably continue, but not on a regular basis. There are so many things I need to do.

-Ben