July 07, 2006

going 6

I was between Thievery Corporation and very very old and to me quasi unrecognizable Red Crayola when I stumbled into the equally old King Crimson's Larks' Tongues in Aspic (1973). This is a very much unknown by KC Mark II, followed by the equally unknown Starless... and the solid and M.O.R. deadline album Red (1974). It makes me wonder why Fripp started with the metrics in this album for his solo carrier, debuting Exposure of 1979, only mitigated by two looping Revox, inheritance of the brief and flashy adventure with Eno, No Pussyfooting and Evening Star.

I spent hours at the beach with the almost 6 years old Melissa and W. We were observing the minutiae of the place and collecting short over-lived sticks, easy to pull together and tie up with a used up nylon string or net. Mine was calibrated on my fist like a baton relay, her was built in a similar fashion with a bright orange plastic rope. I remember that at one point in the discussion, when I was not grasping her point although trying to she served me with a never-mind. Calling a raw phrase a turning point is a clear exaggeration or not. She's growing old and getting tired of detailing the whole picture to the grands. Grabbing hands and nevermind.

After getting over with a big assignment from our client in Abu Dhabi, a packaging work for which we produced more concepts than for any other work ever, I believe it is time for some clean-up. Here come the Beatles, a good reading of past languages a bit before pushing the corners of the next framework. Coruscus is going CSS and is near, white, menu-less, portfolio-centric with samples of a size that scares, I'll be on that thru the next update for PixArtisan. Speaking of which, stats inform PixArtisan has received on average above 1000 unique visitors a day for 10 days in a row now. These are very interesting news considering Angela Rohner wanted to include the site in her gallery of the best designs and that we are simultaneously on netdiver.net, defrost.com and the excellent webcreme.

to google was finally included into the standard body of the Oxford Dictionary today, a verb. For how long have we been using that very verbiage, three years? Google it!, more than anything a "no-excuses" call to coworkers and friends who still don't get it. When I use to decline their questions with this now-famous short for "the-tool's-out-there-just-use-it".

Back to the kid, turning 6 on the 7th of July, what is she getting? Lots of very girl-ish stuff of course, mitigating her wandering ego is an assignment, an arch with arrows to check her homicidal tendencies, but two things I point out: phones and cameras. We're giving her a phone, no bells and whistles, I said phone. She's already our bilingual secretary, she can have her own phone. Most important she's getting a digital camera, a 3MP simple automatic white-balance not-too-many-presets digicam with a 15 MB memory that she can hook up to her Mac. She uses Photoshop, at her age it is important to understand where the input comes from and that it's all digital on the source. Kids need push, not over-protection, before somebody spells the word they have to print their photos. Technologies that make sense, are convenient, flexible and do not rip your time from you need to be embraced and experienced in full. What would you do with your photo prints when half your friends are in the US and the other half spread all over EU? Photo-blogging is in not because it's trendy but because it makes sense.

Now for something that does not make sense. So dark the con of man... you're missing The Da Vinci Code, not the book, the pelicula. Stay away, crap head to toe, do you want me to swear on the keyboard? No link for you!

Posted by lck at 12:39 AM | Comments (0)

June 22, 2006

The 21st album

In 1982 Sonic Youth recorder their first album with same name for Neutral.

Few days ago, Rather Ripped, their 21st album was released in Europe, a week after the US release on the 13rd of June.

The whole album is available for streaming on their website, or:

Reena
Incinerate
Do You Believe in Rapture?
Sleepin' Around
What A Waste
Jums Run Free
Rats
Turquoise Boy
Lights Out
The Neutral
Pink Steam
Or

The most accomplished and mature album Sonic Youth have done in years and a muscular candidate to best of 2006.

- To those asking about growing hemp here in Italy: no, it's a crime. (That's marijuana by the way. The fact that George Washington was growing it in the backyard won't make you skip our procedurals, which is jail and a few good lawyers to get you on the loose again :) -

Hasta (Over)

Posted by lck at 01:27 AM | Comments (0)

June 08, 2006

Poetry takes time, we know that.

Poetry takes time, we know that.
Music (pop, puff) takes sometimes even more time.

On July 20th, 2005 I posted (under Creative Commons) the following post as part of Dead Engine. The plan was to have UnderWave, a local band, use the lyric for a song of theirs. I'm happy to report they finally did it and the track is now in the wild.

It is here

I like their blend of early Smith with moderately polished Velvet Underground. Can't complain about the English as that's possibly the best you can get around here - Amen.

Poetry takes time, we know that.
But sometimes poetry knocks down early. So it is for Sara Carothers, which first and only piece is here. I read and read this piece and how can I believe this is coming from a 17 years old? Would you? So I asked her. And she sent me 6 unpublished pieces. Sara is on PixArtisan. In a few more days.

In 10 or so years nothing called literature has surprised me more than these 6 little poems of her.

Poetry takes time. Sometimes doesn't.

Posted by lck at 01:40 AM | Comments (1)

May 15, 2006

Barbarians

Between a sunny day and then more and family screaming "more of Lost" on the deserted beach not yet stuffed with sweating passengers heading to another holiday season...
Between reality, well packaged into comfortable, acceptable and economical "units" and the equally assuring, impossible and unacceptable Lacan game of hide and seek, so accurate and afar from our psychological needs to buy balance, compromise and acceptance...
In between String Theory and No Theory is a glimpse of History. The ability to read back language and carve sense out of our childish time of panic, reading back fractures, lines and reversals. Legible and usable.

I have been eyeing for two days now the pamphlet an Italian writer started on one of our newspapers, daily. I have never been foggy about Alessandro Baricco's writings. No mystery. In this pamphlet, a most welcome to a major newspaper going to sell it as "enough-entertainment" by the pound and under the umbrella in the coming months, Alessandro is looking to define, or at least inquiry about, what he calls "new barbarians". Alessandro, 48, is himself a writer and runs courses on creative writing in Turin, Italy. He has noticed, his words, as of recent (but according to his own observations as far as 5-years back) his scholars changing. He perceives the change tangible and important up hill to call it a "mutation". As a metric he identifies (in the second shot of this promenade made very clear) Beethoven ninth's Symphony as the "citadel" that, supposedly, defines our culture, times, shares and incontrovertible achievement, Byron and all the way down to Madonna. He also points out, handing some comfort over, that Beethoven's piece #9 was perceived at his time (written 1822-1824) as a disgrace, a barbaric acceleration, away from consolidated rules and values. The noise of today the "C" of tomorrow.

First question is: how many times did we experience this AFTER Beethoven?
An honest answer should have been: every day (with no exciting bangs)

Second question is: why is Alessandro (and legions after him) so enamored with Apocalyptic clashes?
An honest answer should have been: because historical facts and processes are easy to read once latent anthropomorphism is expressed as a fact, not methodology.

Is this in the end about our kids, our cold-blooded un-romantic unemotional tax-hater small branches scattered in-to the world without a (desirable?) sense of tragedy, direction, time, space and, most important, don't like Beethoven? Don't know who he was? Could they care if Madonna sits side by side with the iconic said Uber-Composer on the same shelf?

The questions above are naive, the answers are even more obvious. From an editorial point of view we may have appreciated more a long, articulated article than this long, foggy, vague and non-descriptive event horizon. But, fear not, the trend is real (Ludwig Van is LOL) .

The new barbarians own a free Gmail or Hotmail account, are part of an Internet community of some sort, have a blog they often update, experience some sort of virtual sex, have replaced art with graphic design, browse while at work, are on a short term job contract, maybe/sometimes a disqualifying position. They drive an SUV or a Mercedes-made city-car, have no particular concern for pollution, global warming and related geopolitics. The new barbarians do not buy CDs, catch individual songs on iTunes or grab them on the illegal underground, express acceptance/rejection to a website in average 6 seconds and have their first sex experience on the floor or on a couch, often at a party with same sex counterparts. The new barbarians express stable sex preferences around 30, with a wide range of uncertainty, often persistent beyond that age. The new barbarians do not read or buy books, they write. Their inevitable blogs and journals are all along a marketing tool, a psychological backpack, a connecting lane to the only social side of their life, a tie to a closed (and sometimes suffocating) self-referential community.

The landscape is clear.

Should we support? Influence? Get influenced? Slam the door?

People like me, 42 of age, Alessandro, 48 (I could be wrong, sorry :-), we have been going thru a lot. We may have kids, I do. We have answers to the above four questions, respectively: Yes, Inevitable, Sure, Never. But, kids aside, if we have not learned already, at our age, that "open mind" has a broader, deeper and larger meaning, we have failed. If we can not listen, if we are to read the earthquake ahead as "fracture" only and not as an everyday necessity, we have failed.

In the end, dear Barbarians, fear not, you won't be alone. In good company you are. Indeed!

Posted by lck at 02:20 AM | Comments (0)

May 08, 2006

Less than you think

Hot Fuss floats boatloads of blasé lyrics about the pressures of being fabulous and the politics of fucking over an easily sippable blend of 80s and 90s British pop influences [...] The Killers are just the latest band to be born too quick inside the popular music vacuum, where expectations...

The above is Pitchforkmedia's Review for Hot Fuss. We know the rest of it. They got it right. A good producer may not be enough to push the Nevada native quarter further than this month's pick on iTunes. 2 tracks are recommended: 2 - Mr Brightside and 3 - Smile Like You Mean It. 2 out of 11 is not bad, consider the above 2 have a better-than-average ipod cycle. If you really want to LOL then buy track 12 - Glamorous... you may get a better pic of where the kids are coming from and why aren't breaking any wall.

RHCP have made an art of copying themselves restlessly. Pretending to come with 28 self-covers hoping to snag a clap is definitely beyond what I am allowed to give. The band is finally entombed in so much deserved past. Tracks worthy .99$: 1 - Demi California. The rest is not on iTunes yet, but stop waiting as none of the other 27 matches the price tag.

Pearl Jam: Pearl Jam, 2006. Reviews put this album as a candidate to Best of the Year. Masterpiece, Perfect, Best Album, etc. Hope is the last thing to give, the album is being splattered for what it is not. Tracks worthy .99$: 4 - Comatose. Not ironic, the band has been in a state for years. Track 4 a fast track, well assembled, honest.

Problematic times to invest money in pop? No. Albeit slightly daunting to casual ears, in the following order, more Frou Frou, more Liars and Takagi Masakatsu.

Posted by lck at 05:58 PM | Comments (0)

November 12, 2005

It's Enterteinment

Very noticeable Imogen Heap's Speak for Yourself. At times possibly the best Lounge around, cornering Sade and confused about strawberries. She found the way in. But I have to ask myself if this is a girl (Getting Scared) or just a mild hybridized version of one of Marylin Manson's vocoders & Dido. Respectfully, listen to the fake gospel in "Hide & Seek" making now inroads into major commercials, who said the days of Cher on wah-wah were over? Eno, in his long toupe', is super-envious at how easily these tracks fit on both the top of Middle Of the Road bill and bottom of Innovation. Good job and Imogen(e) and nice, English touch, which is, ironic.

Graeme Revell has spent 10 years at the forefront of Industrial in the eighties with a now defunkt germanische-australian band collective called SPK. Now his ambient noise is constellation to a third of all Hollywood titles. The man behind Sin City's score and many others stands as one of the best Soundtracks composer of our times. Follow him for a good night out.

Vector Lovers, Kraftwerk minus the ideology and mild pop intervention. Nice try. Martin Wheeler, a self-confessed manga mad computer nerd and eighties obsessed knob-twiddler who has produced one of this years most irresistible albums with his eponymous Soma debut, 2005.

Nostalgic of the now-gone Crash Test Dummies (Uhmmmmmm) I give you 40 Foot Echo. Enough deja vous for a nearly identical product. Tears always taste the same, "Brand New Day" is enough trying, so cry baby.

Everybody is adopting Herbie Hancock's drum sessions. Big Tricky Mistery. Madonna's latest. And, for Italy, fresh and good, Jovanotti. Complete with chorus and whispers, we're close to Michael Jackson and reborn. Come on, do we REALLY want to go there, it almost makes me cry Nickleback, please. All the shaking just to get here?

LOST, the ABC's serial rip-off of Castaway, now on sale every Thursday online (it runs on Weds in the USA), sells no surprises and illustrates the psycho-social development of a group of marooned (civilized) passengers stranded on an island due to plane crash, off reach and off routes. The carcass of a jet lying on the beach for the longest time, bodies can be burned. Journey is typical, inner and outer. However, this time, the "outer" is not as quiet as in Robinson's. The island is haunted by boars (they make good steaks), polar bears (ich!), and what seems to be some other much much bigger wild creature and more mysteries. A good amount of anxiety. If you've gone thru Desperate Housewives already, you may look into Lost just watch your steps. After all what's to do when you're lost and under pressure but still hands on a bunch of good iron? Golf, right?

Posted by lck at 01:18 AM | Comments (0)

October 19, 2005

Generations

One of the most striking images that come to shine when talking about "generations" (Not the now de-funkt Star Trek typo) is of a man in his forties and his daughter age 5, both on earphones, sucking up the same tune via a split cable out of a single iPod (or other MP3 cracker). If this sounds overly dramatic, private docu-romance of sorts as you know I have a daughter aged 5, expand your view for a moment and generalize the scene but not abstract: this is a common parent-child duet. Why? Did it happen and quietly that our children at some point in time lost their genes, their social-class-like orientation, their natural propulsion to conflict? Why are they not fighting us anymore as we use our elders? How did it happen that they turned a flat and undetermined deep-blue-sea? Economics? Get out. Values and content distribution systems getting global? One sure factor. One: Did it happen? Two: When or how. Three: good or bad? Four: Is evolution, (and conversely revolution), an obsolete psychological class in an aging framework model? Five: It did happen, at some point in time, we dunno when or how, and yes, evolution is obsolete and forgotten and yes, we love it.

Consider this: rock music.

What is rock music today? What can it possibly and inevitably be? Recycling. Wins who does it better. Some do so with such sophistication and ability, we can only kiss their (forehead?) and go (leave a little love to these masters, think Beck, think Squarepusher). Changes are hiding well if any are present at all, combining and refining is what is left to us to do. Distribution and composition processes have changed a lot, dramatically and in ways that are of no return. The best rock bands on the planet today are so because they have perfected this. They rely on a market that has no memory, no saturation threshold, no model or ability to envision, no patience to fight anything but headaches, check grammar as you type. Our kids are all born into this. They love what we use to embrace a generation ago like free fuel to fight our parents schema, as an empowering personality offer too easy to access and too easy to lean on. We share the speakers with little men and women that were once supposed to take us on a battle. Is it good?

We love it. Don't you deny it, you can't. We love to plug in our kids onto our preferred tunes and find they appreciate the same conglomerates of feeling, regrets, passion. Our kids, loving Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Velvet Underground. How embarrassing.

Good producers, they know the trend well. They have sown it, developed it and exploiting it with a smile. Long dead rock bands re-forming at the sound of big money with a track or two and a number of covers to grab the hail of an army of young kids that still need to believe rock music is revolutionary or at least evolutionary. Play the game.

Depeche Mode new, out yesterday, available on iTunes, Loving The Angel, walking some older shoe's footsteps, Black Celebration, 1986. The band, severely underrated, still remarkably capable of 4 or 5 hits out of the same plate. Exaggeratedly overly romantic, as always (listen to "Precious", #1 on the UK charts). "If god has a master plan, that only he understands, I hope he's you're eyes he's seeing through", geez, breaking the heart of my kid already. And yours? Yours as well, on the same earpiece.

Evolution is over. Just give me a pain that I'm used to.

Posted by lck at 09:32 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2005

Flatland vs. Rocky Mountains

By Jeff Leeds on the New York Times, a short report on an impending uphill battle, this time on the iTunes Music Store.
The story is rather simple: Steve Jobs wants to maintain the one-price model that iTunes has, since inception, adopted - 99 cents to download any song - two out of four major record companies want it replaced with a more complex structure that prices songs by popularity. A hot new single, for example, could sell for $1.49, while a golden oldie could go for substantially less than 99 cents.
Most of the sticky business above will surely find its way in the next six months, in the meantime find the whole article here.

Posted by lck at 12:37 AM | Comments (0)

August 19, 2005

November in the Summer

Patrick Watson - Just Another Ordinary Day - 2004  

Watson meshes jazz, rock and pop with experimental and electronic music sensibilities to create an absolute masterpiece. A cinematic, emotive journey, both uplifting and melancholy, encapsulated in a painfully short 45 minutes through nine tracks. Pianist, vocalist and sound designer Watson, a member of the Sevens Project, leads a cast including guitarist Simon Angell, drummer Robbie Kuster and bassist Mishka Stein to near perfection.
Available at the iTunes Music Store

Available streams:

Step into a dream
Hurracan
Gnossienne

Posted by lck at 10:45 AM | Comments (0)

July 31, 2005

Some Glass Required

Metamorphosis 5 added to the playlist.

Since the sixties, Minimalism continues to be a liberating experience allowing artists to break away from a Europe totally immersed in the Darmstadtian avant-garde.

This avant-garde differs from the American one in that its origin stems from a philosophical foundation. Thoreau used to say: "Music, as I see it, is ecological... it IS ecology". Music is thus an extension of life. It is no longer a closed system, but rather an opening enriched with freedom for the individual. From a European point of view, this conception is equivocal. However, this idea can be linked to another basic phenomenon, one of extra-musical origin, namely the oriental philosophies, in which Sol LeWitt, the sculptor, envisages a more mystical than rational perspective in which "illogical judgements lead to new experience"; it is a salutary experience with variety in the repeated pattern, thus granting a specific treatment of space, duration and sound, as duration and rhythm for Glass, as well as for La Monte Young, Terry Riley or Steve Reich, are the main parameters of sound, at the very heart of compositional thought. Moreover, all these musicians are of the same generation - the first one, Young, was born in 1929 and the last one, Glass, in 1937. Glass studied composition with William Bergsma and Vincent Persichetti, and then studied with Darius Milhaud and Nadia Boulanger.

If Young offers a continuous sound of a constant pitch, Riley a repetitive principle subject to the improviser's fancy, and Reich a process of gradual progression, Glass, however, insists on the use of an additive process of development founded on the progression of a repeated figure. He thus proposes a variable within a simple arithmetic gradation: rhythmically in unison and in parallel, contrary or similar motion. Glass's music thus produces sound differences in time, using the same elements in constantly differentiated sequences.

Creating these differences within a context of repetitions is not only the heart of Minimalism, but it is also one of the basic principles of Far-Eastern musics. For instance, tabla music by Ravi Shankar and Allah Rakha that Glass knew quite well, having made a study-trip to India, then to Northern Africa and Central Asia.

When all is said and done, it is freedom in sounds that is essential. Perception is thus altered, inasmuch as, just as the Variations of Incomplete Open Cubes or Serial Project No I by Sol LeWitt modify the relationship between man and object, minimalist music transforms time and duration, replacing external passive listening by internal active listening. The matter of attention is the very interior of the sound. And Glass's minimalist music gives full reign to this experience. Glass enjoys saying that his music is like "the motor on a space machine".

His book Solo Piano (1991) is made up of three pieces, Metamorphosis, Mad Rush and Wichita Vortex Sutra. Metamorphosis consists of five parts. One introduces a simple melody in the upper register accompanied by a ground bass based on alternating thirds which remain constant throughout the cycle of five movements, as well as Mad Rush and Wichita Vortex Sutra. Two uses the same writing but this time ornate with upper register arpeggios. Three, in D minor, makes use of off-beats and Four of off-beats with arpeggios, whereas Five takes up the original theme.

Mad Rush and Wichita Vortex Sutra manifest more development. While Mad Rush takes up the theme of Metamorphosis both, at the beginning and at the end, it is built polyrhythmically using, amongst others, a three-for-two counter rhythm. Wichita Vortex Sutra, the finale, uses off-beats and arpeggios similarly to Four.

Opening for Piano (1982) is stylistically like Metamorphosis, with alternating thirds in the left hand and the three-for-two counter rhythm.

The Olympian - Lighting of the Torch is the most solemn piece, written for special circumstances: the opening of the Olympic Games in Los Angeles of 1984. This composition is hymn-like while remaining faithful to the composer's style.

Philip Glass's music for piano is a true reflection of this "metamorphosis" in receptivity, as shown by the titles: Metamorphosis consisting of five movements, the majestic equivalent of the mandala. The music sketches out a cosmic diagram with the Earth, the Centre and Number Five, surrounded by the four elements; a spirit composed of an uncontrived melodv, a whirlwind, a vortex with in the middle a zone of quietness, prolonged by the tireless and intuitive words of the sutrâ. Philip Glass does not make use of the instant diluted in time, but rather evokes the cyclic instant, an onslaught, Rush, and an opening, Opening, of a multiple instant and an eternal present.

- Olivier Lussac

Posted by lck at 07:21 PM | Comments (0)

July 12, 2005

(A better) Venetian Snares

Now updated with the excellent unedited transcript by Susanna Glaser, The Wire 254, April 2005. PDF available here.
[beware: explicit Aaron]

Rossz Csillag Allat Született is Aaron Funk's most ambitious work. An overall different feeling, maybe because of the Hungarian strings maybe the fact of Aaron have played violin on several tracks of the album. "Rossz Csillag Allat Született" is VS in a very mature, dramatic way, testing new environments and trying to stay away from the pitiful "breakcore". His music is way too solid and diversified to be labeled in one single style.

Posted by lck at 10:20 PM | Comments (0)

Tin Can from above

Bang on a Can Classics 2002 Canteloupe Music, (unlike all of Annie Gosfield, available on iTunes).
Performing the likes of Annie Gosfield, Evan Ziporyn, Lois Vierk, Nick Didkovsky and themselves, all in a tiny bright can of deep listening.

... co-artistic directors and founders, Wolfe, Lang and Gordon started Bang on a Can in 1987. Since that time they have presented more than one hundred and fifty musical events in New York City, ranging from a tribute to Morton Feldman to the only New York performances of Harry Partch's music on original instruments since Partch's death, to the commissioning and premiere of Bun-Ching Lam's Child God -- an opera accompanied by the Yueh Lun Shadow Puppet Theater, to the presentation of a "comic book opera" based on the cartoons and libretto of comic book artist Ben Katchor, to twelve Bang on a Can Marathons. They have founded an astonishingly successful chamber ensemble, the Bang on a Can All-Stars, and an orchestra, SPIT Orchestra.

For seven years, Gordon, Lang and Wolfe were solely responsible for all administration: producing concerts, producing records, presenting performers, designing and hosting residencies, commissioning, creating special projects, arranging tours, doing marketing and publicity and fundraising. During these seven years Bang on a Can grew from a one-day event on New York's Lower East Side to a year-round organization with a national and international reputation. Now with an office staff of four and major international partnerships, Bang on a Can has continued to grow as a major force in the presentation of new music, with multiple touring productions and a renowned house ensemble.

Having released seven recordings for CRI, Sony Classical, Point Music (Universal), and Nonesuch, Bang on a Can now releases the majority of its recordings on the record label also started by Gordon, Lang and Wolfe, with Bang on a Can Managing Director Kenny Savelson, Cantaloupe Music. And Bang on a Can refuses to sit still - with the All-Stars performing at the Sydney Olympics, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and more. PLUS new multi-media performances such as the Carbon Copy Building, Shadow Bang, Lost Objects, and more. In 2002, they introduced a brand new program, the Summer Institute of Music, a new program for young composers and performers at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Arts, which had a tremendous first season.

Posted by lck at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

June 17, 2005

Venetian Snares

Not quite telling you dump everything else. Aaron is cool and deserves more attention.

Posted by lck at 07:45 PM