Friedrich Gulda  was an Austrian pianist and composer who worked in both the classical and jazz fields. treat yourself to ten minutes today and indulge in some of these You Tube videos – the man is brilliant.

Born in Vienna as the son of a teacher, Gulda began learning to play the piano from Felix Pazofsky at the Wiener Volkskonservatorium, aged 7. In 1942, he entered the Vienna Music Academy, where he studied piano and musical theory under Bruno Seidlhofer and Joseph Marx.

He won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition in 1946. Initially the jury preferred the Belgian pianist Lode Backx, but when the final vote was taken, Gulda was the winner. One of the jurors, Eileen Joyce, who favoured Backx, stormed out and claimed the other jurors were unfairly influenced by Gulda’s supporters. Gulda began to play concerts worldwide. He made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1950. Together with Jörg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda, Gulda formed what became known as the “Viennese troika”.

However, today I wanted to draw attention to his incredible Jazz pieces.

Gulda’s ’Uber album’ As you like it has some of the most incredible jazz pieces ever recorded. Here is the track listing:

1 Blues for H.G.

2 I Only Have Eyes for You Dubin, Warren

3 What Is This Thing Called Love? Porter

4 All Blues

5 Light My Fire

6 ‘Round Midnight Hanighen, Monk, Williams

7 East of the Sun

From the 1950s on he cultivated an interest in jazz, writing several songs and instrumental pieces, and at times combining jazz and classical music in his concerts. In 1956 he performed at Birdland in New York City and at the Newport Jazz Festival. He organized the International Competition for Modern Jazz in 1966  and he established the International Musikforum, a school for students who wanted to learn improvisation, in Ossiach, Austria, in 1968. He once said:

There can be no guarantee that I will become a great jazz musician, but at least I shall know that I am doing the right thing. I don’t want to fall into the routine of the modern concert pianist’s life, nor do I want to ride the cheap triumphs of the Baroque bandwagon.

In jazz he found “the rhythmic drive, the risk, the absolute contrast to the pale, academic approach I had been taught.” He also took up playing the baritone saxophone.

I found it very difficult to find much info on him or this stunning album – at least out of the classic world. There is plenty there of course. The jazz album seems to be partly overlooked, perhaps it is seen as a bridesmaid to his ‘real’ career. I’m not sure. But when You consider the first piece at the top of this post has him playing the recorder, you will understand what a fantastic classical jazz musician he was.

One remarkably interesting tid bit I did pick up was that he expressed a wish to die on Mozart’s birthday, the musician he most admired, and then did so. He died of heart failure at the age of 69 on 27 January 2000 at his home in Weissenbach, Austria.  Gulda is buried in the cemetery of Steinbach am Attersee, Austria. I thought that was kind of cool actually. Although if I’d named a day like that and not a year, I’d get a tad nervous around that time each year.

So sit back. If its night time where you are and you want a sultry wine – help yourself - and enjoy a little cruising Gulda style.

Theo van Doesburg  was a Dutch artist, who practised painting,writing, poetry and architecture. He is best known as the founder and leader of De Stijl.

The De Stijl movement

It was while reviewing an exposition for one of these magazines he wrote for, in 1915 (halfway through his two-year service in the army), that he came in contact with the works of Piet Mondrian, who was eight years older than he was, and had by then already gained some attention with his paintings. Van Doesburg saw in these paintings his ideal in painting: a complete abstraction of reality. Soon after the exposition Van Doesburg got in contact with Mondrian, and together with related artists Bart van der Leck, Anthony Kok, Vilmos Huszar and J.J.P. Oud they founded the magazine De Stijl in 1917.

Promoting De Stijl

Although ‘De Stijl’ was made up of many members, Van Doesburg was the ‘ambassador’ of the movement, promoting it across Europe. He moved to Weimar in 1922, deciding to make an impression on the Bauhaus principal, Walter Gropius, in order to spread the influence of the movement.

de stijl magazine

While Gropius accepted many of the precepts of contemporary art movements he did not feel that Doesburg should become a Bauhaus master. Doesburg then installed himself near to the Bauhaus buildings and started to attract school students interested in the new ideas ofConstructivism. Dadaism, and De Stijl.

The split with Mondrian

The friendship between Van Doesburg and Mondrian remained strong in these years, although their primary way of communication was by letter. In 1923 Van Doesburg moved to Paris together with his later wife Nelly van Moorsel. Because the two men got to see each other on a much more regular basis the differences in character became apparent: Mondrian was an introvert, while van Doesburg was more flamboyant and extravagant.

During 1924 the two men had disagreements, which eventually led to a (temporary) split in the same year. The exact reason for this split has been a point of contention among art historians; usually the divergent ideas about the directions of the lines in the paintings have been named as the primary reason: Mondrian never accepted diagonals, whereas Doesburg insisted on the diagonal’s dynamic aspects, and indeed featured it in his art.

Mondrian lozenge

Mondrian accepted some concepts of diagonals, such as in his “Lozenge” paintings, where the canvas was rotated 45 degrees, while still maintaining horizontal lines. In recent years, however, this theory gained critique from art historians such asCarel Blotkamp, who cites their different concepts about space and time as the main reason for the split. After the split, Van Doesburg launched a new concept for his art, Elementarism, which was characterized by the diagonal lines and rivaled with Mondrian’s Neo-Plasticism.

In 1929 the two men reconciled when they accidentally met in a café in Paris.

Architecture, design, and typography

Van Doesburg had other activities apart from painting and promoting De Stijl: he made efforts in architecture, designing houses for artists, together with Georges Vantongerloo and he designed the decoration for the Café Aubette inStrasbourg. Together with El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, Van Doesburg pioneered the efforts to an International of Arts in two congresses held in Düsseldorf and Weimar, in 1922. A geometrically constructed alphabet Van Doesburg designed in 1919 has been revived in digital form as Architype Van Doesburg. This typeface anticipates similar later experimentation by Kurt Schwitters in his typeface Architype Schwitters.

Van Doesburg also kept a link with DADA, publishing the magazine Mécano under the heteronym of I.K. Bonset (possibly an anagram of “Ik ben zot”, Dutch for “I am foolish”). He also published Dada poetry under the same name in De Stijl. Under a second pseudonym, Aldo Camini, he published anti-philosophical prose, inspired by the Italian representative of Metaphysical art, Carlo Carrà. In these works of literature, he heavily opposed individualism (and thus against the movement of the Tachtigers, realism, and psychological thinking). He sought for a collective experience of reality. His conception of intensity had much in common with Paul van Ostaijen’s conception of “dynamiek”. He wanted to strip words of their former meaning, and give them a new meaning and power of expression. By doing this, he tried to evoke a new reality, instead of describing it.

Last years

Van Doesburg stayed active in art groups such as Cercle et Carré, Art Concret and Abstraction-Création, which he founded in 1931.  At the end of February 1931 he was forced to move to Davos in Switzerland because of his declining health. Van Doesburg did not recuperate: on 7 March 1931 he died of a heart attack. After his death Nelly van Doesburg released the last issue of De Stijl as a memorial issue with contributions by old and new members from De Stijl.

In  François Truffaut’s famously scathing essay about the state of the French Film in 1954 entitled “A certain tendency of French Cinema”  published in Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut writes about the unoriginality of the high prestige  ”tradition of quality” films produced in France. He points out they are usually plodding adaptations with formulaic, anti-clerical and anti-bourgeois messages, hypocritically written by extremely bourgeois screenwriters. Truffaut argues for a more nuanced cinema, written by directors or with a more original approach to adaptation, where middle class life and faith are more honestly dealt with and depicted. Another important essay of the time is  Alexandre Astruc’s “Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” written in 1948. Astruc argues for the cinema to become a more essayistic and personal form where the camera literally acts as the director’s pen, la camera-stylo.

Each of thee men felt that the cinema should be personal and able to touch the intangible, mysterious aspects of human existence. Although it appears well after the movement’s most influential years, My Night at Maud’s is a film bursting with these ideas and this sensibility, very much a film of the New Wave.

Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a devout, unmarried engineer, has a very specific profile in mind for his ideal wife: attractive, blonde, intelligent, and above all, a practicing Catholic. He believes that he has found his soul mate when he spots a young student named Françoise (Marie-Christine Barrault) in a crowded church during Sunday mass, and resolves to make her his wife. He attempts to catch up to Françoise, but loses sight of her behind a slow-moving vehicle.

One evening, he encounters a childhood friend at a restaurant, a philosophy professor named Vidal (Antoine Vitez), and the two begin to discuss the nature of religion and politics as a logical consequence of Pascal’s wager: If a man bets on God’s existence, and God does not exist, then a man loses nothing; but if a man bets on God’s existence, and God does exist, then his reward is infinite. Vidal is fascinated by the modernism of Pascal’s theories – a fusion of religion and mathematics – and believes that the philosophy applies to all aspects of life, even the rise of communism. In contrast, Jean-Louis takes exception to the “severity” of Pascal’s theories, but ironically accepts the strict moral code of the Catholic church.

Vidal invites Jean-Louis to meet the beautiful, sophisticated Maud (Francoise Fabian), and soon the conversation, once again, turns into a philosophical discussion. Jean-Louis insists that despite youthful indiscretions, he is ready for marriage, and cannot be tempted into having a meaningless affair. He wants to control love, very much symbolised by the Catholic Church who want to control love everywhere too – even in the bedroom. Anything outside an ideal is considered frivolous and foolish – even if he hasn’t even met the woman he has decided to marry as yet.

It is years later, when Jean-Louis is married and has children, that he sees Maud in a chance encounter on a beach. Jean-Louis is instantly attracted to her again, but again makes  a big deal of resisting her, because she is not the ‘proper’ image of what he wants from a woman.

There are several ways of reading the role Maud plays in this film. She is obviously the temptation meant to veer Jean-Louis from his course. But is Jean-Louis in good faith?  He knows what he wants – sure – but he has completely objectified the woman he wants to marry (marry not desires) without ever having met her. And what of his disinterestedness in Maud?  Is it in good faith, or does he simply fear a woman who would fill his life with a chaotic passion?

For me this was not a film about the ‘little temptations” that arise on the “pathway to love”. It was a film about   masculine fear of the free feminine (jouissance) and the control of the Catholic Church over  - even – the bourgeoisie.

However, maybe this is not strictly in line with Rohmer’s ideas on what the film is about.

The film is one of Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales series (#3), and the pascal theory does give us a heads up into what Rohmer was trying to say here.  Pascal was a Jansenist, a sect of French Catholicism that believed that salvation can only be achieved through God’s grace, that is predestined, regardless of our actions. In opposition to the Jansenists, the Jesuits advocated actively pursuing a virtuous life to enable entry into heaven. Jean-Louis likes to think of himself as following the Jesuit path, but Rohmer’s scenario at Maud’s is designed to see if this is true.

The truth of this beautiful beautiful film, lies a little somewhere in between.

The film is not merely about Jean-Louis’s self-deception or a sophomoric test of male self-control. Maud is not simply a screenwriter’s device; she is a fully-drawn character who is completely aware of the situation and is watching Jean-Louis carefully and has no expectations of him. It is Maud’s honesty and ability to see what is happening clearly that draws attention to the ways in which Jean-Louis hypocritically couches his subjective feelings in abstract, rational, and culturally sanctioned terms.

Rohmer’s precise and natural dialogue reveals the characters’ philosophical positions as well as their vulnerabilities, contradictions and hopes. The film’s power comes from the looming spectre of the hope for happiness that underlies all of the characters’ actions, but remains out of reach. Rohmer captures the excitement and anticipation, along with the wariness and fear that accompany our decisions about romance, giving the film an unexpected sense of urgency and suspense. The plot continues well after Christmas Eve and we see the consequences of Jean-Louis and Maud’s choices and the bittersweet tone continues, ending with a satisfying note of wistful regret and a rather painful irony.

I’ll end this review with a quote from Senses of Cinema:

Rohmer’s approach has often been called literary. The way in which he weaves moral philosophy and actual quotations from a variety of sources into his characters’ speech is reminiscent of Dostoyevsky, or other 19th century novelists. It is Rohmer’s commitment to realism and naturalistic dialogue and settings that make his films specifically cinematic. He combines his intellectual interests with an intense examination of everyday life. We see this in the wintry landscape of the rather ordinary streets of Clermont-Ferrand, beautifully shot by the great Néstor Almendros (a frequent collaborator of Rohmer’s and the cinematographer of Terrence Malick’s magnificent Days of Heaven made in 1978). He captures the unnatural silence of city streets in the snow as well as the grey slipperiness of roads covered in sludge. As in all great films, what we see and hear when no-one is talking is as important as the plot. The magic of the film is that it moves along with a charming lightness, telling its story, and never seeming overly cerebral or melodramatic; it makes us believe in and feel for its characters, even as we analyse and dissect their actions. Compared to the films of Godard, who confronts us with his Brechtian disruptions and overt political intent, My Night at Maud’s seems rather tame. Yet the clarity of Rohmer’s vision, the intelligence and intensity that he brings to his subjects, as well as the questions he wants to ask, are roughly the same.

This is a sophisticated, delightful and witty film that is another one very high up on my list of all time favorite films. Catch it if you can.

(In my girlie dreams I always fancied myself a bit of a ‘Maud’ )

How did I get here, if I am still an I? If how and where is here? can still be asked and why?

He got here how he got here.  How anyone gets here. How and where it is not my domain, this answering of questions.  It is unbecoming.  Truly insulting.  Beneath me. Below. Rather it is I, who create these questions and endeavour to create them answerless.  Unanswerable to anyone save the asker to whom – and do not fall into the wrong pt if it is in me to ever creat one –  they are still unanswerable but who still must seek. To hide a find. To question my domain, my only power, rather the only power I allow myself in the how and in the here.

A Heaven of Others is Joshua Cohen’s second novel and fourth book of fiction. It is a tale of horror – not of horror per se, but of a very specific horror. The horror of dying Jewish and waking up in Muslim heaven. I must confess right away, that I am not nearly qualified to do justice to a proper review of this masterful novel.  I have very little Jewish theology and I have no classic German poetry. I have leaned heavily on Daniel Elkind and his brilliant review so that you, my treasured reader, do not have to suffer for my ignorance. 

This amazing novella is divided up into seven separate sections. The first is sectioned off by starting with Nelly Sach’s Glühende Rätsel: iii.  The second is titled ‘Shoes’, then ‘Nakedness’, ‘A Pilgrimage’, ‘Limitation’, ‘Maturing to Infinity’, ‘A Metaphor’. Each is a pathway, in a circular style, that lead to the ‘Maturing to Infinity’ of the soul welcomed into heaven.

However, heaven is a confusing , horrifying place. He is the wrong person in another’s shoes. Shoes that lead him to a river of honey that seems like a beautiful idea, till he wades and gets stuck. Abducted by Eagle and dumped at the honey river, he is counseled that he may meet with “the man named Mohommed”.  This is a hoped for meeting, as this mysterious man is the only one who can explain why he is there and help him leave immediately. The depictions of this heaven are theologically accurate, and therefore even to a ten year old Jonathan Schwarzstein (who may or may not still be that age in Muslim heaven) steeped in the deepest horror.

Jonathan arrived in this heaven after he was out shopping for a toy for his birthday:

A toy, I just wanted a toy, to break to get another toy. to break next year or upon the new year, which were never.

 and he and his parents stopped off at the shoe store to get his much loved father a pair of shoes. While standing in the street,  A young Muslim boy hugs him and he hugs back.  the boy, aged ten like Jonathan, is a suicide bomber and he takes Jonathan and his family and many of those around him to another world.

He hugged me I don’t know why I hug him back in return.

Us, we hug tightly. We fall on each other. We feel for one and for others we fall. We feel. And we hug.

Their eyes shut, they squeeze — just like lemons.

And then they explode.

Mind the seeds.

From this intense moment we are pulsed into a sort of anti-climax with glimpses of the Islam heaven we lay folk know about – nakedness, virgins, buffets. the language starts to change here. It is poetic – although the entire novella is almost a prose poem – but it moves into a relationship with pace. Cohen uses clever word plays and a circular swirling motion to draw us into Johnathan’s confusion. There is no linear thought process, narrative or substantive grasp. We are in the liquid swirl of this knowing and not knowing. Cohen uses the body of the text to close the gap between moment and interpretation. Metaphors and similes are indistinguishable from a coherent attempt to understand Jonathan’s experience.  Jonathan, who has survived so much already, comes to this heaven to endure, to remember, to doubt, and to gossip; to expound his opinions on prayer, beet salad, tourism, and personhood; and to tell us who he was while he lived: who we are or were. His father is a piano tuner, his mother the Queen. When faced with the naked virgins, he knows that he wants a Queen, and they offer themselves in a horrific moment of mother-love over kill (ovary kill) to be all mothers to this small boy who grows smaller and smaller the more he longs for his one true Queen.

This is not, however, another voyeuristic novel where heaven becomes this excuse for irony – the carnival of our minds. This is not simply a vehicle for something else. It is in heaven that Jonathan realises he wants to find his way back – it is a creepy horror to his Jewish eyes. If hell is other people, then heaven for he who does not believe in that particular heaven, is the hell from other people.

Part way through, Jonathan realism, exhausted that he isn’t getting out of heaven any time soon and at this point he gives up his commentary, choosing instead to explain and atone:

  I never entered into the Valley of Nails not even as unshod as I was, and because I never entered into the Valley of Nails between the Two Mountains that might have been clouds after all I never had my Salaam answered, neither did I then truly seek the man named Mohammed [. . .] When it came to the ultimate sacrifice, I demurred. When pain entered into the world, my dream exited, flying. When a single choice was offered me I chose another.

[. . .] I cleave to this identity for and only for the memory—mine—of my Aba and the Queen. For them how I loved them. And for the expectations they once had for my own memory. Expectations becoming love in their ripening. A memory to be had by others. Becoming. Others I never made in an image I felt becoming the world.

The book is laced with jewish metaphor and word play that I can read and appreciate the smattering edges of, but for a good source commentary, I will rely here on  DANIEL ELKIND‘s excellent review in A new Haven Revew:

Like the doomed atmosphere of Prague’s old Jewish Quarter in Paul Leppin’s short story collection Others’ Paradise, the very boundaries of existence at any stage are the subject of myth, and existential ambivalence a form of theology; life is a kind of prayer; and the Jew is a feverish metaphor that bears the brunt of evolution. Now that Leppin’s seedy and labyrinthine world is gone along with Leppin’s own peculiar syphilitic paranoia and the comfort of personal enemies, we are left—Cohen seems to imply—with a stranger and more relative doubt almost as sure as certainty, much as Jonathan is lost and knows he is lost in a heaven he can only intuit. In this utter awareness Cohen offers us perhaps a pure, holy regret for what seems lost forever, but lost only to us, he reminds—the survivors: as the heart of his book is an idea-as-doctrine he calls Maturing to Infinity, or growing ever and ever, a metamorphosis abandoned by theology and teleology both. (Though as Cohen, a writer so aware of etymology would appreciate, Jonathan’s lack of a telos, or end, simultaneously makes him teleos, or perfect—as horrifying as that perfection might be.) The victim is a sacrifice at once trapped and free in his eternal victimhood, forced to change unrecognized, uncounted, and unaccounted for, while at the same time mourned on earth, consecrated as a martyr, and remembered forever as the 10-year-old boy he no longer resembles or knows.

We know that Joshua Cohen is an outsider both in Israel and in his native America.  A Heaven of others is not an opportunity to score political or theological points, nor is it completely cut off from those distanced from their own theological origins. This is a fevered cry of individual doubt, agnosticism.  Again I’ll lean on Daniel Elkind’s review to carry this idea further:

…or Agnon’s—gnosticism, as S.Y. Agnon, too, wrote of tradition amidst modernity and was influenced by German literature and reflected his heart’s philosophy in a necessarily new language; though in the untranslated epigram, Cohen chooses the Hebrew-language poet Saul Tchernichovsky as his shadow Virgil, and the poem “Levivot,” or “Pancakes,” which tells the story of a boy’s trajectory from unquestioning obedience and acceptance—the untranslatable egel melumad, literally “a learned calf” and also the taunt for a yeshiva student—to freedom and, consequently, sacrilege: “having no weapon in its hands/It will cleave to all its persecutors forbid.” Notice the double meaning of this English translation: cleave in the sense of to split and to separate, as well as to join together—“Cleave, which in American means both To rend and To adhere,” as Cohen does, in his faith and faithlessness, holiness and profanity. “In this heaven as in any heaven I am no longer a Jew. In this heaven as in any heaven I am no more a Jew than I’m not [. . .] To be forever estranged, even amid your own congregation, and to be forever wandering, even within your own encampment, and only because they make me a stranger, and only because they make me a wanderer, they who would be I only if, I who would be they only why [. . .]”

Finally, the last section, or chapter, is a tour de force single sentence of a breathless virtuoso. One of the many pleasures of this book is the transparency of its influences, even if I am on the outside of so many of them, and the legibility of its inspiration. Ultimately this is cry from the belly to choose the face by which we are known.  In this world, our names, our faces can make targets of us (let me tell you about being called a ‘Thatcher’ some time) on behalf of freedom of speech. In a world that is in continuous ruin, memory is the property of one who remembers. Everything else is lost to Television.

I’ll end with the closing remarks of Elkind’s review and after that another quote from this amazing book:

Perhaps nothing written since Kafka quite conveys the arbitrary cruelty and absurdity of a world such as this in the most proximate human terms, and the inner sense, or intuition, of a soul that mediates between. In fact, now that so much Jewish literature has been written and rewritten again in English, now that we have so many authors and classics, it is all the more rare and inspiring that Cohen, scandalously overlooked in America, especially by the Jewish literary community—the novel is timestamped almost four years ago, in 2004—continues to delve deeper and further with each book into an inherited terrain while making of that holy ground these beautifully uncharted territories with their own maps and legends. (It did not come as a surprise that, according to his website, Cohen has just finished an 800-page novel about the last Jew on earth, called, blasphemously: Graven Imaginings.) “How did I get here, if I am still an I” Jonathan asks in the opening sentence, and is mocked in a kind of Yiddish by the narrator, who is himself: “He got here how he got here.” At once terrifying and singular and singularly important, A Heaven of Others repeats and channels the echo of that initial question, forcing us to see ourselves between destinies, between politics and political persuasions, and between answers themselves, to ask in fact who and what we really are: how did we get here, that is, if we are to remain an I?

From A Heaven of Others:

… there was no revelation, there was none at all to be had and instead though it’s a poor bargain if you’d ask me now if only you could if only I could answer in return the assurance of existence  that’s it times tenfold that’s all that I am shining I’m just shining through the horror just through the raw yolk of existence cracking a shine through its knobless handleless shell it was horror yes because it was horror or rather more accurately more faithfully it was terror yes more like terror that was it was terror was abject terror abject total terror yes terror that’s what heaven is like that absolute truly terrible dreaming of dreaming of mine. 

This post is part of a series. You can see the previous post here.

Oh it’s all happening here today with this selection of amazing music. Its the first half of the 1970′s still, and the most brilliant musicians are learning about musique concrete and jazz fusion and adding it to funk, blues and groovy jazz heat. Add to that a little ‘poor-little-white-guy’ cool from Lewis Furey and some naked-in-the-bush Karutrock from Faust and you have the absolute brilliance of this magnificent section of the Wires list. I was wild with pleasure when I first discovered early seventies jazz. Oh, I love the trad - don’t get me wrong – but when they all get high and get down there’s nothing like it. The above pic is the incomparable Betty Davis, who, for the record, denies cheating on Miles Davis with Jimmy Hendrix.

What a life.

Faust

The Faust Tapes

For no other reason than I can’t do everything in the world, I missed this incredible band when they came to Australia last year. I regret it now… I’m not sure what inane thing I was doing instead. ”We made tons and kilometres of tapes and The Faust Tapes is only the best,” is how the group’s Jean-Herve Peron assessed this epochal album. This was made in a converted school house in the countryside near Wumme in Germany where they grew their own dope, tomatoes and lived naked. This is pure sonic collage, magnificently edited and dipping into that musique contretem, which if anyone here is following my Creel Pone posts, will knmow I have a passion for. This is a little more accessible for a wider audience – but here’s the thing.  None of the integrity is lost, which makes this album oh so oh so very spesh. Apparently the story goes, Uwe Nettelbeck signed the band up with Virgin Records in London him trading the bands latest hard-wired genius for an album sold at a single price. The result was 50,000 copies sold (huge at the time for music of this style) and a whole new fan base in the UK.  Legendary.

Herbie Hancock

Sextant

Electronic music gets accused of being cold, and while I don’t find that myself, melding it with that ‘baby-im-on-fire-kiss-my-ass’ hot/mellow/hot/mellow/hot/mellow jazz feel that our friend Herbie can do better than anyone takes it to another level.  Wire have this to say: When The Herbie Hancock Sextet recorded Sextant they’d been using clavinets and mellotrons and ARP synthesizers on the road for three years. This gave their burbling sonics a hands on, funky spin that still causes smiles today. Buster Williams’s groovesome basslines and Hancock’s boogie figures float over polymetric layerings that recall Eric Dolphy’s Out To Lunch and Miles Davis’s ESP. Trombonist Julian Priester supplied the umbilical link to The Sun Ra Arkestra. Uncushioned by the harmonic conventions that padded out later, more saleable fusions, the players’ lines glisten over deep black space and tangle into multicoloured collective improvisations. Of course, like so much brilliant music, the inacessability of this alienated much of Hancocks fan base. I can’t understand this. Just listen to it. If you stretch toward the music, instead of refusing it, how much floating pleasure is there to enjoy?

Larry Young

Lawrence of Newark

For those of you new to Larry Young, prepare to be absolutely flooredby the unorthodox sounds of this brilliant jazz organist. Listen to what Dangerous Minds blog has to say about this:

I first heard Young’s playing on a bootleg of him jamming in the studio with Jimi Hendrix. If you can hold your own with Jimi, you’ve got to have CHOPS and Young—sometimes called the “Coltrane of the organ”—had chops to spare. What sent me out (er…. to Google) to find this, though, was a reference in a Nick Cave interview where he was saying how he and the musicians in the Grinderman project had been grooving in the studio on Young’s monster of a song “Khadid of Space, Pt. 2 Welcome.” With a title like that—and knowing that Pharoah Sanders was all over this album—I just had to hear it. It did not disappoint. It’s a massive HUNK of music. Funky, psychedelic, both droning and jazzy simultaneously, it’s nothing shot of exhilarating and stunning. Look at the album cover. I’m a sucker for anything that even faintly reeks of Sun Ra-style Afro-Futurism and if you, too, are so inclined, you can thank me in the comments section.

The beating heart of the record is “Khalid of Space Part Two” (Part One remains missing to this day) – 12 minutes of Sun Ra inspired cosmo jam that pushes Young and his ‘Arkestra’ toppling over the edge of free jazz freakout to tear a mindblowing solo from the primal fretboard of James ‘Blood’ Ulmer. Young’s untimely death, and the imprisonment of Perception’s founder, ensured that no further experiments of this kind would be carried out. Meanwhile, Laurence Of Newark begs to be reissued. Get your teeth into this one ASAP!

Betty Davis

They Say I’m Different

Women may be underrepresented in the world of fine fine music, but as this list attests, when they make an impact, they REALLY make an impact. This woman aint like no one, no how!  More cool than Jimmy,  as much talent as Miles and funkier than Sly, this woman inspired and thrilled all of them with her phsenomenal talent and exceptional beauty. She is sass personified. Her own music was a pressure cooker of sex and adrenalin, equaled in guts by only a handful of her husband’s records. They Say I’m Different contains the much sampled “Shoo-B- Doop And Cop Him”, the tough fetish-funk “He Was A Big Freak” (“Pain was his middle name… he used to laugh when I made him cry”), and a title track that remains one of the decade’s overlooked funk masterpieces. In Davis’s own words “If Betty were singing today she’d be something like Madonna; something like Prince… She was the beginning of all that when she was singing as Betty Davis. She was ahead of her time.” Miles made Bitches Brew while passionately in love with Betty – in fact it is rumored he wanted to call it Witches  Brew and it was Betty the genius who convinced him to change it. If the world was a different place, this woman would be as big as any of those men, and the track I’ve posted above would be one of the best known samples of funk brilliance.

Lewis Furey

Lewis Furey

You can hear the influencer on Rufus Wainright here immediately, that campy, show stopping show stopper feel. I like this album a lot, but Im deferring to Wire for the info here:

Previously known to the world only by a session violin credit on Leonard Cohen’s New Skin For The Old Ceremony, Lewis Furey established himself as nothing less than Montreal’s answer to Lou Reed on this, his first (and best) solo album. Cohen’s producer John Lissauer created the sound of francophone cabaret trapped in a bell jar, the perfect showcase for Furey’s piano – and banjo-driven tales of obsessive love and betrayal. Those who currently thrill to Rufus Wainwright’s debut need only hear a few seconds of Lewis’s torchy, nasal vocals to know that there is nothing new under the sun. These tales of Quebec’s demi-monde are laced with imagery drawn equally from Blake and Burroughs, brutal metaphors and sly, devilish arrangements. And speak of the devil, The Rocky Horror Show’s Tim Curry turns up as backing vocalist – along with Cat Stevens.

Didn’t I tell you that you’d love the show today?

This is a break from my usual arts posts.

I thought this exhibition at the Tate last year was so interesting, I would put some of the images together for us here.

The text is from the Tate Modern Gallery website.

Exposed offers a fascinating look at pictures made on the sly, without the explicit permission of the people depicted. With photographs from the late nineteenth century to present day, the pictures present a shocking, illuminating and witty perspective on iconic and taboo subjects.

Beginning with the idea of the ‘unseen photographer’, Exposed presents 250 works by celebrated artists and photographers including Brassaï’s erotic Secret Paris of the 1930s images; Weegee’s iconic photograph of Marilyn Monroe; and Nick Ut’s reportage image of children escaping napalm attacks in the Vietnam War.

Sex and celebrity is an important part of the exhibition, presenting photographs of Liz Taylor and Richard Burton, Paris Hilton on her way to prison and the assassination of JFK. Other renowned photographers represented in the show include Guy Bourdin, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Lorca DiCorcia, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Nan Goldin, Lee Miller, Helmut Newton and Man Ray.

The UK is now the most surveyed country in the world. We have an obsession with voyeurism, privacy laws, freedom of media, and surveillance – images captured and relayed on camera phones, YouTube or reality TV.

Much of Exposed focuses on surveillance, including works by both amateur and press photographers, and images produced using automatic technology such as CCTV. The issues raised are particularly relevant in the current climate, with topical debates raging around the rights and desires of individuals, terrorism and the increasing availability and use of surveillance. Exposed confronts these issues and their implications head-on.

“’The cinema,’ Andre Bazin said, ‘substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.’ Contempt is a story of this world.”

I just cried my way through a third viewing of Contempt (Le Mépris) a film I never ever tire of. I know there are some vague problems with this film – it doesn’t have the coherency of Vire Sa Vie (for example) and the Hercules scene at the end is pretty weird, but honestly, those minor concerns mean nothing in face of the astonishing achievements Godard makes with this beautiful intelligent film.

This is a film about so many things, but mostly it is a criticism of commercial film making. This was his one foray into “commercial” filmmaking and for Godard, that was no small compromise. As much as any director and more than most, Godard believed strongly in art for art’s sake and not compromising his artistic conceptions for prosaic monetary considerations. The very making of this film tore at the fabric of Godard’s artistic vestments. I have read that five million dollars of the budget was paid exclusively for the right to film Bardots bottom, and so Godard, with an astonishingly subtle wit, films her bottom, all the while making fun of the fact that we will pay so much to see Bardot’s bottom.

But that is just the beginning of the thematic contradictions Godard skillfully play with in this film. It is a film about communication, and so three of the films six main characters speak different languages, while only one (an oppressive female presence) speaks the languages of each. It is a film about hierarchical problems in main stream film production, and so we see a remarkably attractiveness crass American producer (played by Jack Palance) dominating and controlling Fritz Lang (played by Fritz Lang) and our writer (MIchael Piccoli), who is really Godard himself. Money and the role it plays in film is an important theme, so the story is about a man who blames his wife for having to take a job that forces his own self-hatred, and so in retaliation, comodifies his wife. Godard opens the film with us watching the virtual making of a scene, the end of which, he turns the camera on us.

In Contempt,  an argument arises between the producer Jerry Prokosch,  and director Fritz Lang over a film version of The Odyssey. After watching some takes Prokosch explodes ‘that’s not what is in the script!’ — and yet, on consultation, there it is. Lang explains patiently: ‘you see, Jerry, in the script it’s written, on the screen it’s pictures’. The two are incommensurable — no wonder such slippages occur between them, is part of what Godard wants us to know.

The film can largely be separated into three separate chapters.  The first chapter occurs in a deserted back lot of the Cinecittà film studios in Rome. Even the opening credits are unusual. They are provided by voice, as a tracking shot follows a woman, Francesca Vanini (Giorgia Moll), walking down the otherwise vacant back lot of the studio. Francesca acts as the interpreter throughout the story. At the end of the credits, the same voice states, “’The cinema,’ Andre Bazin said, ‘substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires.’ Contempt is a story of this world.” Godard was informing newcomers to his audience (his regular fans required no reminder) that he was not interested in making films that mimic reality. His is the world of imagination and desires.

We soon meet screenwriter Paul Javel (Michel Piccoli) and his wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot). In fact, we meet them up-close and personal, especially Camille. They are lying quietly in bed in the morning, Paul already dressed but Camille stretched out naked on her stomach. Bardot in her heyday  was the most photographed woman in the world. Paul and Camille are sharing sweet-nothings as any loving couple might. Camille asks Paul if he likes her feet, then her ankles, then her calves, and continues in an erotic meandering up Bardot’s body. Paul answers “Yes”, with each successive question. Meanwhile, the lighting shifts from natural, to blue filter, and to red. The scene ends with Paul stating, prophetically, “I love you totally, tenderly, tragically.”

This scene was apparently added in at the end of shooting, at the request of the producers, who’d paid all that green for their pound of flesh. This is incredibly ironic when you consider one of the films primary themes is a wife who instantly loses all respect for her husband when he complicity treats her as a sex object in order to impress a rich American film Producer. Godard has Bardot asking Paul (us) “do you like my toes?” then “do you like my ankles” as the camera dwells dwells dwells on her golden flesh. She is carved up for our pleasure – and by her own voice (she who took the five million in exchange for showing her bottom) with an irony that we see revealed as the film moves forward. Godard uses the blue and the red to both mask her, reveal her and obscure that which he has been asked to sell  as Georges Delerue’s music rumbles threateningly like a thunderstorm.  Paul is dressed and almost non existent.  This guerrilla tactic sums up this brilliant film: an act of sabotage occasioned by a story about selling out.

Contempt reverses the idea of love at first sight–that ideal that’s sold so many movie tickets and blighted so many lives. Godard demonstrates that one insignificant gesture, one momentary lapse of attention, can cause the woman you love to become completely indifferent to you.

Paul and Camille have a new apartment and Paul, worries about paying for it. He has been offered a relatively lucrative opportunity to rewrite the script for a film, but taking the job will require compromising his artistic ambitions a bit – selling his talents for a commercial endeavor. Paul meets with the American film producer, Jeremiah (“Jerry”) Prokosch (Jack Palance), who is a vulgar, crass, obnoxious sort of ugly American. Worse still, the film (an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey) is already in production under the direction of the great Fritz Lang.

Prokosch is dissatisfied with what has been produced so far to the point of being irate. As the man in control of the purse strings, he intends to force changes on Lang that will enhance the commercial potential of the film. Near the end of the negotiations between Paul and Prokosch, Camille arrives, by prearrangement, to meet Paul. Prokosch invites the Javels to come to his villa for drinks. He offers to drive Camille in his flashy red Alfa-Romeo sports car, which has room for only two, and suggests that Paul follow in a taxi. Although Camille seems uncomfortable with this plan, Paul agrees. When Paul arrives at the villa, he discovers that Camille is looking at him with new eyes. She feels that he has left her vulnerable to the predatory Prokosch as a sweetener to get him favour with the producer and gain the job he seeks.

The second chapter, which is the centerpiece of the film, takes place in the Javel’s apartment. By the appearance of things in the apartment, Paul and Camille have yet to be fully settled in. The drapes have not yet arrived and boxes of belongings remain strewn about. During the films next half-hour, Paul and Camille engage in a classic marital dispute, neither really able to effectively express their issues or deal with those of their partner. The quarreling is presented with extraordinary psychological realism.

As the conversation ebbs and flows through a troubled relationship, the two go about ordinary daily activities with physical casualness: bathing, sitting on the toilet, sometimes stopping mid-sentence, exiting and entering rooms, standing across the room from one another, and opening a drink. Their conversation has all too much the quality of picking at a scab. They can’t ignore their problems but picking at them is just further irritating the wound. She successively grows cold and contemptuous, denies that her feelings for him have changed, tries haltingly to make up, and finally admits that she no longer loves him. Paul’s primary (but counterproductive) motivation seems to be a need to confirm his suspicion of her newly contemptuous feelings and to demand an explanation. His insistence on an explanation has a bit of the feel of his wanting to bully her out of her feelings, when he should be assuaging them.

The visuals in this scene are breathtaking. The apartment is meant to show a stylistic life. It is an attempt to make great beauty, but it as yet incomplete. There are large figures of women, cold, stone like, dotted about the apartment that make us think of Camille’s coldness toward her husband. shots of the couple ion separate rooms, yet with their back to each other. The couple are moved about by Godard like figures on a chess board as each tries to out manouvre the other.

The third chapter takes place mostly at a magnificent chateau in Capri, on the Mediterranean, where Paul and Camille have gone to observe the next stage of the shoot of the film within the film. Paul must try to cope simultaneously with the unraveling of his marriage while also deciding whether to take the script-rewrite job. The natural beauty of this setting is exceptional and contrasts dramatically with the shattering of the marriage.  Camille decides to leave Paul, gets a lift with Prokosch, and rather strangely, dies with him in a car accident.

An essential component of the film is the film they are making, a remake of the Odessy story. Both of the artists, Fritz Lang and Paul don’t want to mes with the story line but Prokosch wants to ‘modernise’ it.  Lang refuses to, but Paul confesses to Camille that he wants to try to convince Lang to change the film, even though we know Paul does not agree that the classic should be messed with.  In a life imitation of art, Palance had some trouble with Godard, as did Bardot, because of Godards refusal to accommodate their petty needs and desires that symbolised their star status. Godard’s difficulties with Bardot’s celebrity status, Palance’s unhappiness, and his producers paralleled the production difficulties of the Odyssey film within the film.

The marriage of Paul and Camille could be equated with the difficult marriage of Godard’s artsy directing style with the commercial requirements imposed by his producers. Other parallels were intentionally built in by Godard. For example, at one point in the film, Prokosch hurls a reel of film like a Greek discus and at another point expresses his understanding of Greek gods. Paul puts on a toga-like towel after his bath in the middle chapter. Thus, the Greek element permeates not only the Odyssey film within the film but the film itself.

Before feminist critiques of the movies became common, Godard made an early and memorable attack on the sexism of the movies. And later, the absolute mulishness of Bardot’s character earns Godard’s grudging respect. It’s not Bardot whom Godard hates, but Bardotism: the packaging and sexual exploitation of a woman. Bardotism is a metaphor for the packaging and exploitation of any talent, especially his own. Godard once said, “I am a whore fighting the pimps of cinema,” and none of his films expresses that dilemma more starkly than Contempt.

Many nice ideas for this came from the Epinions website reviews.

I hope you enjoy the selection below.  I’ve got the next 4 amazing albums in the count down to the 99 albums that make up the Creel Pine collection.  In this selection we have musique concrete for kids – AT LAST I hear you cry!  Ha!  Take a listen – it’s so worth it. Download a copy of this beautiful, interesting work and play it to your kids. Have a moment when they look at you like your mad.  I bet they come around to loving it eventually.

Enjoy!

# 18 – George Engler – The Inside Of The Outside / Or The Outside Of The Inside – Who Are They? Where Do They Come From? Why Are They Here?

1 Konjugationen

Composed By – Heinz Karl Gruber*

9:10

2 Ghostly Drumming 2:45

3 Echo 1:25

4 Swarm Of Insects 1:40

5 Industry 1:05

6 Metallurgy 1:40

7 Work In Space 1:20

8 Destruction 2:20

9 Saturn 2:00

10 Thunder And Lightning 2:25

11 Dance Of The Unknown 2:35

12 Terror 2:15

13 Spherical Exotic 1:35

14 Hectic 1:15

15 Sparkling Particles 1:35

16 Steel-Harp 1:00

17 Lunacy 1:07

18 Tears 0:25

19 Sounds On Venus

This amazing collection of experimental musique concrete strikes at the very heart of what we think electronic music should be. Originally released in 1965, this reproduction is in excellent shape and supposedly inspired george Harrison on his electronic sounds release, but of course Harrison never went this far – the music literally curving itself up toward space. One can glean all sorts of hypochondroid vibes from the title & liners  alone, even before the music itself hits your ears; a fine mist of space-age paranoic lo-fi/end rumbles and truly insane, tape-augmented guitar-skrabble. Echo is the stand out for me, but I can’t find a copy of it to play play play you. But you can get the download here anyway.

# 19 – PHILIPPE ARTHUYS – LE CRABE QUI JOUAIT AVEC LA MER (1955)

Tracklist
1 Le Crabe Qui Jouait Avec La Mer 13:46
2 Le Crabe Qui Jouait Avec La Mer 11:24

Narrator – Jacques Gripel , Pierre Conte , Sylvine Delannoy
Recorded in the studios of the Groupe de Recherce de Musique Concrète de la R.T.F.
Text is an extract from “Histoires Comme Ca” of Rudyard Kipling, translated into French by M.L. Fabulet and R. d’Humieres.
MUSIQUE CONCRETE FOR CHILDREN !

This is literally, as cute as cute gets!  Of course it’s all in french, but play it for your kids. Its gorgeous! A beautiful animated story with gorgeous electronic sounds in the background to delight and excite children.  What an incredible gift to give your kids!  The gift of alternative music.

#20 – Anthology of dutch electronic tape music v2 (1966-1977)

Jacob Cats – Cadence-1 6:10

1-2 Tera De Marez Oyens – Safed 7:33

1-3 Jos Kunst – Exterieur 9:36

1-4 Gilius Van Bergeijk – D.E.S. 7:46

1-5 Frans Van Doorn – Minnuet 9:05

1-6 Thomas Arras – A.B.C. 8:33

2-1 Simeon Ten Holt – I Am Sylvia 15:30

2-2 Victor Wentink – Discours 13:20

2-3 Louis Andriessen – In Memoriam 5:06

2-4 Peter Smith (2) – Etude-1 8:58

2-5 Tony Van Campen – Sintering

The second volume to the divinely alive Dutch electronic series. I have this and volume one on my i pod and I LOVE to do a freak out shuffle on my way to work on the train.  the music hides behind, beneath and above me and the sounds blend with everything around me.  I get lost in this timeish sort of pocket to which there is no start and no end.  Just listen to this:

Hows that for a mind-fuck? Grab a listen here.  For this volume I have been able to get a hold of the liner notes.  Check it out:

Electronic music has been the subject of intense activity in the Netherlands since 1955, and the variety of this activity is reflected in the histories of the large number of electronic studios. The aim of Anthology I is to illustrate both the work of the various studios and that of individual composers; we have tried to represent as many composers from each studio as possible with preferably their earliest and most characteristic works. The majority are exercises and étude-like pieces with exception of No. 8, a composition for instruments and tape; No. 5, music for a television play; No. 6, a ballet score; and No. 14, music for a stage play. 

In Holland, as in other countries, it was mainly tape music for concerts that was produced until 1966. After that date electronic music expanded: advanced computer techniques were developed, live electronic music received more attention, electronic music penetrated into conservatory and university syllabuses, and above all private studios were set up by and for groups of improvising musicians. The year 1966, the watershed in the history of Dutch electronic music, accordingly marks the limit of this collection: Volume I is built around tape music from 1955 to 1966, and Volume II documents tape music from the ‘open studios’ from 1966 to 1978.

Erwin Roebroeks wrote a review on the anthologies which was published in in Neuw Zeitschrift Musik 2009

#21 – Cellutron and the Invisible - Reflecting on the First Watch, We Uncover Treasure Buried for the Blind.

So… oh my god… get your head around this. Purely for the vanity of being able to sit back with a smooth red and look and feel like hot shit, I would LOVE this collection on vinyl. This  LP is amazing. Whirling and spinning us out of the context of that quirky stab thing, this album moves into different directions again.

Side A is a bees swarm of massive enveloping sound, analog cut with a frosty and (to quote Mutant Sounds)  slightly curdled tone somewhere between Schnitzler-esque dystopian abstraction and the interstellar voids emitted by Nik Raicevic or Tangerine Dream circa Alpha Cerntauri. 

Once we’re done with that abstraction, side B moves us into even more curious zones. ” First is Parisian frequency Shift”, which moves some reverb into the feel and adds some cosmic hippie style voice.

Reap the whirlwind is the best track on the album, a weave of antiquated and hollowly bonking sequencer that Mutant Sounds suggested reminds us of Mort Garson or Tom Dissevelt. I could hear the TD in the track – and it certainly is one to listen to.  Grab your download of the album here or listen to the final track on the you tube below.

Francis Alÿs  is a Belgian artist. His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. After leaving behind his formal training as an architect and relocated to Mexico City, he has created a diverse body of artwork that explores urbanity, spatial justice, and land-based poetics. Employing a broad range of media from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence.

When Faith Moves Mountains

Alÿs commonly enacts paseos—walks that resist the subjection of common space. Alys reconfigures time to the speed of a stroll, making reference to the figure of the flâneur, originating from the work of Charles Baudelaire and developed by Walter Benjamin.  Cyclical repetition and return also inform the character of Alÿs’ movements and mythology—Alÿs contrasts geological and technological time through land-based and social practice that examine individual memory and collective mythology. Alÿs frequently engages rumor as a central theme in his practice, disseminating ephemeral, practice-based works through word-of-mouth and storytelling.

Many of his works involve intense observation and recording of the social, cultural and economic conditions of particular places, usually conceived during walks through urban areas. Citing walking as the centre of his practice, for his first performance The Collector (1991), he dragged a small magnetic toy dog on wheels through Mexico City so as to attract debris to it.

Francis Alÿs - Fairytales

In Fairy Tales (1995), he takes a walk after unravelling the sweater he has on, leaving an ever-lengthening, blue-thread trail in his wake. 

Also in 1995, Alÿs realised an action in São Paulo called The Leak in which he walked from a gallery, around the city, and back into the gallery trailing a dribbled line from an open can of blue paint. This action was reprised in 2004 when Alÿs walked along the armistice border in Jerusalem, known as ‘the green line’, carrying a can filled with green paint. The bottom of the can was perforated with a small hole, so the paint dripped out as a continuous squiggly line on the ground as he walked. 

The Leak by Francis Alÿs from olu odukoya on Vimeo.

The work Paradox of Praxis 1 (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing) documents an action performed on the streets of Mexico City in 1997. The film depicts a simple and seemingly pointless endeavour – a large block of ice being pushed through the city streets for 9 hours until it melts away to nothing.

Paradox of Praxis 1

In 2005 the National Portrait Gallery hosted The Nightwatch, an installation by Alÿs in collaboration with Artangel, in which a wild fox called Bandit was set free in the Gallery with his movements recorded by surveillance cameras.

Night Watch

Night watch

In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (2002), Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers in Ventanilla District outside of Lima, Peru.  Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches.  Art critic Jean Fisher writes that “the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth.”

When Faith Moves Mountains

When Faith Moves Mountains

The Rehearsal (1999), the first part of an as yet unfinished three-part video piece shot in Tijuana, consists of a static long shot of a green VW Beetle driving up the slope of a dirt road in a shantytown while the viewer hears musicians rehearsing a song. Every time they stop, the car rolls backwards down the hill, as if running out of petrol, but when the music starts up again, the car starts driving up the hill once more.

The Rehearsal

At Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Alÿs collaborated with Alejandro González Iñárritu on an installation entitled Amores Perros – El Ensayo (Amores Perros – The Rehearsal, 2002). The scenes shown on numerous monitors and projections were not from the film itself but from hours and hours of crude research video, casting clips, acting rehearsals and discarded rushes.

The rehearsal

Alÿs’ work has been shown in many international institutions, including the Wiels (2010–2011), Tate Modern, London (2010), The AiM Biennale (Arts in Marrakech International Biennale), The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2008), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2007), Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, MALBA, Buenos Aires, Argentina, MALi, Lima;Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Avignon, France (2004); Centro nazionale per le arti contemporanee, Rome, Italy [traveled to Kunsthaus Zürich, Zürich, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid] (all 2003); and Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (2002, 2011); and Or Gallery, Vancouver, Canada (1998). His traveling show of portraits of the Saint Fabiola has traveled to London, New York,Perú and LAMCA. Alÿs participated in the Venice Biennial in 1999, 2001 and 2007, and the Carnegie International in 2004.

Rhodri Davies – Five Knots

Compost and Heist Split Series 007 Available for download.

Rhodri Davies makes the sounds on this beautiful recording by placing an electric harp in two positions on the stone pier at Aberystwyth, his home town on the west coast of Wales.  The recording is called Five Knots, which makes sense when you realise he is refering to the wind. So the sound you are hearing, is the gentle caress of the wind on the instrument – its the god in man playing here. The two recordings have been overlaid, with one each in the left and right channels. The recording was then masterd by Graham Halliwell.  This is a swelling, swooping sound that touches the Kandinsky-esque vibration in your soul. Notes meet, then move away, circular swirlings of persistant delicate drone.

It can’t be forgot, when listening to this piece, that the wind plays the instrument. A thing not seen but felt. The wind has no voice here except for the harp, and even this communication is accidental, not deliberate. At least, rationality would inform us (remind us rewind us) of this. When the music the wind has given, has been recieved, overlaid each  on the other, each poetic statement over the other, I was reminded of Heideggers demonstration that if there is anything so fundamental as being, then it can only perform the complexity and density of well written poetic language. We have the idea from Faucault that history is not a grand succession of events and concepts but rather a fluctuating epistemological horizon in which certain types of statement become possible. Given the placement of these ideas next to each other, and the sound of wind playing in concert with itself, something that was not previously possible, comes alive.

Notes from the website:

Telyn electronig a gwynt/Electric harp and wind

5 hydref/October 5th 2008

Sianel chwith: telyn yn wynebu ynys Enlli
Sianel dde: telyn yn wynebu ynys Lochtyn

Left channel: harp facing Anglesey
Right channel: harp facing Lochtyn island

Y lanfa garreg, ger traeth tan y bwlch, Aberystwyth
The stone pier, near tan y bwlch beach, Aberystwyth

Recordiwyd gan/Recorded by: Angharad Davies and Rhodri Davies

Cymysgwyd gan/Mixed by: Adam
Ol-gynhyrchu /Mastering: Graham halliwell

Diolch/Thanks: Sarah Hughes, Patrick Farmer, Angharad closs, archifau a chofnodion modern, Aberystwyth.

Dominic Lash – assay

Compost and Heist Split Series 007 Available for download.

Along with the Rhodri Davies piece is this beautifully delicate piece from Dominic Lash. It is described as a solo improvisation with some premeditation and is just under ten minutes. The track is recorded by Jonathan McHugh.  It starts with a quiet rustling brush on the body of the bass. Soon the bowed strokes arrive, sounding almost like the creaking wooden bones of a ship at sea.  They build gently with some fits and starts, always keeping the listener on their toes. They don’t drone, but they are sparse and consistent.  At the very midpoint of the track, the brushing builds to a rhythic crecendo, a reminder that Dominic is playing everything here – so the sound is all the more remarkable for the complexity of delivery.

In Dominic Lash’s competent hands, the Double bass moves into a mode where it appears to almost be aware of itself. It shuffles from immancence and silence to explicitness.  There seem to be moments when it is almost not itself any longer, the improvisation becoming the poetry that predicates and structures this world such as we are able to apprehend, comprehend or know it.  The discourse emerges as the entirety and not the entirety at the same time, sharing the same bizzare fusion of organic and inorganic, separate and together living elements of Kafka’s Odradek. This results in an uncomfortable, but at the same time beautiful and mould-shattering poetry of sound that is very fresh for me.

Notes from the website:

Solo double bass, recorded by Jonathan McHugh at Goldsmith’s College, 11th September 2008

A solo double bass improvisation performed with some premeditation, a bow, a brush and one little edit but no processing or overdubbing. A small number of simple and distinct ideas sustained and occasionally overlapped.

Richard Pinnell has written an excellent review of these recordings (A long time ago of course – I am WAY behind the 8-ball) so be sure to check it out.