Music – Page 30

A Crowded Vacuum

September 23, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: Giorgio de Chirico, Melancholy and Mystery of a Street]

The River

This is my formula for the fall of things:
we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross.
It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks

of corn and half-blown sunflowers.
The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself
and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.

Now tell me there is a pause
where we know there should be an end;
then tell me you too imagined it this way

with our shadows never quite touching the river
and the river never quite reaching the sea.

(John Glenday, from Grain [source])

…and:

The logic of emptiness is wonderfully air-tight. Like all simple truths, its clarity is immediately self evident. We are. And there is no moment in which we are separate and apart: we are always connected — to past, to future, to others, to objects, to air, earth, sky. Every thought, every emotion, every action, every moment of time, has multiple causes and reverberations, tendrils of culture, history, hurt and joy that stretch out mysteriously and endlessly.

(Norman Fischer [source])

…and:

An autumn night
don’t think your life
didn’t matter.

(Bashō)

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Shook Twins, “Rose”

September 21, 2011 by John 13 Comments

[No, I don’t know what the deal is with the egg. Clearly this is either (a) a sisterly in-joke or (b) an object of powerfully mystical significance. Maybe a little of both.]

Simply presented with the lyrics to The Shook Twins’ song “Rose,” absent the music, a discerning reader might figure it as some sort of magical-realist allegory of a girl’s growing up, discovering what it meant to be herself, and casting off convention to leave childhood (and home) behind. The free-flowing, unstructured lines, absence of consistent rhyme and meter, phantasmagorical imagery — it all suggests something crafted in the 1960s by, oh, say, Donovan:

Rose
(The Shook Twins)

Rose was born in the country but she dreamt of the sea
She lives with the best friend of a cobbler’s son
Where they take care of their own

She walks freely through the farm missing feathers from her plume
Pushed from the flock she knows so she eats alone
Best friend on her own
And does she know that she has a soul?
And does she know where we all go?

Rose tucks her head in dark feathers to keep from the storm
She sits silent on the front porch watching it all go
And the fire burns
And the garden grows
And the children play
Through the orchard’s moans

One day Rose left her porch and found the water running free
She jumped right in, tucked her feet and took that river to the sea
How does she know where we all go?
And how does she know that she has a soul?

[Lyrics reproduced here courtesy of the Shook Twins.]

And check out that picture at the top of this post. Mirrors, lantern light, floral-print dresses, long straight hair, the egg: more evidence, right? It’s not hard to imagine the Twins as feminist-folkie sorceresses embodying the spirits of Flower Children.

But hold on — what about the music? From the Bio page at their site:

Shook Twins are not your average folk duo. The sisters, Laurie and Katelyn, have some tricks up their sleeves.

You wouldn’t expect a small town girl from North Idaho (Sandpoint) to drop a beatbox in the middle of a song. Katelyn plays the guitar, glockenspiel, mandolin, sings opera into a telephone… Laurie plays wah-wah banjo, bass, ocarina, percussion and loops various melodies and beats to make it sound like more than just two identical twin sisters. Together they sing in twin harmony, which is a whole different experience from non-twin harmony.

Their sound is sculpted from the artists who inspired them most such as: The Beatles, Ani DiFranco, Joni Mitchell, Feist and Bjork.

Oh my. Wait until you hear all this swirled together with those lyrics… and see the Shook Twins in action.

Right. In the Twins’ conception, Rose isn’t a dreamy young woman standing at the end of a jetty with fog swirling around her while elves braid her hair. Rose is a chicken. Not exactly the stuff of conventional spooky-New-Age song, is it? I love the crazy skewed exuberance of that performance, the sense of messing about with a nutty song while stamping it all over with idiosyncratic musical virtuosity. It’s hard not to like artists who wink at themselves with such self-confidence, y’know?

(And yeah: there’s the egg — again.)

They’re still at a fairly early point in their career, as things go, so they’ve got plenty of time to establish just what a typical Shook Twins song might sound like. On the evidence of their Window album, released this past April, the lovely — and yes, haunting — “Shine On” might fall closer to the mark:

[Lyrics]

[Hat tip once again to Beat Surrender, this time for pointing me to the Twins in the first place. I’ve gotta stop this. People are gonna start thinking of RAMH as some kind of unofficial Beat Surrender annex.]

___________________

P.S. In the quotation from the Twins’ Web site, I omitted a phrase from the list of Katelyn’s musical, er, talents: …and bocks like a chicken. Didn’t want to blow the surprise. :)

Alien You

September 16, 2011 by John 12 Comments

From whiskey river:

One Source of Bad Information

There’s a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn’t learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it’s a girl.

This child has to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
“Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk.”

You live with this child, but you don’t know it.
You’re in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He’s uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He’s got six big ideas.
Five don’t work. Right now he’s repeating them to you.

(Robert Bly [source])

…and:

When you think about it, it’s not easy to keep from just wandering out of life. It’s like someone’s always leaving the door open to the next world, and if you aren’t paying attention you could just walk through it, and then you’ve died. That’s why in your dreams it’s like you’re standing in that doorway, and the dying people and the newborn people pass by you, and brush up against you as they come in and out of the world during the night. You get spun around, and in the morning, it takes a while to find your way back into the world.

(Rick Moody, from The Ice Storm (film version) [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Haunting Songs

September 14, 2011 by John 34 Comments

I noticed a few months back that The Missus and I have a favorite way to describe certain music. Haunting, one of us will say, and the other will nod. A very haunting sound. Haunting lyrics, aren’t they? And so on.

The ingredients which go into making a song haunting, vs. all the other ways it might be described? Beats me. (Meant to ask The Missus this morning but forgot. I’ll check with her later.)

But I think there’s a dark(ish) sound, in the first place, maybe with some eerie instrumental hook — strings often seem to play a part — and the vocals might be artificially vibratoed. The dominant pitch needn’t be creepy-low; I think, for example, that some of Loreena McKennitt’s high-pitched quavering music might be called haunting. (There’s one, “The Mystic’s Dream,” included at the foot of this post.) Maybe it’s got something to do with minor keys or blue notes (possibilities I’d entertain more seriously if I had any idea what the terms, y’know, meant).

Anyway, here are a handful of examples from the oldies stack. The first is “Any Day Now” (1962), performed here by Chuck Jackson.

Any Day Now
(by Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard; performed by Chuck Jackson)

Any day now I will hear you say “Goodbye my love”
And you’ll be on your way
Then my wild beautiful bird you will have flown oh
Any day now I’ll be all alone (whoa-oa-oa-oa-oa)

Any day now when your restless eyes meet someone new
Oh to my sad surprise
Then the blue shadows will fall all over town oh
Any day now love will let me down (whoa-oa-oa-oa-oa)

Oh my wild beautiful bird you will have flown oh
Any day now I’ll be all alone

I know I shouldn’t want to keep you
If you don’t want to stay-ay
Until you go forever
I’ll be holding on for dear life
Holding you this way
Begging you to stay

Any day now when the clock strikes “Go”
You’ll call it off
And then my tears will flow
Then the blue shadows will fall all over town oh
Any day now love will let me down ’cause you won’t be around

Don’t fly away my beautiful bird
Don’t don’t fly away

My second nominee du jour would be Johnny Rivers’s “Poor Side of Town,” from 1966:

Poor Side of Town
(Johnny Rivers)

How can you tell me how much you miss me
When the last time I saw you, you wouldn’t even kiss me
That rich guy you’ve been seein’
Must have put you down
So welcome back baby
To the poor side of town

To him you were nothin’ but a little plaything
Not much more than an overnight fling
To me you were the greatest thing this boy had ever found
And girl it’s hard to find nice things
On the poor side of town

I can’t blame you for tryin’
I’m tryin’ to make it too
I’ve got one little hang up baby
I just can’t make it without you

So tell me, are you gonna stay now
Will you stand by me girl all the way now
With you by my side
They just can’t keep us down
Together we can make it baby
From the poor side of town

(So tell me how much you love me)
(Come be near to me and say you need me now)

Oh, with you by my side
This world can’t keep us down
Together we can make it baby
From the poor side of town…

And finally — in a completely different vein — we’ve got Janis Ian’s big hit from 1975, “At Seventeen.” (Since this is pretty much just acoustic and vocals, I offer it as an example whose hauntingness derives from the lyrics and the performer’s voice rather than any studio effects.)

At Seventeen
(Janis Ian)

I learned the truth at seventeen
That love was meant for beauty queens
and high school girls with clear skinned smiles
who married young and then retired
The valentines I never knew
The Friday night charades of youth
were spent on one more beautiful
At seventeen I learned the truth

And those of us with ravaged faces
lacking in the social graces
desperately remained at home
inventing lovers on the phone
who called to say Come dance with me
and murmured vague obscenities
It isn’t all it seems at seventeen

A brown eyed girl in hand me downs
whose name I never could pronounce
said Pity please the ones who serve
They only get what they deserve
The rich relationed hometown queen
marries into what she needs
with a guarantee of company
and haven for the elderly

Remember those who win the game
lose the love they sought to gain
in debentures of quality and dubious integrity
Their small-town eyes will gape at you
in dull surprise when payment due
exceeds accounts received at seventeen

[instrumental]

To those of us who knew the pain
of valentines that never came
and those whose names were never called
when choosing sides for basketball
It was long ago and far away
The world was younger than today
when dreams were all they gave for free
to ugly duckling girls like me

We all play the game, and when we dare
we cheat ourselves at solitaire
Inventing lovers on the phone
Repenting other lives unknown
that call and say Come dance with me
and murmur vague obscenities
at ugly girls like me, at seventeen

What songs haunt you? Is it just their subjects? What is it about their sound?

Something in the Air

September 9, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: at left, all the Earth’s water collected into a single ball, about 865 miles in diameter; at right, all the Earth’s atmosphere in a single ball, about 1240 miles in diameter, assuming sea-level pressure. (source)]

From whiskey river:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

(Edward Abbey [source])

…and:

All beings are encompassed within one all-encompassing great energy: So I understood from the coolness of this morning’s passing breeze.

(Mumon Ekai [source])

…and:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you will still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

(Yamamoto Tsunetomo [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: Switched-On Bach

September 7, 2011 by John 4 Comments

If not for 1968’s Switched-On Bach, I’m not sure I’d ever have paid much attention to classical music. I don’t know why I bought the album, unless in fascination with the sheer weirdness of the concept. As far as I knew then, no one within shouting distance of my life listened to classical music. I didn’t read record reviews. I played no instruments. I knew even less about electronics than I did about music.

The album cover certainly caught the eye. That’s it at the right (click to enlarge), with slightly altered text, as originally approved by Walter (now Wendy) Carlos, the album’s creator. Bach stands before an unmistakably non-contemporaneous keyboard, which itself stands before an array of electronic boxes bedecked with switches, lights, meters, and input/output jacks. In his right hand he holds a pair of stereo headphones; on his face, a look of surpassing confidence which seems to say, Surprised? Don’t be. This makes so much sense, and I’m quite proud of it.

For this Midweek Music Break, I’ve selected not one or two, but three numbers from the album:

“Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29”: The very first track on the album announces, from its first dizzying avalanche of notes through the nearly symphonic conclusion a few minutes later, If you think electronic music sounds like atonal, unmelodic, disharmonious beeps and squawks, think again.
“Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068”: If the “Sinfonia” swept listeners up in the sheer exuberant joy of the Moog synthesizer’s (remixed, and re-remixed) multi-tracked sound, this piece (track #2) calmed them down, reassured them, with what sounds like a lullaby of light woodwinds.
“Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”: If you had to choose Bach’s “greatest hit” for modern listeners, this might be it. At latter-day weddings it’s often played at a stately, formal, almost dirge-like pace. Carlos’s interpretation is more sprightly — not coincidentally, as Bach himself apparently preferred.

For those of you who might want to listen to the three selections back-to-back, I’ve set up the audio-player thingum that way first. If you just want to hear an individual piece, I’ve added separate, er, thingums below the playlist version.

[Below, click Play button to begin selections from Switched-On Bach. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. These pieces, taken together, are about nine minutes long.]

[audio:01sinfoniatocantatabwv29_waltercarlos.mp3, 02aironagstring_orchestralsuite3bwv1068_waltercarlos.mp3, 06jesujoyofmansdesiring_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Selections from Switched-On Bach’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:27 long.]

[audio:01sinfoniatocantatabwv29_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Sinfonia to Cantata BWV 29’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:33 long.]

[audio:02aironagstring_orchestralsuite3bwv1068_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Air on a G String from Orchestral Suite No. 3, BWV 1068’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

—-

[Below, click Play button to begin Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:58 long.]

[audio:06jesujoyofmansdesiring_waltercarlos.mp3|titles=’Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring’|artists=Walter/Wendy Carlos]

Not only a musician and musical technician, Carlos also demonstrates great skill as a photographer of solar eclipses (she’s a self-confessed “coronaphile”) — and holds a deep and abiding interest in maps, especially as projected to or from a sphere. Her Web site is a favorite of mine just to wander around in, on all these (and other) topics.

______________________

Note: About the album cover… You may have noticed the weasel-wording, “as originally approved by its creator.” The cover shown above was not the very first one, though. In that one, as you can see over there at the left, Bach was seated, not standing. Click on that image for a blow-up, and you’ll see why Carlos didn’t like it. Yeah. Bach’s got his lips pursed and eyes a-goggle — apparently bemused in the extreme, if not outright horrified. Remember “Look What They’ve Done to My Song”? (If not, see here; scroll to the video at the bottom.) Yeah. That.

Furthermore, the headphones he’s wearing? They’re plugged into the synthesizer… specifically, to an input jack. Carlos, an electronics wizard as well as a musician, must’ve about keeled over.

Walking Around Empty

September 2, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: still from Man Made Monster (1941).]

From whiskey river:

I don’t want to go on being a root in the dark,
vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
downward, in the soaked guts of the earth,
absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

(Pablo Neruda, from “Walking Around” [source])

…and:

You’ve heard “Don’t believe everything you read.” Here are some useful spinoffs: Don’t believe everything you think. Don’t believe everything you tell yourself. And most especially, don’t believe everything you feel.

(Rev. O. M. Bastet [source unknown])

…and:

As long as we have practiced neither concentration nor mindfulness, the ego takes itself for granted and remains its usual normal size, as big as the people around one will allow.

(Ayya Khema [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: “Bad Moon Rising”

August 31, 2011 by John 6 Comments

Creedence Clearwater Revival’s classic gets most of its airtime around Halloween, maybe for obvious reasons: its association with John Landis’s great 1981 horror film An American Werewolf in London. Interestingly, in the film the song doesn’t get played in its entirety. Instead, the soundtrack plays just a few lines from the opening — almost as a joke — leading into the onscreen (and non-CGI) transformation of actor David Naughton from cute and charming lad to homicidal creature of the night.

“Bad Moon Rising” is also a favorite of disaster groupies, maybe for even more obvious — literal — reasons. Natural calamities have figured prominently in the news of late, and that business about rivers overflowing, earthquakes and lightning, well, it’s almost too perfect.

(If you’ve not been following the extinction-level-disaster/government-coverup-conspiracy chatter about the comet and/or brown and/or “dark” star Elenin, well, oh dear. You may have missed your last chance to survive. I recently saw a lengthy YouTube video, uploaded a few months ago, with a timeline of coming events. The fellow who made it claims that August 1 was the cutoff date — the last practical day to head for a cavern in the Ozarks to join with other believers prepared to live underground for at least a year. Even if you left on time, though, if you don’t arrive with an RV or U-Haul full of food, tough. They have no room for hungry, screaming, latecoming leeches.)

[Below, click Play button to begin Bad Moon Rising. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:20 long.]

[audio:badmoonrising_ccr.mp3|titles=’Bad Moon Rising’|artists=Creedence Clearwater Revival]

Lyrics:

Bad Moon Rising
(Creedence Clearwater Revival)

I see the bad moon arising.
I see trouble on the way.
I see earthquakes and lightning.
I see bad times today.

[chorus:]

Don’t go around tonight,
Well, it’s bound to take your life,
There’s a bad moon on the rise.

I hear hurricanes ablowing.
I know the end is coming soon.
I fear rivers over flowing.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin.

[chorus]

All right!

Hope you got your things together.
Hope you are quite prepared to die.
Looks like we’re in for nasty weather.
One eye is taken for an eye.

[chorus]

[repeat chorus]

And for those who haven’t seen American Werewolf in London, here’s the five-minute lead-in to the transformation scene, right up to the point where Landis (having had his little laugh) abruptly cuts off the song:

The transformation scene itself took a little over two minutes, and you can find several clips of that here and there around the Web. (This one superimposes the full song over the scene, which in fact simply included sound effects and the character’s, um, vocalizations.)

Long, Languorous Tomorrows

August 26, 2011 by John 10 Comments

[Image: “August Morning,” by Tracy, from “August in Ohio” at the Seasons Flow blog]

[Below, click Play button to begin Summertime (Charlie Parker). While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:46 long.]

[audio:summertime_charlieparker.mp3|titles=’Summertime’|artists=Charlie Parker]

From whiskey river:

Late August

Let me enjoy
this late-summer day of my heart
while the leaves are still green
and I won’t look so close
as to see that first tint
of pale yellow slowly creep in.
I will cease endless running
and then look to the sky
and ask the sun to embrace me
and then hope she won’t tell
of tomorrows less long than today
Let me spend just this time
in the slow-cooling glow
of the warm afternoon light
and I’d think
I will still have the strength
for just one more
last fling of my heart

(Jon Bohrn [source])

…and (italicized portion):

Directions

You know the brick path in back of the house,
the one you see from the kitchen window,
the one that bends around the far end of the garden
where all the yellow primroses are?
And you know how if you leave the path
and walk up into the woods you come
to a heap of rocks, probably pushed
down during the horrors of the Ice Age,
and a grove of tall hemlocks, dark green now
against the light-brown fallen leaves?
And farther on, you know
the small footbridge with the broken railing
and if you go beyond that you arrive
at the bottom of that sheep’s head hill?
Well, if you start climbing, and you
might have to grab hold of a sapling
when the going gets steep,
you will eventually come to a long stone
ridge with a border of pine trees
which is as high as you can go
and a good enough place to stop.

The best time is late afternoon
when the sun strobes through
the columns of trees as you are hiking up,
and when you find an agreeable rock
to sit on, you will be able to see
the light pouring down into the woods
and breaking into the shapes and tones
of things and you will hear nothing
but a sprig of birdsong or the leafy
falling of a cone or nut through the trees,
and if this is your day you might even
spot a hare or feel the wing-beats of geese
driving overhead toward some destination.

But it is hard to speak of these things
how the voices of light enter the body
and begin to recite their stories
how the earth holds us painfully against
its breast made of humus and brambles
how we who will soon be gone regard
the entities that continue to return
greener than ever, spring water flowing
through a meadow and the shadows of clouds
passing over the hills and the ground
where we stand in the tremble of thought
taking the vast outside into ourselves.

Still, let me know before you set out.
Come knock on my door
and I will walk with you as far as the garden
with one hand on your shoulder.
I will even watch after you and not turn back
to the house until you disappear
into the crowd of maple and ash,
heading up toward the hill,
piercing the ground with your stick

(Billy Collins [source])

[Read more…]

Midweek Music Break: “I’m Beginning to See the Light”

August 24, 2011 by John 7 Comments

While working on the What’s in a Song posts about “Body and Soul,” my Big Band playlist reminded me of a song which threatened to swamp my attention to the nominal subject of the moment. “I’m Beginning to See the Light” was a #1 recording for Harry James’s band in 1945, with a vocal by Kitty Kallen. (It had also been a #6 hit for its composer, Duke Ellington, and #5 for Ella Fitzgerald and the Ink Spots.)

Unlike “Body and Soul,” this one has an unmistakable melody: each stanza consists of three lines repeating virtually the same tune, followed by a simple refrain of the song title. You couldn’t escape the tune if you tried.

But somehow the song doesn’t become boring, and I think the reason for that lies in the lyrics. The Poets of Tin Pan Alley, by Philip Furia, says:

Ellington’s luck with lyricists hit its peak in 1944 when Don George gave an exuberantly casual setting to the catch-phrase “I’m Beginning to See the Light”…

What is even more artful about the lyric is George’s witty use of a list structure; not only does he develop a catalog of “light” images, he refreshes the tritest metaphors by reading them in literal terms — from stars in the eyes, to a suggestive “afterglow,” and the paradoxical “now when you turn the lamp down low I’m beginning to see the light.”

I think Kitty Kallen’s voice helps, too — the playful, flirtatious spin she puts on the phrasing. Here’s her version:

[Below, click Play button to begin I’m Beginning to See the Light. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:12 long.]

[audio:imbeginningtoseethelight_harryjameskittykallen.mp3|titles=’I’m Beginning to See the Light’|artists=Harry James Orchestra + Kitty Kallen]

Lyrics:

I’m Beginning to See the Light
(Duke Ellington, Harry James, Johnny Hodges, and Don George;
as sung by Kitty Kallen)

I never cared much for moonlit skies
I never winked back at fireflies
But now that the stars are in your eyes
I’m beginning to see the light

I never went in for afterglow
Or candlelight on the mistletoe
But now when you turn the lamp down low
I’m beginning to see the light

Used to ramble through the park
Shadowboxing in the dark
Then you came and caused a spark
That’s a four-alarm fire now

I never made love by lantern-shine
I never saw rainbows in my wine
But now that your lips are burning mine
I’m beginning to see the light

And here’s Ella Fitzgerald with the Ink Spots:

[Below, click Play button to begin I’m Beginning to See the Light. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:45 long.]

[audio:imbeginningtoseethelight_ellafitzgeraldinkspots.mp3|titles=’I’m Beginning to See the Light’|artists=Ella Fitzgerald + The Ink Spots]