Awoken From My Slumber…

…by Mentasms, who I fear is going to be vaguely disgusted at my unregenerate rockism:

“List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they’re not any good, but they must be songs you’re really enjoying now, shaping your spring. Post these instructions in your blog along with your 7 songs. Then tag 7 other people to see what they’re listening to.”

Evidently this one has been doing the rounds for quite a while - I think my spring has already been quite extensively shaped and is now sitting there looking as ugly and misshapen as countless seasons past. 

1. “These Foolish Things” - Teddy Wilson & His Orchestra, Lady Day: The Master Takes & Singles

There’s been a little flurry of bloggers outing themselves as not liking jazz now that Steve Albini has taken the curse off it.  But really, what is it that you’re saying you can’t get your head round? The musicianly polish and tastefully funky jams on Blue Note leave me pretty cold, doubly underwhelming because they’re so rafted with all the signifiers of jazz sophistication. But Black Saint & The Sinner Lady? Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard? A Tribute To Jack Johnson? Or what about something as warm and full of life as this? The grain and phrasing of every second of this song knock me out.

2. Percy’s Song - Bob Dylan, Biograph 

I’ve been listening to Fairport Convention’s cover of this on Unhalfbricking for years now without finding anything remotely memorable about it - if anything, it was a major bringdown after the shimmering high of “Who Knows Where The Time Goes”.  Maybe it’s just too cluttered arranged for a full band, and it’s the intimacy of this recording of a very young Dylan that makes it work.  

3. “Power” - The Dead C, Vain, Erudite & Stupid

Kicking the corpse of rock music uphill.

4. “Lontano” - Ligeti/Nott/Berlin Philharmonic, The Ligeti Project Vol. 2

First fruit of the list from The Rest Is Noise. If the Rite of Spring was so insurrectionary, what would that audience have made of this? At least the Rite has roots in folk dance and pagan ritual, but Lontano and Atmospheres have something unearthly about them, something ominous and implacable in their sinuous, alien textures.

5. “So I Si Sa” - Super Boiro Band, African Pearls 2: Guinee - Cultural Revolution

Although fundamentally the work of the devil, mp3 players redeem themselves every time they cough something like this up from the depths of random shuffle, something that I must have heard half a dozen times before without ever really registering just how hot it is.  Exhibit B - that Quintete Sextete track that is a dead ringer for an early Pentangle track off the self-same disc.  

6. “I’ve Still Got You (Ice Cream)” - Pissed Jeans, Hope For Man

Pure genius.  The more you look around, the more you realise that people in western society can no longer muster enough super-ego to keep the bruised, self-indulgent child side of their character in check.  I can’t believe that Pissed Jeans decided not to stick with the name Unrequited Hard-On…must have felt they couldn’t live up to it.  It’d be a lot of pressure, having a name that good.

7. “The Big Takeover” - Bad Brains, Bad Brains

Look, I didn’t say it had been a great spring.

I’m not sure I even read seven blogs which haven’t already been infected and it seems a bit pointless asking all the Frank’s Apa people but let’s say: Inuit Scarlet Bikini Carwash, Lexicon Devil, Accentmonkey, any of the lads from Soundtracks For Them but especially Krossphader, Chocolate Court, Old Style Rabbit Tales Of Furry Fury and Undersea Community.

You Guys Want It Quieter? Or Louder?

What some people will never understand is that noise is compelling, that noise is a crucial vector for the unpredictability that is necessary to make the hoary ritual of the rock gig vital. Being a shambles does not make you unpredictable - incompetence is the flipside of buttoned-down professionalism, predictably piss-poor, routinely disappointing. Noise overloads your synapses, swamping your brain in a sensory deluge. It carries the risk inherent in introducing sound that can’t wholly be controlled, gambling the certainty of harmony and melody on a flight into the abyss. Noise is half the story with Pissed Jeans - it bleeds from every amplifier, feeding back through every mic and pickup in a coruscurating scree. Even when Dave Rosenstrauss’ bass amp cuts out (as it did for the first two songs) leaving only the Bradley Fry’s guitar and Sean McGuinness’ drums, it sounds like there’s a dozen people playing. When the bass comes back, the sound takes on a belligerent thickness that sinks deep into your innards. On the night, Pissed Jeans favour their slower songs, dragging the lurching, bludgeoning riffs out their instruments like every note pains them. It’s grinding, abject stuff, music to drown out the hell of the outside world. When they erupt into something closer to standard punk speed, you’re blindsided, knocked back by the distortion that’s lashing around like a downed power cable. This is something compelling, something that demands your attention and can’t be readily assimilated or ignored.

The other half of that story is Matt Korvette. Like Iggy Pop, or maybe more relevantly, David Yow, he plays on the revolting plasticity of human flesh, absentmindedly squeezing and folding the slippery flab hanging over the waistband of his jeans. Twisting, kicking out his absurdly long legs, contorting his body around the mic stand, howling his lyrics like a mushmouthed drunk screaming in an alley, he embodies the wrenching discord of the music. The threat implicit in a sweating, half-naked man towering over you as he staggers around the stage draws a wary eye, just as there’s a queasy, uncomfortable fascination in hearing him expose the emotions we usually keep tightly under wraps.

Judging from what others write about them, I’m not alone in seeing in Pissed Jeans the return of something I’ve been missing in rock music for a while. People have drawn a wide range of comparisons, be it to the Birthday Party (I don’t hear it), Flipper (getting warmer) or Black Flag (in “Damaged I” mode, definitely), suggesting that people are hearing what they want to hear, or else that noise offers a wide-open field for interpretation. The name Stickmen With Rayguns shows up like clockwork in every description of them but I suspect that most are cribbing that straight out of the press releases…it’s a name so good you can’t resist dropping it in, but in twenty years I don’t think I’ve even so much as seen it on an actual record. Clearly it’s time to fire up Hype Machine and see if there are any mp3s out there. Pissed Jeans blew me away on Wednesday night, even as they were blatantly struggling with their equipment, even when members of the band were making hurried exits from the stage to puke. The music was a visceral, cathartic blast and I still can’t figure out the reason for the dismally muted response from the admittedly thin audience. But as I say, some people will never understand.

Twenty More

The next twenty, from the Rest is Noise - I’ll edit with links later.

Panorama: Claude Debussy (DG)
Mahler, Sixth Symphony, Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Strauss, Salome, Karajan/Vienna Philharmonic (EMI)
Berg, Wozzeck, Abbado/Vienna Philharmonic (DG)
Janacek and Schulhoff, String Quartets, Tallich Quartet (Calliope)
Prokofiev and Ravel, Piano Concertos, Argerich/Abbado/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Stravinsky, Symphonies, Stravinsky/Columbia Symphony (Sony)
Ives: An American Journey, Tilson Thomas/San Francisco Symphony (RCA)
Gershwin, Porgy & Bess, Rattle/Glyndebourne Opera (EMI dvd)
Weill, The Threepenny Opera (”Berlin 1930″ edition, Teldec)
Shostakovich, String Quartets Nos 3, 7, 8, St. Lawrence Quartet (EMI)
Strauss, Metamorphosen and Four Last Songs, Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Xenakis, Orchestral Works and Chamber Music (col legno)
Stockhausen, Elektronische Musik, 1952-1960 (Stockhausen Edition No. 3)
Cage, The Seasons (ECM)
Feldman, Rothko Chapel (New Albion)
Part, Tabula Rasa (ECM)
Adams, Harmonielehre, de Waart/San Francisco Symphony (Nonesuch)
Lutoslawski, Third Symphony, Salonen/Los Angeles Philharmonic (Sony)
Golijov, Ayre and Berio, Folk Songs, Dawn Upshaw (DG)

The first ten here.

Louder Than A Bomb

I spent Saturday evening listening to Hank Shocklee reminiscing over the early days of hip-hop in the New York boroughs while heavily made-up women plied me with beer and sushi…who dares say the new Dublin has nothing going for it?

Eventually his history reached the rise of the MC and his realisation that his soundsystem was dead on its feet if he couldn’t find a good MC to front it.  In those days, he said, “Good Times” was the record, and a DJ couldn’t drop the needle on it without turning around to find a line of guys standing behind him waiting to get on the mic.  One night he was playing a party at one of the colleges, dropped “Good Times”, and sure enough, every guy in the audience was up there trying out a couple of rhymes.  Every one of them, he said, was just dismal, so when the tune ended he took a break and let a guy on to make an announcement about a fraternity party that was happening the following week.  Just chatting about a frat party, this guy demolished everyone…it only took two years of constant begging from Hank Shocklee to get Chuck D to join what became Public Enemy.

Leaving The Twentieth Century

Back in early November last year a friend emailed me a book review. The book in question wasn’t due for UK publication until March - I ordered a copy and then more or less forgot about it until it arrived a few weeks ago. I finished reading it yesterday, and I’m half-inclined to sit down and start it again immediately. The Rest Is Noise is New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ stab at a history of twentieth century classical music. Probably my scanty knowledge of classical (very scanty, as in, I probably own more cds by the Fall or the Ex alone than I do of classical in toto) increased the book’s impact. As with Simon Reynolds’ Rip It Up & Start Again, the sheer wealth of knowledge new to me was revelatory. That same ignorance means I’m not in any position to comment on the fairness or thoroughness of Ross’ treatment, but with that caveat, I will say this is one of the best books on music I have ever read. The writing is incisive and evocative - even when his discussion of individual pieces moves into technical description, he manages to convey some measure of the impact and the sound of the music, and his evident love of the music inspires (as with any good music writer) the desire to listen to the music, and to hear what he hears in it.

Ross doesn’t confine himself to a narrow definition of history, situating musical developments in a broader artistic, social and political context. Indeed the central section of the book deals with the relationship between music and politics between the wars, in Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s USA. I think Ross would like to be able to say that art is inevitably deformed by politicization and irreducibly crippled under totalitarian governments. There’s certainly an argument that the great works produced in this period are only evidence of impossibility of achieving a truly totalitarian state. The treatment of Shostakovich’s fraught relationship with the Soviet apparat is nuanced - the more explicit Nazi sympathies of Webern and Strauss are not glossed over. He demonstrates the political influences on the emergence of Darmstadt after the war, and notes the covert funding of avant-garde music by the CIA for propaganda purposes during the Cold War. (Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid The Piper is an excellent account of this somewhat surreal propaganda campaign - abstract expressionism to combat agit-prop).

The chapters are broadly thematic, avoiding strict chronology in the aim of a clearer account of the various directions of development pointing up continuities that could easily be obscured. Composers representing those who assiduously cultivated their own gardens (Sibelius and Britten) get stand-alone chapters, while Schoenberg and Stravinsky reappear throughout the book, the former setting the form for avant-garde tendencies across the century, the latter desperately striving to master the critically-acclaimed aesthetic of the day. If the book becomes more fragmented in the later chapters, it is because there are no such canonical figures as Schoenberg holding sway over an increasingly atomised tradition. The result is a fascinatingly rich, complex book, thick with character and incident. The riot at the premiere of The Rite Of Spring, he comments, was far from unique - the concert audiences at the time often divided into conservatives more than happy to give the bird to work they thought sub-par and aesthetes who were overjoyed at the opportunity to excoriate the philistine masses in response. The book is dotted with performances that end in riots - I think he nominates Steve Reich as the last major composer to receive this particular honour. Elsewhere, we see a young Morton Feldman being admonished to write music for the man in the street - looking out the window, the man passing in the street proved to be Jackson Pollock. Ross mercifully resists the temptation to shoehorn extraneous jazz and rock into the book, and generally displays decent if obvious taste when discussion spills into these areas.

The Rest Is Noise might not be a perfect book - I’ve seen some entirely reasonable criticisms elsewhere - but the scale of its’ ambition makes perfection unachievable. That it succeeds as much as it does is remarkable, and for me the measure of that success is the months and years I am going to spend listening to the music that Ross so evidently loves. That, presumably, is all the success he’s looking for.

[The man himself maintains a blog, also called The Rest Is Noise. Among other things, there is a section devoted to audio files of excerpts from pieces mentioned in the book.]

10 Recommended Recordings

As an aide-memoire, Alex Ross’ ten recommended recordings, from The Rest Is Noise. I will update with links as I track them down.

Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, Pieces For Orchestra, Levine/Berlin Philharmonic (DG/Arkivmusic.com)
Stravinsky, Rite Of Spring & Petrushka, Stravinsky/Columbia Symphony (Sony)
Bartok, Concerto For Orchestra & Music For Strings, Percussion and Celesta, Reiner/Chicago Symphony (RCA)
Sibelius, Symphonies 4-7, Karajan/Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
Britten, Peter Grimes, Davis/Royal Opera House (Philips)
Copland The Populist, Tilson-Thomas/San Francisco Symphony (RCA)
Shostakovich, Symphonies 5 & 9, Bernstein/New York Philharmonic (Sony)
Messaien, Quartet For The End Of Time, Tashi (RCA)
Ligeti, Atmospheres & Lontano, Nott/Berlin Philharmonic (Teldec)
Reich, Music For 18 Musicians, (ECM)