FundamentallySound Blog

For 2005, enough of this floundering around part time here part time there, scraping by, holding off on a new jacket because I need to buy a DVD recorder so that I can send my work to a competition, etc. Enough of that, this year I want a comfy teaching job that pays well, has long vacations, and will allow me to travel and perform and do the things I want without the stress of worrying about money all the time. I've got the credentials, the experience, and the passion. Now I just need a small art school in Brooklyn, Rhode Island, San Francisco, Seattle, Amsterdam, Berlin, Frankfurt, Rotterdam, San Francisco, or Tokushima to invite me and I'll be there, pen in hand, ready to sign on the dotted line. OK, I'm waiting already.

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I'm on vacation but have still found myself tinkering away with my website. Besides presenting myself to family members I've not seen in years, and stuffing myself on homemade fudge and the like, I've completely redone my journal and the rest of my webpages.

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Susan Sontag died today. If there were ever a time when America needed her.

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"Bad art is still art in the same way as a bad emotion is still an emotion."
-Marcel Duchamp from a lecture in Houston, Texas, 1957

Recently I've been listening to Duchamp speaking. I was expecting his ideas to sound much more outdated but I find them to still be very resonant. I wonder if an artist who is as unpopular in Europe as Duchamp was early in his career would find such a warm reception in the United States these days. And really, why would any artists come to America now?

I do love hearing Duchamp talk about the Dada spirit, he describes it not as a movement or moment but a spirit, an attitude that makes the act of art a tightly contested game between viewer and object. I also love hearing him speak of eroticism as a kind of tube of paint that you can inject into any work. He goes on to say, "eroticism is a very dear subject to my life" in the touching voice of an old man.

One of my favorite writers on the arts, especially poetry, and the games it plays is Marjorie Perloff. Her book Radical Artifice was a wonderful antidote to the stuffy music theory classes I was taking as an undergraduate. Here she sounds in on Duchamp via Wittgenstein by way of Roubaud.

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It is cold tonight in San Francisco. Not Chicago, Amsterdam, Berlin, or New York cold, but cold enough still.

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I was just sitting down to a dinner of butter chicken curry, made from a package of curry spices that was brought to me from a friend who had recently traveled to India, then I noticed a message from Digiki.

Here's what it said:

The wait is over ! (for those who were awaiting, that is!)

At last, and on time for Christmas, the DIGIKI remixed CD Animals don't care is now available online for download here.
18 tracks, 35+ remixers, mp3 files... GO ! :)

You know the story (worldwide project, 14 months in the making, tons of people involved etc etc), now hear the result !!

As I sit here and drink my red wine, eating curry, listening to these fresh sounds, I just think WOW. This has nothing to with the fact that a few of my sounds were used in it, I'm just amazed by the way he has put this project together, both organizationally and artistically. Go check it out right now, you only have a week!!

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Direct from Seamus in Amsterdam comes this observation.

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It's cold. And sunny, the air is damp, I'm trying not to get shocked.

Good day to stay inside and work on a glitch-porn track with Digiki. Or maybe I'll send an application for a residency at HERE. Or I might finally get around to organizing my laptop, divide it all into new and old. Or I might just wrap some Christmas presents. It's early, and there's time left, I might do all this and more. Dublab is the soundtrack regardless.

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These are the 9 albums released this year that I've been listening to a lot. There were so many albums I learned about but that were released long ago, new only to me, I guess that doesn't count. I would have done 10, but I have to leave in a few minutes and don't have time to find the 10th. Besides, there's nothing magical about the number 10. Nine works just as well.

Swayzak - Loops From the Bergerie
I only learned about this CD a couple of weeks ago when I saw their debut live show in America at Rickshaw Stop. I just can't say no to minimal dub with glitchy vocals.

Alvin Curran / Domenico Sciajno - Our Ur
I learned a lot about an intuitive sense of beauty in music from studying with Alvin, and I'm so happy to see him bringing his sense of humor and sense of beauty to more electronic music. The liner notes to this release have to be seen to be believed. I learned how to use the word beautiful in an un-self-conscious manner from him, for which I am deeply indebted.

Sagan - Unseen Forces
It's a DVD featuring the fancy digital video footwork of Ryan Junell along with pals Blevin Blectum, Jon Leidecker, and Jay Lesser.

Flossin - Lead Singer
A trio of joyous noisemakers, this album is great fun at high volumes.

Anne Laplantine and Momus - Summerisle
I just find this to be an amazing album all around, an incredible release that embraces noise, folk, and hardcore computer wizardry. I think it could be considered groundbreaking at some point in the future, if there's any justice.

Rock's Role (After Ryoanji)
Recording of gallery show in New York of composers Bernhard Gal, Maggi Payne, Masahiko Sunami, and many others. I love to just have it on while I'm working around the house.

Blevin Blectum - Magic Maple
Picking up where her last CD left off and quickly taking us to new magical places, she has developed such a unique and entrancing sound.

Soft Pink Truth - Do You Want New Wave Or Do You Want The Soft Pink Truth?
Minimal dub/techno/glitch covers of some wonderfully obscure gems done in a pure Soft Pink style. He could do Soft Pink covers of reading the phonebook and I'd probably enjoy it.

Joanna Newsom - The Milk Eyed Mender
Beautiful and soothing harpist with a very eccentric vocal style. This strikes me as the most "American" sounding CD of any that I've listed, it's kind of a collection of cowboy/cowgirl songs for a new century.

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I was saddened by the fact that Bill Moyers is ending his show Now on public broadcasting in the USA. I was never a regular watcher of the program, and really only have learned about it after hearing him interviewed recently regarding his decision to stop the show. But when I hear him speak, he is so obviously of a liberal tradition that has since died in this country. He still holds onto the quaint notion that liberalism should be open to dialogue even with others of different opinions, and a fundamental belief in fairness and (gasp!) the existence of facts. It really seems that the conservative movement in the USA is the future, liberalism is dead, activism is dead, gay rights are over, progressivism is done. All that is left is fear, paranoia, and horrible fashion. I just keep asking myself, is it really this bad? And the only answer I can see is yes, it really is.

Sigh... I probably am thinking about this more than normal because I'm going to visit family just a bit north of Chicago in a few days. Republicans are people too, no?

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Over drinks with my friend Mitch the other day, we started talking about hooks, those little beats and melodies that just get in your ear and under your skin and won't let you go. There are so many types of hooks, here are some of my favorites.
-Animal Collective's repetitive yelping of "holiday" in Kids On Holiday
-Brian Eno "I'll come running to tie your shoes" on Another Green World
-Buzzcocks "ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn'a fallen in love with"
-Cornelius "Point! left, right, up"
-Fennesz, the whole Endless Summer track sounds like one big late 20th century glitchy hook to me
-Geez 'n Gosh "Calling Jesus!"
-Hypo, Random Veneziano is just a big orgasmic hook, one after the other
-Lou Reed "bahm bahm bahm (<--bowie in falsetto), satellite of love, bahm bahm bahm, satellite of love"
-Michael Jackson "Billie Jean is not my lover!" (the Thriller album is such genius, if people don't get it, it's just their loss)
-Momus "I want you and I want you to want me to want you, but I don't need you" etc. This is my favorite Momus track, this line just works as a great hook, even if it's a bit unwieldy. It sounds like Leonard Cohen if he were a few degrees more misanthropic.
-Tuxedomoon "No tears for the creatures of the night, no tears"

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Tonight I am doing a performance at the LAB. Originally, the music I made was a kind of celebration of what I had deemed 'salvation songs' from all over the world. By salvation songs, I meant songs that somehow identified with a big power, that sought to appeal to unseen forces. Surprisingly, this whole idea came from listening to Laurie Anderson's "Big Science" and noticing how it was a kind of late 20th century post-religious, post-industrial appeal to a higher power. From there I started sampling sounds from South African gospel choirs, Haitian voodoo chants, the Velvet Underground's "Beginning to See The Light", De La Soul's "Trying People" , Robert Johnson's "Cross Road Blues" and so on. You can get the idea of the type of song I was going for. The results of my experiments sound like this, which I'm pretty pleased with.

Three Minutes of Salvation

After starting this process, Rémi Gerard-Marchant signed on to do an animation for the project. His take on the whole idea was darker, he approached it with suspicion. While I was celebrating humans' capability to find solace from certainty of the existence of powers beyond the physical realm, Rémi was showing the other side of that same coin. He seemed leery of the human need for clarity and singularity of purpose. He began sampling images much the same way as I sampled sound, only his image palette was comprised of scenes of destruction, particularly those of military aggression. His response to my rather naive sound choices explores how humans often destroy one another in the name of higher powers, whether they be god or country.

Rémi has taken the whole piece a big step further, his film is highly stylized and beautiful even as the images he is working from are themselves very disturbing. The result is a kind of brightly colored animated comic book that dances around our, especially we who are Americans, simultaneous disgust and sickening fascination with violence. It's a kind of Abu Ghraib Flash animation told in bold Mondrian colors.

In an email I just got, Rémi says, "Dunno if people will like it, but they should be stunned." And it is stunning. Also tonight, Life On Earth will be playing. The whole event is called Between Heaven and Earth, appropriately enough.

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My friend, ex-Mancunian and super-modern composer, Seamus Cater has a webpage: www.seacater.com.

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The work of Complex Ion, a collective of Taiwanese and American artists, is up at the LAB. I'm delighted that I'll get to perform inside this space next Thursday. It's like being in a very finely-tuned dream.

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