Thanks to some very famous pink elephants, the mighty tuba is generally thought to be a jolly, happy instrument
Jesús Jara will relieve you of the illusion. On this album (lala) of complex tuba and electronic compositions, the king of brass becomes a whale lurking in the inky water of modernity, occasionally coming to the surface but more often acting as an impossibly huge shadow gliding by in the deepest level still perceptible from the surface. His tuba becomes a subconscious to these works, where the tremors of its presence through the complimentary electronics becomes the physical manifestation of the the whole. The listing on lala does not say who composed what, but even across these composers, Jara finds a common thread.
Jara performs his own Profitfürfabi with a video by Daniel Lupión
Nico Muhly is the benefactor of an improbably popular genre - serial minimalism. He played with Philip Glass and is the defacto arranger of strings for things among the indie elite, and through that, his album Mothertongue (lala), a scintillating piece of post-Robert Ashley glittering wonder garnered a review in Pitchfork, albeit a less than charitable one. What, does he need a Brooklyn mailing address and pants that don't reach his ankles to pass muster? But, I can see why they (used loosely to denote a general aesthetic, I know they have different writers writing from different viewpoints) didn't like it - they seem to like it when you ride out on a tricycle and hit them with a giant inflatable banana and then guilelessly drone "Ha I just hit you with a giant inflatable banana..." - in other words, they like transparency. Mothertongue is secretive and quietly difficult while being imminently appealing - everything I want out of modern composition, and life in general.
Part of the first movement of Wonders sounds a lot like that harpsichord song by Joanna Newsom, which my daughter Maya and I heard last night at the sandwich place. She smiled started mock-singing with the elfin harpist minx and remarked "This sounds like one of those terrible Disney princess songs, like 'yaaaaaaaaa, ya YAAAAAAAA' - not the good ones, but the terrible ones." I predict my bloodline will be trashing art for limited returns and a laugh for generations to come.
Most of the material on Mothertongue burbles like a signal coming through everyday appliances, a distress signal being transmitted by the coffee pot on an otherwise lazy morning perhaps. It sounds not unlike the similar qualities practiced by Radiohead, but Muhly's surface is shimmers more than theirs does, and the occassional dive under in which he leads the swimming listener reveals a glimpse of gorgeous coral reefs and the occassional menacing octopus before ascending back to the sun. It is hard to imagine this as art music because it is so effortless and fun to listen to , but art it most asuredly is.
And of anyone I've encountered, I am deeply envious of his mad blogging skills.
Gordon is one of the founding members of Bang on a Can, and my theory its is through the more band-like ensembles and the immediacy of YouTube and MySpace and other carefully capitalized outlets that the real stuff will be discovered.
This piece reminds me of one of my favorite out-there bands Bardo Pond, not so much in direct instrumentation or sound, but in the heavy haze that surrounds the music, like you and the music are both moving through this thicket to reach each other. The wall between this and groups like Bardo Pond and Beme Seed is a thin one, but rather than taking the drug-ravaged ecstatic approach the aforementioned bands with laconic female singers take, Lightning at our Feet seems to come from a high art direction, like it is walking away from an accident, stunned and processing.
Here is a less romantic but equally spectral piece Industry (1992), a solo piece for amplified cello, performed by Jeffrey Zeigler
At first it appears to travel the same wires as Tony Conrad, finding bliss in the physical and metaphoric grind, but as it progresses, the electronics become more integrated into the sawed cello, creating something monstrous and other out of their coupling.
More transparent in its processes and impact is XY, a 1998 piece for solo percussion.
Gordon here explores a natural impulse to repeatedly bang on something. If you have ever witnessed a kid (or me) at a drum kit, this is the default setting - pound away. Actual drummers tend to cringe at this behavior- rightfully so, it is annoying - because the art of being a musician is as much about restraint as it is release, and it is in that restraint/release that the world's great music is crafted. XY is close to the raw experiential, a drum echoing in a room, action fusing with reaction. I realize there is more than that going on here, of course, but that impulse to repeat something that sounds/feels good to do is something that art tends to fight against in the efforts to contour expression, and it is, to me anyway, rather exhilarating when art doubles back on itself.
Kitty Brazelton is a strange bird, straddling the chasm between mannered art song and listen-to-my-amp-hum out rock, at least on the What is it Like to Be a Bat album listed above. The songs here travel through ragged wires until they find a short and they explode in a shower of sparks, further complicated by cavernous tape delay and slam-bam rock/jazz drums. Positively frightening music. There is a bit of the crone-holler of Carla Bouzilich up in this, but Hazelton's approach is harder, more contained, sharper, and ultimately more devastating.
Even in the more subdued confines of her chamber music showcased by the California EAR unit on Emergency Music (lala), there is a bit of the powderkeg waiting impatiently for the spark. In R, the trumpet twitters and honks like a bird, not a Platonic birdsong bird, but a real bird - reptiliian and a little panicked but still in a fuller physical awareness than the human listening to it. This same is true of the more jazz-informed pieces: Sonar como una tromba larga would not sound completely out of place in a brass band repertoire, and Sonata for the Inner Ear is almost coffee-house ready in its worldly ambiance, with just enough pull from the expected to keep it interesting.
Thanks to some very famous pink elephants, the mighty tuba is generally thought to be a jolly, happy instrument
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