Butoh
1984-2006








In 1984, Butoh group Sankai Juku visited the United States as part of the Los Angeles Olympics Arts Festival. Sadly, one of their troup fell to his death that summer during a performance in which they hang from ropes by the feet. Shortly thereafter I was invited by a friend who interned at the Boston Phoenix to see the group perform at the Orpheum in Boston. It was the show in which they dance with a live peacock on stage, utterly breath-taking staging. The organisation Dance Umbrella continued to bring Butoh artists to Boston in the late 80's. I saw a dazzling performance by Dai Rakudakan and a gorgeous dance called The Dead Sea by Butoh founder Kazuo Ohno and his son, probably in 1985 or 86. I have taken any chance I have had to see Sankai Juku and I think I've seen all their US tours since 1985. It is like meeting again with a guru, someone who has taught you much about life, the body and spirit. And I am not a ready guru follower.

San Francisco held a Butoh Festival for several years in the 1990's, and as I lived there was able to see many performances as well as participate in some workshops and classes. The greatest experience of these was a series of classes with Akira Kasai, who has been dancing since the 60's and was a part of co-founder Tatsumi Hijikata's famous ensemble. I met an American student of butoh at the SF festival, Maureen Freehill, whose Japan Foundation grant allowed her to study in Japan, and she invited me to visit Tokyo to see the Butoh World up close. I attended a class at Kazuo Ohno's home in Yokohama and saw him perform in Tokyo. I wrote about that trip for a magazine called Art Papers.

The SF Butoh Festival has stopped its activities for the time being. The marvelous duo of Harupin-Ha continue to teach in Berkeley and run their sushi restaurant in the Mission. I have moved to Los Angeles. Sankai Juku stopped at UCLA in November and presented another beautiful mirror. The World keeps turning.

What Balcony, radio shows 1984-86



Returning to Somerville, Mass from the cross-country Olympia adventure, we looked for somewhere to live. Jake got hooked up in a house with Lenny DiFranza. I eventually got a room in a house with Len's friend Stuart Hoyle, who was having a nervous breakdown and was never around. The other roommate was a Viet Nam vet who played trumpet in the Boston Subway stations. The house was in one of the worst neighborhoods in Somerville. Gangs of kids would occupy the front steps for hours.

I attended the Boston Museum School, where I started work on a film about Hollis Frampton, and did radio shows at WMFO. Jeff Plansker began doing a late-night show right after my own, so we merged them into one 8 hour slot. Tim Clifford also appeared regularly for the show. My idea was to open the studio into the spaces outside the broadcast booth. We narrated the sunrises and talked about racoons walking on the railroad tracks outside. We hung out on the balcony, which was actually a fire escape. The show became known as What Balcony and went on for about 2 years, continuing the tradition of freeform improv and anything goes that we'd done with other groups of people. Kip Chinian was also doing a show on WMFO at this point, so we'd see him there more often, doing his own brand of oddball assault, telling stories about running in the fog on the baseball field out across the train tracks behind Curtis Hall.

Slowly the group of people we'd known around WMFO began to change, some moving away from the school. Factions began to form. I received criticism rather than support from people who once had liked me and my approach to radio. While I continued being involved with WMFO until about 1987, it was good to leave the area eventually, and leave the radio station open for new hands to play with.

There is a CD of excerpts from What Balcony shows available here.

The 4 Corners and OP Conference, Olympia, WA Summer 1984








Jake Dillon and I drove his dad's 1967 VW bug cross-country in the Summer of 1984. OP magazine, an extremely hip new music zine put together by some freaks at KAOS radio at Evergreen College, was folding and having a get-together on what to do post-OP. (Turned out 2 magazines took over, Sound Choice and Option.) So Jake and I decided we would trek out for the conference. We arrived 2 weeks late partly because of regular problems with the bug, she was stripping wheel splines every 800 miles or so. (The bug eventually died with a thrown rod on the return in Minot, ND.)

I shot a bunch of super8 film on the road, and intended to show the reels in Olympia at the conference. I was shooting Kmart super8 that included process mailers, so I could mail my shot film and then expect them to be in Olympia when we got there. I also recorded audio on the trip, including a sequence at the 4 corners, where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet, and was going to present an installation of the site in Olympia.

In San Francisco we stayed with friends in the Golden Gate Park panhandle area and went to a Dead concert at the Greek Theater. The night we arrived a Good Year blimp circled above the rooftops and the birthday party we had arrived for. My backpack was stolen from the car, with clothes, sleeping bag and s8 splicer.

Robin James was our host in Olympia, the author of the Cassette-Mythos guide to cassette culture. Robin wrote many reviews of cassette releases for the pages of OP. Olympia Media Exchange founder Jeffrey Bartone was also living at Robin's apartment at the time. Bartone invited us on to his KAOS radio show, where I stuck paper into a fan's blades and cried "Herman! Herman!" in a spontaneous show of Americana. Bartone also put together a film show at the Smithfield Cafe in downtown Olympia that featured Bruce Baillie showing films on 2 projectors and I projected my travel footage in the outdoor alley, using 1 projector to throw a loop of the VW on itself, giving an impression of it turning 360 degrees, while another projected from inside the VW onto the alley wall.

While we didn't experience the OP conference, perhaps our time in Olympia was better spent doing our own thing, with less music business purpose. OP was extremely influential at the time, being the first college radio music magazine that covered every type of music you could imagine and represented everyone from major jazz artists to micro-home label weirdos like us. It was a great networking tool and introduced many artists to each others work through reviews, interviews etc. Those were the days.

Loaf of Wonder and Simpletone Electronics






Hahn Rowe, Jake Dillon and I, after doing some radio shows together, began playing music as Loaf of Wonder. The rules of the group were you had to play a homemade guitar, usually made out of a piece of wood and a pick-up, and you had to wear a bad Hawai'ian shirt. We jammed several times in Curtis Hall, did some guerrilla performances at the Tufts Student Union, and then 2 performances, one outside as part of the concert series Apple Jams which was a mess, and another at the Alumni Lounge, which was an inspired afternoon of loose improvised tinkering. I think Jake has recordings.

After Hahn moved to New York, Jake and I continued to do radio together and re-organised our group as a duo called Simpletone Electronics. We edited a rough cassette of radio pieces; some were guitar pieces and others were tape loop manifestos. I was known to do a spiel about Le Cranberry, in a French accent with McCoy Tyner vamping to My Favorite Things in the background and had another one called The Snooze. On another, Jake and I warned against Quantum Duck attacks. And Jake did some nice soundscape Frippertronics, one called The Loud Family, about his neighbors. Jake and I had studied animation with Flip Johnson; a lot of our sound work had soundtrack aspects to it. We did a session at the Museum School Electronic Music studio with Andrea Parkins, who now works with Ellery Eskelin trio (on Hat Art), and a performance at the Museum School with Andrea and Pierre Archambault used a photo darkroom timer to limit the length of each piece we spontaneously improvised.

Jake began making music exclusively with an Electric Football Game, using the sheet of tin with a contact mic to create feedback soundscapes. We did some other performances around Boston, at Mobius and other places, where Jake played EFG and I screened 8mm films. Jake suggested we regularly work that way, but I was too interested in sound to just project film. For a while Jake was doing regular EFG performances at the Somerville Theater, when Len DiFranza set up an Extended Theater salon on Saturday mornings.

Jake and I also drove cross-sountry in his dad's '67 VW bug in the Summer of 1984; destination: Olympia, Washington's OP magazine conference. But that's another story.

Absinthe Radio Part 1 1983













In 1982 I studied for a semester in Barcelona. Felipe Gonzales was elected the first socialist president of Spain. Reagan was rattling sabres and making the world unfit for communism. In the spring of 1983, some fellow students returned from their full year in Barcelona, bringing with them several bottles of Spanish absinthe. They agreed to bring this liquid to a meeting of the On-Air Absinthe Arts Society, that is: we shared in the mixture and performed a radio show for the express purpose of discovering how creative we could possibly be under the circumstances.

Absinthe has long been known as the aperitif of poets. And although it was banned across most of Europe after a series of gothically dramatic crimes in the early 1900's, a cult following has remained for the stuff, in fact only growing due to its disrepute. There are now countless websites devoted to the stuff, tours of Prague to savor flaming shots of the emerald elixir, and worldwide mailorder availability.

In 1982, we did a series of radio shows under its spell. The effect is akin to a combination of hashish and alcohol; absinthe's active ingradient, thujone, is chemically akin to THC. I recall that there were many intelligent people at these gatherings and that our program became a bit folkloric due to these acid tests. Programmers from Brandeis University's radio station WBRS began making frequent visits to WMFO; they liked the sense of experimentation they saw on the 3rd floor of Curtis Hall. More people began doing outrageous experimental radio shows, and I don't think I'm inflating my own head to say it was partly because of our willingness to push the envelope, to try to do fabulously strange radio. The world was getting frightening with each new year under Reagan, a swaggering idiot with his finger on the button if you asked me, and this acting out, our radio activity, was a method of coping with a world going insane.

One of the great aspects of these radio nights was being able to organize group radio shows where no one was in charge. Nominally I was the host of the show, but we regularly took turns, each doing a different aspect of the show-making and then shifting. The production studios allowed people to craft unique short pieces for playback while others were doing an on-air mix. Some weeks we had 10 or 12 people all interacting in the radio studio. I also got into a thing where I set up a curtain around the DJ console which made it impossible for an visitor to see what the DJ was doing; the radio studios can feel like a fishbowl sometimes, with people dropping in and watching, so that was a way to claim back some secrecy or privacy.

One absinthe radio show was recorded by a high school kid across town in Brookline named Tim Clifford, who brought the tape over, declaring "I have a beaker!" and "You stole it from the chem lab" as he heard it from the tape. He started doing radio regularly with us, although we later had a falling out when he spilled bongwater at a David Tudor concert.

Curtis Hall, Tufts University
Home of WMFO


Research Building 1981-87



This building was the site for many musical and social educations. The studios of WMFO are still housed on the 3rd floor of Curtis Hall, at the corner of College and Boston Aves. Radio was an undeclared "major" for many of us, allowing a center for the development of political and social consciousness in between radio shows. The production studios allowed experimentation with open reel tape loop effects, opening up new vocabularies of sound. We ran a series of open shows between 1981 and 87, including "Dangerous Thursday" and "What Balcony", where many creative people tried their hands on the radio dials. We brought students from the Boston Museum School over to Medford to apply the artist mind to radio. I recall Lewis Gesner's project Town, which asked a group of participants to develop a shared language from the ground up over a 6-hour on-air broadcast.

In 2002 I corresponded with a younger Tufts student who said he'd heard that I wrapped Curtis Hall in magnetic tape, a wonderful image and something I would like to take credit for. So let it be said that we wrapped Curtis Hall with recording tape from the inside out. This blog is dedicated to that period and to those who shared in it with me. It remains the foundation of my love for sound.

The Vinyl Record Collection Part 1 2007


Booker Little--Out Front--Candid Jap
James Blood Ulmer--Music Revelation Ensemble--no wave (moers)
George Russell--Vertical Form VI (soul note)
The Essence of George Russell
Tete Montelieu--Catalonian Folk Songs
Rasaan Roland Kirk--Other Folks Music
Blood Ulmer--Are you Glad to be in America (rough)
Max Roach--We Insist (freedom Now Suite)(col)
Merzbow--with memorial gadgets (RRR)
Shastakovich--Violin Sonata op134
Hans Eisler--Musica di Camera (l'Orch)
Hans Reichel/Achim Knispel--Erdmanchen (FMP)
Steve Lacy--Follies (SAJ18)
Sam Rivers--Involution (Blue Note)
Ganelin Trio-- Baltic Triangle
Willem Breuker-Doodzonde (BVHAAST)
OM--Rautionaha (JAPO)
Marcello Mellis--Gruppo Rubanu
Jemeel Moondoc 6--Constanza's Delight (soul note)
Leroy Jenkins--Space Minds (Tomato)
John Coltrane--OM (Impulse)
Mastery of John Coltrane vol. 2 (ABC)
Miles Davis--Sketches of Spain
Canaille--Intl Women's Fest (Intakt)
Das Saxophone Orch Frankfurt (SAJ)
Booker Little--Victory and Sorrow (Bethlehem)
Booker Little--Sounds of Inner City (tcb)
Alvin Batiste--Musique du Afrique Nouvelle Orleans (India Nav)
Welcome to Dreamland (cel)
Eugene Chadbourne--2000 Statues (parachute)
Elliot Sharpe--(t)here (zoar)
Edie Adams--the charming miss (RKO)
Paul Robeson--Favorite Songs (monitor)
Steve Tibbetts-Yr (frammis)
Bomis Prendin-test
Chas Smith--Nakadai
Happy The Man
Happy The Man--Crafty Hands (arista)
Marc Barreca-Twilight (pol)
Durutti Column--LC (factory)
Edgar Winter--They Only Come Out
Crawling With Tarts--Operas
Takemitsu--Asterism/Requiem/Dorian
The Enid--Aerie Faerie Nonsense
Chas Smith--Santa Fe
Berlioz--Symphony Fantastique
Mozart--Div 4 (westm)
Residents--Intermission
Music From Kabul, Afghan
Marion Brown--Afternoon of a Georgia Fawn (ECMPolydor)
Ganelin Trio--Concerto Grosso
Sun Ra--We Are In The Future (savoy)
Sun Ra--Reflections in Blue
Sun Ra--A Night In East Berlin (Leo)
Istvan Szigeti--Electroacoustic comp (Hungar)
Michel Redolfi--Immersion (INA/GRM)
Tri O (melodia)
De Lenin a Lennon (new rose)
Gordon Mumma--(Lovely)
Kagel/Mumma/Wolff--Second Wind For Organ (odyssey)
Lili Marleen (Fassbinder) Soundtrack
Rissett--Mutations (INA/GRM)
Levias/Kessler-- (INA/GRM)
Ligeti--SF Poliphanie (wergo)
Ligeti--(candide)
Terry Riley--Cadenza on the Night Plain (grama)
Tape Beatles 10"
Kansas--Song for America
Kansas
Kansas--Point of No Return
Kiss--Alive
Jethro Tull--War Child
Black Sabbath--Greatest Hits (fr)
Kiss--Hotter Than Hell
Cheech and Chong Wedding Album
Javanese Court Gamelan vol 3 (nonesuch)
Erik Satie--The Irreverent Inspirations (angel)
Charlie Parker--Rare Broadcast 47-48(Jazz anthology)
Fats Navarro Memorial
Benny Goodman + Orch
Art Tatum Classic Solos
Charlie Christian--solo Flight
Charlie Christian (archives of folk music jazz series)
Leo Smith/Kowald/Sommer--Touch The Earth (FMP)
Clarinet Summit--(Black Saint)
Masterpieces by Ellington (Col)
Ellington--New Orleans Suite
Ellington--Indiana Live Session (jazz anth)
Frank Zappa--Shut Up (barking spider)
LaMonte Young--well tuned piano (CDs)
Keith Jarrett--Giurdjieff (ECM)
Ennio Morricone--Film Music vol2 (movie music)
George Wright--Encores on the Mighty Wurlitzer
The Haters--In The Shade of Fire
Reflections--(new music st. louis)
Songs of the Watusi (folkways)
The Central Middle Ages (archive)
Penn/Wilson/Peck (CRI)
Michael Czajkowsky/Buchla--People The Sky (vanguard)
Religious Sound of Tibet
Unesco Iran 1
Unesco Iran 2
Aki Takahashi Plays Satie (east world)
George Crumb--Macrocosmos 1 and 2
Carla Bley/Michael Mantler-- 3/4 (watt)
Harry Partch--The bewitched
Jungle--Spring in Shanghai (melodia)
Masada--original film soundtrack
Terry Riley--A Rainbow in Curved Air (CBS)
Popol Vuh--Hossianah mantra (celestial)
AMM-Generative Themes (matchless)
A. More--Flying Doesn't Help
Kahondo Style--My Heart's In Motion (nato)
Steve Beresford--Dancing the Line (nato)
Music Improvisation Co. (ecm)
EMT--Canadian Cup of Coffee (SAJ)
Jimmy Lyons--Give It Up (black saint)
Lyttle/Cartwright--Bright Bank Alewhale (cornpride)
Roedelius--Self-portrait vol2
van Bebber/Lemke (el capitan)
Dimthings w/Jean Chaine--Ulterior...
Cathedral Chimes Paul Nicholson 10"
Bells (melodia)
Duke Ellington--monologue (CBS)
Ganelin Trio--semplice (melodia)
Sergei Kuriokhin--Polynesia (melodia)
Lukas Foss--Echoi (wergo)
Robert Schuman--Organ Fugues on Bach
Henry Cowell--Episodes (CRI)
Moslang/Guhl--Knack On
Festival of Hits (deutsche gram)
Messiaen--Tarangalila Symphony (CBS)
Duke Ellington--Anatomy of a Murder (coronet)
Art Blakey--NY 1957 (jazz anth)
Eric Dolphy--1961 (jazz anth)
Coleman Hawkins (jazz anth)
Counterpoint--French Woodwind Music (everest)
Shchedrin--Frescoes of Dionysus
Shchedrin--Concerto 1 for Piano
Messiaen--Nativite du Signeur
Jacques Bekaert--Summer Music (lovely)
John Wiggins--All The Truth (RRR)
Alvin Lucier--I Am Sitting (lovely)
Laurie Spiegal--Harmonisus Mundi (TOE)
Shchedrin--Symph 2 (angel/melodia)
Urban Sax
Moslang/Guhl--Deep Voices (FMP)
Achim Knispel--Strapsse (FMP)
Johnny Rondo Duo (FMP)
Hans Reichel--Dawn of the Dachsman (FMP)
Gil Scott-Heron--First Minute of a New Day
Old and New Dreams
Mr. John Cage's Prepared Piano (decca)
Carl Stone--woo lei oak
Oskorri--addio kattalina (elkar)
Walt Disney (dutch lp)
Cecil Taylor--For Olim
C. Taylor--Segments 2
Horace Tapscott--The Call
NFL Films 1
Trevor Johns Waddle--Art of the Digeridoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz soundtrack
Steve Reich--Music for 18
Vezhli Vui Otkaz
Abthony Braxton--Creative Music Orchestra 1976 (arista)
Gunter Hampel--Journey to the Song Within
Ustilus--Hungarian Danca Music (uka)
Paul Whiteman Orch--Bix and Bing (living era)
Mars Everywhere--industrial sabotage
Black Orpheus soundtrack (fontana)
Otto Preminger's Exodus (RCA)
Chet Baker/Keith Jarrett/Lee Konitz (jazz connaisseur)
Lord Buckley--Bad Rapping (wp)
Lord Buckley--Blowing His Mind (demon verbals)
Lord Buckley--Best (wp)
LB--In Concert (demon)
Ron Geesin--Right Through
Samla Mammas Manna--Maltid (silence)
Flecther Henderson--1927-28 (swaggie)
Comic Cuts (old bean)
Emmett Miller (TOM)
Clarence Williams Orch--Golden Jazz 1
Tiny Parham 3 (swaggie)
Anson Weeks (glendale)
Pink Floyd--atom heart mother
Peter Sellers--Fool Britania (ember)
Yardbird--Shapes of Things (bomb)
Globe Unity Orch--Intergalactic Blow (japo)
Cecil Taylor (new world)
Cecil Taylor Unit--Live in Bologna (Leo)
Van Dyke Parks-- Song Cycle (wb + sundaze)
Anthony Braxton--Quartet London 1985 (Leo)
Erik Satie--Monotones (angel)
Boulez Conducts Varese (columbia)
King Oliver--NY Sessions 1929-30
King Oliver's Dixie Sync--Papa Joe (MCA)

Hatfield and the North
Faust
Faust--so far (ReR)
Faust IV (virgin)
Fred Frith--Technology of Tears (sst)
Art Bears--Hopes and fears (ReR)
Soft Machine 1+2 (abc)
Robert Wyatt--Ruth Is Stranger
Robert Wyatt--4 track EP I'm a Believer
Robert Wyatt--1982-84
Begnagrad
Nick Mason's Fictitious Sports
The Commuters
Benjamin Lew/Steven Brown--12th Day (original/crammed)
Family Fodder--monkey banana kitchen (fresh)
Catherine Jeunaiux--Fluvial (woof)
Kalahari Surfers--Own Affairs (gnp)
This Heat--Deceit
Caravan--Waterloo Lily (london)
Hatfield and the North--Rotters Club
Musci/Venosta--Urban and Tribal Portraits (ReR)
Robet Wyatt--Rock Bottom
Matching Mole
Soft Machine--Fourth
Soft Machine--Third
Michael Mantler--Silence
Michael Mantler--The Hapless Child
National Health--Of Ques and Cures
National Health (visa)
Egg--The Civil Surface
Wyatt-Old Rottenhat (gram)
The Homosexuals
Pascal Comelade--sentimentos
Telectu--Knitting Factory
Art Bears--The World as it is today
TRex (mfp)
Henry Cow--western (interzone)
This Heat (piano)
Goebbels+Harth--Indianer fur morgen
Muffins--185 (RR)
So-called Leftwing Radical Windorchestra--(L'orch)
Muffins--Manna/Mirage (RR)
ICP Tentet (SAJ)
Faust--Tapes (ReR)
Lindsay Cooper--Music for Other Occasions
Matching Mole--Little Red Record
London Jazz Composers Orch/Barry Guy
Miller/Coxhill (virgin)
Julverne--a neuf (crammed)
Marc Hollander/Aksak Maboul--Onze Danses (crammed)
Magma--Udu Wudu
Slapp Happy--Acnalbasac Noom
Reportaz (panton)
Magma--Inedits
Univers Zero--Heresie (atem)
Robert Wyatt--Shipbuilding 12"
Christian Vander--Tristan und Isolt
Michael Bass--Parchesi Pie (RR)
Mnemonists--Some Attributes
JA Caesar
Ivor Cutler--Privelege (rough)
Bosho--Chop Socky