Underminds

2011-11-18T23:13:00.000-08:00

THE END OF AMOEBA AS WE KNEW IT, Part 2.

Yesterday, I brought a bag of CDs and LPs to Amoeba Records in Hollywood, hoping to trade out some of my record collection for hard currency. I had about 60 CDs and 30 LPs with me and figured the lot would be worth several hundred dollars to buy groceries with for the next several weeks. This small collection was not a pile of detritus, including about 4 early Miles Davis recordings, Major Works of John Coltrane, the Art Ensemble live in Japan, Dolphy, Basie, Wayne Shorter, Sidney Bechet, Toru Takemitsu, Charlie Parker, Brian Eno, Ornette, Jobim. A very diverse group of records in great shape, which I thought might merit 4$ each or so. I told myself that I wouldn't accept anything less than $300 and dropped off my stuff, the consignment officer telling me to take a look around the shop and they'd call me on the intercom. Imagine my surprise, when called, to be offered $138 cash. Wow. I had no idea records, CDs or LPS, had descended in value to such a level. Like everything else I guess since no one seems to have money to buy anything. I was also expecting to see a line of people waiting to sell records there, but I guess people know at this point they will be offered very little money at a retail store like Amoeba. I want to support the brick and mortar record store, but I couldn't just give away a piece of my collection, purchased carefully over so many years. I realize that a place like Amoeba has a huge overhead to pay for, and while they did amazing business the past 15 years, which allowed for their expansion out of the Bay Area into Hollywood, who could have predicted the slump of the world economy and thus have saved appropriately? Prices for records at Amoeba has not gone down. A new CD is still stickered at $12.99 or so and good used CDs are still 9 or 10$.

Record collecting, doing radio programs, listening and thinking about music are major parts of the life I have lived. I am of a generation of music lovers for whom buying an LP was always a major aspect of identity. I have lived for finding new music, lifting the record out of the shop bin and exclaiming "Ahh!" after looking for it for so long. Collections are now stuff for rich people, museums and foundations. I mean, who can even house a collection of a few thousand LPs anymore? And what's the point? How many people maintain a turntable and a decent pair of speakers? You do what you can.

I can't imagine letting go of my entire record collection and accepting a virtual library of hollow-bodied MP3s. Maybe trim down to a skeleton selection of a few hundred LPs and CDs, but the wholesale shift to Going Mobile is not an option. Of course, I haven't been evicted yet.

Young people (and some excitable contemporaries) are content exchanging MP3s with one another and spend their spare dollars on iPhone apps. They cross the street at the same time as they read their e-mail, both are given a percentage of one's attention. Can the same people be present at a concert or a film screening? Do they feel anxious about the twitter feed they might be missing? I have to ask: What's "smart" about the new generation of mobile phones? They may allow us a million ways to interact with the internet and our un-present friends, but what are we losing in presence by being a slave to the "hand-held device"?

Committing a certain percentage of my life to buying music, supporting music both live and recorded, it is surprising to find that the record collection no longer holds much value. A friend used to say about his burgeoning collection: "It's like putting money in the bank!" Well, that has changed. And sure, some of these records will not be hard to sell. Single pieces sell depending on their rarity and niche importance. I sold 1 Sun Ra Saturn LP about 10 years ago, when the internet was still sort of new, for 130$. I just saw the new Sun Ra 14CD box at Amoeba for around $110. You can buy the world for $100. But raising $100 is another story. Some of us must now resort to scavenging, although I guess that word applies to what many of us do here on Earth.

Records are like vessels with holes in the middle. They only hold water, or function, when they are connected to larger home listening systems, the hole is plugged. People don't seem interested in listening to recorded music any longer. Or they accept music as part of a background within their larger experience. People watch movies and other programs on large LCD televisions partly because the medium envelopes more of our total sensory ability. We want to be consumed by experience. Maybe that's a reaction to being conditioned as consumers for so long. And a stand-in for what was once community.

Life is broken down into smaller and smaller units. Songs cost 99c on iTunes and each one is ephemeral as the smoke from a cigarette. Didn't Buddy Holly exhale this smoke? We have cloned the smoke.

The most vital and real recorded experience might still be a great sounding LP on a good home music system. Though many people can't stand the solitude that comes from hearing intensely great music, eyes closed into the dark interior.

2010-02-09T00:13:00.000-08:00

Wet Gate Plays Berkeley Art Museum L@TE

Wet Gate, the 3 person projector band I play in, was invited to perform as part of the Berkeley Art Museum's L@TE Friday series, which featured Terry Riley and Ellen Fullman on the 2 previous occasions and has upcoming or just occurred events with William Wynant and Fred Frith, as well as Carl Stone among others. So we had to accept the honor of the appointment. We were scheduled for January 29th, with friends Anne McGuire and Jon Leidecker (aka wobbly), who do a bizarre nightclub song set.

We had several months to prepare our material, which was fortunate given that Wet Gate had not played together for almost 3 years and that I now live in Los Angeles, which makes rehearsing a challenge. Those months allowed us to go through olde material and choose what we still liked from it as well as check our equipment for functionality. 16mm projectors can tend to keep on chugging, thankfully, but they do require some minor standards of upkeep and storage. We also looked into updating our various methods of image alteration, more or less the mirrors we use to bounce images up onto the screen. Because Wet Gate, as a band, plays projectors at the front of the house, before the audience, not hidden in the booth at the back.

Wet Gate enjoyed some good years in the Bay Area, in some ways leading a wave of artists working in fields of expanded cinema. (I know that sounds pretentious but I believe true.) The group silt had been doing something else quite rare and otherly, with super8 mostly but by diverse means, and Wet Gate's appearance came as silt seemed to dissolve, then working more as individual artists and out of town. (Our approach was also uniquely sound-centric, whereas experimental film culture tends heavily towards the imago-centric. We identified more with the music scene, as a band.) There was overlap to the activities of these 2 groups, silt and Wet Gate, and as friends we encouraged each other. What I'm trying to say is that the late 90's and early 00's were the years when Wet Gate really developed as a group and innovated a very clear approach to film performance. (While it may be frustrating at times that the film and music worlds seem so separate, these fences between genres or mediums became the scaffolding we could walk upon and build something almost new... San Francisco is also a uniquely open-minded town.)

Anyway. After an initial get together around Thanksgiving, when we visited the Berkeley Museum and saw the strange orange blob-like landscape seating which we would be sharing the space with, we began to conceive a show. A usual Wet Gate show runs about 40 minutes and involves alternating sequences of pictoral and abstract film loop projections. We looked at some material we each proposed to bring into the show. Peter (Conheim) showed Steve (Dye) and me a great Margaret Mead film of Indonesian trance theater. We enjoyed our usual brown dinner at a Mexican restaurant in Alameda.

The Winter went by. Our rehearsal time turned out to be only the day prior to our Friday show, although we exchanged volumes of e-mail discussing the museum space and our use of it. This procrastinative approach is historical with Wet Gate; we have often created set lists at restaurants just prior to show. There is a fine line with Wet Gate work, wherein repeated rehearsals of a show contents can lead to exhaustion of interest in that material. The machines also slowly destroy the film material. While we have a written set, improvisational aspects add just enough room to give the performance a flexibility that makes it exciting. We took notes from several "jam sessions" that Thursday. I sat with notebook and tried to piece together a set from what we were looking at, with Steve and Peter's corrections and comments. We ran through some of the material and Steve and Peter made more suggestions. We shuffled the order and re-wrote the set.

We met Friday morning and again worked on some of the transitions and sections of the show, did some tweaks to the set, but really we had time now only to load out to the museum and see if we could work there for a few hours. We were blessed by wonderful weather, cloudy with a chance of meatballs, right? (It did rain that evening, but only after we were well set up inside the gallery.) I had major concerns that we would have trouble getting good vantage on the screen as it hung over the orange landscape blobs in the gallery, but as we turned on the projectors and started to toss some light around it appeared that we had a great spot. Set up went smoothly and easily with very good support from many hands on deck at the museum. Steve and Peter spent a lot of effort maximizing placement of the Mackie loudspeakers in the orange waves of grain. We had all afternoon to get comfortable in the space, and Anne and Jon showed up much later and seemed ready to go in minutes. We decamped to a Korean restaurant and chatted with Gibbs (Chapman) and Keith (Evans) while also considering any changes needed to be made to the set.

It seems that over 400 people came out in rainy weather to see the show, it seems a great thing that museums are opening their doors to the public at night and hosting performance events. Ever increasing disposability of culture must demand that museums seek some spontaneity in their hallways. Art is expensive; kids want cheap MP3's. Where is the meeting point? In experiences, perhaps.

Wobbly and Anne (Freddy) did a very fun set of twisted lounge singing, she curled into the orange turf under the screen which projected, Peter Campus style, herself in closed circuit video feedback. (The screen projects.) Jon selected from a series of arch pop music samples to create the vertebrae for her singing, and his rig sounded great considering the space. (The best vantage point was directly in front of what was the stage and then moving out from there sound became echous.) It was very funny at times, perhaps a little grandiose a venue for receiving the messages of some of her ruminations, but some great moments, including when viewed from high up in one of the museum balconies. The party atmosphere of the event had a lot of background chatter all through the night. In the middle of one song, Anne good-naturedly commented: "Go ahead and talk among yourselves. Get a drink at the bar." She had also threatened to strip at the show's start but didn't carry through with that, understandably.

We then came on and did our 40 minutes of chaos, which started a little stiffly but relaxed into a groove in which we listened and played well, if not absolutely inspiredly. Our show seemed to fit the room well. We somehow fell back into the conversation we had learned to have with this equipment and each other. At one point early in the show, Peter, fed up with the audience chatter and innattentiveness, suggested we ramp up the energy and fight back, which we did and it added a needed jolt of steam to the show. I tend to prefer the less formal performance, and this situation was something between a formal performance and a more relaxed workout, a nice balance in a pretty unique situation.

While it's uncertain what future remains for Wet Gate, this event was definitely a good one. I'm trying to fold my performance energy towards a solo sound and image show and continue to see Wet Gate as an incubator that could lead each of us to new things. It was nice to be back together again and we had many encouraging comments, as well as a nice anonymous timelapse youTube document you can see here (sound coming some day soon):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2toVwJV2MDc

(Images above both from this youTube clip.)

See also BAM/PFA site for L@TE schedule:

http://www.bampfa.berkeley.edu/about/late

2009-12-17T17:32:00.000-08:00

(Still from Evolution of the Red Star. Adam Beckett 1973.)

Carl Stone Interview 8/27/09 Los Angeles La Brea Farmers Market by Owen O'Toole

The context for this discussion was the recent Adam Beckett commemorative exhibition at The Academy of Motion Picture Sciences. Beckett's ground-breaking animated films were restored by Mark Toscano of The Academy.

Owen O'Toole: We were both at that screening, myself by virtue of knowing Mark Toscano, who worked at Canyon Cinema at a time when I was on the board of directors there, and I assume you came to that screening as a) having been a composer on one of the films that was restored and b) being part of that whole milieu.

Carl Stone: Adam was a friend and I knew him actually in high school, we went to the same high school together and then knew him at Cal Arts (California Institute of the Arts) as well, and then we worked together, I did that soundtrack for Evolution of the Red Star, and so it was Mark in fact who, well both Mark and Pam (Taylor Turner) contacted me about this, she contacted me for memory about Adam and trying to piece together his life in retrospect. She's a film historian based in Virginia, one of the moderators. So she had contacted me and then also Toscano contacted me about some technical stuff around the restoration of Red Star. And he was very kind, he invited me over to the Academy, showed me the work that they had been doing. They've been doing a lot of great work restoring not only Adam's stuff but a lot of very important experimental filmmakers: Brakhage and others, and working from the original materials which is mind boggling when you think about it.

OO: It's so great that at least motion picture film has tremendous life span. It's not something you can say for magnetic tape is it?

CS: No.

OO: Though I guess Mark was working with mag stock originals from the lab that contained your original soundtracks on them.

CS: I believe so yes, he got a hold somehow.. I guess Adam must have had the foresight to keep those things at his mother's house or maybe they were stored at Cal Arts, that would make more sense.

OO: Or a film lab where prints were... doubtful?

CS: I just don''t think Adam would have done that. I would have thought he kept them at his place in Val Verde, and thank god he didn't.

OO: Is that the place that burned down and he died at?

CS: That place burned to the ground, yeah. So he must have kept them either at Cal Arts or some other location and they were saved and available to be used.

OO: Mark also mentioned that he'd discussed with you the other works you'd done from that period, and you also mentioned that they're in your garage. Could you talk about that material? You're saying that the restorable aspects might be in question on some of this material.

CS: Well again, as you alluded to, audio tape stock in the '70's had some pretty severe manufacturing flaws that require a lot of care and attention to get around these days. There's a whole industry built around restoring old mag tapes which tend to ooze gummy residue.

OO: The adhesive.

CS: Yeah, and the actual magnetic filings will fall off leaving the tape meaningless. So you have to bake them and then you basically have, my understanding is, i've never done it myself...

OO: And then you get one opportunity to play it back.

CS: You've got one chance to play it and load it onto some presumably non-destructive medium like electronic...

OO: Computer.

CS: So my masters are there. They were all done at that time, they were all using 3M tape which is especially notorious.

OO: That's quarter inch stereo recordings?

CS: Generally the way I worked is: the studio I worked in had 2 half inch 4 track tape recorders recorders and then two or three half track tape recorders plus a synthesizer of course. All my pieces were made usually recording through the process of overdubbing onto the 4 tracks and then the final product would usually be a 4 track version accompanied by a mix-down 2-track version, which would be easier to send out for people to listen to or play in a concert.

OO: Just to jump back, how did you come to go to Cal Arts as a musician or sound artist at that point? Was there already a burgeoning program led by somebody, was there a teacher there who was a luminary?

CS: Yeah. well I graduated high school right at the time when Cal Arts was starting up as Cal Arts and so everyone was very excited about this new citadel of the avant garde that was going to be opening up. And I didnt know that much about the history of electronic music or who was doing what, but I had come across..., I mean I knew Cage's work and some of the computer music done by people like Milton Babbitt, Vladimir Ussachevsky, Pierre Henry I'd heard a little of, but I knew that I loved synthesized sound and I was very interested in the idea of sythesis. I had come to be interested in electronics because of my work playing improvisational rock keyboards when I was in high school. I was influenced by the keyboardist for the Soft Machine, a guy named Michael Ratledge. And the things that he was doing, sort of simple in retrospect... He basically hot rodded a console organ and then put it through fuzz, distortion and wah wah and things like that, and so it was kind of a new sound world. And that led me to be interested in synthesis and Cal Arts was opening up, I knew they were going to have one or two big synthesizer studios, and I knew I wanted to go. I was just graduating and had no other plan. And so when I was there I came to know who Morton Subotnik, who ran the program, was, and met a lot of people like Charlemagne Palestine, Ingram Marshall..., they were TA's there. Serge Trepnin was also a TA there and he went on to build and design his own synthesizers.

OO: Modular sythesizers?

CS: Yeah, they were sort of Buchla 2.0. I think he took a lot of the best parts of Buchla 's designs and improved on them.

OO: I think of the keyboardless ribbon when i think of Buchla. Was there anything else that was specifically unique to his intruments?

CS: Yeah, a lot of things. Moog was optimized for people who wanted almost an extended organ, (that was) using a black and white keyboard. It was very much oriented towards diatonic music, twelve tones, and the oscillators themselves were calibrated to provide...

OO: Whole tone increments.

CS: Right, or half tone increments, whatever. Of course you could get in between, but it was different from Buchla which said the world of sound is a blank slate, we're not going to calibrate, we're not going to make any concessions to western music by including a black and white keyboard, we're just going to go back to ground zero.

OO: So Buchla's piece is interesting as a microtonal instrument essentially or potentially.

CS: Well yeah, it made microtonal music as easy to do as.. It made tonal music harder to do and so as a consequence it gave a kind of promotional bias towards microtoal music. And so yes, all the music that those of us who were at Cal Arts in those days tended to.. nobody was doing Bach transcriptions or arrangements or even writing tonal music at all. I mean some music might have tonal implications but you almost had to work hard in order to do that.

OO: And Subotnik brought the Buchla machine to Cal Arts.

CS: Yeah, he's the one who arranged it. He and Buchla had a working arrangement that went back to his days at the San Francisco Tape Center and on through New York, and so he brought Buchla in and purchased... Actually we had 3 studios of Buchla equipment.

OO: Was that a high point in production of Buchlas or was it just good timing in terms of that equipment being (available)?

CS: I think it was an economical shot in the arm to the Buchla business and allowed him... We had the first generation, the so called 100 series and then a year or 2 after that everything was upgraded to the so called 200 series which was a big improvement. And then later on there were other series and Buchla continued his development. Yeah, i think it was kind of a perfect moment actually.

OO: Was Evolution of the Red Star..., was that early on in your time at Cal Arts?

CS: About midway. I believe Evolution of the Red Star was '72 or '73 in my memory.

OO: I think it said '73 on the title card.

CS: That sounds right.

OO: What years were you there?

CS: '70 to '75.

OO: And was Subotnik there that whole time?

CS: Yes

OO: And it was a pretty exciting place to be?

CS: I found it to be, yes.

OO: Who were some of the other music students who you talked with and i assume worked with on things a lot.

CS: The graduate students, like Charlemagne Palestine, Ingram Marshall i mentioned. Students kind of at my age level more or less, undergrads, were...

OO: Barry Shrader was mentioned.

CS: Barry Shrader was a teacher. He had more hands on with the Buchlas and taught the class of fundamentals. He taught an electronic music history class and others. You should interview Barry if you can. Other students: Chas Smith , William Hawley, Earl Howard, Joseph Paul Taylor... I'm just talking about the electronic music studio now. David Mahler...

OO: Are these people that you are still in contact with at all?

CS: Pretty much, some more than others.

OO: Are most of them active?

CS: Well again, some more than others. Joseph Paul Taylor, who was just known as Paul Taylor at the time, seems to have dropped out of music unfortunately, he was a great musician. Earl Howard is very much continuing. William Hawley is not doing electronic music anymore as far as i know but he is still composing. Chas Smith... you're familiar with, he's doing stuff.

OO: Well maybe that's an appropriate point to ask about the world that I know him through, which is the Cold Blue record label, and another person involved with that: Daniel Lentz. Is that a world that intersected with yours much other than knowing Chas Smith at Cal Arts?

CS: Well the roots of Cold Blue go back to Jim Fox, who started the label and pulled the artists on the label together. Many of those artists like Rick Cox and...

OO: Was Peter Garland part of that?

CS: Well, Peter was at Cal Arts. So... Jim Fox was going to the University of Redlands and he was a student of Barney Childs. And so he and Rick Cox and a couple of other people, Barney Childs' students, they were out there. We didn't know them. Barney Childs came to Cal Arts a couple times and did little guest lectures, but i dont think there was that much interaction between the student bodies of the 2 schools. Later, Jim came to LA and brought his coterie with him but then also embraced Chas Smith who was a student at Cal Arts, Peter Garland who was a student at Cal Arts but did not do electronic music. Daniel Lentz was older than everybody else, little bit of a different generation actually, already had a reputation and was based out of Santa Barbara.

OO: Did that become part of the Venice and Santa Monica new music scene, the Cold Blue people? There was a record shop in Venice that I visited in the early 90's and it seemed like it had bins deeply devoted to some of this music and I hadnt seen that elsewhere. There was Rhino Records, and some other record stores that sold new music, but there was this one record shop off of Main St. that I thought must be affiliated with Cold Blue Records.

CS: Certainly did not exist in the 70s at all. Record stores in the 70s, there was Rhino, there was Poobah in Pasadena, there was Aron Records. That was pretty much it. Rhino was kind of your go to place for experimental, improv, electronic stuff. Poobah was also good. That was pretty much it, come to think of it. And Arons.

OO: So Jim Fox, he came to LA well after you were done with Cal Arts...

CS: I think Jim was starting to make his presence felt in the late '70s, maybe very beginning of the '80s, and I graduated in '75.

OO: And where did you take yourself to after finishing school, was there a next step?

CS: Well after finishing school my main activity in the music community here was to co-found an organisation called the Independent Composers Association, ICA, and we started it in about '77. It was a number of ex-Cal Arts students joining together with some UCLA students, a bunch of people who just graduated, who quickly discovered that the only way to get your music performed was to produce the performances yourselves. So a number of us gathered together as a collective and...

OO: Started doing concerts?

CS: Exactly. So, Jim Fox was not a core member of that group, but I think along the way we started some alliances with him. Then in 1978 I started working at a radio station, at KPFK, the Pacifica Station in Los Angeles, and I became the music director there and so my vantage point was as the music director of the local Pacifica station, and I wasn't really working on a daily basis with the ICA anymore, I was more cooperating with them on doing stuff.

OO: When you left Cal Arts did you go back to using the Buchla in those studios occasionally? What did you set yourself up with in terms of home equipment that allowed you to continue being an artist?

CS: Right, It's a very good question because it required a big paradigm change of thinking, because working at Cal Arts, basically I couldn't work there anymore once I graduated. So I had to figure out a way to continue composing. I'd become sort of spoiled. I mean, the synthesizer at Cal Arts was many hundreds of thousands of dollars in its day. Of course today for a thousand dollars you could buy the same amount of power, but that's what it cost in those days, plus all those tape recorders and everything. I really didn't know what to do for a while. But being at the radio station, the radio station had tape recorders and it had LP record players and it had a big music library and so that was... I said: this is what i've got, what can i do? So the first pieces that I consider part of my professional output and which I think are important pieces at least in my own musical history are the pieces that I did in the upstairs production studio, pieces like Sukothai and Woo Lae Oak which came out on LP that you have. Those were done at the studios of KPFK and I used KPFK... again, just a couple of tape recorders and a record player, microphones, because I didnt have... Nobody had a home studio then. You couldnt have a home studio unless you were very, very wealthy, a studio musician, or affiliated with some major institution.

OO: What did they have, some Revox decks?

CS: KPFK had a bunch of Scully quarter inch machines, that's all.

OO: And you did everything that one does with open reel tape recorders: tape delay and loop making...?

CS: Well, i did a lot of loop making, yes. Basically the technique that i worked on that sort of got me started, which is emblemised, if that's a word, with my piece Sukothai, and is also used to a certain extent in Woo Lae Oak, is a multiplicative process I call layering, where basically... the way I did Sukothai was I took a recording out of the music library and I just played it on the turntable and I copied it onto tape in stereo. Then I rewound the tape recorder, I mixed the 2 channels of the stereo tape onto mono and I recorded it on the left channel of the 2nd tape recorder. I rewound again and I recorded it on the right channel. It was a harpsichord recording, so I went from having one harpsichord performance to having 2 slightly delayed in time. Just like a delay effect, right? Simple cannon. And then what I did is I took that recording, I rewound and mixed the 2 harpsichords to mono and I recorded that on the left channel of the other tape recorder and rewound again and recorded the 2 on the right channel. So now I had 4 harpsichords and the rhythmic..., the pattern of delay had become irregular, right? 'Cause it was done in 2 passes.

OO: And in discrete channels these kinds of effects do incredible things, the same information coming... It's one thing if they are both panned equally to the 2 channels, that's one type of delay, but the discrete left and right delay, it's a pretty awesome sound structure.

CS: Well, especially if you keep going. Because that's what i did is I rewound the tape again and I mixed down the 4 tracks of the harpsichord into mono, and then I just continued this process over and over and over and over and over and over again until I had 1,024.

OO: Wow.

CS: It only took 10 times, but it took all night to do that. And basically... then what I did to make the final piece is I just took it serially and assembled the final mixes: 1,2,4,8,16, and all the way through, and that's the piece. So I didnt use all the techniques available to the contemporary musique concrete artists, there are so many of them. I just concentrated on 2 or 3, looping and layering being the main ones. And so I built a bunch of pieces just based on those techniques.

OO: In the time at Cal Arts, did Subotnik bring a lot of other artists through to influence the students who were there? What about Alvin Lucier?

CS: Alvin Lucier, definitely.

OO: New York people...

CS: Well, yes.

OO: Gordon Mumma, is he a west coaster?

CS: Yeah, he's originally from I think Ann Arbor, but taught at Santa Cruz for many years. Gordon Mumma definitely came through. Steve Reich, Philip Glass, they all came through. Lucier probably came through, I dont have a specific memory but we certainly knew his music because in history class that I took we listened to I Am Sitting in a Room. You know that piece?

OO: Yeah.

CS: Well that was very influential, and the piece I just described to you, my piece Sukothai was very influenced by that kind of serial process assembly.

OO: I dont know how much later this is, and I dont know if its the first piece of yours I heard, but it's on one of the Trance Port tape releases, i think it was called LA Mantra... But anyway, the piece Wave Heat, it's a pop song, what is it: Linda Ronstadt?

CS: Heat Wave is... Well, she may have done a cover, but the original was by Martha and the Vandellas.

OO: Right, it was a Motown track. So that's along the same trajectory in terms of your tape work. Was that done at KPFK?

CS: Well, that was done by..., that was like 1982, and the KPFK pieces I described to you were done in '79 and '80. Sukothia was '79, Woo Lae Oak was I think '80 or '81. Then what I was interested in is the idea of real time performance, and I didnt really see tape as being a truly... I mean, I did some performances mixing tapes in real time, but there was a certain lack of spontaneity and a certain lack of control. You're working with these very fixed objects, like tapes. There was no random access in those days, you had to rewind tapes and fast forward tapes to get to the location you wanted, and it seemd to me first of all that LP records... They weren't truly random access, but at least you could pick a needle up and put it down somewhere else. You could go backwards and forwards. So I was kind of a proto DJ, because I started fooling around with turntables and I thought: how about using turntables for live performance? Didn't occur to me to make my own records, that seemed out of the question, nobody was doing it then and making a record would mean... Usually it meant you had to print 500 or a thousand copies in those days. A lot of money.

OO: But you were doing a radio show as well as working at the station, right? so playing music was the most natural thing in the world...

CS: That's right. And just fooling around with turntables was very natural too, and doing mixes and things like that on the air, we did stuff like that. But what happened was I discovered a stereo digital delay with some special features, and again this is 1980, '81. Digital delays now with looping, you can get 'em for 100 bucks, maybe if you want to buy a hand version you might pay 500$, 600 or a thousand if you're really splurging. You had to work hard to pay 5,000$ for a car in those days and that's what this thing cost. But I did some fundraising. My dad helped, I got family friends.

OO: For the station studio?

CS: No, for my self.

OO: Oh, wow. That's incredible.

CS: Raised the money...

OO: What was that thing called?

CS: It was called a Publison DH-89.

OO: Do you still have it?

CS: It got stolen from me twice. Not once but twice. They broke into my house in Hollywood, they stole it, it was insured, I got a new one and they stole it again.

OO: Wow. They knew what they were looking for.

CS: Well, they wiped me out, they took everything. They probably didnt know what it was. Who knows where those things ended up? There weren't that many of them in the market place, in fact there were so few of them in the marketplace... They were sold mostly to rich rock musicians. And once, they had an office in LA, a sales office. The company was French, but they had a sales office in LA and once I went to the office and met with the guy, they were friendly. And above the guy sitting at his desk was a huge sign that said: What do Peter Gabriel, Stevie Wonder, Madonna, Michael Jackson, Carl Stone, bla bla bla, have in common?

OO: Really? You were up there?

CS: I was up there. Not because they even knew who I was. They knew that I'd bought one and I was like one of twenty people in the world who had one.

OO: That's sweet. Do you have a picture of that somewhere?

CS: I don't have a picture of it, goddam it, but somewhere...

OO: I think you need to photoshop one up. With Publison...

CS: I should. But they also ran ads in some electronic music magazine or studio sound and I do somewhere have a clipping of kind of the same thing.

OO: With it you were able to make similar effects as you were getting with that channel separation..., or was it a new...

CS: Well I sort of moved on from that. I wasn't trying to duplicate that effect so much as I became interested in chopping, looping, repeating, and so Wave Heat was a kind of early version of some of the pieces that you can find on my website now, if you go there, the pieces from the '80s, Shibucho and Dong Il Jang. Go to my website and you'll find them, the pieces that used that Publison.

OO: Is Wave Heat on there?

CS: Wave Heat's not on there

OO: Do you have a decent copy of that? It was put out on cassette in a fairly decent sounding edition that I played on the radio for years. Ha ha.

CS: I have the master somewhere, the stereo master somewhere. My archive version is probably from the cassette.

OO: Well it makes sense, in terms of that change of equipment, because you can hear the combing things that are happening in that piece and it's pretty fascinating. I enjoyed it a lot and I think it's what drew me to your work. It might be that piece alone, there may have been some other... Were there some other releases? Just to focus on that for a second: Trance Port tapes and a produce, he wasn't a Cal Arts person, was he?

CS: No, as far as I know, I don't believe he was. Where did he come from? I'm not even sure. He just contacted me out of the blue.

OO: OK. Because he did an interesting job. He also produced a couple of CDs of his own work that are somewhat interesting, kind of sample space music. And then he invented packaging for cassettes, this was during the time when cassette was the radical exchange medium, and everybody, especially people at radio stations, used them to trade material.

CS: Yeah. I hated them, I hated cassette. I always did. Sounded shitty, was very hard to find an exact location, they broke, they jammed, got caught.

OO: So you tended not to use it..?

CS: You couldnt help it because it was what everyone else was using, and for years if you wanted to send out demos of your work you had to do it on cassette, couldn't avoid it, but I never liked them. And I was so glad when the compact disc came out as a medium, and when the cd burner came out I was really happy 'cuz then I could make my own CDs and get rid of the whole cassette thing forever.

OO: I failed to ask questions about this: Mark Toscano specifically encouraged me to ask you a little bit more about collaborating with filmmakers and soundtrack work in general. First, he mentioned 2 other films that i guess were produced at Cal Arts that he says you did soundtracks for: Amusement Park Composition and Decay, was that by Roberta Friedman and Graham Weinbren?

CS: Yes.

OO: And then Accident by Jules Engel.

CS: Yes.

OO: Did you talk with Mark about those when you met with him recently, or...

CS: Not recently, we didnt talk about it recently.

OO: Is there anything about those 2 film soundtracks that you recall that were especially neat, maybe in relation to Evolution of The Red Star? Do you remember those soundtracks, those films at all?

CS: It has been many years since I've seen or heard those films. It was a revelation listening to Red Star after many years, and it's obviously an early work of mine and in some respects I hear it as such. But on the other hand I dont think it sucks and I see in it the kind of seeds of a number of tendencies that I've followed in later years. and some of the tricks and techniques that I use today have their origins maybe in that soundtrack. I dont know what it would be like..., I would be very curious to listen to Amusement Park, or to see it. I recall, Red Star came together in a way that felt right. I think Adam and I, we may have had some spirited discussion, but we basically understood each others ideas and it all came together in a way that I think we felt good about. As I recall Amusement Park was a bit more of a struggle, it wasnt quite as natural a process, and Accident also came together pretty well I think. But the thing about Accident that disappointed both me and Jules Engel, who was the filmmaker, was that the small details of the sound that I put in the soundtrack did not survive.

OO: Because of the bandwidth of the 16mm...

CS: Because of the bandwidth of the optical soundtrack, yeah. And I being very young and very inexperienced really didnt understand that I was going to lose the detail that I wanted. And Jules was..., I think we did it twice: we mastered it, we got the optical print back and we sat down and we listened to it and we both said: what went wrong? Jules probably paid for it out of his own pocket. We had to go back and we just tried the whole thing again to see if we could get a better version and it didnt work. It was just too much to ask for an optical soundtrack.

OO: So when Adam Beckett's films all listed a mixer...?

CS: Don Worthen. He's the guy who did the Accident soundtrack too.

OO: Was he a professional in town somewhere?

CS: His roots were in Hollywood, he was a professional sound man in Hollywood for many years, good reputation. And Cal Arts hired him to run the film sound department.

OO: So they had a printer head at the school to burn soundtracks onto?

CS: They didn't burn the soundtracks, but he did all the mixing. He did the transfers on to mag stock and the mixing. They had maybe a 3 channel..., you know these big machines, you thread them up, it would be like 35mm mag stock going through all these...

OO: Pretty impressive.

CS: Uh huh, in those days it was phenomenal. And they had a mixing room and so on.

OO: So he was supposed to understand some of the limitations of the medium and he did his best...

CS: He did his best, absolutely, and we just didnt... I didnt have the vocabulary or really even the full understanding of what a microtransient was, to know that that's what we were losing. And that is exactly what it was, just that transient response both in terms of the overall bandwidth and the ability.. You just can't cut that into a 16mm optical track.

OO: I'm still having a little bit of a disjoinder in terms of understanding how Adam Beckett's work suddenly made its way towards the production of Star Wars. I guess George Lucas sort of swooped in and saw a creative universe under the direction of Jules Engel, was it?

CS: Jules Engel was the head of the animation department and yes, I think they sensed that there was...

OO: And It was an affordable work crew and they were interested in sci-fi to some extent. Some of the talk about Beckett was that he was a sci-fi enthusiast.

CS: Yeah... I think if he had been a stamp collector it wouldn't have made any difference.

OO: It was networks of friends?

CS: Yeah, I think that's what it was.

OO: What about your work as soundtrack? I saw the piece you did for dance with Akira Kasai and I assume you've done some other dance related compositions. I think, in the arts world..., just the possibility that dance can exist... It's a whole other world than film which is high finance. Dance is almost an aberration to the money system. The fact that human bodies on a stage can still be presented sensibly is a miracle. And so it's natural that artists would work together through those 2 mediums. Have you had any interesting run ins with filmmakers, where things happen? I dont know of any other soundtrack work that you've done. To me it would seem natural that your work would make its way to film soundtrack. Have there been any intimations in that direction or any courtings between yourself and filmmakers that either did or didn't materialize, that you want to mention?

CS: In commercial film: nothing. I never pursued it. And nobody came to me. I have done soundtracks for experimental film. Most recent was with 2 films by Pat O'Neil. Do you know his work at all? They were presented at the Getty here in LA and in England and also at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

OO: Was that compositions originally made for his films.

CS: Yes. And designed to be performed live or as a fixed soundtrack.

OO: You mentioned some live presentations, were those pretty wonderful? Did you enjoy them?

CS: Depends who you ask. I enjoyed them and we got good results. I mean, the exact same program presented originally in LA and in San Francisco. In LA some people dug it of course and some people walked out. In San Francisco everybody dug it. What can I say?

OO: And so opportunities to present live, performance based music is a primary interest to you or is that something that maybe requires a little more expense in terms of putting it together and maybe funding?

CS: Well it is fun to do and you have the added spontaneity of the moment, plus the added ability to really screw up royally and get all messed up. Which I've... I've done both. Both are interesting, having a fixed soundtrack that's perfectly polished and really great, is fine. Doing stuff live is fine too, I don't have a strong philosophical predilection one way or the other.

OO: So you're open to doing work as it comes to you.

CS: Yeah. I mean it would depend on the artist and our ability to communicate and our common aesthetic ground. I feel aesthetically, I really like Pat's work and always felt... I've always loved it. You know he was at Cal Arts as a teacher, he was Adam Beckett's teacher. And I loved his work then. I didn't particularly like his soundtracks at the time. I always thought: Oh god i hope someday I'll have a chance to do a soundtrack for Pat O'Neil. And it took 35 years but eventually I had the chance.

OO: That's kind of what it's all about: to work with the people who you've admired and learned so much from, to be able to give back into their work and become part of those lives. Pretty nice reward even though... it's not the most lucrative career in the world.

CS: Yeah, that's a very polite way to put it.

OO: So, you have a teaching gig in Japan, which is probably wonderful in some ways. From my point of view you've done a great job of getting your work out there and being involved in growing communities of sound art, at least here on the west coast, Los Angeles, San Francisco. I don't exactly know what your relationship is with east coast people, i'm sure you have contacts, friends there who contact you. But making a living is difficult as a sound artist or composer of electronic music, isnt it?

CS: Well, it's so difficult that I gave up trying. I mean, I basically for years... of course i was never 100%. I mean, I worked for a radio station, I ran the California office of Meet the Composer which is a funding organization, I did freelance consulting. and stuff. But I for many years was sort of proud of the fact that I never taught at a university, I didn't do any Hollywood soundtracks, I was kind of scraping by on my own music ... as music. But it was getting harder and harder and it got to the point where it became almost impossible really. And fortunately I did get an opportunity, I was offered a job to teach at a university in Japan. Which you know... if teaching at a university can be a drag at least teaching at a university in Japan would be a challenge.

OO: Language wise?

CS: Language, culture, business culture, everything. So I decided to go for it. It also coincided with the takeover of the Bush Administration, 9-11, the rise of...

OO: The right.

CS: The rise of the right. And the fall of the media in this country, so it seemed a good time to put a little distance between me and the US.

OO: How is the technology for music for you these days. Do you see the tools for the composer to be immense and fruitful? Is it absolutely a good time for say: a young person wanting to explore... making music? Is there great equipment, and, I mean, software winds up being a big part of composing electronic music doesn't it?

CS: Yes.

OO: I realize MAX has been a huge part of, and other MIDI driver type... That's actually more of a virtual synthesis program, but are there any other tools that you've run across over the past 10 years. I don't think i've talked to you since... didn't you do a piece in Japan with like 100 iMacs playing ..

CS: Well, 50 but who's counting? For a long time the music software that I was using was only available for a Mac platform. Now it doesn't matter, any platform. The tools that I use are available for any platform, like MAX.

OO: If someone threw a laptop of any type at you and an internet connection, could you get going relatively quickly?

CS: Yeah. of course. I've stuck with the same platform for a long time, MAX/MSP as you said. I haven't really felt the need to move beyond that because I'm able to do everything that I want to do with that, and it runs on a Mac, it runs on windows, and it runs on Linux, so...

OO: Has cycling (cycling 74) been a responsive company to your needs? Have you needed to contact them about things over the years.

CS: A few things. I beta-tested one of the early versions of MAX. And from time to time will send them a suggestion or a complaint. Their user base is very large and a lot of cool ideas come from them. I've found that their improvements have pretty much tracked my needs even without me having to say a lot to them.

OO: I know that there's a lot more that we could talk about of the past 20 years. Maybe next winter we could do another one.

CS: I like this. Sure.

2009-08-07T17:52:00.000-07:00

Rascalities, Part One.

Steve Gore was in the process of collecting a huge amount of archive material by the Rascal Reporters into a 16 CD set to be called Rascalities. He sent me the first volume maybe a year and a half ago, the first 4 CDs, although I didn't have much time to go through it then, being a new dad. I recently have begun re-listening to this material and intend to write a proper review here as it comes along. I do not know if Steve had finished organizing the full set of material, all 16 CDs, before the accident which took him away from us. But I do also have a pile of cassettes that Steve made for me of unreleased material. Some of it is flat out amazing and will take some time to revisit. I intend to carefully go through and catalog this collection. I consider it some of the best music I've ever heard and wish more people could hear it.
So I am now dedicating a certain amount of this blog to reviewing the collected work of the Rascal Reporters. Coming soon. Get ready.

2009-07-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

The Fred Frith Tapes, Part 2.

Here is Fred Frith's reply with corrective remarks to my recent blog post.
I truly appreciate the time Fred took to inform me of the details surrounding these histories and mentions and hope people find some good information here. Perhaps much of this information is available elsewhere but it was largely news to me.
______________________________________

hi
thanks for taking the time to write about this stuff. It's always appreciated. Can't help noticing, however, that there are rather a lot of outright non-facts included. Since you took the time to write it, I will take the time to comment!

Fred Frith and Chris Cutler performed in a science lecture room of Barnum Hall in the winter of 1979/80. It was to have been an Art Bears tour, but Dagmar backed out for health reasons.

—This is a nice idea, but completely untrue - we were never going to perform as Art Bears at Tufts. The only way we could have done that would have been with Marc Hollander and Peter Blegvad, with whom we had recently toured in Europe, but that would have been moot since the "group" ceased to exist immediately after that tour, and we were never booked for any American dates.

Skeleton Crew, Frith's duo with Tom Cora (which was expanded to include Zeena Parkins later) visited Boston a number of times when I was student there. They made 2 very good records, Learn To Talk and Country of Blinds, which contain some of Frith's most political songs. He had moved to New York around the time of Reagan coming into "power" and attacked a lot of the Reaganist values through Skeleton Crew agit-improv. Frith incorporated rough cassette recordings into Skeleton Crew live shows and recordings. You might hear Reagan mumble: "We're still free in America", followed by Frith's manic peel of laughter before launching into a song.

—A couple of myths:
1, that Skeleton Crew was an improv band. We weren't. We performed songs, and, since we played all the instruments, those songs took an endless amount of rehearsal. Our records should make it pretty clear that improv was the exception in the group rather than the rule. This was composed music.
2, the voice heard saying "We're still free" is not Reagan, but Jerry Falwell, and the cassette recordings weren't rough, they were purchased by us directly from the Moral Majority, of which Tom was a member!

The influence of Bob Ostertag can't be downplayed in Frith's incorporation of mixing rough tape sound into his music. Ostertag was an early user of samplers and field recordings and there are some great records of Frith and Ostertag together, particularly "Getting A Head" and "Voice of America".

—Henry Cow introduced field recordings into our live performances as early as 1974, several years before I met Bob and heard his music. When I first heard his music he was playing a Serge synthesizer. His interest in samples was radically enhanced when said instrument blew up in London and he was compelled to use cassette machines for our London concert. This concert became the LP Voice of America.

Ostertag also founded the school of No Photos, a period in which Frith and Cutler refused to allow their photos to be easily captured, often holding a hand in front of their face, a clearly political gesture asking people, and photographers in particular, to listen to the massage of music rather than focusing on image and personality. A great example of this is Ostertag's appearance in the film "Step Across The Border", where he is rehearsing with Frith and others and when the film camera turns on him he shoos it away, Don't Look Here. I definitely appreciated this stance for a time, but it's funny how trying to avoid The Eye can sometimes bring more attention to oneself. A strange circular game of control.

—no idea what you are talking about. I have never heard Bob or anyone else refer to such a "school", and the idea that I have refused to allow my photo to be taken is refuted by the literally thousands of photos taken over the whole span of my working life from 1973 to the present. The moment in Step Across the Border is probably the only moment Bob ever made such a gesture, and it was probably done by way of letting the filmmakers know that he was not involved in the music they were supposed to be shooting. I have a policy of not allowing photographers to use flash, or to move around in front of an audience when I am performing. The reason for that is because it is distracting both for me and for the audience, who are there to hear music not to watch photographers. This is fairly standard practice among most professional musicians that I know. In fact I know many who are much stricter than I am. My technical rider states that photographers are welcome to come to our sound-checks and take as many pictures as they want. If I'm so against image and personality, how come I'm in (so far) 5 different documentary films?

Henry Cow, the great English band Frith (and Cutler) led from 1968 until about 1978, learned amazing things about using the recording atudio as a compositional tool. The influence of German group Faust, Virgin Records labelmates, must have been considerable. Faust incorporated incredible tape echo effects and droning oscillator noise in their work and this crept quickly into Henry Cow.

—I loved the 1973 era Faust, and they definitely had an impact, but when it came to using the recording studio there were plenty of models that both they and we shared, especially Phil Spector, George Martin, and Frank Zappa, and not mention the electronic music of Stockhausen and Berio, all of which models were a great deal more pertinent to our studio work, especially early on. Incidentally, Chris didn't join Henry Cow until 1971.

This was the era of "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", Byrne and Eno's dissertation on the use of found (or stolen) sound, and Holger Czukay's "Movies" is another example of the great use of tape recordings of ethno-musical sources as well as field recordings mashed into the mix. Today "mash ups" may be everyone's middle name but in 1980, with the arrival of the Professional Walkman and other recording devices, this was all new territory.

—It's perhaps useful to note that Gravity was made at approximately the same time as both of the above records and it also contains a vast number of sampled recordings, many of them from a well-known tape archive to which I had access for a time. Samples included on Gravity include Iranian demonstrators, various recordings of dance music from renaissance times, and field recordings of native american singing and drumming, as well as a whole catalog of nature recordings from the Arctic, including seabirds and seals. Much of this material had also been used at Henry Cow concerts in the mid-70s, as I said earlier, using reel to reel tape recorders on stage.

"Speechless" (Ralph Records LP, now on Fred Records CD) includes numerable exquisitely creative uses of documentary tape sound, and so serves as a great snapshot of its time and place (mid 80's NYC). Police: "Get back, get back"/(cut) Woman: "I don't know where to go." There are sprawling sections of street protests Frith recorded in New York. Even the Satie-esque "Domain de Planousset" is suffused with tapes of night birds.

—Being a hopeless pedant I can't resist pointing out that they aren't birds but frogs!!

Frith collaborated with the Michigan studio duo Rascal Reporters on a number of tape-by-mail projects, including a re-working of Frith's New York protest tapes into the track "No More War", which appears as an extra on the recent "Speechless" re-issue. Frith told me that Steve Gore sent him a 1/4" reel tape of very complex time signature playing, asking for a guitar solo to which FF responded by cutting the tape up into fragments and randomly re-attaching them. A large part of that appeared on the Rascal Reporters LP "Ridin' On A Bummer" and Frith's re-do of that is the classic "No More War", which was discussed at large on an internet bulletin board where Frith and Gore clashed over the merits of improvised vs. composed musical activity. Anyway, there was a fruitful friendship between Steve and Fred, one which made people think, even if contentious. (The recent death of Steve Gore is a huge loss to the American progressive music community, if such a thing exists.)

—Hmm. Interesting! I did one collaboration with Steve Gore, and one only. I don't know what conversation with me you're referring to but one or the other or both of must have been on drugs! I did indeed refuse to do a guitar solo, but I certainly didn't cut up the original and reassemble it. I left it completely alone. What I added was a recording of a siren in upstate New York being tested. It is a very long continuous downwards glissando and it has the effect of always pulling the chords into its psychological orbit. I found it absolutely haunting, and added recordings of a demonstration in New York to create a kind of "narrative" feeling. I was very pleased with the result. I sent it to Steve, and as far as I remember he used exactly what I sent him, as did I when I put it on the Speechless re-release. I'm not aware of any difference between the two versions. I have no recollection of any conversation on an internet bulletin board with Steve. I always found him to be an intense and eccentric and supremely creative fellow.

Morgan Fisher created a great LP of "1 Minute Masterpieces" called "Miniatures" which includes Frith's looping summary "The Complete Recorded Works of Henry Cow", a tongue-in-cheek rush through their sonic catalog which should be heard.

—Certainly not a rush, and no loops either. A meticulously constructed tape piece which used some part of everything Henry Cow ever recorded assembled according to a strict mathematical template and took a lot of studio hours to complete.

"Step Across The Border" should be mentioned again as a good glimpse of Frith at work. I recall the film containing a number of seagull appearances, and the sound of seagulls is something Frith returns to again and again. See also his track on the guitar compilation "Guitar Solos 3", called "Alienated Industrial Seagulls". All of Frith's solo guitar recordings deserve consideration for his ability to use the instrument to invoke other sound sources, like strange radio broadcasts coming through his guitar pickups.

—1. there is one scene in the film with seagulls
—2. Alienated Industrial Seagulls is just a silly title, and has nothing to do with the actual birds
—3. strange radio broadcasts are not invoked by the guitar. They are exactly that - strange radio broadcasts, amplified by holding the radio over the pickups. Old trick..

Perhaps the strangest Fred Frith tape I have in my collection, and never see on any recordings lists, is from a Japanese cassette compilation called Omni 1. It's actually a Tim Hodgkinson piece, with organ and saxophone solo in heavy reverb, called "Pampkin The Great", and Frith chants with Dagmar Krause various terms of sexual "pathology", "Nymphomania" for example. I'll have to transfer that tape to new media sometime soon.

—I have never heard of this, and certainly had nothing to do with it. Just somebody using my name I'm afraid.

there we have it.
cheers
Fred

2009-06-30T11:24:00.000-07:00

To celebrate the release of the 40th Anniversary Henry Cow box of live recordings, I've decided to brush off this unfinshed article I started over 10 years ago.

The Fred Frith Tapes

I was introduced to the music of Fred Frith and Henry Cow by Hahn Rowe, when we were both freshmen at Tufts University, fall of 1979. My musical tastes were wide compared to most of my high school friends but I was unprepared for the vast range of strange music I would encounter over the next few years, thanks to Hahn and others involved in the Tufts radio station WMFO. There was an excellent show on MFO called Mental Notes, co-hosted by Michael Pailas and Andy MacKenzie, and this weekly show highlighted all of the best avant-garde groups and musicians particularly of the "progressive rock" dominion. I heard Gong and Robert Wyatt and Magma regularly. I got involved with the radio station.

These notes will focus on stray and sometimes overlooked aspects of Frith's work as it relates to taped music, studio production tricks and other tape oddities. I have collected most of Frith's recorded output and seen him perform live over 20 times, and although I'm not the eager fan I once was, I remain indebted to Fred Frith for opening certain sound windows for me.

Fred Frith and Chris Cutler performed in a science lecture room of Barnum Hall in the winter of 1979/80. It was to have been an Art Bears tour, but Dagmar backed out for health reasons. People at WMFO hosted and recorded the concert and Hahn got me to go. I have a cassette dub somewhere. Upon entering, Cutler wrote Noise 101 on the blackboard. Frith played guitars on the table and Cutler used his drums in a very abstract manner and they moved through their series of duet experiments culminating in a kind of anti-jig. This era of performances is captured pretty well on the record Live in Prague and Washington, which is a tough listen but is astounding work to see invented live, especially if new to experimental music.

Skeleton Crew, Frith's duo with Tom Cora (which was expanded to include Zeena Parkins later) visited Boston a number of times when I was student there. They made 2 very good records, Learn To Talk and Country of Blinds, which contain some of Frith's most political songs. He had moved to New York around the time of Reagan coming into "power" and attacked a lot of the Reaganist values through Skeleton Crew agit-improv. Frith incorporated rough cassette recordings into Skeleton Crew live shows and recordings. You might hear Reagan mumble: "We're still free in America", followed by Frith's manic peel of laughter before launching into a song.

The influence of Bob Ostertag can't be downplayed in Frith's incorporation of mixing rough tape sound into his music. Ostertag was an early user of samplers and field recordings and there are some great records of Frith and Ostertag together, particularly "Getting A Head" and "Voice of America". Ostertag also made a record called "Sooner Or Later" which is one of the most unlistenable records ever produced, sampling from a tape of an El Salvadoran boy burying his father killed in the civil war there.

Ostertag also founded the school of No Photos, a period in which Frith and Cutler refused to allow their photos to be easily captured, often holding a hand in front of their face, a clearly political gesture asking people, and photographers in particular, to listen to the massage of music rather than focusing on image and personality. A great example of this is Ostertag's appearance in the film "Step Across The Border", where he is rehearsing with Frith and others and when the film camera turns on him he shoos it away, Don't Look Here. I definitely appreciated this stance for a time, but it's funny how trying to avoid The Eye can sometimes bring more attention to oneself. A strange circular game of control.

Henry Cow, the great English band Frith (and Cutler) led from 1968 until about 1978, learned amazing things about using the recording atudio as a compositional tool. The influence of German group Faust, Virgin Records labelmates, must have been considerable. Faust incorporated incredible tape echo effects and droning oscillator noise in their work and this crept quickly into Henry Cow.

This was the era of "My Life In The Bush of Ghosts", Byrne and Eno's dissertation on the use of found (or stolen) sound, and Holger Czukay's "Movies" is another example of the great use of tape recordings of ethno-musical sources as well as field recordings mashed into the mix. Today "mash ups" may be everyone's middle name but in 1980, with the arrival of the Professional Walkman and other recording devices, this was all new territory.

In New York, Frith began producing records for other groups. I think of The Muffins record 185, which has great contributions by Frith as a player and also in the use of tapes, like the appearance of what sounds like a creaking ship mast on "Antidote To Drydock", a sound which also appears in Frith's sound collage masterpiece record "Speechless". (The LP "Gravity" should also be mentioned for the appearance of early tape sound, rain on a tin roof for example, an early drum machine?) Frith produced records by many groups during this period (early to mid-80's), including V Effect, the Orthotonics and France's Etron Fou Leloublon.

"Speechless" (Ralph Records LP, now on Fred Records CD) includes numerable exquisitely creative uses of documentary tape sound, and so serves as a great snapshot of its time and place (mid 80's NYC). Police: "Get back, get back"/(cut) Woman: "I don't know where to go." There are sprawling sections of street protests Frith recorded in New York. Even the Satie-esque "Domain de Planousset" is suffused with tapes of night birds.

Frith collaborated with the Michigan studio duo Rascal Reporters on a number of tape-by-mail projects, including a re-working of Frith's New York protest tapes into the track "No More War", which appears as an extra on the recent "Speechless" re-issue. Frith told me that Steve Gore sent him a 1/4" reel tape of very complex time signature playing, asking for a guitar solo to which FF responded by cutting the tape up into fragments and randomly re-attaching them. A large part of that appeared on the Rascal Reporters LP "Ridin' On A Bummer" and Frith's re-do of that is the classic "No More War", which was discussed at large on an internet bulletin board where Frith and Gore clashed over the merits of improvised vs. composed musical activity. Anyway, there was a fruitful friendship between Steve and Fred, one which made people think, even if contentious. (The recent death of Steve Gore is a huge loss to the American progressive music community, if such a thing exists.)

Morgan Fisher created a great LP of "1 Minute Masterpieces" called "Miniatures" which includes Frith's looping summary "The Complete Recorded Works of Henry Cow", a tongue-in-cheek rush through their sonic catalog which should be heard.

"Step Across The Border" should be mentioned again as a good glimpse of Frith at work. I recall the film containing a number of seagull appearances, and the sound of seagulls is something Frith returns to again and again. See also his track on the guitar compilation "Guitar Solos 3", called "Alienated Industrial Seagulls". All of Frith's solo guitar recordings deserve consideration for his ability to use the instrument to invoke other sound sources, like strange radio broadcasts coming through his guitar pickups.

Perhaps the strangest Fred Frith tape I have in my collection, and never see on any recordings lists, is from a Japanese cassette compilation called Omni 1. It's actually a Tim Hodgkinson piece, with organ and saxophone solo in heavy reverb, called "Pampkin The Great", and Frith chants with Dagmar Krause various terms of sexual "pathology", "Nymphomania" for example. I'll have to transfer that tape to new media sometime soon.

I have way too many Fred Frith records. He has been a central figure in my own development as a musical thinker and he continues to create sometimes astoundingly great music. His contribution to the "Rivers and Tides" documentary, while subtle and minimal, is wonderful. His homage to John Cage on the record "The Previous Evening" is an astounding piece of modern collage sound and a beautiful tribute. And the Evelyn Glennie film "Touch The Sound" has beautiful footage of Frith and Gleniie performing in an old factory, Frith en-lightening the moment by playfully tossing rolls of tissue paper down several stories.

Here is an abbreviated list of Fred Frith performances I have attended:
Frith and Cutler, Barnum Hall, Tufts University 1979
Frith solo guitar, Mass College of Art, 1980
Skeleton Crew, Mass Art 1982(?)
Skeleton Crew, Medford Jewish Center 1984(?)
Frith and Phil Minton, DC Space, Wash, DC 1984(?)
Frith and Hans Reichel, Nightstage, Cambridge, Mass. 1987
Fred Frith Guitar Quartet, Victoriaville Festival, Quebec 1996
Massacre, Great American Music Hall, SF 1997(?)
Frith/Ochs/Masaoka, Great American, SF 1998(?)
Fred Frith Re-Mix, Mills College, Oakland 2000(?)
Fred Frith solo guitar, Berkeley Rep Theater 2005(?)

I hope to consider Frith's compositonal techniques, including the ideas of "melody extraction" and "block melodies" in a future post.

For info on the Henry Cow 40th Anniversary set and other new music, see www.rermegacorp.com

2009-05-29T23:26:00.000-07:00

Building the Slork Speaker Array, Part 2

I have pretty much finished the 6 speaker spatial array. I tried it out with 10k ohm resistors in each of the input lines, but it played extremely hot. I had to reduce volume levels within the ProTools sessions by about 13db average. After exchanging messages with my electronics-whiz brother about it, I went over to RS again and got what higher ohm resistors I could find. They had 33k ohm and 47k ohm to choose from, and I opted 33. After installing those, the levels were still at about 5db too hot. Tom suggested running the 33k ohm and 10k ohm (I'd started with) resistors in series, and so I did that and found the level to be pretty close to optimum. So I've got 43k ohms of resistance on the inputs.

So the array is now pretty much done. It sounds very good, better than I expected, with no buzz or rattle of parts on the shell or within. I did stuff some insulation that came from inside a sound dock type of speaker system in to protect some of the solders from touching each other and for damping. Once I've lived with it a while I may wood gloe the shell down onto the base, since it is now held together only with 5 small screws along the jack strap, but it is essentially complete and ready for playing out.

Now I just have to work on a radiophonic-type piece for presentation, which I have begun. It will collect several short electro-acoustic pieces I've done the past few years as part of "commercial work" and tie those together with longer abstract sections. It should be fun to create soundscapes especially with this spatial speaker array in mind. Thanks to brother Tom, Ge Wang at Stanford and the Princeton group for all the open source style information online. Could find myself grouping up with others doing this in the LA area and I have mentioned the idea of working with Wet Gate in this direction, as an electro-acoustic trio outside of the optical film bag (and as Black Gate). I appreciate the laptop orchestra ideas, but am drawn to more freeform approaches to solo, duo, trio etc work in this area. More on this as it develops.

2009-05-23T23:02:00.000-07:00

Building The Slork Speaker Array, Part 1

Several months ago I was looking at Apple's webpages for info on one-of-a-kind book publishing and came upon an article featuring the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, a project of Ge Wang at Stanford's computer music center. I became drawn to a revolutionary design for a small 6-speaker spatial array the group uses. Made from an IKEA salad bowl, 3 stereo triamp chip based micro-amplifiers and 6 car speakers, the design creates a sound source that I quickly felt matched my inner idea of an appropriate personal amplification system, and I decided I had to build it for myself.

There is a lot of good information about this project online, between the Stanford Laptop Orchestra pages, the Princeton Laptop Orchestra pages and various DIY audio boards where audiophiles discuss modifications of equipment, including the little amplifiers used here. The laptop groups use triamp chip amplifiers, which are tiny solid state amps about the size of a credit card and quite affordable. These were most likely made for use in flat screen tvs and other small speakered gadgets, but audiophiles got hold of them and found they have, with a few modifications, very good quality sound.

Over the next several months I acquired parts and studied the online materials. I was lucky to get 3 Sonic Impact V2 t-amps for 30$ each and good prices on the 6 speakers used by Stanford in their array. I added some 16v 2200uF capacitors to the power rail cap and cut out the volume pots, replacing each with a 10k ohm resistor, as per GW's suggestion. Building the input saddle or jack block was challenging, using radio shack and home despot off the shelf materials. An original pine base was discarded for a hardwood base as suggested again by GW.

This was a remarkably useful project besides the purpose of creating a usable amplifier-speaker for presenting live electronic music. I finally found a project that taught me the basics of amplifier electronics and I learned to solder. I had soldered before but was never satisfied with my work. Today I got very close to being completely finished with the speaker array, tied everything together and mounted several of the speakers into the bowl, screwed the bowl on to the base. I'm looking forward to hearing the completed unit in the next few days, testing it out with playback of a 6-channel recording in ProTools, and then preparing a piece for public presentation. The first live event may be a recording for pocketradio.org

2009-01-27T00:25:00.000-08:00

Brotzman Kowald Cyrille Trio, Somerville Theater

It was winter 1984-85 I believe. We used to hold events at the old Somerville Theater in Davis Square thanks to manager Lenny DiFranza's adventurousness. One Saturday brought this great trio of improvisors into the theater. Their work is chronicled on many FMP albums out of Berlin and we played a lot of this stuff back then on WMFO, the little Tufts radio station. I shot a roll of fotos using a tiny Minox travel camera and had the film printed to a contact sheet. Chris Rich, who arranged the musicians trip up from NYC saw the contact proof and said it sucked, so I filed it away rather than print any. Another mistake of letting others' hasty opinions squelch your work.

2008-08-12T22:46:00.000-07:00

My Time At WMPG, Portland Maine. A Brief Recollection.

I arrived in Portland as a refugee from the Boston area in 1989, in search of greener worlds, better natural environments. Maine does have gorgeous coastlines, woods and mountain access. There are also several good community radio stations, including WERU in Blue Hill to the north (or Down East, as they say) and Portland's WMPG, the station of the University of Southern Maine. In early 1990 I approached WMPG about doing a show of experimental and "progressive" music and fairly quickly was given a show, I think an 11PM to 2AM slot, when the studios were still in the Student Union building out in Gorham.

My show followed The Dads, whose Dad's New Slacks was the most outlandish and experimental show at the time. We became pretty good friends, the Dads Townsend and Pajack and I (Bert wasn't available), and our shows sometimes bled into one anothers if I recall correctly. When my show morphed and moved to another time, we continued to collaborate. Michael Townsend was particularly encouraging of my approach to radio and we worked on numerous projects together in the 4 short years I lived in the area. Portland is lucky to have Michael there as an ongoing creative force and living history book. I particularly recall how much Michael contributed to the re-writing of the station bylaws and constitution (around 1991), when there was considerable friction growing between staff and volunteer programmers over how the place should be run.

I hosted a program called The Plagiarist for 2-3 years. I would play records for the first hour (a sub-show I called World Receiver) and then slide into sound collage for the 2nd hour. Usually I would create a backing tape of sample sound environments during the week and begin the collage using that, then mixing in found sources at the station: multiple looping CD players (AB repeat function) and recording the lot on the Otari reel deck used also for echo effects. After about a half hour I would usually flip the reel tape and play that first half-hour backwards into further mixing. I really enjoyed the show, felt generally inspired much of the time and had some great visitors on air, including Leo Loginov, the Russian pianist who I went to Moscow with later in 1992 and who was part of The Plagiarist Trio which performed at the New Music Across America Festival at Portland Performing Arts that same year. We made an LP of that concert and recordings from Russia but by now most of those records are lost, destroyed and otherwise dispersed. I hope WMPG has one. Jeff Plansker also visited via phone link and in person for some crazy nights of absurd radio antics. There is a 7" record we made called Louisiana Cookin that gives a picture of some of that, copies are still available! Phil Stewart, who commanded a show on Russian and Eastern European rock, was also involved with a lot of the edgier activities at WMPG. We made a radio coloring book as a fund raiser gift. Michael and Ron Welch (the Radio Poet, who now lives in Spain) began a series of shows focusing on the 4 elements, the first and perhaps only one we did being on AIR, where we ran an amplified fishing line out the window and across the street which truly amplified the sound of wind. Michael and I were invited up to Bowdoin College by Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky, then a student at Bowdoin) to perform electronic music with video to a small but friendly audience. There was another show or 2 in which we sampled Spanish absinthe prior to programming, there were jam sessions in the basement during lightning storms. There was a leaflet-publication we made called Panic Boredom which commented sarcastically on various management schemes we disagreed with. The station was a beautiful haven for fun, experimental activity and I hope it has stayed that way to some extent and does so forever. I packed my bags and went to Russia in October of 1992 for 2 months after which I moved to California.

(Photo found on a flicker page via Google search for WMPG and used without permission. I hope photographer doesn't mind...)

2008-04-12T23:18:00.000-07:00

MY 3 YEARS
in Public Radio in Mendocino County

In 1999 I moved to the country, partly as a Y2Ker who foresaw unpleasant futures in city life. While the SF Bay Area is a very liveable urban environment, my sensitivity to pollution and traffic was high. Riding a bicycle in Berkeley began to feel suicidal with all the diesel fumes emitted by AC Transit buses. I moved north to Anderson Valley partly because I'd subscribed for a while to a crazy local paper: The Anderson Valley Advertiser, which familiarized me with the place. Meeting people in the area, making new friends, was not too difficult. I am a bit of a refugee who every few years moves on to find a new home; I've had difficulty settling down. The health food shop in Boonville, Boont Berry Farms, was a welcoming center of civilisation.

Because of my background in radio I was drawn into the small local public station and proposed to do a show there on antique and avant-garde music. The show went on the air pretty quickly and was first called The Worst Is Yet To Come, after an early Billy Jones Edison record about World War 1. Soon thereafter there was a mass quitting of several members of the station staff, including one person who was taking off to pursue a sex change in a less confined, small-townish environment. I began working at KZYX in March of 2001, as half of the Operations Director position and early morning NPR shifts on Thursday and Friday. My time at KZYX was at turns wonderful and miserable; I learned a lot about the technical aspects of radio being operated on a shoestring, and I quickly met almost everyone "of consequence" in the area and so was thrust into the middle of some long-standing arguments.

KZYX had been a central mouthpiece for EarthFirst! activists who tried to save the redwood groves in Northern California from rapacious timber companies throughout the 80's and 90's and continue today. Judi Bari did a show there for some time and several current environmental programmers were her friends. I met some very interesting people and befriended them. There is a type of person who moves to Mendocino, often a lover of nature who has some problems communicating with other humans; I know being one of those. Not surprisingly, the relative isolation lived by inhabitants of the county makes public radio a meeting place for all discussion. KZYX is a wonderful little radio station plagued by recurring problems that grow on the rocky, mountainous landscape there.

One of KZYX's great attributes is its daily playback of Democracy Now, a progressive news and current events show produced by Amy Goodman in NYC. This is singularly the most important work being done by the station, which accounts for democracy Now being the most pledged for show by far come fundraising time. Democracy Now has more recently gone from being simply an audiocast to a fully produced TV show as well, that is: there is live video to the radio show and this is carried by dishTV and other video outlets. Amy has visited Anderson Valley several times on book and fundraising tours, giving talks at the Mendocino County Fair Apple Hall and doing Democracy Now live from the KZYX studios during my first week with the station. We broadcast her talk live using a Codec Buddy, a device we often used to send an improved audio signal over a standard phone line (the box shifts the frequency of the spoken word to a higher frequency where phone lines carry less noise and then shifts it back on the reciving end). Democracy Now was normally downlinked from a live satellite feed from the Pacifica Network and recorded to MiniDisc for playback later that day, but we often had problems with capturing that recording and so would resort to asking for special re-feeds from KPFA using ISDN technology (which, like the Codec Buddy used phone lines to send audio programs but with much higher quality encoding techniques).

The job of Operations Director involved overseeing all of the programming coming into the station via satellite feeds, most or all of these originating with National Public radio or Pacifica. KZYX was interesting in its combination of NPR and Pacifica programming, as well as the many locally produced public affairs and music shows. We also ("we" because i shared the job with someone) did a lot of "air time", announcing between changes in programs, station identification etc. While none of these were particularly difficult tasks, they all took place in a social environment that became competitive, the hours stretched out longer as people were needed to fill in, help out, keep things going, and relationships got fraught with tension. The first 5 months of my being there coincided with great upheavals at Pacifica, in which democracy Now was bullied out of the WBAI studios and certain MOR factions (allied with the Clinton Administration at least nominally) tried to take control of the precious Pacifica stations and transmitters by coup. This climaxed with a lockout at KPFA in Berkeley and a large number of civil disoberdiance arrests I witnessed. There were months where Pacifica, held by imposter leadership, tried to pawn off archived Democracy Now programs on the satellite while we were getting direct ISDN feeds of Amy's new show produced at the firehouse in Chinatown NY. Eventually Pacifica was wrested fromthose hands and resumed its purpose, being a voice for the community against big money interests and being a voice for Peace. One remarkable aspect of KZYX's balance of NPR and Pacifica programming is that NPR listeners become slowly radicalized as they are exposed to the stories coming through Pacifica and some of the very good community generated programs. And then there are members of the KZYX community who constantly agitate for removing NPR entirely from the schedule, believeing the station should be community-based entirely. Some of these people were the most regularly abusive in the interactions with others. KZYX actually owes its existence to a Federal PTFP grant which established funds for new NPR stations in areas beyond major urban station reach.

2008-04-01T13:27:00.000-07:00

The End of Amoeba As We Knew It.

I've lived in California for 15 years, beginning in Berkeley where I was introduced to music mega-stores Rasputin's and Amoeba Records. I spent a lot of time at both, being a vinyl junkie, leaning towards Amoeba due to the amazing storehouse of unusual records that would appear for sale there. They even have a section called "Unusually Experimental" which today still holds the oddball recordings I learned to ride a bike on. In Berkeley, the Amoeba shop was the one that would have rare FMP LPs for a while, a great jazz collection and what seemed like miles of used LPs. Amoeba was so successful at what they did, buying and selling in volumes that allowed them discount pricing, that they opened a second shop on Haight Street in San Francisco in the late 90's and another in Los Angeles in the early 00's. I recall selling some records at Amoeba in Berkeley back in the mid 90's and getting a great deal from the staff. By the time the 2 new stores opened things began to change; I guess that's normal for a small operation going big-time. The buying policy became much stricter. The rare LPs had always been taped shut into plastic poly-bags, but it seemed suddenly that each record had an entire roll of clear tape locking it shut and you could hear the guy or gal in charge of taping up records ripping away at the roll of tape, the noise competing with whatever music was on the PA system.

Jeff Plansker and I have made pilgrimages to the LA store on a regular basis on my visits south and since I moved to LA 2 years ago; it is like a trip to church, checking in at the holy shrine of recorded sound. For years you would almost always be surprised at the treasures you'd find. I can only begin to list what great records I found at Amoeba: like the Music In The World of Islam on Tangent Records, another copy of the great Ron Geesin LP "Right Through" that I'd had in the 80's but lent to the electronic music teacher at the Boston Museum School; I literally yelled "Yes!" when I found that about 2 years ago in the Recent Arrivals bin in the LA store. But recently our less frequent visits have supported the feeling that the Great days of Amoeba past are gone. We often leave the shop with nothing; there is just not the great turnover of records that there was back a few years. I suppose with eBay, sellers of vinyl have gotten savier about getting what they can for rare records. The whole market for recorded sound has changed so much in just a few years, with so many young persons just going online for MP3 copies and trading with friends.

While it's good to see the demise of the dinosaur record companies who gave recording artists small percentages of music sales, it contributes to a more specialized and precious world of collecting records. The death of Tower Records was a landmark of this trend, that people are just not buying enough CDs to keep the big retail chain stores in business. Amoeba seems to be going strong, and they have a good dvd/movie room that probably accounts for a growing amount of sales, as many people seem hyped about dvd and home theater (not to mention "gaming") these days. But sadly, Amoeba has begun to feel like the second coming of Tower. The used selection has diminished greatly and prices for rare-ish records are high. We've noticed that it seems there is a box set of anything by anyone who ever farted; everything musical has been commodified to such an extent that it is rendered inert and easily explained. There is so little mystery left in the discovery of unusual music. Now this could be partly an effect of growing older; we may have arrived at a point where looking for recorded music just doesn't provide a lot of discovery any more. We must look into our collections now and figure out what we have gathered, it may be something of a totality which describes the experience of our lives, finding music that we had to have which led to further discoveries. When you're discussing Horace Tapscott and Morton Feldman records I think there isn't that much further to go. The question then is How do I activate what I know, what I have, into an educational force, How can I share this?

So it may seem that an era of record stores has come to an end, both for me personally and in general, that I was just lucky enough to have my interest in recorded music coincide with a period of great richness in the music market. I can't say how much it is me and how much of it is the record market. I've lived my life very closely with records, not having to listen to music constantly but always seeking out new material --often for radio programs I hosted-- and then as an interested listener, maker of music myself and filmmaker who sees music and sound as integral to film experience, to open my own mind, in search of new experience. It is all being folded into the internet. But nothing approaches the clarity of expression found on well recorded and preserved LPs and CDs.

Amoeba is dead; long live Amoeba.

2007-12-06T12:28:00.000-08:00

PRIMITIVE FORCE
Monday Evening Concerts at the Colburn School, Los Angeles, December 3, 2007
Music of Radulescu, Stravinsky, and Xenakis

After living in the LA area for 2 years now, it is nice to finally be finding a new music scene, and this group (www.mondayeveningconcerts.org) has been presenting concerts in LA since 1939! I only stumbled upon their schedule in the window of Canterbury Records in Pasadena, noticing a presentation of work by Horatio Radulescu, the central luminence in what is called the "Spectral School" or "spectralism". Another blogger (zhao, see differentwaters.blogspot.com and thesameriver.blogspot.com) has written quite a bit on spectralism and linked numerous MP3 examples, and I found the Sub Rosa disc "Intimate Rituals", devoted to Radulescu, and featuring the violinist of this night's performance, about 6 months ago. I am still a novice to this group of composers, but the program notes give some clues: "Though his concern with sound spectra (the overtone components that partly determine timbre) presaged certain aspects of spectralism, his thinking was more ranging and mystical than that of such contemporaries as grisey. And though he shares Stockhausen's view of sound as spiritual substance and sound-making as ritual, most of his works are instrumental and essentially abstract." (Monday Evening Concerts Notes, ©Paul Griffiths)

Anyhow, the program was held in the beautiful Zipper Hall at Colburn Music School in downtown LA, across from the Disney Center. The room was a large recital hall with gorgeous acoustics helped by a towering peaked ceiling with woodslat acoustic baffles arching above and 5 large discs above the stage to diffract sound. It was great to see so many people out to hear avant-garde music, I'd say 150 people were there. Of course Stravinsky and Xenakis bring the crowds, but Radulescu? The show was brilliantly curated to present 2 pieces of Radulescu's to a wider audience and to underline the contrasts and similarities between these composers. The presence of Vincent Royer, a young violist from France who has specialized in performing works by Radulescu (as well as Giacinto Scelsi and Luc Ferrari among others, made this event particularly noteworthy. His performances of Agnus Dei (in duet with local violist Kazi Pitelka) and Das Andere (solo) were uniquely spellbinding; complex patterns of arpeggios and rough bow chording made both of these pieces anything but minimal. I expected long tone, Feldmanesque tonefields, but the Radulescu works were closer to Transylvanian gypsy improvisation or the extreme sound studies of James Tenney (KOAN for solo violin), beautifully interpreted by Royer and Pitelka. The solo piece Das Andere was particularly moving, and Royer danced gently with his instrument as he sometimes ground extreme chordal textures from his bow and viola, akin perhaps to a filmmaker scratching celluloid or a painter's use of the palette knife to lift one layer of pigment off and reveal another. Royer played another short koda piece to close the first half. And between the Radulescu pieces was the wonderful Stravinsky work "In Memorium Dylan Thomas", a setting of that most famous poem ("Do not go gentle..."), a piece first presented in 1954 at Monday Evening Concerts and one which Radulescu was partly inspired by (Program Notes). An ensemble of 4 trombones, string quartet, and voice did a wonderful job with this piece, a beautifully balanced pull between the melancholy sunset of life passing and the "rage against the dying".

The second half of the evening was given to 2 works by Iannis Xenakis, who I'd always thought was Greek but is declared Romanian born in the notes. (So many interesting artists have emerged from otherwise unknown Romania: Tristan Tzara, Constantin Brancusi, Eugene Ionesco.) the first piece was percussion solo "Rebonds" from 1989, a whirlwind performance by Steven Schick on woodblocks and 5 assorted drums, excellently played and with great personality. An example of how great percussion music can be, saying so much with such limited tools. "Eonta", for 3 trombones, 2 trumpets and piano from 1963 was a radical work akin to seeing the Globe Unity Orchestra perform. Pianist Eric Huebner's hands were flying across the keys in the manner of Cecil Taylor and the horns moved around the stage from 1 position to another, sometimes blaring into the sustained open grand piano and sometimes just wandering. A wild piece approaching free jazz in its implications. A great night out for music.

I've been avoiding going to Disney's Redcat series, but may have to break down and see something there soon. Official avant-garde culture can be stifling. There is also a series starting up in a church in Pasadena involving tape (recorded) works for presentation in 12-channel "diffusion" sound. I hope to report on that soon.

2007-04-20T00:23:00.000-07:00

Wafer Face

Wafer Face was a record label begun in 1991 from my bedroom in Portland, Maine. Michael Townsend encouraged me to have a pressing made of 500 7" records of the live radio performance of a track we called Louisiana Cookin', edited from a radio show called The Plagiarist and featuring call-in voice-over star Mr. Clean (Jeff Plansker). The Plagiarist was an experimental radio show on WMPG from 1989-1992, featuring on air loop collage and musical/vocal experiments. The B-side for Louisiana Cookin became a remix of the Abba track Fernando, appropriately plundered. Wafer Face was related to other artists and labels working in the field of sampling and plunderphonia. We decided to issue a series of 7" records. Perhaps Wafer Face would still be publishing if we had stayed with the 7" record as our only product.

A second 7" vinyl record (or Slug) was released featuring work by Dad Slack (Michael Townsend also of WMPG) and Busyditch. These 7" discs were manufactured at United Records in Nashville. A third Slug was commisioned, featuring Your Host Bobby and Platzangst. All of the Wafer Face Slugs were designed as radio works. Copies of these singles are still available and Louisiana Cookin can be heard on the What Balcony CD.

At some point, we decided to finance and press a 12" vinyl album recorded by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and his OFFICIAL band, largely because no one else was showing any interest in publishing the audio work of tENT, who had been a constant figure in the cassette and film undergrounds for years. We proposed a 2 record arrangement and tENT began work on a retrospective LP of his audio work which became USIC MINUS THE SQUARE ROOT OF NEGATIVE ONE, called "the last collectible LP of the 20th century", a deluxe picture disc with multiple play grooves. One San Francisco distributor was happy to take 10 copies of each record and then never paid for them.

A set of 2 CDs by the Rascal reporters was also published by Wafer Face in the early 1990's: Purple Entrapment and We're God, both excellent examples of American prog keyboard based complex music. Unfortunately, the American progressive music distribution monopoly (Wayside Music) gave bad reviews and little notice to these releases and the records didn't sell.

We teamed up temporarily with ElectroMotive in Berkeley on the distribution project Smooth Stone, doing some large promo mailings.

While happy to have encouraged and been involved with these artists by releasing their work, the Wafer Face project must be considered a failure in its inability to gain distribution or make back enough cash to allow further records to be issued. An interesting experiment in record production. Hopefully some adventurous listeners still value their Wafer Face releases.

2007-03-21T15:38:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-17T00:43:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-03-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-16T18:08:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-16T16:33:00.001-07:00

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.

2007-03-16T01:44:00.000-07:00

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.

2007-03-16T01:31:00.000-07:00

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