morrissey

morrissey gets in trouble.

deadeye dick

completely unrelated: nbc website reported, and then deleted, that dick cheney may have been intoxicated during his "hunting" trip, refused to speak to deputy afterwards.

records i"ve been listening to:
moby grape - '69
damien youth - bride of the asylum
george fridiric handel - water music
antonin dvorák - symphony 9
philip glass - glassworks

joy division

this according to harpers.org:

In Manchester, England, the BBC was planning an Easter tribute in which Jesus Christ will sing "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division before joining Judas in a duet of "Blue Monday" by New Order. Later, as Roman soldiers flay him, Jesus will sing "Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now" by The Smiths.

here is the guardian article.

silver apples, can

some words on the silver apples and can:

the silver apples are really interesting. their music is really noisy, i mean has weird sounds... they could be distracting, or even unnerving like the beeping in bauhaus's "spy in the cab," but they are really just interesting and fun. you can kind of think about them or not.
apparently they are named after Morton Subotnick's work "Silver Apples of the Moon,"
which i think came out just a year before the Silver Apples' "Contact" record.
they are kind of like an east-coast answer to the 13th floor elevators (who feature the ironically space-age sound an amplified jug), with a little bit of a jefferson aeroplane sound. this is a band that must have been familiar with john cage, based on their incorporation of "found sounds".

the instrument making those weird sounds is some sort of homemade hand-held synthesiser.

silver apples interview: here




can has recently become one of my favorite bands. when i first started listening to them, somebody told me that they were swedish, so for a while i was describing them as a "swedish psychedelic jazz-punk band." well, not only did it turn out that they were actually german, but the singer after their first record was japanese. listen to them.

satie

to add to my previous post on satie:

it's really interesting that phillip glass was influenced by satie, because while satie seems to
create a lot of excitement with just a minimal amount of sound, glass is almost the opposite. i'm thinking of "glassworks," where he simultaneously conveys the intricacies of movement
while suggesting a sort of calm or stillness. it's very "busy" musically, i mean to the ear, but it has a different effect on the emotions.

erik satie

records i've been listening to:
no smoking orchestra - unza unza time
joy division - substance
sun ra - nuclear war
björk - telegram
can - tago mago


i'm writing about erik satie because he was a pretty big influence on john cage, and we haven't really talked about him any...

i've been listening to his "gymnopedies" and "gnossiennes," and i was thinking about the use of silence in music, and i thought that these pieces were good examples of that. however, upon relistening to them, i relaised that there was very little silence involved, not really any spaces between sounds. what i was hearing was the suggestion of silence, the way that satie's notes are suspended, they create the sensation or illusion of silence. the music is simple, there are no chords played, only carefully timed individual notes that invoke a sort of sadness in their expectation.

i did some reading on satie, and here's what i learned (and what i wrote about silence was before i came to the realisation stated above):

he was considered an unremarkable student at the paris conservatory, but his music had a lot of influence on (besides john cage and phillip glass), claude debussy, maurice ravel and igor stravinsky. apparently he earned a living by playing at bars, and eventually died from liver problems resulting from alcoholism. he disliked the big-production feel of the romantic composers, and wrote mostly quiet, contemplative piano works like his gymnopedies, gnossiennes, and nocturnes. he also worte a piece called vexations with 840 repetitions, a ballet that included a part for a typewriter (with picasso providing visual), and piece called embryons desseches or 'dried up embryos' instructions on his scores included things like "open your mind" and "wonder about yourself." his music really provides a groundwork for the later minimalists, and the use of silence is very important, as it creates a sense of anticipation between one note and the next.

(thumb is from "the scandalous success of salvador dali," which has the gnossiennes as its score)