what’s new
Black Dice, “Pigs”
Recording (Mr. Impossible, 4/12) & Video
I fell in love tonight. She left immediately when I played her this.
—YouTube comment
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Live (music starts at 1:40), New York, 2012
Shabazz Palaces, live (studio performance, KEXP-FM), 2011
These guys—their mix of drums, mbira, electronics—call to mind the AACM’s* tagline: ancient to the future.
*Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (Art Ensemble of Chicago, Anthony Braxton, Fred Anderson, Leroy Jenkins, et al.).
what’s new
Grimes, “Genesis”
Recording, Visions, 2/12
*****
Live, San Francisco (The Sub), 5/11
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lagniappe
found words
Your password will expire after 9999 day(s).
—message from my health club, after registering at their website
Tim Hecker, “The Piano Drop” (Ravedeath, 1972), 2011*
The First MIT Baker House Piano Drop, 11/1972
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lagniappe
random thoughts
Suppose you had to assign a number: what percentage of your daily life do you understand?
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*One of the year’s top 10 albums—Ben Ratliff (New York Times).
three takes
Salif Keita (with Cesaria Evora, takes 1 & 2), “Yamore”
Luciano remix, 2006
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Original recording & video, 2002
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Live, London, 2002
More? Here.
Chrome, “Meet You In The Subway” (1979, record; 1984, video)
So much of our musical experience resists explanation. Take this track, for instance. As soon as it’s over, I want to hear it again. Why? No idea.
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lagniappe
mail: two posts, two messages, same correspondent
Last Monday (Koko Taylor/Louis Jordan):
Great boost!
Yesterday (Brother Anthony Wynn/Sensimo):
what the fuck!?!
only rock ’n roll
Animal Collective, Unitled/“Brothersport”
Live, Chicago (Pitchfork Festival), 7/15/11
*****
Want to hear the entire set?
Jazz, classical, gospel, rock: the names may be different, but what they offer is the same—a way, pleasurably, to lose your mind.
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lagniappe
In the evening darkness at a place outside New York, an outlook where/you can perceive eight million people’s homes in a single glance. . . ./Schubert’s being played in some room/there and for someone the tones at this moment are more real than everything else.
—Tomas Transtromer, “Schubertiana” (excerpt), trans. Samuel Charters
Here, in an undated audio clip, Transtromer, winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature, talks about this poem and reads it in this English translation.
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Transtromer suffered a stroke in 1990, at the age of fifty-nine, which robbed him of speech and impaired the use of his right arm. Rather than delivering the customary [Nobel] laureate’s address when he accepts the award, on December 10th, he will play a piece on the piano using only his left hand.
—Dan Chiasson, “Night Thoughts: The poetry of Tomas Transtromer,” New Yorker, 10/31/11
No one could convince me, when I’m listening to the clarinet, that any instrument is more beautiful.
Shabaka Hutchings, clarinet, with Kit Downes, keyboards; John Edwards, bass; Mark Sanders, drums; Leafcutter John, electronics; live, London (St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate), 7/14/11
Vodpod videos no longer available.Melody?
Just little fragments now and then.
Harmony?
None in the usual sense.
Rhythm?
Ditto.
What is there?
A sonic space you inhabit the way you would a dream.
Olivia Block, composer, sound artist, performer; “field recordings on damaged cassette tapes,” “controlled feedback from small speakers/contact mic,” “amplified autoharp” (YouTube post); Chicago (Saki Records), 2010
Vodpod videos no longer available.You’ve got to be bold, or nuts, or both to do what these Saki folks did last year in Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood—open a new record store.
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lagniappe
reading table
summer moon—
there is no such thing
as a flawless night—Kobayashi Issa, 1812 (trans. David G. Lanoue)
