Author: musicforcougars

14 Foot 1 – We’re Sorry Coconuts

Hailing from the NE (Massachusetts & Rhode Island), 14 Foot 1 is a three-pice rock outfit comprising Casey Belisle on drums with Brad Kreiger and Rob Forsythe on guitar. This track comes off their first record, Christ Grenades, released in 2007 on New Neighbor Records. I couldn’t track down much information on these guys online, though their Facebook does have some upcoming dates and some live videos. They just released a 7″ on New Neighbor Records that you can purchase in physical or digital form on their Bandcamp.

Party on Wayne.

headbanging_waynes_world

Ravi Shankar & Yehudi Menuhin – Raga Piloo

This track comes off the second in a series featuring two virtuosos appropriately titled “East Meets West.” The first in the series was released in 1966 to much acclaim, becoming one of the top selling classical releases of the year and even had a place on the mainstream Billboard charts, perhaps as a result of the interest that American and British bands were showing in Indian classical music at the time. Menuhin had met Shankar in the 1950s, and the two became fast friends, with Menuhin making almost annual trips to India to, among other things, see Shankar. They recounted their meeting and friendship in an interview for the Independent. It makes for pretty interesting reading, as the two excitedly exchanged musical ideas.

SHANKAR: I remember once, in London in the early Fifties, that Yehudi was particularly excited about a composition by Wilhelm Furtwangler, who had written a piece based on an Indian melody in what we call a raga pattern a scientific, precise, subtle and aesthetic melodic form with its own peculiar ascending and descending movement. Yehudi talked to me about the piece, which he was anxious for me to play. I looked at it, and from a Western point of view the composition was very good; but as an Indian sitar player, I felt it was not proper for me to play because it was also, from an Indian point of view, quite childish. It was also written in Western notation which was difficult for me to read, so I asked one of my English students to translate it for me. Eventually, I decided that I would rewrite the piece but that I wouldn’t change the raga. There is a saying in Sanskrit, “Ranjayati iti Ragah” which means: “That which colours the mind is raga.”

The two played their first concert at the Bath Music Festival in 1966 and based on the success of those concerts agreed to record together. While the first two feature primarily Shankar and Menuhin, the third release incorporates other Indian and Western instruments such as the flute (played by Jean-Pierre Rampal) and the tanpura (played by Kamala Chakravarty). The drum on this track is an Indian instrument called a tabla and is played on this recording by Alla Rakha, who often accompanied Shankar and is considered quite accomplished on the instrument. Chakravarty and Rakha also accompanied Shankar at his concert at the Moneterey Pop Festival in 1967. Check out a video of their performance here. The third record features more improvised material and a vocal introduction by Menuhin describing the musical structure to the piece, which is pretty interesting if you’re like me and know nothing about Indian music. If anybody is interested in hearing that I can try to post it, so just leave a comment saying as much and I’ll try to get it up here.

Magical Beautiful – Double Moon

Double Moon comes off the final release from Tyson Torstenson’s art rock project Magical Beautiful entitled Discover Death. Torstensen has been active in the experimental music scene in Chicago since the early 2000s, and he began releasing material under the name Magical Beautiful (along with an array of collaborators) in 2005 with a self-titled release coming in 2006. That first record featured covers/re-workings of songs by artists like Bjork and Joe Meek and had Torstensen performing, mixing, and mastering the release himself. On subsequent Magical Beautiful releases, he would enlist other Chicago artists like Nick Broste, Alance Ward, and Peter Andreadis in various roles. In addition to Magical Beautiful, Torstensen records ambient music with Broste under the name Gaspra and plays bass with the group Axis:Sova. For a full list of his projects, check out his website. The whole record is a really great and it’s free to download on Bandcamp, so if you dig Double Moon I’d encourage you to listen to the rest.

John Adams – Light Over Water

Part I

Part II

Part III

John Adams is an American composer who is often associated with the Minimalist and post-Minimalist movements in American music. While Light Over Water features electronics quite prominently (along with brass instruments), Adams has composed many works which are entirely “acoustic” but which are often influenced by electronic means of composition. According to composer Ingram Marshall, who wrote an essay on Light Over Water over at Earbox:

As synthesizers come to mimic the “real thing,” they truly begin to live up to their hitherto inappropriate name. Technology offers the possibility of a truly synthetic orchestra. Thus Adams, who has a natural gift for composing the lyrical and expressive sounds of instruments, found a technology that could augment and reinforce the orchestral traditions of several centuries.

This is the nascent situation of Light Over Water. Essentially electronic, it was nevertheless born out of the world of the orchestra. In previous works, Adams “electrified” his orchestrations. Now he “orchestrates” his electronics.

This tension between traditional orchestral sounds and electronic means of composition can also be seen in one of Adams’ best known works, Shaker Loops which was released along with Light Over Water by New Albion in 1987. Shaker Loops is written for a string orchestra but it’s repetitive structure of loops played by different string instruments harken back to early experiments with tape loops.

Light Over Water was originally commissioned by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1983 as accompaniment for an installation choreographed by Lucinda Childs and featuring set design by Frank Gehry. You can watch a tech rehearsal for the performance, which was entitled “Available Light,” here. You can read more about the performance in this article written to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the performance.

Other notable works by Adams include Nixon in China, an opera based on Nixon’s 1972 trip to China, Harmonium, and The Death of Klinghoffer. The Death of Klinghoffer has been controversial since its debut, as some have claimed that the opera distorts the story of the Palestine Liberation Front’s highjacking of a cruise ship in 1985, and their murder of Klinghoffer in a way which is antisemitic. After 9/11, the Boston Symphony cancelled a planned performance of excerpts from the opera and former mayor of New York Rudy Giuliani protested the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Klinghoffer.

You can hear samples of each of these works below:

Nixon in China
Harmonium
The Death of Klinghoffer

Symphonies of the Planets

The artist of the above track is in part the Voyager space probes themselves, who collected the raw electromagnetic data from space which were edited into the sounds you hear. The five disc set was released by Laserlight in 1992 and has been out of print for some time now, though it’s possible to hear all five discs on Youtube.

From the liner notes:

This unique series of recordings (5 volumes) is created from Original Voyager recordings of the electromagnetic “voices” of the planets and moons in our Solar System. Although space is a virtual vacuum, this does not mean there is no sound in space. Sound does exist as electronic vibrations. The specially designed instruments on board the Voyagers performed special experiments to pick up and record these vibrations, all within the range of human hearing.

The data that was collected was then further edited to make it a bit more pleasing to the ear than the raw data likely would have been, but the source of the signal itself is still signals from space, which is in-fucking-credible. The liner notes continue describing the sources of signals present in the recordings:

1. From the interaction of the solar wind with the planet’s magnetosphere, which releases charged ionic particles within a vibration frequency in an audible range (20-20,000 Hz).
2. From the magnetosphere itself.
3. From trapped radio waves bouncing between the planet and the inner surface of its atmosphere.
4. Electromagnetic field noise within space itself.
5. From charged particle interactions of the planet, its moons, and the solar wind.
6. From charged particle emissions from the rings of certain planets.

In 2012 the Voyager I probe became the first scientific instrument to leave the boundary of our solar system and, remarkably, still receives commands and transmits data back to NASA. It communicates using the Deep Space Network which is run by NASA and operates facilities around the world for communicating with Voyager and other exploratory and scientific tools in space. NASA has plans to continue using the Voyager probe until 2025, when it will stop producing enough power to continue communication.

The Voyager probe has another interesting connection to music. Unsure what they would find, researchers attached a golden record to the spacecraft in case another intelligent life form should encounter the probe. The contents were selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan and were meant to serve as a sort of time capsule of life on Earth. It featured greetings in 55 ancient and modern languages, recordings of natural sounds like surf breaking on the beach, crickets chirping, a wild dog, and a tame dog. It also featured a selection of music from around the world, including part of the Brandenberg Concertos, Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode, and a sampling of Indonesian gamelan (which I’ve mentioned elsewhere). Interestingly, Sagan originally attempted to have “Here Comes the Sun” added to the record, which the Beatles supported, but EMI blocked because, and I’m just speculating, they’re lifeless monsters who would probably make aliens pay royalties for playing it on their superstructures. The record also had images on it representing mathematical definitions, the color spectrum, a nursing mother, and others meant to show life on Earth. More information on the contents of this record can be found on Wikipedia.

This track is the third in the series and if it grabs you then I highly recommend checking out the other installments. I snagged it a few months ago and would be happy to post any other info from the release notes if people are interested, though admittedly they are a bit sparse.

Craig Leon – She Wears a Hemispherical Skullcap

Craig Leon got his start in music in the mid-1970s working as an assistant producer at Sire Records where he was involved in the discovery and development of New York groups like The Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads. Nommos is his first release and it represents one of the more unique entries in the catalog of John Fahey’s Takoma Records, which is perhaps better known for releasing blues and fingerstyle guitar records more in the style of its founder. Though he was more involved with pop, electronic, and experimental work during the 1980s and 1990s, his material in recent years has been decidedly classical, working with the likes of Pavarotti. He talks about the difference in working in these two worlds in an interview with Moog:

The pop people picked up on synths a lot earlier–I was doing pop at the time–and what fascinated me was the way the so-called pop artists were doing with synths at the time were using synthesizers in their work which was close to what I wanted to do in classical. You would hear something new on a Beatles or Beach Boys album … where yes there would be one or two obvious synth sounds on a given song but theres ton of these little things that shape the sound.

He is still active as a producer, composer, and arranger of classical pieces living in England. Nommos was recently reissued by Harmonia Mundia along with his other early electronic work Visiting. Check out that Moog interview because he talks through arranging Bach for the Moog modular synth and talks more at length about using electronics in classical composition.

M. Geddes Gengras – Magical Writing

M. Geddes Gengras has been active in the experimental scene in Los Angeles for a number of years, releasing material under his own name as well as the moniker Personable. I initially heard this release in excerpted form on the Umor Rex compilation Collected Works Vol. 1 (The Moog Years), though the above represents the full cassette. He works primarily with a combination of modular synthesizers and other non-modular electronics, though he does play bass with Warm Climate. He is also active on the technical side of releases, producing albums for the likes of Sun Araw and Antique Brothers and mixing/mastering releases from Plankton Wat and LA Vampires (with whom he also performs).

Along with Sun Araw, Gengras founded the label Duppy Gun. The label came about following a trip to Jamaica to record an album with the reggae group The Congos. The dizzying blend of dub, dancehall, and Gengras/Sun Araw’s array of experimental electronics is definitely worth checking out on Duppy Gun’s Youtube channel. If you’d like to hear more of Gengras’ experimental works like Magical Writing, check out his Bandcamp.

Penguin Cafe Orchestra – In the Back of a Taxi

Penguin Cafe Orchestra is a collective musical project that was founded and anchored by Simon Jeffes and Helen Liebmann. Their first record, Music from the Penguin Cafe was released on Brian Eno’s Obscure Records int 1976 and gave their first public performance in support of that record by opening for Kraftwerk. According to his son, Jeffes claimed that the inciting incident for the Penguin Cafe was a fever dream where he pictured

a nightmare vision of the near future – where everyone lived in big concrete blocks and spent their lives looking into screens. There was a big camera in the corner of everyone’s room, an eye looking down at them. In one room there was a couple making love lovelessly, while in another there was a musician sat at a vast array of equipment but with headphones on so there was no actual music in the room. This was a very disconnected de-humanising world that people had made for themselves…
However you could reject that and look further afield, and if you went down this dusty road you would eventually find a ramshackle old building with noise and light pouring out into the dark. It’s a place you just fundamentally want to go into, and this is the Penguin Cafe.

Blending Jeffes’ and Liebmann’s classical experience with rock music, and an interest in non-Western rhythms and instrumentations, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra released records regularly throughout the 1980s, albeit with a rotating list of members. “In the Back of a Taxi” was comes off their 1984 release Broadcasting From Home, which features perhaps their best known track “Music for a Found Harmonium,” which has been covered many times and featured in television, movies, and advertisements. Some notable appearances include Napoleon Dynamite, She’s Having a Baby, Capitalism: A Love Story, and, ironically enough, advertisements for major companies like Ford and Hewlett Packard. You can watch a 1989 performance of “Music for a Found Harmonium” at the BBC here.

Jeffes passed away in 1997 from a brain tumor, but members of the group have continued performing Penguin Cafe Orchestra material under the name The Anteaters while Simon Jeffes’ son Arthur has formed his own group called the Penguin Cafe.

Grateful Dead – Looks Like Rain

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ogl_reZlQbk

 

In my younger years I was told I needed to do a book report on a biography of somebody who I admired. Naturally, I chose a memoir of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh entitled Searching for the Sound. Recently I’ve been listening to more live Dead and this time I might not re-emerge. Through the Grateful Dead Archive and a sweet live recordings app called Relisten I’ve been reliving the only cool period in my life, the pubescent deadhead period. Looks Like Rain in particular has really grabbed me, and I thought I’d post this footage from their 06/19/1976 performance from the Capitol Theater in New Jersey because it’s pretty representative of what I love about this song. There are a couple other recordings I’ve been digging, including one from the early 80s, which is a Dead period I haven’t really explored at all. Beautiful guitar work from Garcia and nice vocal work from Donna Jean Godchaux and Weir, who can both get shouty at times in my opinion. On the Europe ’72 recording of this song, Weir introduces it by saying it’s a “crying song,” which it certainly is. Weir also released a version on his 1972 record Ace. The lyrics were penned by John Perry Barlow, a frequent Dead collaborator who also wrote A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace in 1996, which has become something of a rallying cry for groups like Anonymous. You can see a video of him reading it here or read the full text here. It was released with musical accompaniment by Department of Records, who also produced the video. The full footage Dead show that this recording comes from can be found on Youtube.

There’s no need to add another Dead blog to cyberspace, so I probably will not post live Dead very often, but I can’t guarantee it won’t happen again.

Subhaeris – Blue Tokyo

Subhaeris is a future music artist based out of Tokyo. Blue Tokyo comes off a cassette entitled New Tokyo Blue Mood 2 which is excellent from start to finish, though this track stood out for me. If you’re interested in the cassette, it’s available for preorder on December 1st. The first New Tokyo Blue Mood was released on the excellent UK vaporwave label Dream Catalogue, which also put out a release by 회사AUTO that was featured on an earlier post. Those interested in other updates should check out Subhaeris’ Facebook.