tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post3000189215522292940..comments2024-02-12T23:25:09.583-08:00Comments on Overweening Generalist: A Smattering on Odd Musical Instrumentsmichaelhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-31075029483136195092013-05-21T08:07:11.528-07:002013-05-21T08:07:11.528-07:00Conway Twitty and the Residents: http://www.youtu...Conway Twitty and the Residents: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO_xzwbXKas<br /><br />Eric Wagnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04312033917401203598noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-28390243053275309432013-05-21T08:02:11.656-07:002013-05-21T08:02:11.656-07:00Yeah, I know of nothing to clear out a party like ...Yeah, I know of nothing to clear out a party like the Resident's "Third Reich and Roll."<br /><br />I saw Snakefinger in concert once. I remember one lyric: "I gave you my spleen. You said it was obscene."<br /><br />On another note, I've changed my perception of Bob's Tale of the Tribe. I used to regard it as an unwritten work. Now I regard it as a perfect fragment, like the fragments the Romantics liked so much. (I love Charles Rosen's discussion of Romantic fragments in his The Romantic Generation.) We live in that perfect fragment, the Tale of the Tribe. (Well, you and I seem to live in that fragment. Perhaps our whole culture, our whole tribe, does.) <br /><br />One can see "Kubla Khan" as another such, um, complete fragment, a successful poem about incompletion.<br /><br />I remember Bob telling me he had a conversation in 1968 in Chicago with Ginsberg and Burroughs about The Cantos, and they decided it seemed appropriate for the epic of the 20th century to end in fragments.Eric Wagnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04312033917401203598noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-39115635496617667802013-05-20T23:40:49.178-07:002013-05-20T23:40:49.178-07:00@Anon: Killuh addition to the OG here. Thanks! I c...@Anon: Killuh addition to the OG here. Thanks! I checked out Laurie Anderson for around 6 months back around 1994...it started with her collaboration with Burroughs. <br /><br />The Residents: Duck Stab and Cap'n Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica (along with John Zorn's "Bad Hawkwind") were CDs to pop in when the party was going on far too long and I wanted everyone to go home. I remember a friend playing something from the mid-80s by the Residents and it sounded like a completely different band. I have not kept up on them. I'll check The Ughs.<br /><br />@Eric: REALLY? Conway Twitty and The Residents on the same TV show together? Far-flippin' out!<br /><br />I saw Conway Twitty on Family Guy not long ago. He was not animated. <br /><br />Feel free to link the Pynch-Residents imaginative interview here.<br /><br />Jeez! Both Anon and Wagner show themselves as major info-philes here. Me like.michaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-34368925809247640172013-05-20T20:41:29.581-07:002013-05-20T20:41:29.581-07:00Great blog. I love the Residents. I remember the...Great blog. I love the Residents. I remember the TV show Night Music (1988 - 1990). They would have a variety of musical guests each week, and at the end of the show they would perform together. One week they had Conway Twitty and the Residents. I hoped and prayed they would perform together. At the show's conclusion, Conway performed "When You're Cool, The Sun Shines All the Time" and the Residents danced along. I felt very happy with the world. <br /><br />I once published an interview between the Residents and Thomas Pynchon. (Yes, I made it up.)Eric Wagnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04312033917401203598noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-26702443261870809222013-05-20T04:12:48.693-07:002013-05-20T04:12:48.693-07:00I forgot to mention one more inventor of zany inst...I forgot to mention one more inventor of zany instruments, Laurie Anderson. I find her tape-bow violen quite amazing. Not only has she made her own instruments and voice filters but she worked for the Encyclopedia Britannica and played the role of Artist in Residence at NASA. A person your age with your tastes and interests has probably heard of her but I did not live through the time when they played Laurie Anderson's music on TV and many people of my generation have not heard of her.<br /><br />And no, thank you. I have read every one of your blogspews for the last year or more and you have turned me onto many great ideas, videos, books and articles. I would love to spend a day digging through your blog archives.<br /><br />I think a good deal of the clips in your Partch Link come from Harry Partch - Music Studio video which you can find on YouTube. Very interesting stuff.<br /><br />Thinking about Laurie Anderson, who explores the territory between Science and Art, or Harry Partch, who created new tools from old junk, brings me back to Joe Davis. They call him an Artist in Residence at MIT where he creates installations in exchange for scrap-junk. At Harvard they call him an Artist Residence and I think they might even have him on the payroll. He didn't just invent the Audio Microscope but other far-out and exciting toys like the polytractor - a protractor that one can use to create polygons not allowed by 360º bias of ancient Sumeria. His lecture on exo-hexahedrons (another thing ou can find on YouTube) blew my mind. You'll have to watch the lecture to find out what exo-hexahedron means.<br /><br /><br />That reinterpretation of Paganini reminds me of OOIOO's interpretation of Coro Delle Lavandaie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ1FLn7T448<br /><br />OOIOO hails from Japan and has gained some popularity in The West but Coro Delle Lavandaie comes from Italy. The idea that American listeners may think the lyrics Japanese while Japanese listeners may think the lyrics Nonsense amuses me. I heard tale that Yoshimi P-We of OOIOO practices Oomoto along with her fellow members in band The Boredoms. The Oomoto religion claims con-lang Esperanto as their official language. I sense some sort of attempt to transcend cultural and linguistic limitations here but perhaps not.<br /><br />The Residents ain't nothing to sneeze at neither. They've made music, videos (heck! they invented the music video) and art for four decades and until recently nobody knew their names. Nowadays they go by Chuck, Randy & Bob. Chuck or Charles Bobuck (banana nana fo-fuck) recently name-dropped Thomas Pynchon on his Facebook and it wouldn't surprise me if the dudes went waaay back.<br /><br />These Residents have some high concept stuff! Lately I dig on The Ughs: a primitive-jazz and foley-room type reproduction of their narrative album The Sandman which they based off of Hoffman's old tale.<br /><br />Okay, the little clock at the bottom left corner of my screen says 5:09 AM, I've sucked myself into an infinite digression catastrophe and I got shit to do tomorrow (er, today?) so I'll let this sprawling comment come to an end.<br /><br />Enjoy. Hopefully I've pointed out some new things for you to groove on. Hope you have plenty of warmth and summertime fragrance in Berzerkely down there. C'ya!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-78122222693063265372013-05-20T02:25:42.584-07:002013-05-20T02:25:42.584-07:00@Anon: That link to Partch is nothing to sneeze at...@Anon: That link to Partch is nothing to sneeze at: you can "play" his instruments there; it's pretty cool.<br /><br />Thanks for lending further confirmation to my suspicion that I have some readers who are WAY beyond me in some of my enthusiasms. Raymond Scott should be better known. I had only known of Nancarrow for about 18 months when I mentioned him, above. Then, just yesterday, I played a CD of 20th c. composers I'd checked out from the library - on impluse, simply because Elliot Carter's name was on the cover - and Nancarrow was the first composer.<br /><br />I had to look up Joe Davis. Wow. It's getting to the point: you start Googling this stuff and following a few odd tributaries of musical weirdness...and you realize that, people will take all sorts of things from nature and assign them numbers with attributes to fit into algorithms, and VOILA!:you have DNA-created pieces, and Cagey uses of musique concrete with mash-ups and accompanying voice-over by Burroughs, McKenna, RAW...<br /><br />I think a lot of people hear "Moog" and they think of Rick Wakeman or something like that (which is cool), but how about Jean-Jacques Perrey using Paganini's "Moto Perpetual" and using "gossip" as the idea...?<br />http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxvzl9k-FXEmichaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-65611822175438156282013-05-19T03:59:09.764-07:002013-05-19T03:59:09.764-07:00Oh! And on the subject of singing plants, there...Oh! And on the subject of singing plants, there's Joe Davis and his audio microscope.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-11246536906574438952013-05-19T03:45:18.831-07:002013-05-19T03:45:18.831-07:00I had Harry Partch on the mind throughout my entir...I had Harry Partch on the mind throughout my entire reading of this blogspew. You gave him an honorable mention at the end but you did not mention Raymond Scott, another figure that comes to my mind when these innovators of zany musical instruments come up. He invented many electronic instruments like the Clavivox and Harmonium. The compositions he wrote these musical toys seem to prefigure the music of guys like Brian Eno. Bob Moog worked for Raymond Scott before creating his own synthesizer and credited him as an influence.<br /><br />The Residents seem like they have taken a few notes from guys like Raymond Scott and Harry Partch. Their most recent album has an Homage to Nancarrow.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-84327126725043227742013-05-18T14:00:05.872-07:002013-05-18T14:00:05.872-07:00That insane circus music, overflowing with chromat...That insane circus music, overflowing with chromatics and dissonance and huge chords I can't identify as they careen past my ears at near light speed, and over a cliff...it makes me wonder about the nervous system of a guy who composes this. Nancarrow seemed to live there; Marc-Andre Hamelin did a bang-up job of it if the express purpose was to stress test the limits of other systems by overloading them with possibilities.<br /><br />The quartz harmonica's timbre seems as "celestial" as that wonderful little instrument Tchaikovsky had made for that section of The Nutcracker: the celeste. Who DOESN'T respond to that sound quality, as long as it's not overdone? It's light snow falling through craggy tree branches with a full moon lighting up the night sky in the distance, while you rest comfortably in bed without a care in the world, drifting in and out of pleasant dreams.michaelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13526042582094867513noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1178284085080580526.post-52186485052277216802013-05-18T08:02:02.879-07:002013-05-18T08:02:02.879-07:00Thta last one is nuts. Great fun.Love the flass ha...Thta last one is nuts. Great fun.Love the flass harmonium too which I think you can buy sampled. tony smythhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17771763749137149585noreply@blogger.com