This one is a sound palette for the revival of Black Kaspar - bound to be big news for two or three of you - and bears a lot of resemblance to the Drone Wars Scrapbook from late last year. As a matter of fact, there is overlap: Drone Wars Scrapbook has Movement #3 from Górecki's Third, and this one has the entire Third. They also shared Throbbing Gristle's "Wall of Sound" until I replaced it with an Earth cut.
Speaking of Górecki, this version of the Third is different than the one in the earlier playlist. This one is an earlier version (perhaps the premiere recording?) than the famous Elektra/Nonesuch 1992 recording which actually managed to chart. If you are a devotee of the Third, you will hear a difference: there is more space, more air, the playing is more understated and at the same time more dynamic within the slow, minimalist scope of the composition. The nearest analog I can think of for the rockers out there would be that this version is like The Kinks' "You Really Got Me", and the Zinman/Upshaw/LSO version is like Van Halen's cover of "You Really Got Me" . . . Van Halen's version is melodramatic, overdriven, (over)polished version of the original which no doubt has its charms, but loses some of the subtlety and nuance of the original. You can find a very brief discussion of Górecki 3 versions here, as well as an mp3 for this version.
As for Black Kaspar, we will be going forward as a duo. The plan now is to rely heavily on electronics to accompany the two guitars (I briefly considered recruiting another guitarist so that I could move to electronics full time, but decided against it for the time being). As always, plans can change, but for now we are two, and we likely will not be back on stage for a few months yet.
I will likely be producing more audio scrapbooks. They will be here if/when I do.
I have a long and somewhat complicated relationship with minimalism. I remember running across Koyaanisqatsi in '84 or '85, through a room mate who worked with a guy who had worked on the film. I remember being okay with the film . . . but boy, did 24-year-old punk rock me fucking hate Philip Glass. That opinion didn't change much as I moved (roughly) through punk to noise to free jazz to experimental free improv to modern classical. By the time I started really getting into John Cage, I started to appreciate space and silence in music much more than I had previously; but still, John Cage is not a minimalist, and chance operation is not the same repetition and decay, nor is spaciousness in music the same as ambiance. Glass's chirpy repetition bugs me, as does (to a lesser degree) Terry Riley's.
There is, of course, a lot of cross breeding between Minimalist "serious" music and experimental rock music, from the Velvet Underground - Cale shows up here with his Theater of Eternal Music crew, and you can see/hear a direct link between this and a song like "Venus in Furs" from the first album - through Mark E. Smith's three R's ("repetition, repetition, repetition"), to the druggy drones of Spacemen 3's Dreamweapon (which is heavily influenced by La Monte Young and Angus MacLise, and would fit in perfectly with this collection), to the high volume doom drones of Earth and Sunn O))). For me, always the 15-year-old metal head at heart, the heavier the drone, the better . . . but probably what really got me back into minimalism, as far as my own music is concerned, is the Buddha Machine.
I actually had a sort of joke minimalist piece on side 2 of Pain Free Living, the first Black Kaspar tape, called "Bring Me the Head of Terry Riley". What happened was that I had about 45 minutes worth of material for the tape, so I just duped them myself onto Radio Shack 90s, and put everything on the first side. Rather than leaving side two blank, or repeating the same program on both sides, I took a three second sample of my guitar shorting out while I was recording a solo, and looped it for 53 minutes. This does not really function like classical minimalism, since the loop does not decay or, indeed, change in any way whatsoever over the course of the 45 minute tape side. I did the whole piece as a goof; but Dan Willems, after listening to it a couple times whilst doing the dishes, told me it had a sort of weird, hypnotic, almost hallucinogenic effect on him . . . so, I suppose at some level it was a successful composition. And hey, it beat the fuck out of Philip Glass.
I got a few of the Buddha Machines and used them frequently in the 2012-2013 time frame. The videos above are short, but only because of the limitations of recording on my phone and uploading long video to YouTube . . . I was interested in working longer, though not as long as the standard minimalist pieces tend to go, and certainly not hours or days, which is the preferred working time frame of La Monte Young. And even beyond using them in my music, I still occasionally set them up and just let them go for my own listening pleasure.
At the end of the day, however, I am not a committed minimalist. Though the machines often show up in the music from the time frame listed above, they are often mutated much more aggressively than a minimalist would tolerate:
So, I am not a minimalist, but the influence is there.
* * * * *
I recently posted a killer Bo Diddley video on facebook, and in the comments, lamented the fact that my collection was woefully lean on Bo's recorded output. Old friend Dave Cruse offered to hook me up with some outside/rare Bo, and a week or so later two (killer!) 90 minute Maxells showed up in my mailbox. In return, he asked for some minimalism, so he's getting four tapes worth. Before I get into the notes, I should say that, per the sixties minimalism practices, these performances were meant to experience, not listen to on a recording, and it is not a genre that lends itself well to recordings, generally speaking. And, obviously, this is not a comprehensive study, since it leaves off two seminal figures (Glass and Steve Reich), more traditional minimalists like Arvo Pärt and John Adams, precursors and fellow travelers like Moondog, John Cage and Morton Feldman, rock/pop crossovers like Arthur Russell, Faust, and Spacemen 3, and whole genres of dance music (including EDM) which should be included in minimalism.
Tape One starts with Terry Riley, and I've already slandered him a couple times, so I will stop. In C gets performed in Louisville at least once a year.
Ryhs Chatham is a favorite of mine, and not just because he assembles huge guitar orchestras. He has an almost Romantic approach to music (I am a sucker for Romantic composers and romanticism, generally speaking). The undulating swell of the first movement of The Crimson Grail faintly echoes various Wagner overtures, to my somewhat warped ear. Chatham also has a phenomenal recording called Two Gongs, which is . . . you guessed it! . . . two gongs getting bashed for over an hour, which is much more aesthetically in line with classical minimalism.
La Monte Young, with his connection to the Velvet Underground and the New York sixties scene in general, is probably the most high profile minimalist to the average rock fan. Young is also well known for his dedication to making performances of his music into happenings. The Well Tuned Piano is a piece that runs roughly five hours.
If I can be said to have a favorite artist who falls roughly into the minimalist category, it would probably be Henry Flynt. Flynt is an extraordinarily interesting person in a general sense, and You Are My Everlovin' is unique in the way it sucks in so much of the cultural scrapheap of America and puts it back out in a way so raw and honest that it virtually erases artifice altogether. Even Flynt's musical failures (and he has a few) are fascinating.
More from the New York scene as the Theater of Eternal Music crew comes across with an excerpt. As mentioned above, you could draw a direct line between this and "Venus in Furs".
I wish I could speak intelligently about Pauline Oliveros. Her work is fascinating, but I frankly have yet to really wrap my head around it. Here her concept of "deep listening" is on display: a group improv, but rather than the lightning quick chatter of the jazz improviser, this is slow, graceful, and seamless.
We mentioned the Young-VU connection between minimalism and rock, but David Bowie (along with Brian Eno) is the one who brought it to pop with his Berlin trilogy, most notably Low. It should be mentioned that the Krautrock scene was also heavily influenced by minimalism.
Phill Niblock, who is still very active, is one of the later New York minimalists. His hurdy gurdy pieces are fabulous in the way they reference the ground zero of minimalism, the primal source of the drone - the Southern or Central Asian tambura, the Indian tanpura or sitar - and do it with a European instrument, albeit one that has origins in the Middle East. Oh, and he's from my hometown, so shout out to Anderson Indiana!
Tony Conrad, another key figure of the notorious New York scene and member of The Primitives with Lou Reed and John Cale, is largely responsible for making the minimalist/Krautrock connection by collaborating with Faust in 1973. This particular cut comes from a 1995 album recorded by Steve Albini and featuring post-rockers David Grubbs and Jim O'Rourke. Conrad was also quite the raconteur; the movie about him is a must-see.
The four volumes of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops are legendary: consisting of tape loop experiments he had done over the years, the Disintegration Loops were the result of the disintegration of the tapes as he tried to transfer them over to hard drives after years in storage. The loops famously were finished on September 11th, 2001, and served as soundtrack to videos that Basinski shot that day from his Brooklyn loft.
CC Hennix is yet another of the New Yorkers, though she was born in Sweden. Like Conrad (and others), she is a mathematician.
Charlemagne Palestine is, you guessed it, another New Yorker, but more toward the gentle hippy side of things than provocateurs like Flynt and Conrad. This long piano piece is not unlike Young's Well Tuned Piano, but Palestine is actually playing a standard piano.
No Spotify playlist on this one. Most of these pieces are up on YouTube. Tapes are on the way, Dave. Enjoy!
Tape One Side One
Terry Riley - In C
Rhys Chatham - The Crimson Grail (for 400 Guitars): Part One
Side Two
La Monte Young - The Well-Tuned Piano (excerpt)
Tape Two Side One
Henry Flynt - You Are My Everlovin' Side Two
Henry Flynt - Celestial Power
Tape Three Side One
Theater of Eternal Music (John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus MacLise, La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela) - Inside the Dream Syndicate Volume I: Day of Niagara
Pauline Oliveros - "Suiren" from Deep Listening
David Bowie - "Wailing Wall" from Low Side Two
Phill Niblock - Four Arthurs Superimposed with Two Octaves and a Fifth
Tony Conrad - "The Heterophony Of The Avenging Democrats, Outside, Cheers The Incineration Of The Pythagorean Elite, Whose Shrill Harmonic Agonies Merge And Shimmer Inside Their Torched Meeting House" from Slapping Pythagoras Tape Four Side One
William Basinski - "dlp 1.02" from Disintegration Loops IV
Catherine Christer Hennix - The Electric Harpsichord Side Two
Charlemagne Palestine - Strumming Music (excerpt)
I'm in the process of organizing my thoughts to approach a show near the end of February. It will likely be the last Black Kaspar show for a while, though nothing is really certain.
Since the end of 2016, the band has undergone a lot of changes. Black Kaspar was always, in theory, a "project" band; the idea was to recruit a band on a project basis. The first Black Kaspar recording, the ridiculously rare Pain Free Living from 2008, featured two of my TBW! band mates, Matt Whitaker and Tony Woollard. Not long after that, I started working with the rest of final TBW! lineup - Heather Floyd, Dan Willems, and Chris Willems - along with drummer Bart Galloway. Galloway, Floyd, and the Willems brothers were working as the Sick City Four at the time, and I (as Black Kaspar) referred to the Sick City Four as the "mobile strike force", the idea being that, while Black Kaspar was still theoretically revolving membership, working with the Sick City Four allowed me to do live shows on short notice without recruiting a new band each time. Eventually, the SC4 became part of Black Kaspar, due in part to my laziness and homebody tendencies (which meant that I didn't really make a lot of connections with other musicians), and in part to the fact that I really, really like playing with Heather, Dan, Chris, and Bart, and really like what we were doing at the time. After 2008's Pain Free Living, there are two bandcamp releases, 2011's The Rocker and The Null Set, which feature various paramutations of Dan, Chris, Heather, and I working out nebulous ideas and concepts. The first coherent Black Kaspar release was, in my opinion, 2012's The Expression Machine. Jim Marlowe's Loin Seepage label put out Schizo-Tech in 2014, which was the last thing to feature Bart on drums.
After a while, SC4 wound down, and Bart drifted away. Black Kaspar continued, drummerless, for most of 2014 and 2015. We played live rarely; once, to be precise, in a rather infamous show at the Zanzibar in Louisville.
In 2014, we released The Tower. Ruins (The Tower Pt. II) came along in 2016, along with Science Fiction, which included a live show from 2012 and a solo no-input mixer piece I recorded in my basement the same year.
In the spring of 2016, we hooked up with drummer Jeff Komara, just out of Tropical Trash (he is on the first two singles and the album, as well as a couplecassettes). From spring to the end of 2016, the band was Heather, Dan, Chris, Jeff, and I, and it was the most productive period of the band, not to mention the most "band like", although that exact lineup never played live. It was during that period that Year of the Centipede was recorded (released on Gubbey Records in March of 2017). There is still over an hour of recordings from those 2016 sessions that haven't seen the light of day, all of it at least as good as Year of the Centipede.
At the end of 2016, Dan and Heather left Louisville for Indianapolis, and the weekly quintet workshops ended. The idea was to have Dan and Heather come down for the tape release in March 2017, but, for various reasons, that did not materialize. Brian Manley from Insect Policy ably assisted us at the release show and a time or two thereafter, but for the most part, as 2017 dawned, Black Kaspar was a trio, with Jeff, Chis, and I. A fucking power trio, mind you. Achievement unlocked!
The sound changed as well . . . probably as dramatically as at any point throughout the long and winding Black Kaspar road. BK had toyed with the wall of droning guitars before - Death March in 2014, "The Rocker", "Fukushima", "After Image/Beyond Image" from the first two e.p.s in 2011, "Taste the Rainbow" from Gubbey Record's 2013 Headcleaner Louisville music compilation, and even the very first public performance was a four guitar drone - but drone and guitar walls became the centerpiece of the trio sound, driven by Jeff's krautrock drums.
The power trio version of the band played out more frequently than any other version of the band - though that was still only five times, and never outside Louisville (the band has never played outside of Louisville) - and amassed a big backlog of recordings, some of which show up on Soundcloud. There is one bandcamp album, Radiate, and there is a double cassette planned for 2018 from the trio.
In November of 2017, the band (by this time it was functioning more as a band, and less as a project) decided to stop regular rehearsals/recordings/live shows to work on other projects. Chris Willems and I will continue to work together on projects which may or may not end up being Black Kaspar, while Jeff works on his own projects (though likely our paths will cross again). The sole remaining live commitment is to our friend Doodlehound's book/CD release in February.
* * * * *
Which is a long set-up for the fact that I've got to get my shit together for the February show. I know Chris is on board, I know Dan and Heather won't be, but beyond that, I don't know. Back to the original concept: get a project, recruit a band, develop an idea, go.
Part of the most recent work stoppage on the band is that we were headed to what appeared to be a dead end. I am comfortable banging my head against a wall, as is Chris (there is a reason TBW! lasted for twenty years), but we were at a stalemate with the drones. Black Kaspar has always orbited somewhere between three poles: noise, free improv, and drones. With the trio, drones came to the fore - purely my deal, nobody else's, just seemed to make sense to me. But we worked it, twisted it, pushed it, and finally wore it out. It was high time to reset, work another angle, try a different tack.
To that end, I decided to dedicate the February show to . . . drones? Yeah, that's how I think. Let's have a going away party to the drones; makes perfect sense to me. Hence, Drone Wars!
So I've put together a scrapbook to define my headspace for the show. Thought I would share it with you. It starts with Wagner's majestic overture to Das Rheingold, and continues through the first act: Wagner starts with a sonorous drone, where does he go from there? It also covers Buddhist chants that leaven the droning throat singing with clanging gongs and howling reeds. Sunn O))) and Earth are there, of course, but there's a little disruption and noise as well, from people like John Cage, Robert Ashley, and Pauline Oliveros. There's noise that becomes hypnotic, repetitive, and droning, from Throbbing Gristle. Krautrock's there too, with the eponymous song from Faust IV. There's silence, like the extended silence that begins Ives's Sixth Symphony. And the drones come in different flavors, from drone metal to Tony Conrad/Phil Niblock/Henry Flynt minimalism (which is much more interesting from where I'm sitting).
I won't be composing much for the show: just recruiting the band, setting some parameters, developing some leitmotifs, and letting the chips fall where they may. There was a time when I was considering really fleshing this out, working past the February deadline and creating a composed work. That still may happen; but right now, it doesn't seem likely. I've really been itching to work more noise back into the sound, and I'm always heavily into improv, so it looks like the other two poles may end up re-asserting themselves.
As for the future of the band, that too is unclear. Being in a loud band means two things: one, heavy equipment; and two, hearing damage. I have been doing this for a very long time, and the amplifiers have taken a toll on my hearing. That can be addressed with visits to the doctor and earplugs; but, barring BK becoming famous enough to make enough money to afford roadies, the day is coming when I won't be able to move those big ass amps and speaker cabinets any more. I mean, that's not happening tomorrow, but it is on the horizon. Maybe when I recruit a new band I need to also get people who can move my shit?
Anyway, below is the playlist/scrapbook. It will be changing as I get closer to the show, so you can follow it on Spotify, or just return to this post as it will automatically update here. I also plan to add more notes on this blog as I make them, and ideally I will get a recording of the set as well.
Live at the Mammoth's small outdoor stage, Louisville KY 8/17/2017
This was, of course, the Thursday after the weekend of the Charlottesville fiasco.
I was on the road between Traverse City and Louisville on that Saturday, and Sharri and I had stopped for some food and a beer in Grand Rapids; we learned about the shitstorm by checking our phones while we were waiting for our orders. We were horrified to find what was going down . . . by that time Heather's death had been confirmed, and the police had "a person of interest" in custody. The next day we marched with BLM down Broadway in Louisville.
Everyone still had that feeling of dread Thursday when the show rolled around (hell, as I write this, two weeks after the event, the dread still hasn't abated one bit). I toyed with going into a rant at the start of the set, but there was no point in me yelling at my friends, so I let it go. Along those same lines, I had no specific intention of reflecting the events of the time in our set, but we're improvisers: at some point, if you are honest with improv music, what is in your head is coming out.
Our usual trio was augmented by Insect Policy's Brian Manley on bass (I wish he had been a tad more present on the recording, because he had it on lock that night). The Mammoth is an old abandoned/repurposed warehouse in a largely deserted industrial area off Broadway at 13th. We were playing on the small outdoor stage that night in support of New Orleans's Cult Wife. The outdoor stages are literally cut into overgrowth created by weed trees that had been let go for decades without culling. The paths carved out were illuminated with Christmas lights; there was lighting and small torches (oddly recalling the tiki torches of the Friday Charlottesville white supremacist march, but recontextualized) everywhere in the grove, creating an otherworld/fairieworld vibe in the low canopy. So: you roll up to the grassed over parking lot, you park, then pass by a table set up at the entrance to a two track lane that goes back into the undergrowth. When you get back in, you follow the paths cut into a close tree canopy and lit with torches and small colored lights. Well back into the grove is set a small stage.
Thunderstorms had been pounding Louisville all day Thursday, but by 8 pm the storms had moved through. What hadn't moved through, however, were the temperatures clocking in at just under 90 degrees at 100% humidity. The air was so thick that I had to take my glasses off, disorienting me even further. There was a thin layer of wet grit on the stage that I had to set my pedals and cords in to; it was so damp that I was almost sure that my amp would start acting like it was submerged in water. The simple act of setting up my equipment left me completely drenched, with water/sweat pouring off my body. At that point I decided to leave my good guitar in its case, grateful for the fact that I ponied up 40 bucks for a beater electric earlier in the summer. Jeff (the drummer) decided to set up on the ground in front of the stage: somebody had to set up in the wet grit, and it best not be people connected to sources of electricity.
We set up quickly. Chris tuned up his guitar; in spite of the fact that I had a tuner in my abbreviated signal chain, I decided to go with a detuned guitar instead. A very brief level check on the strings (20 seconds or so), and we were off. About twenty minutes later we were done.
I don't spend a lot of time discussing politics with my bandmates, though I know where they stand. As I noted earlier, we had no intention of making a political statement, and I don't even know that it necessarily ended up being a political statement, at least not to the degree that we were MAKING A STATEMENT. Politics, however, are inescapable, and become even moreso at crisis points. And this, clearly, qualifies as a crisis point. Just living is political, and in times like this, everything political gets amplified, while the apolitical gets contextualized and mapped upon the political. The sounds we put out drew from the air, and projected back into the air. Politics is in the air; we inhaled and exhaled.
Titling improvised music is an odd task. I'm okay at it, but Jeff is better, so I'll probably be subcontracting that job out to him more in the future. In this case, though, the title seems apt to me: this is an injured howl, a raw wound radiating pain into the swamped dark of a Louisville August night. I hesitated before dedicating it to martyred Heather Heyer - such a move reeks of exploitation, even if not deliberate - but in the end, I wanted to say her name. I was also inspired by No Hate, the Wolf Eyes tribute, which (to my mind) stands as some of their very best work. They too exposed the raw wound opened by the blade of oppression, they too chose not to dance around the elephant in the room.
In the end, I believe that "Wound" is upfront about the pain, but more defined by a snarl not unlike the snarl of the anarcho-kitty that I chose as the visual representation of the song. And when it's done, it fades away into the night . . . just another howl blunted by heavy atmosphere, just another faded voice in the Louisville dark. Just another dead soldier memorialized in a manner forever inadequate.
