My Bookshelf - Wombo (2018)

New Louisville sound on Sophmore Lounge.

Convincing People - Peaches (2018)

Bloodroot - Kelly Moran (2017)

Highly Recommended

Bloodroot isn't a prepared piano record per se - the prepared piano sounds are sampled and loaded into MIDI controllers so Moran has access to them through her synthesizer - but unlike, say, Conlon Nancarrow, who wrote player piano rolls to execute piano compositions that humans couldn't play, Moran uses the samples to have her prepared piano vocabulary at her fingertips, and to extend that vocabulary (but always within the context of the composition!) by mixing the prepared piano sounds with straight piano sounds. It also allows her to do things that would require a second set of hands, like using an ebow whilst playing prepared/straight piano on some of the same notes.*

tl:dr; All of this is a way of saying that this is a prepared piano record, even if not technically a prepared piano record. As such, it is most obviously compared to John Cage's Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano . . . and while that may seem too easy, it also happens to be fair & useful. Given the stature of Sonatas and Interludes, it is a tribute to Moran that she is produce an album that stands up to Cage's masterwork.

Circa 2017, prepared piano is not the novelty it was when Cage first started toying with it in the late 1930s, even if it is not exactly commonplace. The thing that makes Sonatas and Interludes transcendent is that, once you get past the technical innovation, it is composition itself that really makes it immortal. In the same way, above and beyond Moran's technical vision, the composition is what carries Bloodroot. 

The thing that really makes Sonatas and Interludes shine is the way that pianist Maro Ajemian (to whom Cage dedicates the work) finds the Satie at the core of Cage's compositions**: the archness, the asceticism, the playfulness, the obstinance, the longing . . . the soul, if you will indulge the cliché. In Moran's work to you can hear echoes of Satie - I also hear Messiaen, Cowell, and Ligeti, just off the top of my head - but manages to create a work that is informed by her predecessors, not dependent upon them. And while the simple fact that it is a prepared piano work links it closely to Sonatas and Interludes, that too informs it, but does not define it. The compositions are, after the first blush of sound wears off, beautiful, varied, and unique. While Bloodroot will perhaps never fully escape the orbit of Sonatas and Interludes, it will stand up as part of the canon.

____________________

*  Something has been made of the hybrid nature of the technology, linking it to electronic music as well as prepared piano. I think this is misleading: while electronics do show up on the treatments of some sounds, the effect is subtle and not at all like what we understand as electronic music in the avant garde classical sense.  

** I've heard other versions; Ajemian's debut of the work on Dial Records is the best version of the work by far.

Coca néon arc-en-ciel Polaroïd - Matmos / Villeneuve / Class of 69 (2017)

Dispatch From Mar-a-Lago - L7 (2017)

Mercury - GHOSTEMANE (2017)

Best video I've seen in a minute.

GHOSTEMANE soundcloud

GHOSTEMANE bandcamp

Fascist Groove Thang - 100 Flowers

Monkey Bizness - Pere Ubu (2017)

out Friday

Passion's Not Enough - Cereal Glyphs (2017)

Wound (for Heather Heyer) - Black Kaspar (2017)

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.

God Of Nicaragua (Live at Hi Hat, La) - Feral Ohms (2017)

Negus - Sean Price featuring DOOM, Ike Eyez (2017)

Decisions' Empty Nest - Tropical Trash (2017)

Absolutego - Boris (2017)

A.S.G.T.O.M. - Lather Sommer Duo ft. Drekka (2017)

Lather Sommer Duo bandcamp

Relatives In Descent - Protomartyr (2017)

Another Protomartyr album on the way!

A Crime Scene (a Haunted House) - Harpy (2017)

Eviction Records Bandcamp

Big Inside the Block ( . . . Dogs Out) - Equipment Pointed Ankh (2017)

Equipment Pointed Ankh Bandcamp

Kaspar Hauser - Pencil Doings (2017)

Le fruit vert - Qu'en pense le sablier? (2017)

Le fruit vert's Paon perdu is out now. Saw a wonderful set by AJ Cornell, 1/2 of Le fruit vert, the other night at the Green Room. Can't wait to grab this LP.

Le fruit vert Bandcamp