on being gwyneth

Yesterday was one of those brief moments that makes it worth it.

For the past several weeks we’ve been overhauling the apartment: throwing stuff out, getting things into and out of storage, moving components and shelving, cleaning everywhere, and most importantly, rebuilding the studio area… and this time, according to Alison’s direct needs rather than my idiosyncratic feng shui.

We finally got it to a point where she can sit comfortably, access her tools with a minimum of technological interference, and practice at will. It’s not a great solution by any means – not yet a room of her own where she can compose, think, and even just not be around me all the time – but it functions for now and we’re committed to not being static.

I was sitting at my desk – at a right angle to hers and facing outward, so we have full access to the whole arc of equipment and screens – deep in some engineering task or other, when I realized that the music I was listening to was her. I turned around and saw that she was practicing guitar to a recording of Toto’s “Girl Goodbye,” a very intricate and precise piece of power rock.

It was astonishing. She was so in the groove, so completely with the feel of the thing. I was watching a professional musician at work, not just an amateur guitarist flexing her chops.

These moments are yet few and short. She has a lot of work to do, to rebuild her stamina and focus. But when she’s on, she’s amazing, and I want nothing more than to get her that room so I can hear that sound.

i’ve bought a lap steel guitar.

i’ve never been comfortable with conventional guitar technique, but have always been fascinated by this instrument and i think i can better manage its physical quirks. i’m listening to lots of dobro and hawaiian music (the latter is especially good for work) and am beginning to pick up a bit on the idiosyncratic culture… much of which involves the unbelievably wide variety of tunings. dealing with the tunings, and how they affect chording, is going to have the side effect of finally forcing me to “get” music theory, which i’ve avoided pretty thoroughly until now.

i even have a possible line on a nice pedal steel. as if i didn’t already have enough oddball things to keep busy with.

in (post)modern times, one may not be yet be “hardcore”, but perhaps be taken as “getting serious about this,” when one purchases and enjoys their opera in mono, because of the quality of a particular performance.

in my cd tray today: the 1953 furtwängler Don Giovanni.

what i’m discovering is that the music really is everything… despite this recording’s technical flaws (or idiosyncracies, depending on your tastes in live recording), i find myself completely immersed in the nearly perfect performance and balance. and i’m not really that big of a mozart fan.

starting today, i’m going to post irregular fragments of my “work in progress” on my other, emusic-related domain. for now it’s going to be a non-public link. if any friends want the URL, let me know by mail or comment. caveat: the stuff there will be tedious, unpolished, repetitive and just generally scruffy. but just getting the tinkering rendered will help motivate me toward follow-through.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSUjmBPwTho

a young japanese girl performs “carry on my wayward son” on a modern sampling electronic organ – two ranks of keyboards, plus full pedals. the drums are sequenced, but probably by her, and she plays everything else… and better than most bar bands.

edit: apparently the version i had was removed. the link has been updated.

nihilism, mass murder, rape, cannibalism…

what’s not to like?

Read more

“Eric Clapton Confesses”

to what, being the most overrated guitarist of all time?

oh yes. i need this:

Obsessive Compulsive Distortion

who the fuck decided that tossing an irrelevant rapper onstage in the middle of a set does anything for pop music? while i suppose the marketing idiots who come up with this shit think it represents some kind of cool interdisciplinary fusion that brings people together, all that results is a strained, incoherent fug that probably makes hip-hop fans want to tear their eyeballs out just as much as me.

and really, i come back to “what the hell are they thinking”? is it supposed to make white pop more “accessible” to hip-hop listeners or the other way around? speaking as someone who doesn’t particularly care for hip-hop, but who, like most eclectic listeners, occasionally finds something in an otherwise unappreciated genre that makes me go “hmmm…”, i can tell you that these kinds of half-witted mashups don’t a damned thing toward making me a more likely rap marketing target… and in fact quite, quite the opposite.

and yes, this is in reaction to watching kanye west with the Police on Live Earth, but it’s not the first time i’ve seen it. i recall a televised cyndi lauper performance that took a similarly incomprehensible turn.

born in 1960, i was raised after my parents’ early divorce by a young man who skirted the edges of psychedelic culture and media. i grew up listening, not to the beach boys and brill building pop, but to country joe & the fish, the mothers of invention, and even john cage… and not because these and other artists’ albums were in my own collection – i was far too young to even have one – but because they were my father’s.

among the strangest albums in that collection were the works of david axelrod which i have now, after so many years, finally reassembled for myself.

axelrod was primarily a producer specializing in jazz who is probably best known in the industry for collaborating with cannonball adderley on his recording of one of the most famous tunes in the canon, zawinul’s mercy, mercy, mercy.

but axelrod had a singularly weird vision of his own that he struggled to realize over a series of albums produced in the late 60s… a vision almost completely at odds with the expectations of popular music and even jazz but well suited to the cosmic aspirations of psychedelia. his two significant solo albums, songs of innocence and songs of experience, are heavily orchestrated, almost hypnotic meditations played in strange minor key progressions – trance music, really. but what makes them truly bizarre is the tension between what he was trying to do and the material he had to work with. listening to these albums, it seems that he entered the studio with fully composed parts for his orchestra – pulsing, sweeping, interlocking horn and string sections that serve as both texture and melody – but only charts for his session players… jazz musicians he’d worked with for several years who clearly just didn’t get the vision thing and who play absurdly conventional rhythms and riffs behind his ethereal washes. imagine an eric clapton cover band trying to accompany debussy.

for the other two albums he recorded during this period, he enlisted the electric prunes… who, while they get title credit, are really just his instruments again. mass in f minor and release of an oath, while less beautiful than the songs diptych, are nevertheless more coherent… probably because the band, not so bound by the traditions of jazz and blues, had a better sense of where axelrod was headed.

they are also much more explicitly ecclesiastical – something that completely escaped me as a child, not having had an ounce of any kind of indoctrination along those lines when i was growing up, but that impresses itself on me pretty baldly today… and which i have to admit gives me pause, but which i have also slowly learned to just deal with since many of the metal bands i listen to are more overtly christian than i would have been comfortable with even just a couple of years ago. it’s one of those things where i allow the artist his source and just appreciate the result. after all, i do like cathedral architecture.