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My recent listening:

Monday, January 9, 2006, 1:41pm

Amazon finally delivered my copy of Bill Martin's book Avant Rock: Experimental Music from the Beatles to Björk, which I mentioned buying in an earlier entry. I'm about 50 pages into it and while it's not exactly compellingly readable, it's interesting to me thanks to my insatiable interest in the subject. Martin's writing style is awful, though — the organization of this book is pretty much impossible to follow (if indeed there's any rhyme or reason to it at all), and he has an annoying habit of name-dropping esoteric Western philosophers at literally every turn. While I am enough of an academic at heart to be interested in how avant-rock relates to Derrida, this is just a little much. I almost get the feeling that Martin just included every single connection between music and philosophy that came to his mind while writing (let's not even start on his weird chess analogies). This guy needs an editor, bad.

None of this is stopping me from reading, of course. Just... be warned if you're expecting an easy-to-read overview of avant-rock, because this sure isn't it. Avant Rock makes Chris Cutler's File Under Popular look like a children's book.

Thursday, January 6, 2006, 5:00pm

In the spirit of the new year, here are a few thoughts on how Ground & Sky is inadequate in many different ways.

Originally, the intent of Ground & Sky was twofold: one, to offer me (and others whom I recruited to write for the site) an outlet for writing about my CDs, and thus to help me in understanding them better. The idea being, of course, that in order to write about a CD, you have to listen to it, and listen to it not just casually, but attentively. Secondly, Ground & Sky was intended to be a comprehensive database of progressive rock albums of all eras, a la the GEPR, but with more information.

Obviously the second goal has proven impossible. It could be possible with a far, far more focused effort to review everything and a far larger reviewer staff. However, it's even strayed from the first goal, at least for me. In the beginning, Ground & Sky reviews were short capsule reviews, basically a paragraph where I (or another reviewer) would give a brief opinion about the album. Period. Now, Ground & Sky reviews tend to be longer affairs, and I at least put a fair amount of research and careful thought into each of mine. This is fine, except it precludes me, for the simple reason of limitations on free time, from writing about all of the CDs I'd like to write about. Thus, there are lots of CDs that I'd like to write about, but I don't have enough time to dedicate to listening that carefully to them or researching them deeply enough in order to write full-length reviews of all of them.

(Interjection: interestingly, this shift in style from capsule review to full-length review, so to speak, was completely unintentional. It does not represent any conscious shift in mentality, only a gradual, structural change. I could write an entire article on how and why this happened.)

Another way in which Ground & Sky is "inadequate," per se, is that the entire idea of a music review is a fundamentally synchronic one. This is not how music is experienced. By posting a review of an album, the message is that the experience of an album is a one-time thing, and that one's attitude towards that album never changes. Obviously this is false; the experience of music is a diachronic one, with feelings, opinions, and understandings changing over time with further listening. Therefore any review site offers a distorted view of how music is experienced. Certainly most of the reviews I wrote a year ago (to say nothing of those I wrote five years ago) are not necessarily accurate of how I feel about the albums in question now.

I think Mike McLatchey, with his private Other Music Diary, is on to a better model of writing about music: an ongoing, thinking-out-loud blog of sorts, in which he and other participants post brief paragraphs about what they listen to each day. Gradually, and especially as albums are written about over and over again each time they are listened to, this offers a more accurate picture of how a listener's experience of a given piece of music is constructed.

I have other thoughts, but that's enough for now. However, a disclaimer is probably in order: I still believe that Ground & Sky does fulfill certain important needs, for myself personally and hopefully for our reviewers and even more hopefully for some nebulous general public of regular readers who get something out of our writings. This is merely an effort to reveal some of my underlying feelings about the site and the way that it is presented.

Tuesday, January 3, 2006, 2:26pm

Happy new year!

One of my most recent acquisitions, which has quickly become a prized possession, is the 2003 box set of Fläsket Brinner's Swedish Radio Recordings, 1970-1975. It is amazing that such a thing exists: four discs of top-notch performances from this obscure (outside Sweden, at least — but I imagine they are hardly mainstream material even in their native country) psych-prog group. Perhaps the best of these is the final disc, from 1975, in which two members of Älgarnas Trädgård joined the band, giving a much spacier and more "out" feel to the jams. But it's all fantastic stuff and highly recommended. The packaging is gorgeous, and the little note in the booklet confirms my suspicions as to why: "This project was supported by the Swedish Council for Cultural Affairs."

The Swedish system of social democracy at its best: public grants supporting boundary-pushing artists in the interests of advancing the state of modern music. Well, Fläsket Brinner was "boundary-pushing" 30 years ago, at least. Still, I'm not complaining.

Thursday, December 29, 2005, 9:02pm

Stupid Useless Gimmick Reviews, Exhibit A.

I really like this album, by the way (Simpatico by The Vandermark 5 for those of you not interested enough to follow the link). "STHLM," dedicated to Mats Gustafsson, is one of my favorite pieces by this prolific group. A barn-burner.

Wednesday, December 28, 2005, 11:47am

Looking ahead to 2006, here are some things coming down the pipeline that I'm excited about. In no particular order, although the stream-of-consciousness organization might reveal something about what's foremost on my mind.

• Magma — a rumored four (!!!) new DVD releases drawn from the 2005 shows at Les Tritonales
• Univers Zero — Live
• NeBeLNeST — ZePTo
• DFA — new one
• Tim Berne with David Torn, Craig Taborn, Tom Rainey — debut release
• Ahleuchatistas — What You Will
• Zaar — Zaar
• Mastodon — The Workhorse Chronicles DVD
• White Willow — new one
• Guapo — new one, maybe?
• Yugen — debut release
• French TV — #9
• Tanakh — Ardent Fevers
• Mujician — There's No Going Back Now
• Aghora — new one
• Karnataka (new incarnation with Alquimia) — The Gathering Light
• Mogwai — Mr. Beast
• Beans (with William Parker & Hamid Drake) — new one
• Matthew Shipp — One
• The Nels Cline Singers — new one
• The Coup — Pick a Bigger Weapon
• Mono — You Are There

And some reissues and archivals:

• Conventum — both studio albums
• Maneige — Ni Vent... Ni Nouvelle and Libre Service
• Secret Oyster — Sea Son and 2 others
• This Heat — comprehensive box set
• Miles Davis — 3CD "1956 Legendary Quintet Sessions" box set
• Keith Jarrett — Concerts (Bregenz/München) and Tokyo Solo 2002

If most or all of these things are actually released in 2006, and they live up to their promise, it looks like it could be another banner year for music I like. Between Miles box sets and four Magma DVDs from Seventh Records, of course, it could also be a painful year for my wallet...

Thursday, December 22, 2005, 1:58pm

Wow: according to this Bloomberg article, the French Parliament voted to legalize file-sharing with regards to music and movies. Not really sure what to think of that. I'm all for the replacement of the current music industry business model with something sustainable given the utter ease of digital duplication and distribution these days, but is this really the right answer?

Probably a half-step would be better: don't let industry thugs like the RIAA get away with suing grandmothers and pre-teens for downloading, but at the same time, don't just let people copy whatever they want whenever they want. How to find (and how, technologically, to implement) a middle-ground measure is awfully tricky to imagine, though. What the ethical basis for such a compromise would be is also a bit hard to see.

Wednesday, December 21, 2005, 2:57pm

Nice ending paragraph from an article in today's New York Times about the 2005 releases of a 1957 Thelonius Monk Quartet archival on Blue Note, and Coltrane's One Down, One Up (which is at the top of my wish list).

This is how jazz works. It is not a volume business. (Its essence is the opposite of business.) Its greatest experiences are given away cheaply, to rooms of 50 to 200 people. Literature and visual art are both so different: the creator stands back, judges a fixed object, then refines or discards before letting the words go to print, or putting images to walls. A posthumously found Hemingway novel is never as good as what he judged to be his best work. But in jazz there is always the promise that the art's greatest examples - even by those long dead - may still be found.

If this is the case, then, and I say this because I have Tzadik on the brain thanks to eMusic, John Zorn and company are following the right model — releasing scads of great live recordings alongside (or, in the case of bands like Electric Masada, in lieu of) relatively contemporaneous studio recordings. Tim Berne is another great example, as his Screwgun releases are often basically just high-quality audience DAT recordings packaged onto CDs.

On that topic, I'm currently most enthralled with the latest 50th Birthday release, Painkiller's. This series has been a real goldmine for me, although I've been avoiding the non-band stuff (Zorn solo and with guests) except for Volume 5, the duo with Fred Frith, because I know that stuff will just grate on me more than anything else. But the stuff I do have is fantastic, including this one (Volume 12).