Twittering Machines

Bob Dylan
The Brazil Series

The Statens Museum for Kunst /National Gallery of Denmark is home to the exhibit Bob Dylan: The Brazil Series running from September 4, 2010 through January 30, 2011. Who knew? I suppose a lot of people since Bob Dylan has been painting since the 1960s or as he says “I have always painted.”

Music From Big Pink

Of course there’s Dylan’s cover art for Planet Waves and Self Portrait as well as his painting for The Band’s Music From Big Pink.

“In a strange way I noticed that it purified the experience of my eye…” Bob Dylan on drawing

Bahia, 2010 © Bob Dylan. Acrylic on canvas, 121,9 x 91,4 cm

These new paintings are based on Dylan’s many visits to Brazil and were created specifically for this exhibit, about 40 paintings in all.

Favela Villa Broncos, 2010 © Bob Dylan. Acrylic on canvas, 106,7 x 142,2 cm

But few artists are afforded respect in more than one area of expression. Why is that? Are you your own toughest act to follow?

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various
The Great Blues Men

I don’t remember exactly when I first bought this record but it was some time in the mid-1970s. What I do remember is being captivated, completely and totally taken with the sounds of Homesick James, Sleepy John Estes, Rev. Gary Davis, Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Robert Pete Williams, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Big Bill Broonzy, Otis Span, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, Lightnin Hopkins, Johnny Young, James Cotton, Jimmy Rushing, JB Hutto, Ida Cox, Joe Turner & Pete Johnson, Johnny Shines, Junior Wells, Jesse Fuller, Mance Lipscomb and Otis Rush. Every single track of this double LP was like a trip to some other time and place and no two destinations were alike.

The Blues. More than any other, this record helped me hear how inept that one word is at capturing all of these people and their music. Hell, even if you narrow it down to Delta Blues you’re still talking about trying to stick Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt, Fred McDowell, Johnny Shines, James Cotton, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters into the same stylistic pot that wouldn’t fit any two. Just compare the brute force of Son House to the gentleness of John Hurt or the falsetto moans of Skip James to the baritone bluster of Muddy Waters and you’ll see how futile it is to cull and call these men by anything but their names. But for the purposes of this record, I’m glad they generalized.

Put out by Vanguard in 1972, The Great Blues Men is a stunning compilation that still leaves me awestruck and inspired. Even if you own LPs by all or most of these blues men (and woman), I’d still recommend this collection because its just so much damn fun to listen through. And it’s easy to get, inexpensive, includes brief bios and that cover collage by Eric Von Schmidt (yes, that Eric Von Schmidt who hung with Dylan and whose LP cover appears at the top of the pile on Dylan’s Bringing it All Back Home) is a visual treat.

A number of these tracks are live recordings taken from John Hammond’s 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall (available on Vanguard) and the Newport Folk Festivals from 1959 – ’65. I’d also recommend the LPs titled The Blues at Newport from 1963 and 1964. Come to think of it I suppose I’d recommend getting at least 1 LP by every player on this record and I realize as I type this I’m not done.

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After a Sunday steak dinner, I lit up my first ever Camacho Liberty 2009. While you can see for yourself what it looks like, the 2009 Liberty is rather light in the hand as opposed to something dense and heavy like the Camacho Triple Maduro or any of the Cain cigars. That lovely Spanish cedar coffin these babies travel in helps impart a big cedar pre-light aroma along with some nice rich sweet tobacco and with their protective tissue paper wraps they look positively Egyptian.

Specifications:

Size: 11/18, 6″ x 56 figurado
Wrapper: Habano
Binder: Honduras
Filler: Honduras
#: 32,681 of 40,000 total

This limited edition cigar was blended by Christian Eiroa “using our one and only crop of Habano, a seed that has not been grown since and only yielded enough for a small amount of cigars”. Every cigar is aged for 2 years making the 2009 Liberty a 2007 production and these cigars a full 3 years old.

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Tristan Perich
1-Bit Symphony

Remember the Buddha Machine? Well Artist/Composer Tristan Perich has gone 1 bit further and created a movable feast inside a CD jewel case:

1-Bit Symphony utilizes on and off electrical pulses, synthesized by assembly code and routed from microchip to speaker, to manifest data as sound. The device treats electricity as a sonic medium, making an intimate connection between the materiality of hardware and the abstract logic of software.

Perich programs the music directly onto (into?) a microchip and hand-assembles the CD case which includes a complete electronic circuit, battery and headphone jack. So in effect you’re buying a handmade self-powered ‘master’ music machine that literally plays itself. Lovely.

You can pre-order 1-Bit Symphony for $29.00 from Bang On A Can. Release date scheduled for August 24, 2010.

There’s also an “Artist’s Edition’ which is a signed/numbered limited edition of 50 that includes a silkscreen print of the source code and schematic for $150.00. Available direct from the 1-Bit Symphony site.

Somehow I missed Perich’s first 1-bit device, 1-Bit Music from 2006 – “1-Bit Music probes the foundations of digital sound. An electronic circuit is assembled inside a CD case with a headphone jack on the side. The device plays back 40 minutes of low-fi 1-bit electronic music, the lowest possible digital representation of audio.”

The regular edition has since sold out but the Artists Edition is available through Tristan Perich’s website for $100.

various
Bloody War: Songs 1924 – 1939

This is a bit of a TM oddity in that its currently a CD-only release (it may see a vinyl release someday according to Josh Rosenthal) and I don’t own it. Yet. I received an email from Josh of Tompkins Square Records giving me the heads up on this new release so I gave it a listen and loved it. Tomkins Square, if you didn’t know, has a wonderfully diverse catalog that includes Ran Blake, Giuseppi Logan, Peter Walker, E.C. Ball, James Blackshaw and more. And they release vinyl like this very cool 7″ from 12-string picker Suni McGrath who studied with the Rev. Gary Davis and Mississippi John Hurt.

Bloody War: Songs 1924 – 1939 is what the title says – “This newly minted collection presents performances captured between 1924 and 1939 of songs originating from the American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, and the “war to end all wars,” the First World War. These recordings were the folk foundation both of the common soldier’s perspective of the battlefield and of the family and loved ones that were left behind.“

Here’s a tasty taste - Everybody Help The Boys Come Home by William & Versey Smith (1927)

These songs let us listen back to we’re all in this together Americanness which nearly hurts when compared to our current state of divisive partisan pomp represented by pudgy white whiny pricks with a pulpit. Dough boys. Part of what’s so extraordinary about these songs is a sense of facing the inevitable with whatever it takes including a big helping of humor – All ya can do is do what you must. You do what you must do and ya do it well (to borrow from Mr. Dylan who borrowed so much from this music). Even when what you must do is some horrid shit or the nearly always sensible alternative from “The Battleship of Maine” (1927) -

Why are you running?
Are you afraid to die?
The reason I am running
is because I cannot fly.

Amen. Or as Bob Marley explained “He who fight and run away, lives to fight another day.”

It’s also a lesson in how much you can communicate through such simple means – an analog recording of live acoustic music cut to shellac at 78rpm. Of course there is some irony here seeing as I listened to this music via MP3s which always feel like I’m renting the music (CDs being akin to a lease whereas an LP is my copy of the real thing. A home for music. But that’s just me) i.e., Bloody War: Songs 1924 – 1939 wants to be a vinyl release.

Produced by Christopher King and Josh Rosenthal, with art-design by Susan Archie and liner-notes by country music historian Tony Russell. A portion of all proceeds from the sale of this album will be donated to Iraq & Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA.org).

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The Perfect Resting Place for Vinyl Lovers

Speaking of segues…If you’re interested in where your remains end up after you’ve ended up, Rest In Vinyl may just have the LP lover’s afterlife covered. No, it’s no joke (well it kinda is):

“When the album that is life finally reaches the end wouldn’t it be nice to keep that record spinning for all eternity? We offer the chance to press your ashes in a vinyl recording your loved ones will cherish for generations.“

£2,000 gets you the Basic Package which includes the standard R.I.V. Cover (below) showing your d.o.b. – d.o.d. and 24 minutes of whatever sound you want pressed with your flesh (cremated first please) into 30 long-lasting vinyl records.

Of course there are extras available, what respectable death service doesn’t offer extras?, like cover portraits by James Hague (£3,500/painting), closed loops, bespoke music (£500/track), record store distribution and more. I’m a fan of the minimal package – the generic RIV cover and just my ashes mixed with vinyl. No music. I wonder what that’ll sound like backwards? And don’t you think a lockout groove would be fitting?

Thanks to the Simon and Kristop from the chilly north for the tip on this one. Hey! Maybe we can start up a service and press ashes into reusable beer mugs! Drink with your friends – forever.
;-)

Okkyung Lee
i saw the ghost of an unknown soul and it said…

Recorded in 2006 and released in 2008 on Ecstatic Peace, if you were wondering where our avant-garde went and if you need special 3d glasses or a decoder ring to find it you should pick up this LP and let it sink in deep.

Korean-born Okkyung Lee studied music from the age of 3-25 then moved to the lower east side of NYC and played her cello with Laurie Anderson, Derek Bailey, Steve Beresford, Nels Cline, Chris Corsano, Fred Frith, Shelley Hirsch, Susie Ibarra, Thurston Moore, “Butch” Morris, Jim O’Rourke, Beth Orton, Christian Marclay, Ikue Mori, DJ Olive, Zeena Parkins, Marina Rosenfeld, John Zorn and more but here she plays alone. Although from listening you might not know it – bowed, scraped, scratched, thumped and plucked there are so many sounds coming out of this record you begin to feel like a sonic detective – who, what, where, when, why and how? Although at some point all those questions fade and your left with music and you. And that’s quite a magical moving musical trick trip.

Track listing goes like this:

side a: one, two three, four…
side b: five, and…

Liner notes go like this:

special thanks to ikue mori, zeena parkins, dion workman, andrew lampart, thurston moore, raz mestinai and tim barnes and those who still believe in noise

I still believe in noise.

The LP cover image is from a series of beautiful silent films of Okkyung Lee playing her cello by Andrew Lampart and you can watch them on the ever fascinating chock-full-o-avant-garde goodness UbuWeb.

Okkjung Lee will be performing September 1st – 15th at the Whitney Museum’s Christian Marclay: Festival.

The Camacho Liberty 2009 is limited to one size and just 40,000 cigars. Is that a little? I guess so but it sounds like a lot. Selling 40,000 anythings hardly seems limited but I suppose cigars sell. Especially when they come in their own individual Spanish cedar coffin. Yup, that’s what they call that little wooden box – a coffin. Funny no?

I took one 11/18, 6″ x 56 figurado corpse out but have yet to consume it. Based on my Camacho experiences to date (thanks again to Jonathan for the tip), I’m expecting a drop dead smoke. Here’s what Camacho has to say:

“This latest edition was blended by Christian Eiroa as an attempt to debunk the 2005 Liberty, which has been touted as the best Camacho Liberty to date. This particular issue is being offered with much anticipation as they were made in October 2007 using our one and only crop of Habano, a seed that has not been grown since and only yielded enough for a small amount of cigars. The blend is rich and complex and the body is medium to full. However, with this kind of flavor, the strength is secondary!

Only 40,000 Camacho Liberty 2009 cigars were made, all of which are packed in their own individual coffins. The NEW 2009 Camacho Liberty comes in boxes of 20 cigars and is now available at select retailers.“

See, I told you. They really call them coffins. I bought 2 on CigarBid and plan to sample 1 sometime this weekend.

Paul Bley, Bill Dixon, Bob (Cleve) Pozar, Archie Shepp, Marzette Watts
New Music: Second Wave

Released in 1979 five years after Clive Davis/Arista purchased Savoy Records, New Music: Second Wave contains mostly excerpts from some great ’60s Savoy jazz releases produced by Bill Dixon (with the exception of the Paul Bley tracks) – Archie Shepp/Bill Dixon Consequences (1964), Marzette Watts The Marzette Watts Ensemble (1968) and the Robert F. (Cleve) Pozar Ensemble Good Golly Miss Nancy (1966). The Paul Bley tracks were previously unreleased.

My main attraction to this LP was to finally get my hands and ears on Marzette Watts. I knew of Marzette from his association with Bill Dixon who plays piano on and produced this Savoy outing as well as Marzette’s life as an abstract expressionist painter who ended up destroying most of his work.  The only other Marzette Watts record I’m aware of is Marzette Watts & Company on ESP Disk from 1966 which includes Sonny Sharrock on guitar. Yes, both LPs are hard to come by and I haven’t, yet.

Marzette Watts
The Marzette Watts Ensemble

“Play It Straight” (an Ornette Coleman tune) features Marzette Watts on tenor sax, Bill Dixon piano, Steve Tintweiss  bass and Tom Berge drums and its anything but played straight. Think manic drunken monkey master free jazz vibe with Dixon’s piano sounding like honky tonk Schoenberg. The other Watts track “Lonely Woman” (also by Coleman) features Watts on tenor, Marty Cook trombone, Amy Schaeffer vocals, Juni Booth bass and JC Moses drums. I’m not familiar with Amy Schaeffer but here she’s in lovely voice reminiscent of Dee Dee Bridgewater.

Any sampler worth its salt will give something unexpected and in that sense, this one worked wonders for me. From the liner notes by Michael Cuscuna – “Although Savoy at this point [1962] had narrowed its activities almost exclusively to the Gospel field, the company did collaborate with trumpeter-composer-educator Bill Dixon to fill the initial vacuum for a second wave of new music creators.” I also learned from the liner notes that Bill personally financed his recording sessions with Archie Shepp and leased them to Savoy. If you couple this with the October Revolution in Jazz (1964) concert series that Dixon organized and his Jazz Composers Guild, you’ll find that Bill Dixon was a major impetuous behind this second wave.

Robert F. (Cleve) Pozar Ensemble
Good Golly Miss Nancy

The other pleasant surprise of this collection turned out to be Cleve Pozar (Robert Frank Pozar officially changed his name to Cleve Pozar because “my father was a very stern kind of guy, and he was always on my case, and he used to say, “Bob!” and it was like a gunshot, and I used to have nightmares about that shit. And I said, “I’m gonna get a name that nobody can say harshly.“). Cleve studied with among others…Bill Dixon and he also played on Dixon’s seminal Intents an Purposes. Here he’s represented by three tracks, “Robin Hood” and “The Mechanical Answering Service of Chris and Marta White”, featuring Cleve Pozar on drums, Mike Zwerin on bass trumpet and trombone, Kathy Norris on cello, and Jimmy Garrison bass and “Sweet Little Maia” which was composed by Jimmy Garrison and features only Garrison and Norris’ cello. Which makes it a Jimmy Garrison track. No?

Nonetheless, the purely Pozar cuts are beautifully composed and a step back to structured play but Pozar’s playfulness comes through his claimed sources of inspiration – the Robin Hood TV show theme song and Chris White’s pitch modulation and dynamics on her answering machine message (Pozar worked with John Cage, Morton Feldman, Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma at Ann Arbor’s Once Festival). A copy of this LP which was supposedly from Bill Dixon’s personal collection just sold for $165.75 on eBay…

Cleve Pozar
Solo Percussion

Cleve Pozar’s other record is called Solo Percussion and the few tracks I’ve heard from it sound like more. Listen to Echo Afrika.

Here’s a great Bill Dixon story as told by Cleve Pozar from Working Out of Another Bag by Hank Shteamer (April 2008):

“How come you’re not studying with Bill anymore?” I said, “Judy [Dunn], man, I got no bread. I don’t have food money.” So Bill finds out through Judy that the reason I’m not studying with him is because I don’t even have food. He comes over to my place with two grocery bags, one filled with food and the other filled with ale, walks in, puts the shit in my refrigerator, puts the extra bottle of ale in my refrigerator, opens up a bottle for me and a bottle for him and says, “Sit down on the drumset.” He takes the barstool, leans over to me and says, “Don’t ever do that to me again!”

If you want to learn more about the fascinating Cleve Pozar, I suggest this interview with none other than Adam Lore of 50 Miles of Elbow Room.

Trivia – that odd cover photo of a weed among gems? is by John E. Barrett of Muppet photo fame.

Zola Jesus
Valusia

The Golden Filter
Voluspa

The Golden Filter press photo

Coincidence or copycat? The Golden Filter seems to think the latter since they’ve posted the Zola Jesus’ cover on their blog directly below this press photo with the comment – “Voluspa. Valusia? 2 letters and 2 months apart. ????“

We’ve had two comments reflecting the same opinion on my Zola Jesus Valusia post. I can’t imagine what possible benefit Zola Jesus would have in purposefully naming her forthcoming EP after The Golden Filter’s debut LP (to trick Googleing mis-spellers?) and she doesn’t strike me as someone short on her own ideas.

But I have to admit, those titles use a lot of the same letters. Thoughts?

Brian Eno
Small Craft On A Milk Sea

A lovely looking new Brian Eno album, his first in five years and priced/prized for the included art in the vinyl editions. With Jon Hopkins and Leo Abrahams on Warp Records.

In lieu of music (I don’t believe any samples have been released. How old-school mysterious), here’s some words from Warp’s Josh Berman – “This record swings from ambient droning tones to some up-tempo pieces featuring guitar work by Leo Abrahams and programming and various sounds from composer and production whiz Jon Hopkins,” said Berman. “The whole thing has a rather ethereal vibe.” Eno ethereal?

Release date: 2nd November 2010 in three versions (available for pre-order from BLEEP):

1. Standard CD (ew), $14.99
2. Limited Edition Box Set (Heavyweight vinyl, 2xCD, Lithographic Print), $99.99
3. Collectors’ Edition Box Set (Unique signed, numbered screen print by Brian Eno, Heavyweight vinyl, 2xCD limited to 250 world wide), $450

Cadavre exquis [Exquisite Corpse]
André Breton

I was never a gear-head. Actually if there’s an exact opposite, that’s what I was and I have the piss poor results of my technical skills aptitude tests to prove it. Those diagrams where you had to figure out which way a particular gear turned or pulley pulled looked like a game of Exquisite Corpse to me. I wanted to add a chicken head or old boot and call it art. After all, a drawing of a machine is a drawing, not a machine.

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New rule – Mississippi Records can only release 1 new LP per month. Dammit!

Mississippi Records and the Alan Lomax Collection have collaborated on five commemorative LPs, spanning the breadth of Lomax’s ’59-60 Southern recordings, drawing on new transfers of the original 1/4″ tapes, and featuring a considerable amount of previously unreleased material. The five LP volumes feature singing siblings Hobart Smith and Texas Gladden from Saltville, Virginia; menhaden fishermen’s chorus the Bright Light Quartet; the Young Brothers’ Mississippi Hill Country fife and drum band; Blue Ridge instrumentalists Wade Ward and Charlie Higgins; Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers; work songs and hollers from Parchman Farm; congregational hymns from African American and white Appalachian meeting-houses; Alabama’s singing washerwoman Vera Ward Hall; the 1959 United Sacred Harp Convention; and the debut recordings of bluesman Fred McDowell, among much else.

Each volume is being sold separately with its own distinctive packaging. All come with a 12-page booklet featuring many never before published photos. Old school tip on sleeves & beautiful sound. Not to be missed!

What else needs to be said?

Old And New Dreams
Playing

“The kicker suddenly started his run.

The goalkeeper, who was wearing a bright yellow jersey, stood absolutely still, and the penalty kicker shot the ball into this hands.”

This quote appears on the front and back jacket of Playing and it comes from a favorite novel with a favorite title by Peter Handke…

Peter Handke
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

Old And New Dreams is Don Cherry (trumpet, piano), Dewey Redman (tenor sax, musette), Charlie Haden (bass), and Ed Blackwell (drums). This group was together from 1976 – 1987 and they released 2 LPs on the Black Saint label (a 1976 self titled LP and A Tribute to Ed Blackwell from 1987) and 2 LPs on ECM – another self-titled LP from 1979 and Playing a live recording from June 1980 at the Theater am Kornmarkt, Austria.

There’s something fitting about this novel being tied to music – namely the tension between players and the anticipation/anxiety that comes about through improvisation, playing. Wim Wenders made a film of the novel (Handke also wrote the screenplay for Wings of Desire and Until the End of the World) which is about a soccer player’s decent into madness or maybe he always was.

Whose idea was it to put this Handke quote on Playing?

I don’t know but I do know these ECM records sound pretty amazing and this band of ex-Ornette players sure can play.

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Bob Dylan
Planet Waves

One of the things that happens when you’ve previously sold off your entire record collection and started anew is you have these holes in all the wrong places. I mean, you can’t buy everything you had in one shot and keep up with that tiny % of new stuff you can actually keep up with while discovering great old records and pay the electric bill.  So you have gaps where there should and used to be records. I hate that.

Dylan and The Band recorded Planet Waves in 1973, the same year and just a month before Mal Waldron recorded Up Popped The Devil. While I’d like to make some clever comparison, I can’t. I only mention this timely coincidence because it helps put into focus how vast music is. If the only thing I knew about these two records was learned from listening, you could have told me they were recorded in different countries or decades or planets and I’d have believed you. I love that.

I recently grabbed Planet Waves off the PREX shelves and stopped that gap and I did so so readily because Stephen placed it freshly in my mind. The only other thing I’ve got to say about Plant Waves is – what he said.