Marisa Anderson
The Golden Hour

12 improvisations for guitar and lap steel recorded using a four track, quarter inch reel to reel. No preservatives, additives, overdubs, looping or layering. No voice neither just solo strings, some reverb and the occasional over-driven squeal. Recorded in 2009 and released by Mississippi Records in January 2011.

Marisa Anderson lives in Portland and plays Delta-Takoma-style country folk blues with a twist. If that sounds like a string of uncomfortable non sequiturs, give her music a listen and hear for yourself how Marisa slides a locomotive, picks out a lonesome whippoorwill and bends some sorrow.

Golden hour: the first hour after dawn and the last hour before dusk

My favorite Japanese-made American-inspired work wear company K&T H MFG Co. has opened a retail store! It’s in Japan. They also list Stockists/Dealers! They’re in Japan. Hmm. But, they also seem to have more clothes listed in the “Stocks” section of their website which is globally good news. Speaking of, I do so enjoy it when a small company that makes things beautifully does well.

My only quandary is that copy of Sonic Youth’s Nurse is still sealed (so was the Bauhaus but I made that decision more easily) – should I just open it now and listen, or wait till a special occasion? Dammit.

Tokyo San-Esu Co., Ltd, Japan
Brass Bicycle Bell

1.5 mm thick brass bell, plated steel attachment clamp and bell lever. 4.5 cm dia. Weight 70g. $20.00 from the Cooper-Hewitt Design Store. You can ring my bell. Lovely. The perfect audiophile bracelet.

I think we all think we know the answer to the question – What is an Audiophile? – but I wonder if we do. I wonder if we all agree on what it means to be an audiophile. So let’s see what some authorities on the meaning of words tell us (they all agree it’s a noun):

Miriam Webster

: a person who is enthusiastic about high-fidelity sound reproduction.

First Known Use of AUDIOPHILE
1951

Dictionary.com

: a person who is especially interested in high-fidelity sound reproduction.

American Heritage Dictionary

: a person having an ardent interest in stereo or high-fidelity sound reproduction.

Websters New World College Dictionary

: a devotee of high-fidelity sound reproduction, as from recordings

Oxford Dictionaries

: a hi-fi enthusiast.

PC Magazine

Definition of: audiophile

An individual who is very interested and enthusiastic about the sound quality of a stereo or home theater system. Quality audio components are designed to reproduce the audio without adding any distortion or coloration.

Quite often, audiophiles are as passionate about the equipment they use as the music they listen to. An entry-level, audiophile-class stereo system typically begins around $10,000 and includes a CD player, AM/FM tuner, preamplifier, amplifier and two speakers. The highest-quality equipment with the same number of components can cost several hundred thousand dollars. Contrast with videophile.

Stereophile asked this question on January 20, 2008 and you can read the responses here. To summarize, the answers are all over the place.

(more…)

Kelan Phil Cohran and Legacy
African Skies

On Milo’s recommendation I picked this record up and put it down on my turntable and boy am I glad I did. Recorded in 1993 at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, this is dreamy jazz for the soul. Or maybe its dreamy soul music for the jazzy. Kelan Phil Cohran (harp, frankiphone, trumpet, congas, violin uke, guitar and flute), Oscar Brown III (regular and piccolo string bass (bow), flute), Malik Cohran (guitar, string bass and flute), Aquilla Sadalla (bass clarinet, guitar, flute and vocals) and Josefe Marie Verna (classical harp, trombone and flute).

When the first few delicate acoustic sounds came out of my speakers, I was reminded of Alice Coltrane. And I knew at the same time that I would love this record. And while I’d stick to that reference, even though the presence of a female harpist makes it seem trite, when you combine that with Phil Cohran’s trumpet and frankiphone (which he invented) playing history with Sun Ra (1959-1961), the AACM (which he helped found), the Artistic Heritage Ensemble, and spice with a heady dose of African sounds and influence, it all adds up to one tasty record. Released on Captcha Records in an edition of 998.

This record was made as a tribute to and inspired by the spirit of Sun Ra.

“Women in wool hair chant their poetry. Phil Cohran gives us messages and music made of developed bone and polished and honed cult. It is the Hour of tribe and of vibration, the day-long Hour. It is the Hour of ringing, rouse, of ferment-festival. On Forty-third and Langley black furnaces resent ancient legislatures of play and scruple and practical gelatin. They keep the fever in, fondle the fever. All worship the Wall.” – Gwendolyn Brooks, “Two Dedications: II The Wall August 27, 1967″

(more…)

Marsden Hartley
Portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder (1938)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Albert Pinkham Ryder was born on March 19, 1847 in New Bedford, MA a whaling town. The family followed Albert’s older brother to NYC in 1867 where he’d opened a successful restaurant followed by The Hotel Albert located on 11th St. and University Place. This is where Albert, the hotel’s namesake, would live and paint for most of his life although the sea would remain fixed in Albert’s imagination and figure prominently in his paint.

Albert worked on paintings for years, often working wet on wet, wet on dry, paint on varnish over paint over varnish over paint (the dates given to Ryder’s paintings are typically the date of sale or when he let them go, not how long he worked on them). I’ve read that Albert would pour his cognac over a canvas or smear on some raw egg to give it that freshly-varnished glow. Some paintings remained wet after sitting untouched for decades.

(more…)

deadbeats

Fair-Haired and Unbalanced™ Headphones

From the men who celebrate the lower things in life and, above all else, greed, ignorance, hatred and fear, comes a headphone like no other: Deadbeats. Engineered to reproduce all the emotion stirring, crowd moving power faux-journalism lovers crave, Deadbeats perform at the basest level and look soft, pudgy and white at the same time. Wrapped with the look and feel of real journalism while imbued with the hatred for all things less white and less uptight, Deadbeats compliment any xenophobe’s wardrobe.

Darin Gray & Loren Connors
The Lost Mariner

I like Loren Connors. We’ve never met but somehow that doesn’t matter. I feel like I like him. I suppose that’s because I also feel like I sort of know him from listening to him play his guitar. Or maybe its because when Loren Connors plays his guitar, slowly searching, I hear his voice.

Recorded in 1998 and originally released on CD the following year, Family Vineyard has done what every record company should do which is to say they released this wonderful record as a record (limited to 700 copies). Since I like Loren Connors, I knew I wanted this record when I read about it but when I actually saw it in the racks at Other Music, and I saw that whopping 12″ x 12″ of unadorned Albert Pinkham Ryder on the cover, I knew I had to have it. It’s like getting a fine art print for free!

Speaking of free…

The Lost Mariner LP comes with a bonus 7″ (33 1/3) a lovely swirling sea of colored vinyl containing two tracks from 1999 recorded live at The Old Factory, NYC and its equally lovely both musically and visually with cover art by Katie Leming (Cro Magnon, Bird). And I should mention that Darin Gray’s bass speaks the same language as Loren Connors’ guitar so it looks like I’ve made another new friend. Bonus!

I don’t know about you, but I love a bonus especially when it contains more music made by Loren Connors and I love an LP when it’s covered in Albert Pinkham Ryder. This particular painting is titled Constance (1896) and it depicts a scene from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The Man of Law’s Tale wherein Constance and her infant son are sent adrift in a rudderless sail-less boat after her soon-to-be mother-in-law had her son, the Sultan and Constance’s soon-to-be husband, and all others who’d converted from Muslim to Christian (the Sultan did so to get into beautiful Constance’s Christian pants where according to critic Margaret Schlauch and Claude Lévi-Strauss Constance’s father had already been) chopped to bits.

“The Last Mariner” is one of the case studies in Oliver Sachs’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat which is about a man, Jimmie R., who has lost the ability to form new memories so he believes its still 1945 which is when he last had a memory. Jimmie R. is otherwise just like you and me.

You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all…. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing…. (I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s….)
~ Luis Buñuel

I was born an audiophile. Or maybe I should say I was raised by an audiophile (that’s him) which made me, by default, an audiophile.

(more…)

“We hope to be in Ballylee in a month and there I dream of making a house that may encourage people to avoid ugly manufactured things – an ideal poor man’s house. Except a very few things imported as models we should get all made in Galway or Limerick. I am told that our neighbours are pleased that we are not getting ‘grand things but old Irish furniture.”
W.B. Yeats from a letter to Maud Gonne dated May 1918

From 1919 to 1929 William Butler Yeats along with his wife and two children spent the summer months in Thoor Ballylee, a sixteenth century Norman castle built by the Burke septs which Yeats bought for 35 pounds (maybe I should offer them 35 pounds for The Mill).

“We are in our Tower and I am writing poetry as I always do here, and, as always happens, no matter how I begin, it becomes love poetry before I am finished with it.”

“out of doors, with the hawthorn all in blossom all along the river banks, everything is so beautiful that to go elsewhere is to leave beauty behind.”

Ballylee, aka The Tower which also housed The Winding Stair, was near Lady Gregory’s estate and The Wild Swans of Coole (1919).

THE TREES are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones

Are nine and fifty swans.
The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount

And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.
I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,

The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.
Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,

Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.
But now they drift on the still water

Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

Ok, I’ll fess up; I’ve been listening to this on my iPod (yikes, but it’s an old school 4G click wheel). Yes, I do own this EP and yes, I’ve misfiled it. This is happening a little too often lately ….

Anyway, these six songs never fail me; it’s been twenty some odd years and I still smile. If things like Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Michael Nyman Band or, something more current like Hauschka float your boat, then this is a sure bet.

Play “Struggle … ” Now

Pretty serious looking chaps!

Sonic Youth
SYR 9  “Simon Werner a Disparu”

Available for pre-order. Release date on or near March 1/2011.

The Great Concert of Charles Mingus

Recorded Sunday, April 19, 1964 at the Thèâtre des Champs-Elysées, Paris featuring Charles Mingus (bass), Johnny Coles’ trumpet, Eric Dolphy (alto, clarinet, flute), Clifford Jordan (tenor sax), Jaki Byard (piano) and Dannie Richmond (drums). Three LPs worth of damn-near everything you could ask for from a record. Loose, tight, fast, slow, in, out, quiet, mad, angry, silly, moving, touching, introspective and rousing and more.

Officially released in 1971 on America Records (France/Canada) and on Prestige in the US in 1982, there are some sonic issues here including the occasional feedback but I only mention this because it doesn’t matter one bit.

The day before April 19th Johnny Coles collapsed on stage from a stomach ulcer and had to be rushed to the hospital so the band plays minus 1* (Coles’ trumpet sat on stage atop a flight case throughout this performance in tribute). While the LP-version also leaves out the Byard solo tribute to Art Tatum and Fats Waller “A.T.F.W.” and “So Long Eric” which are found on the 2003 Universal Music Jazz (France)/Verve remastered CD, there’s still plenty of Byard who plays monstrously throughout and Dolphy is peaking and prime just months before his premature passing. Mingus is in typical form bantering with the audience, joking one minute and talking about concentration camps being built in the US the next all the while speaking in clipped, broken sentences as if his brain doesn’t adhere to speech-time.

*Because of recording problems found on the actual opening songs from April 19, this LP opens with “Good Bye Pork Pie Hat” which was recorded the previous night – so we get a taste of Johnny Coles after all. The aforementioned CD restores the full April 19th performance.

All told, a truly great live record, among the greatest I’d say. If you don’t already have it, you need it.