I recall writing this review, which predates this blog by just over two years, but I don't remember for what outlet I wrote it. I located it today on a whim – after posting the image you see above on Twitter – on Acoustic Levitation, an online journal edited and published by Steve Koenig, a poet, teacher, and activist based in Brooklyn. A bit of introductory text on that site states "we are transplanting this from our former website," but I don't know what that other website was. I do recall distinctly that this review caused some passing friction between myself and one of the artists cited herein, until I'd clarified what I'd meant by a certain comparison—and that what I'd intended was the absolute highest of praise.
It's difficult for me to read this now, given its endless, seemingly unedited gush. But I'm always glad to find and preserve bits of my past, and the account absolutely does bring back some very, very good memories. I'll always be grateful to Stone… and to Stephanie Stone, his wife, who passed away in 2014, and Steve Dalachinsky, so present herein, who we lost in 2019.
Irving Stone Memorial Concert Saturday, July 5, 2003 Tonic, New York City
What are the odds that a little old man with a big heart, a sharp tongue and a taste for wild music and sweet herb could unite an all-star array of New York avant-jazzers and free improvisers and inspire them to perform all day long on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in July? Irving Stone probably could have given you an exact answer. After all, he'd spent decades employed as a statistician for the New York City Housing Authority. Stone, as he was universally known, was a fixture at pretty much every concert of exploratory jazz and downtown experimentation since Coltrane was blowing the roof off the Vanguard. (I used to use "Ayler" in that sentence, until his wife Stephanie once corrected me: She and Stone never saw Ayler at the Vanguard, though they saw him plenty of other places.)
As has been noted in countless other places, the Stones were treated like royalty among the circles in which they traveled. Yet conversely, they were – and Stephanie remains – among the most generous and welcoming of all souls on that scene. Again, as more than one observer has mentioned, when you saw them at a gig you were attending, you felt like you were visiting family. For at least one generation of downtown musicians, and likely more, the mere presence of the Stones at a gig felt like artistic validation.
All of those points, and many more like them, were brought up during two hours of heartfelt reminiscences of Stone that preceded Saturday's memorial music marathon, which was organized by longtime Stone favorite John Zorn with help from numerous close friends, including poet Steve Dalachinsky, critic Kevin Whitehead and many others. Though we heard tales that we'd all heard before, or perhaps even witnessed firsthand, still, there was more revealed that gave us a better image of who Stone had been before he became the Stone we all knew. "Irving Stone taught Harry Partch how to balance a checkbook," said Mrs. Gosfield, an old family friend whose daughter Annie has become a significant downtown composer in the Zorn orbit. "Irving Stone could sing Gilbert and Sullivan operettas in the voice of Louis Armstrong."
And on it went, as local luminaries traded tales with longtime friends. Barely able to catch his breath in a headlong rush of emotion, step-grandson Jesse lamented that he wished he'd known his step-grandfather nearly as well as the sizeable audience assembled in the room. Steve Dalachinsky (who said he was unable to complete a serious poem about Stone because he knew the dedicatee would not approve) instead read a well-known poem by another late friend of his, Ted Joans, adapting certain phrases to better capture Stone's preferences.
Stephanie Stone, no doubt overwhelmed, addressed the audience from a seat in the front row. Normally a gregarious figure, she was clearly affected by the outpouring. The next, and last voice, belonged to Stone himself. No one in the room was spared a tear at the voice, nor a laugh as, in a pre-recorded interview, he recalled a conversation with Mark Feldman. The violinist had asked Stone if he'd noticed any difference in the way he sounded that evening, when he had used an expensive new bow for the first time. Stone politely replied that he hadn't.
"What? You mean you can't tell the difference between when I use a $2,000 bow and when I use a $500 bow?" Feldman had asked, incredulous.
"No, but I can tell the difference between when you're playing for real and when you're just fucking around," was the sincere reply. ("Fuck," we were told more than a few times, was a potent component in Stone's vocabulary.)
Further reminiscences detailed whimsical close encounters with Kenny Dorham, Salvador Dali and Charlie Chaplin—all of which served notice that Stone was a man who lived life to the fullest, and shared everything that he had. For the rest of the afternoon and well into the evening, many of the artists who Stone nurtured over the years came forward to pay tribute on behalf of everyone assembled, in the manner that Stone had loved best.
Originally published on National Sawdust Log, April 13, 2018
Drummer Brian Chase is best known as a member of the vital indie-rock band Yeah Yeah Yeahs, but that only reveals the tip of the iceberg where his creative life is concerned. A longtime participant in New York City’s busy underground-music scene, Chase has performed and recorded with a dizzying range of innovators, including Lee Ranaldo, Alan Licht, Tyondai Braxton, Andrea Parkins, Jeremiah Cymerman, and Mary Halvorson, as well as bands such as the Fretless Brothers, Oakley Hall, the Sway Machinery, and Man Forever. Recently, he was among the dozens of artists who joined John Zorn in bidding farewell to The Stone in its original East Village location.
As a solo artist, Chase for more than a decade has pursued an interest in the limitless possibilities of just intonation and drone, inspired by the iconic Dream House operated by the maverick artists La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. In 2013 he released Drums and Drones, the initial CD + DVD release devoted to his ongoing project of that name, on the esteemed experimental-music label Pogus Productions. The album’s DVD component included videos that New York artists Ursula Scherrer and Erik Z. made to complement Chase’s live performances. About that release, Chase explained at the time:
“Drums and percussion has seen some but not much exploration in Just Intonation, yet they are inherently designed to represent it as such: a drum head is tuned to a single pitch, one frequency, and resonates with rich harmonic detail. From there the overtone series can be uncovered and expressed. The Drums and Drones project deals directly with approaching drums and percussion from the standpoint of Just Intonation.”
Now, Chase will document the evolution and refinement of his pursuit with the forthcoming release of Drums and Drones: Decade, a three-CD package bundled with a 144-page book featuring essays about the project and its components, performance photos, and still images from the videos he's performed with. Encouraged by Zorn, Chase will release the set June 15 on his own newly established label, Chaikin Records. In a telephone interview, he discussed the album and label, and hinted at some of his future plans.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: The press materials announcing Drums and Drones: Decade mention that the project was inspired initially by your interest in the work of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. How did you become acquainted with their art?
BRIAN CHASE: For about a year and a half, I worked as a volunteer at the Dream House space… this was in 2005 or so. And that just sucked me in – I was hooked on the vibrations. And before that, I had met Jon Catler, who was a guitarist in La Monte's ensembles. So that's how I got introduced to La Monte Young, apart from history books: I met Jon and started playing in some of his groups, and Jon got me into just intonation and that whole scene, and that led me to La Monte. As I was working at the Dream House, I started to see parallels between just intonation and the resonance of a drum head.
I'd wondered how you made that leap. Most people, when they think of drums, think of the qualities of attack and impact, rather than sustain and resonance.
Yeah, but I was thinking about it… the way a drum is set up is that a drum head is tuned to have a pitch, but within that resonance there's a whole complex sound world, a complex array of harmonics. I started to develop my skills in tuning, where I could tune a drum head to a very specific frequency, and then from knowing the frequency, I would be able to know my harmonics, and where they exist on the frequency spectrum. The way the project developed was I would start by tuning the drum to a specific frequency, usually 480Hz, based on how La Monte went about tuning – he would tune to a fundamental of 80Hz, which is the hum of ConEd… or National Grid, whatever it is now – and from there, I would use digital EQ to boost the harmonics of that fundamental.
So that's the technical aspect. But I was also very much into the meditative aspect of listening that came with the Dream House: the idea of not being able to hear all of the sound all at once, and understanding listening as a process. The compositions developed with that in mind; they were structured to allow listening to unfold, and to be experienced as a subjective process for the listener.
Did you ever have any kind of personal interaction with La Monte and Marian?
I've had some over the years, yeah, little bits here and there. Social encounters, as opposed to artistic collaborations? Yeah. One memory I have is when I was working at the Dream House around holiday time, New Year's. I was finishing my shift, and La Monte stopped me and had gifts for me: "a gift for your body, a gift for your mind, and a gift for your soul." The gift for my body was homegrown chili peppers [laughs], and they were the hottest chili peppers I've ever had. The gift for my mind was some incense, and the gift for my soul was the Midnight ragas CD with Pandit Pran Nath.
You've been developing this body of work for more than a decade now, a process illustrated by your new album. How has your approach evolved over the years?
It's been a continual trial and error experience. [Laughs] The first album is very much about me finding the methods for the first time – which is really exciting. I love the spontaneity of that.
The second album [Drums and Drones II: Ataraxia] definitely shows a more refined approach to my methods. And then the third album [Drums and Drones III: Acoustic] is a purely acoustic album, because in the process of developing the electroacoustic material, I would discover new techniques of getting harmonics in an acoustic way. It took about eight or nine years before I had a full repertoire of developing methods to bring out the harmonics in a purely acoustic way from drums.
You've played these kinds of pieces everywhere from The Stone to Basilica Hudson. Is there an ideal space or an ideal acoustic for getting the results you're after? Can you do it literally anywhere, with the judicious use of electronics?
It can be dome anywhere, but the environment changes what is done. I have to learn how to adapt to the scenario.
Each performance is in a sense site-specific.
Definitely.
So you've got this massive project you want to put out into the worlds. What made you take the leap of starting your own label?
The label came about as an idea from Zorn. He knew I was developing some releases, but I didn't have the output for them. I told him of one label that was interested, but wanted me to pay for the manufacturing. Zorn said for that same money, I could start my own label.
And he would know.
Exactly. So I took his advice. It was kind of the next step for me, because I do have a lot of projects, and I'm very deeply involved with many different aspects of the New York City music community. I was starting to feel a little inhibited by not having a label. So while I wouldn't necessarily have envisioned it for myself, now that I'm in it and starting to do it, I see all the possibilities.
You've announced two more projects for future release already. One is untitled: after, your collaboration with Catherine Sikora. Can you talk a little bit about that?
That music is more on the avant-jazz side. Catherine is a brilliant improviser, and we've had a project for a number of years now.
It's fully improvised, rather than assembled with some compositional strategy?
Yeah. And the way we developed our pieces was we used pieces of text from a Beowulf translation.
Seamus Heaney?
Exactly. Catherine is a big fan of Beowulf and Seamus. She typed out some excerpts on an old typewriter that she had, and brought them into a rehearsal one day. We went through and developed some themes and motifs that provided a springboard for improvisation.
Is that basically a loose template, where every time you revisit that project it comes out differently?
Definitely. The pieces tend to have the same character, which is kind of cool, considering that they're all based on specific passages from the book. But yeah, the music is different.
I gather from the press-release statement about your third release, 13 Million Year Old Ghost, that you're not allowed to reveal the performer's true identity. But can you point toward the sound world the music occupies?
It does hint at the drone side of things, but it does kind of have more of a typical song aspect to it.
You can't divulge who it is for contractual reasons?
Well, it's a friend of mine from the rock world. We're doing the mastering next week, so I think after that we'll start to feel more confident about revealing more information.
Going forward, do you have a sense of what kinds of projects and artists you're interested in pursuing?
I've started thinking about another round – I like the idea of doing three releases at a time. We'll see how this goes, and if I break even or it's sustainable, then I'll look toward another batch. One idea I had was to feature some great Brooklyn music… there was a lot of great stuff happening on the Brooklyn rock scene that I don't think made it past its history, unfortunately. A lot of bands that were pivotal at the time, like from 2000 to 2006, that get overlooked when people talk about the Brooklyn scene. So I was thinking about doing a compilation in a similar format to No New York that features four bands. And maybe it would be a two-LP thing; maybe it would be four bands over two LPs, possibly. So that's something I was thinking of for next time.
Your use of the term LP just then begs the question of whether you'll be issuing Chaikin releases on formats other than CD. Any plans for vinyl or cassette?
Yeah, definitely, 13 Million Year Old Ghost will be an LP. I thought about doing the album with Catherine on cassette, also, but I think that'll just stay on CD. Doing a label, the economics of all of this is… very apparent. [laughs]
Drums and Drones: Decade is due June 15, 2018, on Chaikin Records.
Originally published on National Sawdust Log, Nov. 29, 2017
Even for an artist as versatile and unpredictable as Sarah Hennies—a percussionist, improviser, and composer originally from Louisville, Kentucky, and now based in Ithaca, New York—her newest work represents a substantial achievement. Contralto, an hour-long work for vocalists on video with strings and percussion (either live or recorded), is named for the musical term that denotes the lowest female voice type. The principal source material is provided by a cast of trans women, filmed by first-time director Hennies as they speak, sing, and perform vocal exercises designed to help trans women develop a more conventionally female vocal sound.
Hennies is best known to new-music cognoscenti as a solo artist and for her work alongside fellow percussionists Tim Feeney and Greg Stuart in the protean percussion trio Meridian. In indie-rock circles, she's the former drummer for Austin combo The Weird Weeds, and the current time keeper for Philadelphia slowcore outfit Obody. For Contralto, which will be presented its world premiere on Nov. 30 at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn, Hennies has assembled a stellar band of old friends and regular collaborators: Meridian bandmates Feeney and Stuart, violinist Erik Carlson, violist Wendy Richman, cellist T.J. Borden, bassist James Ilgenfritz, and percussionist Ashley Tini.
Speaking by telephone from her home in Ithaca, Hennies talked about the personal and stylistic discoveries that led her to imagine and assemble Contralto, as well as the circuitous creative path that gave her the tools and determination to get it done.
NATIONAL SAWDUST LOG: To judge by the evidence I've seen thus far—a video trailer, a descriptive essay, and some sections of the score—Contralto is unlike anything you created before it. So let's get rolling with the most basic question: How did you come to conceive this piece?
SARAH HENNIES: It started a few different ways. Around three or four years ago, when I was first dealing with any kind of trans stuff and I didn’t know anything, this friend of mine had this really squeaky voice: super, super high. The first time we hung out, I don’t even remember how it came up, but she was like, “Oh, I can still do my old voice.” She started talking in this really profoundly deep, low voice, and I thought it was so startling. So when I started to think about making a piece that was about voices, at first I wanted to try to get a bunch of trans women to expose their quote-unquote “natural” voices. And the more I thought about that, the more wrong it felt for a lot of reasons… not that interesting, and not something that I wanted to do, because I felt like it would sensationalize physical things and focus on body stuff instead of actual identity.
And then, there’s a course that is offered at Ithaca College for free that is basically like trans voice training. They say it’s for trans people, but really only women take it, because what I learned years ago was that when a trans man transitions, his voice changes, because when you take testosterone, it causes your vocal chords to thicken, and your voice drops and gets more profound. And that does not go the other way. So I started to think of this as: when you think about trans women’s place in the world, you can change all of these things and go to all of this effort to do what’s called “passing,” and kind of assimilate into society, but there’s this one thing that you just can’t fix… or I wouldn’t use the word “fix”…
Alter?
Right. There’s this one pesky thing that none of us can really deal with. And what I found from the class… one of the women in the piece—the older woman in the pink sweater, her name is Dreia [Spies]—when we were filming her part, we talked about the class, because I met her there. She was asking me to explain the piece a little bit. I was like, well, I think the class is asking people to do something that is basically impossible. This is someone who’s taken the class repeatedly, and she was like, yeah, I think that’s basically true.
The class is designed to help you essentially pass, vocally?
Right, but what I found is that it does not… you know, it depends on the person. A different person, who I really wanted to be in the film, but she maybe just decided she didn’t want to, has one of the deepest speaking voices I’ve ever heard. I feel for her, because that’s really hard. But also, I started to think that the piece I needed to make was not that we all need to change our voices so that we can fit into society better, but that people need to change their definition of what they think a woman sounds like. This idea that it was trying to do something impossible is something that I was already doing in my music a lot. And from taking this class, there’s all of these exercises that started to remind me of pieces that I had already made before I ever thought about this class. [Laughs]
Oh, now that’s really curious and interesting.
The music in the trailer for the film, the kind of droney humming and sine-wave music, I actually made about six years ago. It was a test for a vocal piece that I never wrote, for a concert that a group I was in was doing in Austin, the Austin New Music Co-Op. We did a concert with a vocal group called Convergence…
A contemporary-classical kind of situation?
Right, right. The thing that ended up in Contralto I ended up releasing on a tape, just as its own piece. It’s a recording of myself multi-tracked four times, where all I’m doing is humming across my vocal range, so that one part is as low as I can possibly hum and one part is as high as I can hum. The highest part is kind of squeaky, it’s the only part that kind of wavers, and you can tell it was a little bit difficult. I wasn’t thinking about this in relation to trans- anything when I made the piece; I just made it. And there’s a lot of stuff like this where I can look back to 10, 20 years ago and be like: oh, that’s why I was thinking about this, and that’s why I was doing this.
Which tape includes the vocal piece?
It was called Casts. It’s on Astral Spirits. That tape ended up being sort of an odds-and-ends collection, just four pieces for something-plus-sine waves. There was one where I’m repeating a word over and over again, one for hi-hat, and one for vibraphone, and then this voice thing.
It’s interesting, [Contralto] is a convergence of all these things that I’ve been interested in, and they’re all just sort of happening at the same time. But it’s not explicit… I didn’t think of it as trying to do that. It just kind of happened on its own. I started to see that this was a link between all of these different things that I was doing. So that’s why I initially wanted to make the piece.
1. Emmylou HarrisStumble Into Grace (Nonesuch). Alt-country's matriarch makes unrequited love sound positively radiant.
2. Various artistsAMPLIFY 2002: balance (Erstwhile box set). European and Japanese improvisers intuitively fashion soundscapes of the future.
3. The Mars VoltaDe-Loused in the Comatorium (GSL/Strummer). Former emo-ers go for baroque, to thunderous, hallucinatory effect.
4. Lamb of GodAs the Palaces Burn (Prosthetic). Feral, confrontational metalists slash a topical vein.
5. Erin McKeownGrand (Nettwerk). McKeown's latest is typically literate and eclectic, but also irresistibly tuneful.
6. Dimmu BorgirDeath Cult Armageddon (Nuclear Blast). Norway's Satanic majesties say yes to excess, resulting in glorious, widescreen mayhem.
7. CursiveThe Ugly Organ (Saddle Creek). Tim Kasher spins self-loathing and revenge fucks into a gorgeous, wounded song cycle.
8. Tony MalabyAdobe (Free Lance). New York's fastest-rising tenorman hits his stride with a bluesy, joyously swinging trio.
9. David SylvianBlemish (Samadhi Sound). Assisted by Derek Bailey and Fennesz, Sylvian creates his most intimate, haunted music to date.
10. In da 'Pod Who needs a tenth album when you can download infectious hits like "Crazy in Love" (Beyoncé), "Hey Ya!" (OutKast), "Seven Nation Army" (the White Stripes), "Ignition (Remix)" (R. Kelly), "I Know" (Nas), "Cry Me a River" (Justin Timberlake)—and, yes, "In da Club" (50 Cent)?
2020 postscript: This list ran in the Music section of Time Out New York; a Classical & Opera list ran elsewhere, but I've not located a clipped copy yet. Among my then-teammates, Jay Ruttenberg cited "various demos" by Nellie McKay as his No. 1 pick; Leah Greenblatt favored Give Up by The Postal Service; K. Leander Williams opted for Passing Ships, by Andrew Hill; and music editor Mike Wolf selected Shivering King and Others, by Dead Meadow.
Leah and Mike converged with You Are Free, by Cat Power. Jay and Mike coincided with Haha Sound, by Broadcast. Erin McKeown appeared on Jay's list as well as mine. Those aside, there were no further overlaps among the 50-ish records we cited collectively. Quite a team we had. (Sorry about R. Kelly—even if it's still a slick tune.)
Many words have been used to describe the distinctive oeuvre of downtown guitarist-composer Elliott Sharp. Gentle and soothing, however, aren't among them. That's not to say that there isn't any subtlety in the pummeling calculus-core onslaught of Sharp's late, lamented band, Carbon, on in the vexing ferocity of his concert pieces. But in both of those settings, power and exuberance have played a far greater role than gentility and songfulness.
Admirers of Sharp's amplified din might wonder, upon hearing The Velocity of Hue, if the guitarist forgot to pay his Con Ed bill. Velocity's short, soft improvisations for solo acoustic guitar draw equally upon Blind Willie Johnson, John Fahey, and string-playing traditions from Korea, Africa and India. Sharp employs a gorgeous, warm-toned instrument modified with a dobro bridge, which affords him still more string to bend.
Even stripped down, his music is anything but simple. On tracks such as "The Face of Another" and "Nebel," he combines fingerpicking and delicate rubbing with slide and e-bow; deep, resonant sustained notes sing out elegantly over tactile chirps and pings. "Euwrecka" spins like an incandescent pinwheel, sending tiny harmonic sparks flying into the ether.
While it may seem like a radical departure at first, Velocity ultimately remains true to Sharp's careerlong investigation into the science of sound. If much of his previous work has found beauty in extremes of intensity, he reverses course here, creating a cumulative intensity out of extremes of beauty.—Steve Smith
2020 postscript: The Velocity of Hue remains available on CD direct from Emanem, here. The album can also be purchased in MP3 format on CD Baby, here, and is available for authorized streaming on YouTube, Spotify, and so on.
I wrote for the Village Voice only one time, very early in my professional career, at the tail end of the full-time jazz journalism stage that preceded my return to classical music after around five years of estrangement. The article was published Feb. 27, 2001, or so the website tells me. That I never returned to the Voice was not because of dissatisfaction on anyone's part; I was just getting too busy with my new line of work for Billboard.
There are plenty of things I still like about the article, a "Regulars" column on Tony Malaby in residence at the Internet Café, one of the crucial hangs in the mid-to-late '90s. I'm especially fond of the bit about Malaby and Tim Berne repeatedly bending at the waist while they played, "like the insatiable 'drinking birds' everyone's grandfather used to have." One detail I reported and enjoyed was cut by the editor: while Malaby and Berne were blowing fire, Wynton Marsalis was directly overhead, pontificating at length in the Ken Burns Jazz series on a TV with the sound turned off.
But there's also a bit in the article that embarrasses me so profoundly now that I've never shared it, either on this blog or on social media. It's a passing bit of casual snobbery meant to help evoke the setting, the inclusion of which now smells too much like a sexist jibe for me to make peace with it. I regret writing it, and I'm sorry it's out there as part of my permanent record.
Still, if today is the day the Village Voice died, then I suppose I can celebrate my one little, tiny piece of it. As for the rest: we live, we learn, we atone and try to do better.
The Tony Malaby column is here, but I'm going to quote the complete text after the page break… just in case.
After which came another response to a subsequent tweet on Friday, inspired by the first…
Diligent work at small jobs for low pay, at first. But honestly, I made some very good friends during my seven-year PR detour, and when I returned to journalism, some of those friends opened doors. I owe huge debts to Larry Blumenfeld, Bradley Bambarger, and K. Leander Williams. https://t.co/oCzxYmUAdh
To explain that last sentence: Larry Blumenfeld, during his fondly remembered tenure as editor of Jazziz, hired me to write a handful of small articles while I was working in P.R. – obviously I never wrote about anything remotely related to the clients I represented – and then brought me on as his assistant editor when BMG Classics, the last company at which I held a P.R. job, eliminated my department and laid off most of the staff in 2000. Thanks to Larry, I wasn't unemployed even for a weekend.
Bradley Bambarger brought me back to classical music journalism – and, really, to classical music, period – early in 2001, when he hired me to take over his weekly column about the classical recording industry at Billboard. And K. Leander Williams, who knew me mostly from the jazz world, but also was aware of my classical background and the new Billboard post, passed my name to the powers-that-were at Time Out New York when that magazine was looking for a classical-music editor, also in 2001.
I then added a brief thread later on Friday, expanding upon that second response tweet and taking a little more agency for my route to full-time employment in journalism.
Also! In what amounts to a mix of serendipity, tenacity & chutzpah, I “arrived” during peak years for blogs. So in addition to part- or full-time employment, I blogged frenetically. That gave potential editors and employers something to look at, unfiltered.
Having related employment helped immeasurably - I won’t deny the “legitimizing” effect. But because of blogging, some publications I’d tried unsuccessfully to crack for years eventually came and found me.
Personal blogs may not be as big a deal now, but as an editor I still scan them - and websites, and social media (including Twitter) - for promising new writers to hire.
So while I pretty much will never advocate for writing for someone else for no pay, I am a strong proponent of any aspiring/practicing writer putting her/his words out into the world by any means necessary - through one’s own channels.
Interview: Steven Wilson of Porcupine Tree The Volume blog Time Out New York Sept. 20, 2010 (link)
Founded in England at the onset of the 1990s, Porcupine Tree was originally passed off as a "forgotten" old-school prog-rock band. But yarn-spinning ceded to singer, guitarist and bandleader Steven Wilson's knack for reconciling vintage influences with contemporary sounds, while never forgetting the strength of a solid hook. The band's most recent album, The Incident, showcases a seamless 55-minute epic that combines Wilson's customary sophisticated arrangements and soaring melodies with the heavy crunch of progressive-metal bands like Opeth (led by Wilson's friend and collaborator Mikael Åkerfeldt). This Friday, Sept. 24, Porcupine Tree plays its biggest New York show to date at Radio City Music Hall. Via telephone from his home in England, Wilson spoke to TONY about the current prog-rock groundswell, the stifling qualities of contemporary life and Insurgentes, a gorgeously moody Lasse Hoile film spun off from Wilson's 2008 solo album of the same title. (The film screens at the IFC Center on Tuesday, September 21, followed by a Q&A with Wilson and Hoile.)
Time Out New York: Every now and then you hear about a progressive-rock resurgence, most recently when Emerson, Lake and Palmer headlined England's High Voltage Festival. Is this convenient media jargon, or is there truth to the notion?
Steven Wilson: I don't think it's ever really gone away, but there certainly is now a reembracing of ambitious, album-orientated rock music. That, for me, ultimately is what progressive music is. Into that, you can throw anything: Flaming Lips, Radiohead, Muse, Massive Attack. For me, these are all artists very much in the tradition of the original wave of so-called progressive bands. Let's not forget that none of those bands ever referred to themselves as progressive bands at the time; they were simply bands that had come out of the climate that the Beatles and the Beach Boys created with albums like Sgt. Pepper and Pet Sounds, for ambitious music not necessarily conforming to the three-minute pop-song format. Bands like Jethro Tull, Pink Floyd, ELP, Genesis, they had very little in common with each other except for that. They were trying to do something more conceptual, more ambitious with the album, and perhaps putting more focus—not all of them, I don't think Pink Floyd were, but some of them putting more focus on musicianship, perhaps, than '60s pop bands had. But even that, I think, is a moot point, because a band like Floyd weren't great musicians, and yet arguably were the most progressive of all of those bands.
You used to read stories about Roger Waters supposedly thanking David Gilmour for recording the bass parts that won Waters some big poll as "best bass player."
They weren't great musicians, but many people think of them as the kind of quintessential progressive rock band, in the sense that their music has proved to be much more timeless than most of the other progressive bands, mainly because there wasn't that emphasis on musicianship. It was purely an allegiance to doing something more creative with the album, the idea of the album as a musical continuum, a musical journey. Has that ever gone away completely? Certainly it had some dark ages in grunge and all those things. But I think that idea of the album as a musical journey as always been around, and it's probably more popular than ever before now—or not ever before, but since that original wave—because music has been liberated from commercial radio and MTV.
Liberated is an interesting choice of words.
What is most responsible for confining popular music to the three-minute pop song over the last 25 years is those two things. If you take those two things out of the loop, there's no need anymore to conform to the three-minute pop-song format, and I think that's one of the reasons why you've had a resurgence in music that doesn't necessarily think about commercial popular-music formats. The other reason is it's now possible to make music for a much smaller market and still survive on that by selling directly to fans through the Internet. So people don't have to think so much in commercial-radio terms in the way that perhaps they did in the '80s, certainly, which is when I started. You had to focus on getting things on the radio, because you weren't going to make a career otherwise. That's not true anymore. I think in that sense, a band like Rush from the '70s is the great model, a band that have just toured and made consistently quality albums, never really had big hit singles, never been fashionable, never been on MTV, and yet are bigger than ever. So I think they're really the model for what's going on right now.
Yet working outside of the commercial mainstream, Porcupine Tree is playing Radio City Music Hall this week. How did you achieve that kind of success without much obvious music-industry support?
One thing I realized very early on when I started making music as Porcupine Tree—which was in the early to mid-'90s, and I was just doing it as a solo thing at the time, doing it really for myself because I didn't think anyone else wanted to listen to it—is that there is always an audience out there for music with integrity, music that doesn't necessarily play by the commercial mainstream rules. In fact, some people are put off by what they perceive to be courting the mainstream. I consider myself one of those people. When I was growing up, I was always looking for the most willfully uncommercial music: Whether it was Captain Beefheart or Frank Zappa or King Crimson, that's what attracted me. And if I felt for a moment that one of those artists was beginning to try and court the mainstream, that was the beginning of the end for my relationship with that band. This is where we come back to Rush as being a great example. Floyd is another, Led Zeppelin...both bands that never really released singles throughout their heyday. And I think Porcupine Tree is definitely in that tradition of a band that have kept faith with the fan base by never scaring them off with this idea that we might go for the almighty dollar. So it's been very organic, it's been very slow, but it has been always on an upward trajectory; for 20 years now it's kept going up, and there aren't many artists that can say that. It's been a very slow curve, but nevertheless it's always gone in the right direction.
Steven Wilson; photograph by Diana Nitschke
Your lyrics, especially on your most recent records, seem to express a kind of melancholy, a distrust and unease with the status quo of the modern world. Is that a conscious thing for you?
Well, yes is the simple answer. Like anybody, I look around at the world that we live in, and I find it hard to be completely positive about everything that's going on. One of the things that I think has really hit home for me over the last five years, and over the last couple of records particularly, is how much being young has changed, even since I was young, which wasn't that long ago. I grew up in the '80s, and the example I give most people is the idea that I could go to my parents as a teenager, or even as a 10-year-old, and say I wanted my own TV would have been laughed out of the room. Now look at the situation: Kids not only have their own TVs, they have cell phones, iPods, Sony PlayStations, they have the Internet portal, which of course is a kind of gateway to...well, to everything.
The good, the bad and the ugly.
Yeah. I never heard people talking about kids being on prescription drugs when I was a kid. If your parents were having trouble with you, then that was a problem in the family, it wasn't because you had attention deficit disorder or one of these other catchphrases you hear. It's quite easy now to be—and here's the thing, this is the word that for me sums up everything—it seems very easy now to live your life without, capital letters, curiosity. And curiosity, I think, is the greatest, the most underrated human attribute. Without curiosity, you never look beyond the mainstream. You never look at what isn't being marketed to you, in terms of products, TV, film, music, whatever it is. And you never actually have the ambition to travel outside of your immediate vicinity. And these are all things that, for me, were so important as a kid. I couldn't wait to finish school, I couldn't wait to get out of my home town, I couldn't wait to travel. I couldn't wait to devour everything, all the books, all the music, all the cinema—the more obscure, the better. I wonder now with all of the things we've been talking about, the Internet particularly, whether that same sense of curiosity is already dead by the time kids leave high school. And that's what I write about. I know I'm generalizing; not everyone is like that, and I've met a lot of kids that are very passionate and very curious about life. But I was a big fan of Bret Easton Ellis, and for me he summed up the boredom of modern life better than anyone else.
What about the liberating potential of the Internet for a kid stuck in a dead-end small town in the Midwest, who pokes around and follows links and discovers things like, well, Porcupine Tree?
Well, absolutely, and this is where there's no black and white. In many respects the Internet is the great liberator. Unfortunately, the way I perceive it, and the way I wrote about it in Fear of a Blank Planet particularly, was that you have this incredible tool for knowledge and information, and 99 percent of us use it to download pornography and music. Again, I'm generalizing, but that seems to be the way the human race goes. The other kind of symptom of this for me is I grew up with great music journalism. I was reading music journalists and buying music papers: people who could actually enthuse you about music in the way that they wrote articulately, informatively, with context and all that stuff. Now I can go on the Internet and find a million reviews of my latest record—literally a million reviews of Porcupine Tree! [Laughs]—and it's just noise. It's just, "this album sucks," "this is the best album they've ever done," "this is the worst album they've ever done." It's just people expressing opinions as fact, without any real kind of insight or understanding. And that, also, I find a bit depressing. So I guess I'm old-fashioned in the respect that I find myself feeling slightly alienated from the modern world. Go back 15 years and you had OK Computer, which was about the same thing. Go back another 15 years and you had Dark Side of the Moon, very much about the same thing. So I'm not new in kind of feeling, getting to a certain point in my life and feeling that sense of alienation and confusion of being in this modern world.
I used to cut out and save old print reviews and articles from Rolling Stone and Musician, about bands like Public Image Ltd. and Joy Division, who weren't covered anywhere else.
Exactly. Let's just say that a kid is going to go out and discover Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica on the Internet today. Now, this was one of my Holy Grails when I was a kid, because I would hear about this album in kind of legendary terms, and it took me months to hunt it down. By the time I found that record—and I actually found it as an expensive American import, and I had to spend a lot of my pocket money to buy it—I had been searching for it for months. And I had such an incredible investment in terms of time, energy and money that even though I hated the record the first time I heard it [Laughs]—and the second time, and the third time, and then the fourth time it began to make some kind of sense—you can bet your bottom dollar I was going to get anything and everything I could out of that record before I gave up on it. If a kid wants to hear Trout Mask Replica now, he can go on the Internet and he can find it effortlessly, and probably download the whole thing in a few moments. Has he got the same investment of time and energy and money in that record? No, he has none of those things. So that likelihood is if it doesn't hit the first time—and as a p.s. here I would say most of the records that I love the most I didn't like the first time—if he doesn't like it the first time, is he going to persevere with it? Probably not. I'm not saying the Internet is a bad thing; it is progress, and it's great that people can go and find Trout Mask Replica easily. But at the same time, also, in the back of my mind I'm thinking it's too easy. It's too easy now to find music, and it's therefore too easy to dismiss music, particularly music that doesn't hit you the first time you hear it.
Let's talk about Insurgentes, because you're participating in a screening while you're here in New York. How did that project get rolling, and how did it become such an elaborate multimedia concept?
I'll try and cut a long story short. It basically came about because I decided I wanted to make a solo record. Now, early Porcupine Tree were de facto solo records anyway, so it's not the first time I've made a record on my own. What made this project different, what made me think this is the first time I want to actually put my own name to an album, is that it was the first time I felt that I wanted to try and incorporate all of my musical interests into one record. I grew up listening to bands like the Cure, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance—these are the bands that I actually grew up with, and I always had these things in my taste, too. And I always loved industrial music as well: I listened to Throbbing Gristle, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire. And shoegaze bands like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. All these things were part of my musical world, which people had never really heard before in my own music. So I wanted to create this record which kind of incorporated for the first time all the aspects of my musical personality. And the other thing I decided to do, because making a record usually just means holing up in a studio and looking at the same four walls for three months, I actually said to myself, I don't want to do that; I want to travel the world and make this record. And as soon as I made that decision I thought, great to take a filmmaker with me and document this process.
We went to Mexico for a few weeks; literally, we made it up as we went along. We went to Israel, to Japan, to America, Scandinavia, meeting musicians, writing on the road while I was traveling, being inspired and making this record. But what was very interesting is how the film went far beyond just being a making-of documentary. It became—partly, I think, because as you can tell I'm quite opinionated about the music industry today and I have a lot to say about it—it partly became a document of what it means to be a working musician in the music industry today. I don't mean like a Michael Jackson or a U2; I mean someone at the kind of grassroots level with a small but dedicated fan base. How do you reconcile download culture? How do you reconcile the death of commercial product and the death of record companies? How do you reconcile that all with being a working musician in the early 21st century? So there's a lot of talking about that in the film, talking about download culture, American Idol, the packaging of records these days, the resurgence in vinyl. And also talking to other musicians, and in one case a record producer: We spoke to Trevor Horn, who was a big influence on me. He's a guy that's always made great-sounding records; how does he feel about his records being compressed to shit, basically? How does he feel about the fact that 90 percent of the people listen to music now as MP3s on iPods, on teeny little iPhone headphones? So we talk about all those things in the movie, with other musicians. And so it took on a life of its own; it became much more than a film about me. It became a film about being a musician in this time.
Extra: Check out the video for "Harmony Korine" from Steven Wilson's Insurgentes, filmed by director Lasse Hoile.
Vanessa Rossetto erased de kooning +rocinante Bandcamp; DL only
Originally published by National Sawdust Log, May 5, 2017
Everything that’s erased leaves its trace of its passage behind: a point as familiar to the manuscript recyclers of antiquity for whom the term palimpsest was coined to modern-day digital data-recovery sleuths. We learn via firsthand accounts of concert tapes by John Coltrane and Albert Ayler wiped clean for reuse, and become acquainted with vintage Doctor Who episodes bulk-erased by the BBC through muzzy snapshots of fuzzy TV screens.
Common to those examples is the idea that deletion rarely amounts to a positive thing. But on erased de kooning, one of two recent recordings composer Vanessa Rossetto posted on her Bandcamp site May 4, an act of bulk erasure results in an absorbing new piece surprisingly rich in ghostly associations. An even newer composition issued at the same time, rocinante, is immediately notable not for an act of removal, but for the return after several years of Rossetto’s viola to a position of foregrounded prominence in her work; still, hovering throughout the piece is a sensation that thematic signifiers might be hidden just out of reach.
Rossetto, long active in Austin and now based in New York, entered the public sphere in 2008 with a trio of self-released albums in generic black packages: imperial brick,misafridal, and whoreson in the wilderness, all on her Music Appreciation label. Released more or less simultaneously, the discs provide a tightly compressed view of a stylistic evolution, from intense, tight-focus scrabbling on viola to a broader, more layered, and more nuanced approach to evoking a holistic sound ecology in which her playing was one part, her listening another. (Matthew Revert, an Australian composer-performer, novelist, and graphic artist who has worked closely with Rossetto, lays out her back story with exacting detail and a keen ear in a 2013 article for the web journal Surround.)
On the strength of those discs, and especially for a brilliant 2009 release, dogs in english porcelain, which built on the original trilogy’s foundation, Rossetto generated substantial buzz among followers of electroacoustic improvisation and field recording – a paradox, considering she seldom improvised live onstage, and treated field recordings less as inviolate artifacts than as raw material for cut-ups and assemblages. Rossetto told one interviewer after another that despite her lack of formal musical study (she trained as a painter), she considers herself a composer, one happiest left alone to contemplate and manipulate recordings retrieved from her routine ambling.
Regardless of her lack of academic credentials, Rossetto has proved her compositional acumen repeatedly with each new project she’s released. In particular, three limited-edition vinyl LPs to date on the Kye label – mineral orange (2010), exotic exit (2012), and whole stories (2014) – established her as a sound artist of astounding efficacy: one able to direct the ear from one detail or vector to another as efficiently as a seasoned film director leads the eye, while also situating discrete elements within a teeming soundscape exactingly designed and intimately nuanced.
At any given moment a listener can feel swept up within a vast panorama, or privy to someone else’s personal conversation. Moments later, Rossetto might bring a random noise (or her viola) uncomfortably close; execute a jump cut too sharp for routine perception to navigate; or foreground some bit of noisy detritus that reminds you explicitly: This is a recording. In duo projects issued with Revert, Kevin Parks, and Lee Patterson, she has proved her techniques are amenable to collaboration.
Rossetto’s impetus to create erased de kooning – its title a reference to Robert Rauschenberg’s famous 1953 conceptual art piece Erased de Kooning Drawing – was an invitation from Casey Anderson in 2015 to contribute to the Experimental Music Yearbook, using only past contributions to that annual series as her raw materials. She downloaded all previous submissions back to 2009, recordings by artists such as Christian Wolff, Olivia Block, Taku Sugimoto, Peter Ablinger, Julia Holter, and Blevin Blectum (Bevin Kelly), then manually erased them and worked with what was left. Rossetto explains her approach thusly:
It occurred to me to build the piece out of the interstices – the unperformed parts of pieces and the silences between deliberate acts. … As in any erasure, complete eradication to the point of absolute vacuum is not possible – marks may remain that prove unusually indelible and in yet other spots the hand of the remover may prove too forceful and rend uneven holes in the plane of the paper.
What resulted is an expansive aural terrain littered with tiny scrapes, pings, rumples, and hisses, punctuated liberally with recognizable sounds from musical instruments, electronic implements, and the occasional human voice. The background ambience shifts as often as the foregrounded details, from antiseptic silence to the shush and hum of a voluminous space. The piece feels quietly chaotic, but never merely random, and the continual ebb and flow moves at a pleasingly narcotic pace: a leisurely parade of fleeting sensations, with the emotional gravity of memories misplaced or cast off. It’s surely because of that last quality that the overall impact of erased de kooning is not one of absence, but of presence.
The other newly released project, rocinante, marks a fresh turn in Rossetto’s compositional and performative output. At just over 60 minutes in length, the piece is her most extended creation on record – “also known as ‘long piece,'” her Bandcamp page acknowledges. What’s apparent immediately is that Rossetto’s viola has returned to center stage, foregrounded to an extent unheard since her first few self-released albums, and joined here by a newcomer, the cello. It’s not uncommon to hear two or more stringed implements simultaneously vying for space among the other sound objects she collages into the mix.
As ever, Rossetto uses her string instruments chiefly as noise generators, producing hisses, pops, scrapes, and rumbling beats far more frequently than mellow bowed tones. But the handmade quality of those extramusical sounds gives her music a relatable sensation: a feeling of hands being used, choices being made in real time well before manipulation on a notebook computer’s screen occurs.
Given the album’s title, one might presume a connection to Cervantes and his iconic knight, Don Quixote, rider of the titular steed. That supposition is borne out by a quotation on the Bandcamp page:
“a name, to his thinking, lofty, sonorous, and significant of his condition as a hack before he became what he now was, the first and foremost of all the hacks in the world”
Whether the reference extends to Richard Strauss, in whose symphonic poem Don Quixote the viola and cello also play starring roles, is unclear, though complete coincidence is unlikely. No musical affinity to Strauss is evident, yet there’s no denying this music is Rossetto’s plushest and most sensual, in its way. Again, she creates and sustains a sensation of forward motion without conventional architecture or obvious thematic signposts.
The music moves and morphs at a pace all its own, unfolding with mystery and intensity. A gradual metamorphosis that transpires over a nearly 20-minute central span starting 16 minutes in, wherein a minor, ticklish metallic buzz mixed deep into the background slowly swells to become an insistent and then dominant feature, and then recedes to be overcome by equally urgent wooden tones, is brilliantly handled, and just one example of the long-sighted processes that Rossetto develops over the course of this rich, engrossing piece.
Equally effective is the element of surprise she enacts by shutting down the aforementioned chain of events abruptly and completely just before the 36-minute mark, and then sustaining a minute of silence – a gesture familiar among Wandelweiser composers like Michael Pisaro, whose work might be a useful touchstone in assessing rocinante – before building anew from gently sustained drones.
Whether rocinante marks a new direction for Rossetto or is revealed in time to be a distinguished outlier, it is a marvelous affirmation of her versatility, growing assurance, and capacity for fresh intrigue.
The early 1980s were a period of transition for the avant-garde fringe in New York. The loft scene – the days in which Ornette Coleman's hom on Prince Street and Sam Rivers' Studio Rivbea provided workshops for experimenters to develop their art –was drawing to a close, and the arrival of the Knitting Factory and its explosive impact on the Downtown scene was still a few years away, it fell to the artists themselves to create new opportunities.
As chronicled in Ebba Jahn's 1984 [sic – 1985, actually] documentary, Rising Tones Cross (just released on video), two such motivated visionaries were bassist William Parker and dancer Patricia Nicholson. The film centers around the Sound Unity Festival, a precursor to the couple's current Lower East Side bash, the now four-year-old Vision Festival.
It was German bassist Peter Kowald, on an extended sojourn in New York that included a hefty formative role in Sound Unity, who convinced Jahn to make a film about the upstart festival. "It was clear to me that I wanted to have a German protagonist and an American protagonist," Jahn says. Her friend Kowald was the German of choice, naturally, but America's representative had yet to be confirmed. "Originally, I had thought of Ornette Coleman. But on the day I arrived, first thing in the morning I met Charles Gayle, the most un-famous saxophonist at the time in New York City." That meeting, combined with a choice encounter with a cameraman who was working on Shirley Clark's Coleman documentary, Made in America, led Jahn to shift her focus "from the most famous avant-garde saxophonist to the most un-famous."
Instead of simply a compilation of festival footage – though performances by musicians like Jemeel Moondoc, Don Cherry, and Peter Brötzmann abound in the film – Rising Tones Cross was intended to be a tool for music education. "For many people who saw the film in Germany, it was the first time they ever heard this type of music," she says. "They said in the beginning they had difficulty. But after a while, they could, all of a sudden, hear it 'click' in their ears, and something opened up."
To help facilitate this reaction, Jahn put the most difficult music at the end of the film, easing the audience into it gradually. She also included a number of scenes intended to dispel common myths about free jazz. For example, when Brötzmann's strapping 11-piece ensemble – boasting a tenor phalanx comprised of the leader, Gayle, David S. Ware, and Frank Wright – seems to be blowing chaotically onstage, Jahn's camera pans across Brötzmann's diagrammatic score to reveal an extraordinary amount of careful detail, planning, and scripting – the architecture girding the maelstrom.
And having overcome an initial distrust and some reluctance to take part in the film, the enigmatic Gayle is revealed to be affable, erudite, and quite well-versed in jazz history, a far cry from his dark public persona and stage presence. "He was perceived as a philosopher in Germany," says Jahn.
Now that the film is available on video – through Jahn's Website (http://members.aol.com/FilmPals/store.htm) and through NorthCountry Distribution – Jahn looks forward to her film reaching new viewers. "I would like it to be in colleges," she says, "where people learn about jazz. I think it's a good tool for people wanting to learn a little bit about this music. Nobody else has made a film about this music. And at the end of the century, the time is probably right for it."
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The Vision Festival, now in its 18th season, will be held June 12-16 at Roulette. Rising Tones Cross was issued on DVD by the FMP label in 2005; I have no idea whether it's still available, but you can watch the first 26 minutes of it here. Below, the Peter Brötzmann scene I described in the article, mistakenly labeled as the Vision Festival (which was launched in 1996).
