Who Is Colin Stetson?

The only logical thing to post after posting Bendik Giske is Colin Stetson.  

Stetson's saxophone technique covers advanced circular breathing, multiphonics, altissimo, microtones, reed vocalizations, percussive valve-work, clicking keys, and growling. Stetson has performed and recorded with dozens of artists, and if you've ever seen a band decide to experiment with horns (St. Vincent and David Byrne), chances are excellent Stetson was in the line up. Stetson has also played with Tom Waits, Arcade Fire, TV on the Radio, Feist, Bon Iver, Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Sinéad O'Connor, The National, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Animal Collective, LCD Soundsystem, My Brightest Diamond, Angélique Kidjo, Kevin Devine, Bill Laswell, Evan Parker, Mats Gustafsson, and Anthony Braxton. The Music Desk is sure we're leaving out lots more.  

His recordings have also been featured in numerous films and TV episodes, and he has also produced original scores for a wide variety of films, where his signature sound has been enhanced by various arrangements and instrumentations. The overall effect led New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane to describe Stetson's score to the film Hereditary as having been seemingly "scored for violins, percussion, a humpback whale, and bats."

Who Is Bendik Giske?

Yesterday, the Music Desk posted five songs from it's Top 10 list of albums of 2019 (so far), having already posted the top four from that list earlier this year.  So with nine of the ten albums posted, it brings up the obvious question - who is Bendik Giske, the 10th artist on the list?

Born in Oslo and splitting much of his adolescence between there and Bali, Giske took up the saxophone at the age of 12. Over the years, he began to push the boundaries of what he could accomplish creatively with the instrument. 

“I consider myself a queer performance artist—the queer perspective is always there,” he states. “In gay culture, we have the terms ‘top’ and ‘bottom,’ with ‘bottom’ referencing an act of surrender and trust. This act of surrender gives you a different perspective on how you relate to the world—how you apply yourself and experience things.” 

The album Surrender was recorded at Oslo’s Emanuel Vigeland Mausoleum.  To create the pieces, Giske and producer Amund Ulvestad placed tiny microphones all over the saxophonist’s instrument and body, right down to being able to capture his breathing between notes.  We don't have technical notes beyond that, but to our ears it sounds like looped layers of circular breathing, with the sax's key pads providing a kind of percussion.
 
Surrender wasn't included in yesterday's list merely because it's so different from everything else on the list that it either wouldn't have gotten noticed and given the attention that it deserves, or else it would have overshadowed the rest and kept all the rest from being noticed.   Here's the video for the song Adjust:

AOTY Contenders

As we said last month, 2019 is shaping up to be a great year for music, and February is not even over yet and we already have a strong list of Top 10 AOTY contenders for 2019. See the sidebar.

We've already covered Better Oblivion Community Center, Vampire Weekend and Panda Bear, not to mention the triumphant return of Sharon van Etten (Comeback Kid might already be our Song of the Year). Here are some samples from some of the other albums on the list.

We'll start with Florence + The Machine, and if you can't hear why this song made the list, then the Music Desk simply doesn't understand you. Starting with a bluesy drum and piano intro, the three-minute track lays down some gospel licks as it builds into an aggressive rock anthem that takes Welch and the band back to their Kiss With A Fist roots.

Assume Form may or may not be James Blake's best record (many are arguing that it's his worst, but time will tell), but even an off-pace offering from Blake is still good enough to enhance this year's list.  Here's Don't Miss It, a heartbreak ballad that wouldn't have sounded out of place on previous Blake albums. The lyrics are kind of lame, though - it sounds better than it reads - so it's surprising that he chose to promote the song with a lyrics video.

If those first two cuts were too mainstream for you, first, get over yourself and second, here's Atlanta's Deerhunter sounding surprisingly upbeat, especially for a song titled Death in Midsummer while also being just as quirky and odd as ever.

The new Juliana Hatfield record not only sounds so effortlessly cool, from the fuzzed out guitar to the girl-pop chorus, but it's also amazing that Hatfield can still sound so relevant after putting out records for over 25 years (Hey Babe came out in 1992).  The Duxbury native (and one-semester BU student) has definitely got that whole career-longevity thing down.

And speaking of effortlessly cool, check out Toro y Moi.  Freelance might challenge Comeback Kid for Song of the Year (uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah). Once that groove gets under your skin, you don't want the song to ever end (earworm warning).

Yes, boys and girls, we're off to a good start.  Even if the year doesn't bring us anything more, we can still check 2019 off as a good year.

And THAT'S Why They Call Him "Superman"

Cats and Dogs

Hocket(ing)

We would be remiss in our ongoing discussion of innovative vocal techniques if we didn't bring up the New York band Dirty Projectors.  The band is the project of Yale-educated musician David Longstreth, who most notably uses a trio of female vocalists to help him with his songs.  The band uses a variety of unusual harmonies and chords, and I'm sure a music theorist can explain what they do a lot better than we can, but a great explanation of hocketing, one of the many tools in their musical arsenal, was provided by writer Sasha Frere Jones in The New Yorker back in 2009:

Longstreth employs a method for arranging voices known as hocketing, which stretches back to the work of thirteenth-century French monks. To hocket, you split up a melody or a chord and assign the notes to different voices. (It’s like an advanced version of those Sesame Street segments where Muppets individually say the syllables of a word and then combine to say the entire word together.) When voices begin to hocket (the word is related to “hiccup”), the sound starts to flicker and pop, as if the chords and melodies were multiplying like soap bubbles. (Hocketing is the mirror ball of arranging.) The effect is most striking live. There’s your band, standing still, but the music is rotating all over the stage.

Sometime around 2011, we were fortunate enough to hear Dirty Projectors perform Beautiful Mother live during their show at Variety Playhouse.  The video above, or any recording for that matter, can't quite capture the full effect of hearing hocketing and the ensuing harmony performed live.  The shimmering effect of  the sound waves and harmonic interference patterns is almost like a tangible sheet of sound being unfurled over the heads of the audience.  It's astonishing, and you immediately want to hear it again and fortunately the band is generous enough that they hit it three times in the song, but like all good magicians, they don't repeat the trick enough times to let it become mundane.  It's one of our all-time favorite live-music experiences, and we've never heard anyone quite match that particular feat of magic since.

As Frere Jones points out, hocketing goes back to 13th-Century French monks and certainly wasn't invented by Longstreth and Dirty Projectors.  Nor were they the first to introduce it to modern music.  Here's American treasure (and guest Zen Mountain Monastery singing teacher) Meredith Monk's 1990 composition, Hocket, performed live at Judson Church in NYC.

Like a lot of other things in rock 'n' roll music, hocketing wasn't just adapted from other musical traditions but it was also amplified and played faster and louder.  Dirty Projectors' hocketing is done a lot quicker than by chamber-music vocalists (Dirty Projector band rehearsals are apparently quite long, Frere Jones notes), but one of the many things we like about the Monk composition is that the languid pace breaks the process down and lets you observe just how the process actually works (the magician allows you to see the sleight of hand). What we like about the Dirty Projectors' version is that they whip the technique out in a flash and instantly amaze the audience with the flickering and popping sheets of sounds shimmering over their heads (just listen to the spontaneous, mid-song cheers and applause).   

In all fairness, though, Longstreth is equally candid and also shows how the trick is done.  Here's a 2009 interview with Longstreth, and to demonstrate exactly what hocketing is and how it works, he brings Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian onstage with him, and starting around the 7:25 mark, they break the technique down for all the world to see how it's done.  What concerns us here is that the explanation is not unlike that of the juggler who once tried to explain how he did it, and then having explained, wasn't able to juggle again.

Big Ears scorecard:  Meredith Monk will be performing this year, Dirty Projectors won't.

New Dreams, New Masters

A Pulitzer finalist, Doris Duke Artist Award winner, and Guggenheim fellow, Wadada Leo Smith, the son of an early Delta blues guitarist, is a national treasure.  After working as an integral member of Anthony Braxton’s early ensembles, Smith applied his unique trumpet tone, somewhere between the moan of a blues guitar and the ascendance of the human voice, to his debut album, Creative Music - 1. He has since composed for and improvised with ensembles of almost every imaginable size, from small bands to orchestras, and developed his own beautiful and specific system of graphic notation, dubbed Ankhrasmation, to the point that the scores have themselves become the stuff of museum installations. 

A fan of monolithic, focused works, Smith released Ten Freedom Summers, a four-disc ode to the Civil Rights movement, as well as the Yo, Miles! series of LPs, both a tribute to and a reinterpretation of songs from Miles Davis' electric phase. With America’s National Parks, Smith composed a suite inspired by the scenic splendor, the historic legacy, and the political controversies associated with the country’s public landscapes. 

The spark for the project came from Ken Burns’ 12-hour documentary series The National Parks: America’s Best Idea.  "The idea that Ken Burns explored in that documentary was that the grandeur of nature was like a religion or a cathedral," Smith said. "I reject that image because the natural phenomenon in creation, just like man and stars and light and water, is all one thing, just a diffusion of energy. My focus is on the spiritual and psychological dimensions of the idea of setting aside reserves for common property of the American citizens." 

The 28-page score for America’s National Parks was composed for his Golden Quintet. Pianist Anthony Davis, bassist John Lindberg and drummer Pheeroan akLaff are joined by cellist Ashley Walters, affording the composer and bandleader new melodic and coloristic possibilities. "The cello as a lead voice with the trumpet is magnificent," Smith says, "but when you look at the possibilities for melodic formation with the trumpet, the cello, the piano and the bass, that’s paradise for a composer and for a performer." 

While these preserved landscapes offer the inspiration of powerful natural beauty, Smith’s always open-minded view of the world leads him to find that same inspiration wherever he is. "Every concrete house is from nature," he says. "Every plastic airplane that flies 300 people across the ocean comes out of nature. Every air conditioner conditions a natural piece of air. I think that the human being is constantly enfolded in organic nature and constructed nature, so I’m constantly inspired, inside the house or outside the house."

At this year's Big Ears Festival, Smith will play two sets: one titled Reflections and Meditations on Monk, a tribute to Thelonious, and the other a performance of his LP Divine Love, a 1978 set that had the now-departed trumpeters Kenny Wheeler and Lester Bowie joining Smith on trumpet. 

Look Who's Back!

Charon, that dark chariot of death, once again darkens our driveway.  The car that tried to kill us by blowing out a tire and brakes while moving at a fast speed and left us stranded in the high-velocity HOV lane for a harrowing 25 minutes, has been repaired and is now sitting back in the driveway.

It's almost as if the car wants us dead.  Some eighteen months ago, in a morbid sort of thought experiment, we fantasized about the various ways which, if we were so inclined (which we weren't then and aren't now), we might commit suicide.  For some reason, all of them involved our car, so we decided to name it Charon for the ferryman in Greek mythology who transported the dead to the underworld.

Speaking of Greek mythology, we learned while playing the Hellenistic video game Assassin's Creed Odyssey that the ancient Greeks thought that when one sneezed, it was an omen from the gods.  A sneeze is an involuntary action, and since you didn't initiate it, it must have been the gods that did. We haven't played long enough yet to learn what the Greeks thought about other bodily functions, such as hiccups, burps, and farts.  Burps and farts seem to us to be due more to what and how we ate - eating too fast might produce a burp and eating beans famously results in the other bodily function.  But hiccups seem to us to be particularly supernatural - a bad case of hiccups feels more like a curse, some sort of demonic possession, than a consequence of improper dietary actions.

But anyway, the Greeks, at least with regard to sneezing, considered the involuntary reaction to be something initiated by the gods.  Many indigenous religions hold anything that can't be explained by their primitive understanding of nature to the actions of supernatural beings - thunder and lightning, the phases of the moon, infant mortality, rainbows, earthquakes, etc.  I understand (or more likely, misunderstand) that Shinto, the native religion of Japanese, is almost entirely about unexplained phenomena - anything out of the ordinary, anything weird, falls under the provenance of Shinto.

So it interests us that many people, upon hearing about our adventures in the HOV lane on Monday night, tell us that we weren't hit or killed because god or a guardian angel or some other divine being must have been watching out for us.  It couldn't have been mere luck - the statistical probability that, say, only 1 out of 100 cars wouldn't have been able to get out of our way in time meant that we would survive for some limited time (apparently at least 25 minutes) before getting struck. No, it can't be explained away and rationalized so easily, so some ascribe our survival to the will of the gods, just like a Greek ascribed a sneeze, or a Bushman a thunderbolt, or a Shinto priest a strange dream.

But the amusing part is that while they assert that our survival had to have been divinely ordained, the fact that our tire suddenly and unexpectedly just blew out was merely happenstance, shit luck, one of those things that just happens.  It couldn't be that god blew out our tire to punish us or teach us or to simply scare the living shit out of us.  That part was just bad luck. Or auto mechanics.  God only gets invoked to explain why we weren't killed, not why we were almost killed.

Maybe god simply didn't like us anymore, had enough of us and was trying to kill us, and, incompetent old doddard that he is, failed even at that simple task.  He blew out a tire, directed a chunk of the rubber to fly off and rupture the brake line, but then couldn't distract any oncoming motorists enough to not notice us and collide with our disabled vehicle.  Maybe god's just a sick bastard and, bored out of his eternal mind, simply wanted to mess with us just to see what would happen.

No, no one ever supposes that (at least not out loud, at least not to us).  They can look at half the incident and see science and mechanics and probability, but those are all forgotten in the second half and the supernatural gets invoked.

We find that interesting.  People are strange.

Jonathan Richman at Eddie's Attic, Atlanta, February 19, 2019

Well, Monday night was certainly intense.  So what does one do on a Tuesday night after spending the previous evening staring down death in the rear-view mirror for 25 minutes?  Why, go to a Jonathan Richman show, of course.

We first saw Jonathan perform live sometime in the mid-80s.  There was something so joyful and life-affirming and honest about the set that we made a vow to ourselves then and there that if were ever again in the same town in which Jonathan was performing, we'd go see him. If we've ever broken that vow, it's only because we didn't know he would be playing that night.  

Last night's show was at Eddie's Attic, an old cabaret-style club, so of course there were two show - an early 7:30 set and a "late" 9:30 set. We stayed for them both.

Jonathan's constantly evolving style now has him as likely to be playing a flamenco passage on guitar or singing in Spanish, French, or Italian as playing any of his older, 80s or 90s songs.  In fact, come to think of it, it's been quite a while since we've heard him play Pablo Picasso or I Was Dancing In the Lesbian Bar.  But his songs are still as quirky and charming as ever, full of references to Boston and Fenway and the Gardner Museum, as well as his career-long themes of adolescent love and the quest for personal identity.  It's just that he now peppers in equal numbers of references to Rumi, Spanish wines, abandonment of ego, and, um, one new song from the point of view of a dog in the pound.

One of the interesting thing about watching both sets last night is it gave us a glimpse of his creative process.  The set lists weren't the same - at least not the same order - and like a jazz musician improvising on a theme, even when he did repeat a song, he did it differently, with different lyrics in places and different commentary to the audience, a large part of his set.  His sets are now almost equal parts stage banter backed by music, written songs, and improvisations on written songs. 

As he has for at least the past 15 or 20 years, he played acoustic guitar backed only by drummer Tommy Larkins, with whom he's developed a near-telepathic rapport on stage.

Here's a well-shot fan video of a Brooklyn set by Jonathan from a year ago that's pretty indicative of his current style, and he did perform this song last night, even including the audience call-and-response.

I don't know where this current tour takes him next, but if it comes to your town, go see him - he's an American treasure and he probably won't be touring forever, so catch him while you can.

We're Alive. We Survived. We Were Rescued.

Not to sound too melodramatic, but we're lucky to be posting this.  We're lucky to be alive.

Last night, driving home from work, southbound on Interstate I-85, approaching the notorious interchange with the Perimeter Highway I-285, an intersection known to almost everyone in Atlanta as "spaghetti junction," our left rear tire suddenly blew out.  As the tire disintegrated, one or more of the shards of rubber managed to rupture the brake line, so we were suddenly also without brakes.

This happened as we, along with all of the other traffic, were zooming along at well over 70 mph. Because we were approaching spaghetti junction, we had moved over toward the left lanes, where traffic moves even faster, to avoid the backed-up line of cars in the right lanes that were exiting 85 for I-285.  And then suddenly we were riding on our rim and had no brakes.

Fortunately, the cars behind us saw what happened and fell a few extra lengths behind us, and didn't rear-end us or otherwise collide with our suddenly disabled vehicle. But between all of the other traffic as well as the backed up line of cars trying to exit the highway, we couldn't pull over to the right to get off the road, and instead drifted to the left and eventually stopped along the left-side median.

Except it wasn't a median.  It was the HOV lane, separated from the opposite, northbound lane by a concrete Jersey barrier.  Our car was broke down in the ultra-high speed HOV lane and we couldn't get over to safety.  We just had to rely on the on-coming traffic seeing that we weren't moving in time to move over and pass us on the right. 

We put our blinkers on and called 911, and the dispatcher told us to sit tight and wait for a rescue vehicle to arrive.  So we hung up and waited.  And waited.  And waited.

We spent what seemed like the longest 15 minutes of our life stuck there like a sitting duck, watching with horror through our rear-view mirror as car after car came hurtling toward us and swerved just in time to avoid hitting us.  Occasionally, the cars couldn't get over quick enough to pass us because of other traffic in the next lane, but fortunately they were able to come to a stop before colliding with us.  We probably felt safest when there was at least one car behind us, because that one car would absorb the initial blow if the next car didn't see them in time.

After 15 minutes, we called 911 again, and said we're gonna die here if someone doesn't come along soon.  We were told that help was on its way, there was nothing more they could do, and so we waited some more.

Given enough time, one car would eventually fail to notice us in time, or not get over quick enough, and sooner or later we would get hit.  It was just a matter of time.  Not if, but when.  Plus it was starting to get dark, which wasn't improving our prospects any.  But after another infernally slow 10 more minutes, we saw a minor miracle in the rear-view mirror: the traffic had stopped and suddenly no more cars were coming.  After a moment or two, we saw why: a group of multiple emergency responders had formed a phalanx of rescue vans and ambulances, creating a slow-moving wall across the lanes of traffic and keeping the rush-hour traffic behind them.  After 25 minutes of sitting there wondering which of the many on-coming cars was going to kill us, our rescue had finally appeared.  

With the traffic behind us stopped, they ordered us to drive over to the right median where it was safer.  We did, cringing the whole way at the sound of the rim grinding against asphalt, and used the emergency brake to stop.  The rescue squad jacked up the car and replaced the blown-out tire with the spare, gave us the phone number of a towing company, and then took off, leaving us still shaken but in a much safer location, and with at least four working wheels if no brakes.

However, the towing company we called said they were too busy and couldn't help us, and gave us the number of another firm.  That other firm was also too busy, or not interested, or whatever, and told us to try a third firm.  It wasn't until we got to literally the seventh firm before we were offered any help.  The seventh firm couldn't tow us just then either, but they at least offered to come out and follow us in a van with the flashers on so we could drive off the highway and park the car in a safe spot so they could tow it in the morning. 

After another 30-minute wait, they showed up and we drove on the spare tire but with no brakes about a half mile to the next exit, riding mostly in the breakdown lane/left median, and rolled into a Quick Trip gas station and managed to park the car.  We exchanged our car keys for a business card and a promise to tow the car in the morning, and we took an Uber car home from there.

We survived!  Given enough additional time broken down out there in the HOV lane, we would surely have been hit, and while we might have survived the collision, grievous bodily harm would have been inevitable.   Whatever damage had occurred to our car seemed trivial in comparison to what could have been.

We filed a claim with our insurance company this morning, and they in turn had Enterprise come by to pick us up and rent us a car (pictured above) for the duration of the repair.  The towing company was true to their word and this morning took the car over to the dealer, where it's still waiting on an evaluation and assessment of the damages.  

But we're alive.  We survived.  We were rescued. That's more important than the condition of our car.

Impermanence is swift, and life and death is the great matter.  What was here today is gone tomorrow, and that includes our left rear tire, but apparently not our life, at least not yet.   

DakhaBrakha Today

Oh, look.  A video of a performance by the Free Ukrainian band DakhaBrakha from February 2018 (almost exactly one year ago).  Speaking as we've been about unusual vocal techniques and harmonies, and non-traditional musical heritages, it's inevitable that DakhaBrakha will come up in the conversation.  We don't know anything about this performance, because all the commentary on YouTube is in Ukrainian and uses the Cyrillic alphabet.  We don't know where this performance was, but all the masks hanging on the wall makes the venue look like Game of Thrones' House of Black and White. But despite the lack of any English-language explanation, it appears that the band has been through some changes since we saw their revelatory set at Bumbershoot in 2014 and even since their 2017 KEXP live performance. 

First and most notably, it appears that the former costumes are now gone. No more "big hats," at least in this performance, but with no audience present, it's hard to tell if this is just an intimate little jam session or an indication of what their performances are like today.  After five-plus years, the pseudo-ethnic outfits might have come to be seem as schtick to the band, or even a distraction to the music itself, so we have no objection to them dressing as "regular" persons (although the big hats were pretty cool . . .).

Also, they're no longer a quartet but performing here as a trio.  Again, we don't know if this is a "one-off" event or if this is the band as they're touring today, but the former third vocalist and occasional pianist is not with the band in this performance.  

And their drummer now has a fuller kit than the single tom-tom of before.

But the good news - the terrific news, really - is they still sound just as great, just as original and just as startling, as before.  Part of the enjoyment of a DakhaBrakha concert is one often has literally no idea of what's going to happen next, and DakhaBrakha continue to surprise (check out the "trumpet" solo at the 3:00 minute mark).  They still bring it, and we still experience a big dose of sequential-system endorphins as our brains process their ever-unfolding patterns and musical references.  

Back in Seattle in 2014, DakhaBrakha first blew our minds and we regret that our paths have not crossed since then,  Hopefully, if this is in fact a somewhat pared-down version of the band, they might be able to tour more widely and even play the American South some day.

Meditations on Possible Musics

There's so much wrong with the title of this video that we very nearly didn't post it.  First of all, this isn't a "TED talk," unless you can call something a "talk" that doesn't have even one single spoken or sung word.  Doesn't a "talk" consist of words?  This isn't a "talk," it's a performance at a TED conference.

And then there's nothing even remotely "punk" about it.  On the one hand, at the heart of "punk" is a sort of DIY ethos - "you can do this, too" - as apart from polished professionalism and virtuoso performance.  Tagaq has obviously spent years training and rehearsing this type of performance and plays her larynx like a Stradivarius instrument - the very opposite of punk.  I think "punk" is the term the TED organizers use for anything don't understand, anything that sounds different from Katy Perry or Keith Urban.

So it's not a TED talk and it's not punk, and in our humble opinion, Tagaq is not a throat singer, at least in the aspect that while she occasionally dips her toe into producing multiple notes simultaneously and allowing the overtones to emerge, it's only a small part of her style and she's performing in a tradition quite separate from Mongolian (Tuvan) throat singing.  It's more like live phasing and almost sounds more like some of Steve Reich's early tape recorder experiments (Come Out) than traditional throat singing.

She is of Inuit heritage and her performance does make use of Inuit traditions, so that's the one and only thing that the title has correct.  

Here's another TED talk performance, in case you want to hear what Tuvan throat singing actually sounds like.  It's pretty astonishing.

If the sounds of Alash seem somehow "unworldly" to you, think of that as an indication of how you perceive "the world."  This is traditional Mongolian music (okay, the beatboxer is a Western innovation), and sounds as natural, as "worldly" to Mongolian ears as a Tennessee fiddle or a folk song might to us.  

What interests us is that several people have told us that Tagaq's singing sounds to them like demonic possession.  Metal singers, no strangers to Satanic symbolism themselves, have used throat singing, or a facsimile of throat singing, in their music for years.  Why do these growls and guttural noises sound to us like Satanism?

Our theory is that a tradition of throat singing existed in early medieval times among the non-Christianized tribes and indigenous peoples on northern Germany and far-northern Europe, those "pagan" tribes surrounding the Baltic Sea.  The tradition continues in the Sammi, Mongol, indigenous Greenland, and Faroese traditions, where it survived the ages relatively unchanged.  The Vikings were a part of this tradition, as well as the Vandals, Goths and Visigoths and Metagoths (sure, why not?).  The Latin Christians of southern Europe, the peoples surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, feared and hated the Baltic tribes, largely because the Baltics would famously descend upon and kill, rape and pillage the Mediterraneans (not cool). The non-Latin traditions of the pagans were denigrated and despised by the Christians, who came to associate the Baltic culture with Satanism, evil, and other dark forces.  From there, homeopathic herbal medicine became "witchcraft" and Baltic dance and performance became "possession." The word berserk comes from the Germanic word for bear suit - the Pagans would wear bear claws and a bear head in a ceremony recreating a hunt, and the one impersonating the bear was said to be "berserk." And finally, Baltic vocal traditions, including throat singing and guttural growls, was deemed to be "satanic" and evidence of demonic possession. Throat singing has been described pejoratively by Latin writers, who compared the sound to "howling dogs."  

But it was all in the mental models,  the schema (samskara), of the Christians.

Which brings us to the experimental folk band Heilung.  With members from Denmark, Norway, and Germany, Heilung's music is based on texts and original artifacts from the Iron and the Viking Ages. They describe their music as an "amplified history from early medieval northern Europe."  Heilung means "healing" in German, emphasizing the positive aspect of so-called "witchcraft."

According to various on-line explanations, Heilung's music is neither purely Viking nor explicitly Neolithic. To be specific, it's from the proto-Germanic, pre-migration period, or 600 years before the Vikings (1st Century CE to 550, when the Elder Futhark alphabet gave way to the Younger Futhark). It's based on linguistic reconstruction and snippets of historical texts found in the writings of Tacitus and Saxo Grammaticus, some of which were carved in runes on bone fragments.  

Using traditional vocal techniques and extremely traditional instruments that may have been accessible to the proto-Vikings and other Baltic tribes (bones, antlers, animal skin drums), plus some theatrical costume, makeup and modern amplification, Heilung recreate what music might have sounded like in Scandinavia before the missionaries arrived and the global expansion of the Holy Roman Empire. Heilung do incorporate a non-traditional, English-language "rap," but the words are based on descriptions of Viking poetic styles. No surviving examples of these styles exist today outside of a few scant snippets in the Poetic and Prose Edda.

The low growling, the hissing, and the forked fingers are all based on descriptions of Seiðr magic. That imagery morphed into medieval interpretation of "witches," whom the Christians deeply feared, but were in fact real people practicing an indigenous artform.  The tradition become an abstracted meme of its own that evolved and mutated into the 21st century in a variety of pop culture idioms, particularly death metal.

If historical events had occurred slightly differently, or as butterfly-wing theory would have it, if one medieval battle had gone slightly differently, if even one warrior had bested the other instead of falling and thus turn the tide of that particular skirmish, the music of Heilung, Alash and Tagaq would be our familiar "classical" music or at least our "traditional" folk music, and the so-called "western canon" would be viewed derisively, suspiciously, and derogatorily, and would be considered evil and degenerate.

Also, since we mentioned Steve Reich's 1966 composition, Come Out, earlier, here it is:

Finally, since it's become something of a meme/theme on this blog lately, we feel compelled to point out that none of the performers in this post will be performing this year at Big Ears.

Must-See TV

Dumbledorf Pumpernickel, the so-called 45th President of the so-called "United" States, has invoked Emergency Powers to divert military funding from defense of the nation to his dumb-ass and pointless wall, you know, the one Mexico was supposed to pay for.

A real President, a true patriot, would have a lot of things to declare an emergency over, other than that he didn't get his way.  There's the climate change emergency and the economic inequality emergency and the racism and hate crimes emergency, not to mention the Russia's-interfering-with-our democratic-process emergency.

Atlanta's sweethearts, The Coathangers, address the gun violence emergency with their new song, discretely titled F the NRA. It's worth a watch, and the statistics and infographics appear to be accurate, too, but still, nothing hits the nail on the head quite like Negativland's 1992 video, Guns.

New Dreams, New Masters

Since 2015, the Paris-born Makaya McCraven, has been redefining the genres of jazz music with his unique brand of organic beat music.  Raised in New England and a long-time Chicago resident, his breakout album, In The Moment, was culled, cut, post-produced and re-composed by McCraven. Using recordings of free improvisation he collected over dozens of live sessions in Chicago, In The Moment established a procedural blueprint that McCraven has since been sharpening and developing ever since. 

Now, after four-plus years of refining his approach, McCraven has produced an ambitious new work, Universal Beings, a culmination of the concepts conceived by In The Moment and his most elegant and articulated work yet. McCraven traveled to Los Angeles, New York, London, and back to Chicago to record gigs with a top tier of players, from Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet, The Comet Is Coming) and the AACM's Tomeka Reid to Jeff Parker and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson.  He then edited excerpts of these sessions together, forming a globetrotting and style-shifting narrative that weaves in and out frames like a masterful mixtape or a well-written travelogue. Universal Beings projects an all-encompassing message of unity, peace and power by embracing transcendence in all its expressions. It's no surprise, then, to hear echoes of Alice Coltrane in the cut Mantra.

At this point, I doubt you'd be surprised to learn that McCraven will be performing next month at the Mill & Mine in Knoxville, Tennessee as a part of the Big Ears Festival.  In a cruel twist of fate, he's performing at the same time as the legendary Harold Budd at St. John's Cathedral and as Nils Frahm at the majestic Tennessee Theater. 

On the positive side, his set will be followed by Sons Of Kemet, also at the Mill & Mine, so there's that.

The Video Game Desk won the week.

Since downloading the Assassin's Creed game Odyssey on Friday night, we've managed to play for over 20 hours.  That's mostly all on weeknights after work, 3 or 4 hours an evening, after a binge on Saturday (we didn't play on Sunday).

Meanwhile, our Netflix series have gone unwatched, T.C. Boyle's book is gathering dust at Chapter 10 on the night table, and we're sure that someone went to see the band Eyelids last night at 529 but it sure wasn't us.  

We were home playing Odyssey.

So, the VG Desk won and to be honest, we're all enjoying the game.  It's massive, a huge game, and we were a full 9 hours in before the big, cinematic opening title even rolled.  Twenty hours and we're still only at Level 12.  On-line sources say the main storyline takes anywhere from 35 to 50 hours to run through, but that's without any side quests (and there are a lot of those) and doesn't factor in that we're klutzes and keep dying in game and have to run through some quests two or three times before we complete them.  We wouldn't be at all surprised to spend 200 hours before we're through, but that remains to be seen.

Meredith Monk

Roomful of Teeth are certainly innovative in their uses of the human voice, but let's not confuse them with originators of this style.  

Here's Meredith Monk from her 1990 LP, Book of Days.  

Naturally, Monk (who's taught singing at the late John Daido Loori's Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, NY) will be performing at Big Ears this year as a part of their ECM showcase.

You Know Nothing, Jon Snow!

Good points from Doris Kearn Goodwin, though.

Hard Choices

There's a long article in last week's New Yorker (of course it's a long article - it's The New Yorker) about the contemporary choral-music ensemble Roomful of Teeth. It's a great article, informative, entertaining and well written, but you can save yourself a lot of time by just absorbing the title, Roomful of Teeth Is Revolutionizing Choral Music.  That's pretty much the gist of the article.

A lot of interesting things are happening with the human voice in music these days, from death-metal growls to aboriginal throat singing to yodeling to odd-sounding harmonies in newly invented chords. Bands like Dirty Projectors and the inimitable DakhaBrakha have been doing this for years now, and now Roomful of Teeth are taking it even further, featuring no instrumentation but the human voice, pushing the human larynx to its limits, and taking these sounds into the neo-classical, chamber music realm.

In very-much-related news, Roomful of Teeth will be kicking off this year's Big Ears Festival, performing one of the opening sets on Thursday evening at 6:00 p.m.  The only unfortunate part is they're performing at the same time as Irreversible Entanglements, so we have to choose between spoken-word poetry over a free-jazz backing, or a state-of-the-art choral performance.

But wait, there's more!  The ever-reliable Bryce Dessner of the Brooklyn band The National has written a composition called Triptych featuring texts from Patti Smith and Essex Hemphill that reportedly explores the eroticism and inspirations of photographic provocateur Robert Mapplethorpe. The work will have its world premier at this year's Big Ears Festival at the beautiful Tennessee Theater (think The Fox set in the Smokies), and the libretto will be performed by none other than Roomful of Teeth in front of enormous projections of Mapplethorpe’s iconic photographs. 

So that's two chances to see Roomful of Teeth over the span of one extended weekend, and even though it may be at the expense of Irreversible Entanglements, their front-person poet, Moor Mother, will be performing alone that same Thursday night as Teeth, so we may be able to at least sample some of all of the above.  

Fun With Burroughs

Using Burroughs cut-up technique on his own quote, we get,

Youth out eats life? Shit eats life. What youth? It eats shit life. Does all money eat? Quality above spontaneity. What quantity and creativity spontaneity creativity youth. Beauty, beauty, the machine does money. Eats, eats, the quantity eats machine life and quality above all.

(It's not supposed to make literal sense. The meaning is not in what the words say, but in the revelation of what they can't express. Language is a virus from outer space.) 

Total War

It's war - war, I tell you - WAR!  The Video Game Desk felt it wasn't being given it's fair share of time, so last night, without permission from the other desks, they downloaded the latest Assassin's Creed game, Odyssey, and have been playing it all day today, not letting any of the other desks get any time in at all. After all those months of struggling through the basically dysfunctional Fallout 76 and it's pointless and endless searches for consumable loot, it's refreshing to play a real game again with interesting characters, an actual storyline, and no annoying glitches. 

But meanwhile, while the download was, well, downloading last night, the TV Desk was binge watching the Amazon series Transparent. So far, it's a wonderful show, a wise and empathic story centering around a late-60s man coming to terms with his transgender identity.  But now, the Games Desk and the TV Desk are fighting over who gets to command the evening's time - will be watching Season 2 of Transparent tonight or trying to reach Level 10 of Odyssey?  We're surprised they let us free long enough to post this update, but since it doesn't favor either one over the other, we suppose we're able to get away with doing this.

For it's part, the Music Desk has been listening almost non-stop to the new album by the gothic folk-punk band DBUK, Songs Nine Through Sixteen.  DBUK (it apparently stands for "Denver Broncos UK") will be playing The Earl on Wednesday, April 3, a date to which we're looking forward, if the other desks will let us out for the night.

Meanwhile, on top of all this, the Reading Desk has been catching up on back issues of The New Yorker and after reading one particular short story by T. Coraghessan Boyle earlier last week, started reading his novel World's End.  So now, when we're not playing Odyssey or bingeing on Transparent, we've been reading World's End while listening to Songs Nine Through Sixteen.  

It's not like we're not entertained, and all of these different pursuits somehow oddly fit together, although on another level, they couldn't be more different.  We're just concerned that with all this competition for time, the Work Desk won't be allowed to leave home on Monday morning.  We need to remind the other more frivolous desks that it's the Work Desk that pays the bills for all the other desk's interests.

New Dreams, New Masters

Last week's New Master was London's Shabaka Hutchings and his band The Comet Is Coming.  This week's New Master is Shabaka again, but this time for his band Sons of Kemet. Consisting of sax, tuba and tandem drums, Sons of Kemet became one of 2018’s breakout bands, and their third album, Your Queen is a Reptile, made the end-of-year lists on many music sites.  Sons of Kemet add chunks of Caribbean influence and hip-hop to horn-and-drum marches as rich as the best of New Orleans, taking modern jazz into new directions.

But here's the exciting part - we're going to get to see Shabaka next month!  Sons of Kemet will be playing at The Mill & Mine in Knoxville, Tennessee at midnight on Saturday, March 24 as a part of the Big Ears Festival.  This will be after a performance by the legendary Harold Budd at St. John's Episcopal Cathedral, about a mile away, and if we've timed it right, we can stop in at the Tennessee Theater on the way between those two venues to catch the end of Nils Frahm's set.

But wait, there's more!  On March 22, before the Sons show, The Comet Is Coming will also play The Mill & Mine.  We should be excited about that, but at the same time, as a part of the festival's ECM showcase, the legendary jazz guitarist Ralph Towner will be playing at St. John's.  That's unfortunate - we've never seen Towner perform live but we'll choose the new over the old, and besides, logistics: before The Comet Is Coming, we'll be watching Alien Flower Sutra at The Standard, which is much closer to The Mill & Mine than to St. John's, and after The Comet we're going to have to hump it over to the Bijou Theater to see Evan Parker's trio with Paul Lytton and Alexander von Schlippenbach.  Busy day, and sorry Ralph.

And who knows?  With free time over the rest of the festival, Shabaka will be free to drop in for guest spots throughout the festival, which includes many other like-minded musicians, some of whom he's recorded with and some of whom he hasn't.  It should be interesting.

What We're Watchin'

The Legion of Desks that is our conscious mind has been recently rejoined by an old favorite: the Television Desk.  Over the years and without our notice, we've been slowly weaning ourselves off of the boob tube, particularly after the post-2K collapse of network broadcasting.  For years now, the television has just been for movies and HBO, sports, news commentary, and comedy, and then we dropped most of the movies and all but the major sporting events.  So our TV consumption is now reduced to just HBO series, championship sporting events, and news commentary and comedy, with a sizable overlap in the last two categories.

Recently though, after we finally got our television hardwired to the internet, we've started binge-watching Netflix and Amazon Prime original programming.  Last week, we completed the breezy and entertaining The Marvelous Mrs.Maisel (Amazon Prime), and between Saturday and last night, we watched all 17 hours of Seasons 1 and 2 of Netflix' Stranger Things.

We liked it, and find it hard to imagine who wouldn't.  The plot is a sly mix of the best sci-fi and horror movies out there.  It's sort of Stand By Me meets Poltergeist meets Carrie meets ET meets Stargate meets Cloverfield, with some episodes channeling Gremlins, Jurassic Park and Aliens, with none other than Paul Reiser himself dropping Aliens lines and references like Easter eggs were going out of style.  But rather than just being a disjointed amalgam of references, tributes, and rip-offs, the plot is quite cohesive and logical.  It all holds together and it all works.  It was fun and even though at its heart it's really just a monster movie, it was more entertaining than scary.

The real loser here is the Video Games Desk, as the Television Desk has been hogging all of the available free time away from the VGD.  Out poor vault-dweller has been abandoned and forgotten somewhere in Fallout 76's West Virginia, Bayek was last seen chasing something through the desert in Assassin's Creed Origins, and we have no idea what planet we were last exploiting in No Man's Sky. But what we do know is that with Stranger Things now under our belt, we're off tonight to start on our next series, whatever that may be.            

Flashbacks

Ten years ago this month, we were in Bend, Oregon for some reason, trying to cross a chasm of time and space. It did not go well.

More recently, as a matter of fact just last night, the Grand Orange Pumpernickel attempted a "unifying" State of the Union address.  It didn't go well, either.

SOTU to STFU, but no matter, because the New England Patriots are still Super Bowl champions.

And Keanu Reeves is still wiser than most of us.

Cows

We don't know yet whether or not this album, Cows on Hourglass Pond, will make our "Best Of (So Far)" list, but we do know that when it drops (or leaks), we'll give it a serious listen. 

Avey Tare's Cows on Hourglass Pond, will be out March 22 on Domino Records.  We last saw Avey when he performed the seminal AC LP Sung Tongs last summer at Symphony Hall, and we'll be seeing him again at Big Ears (next month!).  Here's a little taste of those cows until then.

State of the Union address is tonight, followed by the Democratic response presented by no other that Georgia's own Stacey Abrams (our next senator!), followed by some sort of comedy stylings by Stephen Colbert (CBS) and Trevor Noah (Comedy Central). Should be good for some moral indignation, followed by a few laughs.  

Another Superb Owl Post

As you undoubtedly already know by now, the New England Patriots just won another Super Bowl, their sixth.  They've been in the last three Super Bowls and won two of those.  Although many across the nation don't like them, the Patriots are statistically the best football team ever, at least in terms of winning, and isn't that what matters in sport? 

Also, as you've probably noticed, it was about the boringest Super Bowl ever.  It was certainly the lowest scoring Super Bowl (16 total points in the game) and there were long stretches where it seemed like absolutely nothing was going on.  And the commercials bent over backwards to avoid any controversy and don't even get us started about the Halftime Show (shhh, the Music Desk will hear us).

The real Super Bowl, the test of New England's guts and mettle, was the AFC Championship Game against Kansas City. That was an exciting game, with several do-or-die Fourth Quarter drives, frequent lead changes, and thrilling plays.  That was a game against a quality opponent and a quality quarterback.  That was the game where the Patriots proved they were a champion-caliber team and the actual Super Bowl was just sort of a coronation featuring a game with a modicum of challenge against the hapless NFC team unlucky enough to draw the assignment by outlasting all the other NFC teams (and some very fortuitous refereeing, as New Orleans fans would like to point out).  

The Red Sox often face the same dilemma.  The road to the AL Championship usually goes through the Bronx, either in the Division or the ALCS itself, and after beating the Yankees, everything else seems sort of anticlimactic.  We beat the Yankees, and then having to face another, sometimes two more, opponents seems less like a greater challenge than a chore necessary to wear the World Series crown that we already earned by downing New York.  

Ironically, it's often teams from the City of Angels, the Dodgers or the Rams, that provide the final chump fodder for our New England teams.

The Rams seemed especially ill-suited to challenge New England. From an inexperienced quarterback just two years past his rookie season, to a clueless young head coach totally outmaneuvered by New England's wily Bill Belichick, to their curious decision not to use their star running back, former Georgia Bulldog Todd Gurley, the Rams never stood a chance.  Saints fans would say the Rams didn't even deserve to be there, and LA proved New Orleans correct on the field yesterday.

The Red Sox and the Patriots won their national championships.  Are the Bruins and the Celtics next?    

Superb Owl

As you undoubtedly know, the Super Bowl is today.  In fact, it starts in about 20 minutes. As you also undoubtedly know, the game is here in Atlanta.  This town is going crazy.

From $500 a ticket hip-hop shows every night to free concerts in Centennial Park, from road closures that started a week before the game to protests over everything from social injustice to the Saints not being in the game (which some claim is an injustice in and of itself), it's been a non-stop spectacle.  All that, and Pepsi signs plastered all over the hometown and birthplace of Coca-Cola.

For our part, we've not taken part in any of the hoopla and will be cheering for New England's favorite (adopted) son Tom Brady and the New England Patriots from the privacy of our home.  The Sports Desk has teamed with the Introvert Desk to lie low until all this blows over. 

This is a big town and hospitality is our biggest industry.  We can handle this, but we here at all of the Desks will be glad when this is over.

By the way, we were going to post something after the game was over, but realistically, we'll probably be drunk by then, so for now we'll say GO PATRIOTS and VIVA LA BRADY!

Van Etten

As we've been saying, so far 2019 is shaping up to be a good year for music.  We've already covered Vampire Weekend and Better Oblivion Community Center (who sold out Terminal West within an hour of going on sale and before we could buy our own tickets), and for some reason Panda Bear, but the big story (at least so far) is the triumphant return of Sharon Van Etten.

We've been fans since the beginning and have seen her perform numerous times, but Van Etten took a few years off, completing a degree in psychology, reportedly entering a fulfilling relationship, and giving birth to her first child.  All of that apparently took six years, and Remind Me Tomorrow is her first record since 2014.      

Remind Me Tomorrow is Van Etten's strongest record yet - the time off did her well.  It's her first bona fide rock record - previously, she dabbled in folk, folk-rock, and what we'll call, for lack of a better term. the indie singer-songwriter genre.  There's nothing wrong with any of that and as we said, we were fans, bi\ut Van Etten just blows the roof off the studio with her new performances.  There was a time when we thought we would never see her wearing glam-rock makeup like she does in Comeback Kid or stand on top of a ladder on the beach and scream her lungs out like she does at the 3:00-minute mark of Seventeen.

Comeback Kid and Seventeen are clearly the stand-out singles, but if you get the chance, you should really give the whole album a listen - it's well worth your time.  And we couldn't be happier for the apparent peace, happiness, and self-assurance Van Etten seems to have found.

New Dreams, New Masters

Jazz certainly wasn't born in London, but it's always hada home there.  There has been an innovative jazz scene in London going back to the so-called Canterbury bands of the 1970s like Nucleus, Colosseum, and Soft Machine. Far from traditionalists, these bands fearlessly created early forms of fusion by mixing free jazz with psychedelic rock, funk, and anything else available.  

At the moment, the London standard bearer for this kind of music is the British-Barbadian Shabaka Hutchings, a  saxophonist, clarinetist and bandleader who, in addition to his own numerous bands, has played saxophone with the Sun Ra Arkestra, Floating Points, Mulatu Astatke, Polar Bear, Melt Yourself Down and Heliocentrics.  A compulsive collaborator,  DownBeat magazine called him “Britain’s best export.” 

A few years ago, Hutchings jammed onstage with the funk tandem of keyboardist Dan Leavers and drummer Maxwell Hallett. Their immediate chemistry resulted in the band The Comet Is Coming.

The Comet Is Coming play a fusion of electronica, funk, hard bop, and post-rock suited to fans of both Medeski Martin & Wood and of Faust. The trio debuted with 2015’s Prophecy, but their first proper full-length, 2016’s Channel the Spirits, showed that they could fold traces of Steve Reich, Neu!, Sun Ra, and Albert Ayler into a futuristic vision of jazz and funk. A group of equals in which writing responsibilities are shared and no one takes a clear leading role despite Hutchings’ rising status, The Comet is Coming is a blast of global jazz, a sign of life in a genre badly needing a resurrection.