Grouper

Fact Magazine · FACT mix 379 - Grouper (Apr '13)

I'm working my way through the 40+ hours of FACT mixes I downloaded to a backup drive as well as the 850+ mixes on the FACT website.  

Many, if not most, of the mixes are dance-club ready EDM music, bangers and thumpers most suitable for the dance floor.  Some artists, particularly d.j.s and electronic music producers, simply provide representative examples of their live, club sets.  If you ever suddenly find yourself in Berlin hosting a rave (these things happen), most of the mixes would ably provide a suitable setlist for you. The FACT mixes got you covered.

But it's not all techno and EDM.  Some performers provide mixes to FACT that cover the music that inspires them, or the sources of their samples, or songs that they simply want to share for whatever reason.  You can learn a lot about the creative process of these performers by the songs they select for these mixes.  It may or may not be surprising that so-and-so has a deep knowledge of reggae, or that some other musician included a lot of mid-60s pop songs.  Some of the mixes cover very specific but little-known sub-genres of music, like Nsasi's mix of queer Ugandan house music.

Few mixes fall further from the definition of "dance music" than the one provided by Grouper (Liz Harris) back in April 2013.  For the longest time now, Grouper has been producing great, generally unclassifiable music somewhere between ambient, folk, doom metal, and pop.  It's hard to describe - you really need to listen for yourself to understand.  

One would expect some dreamy and quiet music from Grouper for her FACT mix, which she titled Image of True Death, but I for one didn't expect baroque chamber music, Celtic folk songs, and whatever the rest of the mix is.  Even the song she included by the post-rock, avant-noise band Swans is a folkish, vocal track. In fact, I couldn't identify much of the mix, even using my SoundHound track identifier and the comments on the SoundCloud app, and unlike most of the FACT mixes, a track list wasn't provided by the artist.  Here's the list as best as I can fathom:

• Ivor Cutler - The Best Thing (1975)
• Jandek - Nancy Sings (1982)
• Anne Briggs - Thorneymoor Woods (1971)
• ??? - ????
• Mignarda - The Willow Song (2007)
• Kronos Quartet - Lachrimae Antique (1997) 
• ??? - ????
• Delia Derbyshire - Mattachin
• (unidentified dialog)
• ??? - ????
• Swans - Blackmail (1997)
• Kathleen Ferrier & London Symphony Orchestra - Rodelinda, Act 1: Art Thou Troubled (1997) 
• ??? - ????
• ??? - ????
• ??? - ????

Bonnie?

A broad area of disturbed weather, associated with a surface trough of low pressure, is currently located over the southern Caribbean. The disturbance is expected to move northwestward near the coasts of Nicaragua and Honduras and there's a 40% chance of a tropical depression forming in the next five days if the system remains over water.  Regardless of development, this system could produce periods of heavy rainfall across portions of eastern Nicaragua and eastern Honduras late this week.

Temperatures reached a high of 95⁰ F in Atlanta today.  In a special statement, the National Weather Service forecast heat index values between 100⁰ and 105⁰ and advised avoiding DeKalb County (East Atlanta) today if possible. I had a dentist appointment in DeKalb today, but braved the extreme temperatures and went anyway.  I survived unscathed.

Episode 2 of The Treason Hearings aired this morning.  Fun to watch over a cup of coffee (a cup of covfefe?) (a coup of covfefe?) and a bagel.  If you didn't know better, watching this show, you'd think Donald Trump was a dishonest man.

FACT Mixes

From left, Authentically Plastic, Nsasi and Turkana, co-founders of queer music collective Anti-Mass, August 8, 2021 (Photograph by Guilherme Gomez)

If you think your life is difficult, imagine being gay in Uganda.  

In 2007, the Ugandan newspaper Red Pepper published a list of allegedly gay men, many of whom suffered harassment as a result. Not to be outdone, the Ugandan newspaper Rolling Stone published a front-page article in 2010 titled 100 Pictures of Uganda's Top Homos Leak that listed the names, addresses, and photographs of 100 alleged homosexuals alongside a yellow banner that read "Hang Them." The paper also alleged that homosexuals aimed to recruit Ugandan children. Many Ugandans were attacked since the article was published, and on January 27, 2011, gay rights activist David Kato was murdered.

In 2009, the Ugandan parliament proposed an Anti-Homosexuality Bill that would have allowed the death penalty for people who were previously convicted or were HIV-positive and engaged in same-sex practices. The bill also included provisions for Ugandans who engaged in same-sex practices outside of Uganda to be extradited back to Uganda for punishment. The bill was signed into law by President Yoweri Museveni on February 24, 2014, although the death penalty was dropped in the final legislation. 

More recently, Kampala police and military personnel raided the gay-friendly Ram Bar on November 10, 2019, and arrested over 120 people. Joan Amek, one of those arrested, later told Human Rights Watch, “They kept on calling us prostitutes and genderless people. They kept on making common mistakes on ‘he’ and ‘she’ and dramatically laughing about it, saying that they thought we didn’t care so why are we complaining.”  The Ugandan police said the Ram Bar served hookah and opium and that those arrested would be charged under the Tobacco Control Act of 2015, which bans smoking in public places. Activists argued that this was a smoke screen for the persecution of the LGBTQ community and when 67 of those arrested were eventually charged, it was with “public nuisance”, not a contravention of the Tobacco Control Act.

Ram Bar, Kampala, Uganda

Despite this oppression, Anti-Mass has emerged in Kampala as both a musical collective and a queer night club. Anti-Mass parties have become vital spaces for safe expression for the city’s gay community, bringing together a diverse gathering of people of wildly different genders, sexual orientations, and backgrounds to move and sweat together, all within a city infamous for its conservatism and increasingly draconian legislation. Anti-Mass co-founders Nsasi, Turkana, and Authentically Plastic are the house dj's, pushing a fluid, hyper-modern style of club music that seeks to disrupt traditional forms.  Their style draws a line from Kiganda percussion to Chicago house and beyond.

I know all this because London's on-line FACT magazine posted a mix by Nsasi last month.  The set opens with a slowed-down version of Oh by Ciara (featuring Ludacris) and from there covers a variety of African dance-music artists, including fellow Anti-Mass member Authentically Plastic toward the end. Overall, it's sort of a trance-inducing set and you can choose to dance to it or zone out to it. Either option is acceptable.

Fact Magazine · Fact Mix 861: Nsasi (May '22)

FACT has admirably been posting more-or-less weekly mixtapes curated by various artists, musicians, producers, and dj's (I'll let you decide where to draw the line between those categories) since 2008. They were nearly 100 sets into their series by the time I first became aware of them in late 2009 and they've kept at it since. The Nsasi mix is number 861 in the series, and they just dropped number 862 by the 19-year-old Tanzanian DJ Travella.  

The young Londoners who maintain the FACT site are hipper, worldlier, and sexier than this ROM, but I can tag along behind and take notes to maintain an open mind.  The vast majority of the FACT mixes are in various styles of electronic dance music, which is not necessarily my thing.  But FACT also invites various other electronic, ambient, post-rock, and psych artists to contribute mixes, often to fascinating results.  My collection ranges from 60 minutes of 1960s French pop auteur Serge Gainsbourg, to field recordings of L.A. by Julia Holter, to a seamless blend of Brazilian field recordings, Kenyan club music, Indonesian gabber, and new music from NYC by Brooklyn composer Britton Powell.

All of the mixes can be streamed and downloaded for free, except for some of the older mixes, which were originally uploaded to file-sharing sites no longer in operation. Today, the mixes are all uploaded to Soundcloud, which allows sharing, reposting, and free downloading.  I've got about 40 of the mixes, ranging from June 2010's number 162 (Oneohtrix Point Never) to Nsasi's recent 861, saved to a backup drive, a total of over 42 hours of music.  The programming is so eclectic and diverse that I can play though the sets multiple times and everything still sounds fresh and new on each listen.

So go along for the ride.  If you listen to Nsasi's mix you're hearing the authentic sounds you'd hear today if you managed to find your way into an underground queer dance party in Kampala, Uganda, one eye on the dance floor and the other on the door for the police.

Better Off Dead

Have you been watching The Treason Hearings?  Season 1 debuted Thursday night, starring some guy from Mississippi, Liz Cheney, and a University of Georgia grad who had the bad fortune of working for the Capital police on January 6. 

Fani Wills, the Fulton County DA here in Atlanta, has assembled a Grand Jury to consider charges against Agent Orange for trying to extort the Georgia Secretary of State into "finding" him some 11,780 votes.  A criminal trial is probably pending.  That show should be a good spin-off of The Treason Hearings.

Of course, all of this is just a prequel to the main event, the 2022 Midterm Elections. Here in Georgia, the Elections will include the Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church (literally, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s old job), versus former Georgia Bulldogs running back Hershel Walker.  

I think Warnock will win (Walker, although a beloved sports figure here in Georgia, is a terrible campaigner), but the Democrats will otherwise get clobbered.  They'll lose control of both the Senate and the House, and control of most of the states.  The Republican-controlled Congress will shut down any remaining investigations or hearings on the criminal actions of Agent Orange's so-called presidency, and devote their time to Hunter Biden's laptop, non-existent voter fraud, and whatever other culture-war distractions they could dredge up (e.g., trans athletes dominating girls' sports, gay couples appearing in television ads). 

The Republicans will eviscerate whatever remains of the Voting Rights Act, will outlaw abortion even under the most dire of circumstances, and ignore any suggestions for common-sense gun-control legislation.  The United States will essentially become an autocracy, a religious autocracy at that.  Any efforts to reduce carbon emissions will be ridiculed as "woke," and much of the planet, if it hasn't already reached the tipping point, will become uninhabitable.  The United States will fall behind Europe and Asia in terms of education and technological advancement and life expectancy. We're already behind several other nations in many of these categories.

Of course, I'm an old man, and this ROM won't be alive to see many of the latter predictions above. But I hope the younger generation enjoys the shitty hellscape of a world we've left behind, and can take solace in the fact that at least they owned the libs and didn't fall for any woke ideology.

As David Berman once said, "The dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind."

Alex

"Potential Tropical Cyclone One" has developed into a Tropical Storm and they named it Alex because, you know, "A." The storm dropped more than 10 inches of rain on Miami and 11 inches on Key Largo. The system didn't develop into a Tropical Storm until after it crossed the Florida Peninsula and met the warm Gulf Stream waters.  But rather than ride the Gulf Stream up the East Coast, it appears that it will head out to sea and dissipate somewhere over the mid-Atlantic. 

Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, a gunman or gunmen opened fire on a South Street crowd during prime, Saturday nightlife hours.  Three people were killed and 11 wounded.  In addition to the recent massacres in Buffalo, Tulsa, and Uvalde, Texas, the Gun Violence Archive has counted more than 235 more mass shootings so far this year, defined as one in which four or more people were killed or injured. Shootings in the United States have risen sharply since the pandemic.

Atlanta is not exempt from the violence, and some Republicans here claim it's because of the actions (or inactions) of the former and current Mayors.  They are calling for the majority white Buckhead district to secede from majority black Atlanta and to form their own City. The secession effort thankfully failed to make the ballot this year and took a lot of steam out of the movement, but the secessionists (or segregationists if you prefer) haven't given up. However, I have yet to hear a coherent explanation from the movement on how the actions (or inactions) of past and present Atlanta mayors have caused crime to increase in Philadelphia, Buffalo, Tulsa, Uvalde, and elsewhere. When pressed for an answer, they just mutter something about BLM, and Antifa, and the "woke" agenda.  Not a compelling argument.

On Thursday, the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the US Capitol will televise the first of its hearings, making their case based on more than 1,000 interviews and review of more than 125,000 records. Fortunately, an NBA Finals game isn't scheduled for that night (go Celtics!), and after two impeachment attempts and lack of any other serious disciplinary action, I can't wait to see how the Democrats blow it this time.

From the Gaming Desk

 

Okay, just because the so-called "real world," you know, the "consensus reality" everyone seems to talk about all the time, is going to hell in a handbasket doesn't mean we can't escape from time to time into the virtual reality of a video game.

While the planet is overheating, while Russia is pushing civilization to the very brink of nuclear annihilation, while the Republican Party in America is conspiring to replace representative democracy with a form of Christian-fascist authoritarianism, while the American populace seems intent of murdering each other with high-capacity assault rifles, and while economic disparity widens, intolerance is on the increase, and polarization is becoming the dominant force in formerly polite society, the Retired Old Man has been amusing himself with a string of fairly entertaining video games. This year alone saw him complete the following games:

• Far Cry 6 - Far from a perfect game, and those who've criticized the game as a clone of the previous Far Cry games have a point.  But that formula developed by the previous games has been successful because quite frankly, the games are fun to play.  You play the games as a hero who learns of his abilities of create mayhem and succeed at asymmetrical combat, single-handedly overtaking heavily fortified enemy encampments.  Far Cry 6 takes place on a Caribbean island similar to Cuba, but who cares about the plot or the politics or the characters?  You get to shoot helicopters out of the sky with a backpack-mounted missile launcher, jump from aircraft and very high places equipped with a wingsuit and a parachute, and battle forces under the command of Giancarlo Esposito (Gus Fring from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul).  Danny Trejo even shows up for a while playing himself.  Not the deepest intellectual experience, but lots of fun.
• The Mass Effect Trilogy - A series of well-written science-fiction games complete with their own backstories, lore, and mythology.  You play as the commander of a spaceship, a sort of James Kirk from the Star Trek series but whichever gender you choose, and engage in a literally intergalactic battle against multi-dimensional entities intent of annihilating existence itself.  Meanwhile, you have a large cast of characters for your crew, each with their own back story and quest lines, that you have to manage and keep in line.  Part of the charm of the series is following the development of video game technology from the first Mass Effect (2007) game to Mass Effect 2 (2010) to Mass Effect 3 (2012).  But the real satisfaction of the game comes from the way it reveals the histories, customs, and manners of the multiple species of aliens in your crew, all without being pedantic or boring, and not requiring the player to read volumes and volumes of embedded texts like the Elder Scrolls games (although there are embedded texts in the Mass Effect universe if one is curious to know more). A fun series of games with true role-playing attributes (decisions made in early gameplay have implications later in the games) and one the ROM would gladly replay, if not for the next game in the queue.
• Horizon Zero Dawn - While most of Western Civilization (as well as the East for all I know) was busy playing the sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, the ROM was playing the original Horizon Zero Dawn.  A masterpiece of a video game, a fine example of the potential games have to provide an immersive, compelling experience.  The gameplay is fun (a LOT of fun) and the storyline is interesting.  The great voice actor Ashley Burch does a fine job as the voice of the main character, Aloy, and there are several other interesting characters in the game.  The setting and imagined world of the game - a far, far future Earth where a medieval-like civilization thrives amid the ruins of our current technology - is pretty original and unlike almost any other game, movie, or book I've experienced.  Much of the gameplay involves hunting or battling large, robotic animals, and both the fighting and the ultimate victories are quite satisfying.  Early in the game, you're given the weapons and lessons needed to "one-shot" some of those beasts, and the satisfaction of the sight and the sound of a mechanical raptor collapsing can't be understated. I'm looking forward to a replay and also to playing the sequel, Forbidden West. Truly one of the best games I've ever played.
• Days Gone - A change of pace, at least for me.  Bikers vs. zombies in rural Oregon. Sons of Anarchy meets The Walking Dead.  And just like those two television shows, not the deepest intellectual experience but if you turn off just a very small portion of your brain, a lot of fun.  The motorcycle simulator is well done and the scenery of the Oregon countryside is frequently breathtaking.  The "zombies" aren't actually zombies, per se, that is, not reanimated dead, but more like frenzied, mindless, cannibalistic victims of some virus a la 28 Days Later. The storyline is simple enough not to be a distraction but not so simple as to insult the intelligence. The real kick of the game, though, is battling hordes of the zombies - huge swarms of 100, 200, even in one case 500, of the monsters - huge masses of more bodies that you can shoot with your weapons and just as fast as you can run.  The first encounter with a swarm is truly a terrifying moment, and I imagine for most players, certainly this ROM, a fatal one.  You have to come up with clever techniques to either lead the swarm into a tight alley, where you can incinerate the trapped zombies with molotovs and napalm, or to spread out the heard where you can pick them off individually one by one.  But either way, once a swarm starts chasing you, it's a totally immersive, if terrifying, encounter and you're not thinking of anything else until the last one is dead.  And then you get to ride around on your motorcycle some more.  

Didn't intend to write capsule reviews of all those games when I started this post, but you never know how these things go.  Anyway, after six highly enjoyable games (four if you count the Mass Effect trilogy as a single game), I finally hit a relative dud.  Although I've liked the Fallout games I've played so far - Fallout 4, New Vegas, and the rebooted version of Fallout 76 (hated the original release of 76, though) - I was disappointed by Fallout 3, the game I played after Days Gone.  Some reviewers and a large portion of the Reddit community consider Fallout 3 to be "one of" the best of the series (New Vegas is widely regarded as the "very best").  I found 3 to be boring, poorly designed, and under-illuminated (the "atmospherics" praised by many reviewers apparently just means many of the settings are so poorly lit that one can barely see).  The game was released in 2008, an eternity ago in video-game years, and some of the shortcomings may be due to the technology available to the game designers back then, although Mass Effect 1 was actually released a year earlier and doesn't feel nearly as clunky.

But anyway, I slogged my way through the game, completing quests that didn't interest me and fighting enemies I couldn't care less about. What I found most interesting was the backstory and lore of some of factions of later Fallout games, like the early version of the Brotherhood of Steel and the Enclave (I was never really sure who the Enclave even were until I played 3). I bought the "Game of the Year" edition of the game, including all of the subsequent downloadable content and to be fair, I found the game's DLCs rather enjoyable, at least compared to the base game.  But to be honest, if I had only bought the base game, I probably wouldn't have added the DLCs based on that primary experience.

Fallout 3 is a big game, especially with all of the DLCs.  According to Steam, I started the game on April 19 and despite my reservations, I managed to put some 116½ hours of play into it, putting it right between Far Cry 3 (113½ hours) and Far Cry 5 (120½ hours) in terms of hours played. 

About a week ago (and I'm just now getting to the point I originally wanted to make when I started this post), I fired up another vintage, 2007 game, Bioshock.  Technically, Bioshock's play mechanisms were more like the enjoyable Mass Effect (2007) experience than that of the clunky Fallout 3 (2008).  In fact, I'd go even further and say it was quite good, despite being 15 years old.  It's a short game - I completed it in a mere 18 hours - but I have to say it's one of the most original, unique games I've played.  It's set in an underwater city, Rapture, designed and built by a sort of John Galt inventor and industrialist, who spouts nearly non-stop Ayn Rand-type philosophy.  It's particularly satisfying killing him in-game (I beat him to death with his own golf club) and finally shutting him up (sometimes I wish I had that option for random dudes who for some reason want to argue with me about Objectivism).

But the game is so unique and original that at times I had no idea what was going on.  You have the typical first-person shooter weapons - pistol, machine gun, a flame-thrower, and if all else fails, a good old reliable pipe wrench - but you also acquire some mutant, recombinant-DNA abilities powered by something called "Adam."  Or is it "Eve?" - there's an "Eve" you're supposed to monitor as well as "Adam."  

And then the quests often get quite convoluted.  At one point, while you're trying to get to a safer, higher floor of the city, your pathway gets blocked by debris.  The plot then goes something like the door to the alternative pathway is locked, so you need to find the key.  But the path to the last known location of the key is guarded by a character who demands you fight some other opponent before he lets you pass, but that opponent can only be beaten by acquiring another "Adam" (or "Eve") superpower at some other, distant location.  So off you go, looking for that power, all this while you're getting randomly attacked by random enemies of various strengths and abilities.  By the time you get the power, beat the opponent, are allowed to pass the guardian, find the key, and then unlock the door, you've forgotten (I'd forgotten) why you wanted to go through in the first place.

But on one level, who cares?  It's about playing the game, and the game play was fun.  So much so, that after completing the game in the mere 18 hours, I've already started a second replay - maybe it will all make more sense to me the second time through.

So that's been my secret, behind-the scenes, virtual second life spent away from the wicked real world of ours.  I can be upset about the recent spate of mass killings (I am!), outraged about Putin's decimation of Ukraine (the bastard!), and angry over the latest Republican shenanigans and flaccid Democratic response (are you fucking kidding me?), or I can go virtual and save a Caribbean banana republic from itself, command a spacecraft, hunt post-apocalyptic animatronics, or shoot zombies from my motorcycle.  I can try to negotiate peace in a post-nuclear dystopia or do whatever it is I'm supposed to be doing in Bioshock's Rapture.

The advantage of the virtual alternative is that if I don't like the way it's all going, I can just turn the computer off, or write a snarky review on my blog.

"And when you spread out your palms in prayer, I hide my eyes from you. Even though you make many prayers, I am not listening, for your very hands are stained with blood." (Isaiah 1:15)

"And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full." (Matthew 6:5)

We don't have a gun problem in America.  We don't have a mental health, godless liberalism, broken family, video game, or over-abundant doorway problem either.  America has a Republican problem, and until we get rid of every last one of those bloodsuckers, children will continue to die in our schools.

I've become very pessimistic about the state of the world - not just America, but the whole damn planet.  I've come to embrace the Tragic View - resolution to our myriad problems can only be found in the extinction of our species.  Humans, homo sapiens, descended from the same common ancestor as gorillas and chimpanzees - territorial, aggressive simians that hunt and fight in organized, patriarchal troops led by the strongest, most dominant members.  We did not descend from the common ancestor of bonobos, those friendly, communal simians who live in peaceful, matriarchal societies. Were that it was the other way around!

Aha!, you think.  Gotcha! Aren't you being just as bad as those warlike gorillas and chimpanzees by blaming the "other" tribe, in this case, the Republicans. on the world's problems? Yes, I am, and while I can make a logical, connect-the-dots case for assigning the blame, I can't help but be tribal about it.  I'm genetically hardwired that way, just as we all are.  It's our evolutionary "original sin."  It's who we are.

I guarantee you this: when some combination of catastrophic climate change, starvation, nuclear war, and infectious disease reduces the world's human population to just two individuals, those two individuals will be at war and would kill each other on sight.

Oh, did I mention catastrophic climate change?  It's only June 3 today, the third official day of the 2022 Hurricane Season, and we already have a "Potential Tropical Cyclone One" forecast to cross the Florida peninsula this weekend.  Considerable flash- and urban flooding is possible across South Florida and the Keys.  Life-threatening flooding and mudslides are possible across western Cuba.

Maybe we'll get lucky and the floods will clear the area of our loathsome species (that's the Tragic View talking). Maybe they will drown Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who today announced his intention to deny Medicare benefits to transgender children.  Think about it - the elected Governor of a state is using his political power not to benefit the people he represents, but to deny a minority portion access to affordable health care to gain political points from a majority portion.  That's some tribal simian shit right there.  And don't even get me started on denying women, fully half the population, access to safe abortion.  That's some hard-core patriarchal action.

In bonobo society, on the rare occasion that a large male individual is seen bullying, harrassing, or dominating a weaker female, all the females in the tribe will rally to her defense and stop the male aggression.  Wouldn't it be something if all the women and transgender youths of Florida all rallied in Tallahassee, and publicly castrated Ron DeSantis?  Not saying they should do that, but wouldn't it be something?  Just throwing some ideas out there. Something to think about.  Not a recommendation, just a suggestion.

"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." - Travis Bickle, Taxi  Driver (1976)

Here We Go! . . .

It's June 1, the first official day of the 2022 Hurricane Deason, and lookie here - we already have two potential storms.

The yellow one above has only about a 10% chance of forming into a tropical depression, and even if it does, it'll likely head out to sea and get swept away by the Gulf Stream. Not gonna worry much about that one.

But the red storm now over the Yucatan Peninsula has a 70 to 80% chance of becoming a tropical depression, and a tropical depression can then form a tropical storm and possibly even a hurricane.  The system is forecast to travel over western Cuba and Florida.  If it reaches the Sunshine State, it could drop as much as a half foot of rain and cause widespread flooding.  

Due to an on-going La Nina, warmer-than-average temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean, weak trade winds, and an enhanced West African monsoon, NOAA predicts an above-normal 2022 Hurricane Season.

So here we go - good times ahead! Wheeee!

 

Blogs Are Boring

 

Blogs are boring and egotistical.  Facebook and Instagram are phony and promote propaganda.  Reddit is a cesspool.

I'm too old and cranky for this world.  Just let me fade away in this pile of bricks on a hill.

The Hard Blues

In February 1972, then 34-year-old alto saxophonist Julius Hemphill went into Archway Studio in St. Louis and recorded four tracks with three like-minded other musicians.  They pressed three of the tracks onto vinyl on Hemphill's own Mbari label as Dogon A.D. and released only 500 copies.

The world is still catching up on what happened. Copies of that original release of 500 LPs now sell for $338 to $542, if you can find one at all.

The music can be classified as "free jazz" and rightly so.  The compositions, especially the title track, consist of extended improvisations framed by short composed sections.  But the playing lacks a lot of the dissonant, atonal cacophony associated with much free jazz.  Instead, Hemphill and his cello player (no bass) get locked into a groove and in the title track, they ride that groove for nearly 15 minutes, with trumpeter Baikaida Yaseen briefly jumping onboard.  Drummer Philip Wilson is admirably restrained, allowing a lot of empty space in the sound to give the piece a cool late-night feel.

Clive Davis' Arista Records re-released the album to wider distribution in 1977, and I first heard the track Dogon A.D. on Boston University's NPR station WBUR around that time on d.j. Steve Schwartz' late-night jazz show. Sometimes he'd play the track as the last selection of the evening before the station succumbed to overnight silence.  

A CD version of the album was finally released in 2011 and included The Hard Blues, the fourth track from that 1972 session.  Prior to the CD release, the 1972 version of The Hard Blues only appeared on Hemphill's 1975 album, Coon Bid'ness.  Although there are other albums by Hemphill that have different versions of The Hard Blues, none compare to his original version with cellist Abdul Wadud. The 2011 CD rightly and finally reunites all four tracks from the St. Louis session onto one album.

The album, especially the complete CD version, is one of my all-time favorites.  AllMusic gave the original album 5 out of 5 stars, and said "This important music is better to be heard than described."

However, that's easier said than done.  Both the vinyl and CD versions have long been out of print.  The album is not available on Spotify, Amazon Music, or other streaming site.  Fortunately, an upload of the track exists on YouTube with reasonable sound quality.  But that's been about it. I've searched online but I'm not about to shell out $500 for a vinyl copy.  I've lurked in share threads and even sniffed around the dark web and couldn't find anything.

But last week, by a miraculous stroke of luck, I found the CD available for free download, and as lossless FLAC files at that.  I'm ecstatic to finally have all four tracks in my personal collection once again.

Here's the funny thing, though.  There are two relatively short tracks sandwiched between Dogon A.D. and The Hard Blues on the album. They're not bad tracks by any means, but are somewhat forgettable compared to the protean masterpieces surrounding them.  But on listening to my new acquisition, I was surprised how well I knew those two tracks, how familiar they were to my ears.  I can only draw one conclusion - sometime in the late 70s, I must have owned a vinyl copy of the Arista LP version.

During the 70s, street vendors in front of Boston University buildings used to sell used LPs at quite reasonable costs, usually a dollar per album.  My guess is that I bought a copy back then (if I saw it on sale, how could I pass?) and played it several times, but then it got "lost" somewhere in my vinyl collection, or disappeared during one of my frequent moves from apartment to apartment, or got sold as I transitioned my collection from vinyl to CD.  I could have sworn I never owned a copy, but there's no denying my familiarity that those two "minor" tracks, a familiarity that couldn't have been based on radio play or other medium.

Anyway, last February marked the 50th anniversary of the recording of Dogon A.D., which to me still sounds as startlingly fresh as it did on WBUR radio in 1977.

Friday the 13th

So, um, I hate to ask, but with Evangelical Christians on the verge of realizing their decades-long goal of finally overturning Roe v. Wade, what does the Bible actually say about abortion?

Well, it turns out not very much.  It's a delicate and sensitive matter, and generally the Bible concerns itself with other things.  But in the Book of Numbers, abortion is not only allowed but required by law to be performed by a priest when a woman has been unfaithful to her husband. To quote Numbers 5:27:

If a woman has made herself impure and been unfaithful to her husband, this will be the result: When she is made to drink bitter water that brings a curse and causes suffering, it will enter her, her abdomen will swell and her womb will miscarry, and she will become a curse.

Chapter 5 has details of how to prepare bitter water and describes the ceremony to be performed in the administration of bitter water.  It's a trial by ordeal - if she hasn't been unfaithful, the bitter water won't affect her, but if she has, it will cause her to miscarry and abort the pregnancy.

How does this reconcile with the Commandment not to kill?  Well, according to the Bible, an abortion isn't killing because life had not yet started.  The Bible does not claim that life starts at conception or at a heartbeat.  According to the Bible, life begins at first breath.  As explained in Genesis 2:7:

And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Man did not become a living being until he received the breath of life.  Likewise, a fetus is not a "living being" until it draws its first breath.

To be sure, I don't recognize the Bible as having any divine or other authority and it does not guide any aspect of my moral or spiritual life.  But Evangelical Christians sure put a lot of stock in it, and yet it seems to contradict their hardline position on abortion - that life begins at conception and abortion should be forbidden in all cases, even incest, rape, and to save the life of the mother.  

This position is not only not found in the Bible, it is flat out contradicted by their holy scripture.  The life-begins-at-conception argument is just a fiction created by anti-abortion zealots taking a no-holds-barred, extreme position to support their goal.  It is the position of those church ladies with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces and of hypocrites, bigots, and bastards.

Unpacking Big Ears, Part 3: Fennesz and Low

Okay, I'm not going to do a separate post on each individual artist I saw at Big Ears this year.  Let's wrap up the opening Thursday night with a recap of the two remaining acts we saw that evening. 

On the opening Thursday night, after catching 75 Dollar Bill at The Standard and then Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble at the Tennessee Amphitheater on the old World's Fairgrounds, I hoofed it over to St. John's Cathedral to see Austrian electronic musician Fennesz.

The walk from the Amphitheater to the Cathedral was long and confusing, and I'm sure I didn't take the shortest, most logical route between the two points.  I also had to walk up a lot of staircases, and I mean a LOT of staircases.  But no worries - not only did I get to St. John's in time to hear Fennesz, I was the first one in the VIP line to get in.

Fennesz is known for his intricate musical worlds and for his electric guitar compositions.  Since the late '90s, he has been creating melodies and atmospheres that fuse classical and orchestral concepts with conceptual music and complex digital structures, resulting in dense multilayered sheets of sound somewhere between concrete, classical, and ambient music.  

At Saint John's, the first half of his set consisted on ambient soundscapes generated from his laptop computer and a keyboard. As the set progressed, he routed a guitar through effects pedals and into his laptop, where the sound was further altered with samplers and other effects. He played solo, all alone, seated behind a small table set up in front of the church's big pedal organ.  

Originally, I was planning to leave his set early in order to get to my next set, but as I started to lose myself in his sonic structures, I decided that I wasn't going to spend my festival rushing from one set to another.  Instead, I'll just relax and take each minute as it comes.  So I stayed - and enjoyed - Fennesz' entire set.  

After the set was over, and after I had time to chat with a few of my fellow festival-goers, I made the long walk from St. John's Cathedral over to The Mill & Mine.  Those two venues are probably the furthest apart of any two places hosting the festival and represent the longest walk between shows.  I walked at a brisk pace and by the time I got to The Mill & Mine, the band playing there, Minnesota's Low, was already on stage.  But as I walked into the club, they began playing the first notes of the first song of their set, White Horses, also the first song of their most recent album.  Turns out, I had managed to stay and enjoy all of Fennesz's set and then to take the long walk between the two venues, and still didn't miss a single note of Low's set.  

Low are a much-beloved indie-folk band whose songs feature haunting melodies and intricate harmonies between husband-and-wife members Alan Sparhawk (guitar) and Mimi Parker (drums).  Although they've been around since the mid-90s, to nearly  everyone's surprised they radically changed their sound in 2018, adding big slabs of noise and static over their songs, although somehow it was still all clearly recognizable as Low.  Their new album, Hey What, the one that starts with White Horses, continues the experimentation.  

I've seen Low a couple of times already, but not since they changed their sound.  I was curious to hear how it sounded live, and how much of the noise and static were studio effects and how much was live instrumentation.  

As it turns out, it's almost all their own instrumentation, and if anything, they sound even more unruly and distorted live than they do on record. To be clear, I like the new sound and appreciate a band expanding their sonic palette,  but part of me also missed the cuddly old Low of earlier, when the term "fuzzy" was used to describe fans' warm emotional response to the music, not the static enveloping the songs.  Still, it was an interesting set, and it's rare for a band that's been around for over 25 years to suddenly have something new to say.

Low played through their new album in its entirety and in the order of the tracks, and then performed several of their older songs.  When the show was finally over well past midnight, I took the long walk back to my hotel (although the distance was only about half the length between St. John's and The Mill & Mine). According to the odometer app on my phone, I walked a total of 4.1 miles that day, and climbed the equivalent of 9 floors.  I unwound with a couple of IPA drafts at Clancy's, a bar next door to my hotel, before calling it a night.

So on the first day of Big Ears, I managed to catch four acts, ranging from free, world-music-inspired improvisation (75 Dollar Bill) to gospel-influenced jazz (Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble) to ambient electronica (Fennesz) to freaked-out indie folk-rock (Low), and I still had three more full days to go.