Well, holy fucking shit, as the kids today like to say. The Lithuanian contemporary music ensemble Synaesthesis just released Hadal Zone, an hour-long piece written by NY-based composer Žibuoklė Martinaitytė. Hadal Zone was written for electronics and low-range instruments (tuba, bass clarinet, contrabass, cello, piano). The low frequencies and the resulting overtones are a metaphor for descending into the depths of the ocean. For example, the Bathypelagic Zone extends from 3,300 to 13,000 feet below the surface.
After nearly a month of listening to sunny Brazilian samba by the tropicalistas and their heirs, this music is about as polar opposite as you can get.
"(Tommy Tuberville) believes that God is causing climate change, even though he doesn't believe there is climate change going on, although he does believe that China burning coal is contributing to climate change, but the US burning coal is not. Because there is no climate change. Unless God is doing it. Which God probably isn't. Maybe.” -Teresa Hanapin
Tuesday, July 11, 2023
No matter where we live, we’re all being affected by climate change; and the more carbon we produce, the worse it will get. Last week, the earth experienced its hottest day on record and it didn’t just happen once or even twice. For four straight days in a row, from July 3 through July 6, the global average daily temperature was higher than anything humans have ever previously recorded.
Unfortunately, the record-breaking temperatures are the result of only 1% of the heat trapped inside the climate system by all the carbon we emit. The vast majority of that heat is going into the ocean, which is also reaching record high temperatures these days. The North Atlantic Ocean reached its highest temperatures last month in over 170 years of record-keeping, surpassing the average by as much as 5° C. With a naturally occurring El Niño event expected on top of the long-term warming trend this year, scientists are worried about the speed of the changes we’re seeing in the world’s oceans.
Heavy rains in southwestern Japan have washed away homes, flooded hospitals and cut off power and water to hundreds of households. In the United States, about 56.7 million people - 17 percent of the mainland population - live in areas expected to have dangerous levels of heat. A high-pressure dome parked over the Southwest is elevating temperatures from Florida to California, and Texas, where the heat wave has already led to at least 13 deaths, continues to experience weeks of extreme heat over 100° F. Ironically, it's wind and solar power that are keeping the power grid running.
According to a recent study out of Northwestern University, the ground between the City of Chicago has warmed by an average of 5.6° F since the mid-20th century. All that heat, which comes mostly from basements and other underground structures, has caused the layers of sand, clay and rock beneath some buildings to subside or swell by several millimeters over the decades, enough to worsen cracks and defects in walls and foundations.
Across the Northeast, deadly floods have inundated towns from New Tork State to Quebec. After days of heavy rain drove rivers across the region to some of their highest levels on record, streets in Vermont's capital city of Montpelier are underwater today as rescuers try to reach people stranded in remote mountain towns. But some people couldn’t be reached by boat and authorities say that helicopters are trying to airlift some stranded residents from dangerous floodwaters
Meanwhile, hail storms across the U.S. in the month of June have 2023 poised to be the costliest severe-weather year on record. These storms aren't getting more frequent, as far as scientists can tell, but climate change may be making hail stones bigger. Large hail stones associated with the latest round of storms damaged crops and homes and injured more than 100 concert-goers at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater last week.
In Canada, Fort Good Hope in the Northwest Territories hit a record-breaking 99° F last week, the hottest temperature ever recorded that far north in Canada. Nearly two months of coast-to-coast wildfires in Canada have already burned an area nearly equal to the size of Virginia, and smoke from many of these wildfires continues to pollute the skies across the U.S. The only good news in all of this is that the heavy rains in Quebec has brought some relief to the wildfires.
Here's Brazilian musician Sessa performing Grandeza at KEXP back on February 6, 2020. Sessa’s songs are sung in Portuguese, accompanied solely by a female backing choir and Afro-Brazilian percussion.
The New Yorker described Sessa as “a songwriter cut from Veloso’s mold and blessed with a flair for the intimate, the enigmatic, and the licentious.”
Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso on Brazilian television, August 20, 2015. Friends since childhood, both musicians were 73 years old at the time of this set, and the performance and associated world tour was in celebration of the 50th anniversary of their first recording.
Other than (arguably) Bob Dylan or (separately) Neil Young, I can't think of a North American musician who's enjoyed a 50-year career of writing and performing quality music for nearly as long, and both Gil and Veloso are approaching their 60th year of music and still going strong.
As Camélias do Quilombo do Leblon was the first song they wrote together since 1993. I don't speak Portuguese and can't interpret the lyrics, but the title can be roughly translated to "Camelias from the Freeman Plantation of Carlos Leblon."
Tropicalia was a time (the 1970s) and a place (Brazil) and not a style or genre. But the spirit of Tropicalia can still be heard today in the music of Ricardo Dias Gomes.
I know very little about Gomes other than he's from a musical family (both his father and grandfather were Brazilian musicians). He played bass on a trio of critically-acclaimed albums released by Tropicalia legend Caetano Veloso in the late 2000s - Cê (2006), Zii and Zie (2009) and Abraçaço (2012). Gomes moved to Lisbon in 2018 where he recorded the album Aa, which featured Moreno Veloso and guitarist Arto Lindsay. Morrerei Por Isso ("I Will Die for This") is from his recent (2023) album Muito Sol, recorded between New York, Lisbon and Rio, and features Shahzad Ismaily ("your favorite musicians’ favorite musician," according to a recent article in the NY Times).
Even a casual listen to Muito Sol ("Very Sunny") distinguishes it from the sounds of Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, but the experimental and searching spirit of Tropicalia, combined with its roots in samba, is apparent throughout the album. Muito Sol is available on Bandcamp and the usual streaming services.
Thursday, July 06, 2023
Our planet just experienced the warmest June ever recorded with deadly heat waves in Texas, Mexico and India. In the North Atlantic, ocean temperatures were 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit hotter in May than they typically are at that time of year. Around Antarctica, sea ice levels have plunged to record lows.
The heat shows no signs of letting up. The New York Times reported that on Monday, July 3, global average temperatures reached 62.6° F (17° C), the hottest day ever recorded. But that record was shattered the following day, Tuesday, July 4, when global average temperatures rose to a new high of 62.9° F. Tuesday was the hottest day Earth has experienced since at least 1940, when records began, and very likely before that.
And then on Wednesday, temperatures tied the 62.9° F record, ensuring that the 7-day week ending on Wednesday was the hottest ever recorded.
The overall warming of the planet is well within the realm of what scientists had projected would happen as humans continued to pump heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
It's been hot here in Georgia, but seasonably so, with daily highs generally in the low 90s, not unusual for July. The humidity makes it more uncomfortable, but also saves us from still higher temperatures - afternoon thunderstorms cool us off and their associated cloud cover keep the sun from warming us even further.
I didn't mean for this blog or even this series of posts to be about Tom Ze exclusively, but that's the thing about rabbit holes - you never know where they will lead. I don't speak Portuguese and I have no idea what's being said in this video, but I understand everything - which is to say, I understand nothing.
The man could make music from anything.
If nothing else, this video is worth watching just for H.J. Koellreutter's eyebrows at around the 8:00-minute mark.
Following up yesterday's post about Brazilian music legend Tom Zé, here's a mini-documentary about him by David Byrne's record label Luaka Bop. Words aren't really necessary because the video really explains things quite succinctly.
Words aren't necessary, but maybe some music is. Aquarama is an Italian band formed in 2017. Here they are covering two tracks, Toc and Ma, from Zé's 1975 album, Estudando do Samba. The fidelity to the source material is amazing, down to the use of an old mechanical typewriter to capture a specific beat in Toc.
This music still lives! As a point of reference, here's Tom Zé himself performing Toc in 2013, and even he didn't use the typewriter from the studio recording in his live version, although the brilliant drummer, Rogério Bastos, performs a most unusual - and most Zé - solo.
Music, as you know, has always been very important to me and since I've retired I've enjoyed a very rich and rewarding experience of diving deep into music on an almost daily basis. Even though I rarely (meaning almost never) go to live shows any more, I get just as much satisfaction by exploring an artist's or a genre's catalog while browsing through Spotify, Bandcamp and YouTube.
I went through a period of exploring minimalism (Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, etc.), Blue Note soul jazz (Stanley Turrentine, Freddy Hubbard, Lee Morgan, Les McCann, etc.), vintage reggae (Gregory Isaacs, Althea & Donna, Ranking Trevor, Lee Perry & the Upsetters, etc.), Australian improvisers (The Necks, Oren Ambarchi, etc.), and the 20th Century lesbian composers (Pauline Oliveros, Ione, Annea Lockwood, Ruth Anderson, etc.).
For the past month or so, I've been listening almost exclusively to Brazilian music, particularly the tropicalia movement of the 1970s. My gateway to this music was probably David Byrne's Brazil Classics 1: Beleza Tropica anthology back in the 1990s. I enjoyed that record immensely and played it in heavy rotation well into the 2000s. My interest in the genre was maintained by Seu Jorge's Portuguese covers of David Bowie songs for the soundtrack of the 2004 Wes Anderson film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. But it wasn't until June 2023 that I did a deep dive into the catalog of the artists represented on these records.
The effort was wonderfully rewarding. The music is so lively and sunny and life affirming that it's like having pure, unadulterated sunshine shot straight up your ass with a flashlight. This music makes me happy. It makes me laugh. It makes me want to dance and it makes me want to play it over and over again.
Tropicalia isn't a genre of music - it was actually a protest movement by various young Brazilian rock and samba practitioners against the military regime that ruled Brazil in the 1970s. The tropicalists merged Brazilian samba with psychedelic rock, jazz, and the avant garde and anything else they could find, creating an extremely diverse range of sounds and styles. I can't post a "typical" tropicalia song because such a thing doesn't exist - it would take at least a dozen tracks (or a complete listening to Byrne's Brazil Classics) to get any idea of the breadth of the music.
Gilberto Gil is the undisputed heavyweight champion of the movement, although he would probably modestly point to his friend Caetano Veloso as the title holder. But I understand that David Byrne was inspired to start documenting the tropicalia movement when he stumbled across a copy of the Tom Zé album Estudando o Samba ("Studies in Samba" or literally "Studying the Samba"). My June 2023 deep dive back into tropicalia started when Four Tet (Kieren Hebden) posted Tom Zé's instrumental Toc from Estudando on his 2,000-song Spotify playlist. So instead of posting my favorite Gilberto Gil track (as if there were one single track that stood out above all of his other incredible work), here's Ogodô, Ano 2000 by Tom Zé, not a track from Estudando but from Brazil Classics, Vol. 5: The Hips of Tradition, his "comeback" album produced by David Byrne.
Tom Zé is a consummate trickster, the Loki in the pantheon of tropicalia gods, and it's a fool's task to try and "explain" him, butOgodô isXango Agodô, a god or spirit in the Brazilian Umbanda religion. The polytheistic religion was created when African slaves brought their traditional beliefs to Brazil and mixed them with Catholicism, much as later Brazilian tropicalists mixed traditional Brazilian samba with various contemporary styles. The lyrics are mostly just an invocation of the name "Ogodô" over and over again, followed by some nonsense syllables mimicking the sounds of the instruments - "talac-tac-tac-TAC - tambourine" and "toloc-knock-knock-KNOCK - agogô" (a Brazilian percussion instrument). The bridge is sung in Portuguese and then repeated in heavily accented English: "The science in her trance will make the sign of (the) cross and we will light bonfires to appreciate the electric bulb."
Make of that what you will. Here's a recent, stripped-down, unplugged version of Ogodô. I'm convinced that the Brazilians do indeed have access to the Fountain of Youth - Zé is 55 in the performance up above, and here he is in 2020 at the age of 84, remarkably spry and good-natured despite uncooperative pants and a recalcitrant mike stand.
In closing, I just want to reemphasize that there is no common sound or style to tropicalia other than a percussive trace of samba, but you'll never get that out from Brazilain musicians - samba is in their very DNA. Each song from the movement is as unique in its own way as Ogodô is from almost everything else. I'll have to post more of these songs in the future to do justice to the diversity of the music.
As my man William S. Burroughs once said (The Western Lands), “People have nothing to say, but they are afraid of saying nothing, so what they do say comes out flat and vapid and meaningless. The shadow of death is on every face.”
As hard as it is for me to believe, today is the four-year anniversary of my retirement. My last day as a productive, income-earning citizen was June 30, 2019 - since July 1 of that year, I've been either a non-productive leech living off entitlements while contributing nothing to society at large, as Republicans would say, or finally free at last, as I would say.
The four years passed in the blinking of an eye. There was a global pandemic that shut down much of the world in successive waves, or spikes, of infection, killing millions across the globe, and dominated 12 to 18 months of those four years. Then in late October 2020, while the covids were still ravaging the world, a tree fell onto my house during Hurricane Zeta causing catastrophic damage, and home repairs, contractors, insurance negotiations, and other headaches dominated the next 12 months.
Parts of me never fully recovered from those twin disasters of 2020, and I'm still living in partial seclusion, and nervously eye the remaining trees on my property every time a storm is forecast. I just took down two more trees last month, the third and fourth since the Zeta incident, but there are still many tons of timber way too high up over my head.
But je ne regrette rien - I'm glad I retired when I did and wouldn't have wanted it any other way. I'm glad I didn't have to make difficult choices about risking an early return to the workplace during the pandemic just to make a living. I don't miss commuting and working 10-hour days only to enrich the owners of the companies for which I worked. I'm perfectly comfortable being the eccentric old man living all alone in the brick house up on the hill.
I left the working world not because I was so financially secure that it made no sense to continue to work but because I was desperately unhappy in my career and realized that this life was my one and only shot at existence. If I wasn't enjoying this singular chance at existance then I should change it - there's no point in suffering one's way to the grave if it's possible to change things.
In other news, despite public protests, including over 12 hours of impassioned testimony, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve Cop City, and the powers that be wasted no time clear-cutting some 85 acres of forest land before the inevitable lawsuits and voter referenda halt construction. Last night, someone set a dozen police motorcycles on fire on the site. A luta continua.
