More youtube

This time, three videos of Glenn Branca.

Here's my her0 in action in a loft in NYC from 1978. Things you can do with an electric guitar that you can't do with a piano, unfortunately. Its almost as much performance art as music.

... and this last one is the most dramatic though much less dynamic, certainly the most visually striking. This beautiful 19th century beaux-arts concert hall filled with music so viceral, so severe and acidic that you almost expect the traditional-looking audience to react in outrage. I think this is one of my favorite videos on youtube.... almost surreal to hear that music in what appears to be a bastion of the old world.

Alright, i'll play along. This is a little meme from Soho's site, and since i have the time to kill on this monday afternoon...

1. Name an opera you love for the libretto, even though you don't particularly like the music.

uh, i dont really listen to much opera other than einstien on the beach, and i think i'd be bored by that libretto (par contre, i love the music). I think for me this works in reverse. I dont know any opera text i like better than the music, the texts are usually rather banal.

2. Name a piece you wish Glenn Gould had played.

HA, if i liked Gould this might work. Uh, i dunno, John Cage's Sonatas and interludes. He probably could have done those fairly well.

3. If you had to choose: Charles Ives or Carl Ruggles

Ives. I sadly only know Ruggles through the written word and nothing more.

4. Name a piece you're glad Glenn Gould never played.

Anything Debussy post-1900. Images 2 contains some of the most delicate music ever written for piano.

5. What's your favorite unlikely solo passage in the repertoire?


hm. these questions are getting harder. Define solo and repetoire. haha.
does the flute in the begining of the orchestral version of Ravel's Barque sur l'ocean count? i think thats several flutes anyway. The opening to the Rite of Spring but i don't know how thats unlikely.

6. What's a Euro-trash high-concept opera production you'd love to see? (No Mortier-haters get to duck this one, either—be creative.)

again with the opera. ok, Puccini's Manon, sung and acted while suspended from bungee chords.
Imagine the chorus. heheh.

7. Name an instance of non-standard concert dress you wish you hadn't seen.

anything too rich looking, jewlery and that crap. I think people who exceed a certain income level and show it off should be forbidden from entering the concert hall.

8. What aging rock-and-roll star do you wish had tried composing large-scale chorus and orchestra works instead of Paul McCartney?

uh. George? i really dont know. Someone from they might be giants, they made good music.


9. If you had to choose: Carl Nielsen or Jean Sibelius?

this is a retarded question. Sibelius wins 16 times over. Just listen to his 4/5/6/7th symphonies and dare to tell me otherwise.

10. If it was scientifically proven that Beethoven's 9th Symphony caused irreversible brain damage, would you still listen to it?

Well, no. no i wouldnt, and I think beethoven would support me on this, as he has 8 others to enjoy afterall. its not the END of the world if i dont listen to the 9th, since it appears most people manage to get along just fine without listening to it... How long before y0u'd get brain damage? could i just do the last movement without the medical problems?

Recently, i've been more or less focusing my musical attention on Last.fm, listening to various radio stations, and generally being awe-struck by the incredible diversity and sheer number of groups of musicians i had never heard of who are/were making very interesting music. on my page (shamless plug) theres a list of all of this music i've up until now been unfamiliar with-

Stereolab,Prefuse 73,The Residents, Philip Jeck, Deerhoof, Four tet, Jackie-O motherfucker, Charalambides. I had only heard of Stereolab, and only the name, and im really impressed by all of this stuff and i hope to hear more. The dazzling array of music thats presented on Last.fm leaves me humbled, I dont by any means have anything close to a big picture of independent music today, and i dont know if that would ever be possible in the first place.

Im traveling to Spain on the 3rd till the 12th.

Hoping for a heat wave.

Political dead-end #1

Recently a friend sent me a link to a post on a blog called This Modern World by tom tomorrow. Anyway, its a ridiculous thing i saw on this site. Apparently theres something called the Conservapedia, (À cause de* liberal bias!) ....anyway, Im not going to get upset by this black hole idiocy and write some sprawling rant, i think, instead, that its more productive to laugh at it.

But im dancing around the subject, the real reason im posting here is because of dinosaurs.

...

err... actually conservapedia's hillarious and pitiful article on dinosaurs. HERE you can find it, but just in case you're lazy like me, i'll quote it for fun. Its too good not to be quoted.

There are a number of lines of evidence that point to dinosaurs and man coexisting. For example, explorers have reported seeing a live dinosaur. A thousand people reported seeing a dinosaur-like monster in two sightings around Sayram Lake in Xinjiang according to the Chinese publication, China Today. An expedition which included Charles W. Gilmore, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology with the United States National Museum, examined an ancient pictograph which is claimed to portray dinosaurs and man coexisting.....

I saw a picture once of a giant cat on a monorail, and im sure more than a thousand people have already seen it. Here, now conservapedia can write an article about the existence of it!



and a little later...

Some Christians reject the Theory of Evolution and the current science community consensus of the age of the earth. Of those Christians who reject evolution, the Young Earth Creationists believe, based primarily on Biblical sources, but also drawing on Archeological and fossil evidence, that dinosaurs were created on the 6th day of the Creation Week as a final addendum to the wonders God created, approximately 6,000 years ago; that they lived in the Garden of Eden in harmony with other animals, eating only plants; that pairs of various dinosaurs were taken onto Noah's Ark during the Great Flood and were preserved from drowning; that fossilized dinosaur bones originated during the mass killing of the Flood; and that some descendants of those dinosaurs taken aboard the Ark still roam the earth today...

and finally....

Because the term only came into use in the 19th century, the Bible obviously does not use the word "dinosaur." However, they are alleged to be mentioned in numerous places throughout the biblical account. For example, the behemoth in Job and the leviathan in Isaiah are sometimes said to be references to dinosaurs, although some reject this view, saying that behemoth was a hippopotamus and leviathan was a crocodile. There is a problem with this view, however, such as the fact that a hippo doesn't have a "tail like a cedar" and a crocodile does not accurately match the description of leviathan.

Now i have bascially quoted the ENTIRE article for you. That whole... whats it called, "science" crap that's those dirty evolu-atheists promote, that liberal bias, is left out. No other possibilities are given. so case closed, god created the dinosaurs and noah lived with them and put them on his boat.

The end.


Anyway, i figured this would make a good companion post to PWS' utterly true post about Conservatives and science.

WebernUhrWerk- pure computer music!

so today i downloaded this program WebernUhrWerk for shits and giggles on this here laptop. I enjoy it so far. Its a very simple program, straightforward and limited in what it does(draw paralells here), nonetheless it produces true, authentic computer music derived from webern's last tone row, ad infinatum. I could listen to serialism constantly for days without ever hearing an exact repetition (i know this prospect must really excite all of you) It'd be nice if could enter in my own tone row and see the effects, but still, i gotta admit, its kinda cool, how many times have computers actually created something... uh, artisticky? . Though my feelings on seralism are, uhm, mixed, i really do enjoy webern from time to time.

thanks to karlheinz Essl for the invention, who actually has an enormous opus of his own compositions available for download on his site, pretty cool stuff, and i think i'll be exploring it for the next few days.

Dolmen Music

Went to Karnag (carnac in french) today in brittany. This was my birthday present.

And exactly what i wanted.











































Sarah here is posing for a perspective of the size....