|
wk complains because a conversation breaks out?
what's the matter?
there's a strange effect of living inside a mountain of music: release dates aren't terribly important. what is new is maybe only new for you. maybe you are crossing genres. maybe something was reissued recently and you didnt know it existed before...at the moment, i am listening to jimmy guiffre's 1962 record "free fall" with paul bley and steve swallow. it's been around, vaguely, for a long time: i just picked it up yesterday (it's a great record, btw...you can hear where someone like john carter picked up from.) i dont know if this is a "perfect" record because it isnt pop. it is an extremely disciplined recording: lots of space, lots of concentration. it's hard to say if the question of whether you would "add anything" while listening means anything.
i dont think it does.
this is a studio performance. on this particular day, during the period the decks were recording, these gentlemen hit a rarified space. but there is no particular easy melody--there are elements being set up, inverted, slowed down, sped up, blown apart. there is great control, great precision in the playing. and i think there is considerable beauty in all this. but i dont know (or particularly care, really) if a whole lot of folk have the patience for this type of music, or if they listen to it, if they know how to hear it when they do.
listening is a very mobile skill: but it's mobility is a function of how you think about it.
if you are oriented toward particular types of structure made up of particular sequences that run you through a sequence of responses that you find reassuring, beautiful, generative for whatever you value from such experiences, then fine: but there are many ways of listening, and many types of music.
pop is a pretty fucking narrow field.
i listen to quite alot of it, but i ususally wedge it between other things, a collage element. putting pop tunes in odd places changes how you hear them, and they change how you hear what's around them.
it seems to me that what you love you would want to allow to change.
to keep music in one form, in one place, is to kill it.
you drain out the process and replace it with a thing.
but sound--music--is not a thing.
it is bizarre that it would be so easy to treat it as if it were.
perfection ain't nothing but a word.
here's a list of stuff that i like today (things that have turned up on my sound system in the past 48 hours while i was thinking about this "perfection" business):
albums:
maro ajemian's 1950 recording of john cage's sonatas and interludes for prepared piano.
(for the micing of the piano, the riot of microtones and harmonics produced by the preparations, caught by her pedalling technique...)
toru takemitsu: music from "kwaidan" <--this is brilliant. seriously.
animal collective: sung tongs
dusty springfield: dusty in memphis.
can: tago mago
singles:
beach boys: heroes and villans
kahimie karie: good morning world
satanicpornocultshop: anorexia gas balloon (reprise)
favorite experience in any media of the past 24 hours:
the music lesson sequence from the short film "colorforms"
which is a lovely thing.
"this is for messy girls everywhere" it says.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|