gwalla

The creepy Pink Elephants sequence from Disney's Dumbo, sync'ed to a version of the tune by Sun Ra! It doesn't always sync exactly, because the Arkestra extended some bits and shortened others, but it works surprisingly well.

The Dumbo animators clearly owe a great debt to Fleischer Studios and their weird, drugged-out jazz cartoons.

Great post-rock song. It starts out quiet and low-key, then about halfway through switches modes to epic and soaring.

And there's one point that reminds me of ursulav's Biting Pear of Salamanca (perhaps better known by the intartubes as the "LOL WUT" Pear). You'll know it when you see it.

EDIT: Deepest Sender ate the entire contents of my post. I hope it works this time.

But I have been writing more stuff on my Last.FM journal than here. I've decided that my music-related posting is going to go in my Last.FM journal (and since I've been going to more concerts and buying more CDs lately, I've had more to say about it). Although I may start cross-posting, because my LJ is looking a little dead these days.

These are my journal posts so far (with the exception of a repost of that Van Halen blooper jokermage posted a while back). My CD reviews:

• Recent acquisitions, reviewed (Mogwai, Sufjan Stevens, Lou Harrison, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, Link Wray, The Bad Plus, Györgi Ligeti, Mastodon, Behold... the Arctopus)
  
• CD reviews: King Crimson, Four Tet, Ruins, Slough Feg, Tony Levin, Barenaked Ladies, Buckshot LeFonque, French Frith Kaiser Thompson, BulletBoys

And reviews of shows I've been to (these were all within one week. I was pretty dead by Friday):

• Ornette Coleman at SFJAZZ
• I rocked with a zombie: Roky Erickson @ The Great American Music Hall, Oct 31
• Battles @ The Great American Music Hall, Nov 1

Enjoy!

But it was long and probably not that interesting to anybody who wasn't already into it. So, in a nutshell: it was awesome, I had a great time, caught up with people I hadn't seen for a while and made some new friends, got my ass kicked by a man in his 60s, learned a lot, and was really tired by the end.

Now with that out of the way, an awesome video by The Avalanches (no, it's not Frontier Psychiatrist):

You've seen them perform the Pythagoras Switch Algorithm March. Now, 1500 inmates of a Phillippine prison perform the video to Michael Jackson's "Thriller"!

Imagine if Pee-Wee Herman went vaguely punk.

I have been tagged by jbacardi  for the following meme:

1. Go to www.popculturemadness.com.
2. Pick the year you turned 18
3. Get yourself nostalgic over the songs of the year
4. Write something about how the song affected you
5. Pass it on to 5 more friends

I'm not sure I'll be able to pull off step 3, though, because ( the songs of 1997 sucked )

I tag...

animal_co
demiurgent
postbox
kadharonon
mcmartin

The script lists the users top 20 overall artists and lists the 8 most similar artists to each one, then deletes any repeated artists. The idea is to see how varied your taste is, a score of 9 is extremely unvaried while 160 represents an extremely varied one (script available here).

( In no particular order )

I got 132. What do I win?

Today sucked mightily. I'm in book print this week, which normally I don't mind, but the books I'm getting seem to be a bad batch and keep getting mangled in the printers. The men's room is closed due to it catching on fire over the weekend. Also, a fire alarm got pulled today and we had to evacuate for a bit. No fun.

I think it's to make up for the rather awesome weekend I just had. On Friday night I went to the San Francisco Symphony to hear Michael Tilson Thomas conduct a few Stravinsky pieces and one Takemitsu piece. MTT has a reputation as a great interpreter of Stravinsky, and he's one of my favorite composers, so it was a nearly ideal opportunity to finally check out Davies Hall and the SF Symphony. I caught the pre-concert talk, which didn't really help me understand what was going on later, but was still enjoyable. Someone apparently had a heart attack or something like it right after the talk, and someone actually shouted out "Is there a doctor in the house?" I never thought I'd hear that said seriously. Given the absence of EMTs in the lobby, I think it turned out okay.

The performance did not disappoint. The first half was two Stravinsky pieces: the Symphonies for Winds and the short ballet Apollo (not staged). Both were great, but Apollo really stood out. After the intermission was Fantasma/Cantos by Takemitsu and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. The piece by Takemitsu is for clarinet solist and orchestra, and the soloist was Richard Stoltzman, for whom it was written. The piece really didn't do much for me—it relies on big washes of sound, while I tend to prefer pieces where it feels like every note counts—but I did like Stoltzman's clarinet tone, which almost felt jazzy in places (I was not terribly surprised to read in his bio on the program that he had done some work with jazz artists). The Symphony of Psalms involved the SF Symphony Chorus as well as the orchestra, and was dazzling. The second movement is a double fugue between chorus and orchestra!

Then on Sunday I took my dad to see Dave Brubeck playing at the Masonic Auditorium as part of the SFJazz series. Dave is looking a little shaky these days (he's 86!) and his voice is cracking, but he can still play piano like anything. He played two sets: one with his current quartet, and one with a big band. His quartet is very cool: his saxophonist doubled on flute for one piece, his drummer can pound out some great rhythms, and his bassist played with a bow for one piece. The big band included his quartet as well as additional saxes, brass, and a percussionist (marimba, glockenspiel, and miscellaneous untuned percussion, I think). I didn't catch the titles for the quartet set. The big band played, among other things, his Theme to Mr. Broadway (for a TV show that had the misfortune to go up against The Man From U.N.C.L.E. in its heyday) and expanded arrangements of Take Five and Blue Rondo a la Turk. They also played a fairly recent piece titled Elementals. It's based on a simple heartbeat rhythm and the melodic motif A B C, and from there branches out into a Gregorian "chant" (instrumental), a Bach-style chorale, polyrhythm, polytonality, and swing, and finally ends up in a Schoenbergian twelve-tone form. Fantastic stuff. They ended with a version of Take the "A" Train.

After that we went to Absinthe for cocktails and chatted about current events, philosophy, education, etc. over our drinks and desserts of fruit and cheese.

( Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, visualized )

Somebody (not me) made this with a nifty little freeware app that generates animated displays from MIDI files. I find it really helps me keep track of the different contrapuntal voices. Pretty fun.

Other visualizations I'd like to see: Ockeghem's Missa Prolationem, Hovhaness's Prelude and Quadruple Fugue, Josquin's L'homme Armé masses, Pärt's Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Baude Cordier's Tout Par Compas, and Bach's Goldberg canons.

Looks like my decision has been made for me. The Roky show is sold out.

Strangely, this makes me feel better. It's out of my hands, so I won't regret my decision.

Did see the documentary on him tonight. It was very good. I did know that he was sent to the psychiatric hospital for marijuana possession, but I didn't now that he'd already had a psychotic break and been diagnosed as schizophrenic before that point, or that he was originally sent to minimum-security hospitals but was sent to the high-security one because his girlfriend kept helping him escape to her place to drop acid. Also, Roky comes by his crazy naturally: his entire family is messed up beyond belief. Even the most outwardly stable-seeming of them, his youngest brother Sumner, is definitely damaged goods.

Had beer & snausages with a friend in the Mission afterwards. Then home and to bed.

This Sunday I found out that one of my favorite songwriters, Roky Erickson, will be performing in San Francisco this Thursday. AIUI, he doesn't tour very much, so this is a rare opportunity. Unfortunately, Thursday is Game Night for me & my friends. Normally I'd just skip game night, but we didn't game last week and I'll be skipping it for sure next week (to see Night of the Lepus as part of the Parkway Theater's Thrillville b-movie series with some friends from work). So that's three weeks down, two of which my character* won't be leveling up with the other characters, which would put him pretty far behind, and he's already one of the weaker party members. And, well, I've kind of been fiending for some D&D action (I'm not proud). Either way I'm going to regret my decision.

Oh well. I'll be seeing a documentary on Roky tomorrow night, and I can make up my mind then.

*Kamandi, a Wild Elf scout. It's a prehistoric D&D campaign. Dungeons & Dinos!

My top artists, according to Last.FM:

It's for King Crimson, one of my favorite rock bands.

KC was one of the first progressive rock bands, debuting and releasing their first album in 1969. The band's membership has been unstable for most of its existence, with the only constant through the years being guitarist Robert Fripp. Their existence can be divided into three eras, separated by periods in which the group was disbanded and inactive: the early years (from In the Court of the Crimson King through Islands), the short-lived but highly-regarded mid-70s incarnation (from Lark's Tongues in Aspic through Red), and the "Belew era" (from 1981's Discipline onwards).

( Epitaph - my favorite song from the first album (1969) )

In 1981, with King Crimson having been out of commission for about half a decade, Fripp put together a new group with drummer Bill Bruford, veteran session bassist Tony Levin, and singer/guitarist Adrian Belew (who had played with both Frank Zappa and the Talking Heads). The result combined the New Wave sound of the time with Fripp's desire to create a "rock gamelan" using structures inspired by Indonesian music, and featuring intricate twin lead arrangements. Belew and Fripp in particular have great chemistry, and ever since Belew has been the other constant member through the group's many lineup changes.

( Elephant Talk - a live performance from the Discipline era )

King Crimson has managed to avoid breaking up since Discipline (knock on wood), although the membership has changed (even becoming a sextet, or "double trio", for a brief period), and their sound had changed as well, losing the New Wave feel and re-integrating some aspects of the mid-70s sound during the '90s, and moving in a more "hard rock" direction recently. The current lineup, the one featured on 2002's Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With EP and 2003's The Power To Believe, is the same as the Discipline group (Levin left for a while but returned) with Pat Mastelotto replacing Bruford on the drums.

( Elektrik - an instrumental tour de force from 2003's The Power To Believe )
( Happy With What You Have To Be Happy With - from the EP of the same name and The Power to Believe )

Do you suspect that  polling, deomgraphics, and focus groups are sucking the art out of entertainment? I come bearing proof, of a sort.

The People's Choice Project is a tongue-in-cheek art project that polls people about their preferences and then uses the data they collect to "scientifically" create works of art that are supposedly statistically "what people want" and "what people don't want". Previously they have applied their methodology to paintings, but now they've applied it to music!

The Most Wanted Song is "smooth jazz"/R&B easy listening pablum, filled with soft saxophones and generic lyrics about love and going to bed. "Baby, can't you see / You're my fantasy" and such.

The Most Unwanted Song, on the other hand, is insane. There are a lot of things that people say they don't like in music, and the People's Choice Project's "scientific" approach demanded that they include them all. The result is a bizarre mishmash that transcends quality. An over-25-minute epic featuring an operatic soprano rapping about cowboys and Wittgenstein is punctuated by children shouting/chanting made-up holiday-themed commercial jingles, backed by organ, accordion, bagpipes, tuba, etc. It has to be heard to be believed.

"Yom Kippur! Yom Kippur! Self-reflection and atonement! Do all your shopping...at Wal-Mart!"

Genius.

It's for MAGMA, my favorite Stravinsky-inspired French prog rock/jazz fusion group singing in an invented language. Samples below:

( De Futura )

( Kohntarkosz Anteria (part 1) )

I've been on a CD-buying jag recently—mostly classical (in the general sense, not the classical era proper), but some jazz. Here's what I've acquired in the past few weeks:

• Miles Davis: Miles In Tokyo — Aside from the fact that it's Miles, I was interested in this album because it also features saxophonist Sam Rivers, who studied under Hovhaness, a composer I really like (and who I wouldn't have thought likely to be connected to jazz). It's the only Miles album with Rivers, who was a little too free jazz for Davis's comfort (and who was quickly replaced by Wayne Shorter), but regardless of how Miles felt about their chemistry, the album smokes.
• Art Farmer/Gigi Gryce: When Farmer Met Gryce — Gigi Gryce is another saxophonist who studied under Hovhaness. This is a pretty sweet album, too.
• The Benzedrine Monks of Santo Domonica: Chantmania — a silly novelty record parodying the craze for Gregorian chant (so it's already pretty dated) with pseudo-medieval covers of popular songs (Smells Like Teen Spirit, theme from The Monkees) and ending with "The Monks' Vow of Silence" (a track with no sound at all). Pretty stupid, really, but good for a laugh. And hell, it only cost two bucks.
• Ars Subtilior: Dawn of the Renaissance — a collection of ars subtilior and other late ars nova songs (motets, chansons, etc.). I really like early polyphony, because it's so intricate and so different from what came later. Plus, I just think isorhythm is a nifty technique.
• Buxtehude: Organ Music Vol. 4— From Naxos. Dietrich Buxtehude was the great German composer of organ music before Bach. Greatness is to be found here. Although he's been overshadowed by Bach, he still measures up quite nicely. If you like the sound of the pipe organ, you're missing out if you haven't heard this stuff.
• Conlon Nancarrow: Player Piano vol. 1: Studies 1-12 — One of the things that inspired this shopping spree was a bout of Wikipedia-surfing that got me interested in prolation canons. These are canons in which different voices play the same melody at different speeds (roughly speaking), and are reputedly very hard to write. Nancarrow is a composer who wrote almost entirely in this form, for player piano because his music is impossible for a single pianist to play (even versions for piano duo are reductions). I'd heard of him before, but had never heard his music, so I was curious. Frankly, I'm not impressed. One of the things I like about fugues and canons is the clarity of structure. But Nancarrow's pieces are so busy that it's impossible to even pick out the main theme. It ends up sounding like a bunch of thrashing about on the keys.
  Not a hit.
• Bach: The Art of Fugue/The Musical Offering (Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner) — It's hard to go wrong with Bach. My suitcase full of standard repertoire (which I received from the Chronicle's classical music critic back when I worked there) lacks these works (it's got the Brandenburgs and the Goldberg Variations, and a bunch of organ works, so it's not really hurting for Bach, and they needed to leave some room for other composers!). I am a sucker for Baroque counterpoint.
• Ockeghem: Requiem / Missa Prolationum — Naxos again. And another target of my search for prolation canons. Ockeghem's Missa Prolationum is a complete Catholic mass consisting entirely of prolation canons! And unlike the Nancarrow, it's very clear. This is a fantastic work. Just beautiful.
• Arvo Pärt: Tabula Rasa  — Besides the title piece, this also contains two versions of Fratres (one for violin and piano, with Keith Jarrett (!) on piano, the other played by the 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic), and the Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten. The latter was the piece I was looking for specifically: it contains a prolation canon (two, actually). I'd only heard Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen before, but it has the distinction of being the only piece of music to make me spontaneously burst into tears in the record store (no mean feat, considering the lyrics are entirely in Old Church Slavonic!), so I was very interested in this. It did not disappoint. I am now convinced that Pärt is one of the all-time greats.
• Górecki: Symphony No. 3 (London Sinfonietta) — I can't recall why I was looking for Górecki, or even if this is the piece I was looking for specifically, but I'm glad I picked it up. Possibly by following links from Pärt. The third symphony is actually a symphony/song cycle: each of the three movements has lyrics. I'll definitely be listening to this again soon. Plus, it was only $5.
• Honegger: Honegger Conducts Honegger — Another name I'd heard but whose work I hadn't. This is a collection of various pieces (Pacific 231, Rugby, Prelude to the Tempest, Cello Concerto, etc.). I knew that many Hollywood film-music composers studied under postwar European modernists, but here you can really hear the connection: Pacific 231 and Rugby in particular sound like they could be on the soundtrack to some late '40s-'50s black and white classic.
• Thelonius Monk Quartet: Monk's Music — Another appearance by Gigi Gryce, this time of course in Monk's band (alongside Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane!). I haven't listened to this all the way through yet, and I was kind of distracted when I was listening, so I really haven't formed an opinion yet. Stay tuned.
• Don Ellis Orchestra: Music from Other Galaxies and Planets: Featuring the Main Title from Star Wars — I'm a Don Ellis fan. I was sure this album would never get released on CD, because the general consensus is that it was terrible (Don agreed; it was basically a contractual obligation album, and the label insisted that he do a version of the Star Wars theme, since Star Wars had just become big). So when I saw it on the racks at Rasputin's, I had to pick it up. The general consensus is right: this is bad. But not bad in a grating way. It's just cheesy as hell. The feature track in particular is almost as lame as the notorious disco version of the theme (this fusion-funk take verges on disco itself).  So naturally, I got a huge kick out of it. I probably should have spent my money on a copy of Live At Fillmore (my only copy was transferred to CD from a slightly worn LP by a friend, back when it looked like they were never going to make an official CD release), but whatever. It's silly fun.
• Sam Rivers: Fuschia Swing Song — I was really impressed by Rivers on Miles in Tokyo, so on a later trip I picked up this album, which is highly regarded. As band leader, he gets to cut loose in his free jazz style here without being reigned in by Miles. His style is to play "inside-outside": seamlessly shifting his improvisations between playing "inside" (harmonizing in traditional fashion with the melody) and "outside" (free jazz). It's wild and fascinating.
• The Unknown Lover: Songs by Solage and Machaut (Gothic Voices) — More ars subtilior, since I liked what I'd heard on the omnibus CD. This is actually a recording of the complete extant works of Solage (10 songs, and 2 more anonymously written songs attributed to him on stylistic grounds), the most prolific composer of the ars subtilior, along with several songs by Guillaume de Machaut (his better known predecessor in the ars nova). I need to listen to this again. The songs tend to blend together, and since they alternate between Solage and Machaut, if I don't pay attention to the begnnings and endings I lose track of who is who and what is what. Fumeux Fume Par Fumee does stand out as pretty amusing: it's a parody of a group of smokers (since this is before contact with the New World, it isn't tobacco, but either hashish or opium) that imitates the effects of the drug on the singers. You don't have to know medieval French to get the joke.
• Gubaidulina: The Deceitful Face of Hope and Despair; Sieben Worte — An impulse buy. I'd heard good things about Gubaidulina on the Unknown Composers Page, so I picked this up. It's not really to my taste, and didn't hold my interest. Not my kind of moderism.
• Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique (Baltimore Symphony Orchestra) — Found in the used bin at The Musical Offering (a great little classical CD shop slash café). I was curious about Berlioz: all I knew of him was the last two movements of the Symphonie Fantastique (the March to the Scaffold and the Dream of the Witches' Sabbath, both of which are common "spooky classical" Halloween music). I'm kind of glad I didn't pay full price. Maybe the performance just isn't up to snuff, but this just didn't grab me. I was ready to like it, too. I've never been as big on the Romantics, and I don't know why.

There are also a couple I haven't had a chance to listen to yet: a disc of violin concertos by Berg and Stravinsky (love Stravinsky, like what I've heard of Berg, optimistic), and Vol. 3 of Buxtehude's organ works (sure I'll love it ifVol. 4 is anything to go by).

I was also looking for a recording of the 14 canons on the Goldberg ground (BWV 1087) by Bach, a kind of appendix to the Goldberg Variations (one of them is a prolation canon!). But the guy at the Musical Offering ran a search for me, and it seems like no recordings exist, or at least are in print. I find this disturbing. I mean, it's by Bach, and nobody's recorded it?

Bach?

Good grief.

from ocarina

For this little three-question game you'll need some sort of play-count record on your mp3 library. No guessing!

1) What's the most-played track in your mp3 collection, and how many times has it been played?
"Ana Ng" by They Might Be Giants: 47

2) Divide that play count in half and round up. What's the nearest song?
"Galvanize" by The Chemical Bros feat. Q-Tip, and "Cock Mobster" by MC Paul Barman: 24

3) Divide that play count in half, and round up again.
"A Hymn to the Morning Star" by Sleepytime Gorilla Museum; "All Caps" by Madvillain; "Anthem Apocalyptica" by Machinae Supremacy; "Borg Sex", "Chords of Life", and "Oriental Melody" by Joe Satriani; "Born Too Slow" by The Crystal Method; "Eminem vs. Benny Hill" (mash-up, artist unknown); "Head Like a Hole" by Devo; "Heavy Metal" by Sammy Hagar; "In a Glass House" by Gentle Giant; "In Da Club (bhangra remix)" by DJ Sanj; "Lapdance" by NERD; "Matte Kudasai" by King Crimson; "Party Hard" by Andrew WK; "Q Samba (Sub Dub Mix)" by Arto Lindsay; "Speed Racer (Porno Remix)" by DJ Keoki; "Steady As She Goes" by The Raconteurs; "Time To Start" by Blue Man Group; "USA USA" by Blacksmoke: 12

4) Care to explain yourself?
I have a tendency to listen to my iPod on full random play a lot of the time, which spreads things around, hence the low numbers. "Ana Ng" is just an awesome song. I feel like I should make excuses for "In Da Club", because 50 Cent sucks so much, but I won't.

Results are slightly different if I go by my Last.FM stats rather than iTunes, since I've had iTunes for longer, but a lot of the same things show up. I was actually surprised that I had two results for #2 with both sources, and "Cock Mobster" is one of them for both.