out standing in the field
Books
Favorites from 2009
Jan 2nd
Here are few favorite picks of recorded media, live shows and print from 2009. As usual, I’m not much of an up-to-the-minute consumer so some of this may be old news. The exception here are the live shows, of course, so let’s start there…
Live Music
My two favorite shows were at EMPAC. The pummeling dished out by The Boredoms + 9 drummers easily takes the top spot. Garth Knox’s viola and viola d’amore might have been the polar opposite of The Boredoms but was no less riveting. I was also mightily impressed with 2009 ASAC guests Area C and Ben Bracken.
Recorded Music
The only new release on my list this year is Take Me To the Water from Dust to Digital. It’s a solid (maybe even stolid) collection of gospel–no real surprises or major standouts. But combined with the beautiful book I know I’ll be returning to this one often.
Two older CDs of music by Arthur Russel and Julius Eastman are now safely ensconced in my desert island collection:
Arthur Russel World of Echo
Where has this record been all my life? I had heard Russel’s avant-disco but was unprepared for the intimacy and sweet strangeness in this recording.
Julius Eastman Unjust Malaise
A life-changing collection of prescient music from a singular talent. There are so many standouts in this collection that it’s hard to choose a favorite.
And some assorted highlights from the year’s listening:
The Hub The Hub & Wreckin’ Ball
Tim Perkis/John Bischoff Artificial Horizon
Some of the synthesized sounds on these records date them, yet no one has better explored the potential for musicking with communication technology. The Hub is still at the heart of the genre, and sadly the genre is still too small. Maybe all those laptop orchestras with their hemi speakers will carry on some this work. They would do well to revisit these recordings.
Junior Kimbrough and the Soul Blues Boys All Night Long
Languorous sound that builds a Calatrava-style bridge between a juke-joint in Mississippi and the sacred sites of minimalism, drone and raga. On second thought, maybe that juke-joint in Mississippi IS a sacred site of minimalism, drone and raga.
Art of Field Recording Volume I
Another Dust to Digital release. I lived with these recordings for most of the year–and won’t be forgetting them soon.
Gloria Coates Symphonies Nos. 1, 7 and 14
This was recommended to me when it first came out. I’m sorry I missed it until this year.
Books
This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levitan was probably the most fun I’ve had thinking about music and sound in a while. His Six Songs is less interesting/convincing, but a good intro to questions about music and evolution.
I enjoyed John Adams‘s Hallelujah Junction more than I expected, based on my experience with Adams’ music. (When will John Luther Adams write a book?) I found his tales about his origins and development illuminating and his writing refreshingly frank. It was especially interesting to read about his life in San Francisco during the 1960s which leads to…
The San Francisco Tape Music Center: an excellent overview of an under-appreciated group of electronic music pioneers and their fascinating intersections with popular culture. This collection puts a new spin on the usual Columbia/Princeton/Bell Laboratory history of electronic music in the US.
Music Technology
I expected 2009 to be about Max for Live, but I never got around to buying Live and then had no reason to get Max for Live. Instead, the one piece of music gear that’s made the most impact on my work in 2009 is an 1860′s style fretless tackhead banjo built by Eric Prust.
Back to the software side, the most notable music software I used this year was for the iPhone
Cleartune is easily the best tuner I’ve ever used. It still makes me a little giddy at how wonderful it is to be able to switch between equal tempered tunings and all manner of Pythagorean, just, meantone and historical tunings. My trusty clip-on tuner finally died this year; I’m not sure I’ll replace it.
SoundLevel is a free, bare-bones sound level meter app. I haven’t upgraded to SoundLevel Pro because the free app does me just fine. The convenience of always having a sound level meter on hand means that I’m much more likely to use it. In fact, it’s become an important step every time I set up a PA or go to a friend’s house to listen to mixes. Not to mention the ability to quickly check how loud that blender really is–time to put in earplugs!
On the productivity/inspiration side of things, OmniFocus for iPhone is essential for me. And the iPhone’s built-in Voice Memos app has become my favorite way to capture a sonic idea or lyric phrase–if only there were a better way to offload those files to my machine rather than having to go through iTunes…
Looking ahead to 2010
Maybe 2010 will be my time for Live and Max for Live. I’ve just started dipping into the Pinewoods International Collection of folk tunes and I expect the book will occupy me for most of next year. I’m hoping that by 2011 I’ll be able to frail my way with ease through all those odd time signatures. Finally, I’m looking forward to making more field recordings with my recently beefed-up rig which now includes a Fostex FR2-LE and a Rode Blimp.
Related PostsHandmade Electronic Music – Updated
Apr 14th
Nic Collins’s wonderful book, Handmade Electronic Music – The Art of Hardware Hacking is getting an update. Routledge is publishing a new edition with, according to Nic, “lots of new circuits and illustrations, more examples of artists’ designs, and a DVD with 87 1-minute video clips by hackers from all over the globe, as well as a series of step-by-step video tutorials.” I can’t wait to see it. After the jump are a number of events surrounding the release.
Related PostsWhat I Did 20 Years Ago: Biodegradable
Jan 18th
David Baird of Peer Pressure Productions has posted every issue of Biodegradable, a zine I helped publish 20 years ago. Get them here. Biodegradable is a window into skate punk culture of Huntsville AL circa 1988, with reports of the hottest skate spots and reviews of albums (that’s what they were back then) from iconic bands such as Jodie Foster’s Army, Suicidal Tendencies, Dead Milkmen, 7 Seconds, and Fugazi. But there’s more than late-80′s skate culture. There’s also plenty of teenage angst in the form of blood and gore drawings (vol. 1 iss. 3) and what was then a kick-ass literature section. I kid you not! Poetry was on everyone’s mind back then, it seems. We even managed to squeeze in a review of the Kronos Quartet! Other not-to-be-missed highlights include an interview with the Sex Clark Five (vol. 1 iss. 4) and the Mail Art sections in later issues. Twenty years from now I’ll be digging out posts from the Field Guide and waxing nostalgic…or blushing…
Related PostsToo Late Book Review: Fear of Music: The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco
Oct 31st
I recently finished reading Garry Mulholland’s Fear of Music: The 261 Greatest Albums Since Punk and Disco. I picked it up to fill in the gaps of my popular music education–specifically the years between 1989 and 1999 when I was either pursuing classical music (and felt obliged to shut out pop influences, oh boy, isn’t that a ripe topic for discussion…) or too involved in some obscure corner of avant-garde/jazz/experimental/electronic/other to pay attention to what the “kids” were hearing.
It’s a fun read, thanks largely to Mulholland’s cheeky streak but even more so to his idealism. Mulholland values his pop music for its world-changing properties as much as for its booty-shaking abilities. And his disappointment as each starry-eyed group and movement sells itself short to crass commerce and popular opinion is somehow registered with eternal optimism: maybe something stuck this time around, maybe lessons were learned, maybe it will all be different next time around… Too bad it never quite works out that way.
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