Watching The Grass Grow
Forget Home and Garden and just give me the Yard. Yard TV broadcasts an unending expanse of green. Sit back and watch the grass grow from the comfort of your living room 24 hours a day. There’s always plenty of sun and never a sunburn; always plenty of rain, but you never get wet. Yard TV. All of the fun, none of the allergens.
In conjunction with Ecstatic Yod, Ecstatic Peace, and Arthur Magazine, the Albany Sonic Arts Collective is proud to present: No More Bush Tour
Sunday Aug 3
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark Street, Albany NY
7:00 pm
Featuring:
This is a great long lineup, hence it’s an early show. See below to study up on press release jargon and artist bios so you can delight your friends with an insider’s knowledge of the event. I’m looking forward to hearing Jack Rose, seeing Tom Carter again, and being pleasantly surprised by someone else on the bill. It’s bound to happen.
“Five years ago, in a time of woe for the underground, the country and the world, the members of the Ecstatic Yod Collective organized a tour called More Hair Less Bush. Including a variety of musicians and writers, the tour brought the flame of hope to cities cast into darkness by the hideous secretions of the Bush Twins.
Now, in 2008, as we prepare to enjoy thelong-promised fruits of regime change, we felt it was time to bring our show on the road again. But this time, rather than offering balm and apologies to the psychically wounded, we would like to celebrate the pre-dawn of a new day — a day when the word “cheney” is once more an empty phrase we use to terrify youngsters. To this end, we have assembled a revolving cast of musicians and writers, all of whom honk the horn of freedom with both hands. We trust it will be a gas. Trinkets will be available at all shows. Tour schedule and bios follow. Support is being provided by Ecstatic Peace Records & Arthur Magazine.”
Eric Hardiman of the Albany Sonic Arts Collective recently appeared on WAMC 90.3 FM. Listen to the archive of the show here. It kicks off with a few seconds of my piece Telephone Temple
[audio:http://hollandhopson.com/music/asac/04_hopson_telephone_temple.mp3]Then Eric and his Roundtable hosts chat about the collective, upcoming events, and attempt to describe experimental music for the average upstate public radio listener. My favorite moment: hearing an excerpt of a piece by Brendan Murray on WAMC.
The Albany Sonic Arts Collective presents Brendan Murray (Boston) and Brown Wing Overdrive (Brooklyn)
Saturday July 12, 2008
doors at 7:30 pm: show at 8:00 pm
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St.
Albany, NY
$5 suggested donation at the door
From the minds of ASAC:
“Brendan Murray is a self-taught musician living in Somerville, MA. He has actively recorded and performed with electronics since 1999. He regards his music as a balance between spontaneous sound making and compositional rigor, with an emphasis on drones and repetition. He records and processes instruments and tapes until all traces of instrumentality are blurred, leaving only large blocks of pure sound.
He has recorded four full-length CDs, four cdrs and two cassettes for various record labels in the United States and Europe. Murray has also toured extensively throughout the United States as a solo performer and as a member of various improvising ensembles.
Brown Wing Overdrive is an electronic trio from Brooklyn specializing in improvisation. Members include Chuck Bettis (electronics and vocals), Mike IQ Jones (electronics and objects), and Derek Morton (electronics and banjo) Between them, they have deep histories in punk rock and electronic improvisational music. Their music has been described as “amorphous ebb-and-flow ooze rippling over No Neckian pick, blurt, and throttle”. Their debut CD, “We Have Issues: live at Issue Project Room”, is available on Living Myth Records.”
I’m looking forward to more banjo weirdness–see you there.
The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP) is back online after a hiatus beginning in early 2008. Read about the reopening here. IMSLP (now also known as the Petrucci Music Library) is a wiki for public domain music scores.
IMSLP operates in Canada where a score is in the public domain if it was published more than 50 years ago and the date of death of the last author of the publication also died more than 50 years ago. Consequently, the collection of scores skews toward older pieces. But the site also includes information on how to submit your own Creative Commons licensed scores, so I’ll look forward to watching the contemporary selections grow.
Welcome back, IMSLP!
Somehow this post from way back in June never made it to the Field Guide. I’m happy to find it and share it now.
Here’s a fun Google mash-up for cyclists in NYC: ridethecity.com. I wish this existed back when I rode in NYC. The route ridethecity.com proposes as “safest” looks better than the route I regularly took to work, albeit a few blocks longer. But I’ll generally choose to ride farther if it’s safer/more pleasant/more fun.
I love the indications for bike shops on the map and the distinction between roads, bike paths, greenways, etc. I also like the simple weather report in the upper right corner (though a windspeed indicator would be a welcome addition).
Let’s hope ridethecity shares their work with other cities. I’d love to see more of them.
The next Albany Sonic Arts Collective show is a doozy. I’ll have to miss it, but don’t let my poor fortune prevent you from getting there.
Thursday 26 June, 2008 at 8PM
Upstate Artists Guild
247 Lark St. Albany, NY
Here’s the lineup:
Peter Kirn at Create Digital Music has reviewed the latest incarnation of lala.com that was recently released in beta as next.lala.com. As a longtime Lala user I agree with his conclusions, and find his idea of tiered music pricing and his comparison of lala with terrestrial radio to be appropriate. Too bad the radio-like features of next.lala.com aren’t exactly riveting. True, you can stream tons of music for free, but the streams are only on a per album basis. Once upon a time, an older version of lala.com allowed users to create and share playlists–essentially turning anyone into the DJ of their own radio station. I’d love to see this feature brought back, or even some relational music suggestions based on recent tracks played. In other words, what makes good radio good is that it’s curated (and what makes bad radio horrible is that it’s overly-curated…another story). The thrill of radio for me is that something great might come on next and sadly, next.lala.com doesn’t allow it. There’s not even a shuffle button. I’ll admit I’ve been having fun checking out albums on next.lala.com, but I can’t say the experience has been one of discovery. It’s more like visiting the reading room at the NY Public Library or the Library of Congress or the British Museum. You finally get to hold a book you’ve been looking for, and then the reading room closes and it’s time to give it back.
Speaking of giving things back, I’m glad to see CD trading hasn’t been thrown out on next.lala.com. I regularly get new music from lala by trading my older CDs for someone else’s. Yes, CD sales are down and may never recover–boo hoo. But right now seems like a great time to trade CDs because they’re suddenly perceived as less valuable while still quite usable and not yet so rare as to be collector’s items.
Go on Bo Diddley! Gone.
I picked up the double album reissue of “Bo Diddley / Go Bo Diddley” a few years ago and I’ve been playing it regularly ever since. Everybody talks about his beat, but what about that strange rhythm section of maracas and tomtoms and no cymbals? Bo Diddley had the weirdness and he knew how to make it work. The NYTimes reports he was one of the first guitarists to use a stomp box to get that wobbly tremolo effect.
I’ve also been playing Bo Diddley recently because of a kind of revisionist listening. Where once I heard iconic 50’s rock and roll, now I hear echoes and flutters from Henry Flynt and Reich’s Four Organs and excise that beat from your mind (if you can) and what’s left resembles some Alvin Lucier modulation+reverb dream.
Gone Bo Diddley! Go on.
Amie Street is running a special today: 50% off all music when you add money to your account. That means my already cheap tunes are twice as cheap. Or is that half as dear?