X-Sessions

A couple of years ago with my brother John, I participated in the X-Wohnungen festival produced by the HAU (Hebbel am Ufer) theater in Berlin. The idea behind the festival was to focus on one neighborhood and have an audience which travels in pairs, and with a map, go from apartment to apartment, seeing several installations, performances, or exhibits. The festival operated for five days, eight hours a day. For my flat, I converted it to look like the old migrant, worker flat it originally was, and made a ten-minute film that was presented as a triple projection (which can be seen in the “film” section of this blog). This was accompanied by interviews John had done with our grandmothers concerning their childhood experiences of immigration. While the interviews and the film played, we performed music live, wired in from the kitchen. The audience rarely knew it was live until exiting the flat and seeing us in the small kitchen filled with instruments.

This we did eight hours a day for five days. It was the most strenuous exercise in improvisation I ever have undertaken. Here I have finally gotten around to putting some of the music together for others to hear. The following sections together form about five hours of improvisation, mixed into roughly 25 minute segments, so it is easy to listen to and come back to the others later. It is not really free improv as we were somewhat bound by the limits of the film, as well as by performing live music for so long in an building that was not really soundproofed for neighbors. I have kept the playing intact, editing out only the exits and entrances of the audience from my apartment. Session X-10 also features Georgian artist BEKA GIGAURI on clarinet and mouth harp, and VAGINAL DAVIS on assorted objects.

I have tried to get these to play in this blog, but cannot seem to figure it out. Here is the link for a free download of each 20 minute track. I think they are nice, and John's guitar playing is lovely.

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Pixie+Kitchen/X-Sessions+MP3+uploads

The Pixie Kitchen

The Pixie Kitchen was the name I took for my early solo work in music. The name itself came from a restaurant/theme park on the Oregon coast. It was a magical place, the magic in part due to its being already in a state of decay in the late 1960s. I used to love to eat their sweetened butter they served with pancakes. 

Anyway...

My brother had moved to San Francisco and we sort of got to know each other for the first time. He had been playing music for a number of years, and had recently made friends with a lot of Mills College graduates. Mills has one of America's best music programs, and many of the students who go there are open to many interpretations of what "music" can be.

I had a friend who left The City in a hurry. He told me to go into his cellar and take whatever I wanted. I left his cellar with an electric guitar, a mixing board, and an 8-track cassette recorder.

I had not played music before, but was the sort of fan that did my research. If I liked a band I would read tons of interviews, which would inevitably turn me on to any number of things. In fact, most of my taste and knowledge of all art comes originally from delving into this mire. Politics too, came from this source. In the early/mid 1980s there was a viable and thriving underground scene, and this underground did NOT see itself as divorced from the rest of 20th century underground movements in music, politics and art.

So I was well prepared...

I was welcomed by my brother and his friends into their various configurations of playing music. For some time I was quite adamant about being a non musician, an identity I can no longer lay claim to. But at the time this was political for me, taken from one of my favorites, Genesis P Orridge in Throbbing Gristle. I was also very influenced by Derek Jarman, whose collaborative way of making films combined the Non and the Professional.

Eventually I needed to begin making music my own way, and with my own ends in mind. This was spurred in part by an interview with Jack Smith, where he stated that the "title was half the work", referring to the political, and also from an interview with Otomo Yoshide where he said something like, "In times of bad economy, or political instability many musicians make Noise, in the good times they make Art" To me these quotes pointed to a type of political expression in art that I was very interested in.

So...

The Pixie Kitchen began making Noise; aggressive, difficult, despairing, sometimes funny works that had this political expression in mind. The PK also was a means to test out what I learned by playing with other musicians and composers. In the beginning I also had this utopian notion that The Pixie Kitchen could be a band, one with no identities, just anonymous players, that it could be a concept that others could use. This did not happen. Very quickly I could not stop recording. Mostly these CDs had me as the only player, but on some of them other players are featured as well. Cheryl Leonard, under whose wing I learned micro listening, John Blue plays guitar and bass on some tracks, also my brother Jerry plays guitar on one CD. Friend Mark Gergis, whose own body of very political work is on another. I am certain to be missing a name or two. Oh yeah, dearest friend Heidi Follin too...

Anyway two...

I put all PK CDs for free download on the website LastFM

The pictures of the album covers and a link to the CDs is in the post below

Annette Frick took the above picture of me

Album Cover Art, The Pixie Kitchen 1995-2005 RIP (click image for full size)

 

http://www.last.fm/music/The+Pixie+Kitchen/+albums

for free complete downloads or plays

VOICE/Not Voice

  01 Voice/Not Voice by The Pixie Kitchen
                            Please click the link above to play

This is a live soundtrack myself and my brother John performed as part of Vaginal Davis' silent film series, Rising Stars/Falling Stars. The film, What 80 Million Women Want was a film about Women's suffrage. John and I thought to question this in light of the fact that in many countries political prisoners cannot vote, and in the case of Aileen Wournos, the State revoked her right to live. To do this we collaged interviews with actual Women suffragrettes, women anarchists who were against the vote, as well as interviews with Assata Shakur and Aileen Wournos. This we mixed with critical feminist theory, and elements of relevant popular song. To all this we also played live instruments. The result is re-created here. It is just shy of an hour, so if you have that time please take a listen.

Terminal Documents

A character in a story by J.G. Ballard accumulated an archive of documents that pointed to a death in time, history or culture. The archive pointed away from history and towards the millennial. The attempt here is to consider a set of sonic documents from the viewpoint of the crime scene photo. What is to be gleaned from the sound of decomposition, from a loss of form? Death itself is not interesting, it's the life these documents speak of that fascinates and compels. I'm not implying these sounds are dead sounds, they continue to resonate even years after genesis, but in many instances they have been made in response to the death of a time, or pointed towards the annihilation of the forms that made their birth possible. With somewhat utopian spirits, they also suggest the death of our own alienating times and open the possibility of Other Ways. So unlike the methods of a coroner and more akin to the ancient practice of fortune telling by reading the entrails of a sacrificial victim, we can look through some of these documents.

  The record that ignited my search for the formless in music was Sly Stone's There's a riot goin on. Specifically, two songs seared themselves into the folds of my brain back in high school, I've had this record in one way or another longer than any other because the questions it begs remain unanswered. In the third track, Poet Sly states his position as adversary. "My only weapon is my pen", he says before lapsing into scarcely mumbled words, falling into silence halfway through the song, which plods along through the mire without the songwriter. Years later an image I ascribe to this is a defeated Nerval wandering his last night through the streets of Paris before hanging himself. The song Thank You For Talkin To Me Africa, a seemingly endless remake of the brighter, more militant Thank you falletin me be mice elf agin, sees the Poet trying to take every word back with him to the grave. If Altamont became the popular symbol for the death of the sixties for white America, one could say this song is the soundtrack for one man's black Altamont. Finally to mention on the original vinyl record, the title track was an empty groove, titled at 00:00. In other words there's nothing going on, it's over. It's not a morbid, romantic fascination, but the feeling of intense loss, of fear felt on this record that pointed me towards an aesthetic of collapse in music for the life it speaks of between the lines.

  When not making little songs a few minutes in length, Throbbing Gristle was at their best the sound of rock music decomposing. Their larger pieces, huge, gaseous affairs are nauseating, powerful testimonies to an attack on rock music that coincided with punk. Whereas punk could be termed traditionalist from one perspective in that it embraced the pop form, hardened it in an attempt to reclaim it from the purveyors and put it back into the streets, TG attacked the form of music and embraced the industry by parodying it. Mass production became Music from the Death Factory. The release titled CD1 was in some ways for me an answer to Sly's Riot. Both existed at the tail end of radical movements. They both are quite soupy in production, thick, viscous. In the case of Sly I was compelled to look at his music prior to this record in an attempt to trace what had happened to him, from where had he fallen. With TG the instinct was to look forward, leaving the cadaver of rock music to rot and move towards new things. The Family tree of TG has branches that lead to the banalities of Marilyn Manson, early techno culture, and traces of TG DNA can be found in today's expansive electro/acoustic scene.

  In the early to mid sixties John Coltrane's quartet was an incredible catalyst for the transformation of forms, musically and socially. I'm sure it wasn't off the cuff that someone once said the folks into civil rights listened to Miles, those into black power listened to Coltrane. The sounds this group made are unlike any before or after. It seems so vertiginous, like a dervish spinning not to achieve some psychic state, but rather to shed the body altogether. It's the sound of life consuming itself, a feast for an occasion just as joyous as mournful. As the rhythm section stays tight but nearly out of control, Trane's playing exhausts nearly every possible combination of notes around a theme, spitting out shards of melody, examining a thing from all sides before ending a song. His music before this quartet seems only a pretext and the music afterwords forecasts of newsletters from an afterlife. During most of his time on the Impulse label this group was very much a body alive, in complete lucidity of it's place in history, ecstatic and blue, before finally shedding itself. For a fine sample of this group at it's most powerful it might be best to start with the box set Live at the Village Vanguard, which also features the unreal Eric Dolphy playing with them.

  By the time John Lennon met Yoko Ono, Art was experiencing the first of it's last gasps (it continues to shudder). It still believed in changing the world, and was not yet the gallery run staging of careers. I think Yoko new the potential in pop music for transformation, and she put her art background to use in realizing that potential. On her first record, Plastic Ono Band, she strips the function of voice as vehicle for narrative and employs it as an instrument, and that instrument as weapon. In the first track, Why? the band simply jumps in a full scale aural assault preceding her jumping in like a machine gun. It's the kind of thing where to treat the subject of horror properly you must match it, anything less demeans it's victims. Given their politics it's easy to see that this merging of art music with pop was an act of war upon war itself. By no means wallpaper, this music is hard to swallow, and the misogyny and vehemence that still greet this record speaks a bit of it's power as well as to the public's ongoing insistence that music be meaningless.

  In the 1946 radio play, To Have Done With The Judgment Of God, onetime surrealist, pioneer of drama, poet and theoretician, Antonin Artaud articulated his own contempt for the body and insistence upon it's dissolution based in part on his experience of shamanic ritual in Mexico. Not that the Indians provided him with a model of suffering, his own mental illness, drug addiction, shock therapy and incarceration are well documented, but I think that what he saw and participated in provided a glimpse of a way out of the corporeal. It is the quality of his voice in this recording that communicates his disgust with the body, and this voice is truly haunting. Unfortunately the text of this play is not included, but it can be found in the City Lights translation of his work. The booklet does however include the story of the circumstances of it's broadcast and suppression.

  In 1967 Glenn Gould was commissioned by the CBC to compose a radio documentary of his choosing. World famous for his piano playing, he eventually stopped performing because of what he perceived to be an inherent dishonesty in the relationships of the performer, the music and the audience. Quite a deed for the world's best. Anyway, he kept recording, and developed an intensely reclusive life. He rarely saw people, but spoke to them for hours, often in the middle of the night over the phone, showing a need to communicate but a distrust of direct communication. He would at times venture into Canada's northern, extreme geographies, developing his fascination of it as a metaphor for solitude. The three radio documentaries he eventually completed are collected as The Solitude Trilogy. Composed of interviews with people living in solitude, he painstakingly removed any traces of questions and spent hundreds of hours splicing these voices into constructed conversations. The first CD deals with theory, the idea of north, and takes place on a recreated train trip into the Canadian interior. The conductor of the train becomes the conductor of these conversations, which at times are layered voice over voice into a verbal labyrinth, the subjects range from idealism, racism towards the country's Indians, and suburban growth. On the second disc, he focuses on the isolated individual in Newfoundland. Whereas in the first the voices are paired with the sounds of train travel, on this is the simple sound of water lapping against the shores of this island. The topics veer from the plausibility of grassroots anarchy to the meaning of creativity or fashion to an outsider. By the third and last of the trilogy, he tackles the notion of a community of outsiders, specifically Mennonites. What you hear in these documents is the overriding need of the hermit to communicate, a famous hermit whose retreat from the world was in great part a moral decision describing a rift between the terms he set for his own life and those the world set fore him.

  Another outsider, filmmaker Jack Smith is represented on the archival subdivision of Table of the Elements. On the CD Les Evening Gowns Damnes, we get a glimmer into the everyday life of the pre-Warhol New York underground. No careerist bullshit here, just Jack and his creatures. You can almost see them cutting speed on the coffee table, or smell the pot in the air, feeling like you're in the room with these drag Queen misfits. A superficial listen will provide alot of camp, but a deeper listen and you begin to hear their values bleed through. The parody of colonial exoticism in the over the top morrocan adventure on the second track to the heartbreaking and warm description of the relationship between two queens on a night out that is the last track testify to a subjective radical politic. The CD features Tony Conrad and Angus Maclaise, two members of the Primitives, which was the kernel of what would become The Velvet Underground, though both of them left before that. Many of Jack's friends would leave him for Warhol fame, indeed Warhol and a number of 60's hipsters owed alot to Jack, who really didn't seem to have it in him to get famous on those terms. It's such a joy listening to the wit, humor, intelligence of this group of friends and the love between them before the 60's took them over.

  Tony Conrad can be heard again on a four CD set of violin drone where he recreates the minimalist music that has been suppressed for over thirty years by onetime collaborator, Lamont Young. The accompanying booklet gives us a sense of the times, a context for the art scene of the late fifties and early sixties, often working class, and where not explicitly political then definitively antisocial, which is one term Tony uses to describe some of the music they made back then. It places the importance of the impact Eastern music had on these people, on Jazz and Pop. It's a coercive music, harsh and beautiful, forcing the listener to really listen. Four violins playing one note for what seems an eternity while waiting for the smallest change for makes for incredible suspense. In the booklet Tony mentions that everyone's life should be so full as to know that the greatest pleasure is in wasting time. It's really more like laying waste to time, hanging out, punching holes in boredom until you realize there is nothing you should be doing other than being.

  Jim O'Rourke answers this with his release, Happy Days. It's another drone thing, but begun with the simplest acoustic guitar line that slowly morphs into a county blues riff of sorts before layer upon layer of hurdy gurdys swallows the guitar, building into a pulsating, massive drone like masses of insects on a hot summer night. The guitar returns at the end, but quicker, the way your heart beats after the best night in your life. In another strange way, this piece seems an abstract cover of that Big Star song about hanging out.

  Of all the methods used to extort new sounds out of a piano, the music of Henry Cowell strike me as the warmest, most human, not theory driven, avant classicism. A Smithsonian Folkways recording captures him playing his own music. His techniques employed playing with fists and forearms, while using another hand to develop a melody, or bowing and scraping the strings of the piano. These ways of playing are utilized in service of the songs, not arbitrary or flashy. The songs are coherent, lyrical, melancholy. An 18 minutes of him talking at the end adds to the warmth, and provides a contextual framing for the songs. He coaxes out the soul of the instrument, or maybe it plays him, regardless it's one of the strangest and beautiful piano recordings that I've heard.

  Though I've strayed a bit, what I have traced here is a rough chronology of my own search for a challenge to form, or a will to formlessness in music. These are Terminal Documents as spoke of earlier in that either the emotional content or the methods of their execution push or dissolve the strictures of accepted forms.  

There's A Riot Goin On/Sly and the Family Stone/Epic

CD1/Throbbing Gristle/Mute

Complete Live At The Village Vanguard/John Coltrane/Impulse

Plastic Ono Band/Yoko Ono/Ryko

To Have Done With The Judgement Of God/Antonin Artaud/SubRosa

The Solitude Trilogy/Glenn Gould/CBC

Les Evening Gowns Damnes/Jack Smith/Audio Artkive

Arsenic/Tony Conrad/Table of the Elements

Happy Days/Jim O'Rourke/Revenant

Piano Music/Henry Cowell/Smithsonian Folkways

Yuragi

The Persistence of the Trickster in Music

  The Raven in mythology is the Trickster, a shape shifter, slipping into countless forms that he creates and discards. The Trickster knows who he is, feels himself regardless of whatever form he may assume. It may be that he has no form at all, that he appears as those who perceive him wish to see him, that an inability to accept something outside of definition compels us to impose form on what we fail to comprehend. The presence of a shape shifter is imperative if creative expression is to survive, much less flourish. This late in history, these communications which speak in subtle impressions between imaginations are increasingly running the risk of falling into a trap more common to language, specifically they are being used to pin an idea or action down when it finally stops moving, and finally being understood as property, not communication. Words work in reverse from the thing itself, categorizing in the service of pure function whereas art could function as a gift, the object being merely a pretext for the expansion and free exchange of ideas.

  In regards to music we still see the insistence on imprisoning sounds into familiar shapes. When music is understood as jazz, rock, pop, classical or world beat it can be approached, trapped and sold as a form, what is ignored is both context and content. Unfortunately most musicians comply with this ghettoization, but now and again the Trickster will show up as this or that until our vision has cleared up just enough to think we know what it is we see, when he eludes us again, laughing his way into another space and time. It is the raven who is the vanguard of these sounds.

 Yuragi

 A very old Japanese word once referred to waterways and beaches as places of asylum where authority and law could not touch. This is where people could trade, sing or exchange ideas. Such a place near a body of water is significant. It exists upon a shifting border that constantly destroys and reshapes both the forms of the body of water and the shores it touches. The word is synonymous with fluctuation, and includes the notions of freedom and dissipation. What sort of people were attracted to such a geography and what songs would they sing?

  The need to be outside, or at the fringes of society is telling, as is that this fringe was pushed to the limit of geographical fact. We tend to consider fringe today as confined to ideas being that rarely does a physical site any longer provide asylum from authority, particularly here in the United States where the military now conducts maneuvers on it's own coastal cities as recently happened in Oakland, CA. Perhaps the grudge that authority bears against shorelines and their rogue cultures will never be forgotten, but conversely the need and desire to evade form and authority will also continue.

  The construction of identities and their maintenance is of great importance to authority and commerce to this day, whether these identities correspond to a group of people or the products and art forms said to be representative of them. Fixed identities are situated by their relationship to a dominant structure that controls them, while having them inventoried into neat categories of a more homogeneous whole. When an individual transgresses the borders of their own group it is perceived as betrayal, while the dominant group sees a provocation to it's own authority. In music we have seen this time and again from violence at the premier of certain classical works earlier in our century to the vilification of free jazz by critics and audiences of the mid 60's, and on into the well documented hostility that punk encountered.

  These are the most obvious examples. The sound of songs sung, played or improvised on lawless shores could always be heard by those floating at sea or brave enough to leave the shelter of a well ordered town in search of community outside identity. The juke joint, the derelict punk club, tiny jazz bar, or deserted warehouse have all at one time or another places of ill repute, seen as dangerous to the larger population specifically because you never knew what would happen there, these places formed their own rules and developed their own languages independent of the common tongue, expressing ideas and emotions that the dominant culture cared not to hear. The accusation of these often fleeting, chimerical sounds not even being music seems to run deep in our world that insists upon proper identification. What Yuragi points to is the possibility of a community outside of identity, a nomadic community that refuses to build monuments or live by rules and governments, communities whose camps are washed away by the changing course of the river. In spite of the hostility to these gatherings and to the sounds of the songs improvised there, the fact remains that the lone traveler or outlaw can still find friendship on hidden shores.

Solvite Corpora et Coagulate Spiritum

  In certain music now emerging we can detect trace evidence, residue of old arts and rites. A basic tenet of Alchemy was to dissolve form and coagulate spirit, to hide what was manifest and make visible what was not apparent. The emphasis was on the spirit, the fundamental nature of matter. One reason for their persecution at least by Christianity was in a perceived threat to a monopoly on the spiritual. In seeking their own answers, the Alchemists ran the risk of dissolving the very body of church authority. Forms remain necessary for control of them to exist, and this is why what evades form still elicits hostility. Regardless the Great Work has continued. In a way music could be said to have continued the aim of it by dissolving the strictures of form to refine expressions of soul into gold. Regarding decomposition, another principle of Alchemy, it is remembered that in the wake of punk early industrial music was at best an undefinable pulp, or fluid from the cadaver of rock music, the sound of decomposition, without which no regeneration is possible.

  We can see the similarity of music to alchemy in the emergence of improvisation in the electro-acoustic field where often single sources for sound are exploded into kaleidoscopic sonic shards. The cross fertilization of imaginations and the affects on their expression on the border of form and identity is a cause for joy in our alienating culture. To this day in defiance of form and identity, temporary communities learn the discipline of seeing with sound to perceive kindred spirits, hearing songs of the outside on the shores of formlessness.