Daniel Huppatz reviews Petroleum Hat.

Sean Cole on Flarf

And a recording of I'm So Stupid, from Petroleum Hat, with me reading and playing piano, and featuring Adam Lane on bass and John McClellan on Drums.

You're gonna make it after all.

You can pay me in space rubles if you want.

Lee Renaldo is writing Flarf.

Somehow, this was not recorded in Brooklyn last week.

ICE at The Tank 10.3.07

Claire Chase, flute, Eric Lamb, flute

Nice little black box theater that does a lot of drama so they have good lighting board. Small enough that you could clearly hear the flautists warming up in the back room as the audience filled in. The pre-gig warm-up sounds through the wall just as valid as the actual performance?

Petite, skinny husband and wife (?) duo team with a passionate, dorky stage presence. They looked like wading birds doing a mating dance.

Claire Chase doing Steve Reich, Vermont Counterpoint, solo flute over laptop multi-track flute recording. Solo-over-laptop is rap music style performance, right? Something of that -- a player interacting w/ an invariable source. But I guess the lack of variability is good in both cases -- a grove. Very precise playing from Chase. Amazing how different a flute is from the recording of a flute when they're played side by side. Hearing Vermont Counterpoint loud and live (sort of) I'm reminded of how inevitable the materials and structures sound. Tons of rough, shimmering high end difference tones zipping back and forth between my ear from all the flutes.

Check the Autoharp.

"All the world loves a big gleaming jelly."

See you at the BPC tonight for the Will Alexander benefit, 6:00-8:00.

MARCELLA DURAND
TONYA FOSTER
JOHN HIGH
JOEL KUSZAI
BILL MARSH
JEROME ROTHENBERG
TOD THILLEMAN
RODRIGO TOSCANO

308 Bowery @ Bleeker

Me:

Is it odd that I would randomly think of King Kong this morning, then see his face in the paper later in the afternoon?

Katie:

King Kong is kind of a part of life.

Who's doing the Ovaltine dance now?

I'm always taken with the sight of pigeons flying in the deep underground tunnel at the 168th Street 1 station. To see these birds fly you take an elevator deep underground. Got me thinking about odd but workable adaptations to finding sustenance and dealing with one's environment, which poets have extensive experience with: In the natural world.

notes on Either/Or ensemble at the Kitchen, 9.14


A performance of some graphics scores from composers featured in the Between Thought and Sound: Graphic Notation in Contemporary Music exhibit, playing in the upstairs gallery. New music of the 50s, 60s 70s, so: old new music. The gallery was totally packed to the point of people sitting on the floor on pillows -- younger people, mostly early 30s. Very quiet, acoustic instruments, no PA. The fan sound in the back of the room over-defined the noise floor a bit....

Robert Ashley:

Drones with shifting attacks, pulses and timbres. associations of weather: snow and wind.

Morton Feldman:

Cello solo. The dynamics were played a little too tentitivly, even for Feldman. All cello techniques delivered simultainiously in a kind of technique kaleidoscope. Beautiful.

Cornelious Cardew:

This performance needed more commitment. Fascinating transformations though. And excellent texturing and control.

Christian Wolf:

These pieces seems to show off the ensemble best. Loose unison lines, like small flecks of birds moving in the sky. Not loud at all but enough volume to hear a bit more meat in the tones. It sounded like a processes of people working together at some collective task, where it means quite different things to the people invovled, yet it's unified in it's manifestation.

Earl Brown:

Delicacy handled with aplomb. Change and landscape.

Oliver Sacks at the Psychiatric Institute, talking about his new book, Musicophilia:

The border between the ear and mind.

The guy can talk. Gotta love that he went at least an hour over his allotted time. Mostly anecdotal clinical stuff about auditory hallucination- usually from patients with some degree of deafness. You think there's a radio playing but it suddenly occurs to you that the same twenty Irish folk songs are repeating- all of which you remember from your childhood. Inter-cranial iPod. One patient heard a splendid version of Old MacDonald Had a Farm followed by thunderous applause. The Hallucinations can also be triggered by cochlear-toxic substances - too much aspirin or quinine for instance. The music is not always to one's taste, and it's impossible to turn it off. Sometimes frightening, especially at onset. One "atonal" (serial?) composer patient heard only "corny melodies." Some people hear repeating fragments over and over … like minimalism?

After a concussion a patient who had previously been an avid listener, concert attendee and collector lost all interest in music, which then produced total indifference in him.

Amusia: inability to hear chords as one thing - the tones sound like "separate laser beams."

Deed, Rod Smith.

Katie's been hogging our copy of Jennifer Moxley's memoir, but I'll be checking out the unplugged version this afternoon at the BPC. See you there.

Tom Beckett interviews Alan Davies.

Nicholas Manning Reviews Nada Gordon's Folly.

Elizabeth Murray, 1940-2007