July 2002 - zorn-list - mailman.xmission.com

Re: Things I just don't get
by Ryan Novak 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

>anymore.) Now you have us >saying that a sine wave generator is more interesting >and exciting than a >free jazz blower like Vandermark. I may or may not >feel that way, but I >wasn't judging Vandermark's worth on the basis of a >comparison with Sachiko >M, for example. They work in completely different >areas, so I see little to >compare. I don't see what's wrong about comparing them on the basis of their perceived newness or avant-garde cred. And I sincerely apologize for the nerd comment to all the electronic experimenters working in a field I "just don't get"- I've had stressful things going on here. >Being able to "play" and being able to >"make music" are not >necessarily the same. Some who cannot "play" well >according to the received >definitions of playing can often have musical senses >as compelling or better >than the ones who "play" well. In general, the electronic field does not speak to me- if they could turn their knobs and hit the keyboard in a way that did- I'd say they are as virtuoso as anyone with a more traditional instrument- but they don't. For me. Maybe you can recommend someone that does this kind of thing with an obvious passion- the Ayler of laptops! :~) >Enjoy your Vandermark, then. But Remco was right >when >he said that V's no >longer avant-garde. I guess I should have just said I don't care if he's avant-garde or not, I thought I did though. The point is the term means little to me- you and Remco can define it up and down, tell us who fits in it and doesn't- and it still won't. That term sounded like some kind of a blessing you give an artist, hence I got the impression you were interested more in innovation. >And Skip was right when he said >that avant-jazz has >become just another category of music with its own >set >of rules and >practices, which isn't to say that the music isn't >any >good. Read carefully >or else this will be just one more thing we just >don't >get. So now we've spent several exchanges figuring out that Vandermark isn't avant-garde, and it hasn't changed anything, because no one really said Vandermark isn't avant-garde, but they LIKE him. So I'll say it- Vandermark is not avant-garde, and I like him. Maybe we're all happy now. ----Ryan Novak __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com

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Re: Bailey/Hemopheliac/Gift
by Arthur Gadney 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

Hello. >Well, that certainly put me in my place. Whether it was intentional or > >not, this came across as a rude put down. I would expect better. I'm happy to hear that you would expect better from me. That's positive I guess. Anyways, it was certainly not meant to be rude, just trying to be precise! >Anyway, I don't take this as proof that "No, he wouldn't". Firstly, >the >Incus site merely states that their *preference* is for new or >recent >recordings. (...) >So I smell a rat. I may be wrong, but that's the reasoning behind it. Well, as far as I recall it is pretty rare for Incus to release archival recordings. But other than that, there is another pretty good reason why Derek would not release this record himself, namely that it also includes some compositions. On the Incus webpage it also says the following: "the policy is centred on improvisation." If it's rare for Incus to release archival stuff, then it's at least extremely rare for them to release stuff which is not free improvisation. And generally, I certainly don't agree with the argument that if an artist has his onw record company, then the stuff he releases on other record companies must be bad. In my opinion it's just not true. I love a lot of Derek's Tzadik releases, for example. Cheers, _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com

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Haino, culture and hairstyle
by Arthur Gadney 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

Hi! >Especially now Joey and Dee Dee Ramone are no longer with us;-) >Remco Phew, for a second I thought you were talking about Joey Baron...! _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com

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Re: Things I just don't get(cecil's poems)
by Kurt Gottschalk 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

not sure i can say i like cecil's poetry, since i can't say i've had the chance to absorb much of it. but i really like his vocalizing. kg np: guillermo brown - soul at the hands of the machine _________________________________________________________________ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com

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Re: Things I just don't get
by Kurt Gottschalk 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

2d for joe m. recent worthy titles: out right now, singularity. >From: Mark Saleski <marks(a)foliage.com> >To: zorn <zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com> >Subject: Re: Things I just don't get >Date: Wed, 03 Jul 2002 16:43:59 -0400 > >>>2) Joe Morris: he may even fit in the group above. I'm not generally a >>>guitar fan, but Morris is pretty low on the list. > >>Count me in also with Joe Morris. I have no idea what is the fuss with >>him. > >may it's a guitar thing. i play guitar and like Morris a lot. i think it's >the angularity of the lines. i just love listening to that tangled mess of >tones. > >same thing with Bruce Eisenbeil (CIMP) > > >-- >Mark Saleski - marks(a)foliage.com | http://www.foliage.com/~marks >"Music melts all the separate parts of our bodies together" - Anais Nin > > > >_______________________________________________ >zorn-list mailing list >zorn-list(a)mailman.xmission.com >To UNSUBSCRIBE or Change Your Subscription Options, go to the webpage below >http://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/zorn-list _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com

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Re: Things I just don't get
by Bill Ashline 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

>From: Ryan Novak <ryan_novak(a)yahoo.com> >Subject: Re: Things I just don't get >Yeah, right- it ain't "new" so it's no good. Didn't >we have a recent discussion based around this little >obsession? Sometimes some nerd who runs a sine-wave >for an hour gets more kudos than someone who can >actually play, just because it's the new thing. The >quality is what matters to me, the voice, and if it >comes with newness- great. But sometimes someone just >playing from their heart is rare enough to look "new". > Let me tell you, Albert Ayler's power was not in how >new his music was. > Just to set the record straight, the previous discussion we had some time ago, a discussion that led to all sorts of misunderstandings, had to do with the notion of the "avant-garde." My original comment was if there was still an "avant-garde" in music post-free jazz, post-Cage, etc., it would likely be in electroacoustic improv, where the ideas of electroacoustic music are combined with improvisational elements. Then a lot of people got bent out of shape thinking that I was saying that there was nothing of value in the area of "avant-garde jazz." Nothing of the sort. Then somebody else wrote in and said that the "avant-garde" was simply a genre, to which I replied that when an avant-garde becomes "genre" its no longer avant-garde, by definition. (Or, to put it differently, if the avant-garde becomes a genre, the whole notion of the "avant-garde" becomes suspect, so we may now be in a milieu where nothing can truly be avant-garde anymore.) Now you have us saying that a sine wave generator is more interesting and exciting than a free jazz blower like Vandermark. I may or may not feel that way, but I wasn't judging Vandermark's worth on the basis of a comparison with Sachiko M, for example. They work in completely different areas, so I see little to compare. As for the part about "nerds" playing sine waves versus those who can "really play," I think we can simply chalk this up to a bias against some of the new music. Being able to "play" and being able to "make music" are not necessarily the same. Some who cannot "play" well according to the received definitions of playing can often have musical senses as compelling or better than the ones who "play" well. Keith Rowe talked about the Duchampian move in the new E/A improv. Well here you have it. People work within the received concepts for a long time, then someone arrives to turn the concepts on their heads and invents a new language. I'd say Rowe's assessment is a bit of wishful thinking. When Duchamp arrived, his art attacked the entire institution of art, top to bottom. I see Rowe and the new breed as continuing to reinforce certain institutions of experimental music all the while proposing some radical concepts of music. Duchamp was more radical. Enjoy your Vandermark, then. But Remco was right when he said that V's no longer avant-garde. And Skip was right when he said that avant-jazz has become just another category of music with its own set of rules and practices, which isn't to say that the music isn't any good. Read carefully or else this will be just one more thing we just don't get. ------------------------------------- His face is turned towards the past. Where we preceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. --Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com

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Japanese Racism
by Mark Corroto 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

Another take on this can be found in the short story "Tony Takitani" by Haruki Murakami in the April 15, 2002 New Yorker interestingly enough one of the characters is a jazz musician who was given the AMERICAN name Tony and the narrator tells how he is tormented for it. MC

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Keiji Haino's racism
by MorMovies＠aol.com 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

All of these countries that complain about being dominated by "American culture" (which is actually a mass fusion and trasnmutation of many cultures) are at the same time, obsessed and almost fetishize our culture (at least the youth do in these countries). This is especially true of the Japanese. To me, culture is not sacred, it's not a right, it is not handed down by god, it is just the bullshit that each community or tribe makes up to create an identity or understand itself. Personally, I refuse to abide by or subscribe to ANY culture and only take what I like from them all and that's usually found in each culture's arts- music, painting, etc. The rest- custom, taboo, religion- FUCK IT!

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re: all sorts of things (two, actually)
by Taylor McLaren 06 Jul '02

06 Jul '02

re: Alan Cummings' comments on the Haino interview I'm living in Osaka at the moment, and while I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I was going to smack my head on doorframes a lot when I moved here (which I did), I was really surprised to see that, while I *am* taller than the vast majority of the over-30 crowd, I'm not freakishly tall when compared with the current crop of high-school and university kids. (Still taller than average, mind you, but I've seen plenty of guys younger than me who also have to crouch to get out of a JR train.) Obviously, you can't hang this entirely on the (admittedly entertaining) image of some great corporate fist ramming Big Macs down everybody's throats, but when asked, a hell of a lot of the kids that I talk to at work will say that their favourite food is yakiniku (essentially barbecued beef, a recipe that was imported from... <liberal shudder> KOREA!). So, yeah, the Japanese diet has changed a lot, coming to incorporate red meat and dairy products on a much greater scale than ever before over the last 100 years or so, and when combined with the gradual changes in the health-care system (though as a Canadian, I have to admit that I hope I never have to spend any time in a hospital here), life span, body sizes, etc., are all changing. Still, as is the case with beef, nobody is forcing anyone here to buy Louis Vuitton purses, Vans, Eminem CDs, or the like. On the other hand, it's hard not to find something creepy about presence of the Gap store across the road from the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima. It's strange, actually, finding myself living here and wondering why more of the locals aren't as routinely frustrated by the overwhelming foreign cultural presence as, say, my roommate and I are. I'm sure that there is just as much of a poo-pooing of these "cultural impurities" as you're likely to find in the underground/indie scene at home, but as with so many other things in this country, I'll be damned if much of it is open to me as a foreigner, and now that I think about it, that's probably worth considering as a part of what Haino is saying. Until 1853, Japan had been pretty much entirely closed off from the rest of the world (though trade with Korea had continued during their 200+ years of self-imposed isolation); we're coming up on the 150th anniversary of the arrival of Matthew Perry and his little convoy of warships that pretty much demanded the signing of a trade treaty that has made all of these changes possible. When I think about all of the swell things my parents and grandparents have to say about the cultural contributions of immigrants to Canada, it doesn't seem completely out of line for somebody who wants to hold on to some sense of his country's uniqueness (and you wouldn't believe the number of Japanese who insist that their country *is* completely unlike any other on the planet, never mind having borrowed almost all of their language from the Chinese and/or the fact that huge swaths of what is said in the context of popular culture reporting is said in a mangled sort of Japlish) to start thumping his chest a bit in an interview. My, but that was wordy. re: the other thing I got to thinking about a philosophy professor that I had a class with a long while back last week, and particularly a tape that he lent me at one point. It was a fairly old mail-order effort that some guy had evidently made in his home, and included recordings of a dozen-odd solo piano compositions written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Does anybody out there have any idea if its still available, and if so, where I might get a copy? (I've found references to a couple of CDs online, but they look like they're almost all ensemble recordings.) Anyway, happy Saturday. -moi ______________________________________________________________________ Post your ad for free now! http://personals.yahoo.ca

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Re: Haino and Racism
by Bill Ashline 05 Jul '02

05 Jul '02

>From: skip Heller <velaires(a)earthlink.net> >Terribly true, and truly terrible. We will turn your country into a >parking >lot (in a display of might makes right), but we just lack the attention >span >to help turn your country into a nation full of all the things we're >allegedly fighting to preserve and even distribute, like medicine, working >currency, police, garbage collection, drivable roads, water filtration, a >decent phone system. Or did I miss the opening of the Kuwait Galleria a >few >yrs back? > >skip h Nicely put, Skip. And congrats on the review by David Toop in the recent issue of the Wire of your new CD. ------------------------------------- His face is turned towards the past. Where we preceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. --Walter Benjamin on the Angel of History _________________________________________________________________ MSN Photos is the easiest way to share and print your photos: http://photos.msn.com/support/worldwide.aspx

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