At the dig site, the architects squinted at blueprints and checked them with the drawings their eyes made on the air before them. The engineers peered and craned their necks and discussed the foundations, for the few hours they spent away from their desks and slide rules and reference books. The surveyors measured and checked and checked and measured.
Everyone concerned - except perhaps for the workers themselves, for they were lazy and short-sighted and could think of nothing but their immediate work, their upcoming lunch, and the bottles that lay waiting for them to come home - could see the finished structures in their minds. They thought of the day that they would bring their families to stand on an observation deck, when they would bask in the adoration of lower-city dwellers who finally understood what space meant. "I made this," they would say, and it would be true.
And the men with the heavy equipment and the bottles waiting for them at home, they knew there would be work beyond this building. They weren't much impressed that the building they were assembling from the bottom up would be the world's tallest, but they were pleased that there would be work for years to come. And then they would move on to a new building, and children would grow around them like trees to build new buildings and turn more wilderness into civilization and survey and engineer and architect.
The first one fell at eleven-thirty. Most of the men had gone home, and I and Riley were getting ready to. Riley was trouble, gentlemen, and he was proud of it. When that feathered lump dropped out of the sky, I thought he was somehow to blame. My back had been turned, after all. He might be hiding a slingshot in his overalls. I thought suspiciously about him as we talked idly about girls we'd known.
But another fell not five minutes later, in front of the both of us, and Riley hadn't moved. And another. We looked up into the sky. Like a rain starting, they drizzled down, and then the downpour came. My mind was having a difficult time making sense of what I saw before me, but more than anything the sound impressed itself on me: tens of thousands of feathers, rippling limp in the air, and then the small thump of impact. By the time it stopped, fully seventy-five hundred little green birds were strewn before us.
For the rest of the month, I stayed indoors, safe at my desk with my reference books and slide rule.
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A melody-free exploration of modal development. It sounds very ancient - Greek in some spots, Baroque in others. One of the most normal and conventionally listenable pieces in the box set.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
A Midnight Rain of Green Wrens at the World's Tallest Building
Friday, September 21, 2007
Ex-Cathedra
One of the shorter tracks in the New York in the 1960s box set at only 5 minutes 4 seconds, "Ex-Cathedra*" makes its presence felt nonetheless. The sole instrument is rapidly pulsing Vox organ.
The right hand plays the high-pitched drone that you hear first, sounding for all the world like the beginning of Pink Floyd's Astronomy Domine, but this bit never moves on - it's played throughout the entire piece. It starts in the right channel and gradually takes over the left. Wrapping around it like a reverb blanket after a minute or so is the left-hand part, lower and more comfortable. This is where the action takes place. There's no force to it at first; it's much quieter than the high-pitched part and accents it by exploring adjacent tones. It starts in both channels.
After three minutes, the hands return to their respective parts of the stereo picture, and the left-hand part takes the lead, bobbing rhythmically. The right hand experiments with bringing in some melody (God does it sound like Rick Wright), until finally at 4:19 the left hand is booted out entirely. The Vox's low-pitched overdrive noise takes an important role here. Finally the song cuts out.
It serves as a palate-cleanser on Dream Interpretation, bridging effectively the 20-minute is-it-viola-or-didgeridoo title track and the 13-minute early-David-Lynch-soundtrack untitled prepared piano piece. Though it's more accessible than the material that surrounds it, it can still clear a room handily. Good stuff.
* There's some disagreement whether this is "from the chair" or "a former cathedral." I need to check my box set.
Monday, August 20, 2007
The Second Fortress
I haven't reviewed any of these yet. They're intimidating. There are more questions in the New York in the 1960s series than answers, and I don't have the training in Stockhausen and Xenakis and friends to speak meaningfully about how or if this stuff fits into the detonation of the Western music tradition that occurred in the middle part of the 20th century. I'm not really sure that La Monte Young & Co's drony antics really had a meaningful connection to their mathematical forebears, for that matter.
Questions I wish I could answer:
You have to understand, too, the state your mind is in by the time you get to the final track of the first disc of the New York in the 1960s box set, Sun Blindness Music. You've heard 43 minutes of the same incredibly overdriven electric organ chord. You've heard a solid eleven minutes of an electric guitar chord being thrashed to death. Your nervous system has done things that it really shouldn't be doing: chills going this way, chills going that way, some atavistic tingling at the back of your skull, all in response to changes in the sound that you can't really perceive directly.
And then Cale takes a drill to your ears. While the so-called "Sun Blindness Music," the 43-minute track, adds and removes tones from the chord, providing a more accessible listen (at least in any given 11-minute block), "The Second Fortress" is a more direct aural equivalent of staring fixedly into the sun. You hear the same set of tones throughout, but there are some phase differences you hear as the track wears on. The sound is filtered, cut up, strangled, shaken. Any structure in this piece all comes from what is done to the sound. It's inexorable and meaningless. It fades out, but you still hear the tone in the surrounding silence, just as you see the sun after it has burned into your retinas.
It is very easy to make fun of attempts in all the arts to make things as primitive and stark as they can be. I've been known to do it. Blank canvases and Rothko don't move me. Last Year at Marienbad seemed so pretentious and stupid I couldn't even keep up a running parody after the first hour. I haven't heard many of the premier musical minimalists, but I don't see why musical minimalism or structuralism would be any less risible. (Iannis Xenakis seeming much smarter than me notwithstanding.) But this stuff directly engages my nervous system in a way that less devolved music doesn't. It's uncomfortable, it's rather frightening, and I don't know that it's healthy, but it's undeniable.
