"Scrubland" by Lemurian Congress

I haven't been blogging lately for two reasons: I'm trying to write some previews for the upcoming Open Ears festival, and I've been working on "Scrubland." It's the first thing I've finished under the "Lemurian Congress" name!



(Thanks to Justin Mathews for the photograph, which I have shamefully cropped)

This started as an experiment in sidechain gating. I'm frequently reading articles about the endless power of a well-chosen sidechain gate, but obviously I didn't choose mine well because you can't even hear it in the song. By the time I'd added a pair of looped drum tracks (one from Front 242, another from EZ Drummer), sent them through some parallel auxiliaries with odd effects preceded by bandpass filters, and tapped out the first few chords with Camel Audio Alchemy, I was already in love. The sidechain stuff wasn't necessary. Something more interesting was taking shape: a minimal trance journey from somewhere to somewhere else.

Two other things inspired this track, and they were both new plugins: Replicant from Audio Damage (which is most obviously used to stutter the drum loops, but is more subtly used elsewhere for various glitchiness) and Melodyne from Celemony. I mostly bought it to correct vocals (hopefully performed by other people) but its "Direct Note Access" feature allows you to meticulously alter (or completely remove) the sensible elements WITHIN a sample.

You see, originally the "Oooooooo" sound was part of the "Doo-doo-doo" vocals that you hear at the end of the track (from a Lyda Husik song, by the way). While using Melodyne to remove the guitar elements from the vocals, I also stripped out the "Oooooooo" and made it another element altogether. I had to timestretch it in Logic (because Melodyne's timestretch is inexcusably bad) but the implications are pretty amazing. You can turn a sample into something totally different if you're willing to play with it enough, which lends itself to the sort of endless possibilities that paralyze me with choice.

Anyway, some of the other samples were taken from quiet bits of Jane Siberry's "The Bird in the Gravel, with the looped oboe going through the DOD effects processor for human-style tweaking. The choir at the end (from IK Multimedia's Miroslav Philharmonic) was a totally unsubtle touch but seemed necessary.

The problem was that something ELSE seemed necessary: a payoff. Transitioning from floaty ambience to the grounded nature of the "Doo-doo-doo" vocals required the song to get off its butt at some point. I dipped my toe into Logic's Ultrabeat for the drums (why did I never explore this before?), added an Alchemy arpeggio...and then had a hell of a time with the bass.

Bass is difficult, especially for those of us without a subwoofer. Some bass sounds have a nice low-mid grunt to them, and some have a punchy sub to them, but few have both. You often need to mix the two together...but WHICH two?

For the "grunty" part of the bass I mixed Taurus I and Minimoog samples (with IK Multimedia's amazing SampleMoog), then -- at a loss for a matching sub -- I bought the Alchemy "Electronic Bass" expansion. Some overdrive and compression and I was there. And incidentally, the recurring echo keyboard notes are from Logic's ES2 synth.

I've had enough mastering experience to know that a GOOD MIX is essential before mastering can even begin. This means stuff like getting your levels and your frequency usage to a pleasant spot, but a really PRACTICAL step is to remove sample-pops before mastering turns them into painful "TICK!" noises. Fade, crossfade, notch filters, and waveform editing (to BOTH stereo channels) can save you lots of grief before harmonic enhancement turns your beautiful mix into the sound of celophane getting hit with a bubble-wrap hammer.

The "Doo-doo-doo" stuff was particularly bad for this, especially because it dwelled in the same frequency that sample-pops tend to so I couldn't just add a highpass filter.

A quick pass through iZotrope's Ozone 4 for loudness, stereo enhancement, and final EQ...and voila! To me, the song is about the day in the life of a bunch of scrubwomen...gearing up for work, washing down, relaxing, listening to the sound of the mudbath (or wherever it is they work), then really getting to it at the end. "The Bird in the Gravel" had this sort of approach as well and I think I adopted it subconsciously.

Oh, and the drips and drops in the middle portion? Not actually drips or drops, but that's a secret for another post.

Recently...

Many things have prevented me from blogging recently, not least my own laziness and ennui. My computer's hard drive totally died after my post about the importance of backups, requiring a trip to the repair shop (and then a total update of everything to Snow Leopard which does kick ass).

This misfortune was immediately followed by a five-day heatwave. Despite my perverse resistance to installing my window air conditioner -- and therefore many nights spent sweating buckets into my sodden bedding -- I learned two things about humans and heat:

1. When people who live in an extremely HUMID area -- like those of us in Southern Ontario -- complain about 35-degree temperatures that feel like 42-degrees due to the humidity, people who live in DRY areas say -- repeatedly and disdainfully -- "Ha! It's that hot here ALL SUMMER!" To which I can only say: try going out in that heat with a wet towel wrapped around your nose and mouth.
2. When people complain about the devastating heat, a subset of other people say "Ha! In the winter you complain about the cold, now you complain about the heat! You just like complaining!" This is like saying "You complained that you were thirsty, so you'd better not complain when I throw you in the pool and drown you!" However illogical it is to complain about the weather -- since nobody you complain to can actually change it -- it is NOT illogical to complain about temperature extremes.

I only mention this because people say these things all the time, and it's tiresome.

Anyway, I'm also living with a cat who is a bit like the Tazmanian Devil, only more hyperactive and noisy. She is a fearless destroyer of bookshelves. She has learned that the best way to send me leaping out of bed in the morning is to sharpen her claws on my mattress, which I imagine her doing with a big grin on her face.

As of this morning, Muffet is forbidden from entering my bedroom. This is difficult because I haven't lived with closed doors for over ten years, and also because I don't think she'll adapt quickly or quietly to this change. Her favourite window is in my bedroom, and so is the sock drawer. I foresee many challenging nights ahead.

Third obstacle: constant pain in my shoulders. Sometimes it's barely there, and other times it feels like my biceps and shoulders are being held together by old rusty rivets made out of bubbling lava.

When I told my family doctor that I was on a three-year waiting list to see a shoulder specialist, he had a fit of furious Irish passion and booked me for a series of examinations. Yesterday a delicate lady held an ultrasound paddle to my shoulders and we viewed the inside of my pathology: wavy lines of bone and fat surrounding ominous black holes of encysted fluid.

Then I crossed the hall to get some X-rays done. It was a much more respectable operation than the last place I went to, though it ALSO had a cupboard which emitted terrifying scrabbling sounds.

Most interesting was the woman who took the X-rays. She was brusque and businesslike, but every time she prepared to take another picture she'd say "Hold your breath!" in an incongruous sing-song way, like the way you'd speak to a mischievous child. I felt weird, standing there in my lead girdle, with this extremely professional lady buzzing around who would suddenly disappear into a booth and sing out -- as though she were offering me a popsicle -- "Hold your breath!"

In other news, I have joined the board for the condo corporation, which is a story I'll tell someday. I also joined the board for the Open Ears festival. I have added "The Toronto G-20" to the list of topics which must not be discussed in friendly company. I walked past my old apartment and saw that the vegetation grew back but the junker cars remain. I read "Babbitt" by Sinclair Lewis, "Day of the Triffids" by John Wyndham, and a beautiful book about undeciphered ancient scripts by Andrew Robinson. If I go on any sort of vacation this year it will hopefully be to Easter Island, because I want to see what their discos are like.

Open Ears 2009: Saturday May 3

The Books

My cubical-mate Dave quite literally FREAKED when he heard that The Books were coming to Kitchener. "Whozzat?" I asked. "Who are the books?

He tried to explain a bit about what they did, and he sent me a couple of videos that I barely watched -- I like to see shows without knowing anything about the artists -- and I heard all sorts of things about how they rarely perform live any more, and this was their first show in years, etc. etc.

After so much hype, could The Books actually live up to the impression that I had in my mind?

Yes. And more.

They're funny and genuine. They have a hint of humbleness to them, but they are totally confident about what they do. Their beats and some of their backing instruments are pre-recorded as part of the videos they perform to, but on stage it's still the two of them: one singing and playing acoustic guitar or bass, the other playing a sort of modified cello. They're great musicians. They're personable. They rock.

But that's only half of The Books that we experienced tonight; the other half were the videos that accompanied every song.

The first few videos were a tad gimmicky, and reminded me of a slightly more irreverent Emergency Broadcast Network: video clips and samples combined and synced up to create a new and otherwise unintended meaning. It was good, but it still tasted a bit bland to me.

But then they played "Classy Penguin." This had nothing to do with EBN-style culture-jamming, it was "just" a collection of home movies from their own families, showing the performers themselves growing up and just plain being alive.



Think of it. We were watching two extremely talented young men playing the guitar and cello on stage, while above them we saw a skillfully-edited re-run of their lives to that point. We saw the influences that shaped them and the silly things they did as children. We saw their parents and houses and even got a bass solo from the guitarists' brother. THIS was a turning point for me. Before that I just LIKED The Books. After this I LOVED them.

They got a standing ovation and did two encores. Their second encore was hilarious: a video that one of the band members had made for his child, to help him learn the alphabet. But it was TERRIFYING, an obscure and bizarre acid trip where the letters spun and flipped and made you want to run away. It so much WANTED to do all the things that a Sesame Street-style vignette would do, but somehow it went all WRONG.

Brilliant.

Blue Dot

Afterwards we went to a party/happening/not-a-rave designed and curated by The Blue Dot. This time they'd shanghaied a large section of "The Tannery," a maze-like factory space complete with balcony, enclosed shaft-courtyard, a selection of DJs, and -- as expected from the Dotters -- something interesting happening in every nook and cranny.

Most impressively we saw a performance of Gordon Monahan's "Swinging Speaker." This was absolutely spectacular and dopplarriffic:



Since it was a sort of Open Ears "after party" I got a chance to chat with a lot of familiar faces. Unfortunately there's just no getting around the fact that such a big event requires a larger crowd than those Open Ears folks willing to stay up past their bedtimes, so when the bar closed and it turned into a not-a-rave, I reluctantly skeedaddled. Oh for a post-Open Ears booze buffet, in a calm venue, with enough attendees to make it financially worthwhile! I'll keep hoping.

So this was the end. I might get out to see some of the installations tomorrow, but otherwise my nights of live shows and no sleep are over until next time.

This was the best Open Ears festival I've seen so far. It had enough diversity and a high enough quality to make almost EVERYTHING worthwhile. Never once did I dread a show, and very rarely did I wish that a bomb would drop and put us out of our misery.

As much as I liked The Books, my favourite night was still the double-bill of David Lang's "Elevated" and the improvisational jazz of E.T.C. I have some seriously fond memories of that night and I don't think I went away unchanged.

Here's to whatever 2011 brings...!

Open Ears 2009: Friday May 2

After my brief recuperative day off I jumped back into the Open Ears fray. Unfortunately tonight's fray was a bit of a muddle, but the martinis at Jane Bond were delicious!

Penderecki String Quartet

There are certain things that I don't "have ears" for. Solo pianists who play modern compositions, for instance. And mezzo sopranos. And string quartets.

But I keep thinking that if I continue to EXPOSE myself to the Penderecki String Quartet -- which is pretty easy to do, frankly, as you can't throw a horsehair-bow without hitting them in this town -- I'll eventually "get it."

That hasn't happened yet and it didn't happen tonight. Therefore I can't pass judgment on them or their choice of music. I can, however, say that they're as cool as cucumbers and they seem like really sweet and stable people, and if they volunteered to look after my cat I would trust them to do a really great job.

Their first piece ("Light Garden" by David R. Scott) was the sort of string quartet-ty music that I never manage to enjoy. Bowing, striking, plucking. I am amazed that so much plucking can happen without the instruments going out of tune. This sort of thing seems to go nowhere in my mind, and when it's finally over I'm always surprised.

Their second, however, was "teatro dell'udito VI," during which they were joined by the composer himself, an extremely fuzzy Giorgio Magnanensi. While they played the composition, Mr. Gagnanensi sampled two of the instruments and played them back using what appeared to be some sort of delayed granular synthesis (I knew it would pop up eventually in this festival...it seems to have been the de facto choice for live electronic experimentation during the last six years).

The altered violin sounds were played back during the piece itself and an extremely creepy waveform morphed on the screen above the musicians, in sync with the electronic noises. During the first section the samples were played back in short discrete howls, sort of the way a dog tries to sing along with the theme for "The Tonight Show." During the second section, however, the waveform took on a life of its own, growing and pulsating in its evil green way, seeming almost to be FED by the string quartet. "Stop feeding it!" we should have yelled as a warning to the musicians. "It's getting bigger behind you!"

This was all quite beautiful, actually, though it kept reminding me of this.

The final piece included a dance interpretation of "Penelope and Odysseus," choreographed by the oddly-named "Dancetheatre David Earle." When I talked about the things that I don't "have ears" for, I should have also mentioned something that I don't have EYES for: modern dance. All that grasping, arching, and cringeing. I simply can't evaluate it in an objective way so -- once again -- I'll leave it to more knowledgeable people to say whether the performance was good or bad. Maybe they can also tell me whether Odysseus was the guy in the gray top, the red top, or the blue top.

I can say, however, that even when they were portraying a Greek person who is dizzy and is about to fall, they never once knocked over a music stand or a violin player, which is certainly a better balancing act than I could ever manage.

Hard Rubber Orchestra

Near the beginning of the set the conductor and spokesperson for the Hard Rubber Orchestra said that their repetoir was wide and varied. Hmmm.

Let me say right off the top that the musicians in the Hard Rubber Orchestra were AMAZING. Like, these guys could join just about any band and instantly create a sensation.

That said, I should have LOVED their show. They were bombastic and disciplined and they played a really likeable style of music: original compositions combining the most well-worn elements of film noir, Starsky & Hutch, and mid-'70s coffee commercials. You see, the problem's already starting.

They were so damn SLICK and SAFE, in the same manner as Cirque de Soleil or The Blue Man Group. Even when somebody was belting out a really amazing solo, they were almost totally steamrolled by a never-ending wave of capably-played soundtrack music, usually dominated and mutilated by a driving rhythm section. You get the feeling that their compositions have been through the wash so many times that all the colours have simply run together; the MUSIC is energetic, but the bulk of the playing HAS NO SOUL.

There were two notable exceptions, however. In the last song, the conductor (and composer of the song) seemed to suddenly pull a James Brown/Frank Zappa and twist things around a bit. The first instance of this was also the most amazing: he got the four trombone players to stand up and begin a toneless, arhythmic improvisation, while gradually the other band members ceased playing. Those trombones just went on and on and on, goofing off, sighing, laughing, climaxing...

...and the music was ALIVE! Frankenstein walked! Spring had come to Waterloo and the air was fresh and sweet and electric!

Then the rest of the band crashed in and it was all just spoiled, like maybe Frankenstein had tried to make good but had gotten frightened by fire. Seven minutes of brilliance does not a good show make. I'd be happy to listen to Hard Rubber Orchestra on the radio, but seeing them live as part of an experimental music festival was totally underwhelming.

I'm sure that Hard Rubber Orchestra is on their way to fame, and they deserve it too. Folks will love them in Vegas!

Open Ears 2009: Wedesday April 29

Tonight was one of extreme contrasts. Open Ears is, at its best, capable of surprising you with a mix of contrasting styles and approaches...two hours and two blocks can span the corners of the globe and the moodiest of moodswings. Tonight was one of those nights.

But first, let me mention the common threads woven through this year's festival: the ubiquitous on-stage Macbook, the ever-present whispered spirit of R. Murray Schafer, and the venue-bracketing duo of mismatched photographers who -- for lack of an introduction -- I think of as "Yo-ho Jack" and "Bungie!"

Elevated with David Lang

The show started with a friendly, goofy-looking dog attempting to get a treat out of a glass mason jar. It pawed and chewed, knocking the jar around. The dog didn't have a plan, its approach showed no evidence of learning or consideration...instead, endearingly, he just worked at the problem with no sign of ever giving up.

Despite the sad piano accompaniment, this film was funny at the beginning. People in the audience laughed at the bumbling, innocent, silly and simple animal.

Then the glass jar broke, and the dog started chewing at the sharp edges, trying to reach the treat that was still inside. The piano's downbeat tone took on a totally new meaning. As the animal continued to chew on the broken glass, a palpable wave of disbelief, hostility, and betrayal rose up around us. We, the audience, were shocked to the core.

So, with the film "Treat Bottle" (by William Wegman) and a song called "Wed," the show began, and though the rest of the performance was somewhat less visceral, the mood continued to be one of futility. Then futility again. Then a darker, more oppressive futility than the futility that had come before, with an emphasis on "futility."

I loved it all.

The films were accompanied by professional musicians playing in total lock-step: not a note out of place, not a baffling beat dropped. For a totally miserable ten-minute adaptation of "Heroin," Nadine Medawar sang with perfect pitch, yet fragile and halting and emotionally devastating. They went about this performance like a business and it suited the mood perfectly.

The show ended with the film "Elevated" by Matt Mullican, consisting of slow fades of irregularly-cut 1935 New York scenes: Madison Square Garden, Central Park, burlesque shows, Christmas shoppers, Luna Park. Meanwhile the musicians performed "Men" for trombone, english horn, bass clarinet, baritone sax, two pianos, percussion, viola, cello, and double bass.

Most of the instruments played single extended notes, sometimes harmoniously, usually with a slight dissonance. The man at the bass drum kept time in an almost -- but not quite -- regular tempo, signalling the instruments to change their notes after an uncomfortably long span of time. This created a repetative and disturbing drone that might have been somewhat lulling...

...except for the constant staccato tinkling of single piano keys, and the endless scraping of a brake drum, going on and on and on against those scenes of long-ago people smiling and bustling and shopping...

...and after five minutes you began to get agitated...

...and after then minutes you didn't think you could take it anymore...

...but after twenty minutes you realized it could go on forever and there was nothing you could do to stop it, and it felt like the aftermath of a speed-drug high when time is dragging and you're unable to sleep and even the most pleasant things leave you with a feeling of terrible emptiness...

...and after thirty minutes you've stopped hoping for change and lost all track of time...

...and then forty-five minutes later it stops. And you feel so good.

E.T.C.

So while the first show was a rigidly-constrained evocation of the most hopeless emotional depths, the second -- The Ellis Tanguay Cram E.T.C. Trio -- was a wild, joyful jazz improv. It was like finding out that the doctor was only kidding when she said you had cancer, and what's more you just won a car. YAY!

I used to hate free jazz, but over the years -- thanks mainly to exposure at past Open Ears festivals -- I've begun to learn how to relate to it. When the musicians start down a particular path I get a sense of the parameters they're setting themselves, and I can follow along with some degree of competence. When the drummer seems to be ripping the song into impossible and ever-unravelling shreds, I can find the beat makers that hide underneath. In short, I've learned to simply loosen up and have fun, and it helps when the musicians are having as much fun as E.T.C. were.

I'm exhausted after a day of work and shows so I can't give the guys their due, but...wow. They brought me up and made me happy, and I certainly wasn't alone. I could have listened to them all night long.

Open Ears 2009: Tuesday April 28

Sunday was my mother's birthday and I had to work on Monday night, so I missed a few minor things...but Tuesday appeared to be the REAL beginning of OE'09.

Jesse Stewart, Improvisations for Solo Waterphone

You want to hear a waterphone in action? Jesse's your man!

But wait, what the heck is a waterphone? It's a very cool, extremely resonant instrument that looks like a cross between a footstool and a sexed-up porcupine. You can tap it, scrape it, pluck it, shake it, then fill it up with water and do it all over again!

Stewart's approach seemed a bit like "A Young Person's Guide to the Waterphone" -- trying every technique once, then moving on to the next one -- but I quickly realized that the effect was infinitely richer if I closed my eyes. With open eyes I found myself intellectualizing in an extremely mundane way ("Now he's rubbing it with something soft...now he's rubbing it the other way!"). But when I was unable to see what he was doing the sounds became rich and mysterious. They became an improvisational composition instead of a demonstration of technique.

I seriously think that Stewart should do this with his back to the audience.

Incidentally, if you've ever heard the soundtrack for "The Hunger," you may have wondered how they made all those wonderful atmospheric noises. Now I can tell you with absolute certainty that they were rubbing a violin bow across the waterphone's spikes. Tell your friends.

tranSpectra

They're the winners of this year's "Stinky Ears" award! (unless something worse comes along, God forbid).

During the endless show -- which made me think of a warm glass of milk growing steadily more tepid beside a collection of videos by The Parachute Club -- I thought of two dozen vicious, evil, absolutely CRUEL things to say about their performance. But I want to be nice about this, because the tranSpectra people are human beings with families and feelings, and there was one exceptionally good moment (see below).

So instead of writing a snarky list of everything I thought was terrible about their show, let me briefly describe what it takes to win a Stinky Ears award. It's open season on whether or not tranSpectra were guilty of these things...you don't have to do ALL of them to win, you lucky devils.

1. Interesting, complex subjects applied in a pedestrian, "yearbook poetry" way.
2. The subjects must have already been "done to death" -- and done much better -- at least ten years ago, preferably twenty. Bonus points for ecology, poverty, physics, mathematics, warfare, and thinly-veiled guilt at one's own social privilege.
3. Total, single-minded pretention. Nobody can crack a smile. The sopranos -- if there be sopranos -- must look stern and sing in a verrrr-eeee seeee-reeee-ussss waaaaaay.
4. Sloppiness. It looks and sounds like a rehearsal. The performers appear to be amazed they're getting away with it.
5. Far too long. Awkward pauses.
   
6. No empathy with the audience.
7. Over-hyped techniques which fall far short of expectations.
8. Musical instruments which fail to mesh together and simply sound ill-conceived or poorly executed. Granular synthesis is a plus, as are boopy keyboards.
   
9. Dirty ears (not necessary).

Tonight's only exception was "Calypso," which rose above everything else with wit, style, skill, and -- for once -- tip-top execution. It had life, and not just in comparison to the totally bloodless pieces which surrounded it...it positively BOUNDED!

At the end, after the hernia-inducing "Deaths of Children Update," I was just rising to leave when the tranSpectra creatures announced that they were GOING TO CONTINUE. This was like being told by an executioner that more children were scheduled for death, and I must watch until the end. I couldn't take it. I left.

So yeah, all-in-all a pretty grim night, but I DO feel the need to point out that the very capable dancer was Yvonne Ng, who I instantly recognized as the freaky baby from "Silent Hill." I almost stuck around to ask her about it but I wasn't sure if it's the way she'd want to be remembered. In the featurette she talked about how difficult it was to pee.

Open Ears 2009: Saturday April 25

Yes, it was day two of the 2009 Open Ears Festival...and I was there. Sort of.

"Vexed," 16 hours, 840 repetitions, much fun

Remember when I said "I was there" in the first sentence of this post. Forget it. I didn't go to "Vexed"

Why not? I guess because I have a strong aversions to "happenings" of any kind. I'm not the type, and I'm generally not a huge fan of those who are. And even though -- in retrospect -- it looked like there were plenty of innovative ways of making it less than simply "840 repetitions," I still couldn't bring myself to take part in it.

Saturdays are good days for breakfast, underwear shopping, and catastrophic thunder storms. I enjoyed all three.

"Flying Bulgars"

Not a SINGLE ONE of them actually flew! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

This was held at St. John the Evangelist church. Do you know how many "St. Johns" there are? The taxi driver told me all about them...John the Baptist, John the apostle, John the Evangelist. Neither of us knew who this particular evangelist was...I don't believe he's ever had a TV show.

Anyway, what do you get when you have a concert in a church gymnasium? Tinny sound, unfortunately, The Flying Bulgar Klezmer Band sounded best when they were laid-back and quiet. When they pulled out the stops and really started romping around, the gymnasium became their Enemy of Treble Echoes.

Even so they were fantastic. I'm not a klezmer fan by any stretch of the imagination -- I find it awfully repetitive and just a tad goofy -- but the Flying Bulgars set consisted mostly of original compositions, and those compositions were AMAZING: original, complex, beautifully articulate, and sometimes political.

Two downsides, though: these new songs will only be available on their UPCOMING album. And they also played a few klezmer songs, surprisingly. I mean, songs that make me think of "The Chicken Dance." Done in a top-notch way, of course -- the arrangements were, I'm sure, absolutely the best -- but still an awful lot of "mazel tov." Which is a shame because, as evidenced by their original work, they can do SO MUCH MORE.

Flugelhorn. How is it differentiated from "a trumpet?" I'm not sure. David Buchbinder can sure play it. Deviating somewhat from the traditional sound of the set, Buchbinder coaxed his flugelhorn into doing some very unusual tricks, without ever -- EVER -- seeming stupid or gimmicky. And Dave Wall has a voice of unleashed power and beauty. Everybody else was great as well, and if their new album had been available I would have bought it in a second.

Oh yes, and the Evangelists served us alcohol and gave us cheese. That's always a good thing!

I leave you with Dana International. Everything I know about Yiddish* I learned from her, so here she is singing "Yesnan Banot." The Flying Bulgars were not particularly like this.



* As Gary pointed out in the comments, Dana International is singing in HEBREW, not Yiddish. So I guess it really IS true that "everything I know about Yiddish I learned from her," ie. "nothing."

Open Ears 2009: Friday April 24

It's time once again for Kitchener's "Open Ears" festival, one of the few events in town that I feel is targeted towards me. It's a time when local venues open their doors to quirky -- and sometimes very famous -- outsider musicians and composers, allowing us to experience new things and finally see those obscure acts we've always heard about. You big-city folk are probably used to this sort of thing, but here in the boonies it's a rare and wonderful treat.

I've been to the last two festivals (it happens every second year) and I've got my full 2009 pass. Tonight the Center in the Square hosted the first two events.

"In C" (Terry Riley), performed by the Wilfrid Laurier University Faculty of Music Students

I've never seen "In C" before. It's something everybody talks about. Now I know why.

You can read about its structure at the Wikipedia page. In this case it was performed by about thirty musicians, and I think it lasted for 45 minutes. The most obvious thing about it were the constant, regular, never-ending C note played on some sort of small xylophone, while violinists, a cellist, an acoustic guitarist, two pianists, a guy with a discreet synthesizer, and a bunch of people with horns played the phrases in a semi-improvisational way.

Obviously the phrases have been picked to avoid any sort of discordance, but even so this sort of thing could be either a creative dogfight or a woefully flat bunch of boring. In this case, however, all the musicians were playing close attention to each other -- rising and falling in long swells throughout the piece -- and they were also allowing others to take the forefront. In short, everybody stuck together and everybody picked up their cues. It was hypnotic, beautiful, and a wee bit awesome.

I felt sorry for the xylophone woman (known as "the Metronome") and the single vocalist. Sore arms and a dry throat, no doubt.

"Sound Explorations" (various composers), performed by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, conducted by Edwin Outwater with Stephen Sitarski, violin

As usual for me, the ticketing procedure for Open Ears has been bizarre. After no end of confusion actually BUYING my festival pass, the fun continued at tonight's show...the usherettes didn't know what to do with the temporary ticket that was mailed to me ("I've never seen one of these. Should I rip it in half?"). The man at the box-office traded half of the temporary ticket for two (?) ACTUAL tickets to the symphony show, even though I was going alone and had only purchased one. The usherettes ripped ONE of the tickets, leaving me with the other that I suppose I could have hocked.

Once inside the venue I presented the other half of my temporary ticket to a guy at the Open Ears kiosk, and he gave it back to me and also gave me a lanyard, leaving me with one UNCLAIMED show ticket, one CLAIMED show ticket, one half of the TEMPORARY ticket ("You need to always keep this with you," he said), and the thing to hang around my neck.

Then, after watching "In C" (which was performed in the lobby), I entered the theater itself and was shown to my assigned seat. A woman sat on my left, and another woman sat two seats to my right, and they started to talk over my head. This totally confused me -- why hadn't they gotten seats together? -- and when I offered to trade seats so they could chat more comfortably they told me that a doctor and his wife always sat in my seats, "but maybe they're on vacation."

So there I was sitting in another person's reserved seat, beside an empty seat for that person's wife, upon which was taped a special invitation telling me to go to the theater office to claim a special gift I'd earned for donating $1250 to the Center in the Square.

Fortunately the concert itself made more sense.

Two of the numbers ("The Hebrides" by Felix Mendelssohn and "The Sea: Suite for Orchestra" by Frank Bridge) were quite conventional, presented as inspirations for the more experimental works that followed them. I was never taken to the symphony as a child and I haven't made it a practice as an adult, so I'm afraid I've never quite known how to LISTEN to orchestral music. How does it parse? Where does it lead? The only experience with classical music I've ever really had was listening to "Switched-on Bach" and watching "Allegro Non Troppo":



(For those who want to know how it ends, the second half is here and the finale is here).

So when I see a symphony performing a really nice piece of music I find myself unable to just soak it up and not think about it; my eyes are always darting from one person to the other...the percussionist who looks like Dawn French, the cadaver playing the cello, the young violinist who bobs her head with carefree abandon, the endearingly swishy conductor.

More my line was R. Murray Schafer's "The Darkly Splendid Earth: The Lonely Traveller," which was a tad more challenging. I tend to be unimpressed by daringly avant-garde symphonic pieces, but this one was short on discord and stayed close within its boundaries: ominous sonic landscape, lonely violin. It was both emotionally and intellectually stimulating.

NOTE: Mr. Schafer himself is coming to Cambridge this week to perform a "Harbingers of Spring" soundwalk which sounds terribly flaky. There are drummers.

After the encore we got John Cage's "4'33"" I was curious to see how the audience would respond to this piece...and I was totally surprised.

Now's a good time to mention that this show overlapped with KW Symphony's "Signature Series" which provides much more conventional fare. For this reason most of the people in the audience were dapper elderly couples, with a scattered collection of the middle-aged. I thought that "4'33"" would annoy them.

As I understand it the piece tends to invoke a lot of "audience noise," which is pretty much the entire point: allowing the theatre environment to express itself. But in this case the folks in the audience were so respectful that we all sat in total silence except for scattered coughs and giggles. A woman behind me even APOLOGIZED for giggling. But I suppose that was one of "the environments" that Cage anticipated.

The last piece was Benjamin Britten's "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra." It had very little relation to the Art of Noise-remixed Frankie Goes to Hollywood song, "Rage Hard (The Young Person's Guide to the 12-Inch Mix)," but was just as fabulous.



"Always note the sequencer. It will never let us down. Let it have its wicked way."

What can I say about "The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra?" It's a showcase of every instrument's strengths without ever being TOO obvious. It deliberately contains every cliche in the book. All four percussionists -- Dawn French included -- got a thorough workout. It felt great, but the best part was the opportunity it gave the "resting" musicians to watch and appreciate those at work, something I think they rarely get to do in such a segmented way.

At the end of the show I started chatting with Wendy, the woman next to me. She holds a pass to the "Signature Series" and I hold a pass to "Open Ears," so we came from different but mutually-appreciative directions. We talked about the music we'd heard and what we liked, and it was VERY interesting to hear her impressions. She explained by the conductor kept shaking hands with ONLY two of the musicians on stage (they were the first and second violins). And then she drove me home! You rock, Wendy!

Anyway, the festival has begun and it's going to be a busy week. Stay tuned for trivial updates.

Photojourney 2.0!

Updating the old Photojourney was an incredible pain in the butt. Photos had to be cropped, resized, exported, uploaded...then the numbnails needed to be copied and cropped and overexposed and...geez, it's no wonder I got tired of it!

So I got myself a Flickr account. In fact, I've spent all weekend figuring it out and uploading the 90-some pictures from the last few months, including some odd stuff that I wouldn't have put on the old site. Go on over and have a look, and feel free to comment or whatever else you can do.

Based on my limited experience, Flickr is super-cool.

Open Ears Festival: April 28

Whew! The final night. After lunch and drinks with my mom (and a few ZZs), time for:

7:30 PM - KWS: Urban/Wilderness

Or perhaps 8:00 PM, depending on your source. I came in late but managed to see most of what transpired.

I always assume that people "dress up" when they go to the Centre in the Square, and I'm always surprised that nobody does but me, which means I don't learn lessons very well. The KW Symphony performed four pieces, the first two of which I saw from a blurry perspective and far removed from the ideal acoustics.

Kleines Requiem fur eine Polka (Henryk Gorecki) and Crystal Fragments (Peter Hatch). Nope, I didn't like them. Didn't feel a thing. Had the usual thoughts about deliberate unconventionalness, though both pieces had a fair share of melody and structure. Sitting, staring straight ahead, thinking about my footwear, it ocurred to me that somebody looking at my face might think I were enjoying the music or at least paying attention. Usually you can tell when somebody is enjoying their own disconnected internal world, but not always. So I stared straight ahead, thinking that I might look appreciative, while only staring straight ahead. I tried to imagine how people look when they appreciate things, but I didn't want to experiment for fear of getting foundation on my gloves.

The world premiere of Linda Smith's Wilderness grabbed me by the heart and didn't let me go. Quiet and meditative, no gimmicks, it appeared to come out of her soul without guile or self-consciousness. Lovely.

Peter Hannan's Side with Entropy, however, wins this year's Muffy award for most awful Open Ears piece. In order to qualify for this award the performance must be high-falutin' and pretentious...and totally fail to achieve its goals. After introducing the piece as an attempt to blend electronic gadgetry and samples with a modern orchestra, Hannan bashed out an awful string of cheesy sci-fi boops and whizzes, even worse than the ones you saw on Star Trek. This might have worked if it somehow matched with what the orchestra was playing, but no...they were off on their own tangent. It was laughable and stupid. Not quite as laughable and stupid as last festival's opera about serial killers...but close.

At every festival there are people who rave about the performance even when you can tell they didn't like it. Two elderly ladies were gushing to each other afterwards: "It reminded me of...Star Wars! Or E.T.!"

10:30 PM - Scanner: Alphaville

(That picture up there is of Beetle and I waiting for the show to start...thanks for all the fun, Festival-Buddy!)

Robin Rimbaud (Scanner) gave us a smart and funny introduction to his project: radically recutting Jean-Luc Godard's "Alphaville" and providing a live soundtrack to it. Without the dialog -- and with most of the human scenes removed -- I might have found myself hungry for plot, but instead I just drowned in beautiful cinematography and remarkably human electronic music. Images of faces and buildings and cars and machines -- lots of machines -- with inexplicable body movements and long quiet static shots, I found it difficult to separate the music from the film. Sad and funny and over-the-top, not a single false note, sheer innovative brilliance without seeming forced or derivative. Loved it.

11:00 PM - Systatic

By midnight the party was just starting at the Former Kitchener Legion. Billed as sort of an unofficial "after party" for the festival, it was shaping up to be an shockingly average hip-hop night. No liquor, only beer and wine. Uncomfortably warm and stifling. People from the festival filtered away into the night, adequately replaced by the very young techno kids who were surely the target audience. The beginnings of a strange gut-rot and the realization that I'd put off getting sick for far too long: I was not feeling well and I couldn't stand the music.

Then the drums started piling up around the dancefloor and I knew we were in for some raucous tribal drumming.

Definitely time to leave before that happened.

As a postscript I dipped into Club Abstract, but my metabolism was winding down and alcohol wasn't going to help. Time to go to sleep and reflect on the festival.

By far, my favourite moments were Barnyard Drama and Scanner. I guess what I liked most about them were their willingness to embrace some degree of convention, and their largely unpretentious demeanor. It didn't hurt that they both consist of extremely talented people.

Those two shows alone were worth it but I saw enough other fun things to make it more than worthwhile. Now it's time to get back to my life, and I'm actually looking forward to that.

Open Ears Festival: April 27

Some celebrities tonight:

7:30 PM -- Frederic Rzewski

I have never managed to get my "contemporary piano composition" ears. This stuff tends to sound like disconnected bursts of tinkling, broken up by brief snatches of melody. It doesn't connect to me emotionally. Intellectually I sit there thinking "yeah, that must be difficult to play," but part of me is also thinking "are you only avoiding melody because you think you're SUPPOSED to?"

Saying this about a composer like Rzewski might be blasphemy -- and his final piece, De Profundis, featuring snatches of letters by Oscar Wilde along with some odd squeaks and squawks, connected with me wonderfully -- but I just don't understand how to appreciate much of this genre, particularly the second piece (Four Pieces). J (festival stalwart) enjoyed it, and B (festival stalwart 2) felt he was on the verge understanding, but I think it comes down to frequent exposure, so you begin to recognize themes and references. When that happens you might be able to break it all down into chunks that you can digest.

10:30 PM -- Wunderkabinet

A dash of Laurie Anderson, a big whack of Peter Greenaway, and you get Pamela Z's "Wunderkabinet." Technically over-the-top with beautifully overlapping samples (these folks know how to use their delay processors!) along with intriguing fake museum entries and a three-dimensional X-ray "piercing devil." Unsettling, cerebral, beautiful visuals by Christina McPhee.

Unfortunately we were seated in a strange position, so we couldn't see much of what was going on...but still a thrill.

Open Ears Festival: April 26

I decided to save my energy and my sanity by not going to Morton Feldman: For Philip Guston, a four-hour, three-musician, extremely minimal and meditative and slow performance. I'm not a very meditative person so I probably would have gotten jittery. From what I hear I didn't miss much.

Instead I walked through the dark, rainy, and deserted back alleys of Kitchener to see:

10:30 PM - Barnyard Drama

Another improv quartet, but instead of being cool as cucumbers, every member of Barnyard Drama brought out their inner autistic. As always it's a matter of "getting into a groove" and, at the beginning, Christine Duncan annoyed me. I'm not much for Rainman postures and vocalizations, and all I could concentrate on was how much she sounded like gibberish guy from "How's Your News" ("Ahh-by! Ah-boy'en boy ahh-by! Ahh-by'en boy-ya by!") and how much I disliked her toilet-cover hat.

But she won me over. They all did. Gospel/jazz improvs with just a touch of silliness, another kick-butt drummer (Jean Martin, not a hobbit tonight), guitarists Bernard Falaise & Justin Haynes (who fell into a GORGEOUS underwater surf-guitar duet near the end), and a big tent revival as an encore. Most importantly they knew when to quit: an hour was all we got out of them.

Open Ears Festival: April 25

Just some thoughts about yesterday, the first "real" day of this year's Open Ears Festival:

7:30 PM - PSQ: Black and Angelic

The Penderecki String Quartet are legendary, but I've never seen them before. This is partly because I tend to find new orchestral/string performances to be sort of madenning; I find myself wondering why it is necessary to so often break ALL the rules -- forsake tempo, melody, coherence -- in order to make highly-regarded "new" music for orchestra.

Or maybe I'm a Philistine, which is possible.

I arrived early due to problems with my festival pass, and found myself in the midst of Kathy Kennedy's "HMMM," which seemed to involve radio interference and static and humming. These sorts of things are always stressful for me because I arrive alone and feel awkwardly out-of-place, considering how seriously these events tend to be taken. It's always a relief to finally be seated.

The first piece was Midaregami (Tangled Hair) by Veronika Krausas, which summed up everything I don't like about this type of music: pretentious and overblown themes that simply cannot be accomodated by a trite score (or, in this case, by the equally trite video by Robert Drummond). This was made worse by Kimberley Barber, mezzo-soprano, whose picture-perfect delivery of the translated Japanese poem turned beautifully minimalistic words into the cries of a spoiled child.

But then, I don't much like this technically perfect operatic delivery; it seems cold and heartless to me.

The only highlight: Krausas' apparent faux-pas during an interview before the show, when she made a flippant comment about drug use that will probably be edited out of the recording made by the CBC. After her draub comments about scales and spectrums, her astonishing facial blush was the most honest display of "spectrum" I saw or heard that night.

Next: "Waves" by R. Murray Shafer. I thought of it as "jumping, echoing, and holding," and it was absolutely beautiful. The theatrical touch at the end -- three of the PSQ members playing in opposite corners of the stage, with the cellist watching them through a telescope in the center of the stage -- was whimsical.

George Crumb's "Black Angels" felt a bit gimmicky to me -- the performers playing crystal glasses and gongs with their bows -- but it did manage to convey its theme of war and chaos. Piotr Grella-Mozejko's "TrancePaining," however, captured the same theme with a relentless chugging bang; the perfect counterpoint to "Waves."

10:30 PM - Françoise Houle with I Have Eaten the City

I wasn't too excited about this; improvs can be hit or miss, depending on the sort of groove the participants get into, and listening to an experimental clarinet improvisation? Oh, please!

But Toronto's Houle -- with his clarinet, laptop, effects, and treated piano -- stole the show. He was unpretentious and spectacular. Despite his incredible breath control, this was one of those performances where you suddenly realize you no longer know how it's happening. Where are those sounds coming from? And how can they sound so GOOD?

After a sort of lacklustre entry at the beginning of the show, the "I Have Eaten the City" trio joined Houle for an improv jam at the end. The guitarist/sax player and the "bag o' tricks" guy seemed to have trouble getting into it, but their Incredible Hobbit Drummer kicked butt and kept it together. The best moments came when any two performers grabbed the spotlight while the remaining two retreated to change instruments. I could have handled a BIT more calm and structure, but I was impressed and I was never bored (hard to say when you've just watched a 45-minute clarinet solo).