May the Lord bless and keep the Remixers - our continuous cauldron stirrers, always dislodging a kitchen's accumulated sauce crusts from the iron's black and moistureless lip.


Learning Music has remixed me

and volcano! has been remixed by me


John Wood of Learning Music is a superhumanly funky, prolific, and compassionate specimen - there are few others besides he and Lisa Tremain that I could want more to remix something of mine.

volcano! are often compared to Radiohead and the Pixies but I think they are in fact better than either of those, and this is not hollow hyperbole but the honest opinion's truth.  My remix only uncluttered a minor masterpiece - no more.


Lovers of music both true and flighty: never cease to mix and remix and again re-remix once more.  This is not a joke - all of antiquity looms large against us!  A spoon is our only defense.

"I couldn't express myself on my own. That's why I wrote in the language of Frascheta. But was that really the language of Frascheta? I was mixing memories of other speech that I had heard around me, the words of the people of Asti, and Pavia, Milan, Genoa, people who sometimes couldn't understand one another. Then later, in those parts we built a city, with people who came from here and from there, all united to build a tower, and they spoke in the same, identical way. I believe it was a bit the way I had invented."

I was born a very small child.  My family moved from Toronto to Fort Lauderdale when I was 1.  For some reason I never became a US citizen, but I promised myself in November that if Obama won then I'd finally file the papers.  It was only the third pres. election I'd missed since I'd been of age.

So when my friends who do Vosotros asked me to record a patriotic song for their Obama inaugural compilation, the one I immediately thought of was "Swanee River", the official State Song of Florida.  It was written antebellum by Stephen Foster, who never actually visited Florida or anywhere else in the South but is famous for writing these fanciful songs romanticizing a place he'd only ever heard about ("My Old Kentucky Home", "I Wish I Was In Dixie", et cet.).  

Today it's easy to dismiss it as sort of silly and racist, but to me "Swanee River" has a lot of unconscious depth, some honest homesickness to it!  Mine turned out to be a pompous oaf of a version: more Paul Robeson than Ray Charles.  I was trying to imitate the heart that "grows weary", and the river itself.


These are all of the bands that also recorded similarly olden patriotic tunes for this:

1. Star Spangled Banner (vosotros)
2. Taps - America The Beautiful (Obi Best)
3. My Country 'Tis of Thee Pt. 1 (Learning Music)
4. My Country 'Tis of Thee Pt. 2 (Learning Music)
5. Yankee Doodle (Dream Kids)
6. You're A Grand Old Flag (weyou)
7. Anchors Aweigh (B.R.A.M.)
8. Swanee River (Mooey Moobau)

The palace they call Knossos in Crete has to be the source for all the labyrinth-minotaur stuff, yes. Dozens of squirreled-away rooms upon rooms. But to a tourist circa 2008 there is so so little to trust. Conjectured stairways made of obvious 1903 concrete. Restored columns a little too perfect red. And this:

Not a Minoan fresco, or a restored Minoan fresco. But a copy of a restored Minoan fresco. The original (by Emile Gillieron, assistant to Arthur Evans, the guy who excavated it) is in the museum at Iraklio. You can see where the real pieces end and interpolations begin, at least. And they left the bottom corner to our imaginations. But what true details there remain need every exegesis!

Bare-chested women? Priestesses? Goddesses? An actual matriarchy here.

Crowds of anonymous men. Red-faced as always.

And crowds within crowds. Are they all watching a ceremony, a dance?

What are those things sticking up at the top? Legs, arms? Why? And what's happening with the blue on the bottom out of nowhere like that, with the man's arm extending into it?

A better question: why isn't this one on postcards instead of that ridiculous Prince of the Lillies?

So I'm doing something for SoundWalk in Long Beach again this year. And they asked all the participants to answer some questions posted in this blog. They seemed sort of like the art world version of those MySpace "have you ever...?" questionnaires that people fill out about their lives sometimes. Reading my answers back, I realized that this was maybe a rare moment of me being more/less honest and scrutable about these things! So I thought I'd repost some of them here.



Creation
1. How do you create?

I am not sure that I ever actually create anything. Whether it's mine or not, I always just feel like I'm acting as a mere channel for whatever it is that's coming out. This is a very romantic notion of the artistic process, I know, but it's honestly how it feels here.


2. Where do you create?

In bed, 20 minutes before my alarm goes off. On the train, while staring at the backs of people's heads. Sometimes even while sitting at a desk! Oh, and of course on a stage - but only for what's really a very short moment.


3. What motivates and inspires you?

Billboards and bus ads. Seeds and babies: little things that grow into bigger things. All these trashy superhero movies that have been coming out lately. Big "collected works" books of poetry. People who do something besides whatever life has handed them to do. Also: unconscious feelings of sympathy and love.


4. Do you remember the first moment(s)?

Probably not!


5. Can you imagine the unborn sound?

Yes but it's less like imagining an unborn sound and more like imagining a person that you know must have existed at some point, somewhere, but you're not sure who or when or where they were.


Cognition
1. What is your understanding of "style" and "idea," and what does the term "underground" mean to you (character, aspect, practice, metaphors etc.)

Style is whatever ideas are clothed in. Style can be an idea too: clothes wearing clothes. I never use the word "underground" unless I'm talking about the place where beetles and snakes and prairie dogs live.


2. Is there such a thing as aesthetic fundamentalism? If so, describe it.

There's such thing as everything. Aesthetic fundamentalism is either...
a. Letting your artistic "beliefs" (however arbitrary) run away with your art
b. Having such a definite vision that you really believe that sticking to your sensibilities will result in a perfect creation
c. A foolish notion
d. All of the above


3.Is recognition important in the "underground," and, if so, how is it different from mainstream recognition?

Recognition is always important. Everyone wants what they do to be seen by as many people as possible. The ones who say they don't are probably lying. And lying is way worse than wanting recognition.


4. Describe your sound, your aesthetic?

The inexplicably detailed mess of the natural world - this is my only aesthetic. I feel down on the human intellect sometimes, but then I have to remember that that's part of nature too.


5. What is your understanding of music and/or sound art as well as music-making and/or sonification?

I don't think music and "sound art" are any different. If they are, it's only because we decided that they are. People feel compelled to communicate by making air vibrate however they can, that's all.


6. In your social context(s), what role(s) do you think music and/or sound art and music-maker and/or sonifier perform?

These things and the people who make them usually function as self-sustaining life forms. They're ostensibly there to irritate and to inspire, and sometimes they really do. But mostly people do these things to make their own lives bearable, because on some level many of us really don't have much of a choice: the music or sound or whatever it is has to come out. Forming a community based on this has kind of a commiserative effect!


7. In an ideal world, what would you do/ would be doing in the future (goals/plans/dreams etc.)?

I want to live in a city that works, in a country that has some humility to it. I want to always be making things with people I love. I want a sledgehammer and an unending supply of boulders.

Gilgamesh: Did you see the little stillborn babies who knew not their own names?

Enkidu: I saw them.

Gilgamesh: How do they fare?

Enkidu: They play with honey and butter at tables of silver and gold.

I thought I would write something about what things I've been doing lately. And then I did start to write something about those things that I've been doing. But then someone else started (and finished) writing about what things I've been doing. So maybe my something about the things I'm doing should start off with what's recently been elsewhere written about what I'm doing.

There is an article on me in the April 2008 issue of Citizen L.A. They boast to be "L.A.'s Premiere Arts & Lifestyle Publication" and I am not going to argue with that, even though I like arguing about these things. The cover of the paper version looks like this:



And the article itself was printed like this:



That picture was taken by Jason Savvy on a downtown L.A. street in February. That night I was lucky enough to be accompanied by the 20-piece marching band version of Killsonic.

And the mention princessFrank makes of my album is correct. Just a couple of days ago I saw some of the cover art for it because Max Markowitz, who is drawing it, showed it to me. Together, Max and some of that art looked like this:



There are some other albums I should mention. One of them just came out. That one is called "The Domestication of Animals Plays the Screams of Drowning Ants, Bites of the Box-Packed Dogs." It looks like this:



It is a collection of songs I recorded with Grant Lovelace and Mike Rings a few years ago, when we thought long album titles were good ideas. Ego Plum has put it out on his label, Ebola Music. You'll be able to order copies through him soon, but until then (and after then, actually) you can pay money for a CD like the one in the picture if you write to me or come and see me play somewhere.

And one other CD that I played on recently that you should know about is Cat Hair Ensemble's "East of Western." It is very close to being done. So is the Bodies of Water album "A Certain Feeling", which will also have some of my trombone playing on it.

This is all I really wanted to say. Thanks for taking an interest.

One beats the trash lids like two old phlegm-throated buskers would bap their fingers' dying skin the other side a dinner table;
another is constant assembly-line rubber liquid as it aerosol's emit and smoking stiffens in the conveyor air.


It's the simple lines of city unplanning I see - the somehow lilies and cornfields' angle walling-in on railways, and all distances arrayed with the weathered horn of a housetop shape.
For dessert were sweating checkerboards, suspended squares moist in plastic millimeter-thin. A tower of raspberried flakes was each one roof-raftering its others up.


The best thing I've ever maybe seen was our unplanned-for Halifax landing:
trees tropical-looking in their wristlike seize and density swept beside me the cauliflower forest roof (for we had loped the way of my window side),
and in the pane between strung some webs of drops stretched left: wet hairs of streaming rain blown thin!

Somehow I played trombone on 5 great albums last year - these are they:


Ego Plum & the Ebola Music Orchestra - The Rat King



Dorian Wood - Bolka



Bodies of Water - Ears Will Pop and Eyes Will Blink



Ferraby Lionheart - Catch the Brass Ring



Listing Ship - Hull Full of Oil and Bone
[not out yet!]

In a stone den was a poet Shi, who loved to eat lions, and decided to eat ten.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
One day at ten o'clock, ten lions just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi just arrived at the market too.
Seeing those ten lions, he killed them with arrows.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that those ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this.