http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/10/classical-music-youve-never-heard-before/

http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/06/chamberfest-cleveland-bursting-on-the-music-scene-with-a-bang/

http://www.coolcleveland.com/blog/2012/05/the-davenport-collective-a-friendly-musical-amoeba/

Phase-sing

Music for 18 Musicians and more:
Reich is pure movement. The joy of discovery transcends the clarity of composition: Thinking becomes feeling. The beginning contains the end but extrapolation surprises: The reasoned becomes the spontaneous. Organic.

In The Cave and others:
Reich makes the unsung sing. He kneads out the melody & key. He finds the music underneath.

Electric Counterpoint and elsewhere:
His pieces extend in chronos (quantity of time) & deepen in kairos (quality of time). Engaged with time & yet timeless. Point & counterpoint. Harmony. Synchronicity. Symmetry. Divergence & convergence. Permutation. Growth. Swimming, dolphins through currents. Submergence & emergence. Renewal. Energy. The flow, the change, the interaction, the variation. A better world to live in, where chaos turns to order but remains in beautiful flux. 

Gauging our position with the power of song

Music is the most enjoyable standard by which we judge ourselves. 

A song is a moment extended, reproducible at any moment---dips on the long timetable of your lifespan (if we were drawing this, it would look like notes on a staff).  

Compare yourself to the person you were at first listen. The song doesn't change, but you do. (You may find new corners to turn within the song, on a deeper layer down, each time it unfolds for you, but you know what to expect.)

Whereas people change (or stay the same in a different way), making perfect timing between two people impossible (well, any kind of perfection is impossible---but you can get to some very nice things that are imperfect yet correct in their own way), CD, tape & vinyl are set in stone.

Does music degrade? What is the half-life of a three-and-a-half minute song? Can you sustain that peak level of enjoyment for the rest of your life? Or does the melody coat itself around the perimeter of your head like wallpaper (as with all comforts & luxuries, fading from our perception)?

We may ignore a song, but it's always there, waiting to be appreciated, even (especially) when we're distracted to do so.

Songs are wiser than we are.

In Transit, to, Somewhere

Words are a public transportation system that you get on when you are a young child & it takes you where you need to go, fast, & you may see something outside the window that you can't get your lips around, but it's all right, you're safe inside, & you can point out the window.

These words never vibrated. I never spoke, spokes on a wheel that turned a cog in your mind. What was changed, when these marks were made, I made not a whisper, not a shout, nothing moved in the air other than the friction of fingers over keys. 

I know why my recording career never took off---I didn't understand that all rooms have a sound, a feeling, & I was content to speak into a microphone [in that one room] or play a synthesizer that never really made a sound, never really vibrated: rock 'n' roll, jazzzzzz, POP, these are sounds, & they need to be released. A synthesizer synthesizes but you need something to start out with, something real, something that actually happened.

Then you can change it.

Low notes

I was inspired to listen to David Bowie's Low for the first time in years after reading Hugo Wilcken's treatise for Continuum's 33 1/3 series. The following are [basically] verbatim from notes taken while performing sit-ups:

Jagged guitar shreds scribbled over by sine waves
Drums: locomotion, changing phases, imploding into itself, hurling forward, swept into & swallowed by a cyclone
Motions of a rock record, but only as passage through a tunnel to altogether more interesting territory
“You” as often as “I”
Hope!
The sound of a band playing together, subverted, splintered, defaced
Hooks in service of sound, not traditional song structure
Layers built up [1. band 2. overdubbed effects 3. vocals] & then stripped back down. [Isolating the middle invents tension organically]
Apex of experimentation: Throw everything in, see what works
Plenty of previous works that were darker, grimier, infused with more self-hatred. Here, the flames of hell lick at his heels [as he runs towards the horizon]
Salvation through creation
Forged from fire
1. Speed of Life: Hurtle into positive atmosphere
2. Breaking Glass: Insular blues
3. What in the World: Loopy joy
4. Sound and Vision: Dance, funk
5. Always Crashing in the Same Car: Finally some terror
6. Be my Wife: Lyrics and music most successfully at odds
7. A New Career in a New Town: Then, finally, throw out words altogether
8. Warsawza: Hope despite desolation---the majesty of survival after devastation. Rediscovery of ritual? [Primordial, before language & meaning] Jettison content from language, substance created in the absence of objective truth (substance and subjectivity)
9. Art Decade: Decay creates art
10. Weeping Wall: Beautiful. Riding flow of melody. Voice producing sound instead of imparting meaning
11. Subterraneans: Again, beautiful

Sound and vision
Sound: texture
Textures creating pictures (vision)
Vision: foresight

{End of album; end of notes}