Category Archives: music

music, review

Jon Brumit’s Vendetta Retreat: A Review

Leave a comment

A Performance Review:

On January 12, 2006, Jon Brumit and musicians performed in San Francisco’s Luggage Store Gallery. The lineup included:

Jon Brumit – director/drums/guitar
Joe Goldring – baritone guitar
Wayne Grim – baritone guitar
Suki O’Kane – drums/percussion
Lee Montgomery – sampler/electronics/laptop/radio

There was a third drummer, but I didn’t catch his name.

This was the loudest concert I’d been at since Glen Branca. But interesting stuff. There were two sonic strategies that I thought worked well for the group. One consisted of single, enormously loud hits by all drummers together. All three drummers delivered a synchronized hit of kick drum, snare/or tom, and cymbol. Immediately after smashing the cymbol the drummer(s) muted it. In the small loft space, at this volume (also amplified with 15″ PAs) the effect was to send the reverberation of the stacatto hits off the walls, hanging it in the air for several seconds. It wasn’t an echo, but a shimmering blast. I doubt it could be accomplished without the amplitude. I loved it–though I do believe I’ve lost five years of hearing that I was kinda counting on…

The second sonic strategy that worked for me was a sustained attack on guitars, drums and possibly electronics, lasting a couple minutes at a time. No definite pitches, no clear rhythm, but a wall of sustained noise that you could “search” actively listening to different parts of the sonic spectrum.

This second strategy took me back to a vinyl album I’d heard in 1970, of La Monte Young rubbing a gong for about 45 minutes. Again–as I remember–no definite rhythm, so melody, just a full spectrum of sound and resonance–like dark Morris Louis veils. I’m sure La Monte Young’s performance was nowhere near the volume Brumit’s group produced (and it would not have occurred to me to turn up speakers or headphones to that level), but the oceanic quality of the sound was similar for me.

Over the 30 minutes or so of the piece, I noticed maybe 12 or 14 distinct sections, and there were various other quieter and occasionally less minimal strategies played. For me, these two were the most, uh, striking. And like Branca, I don’t think this particular piece would reproduce well as a recording. But in person, within this space, it was fascinating.

Brumit opened with a laptop piece that seemed a bit less raw, but I missed the beginning of the piece, so I can’t really report on it, apologies.

The concert was a CD release event for “Vendetta Retreat”, released on Edgetone Records.

music, Odor, raga, South Indian, veena

Ragas, Time, Notime

Leave a comment

A raga is a scale to be explored (along with certain rules for its playing).

On a sitar and some veenas, there are sympathetic strings that vibrate when their pitches are played on the melody strings, and that are also occasionally struck with the little finger.

The sympathetic strings are tuned to the pitches of the raga. Striking them is like projecting a photograph of everything that is possible. A synchronic snapshot, as opposed to the diachronic articulating of the melody.

Neither the veena (South Indian) nor sitar (North Indian) are designed to produce chords. There are no chords in traditional Indian music. But there is this continued reminding interplay of timeless existence of all possibilities versus the soul’s narrative of the specific.

Indian musicians are extremely sensitive to pitch. They know a ragas by its feel. They learn to play each systematically, but when they have learned to explore the raga, they move within it, and know it.

I think of the raga as having an odor, a smell. And there are hundreds of ragas, and an Indian musician knows the range of their feelings. When the sitar player strikes the sympathetic strings it’s like waving the incense: the air is filled with its scent, and the melody runs and weaves through it, writing its life in time.

John Cage, music, Steve Reich, synaesthesia, Vygotsky, Zone of Proximal Development

The Thing at the Edge

Leave a comment

I remember that when I was back in college, Steve Reich made the statement that it wasn’t how you made the music, what was important was whether it was good music or not. And the statement puzzled me, because more than anyone Reich had introduced process into composition, process that led to unintended sonic textures. Well, maybe more than anyone except Cage. But what values did Reich use to determine what was good music?

I’d listened to as wide a range of music as I possibly could, from every inch of the globe, from every electronic and music concrete blurt, and from the very oldest to the current. And what I loved most to hear was something that I absolutely hadn’t ever thought existed.

If something is really foreign, your reaction is not usually intense. If something well known is played badly, you have an intense reaction. But if it’s truly unlike the art you make, you will not recognize the art in it on first blush. It will take repeated exposures, and learning about how it is made, and what rules are followed, and what came before it, and what the instrument that generates it is like to play etc. After a while, you’ll start to feel the inner parts, and you’ll perceive the play it has.

But at the edge of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, you do have a reaction. This is again intense, because your mind and senses are rushing into the experience to get a solid taste of it, to map it and perceive it. To perceive its beauty.

And for me, this is what I’ve come to believe is the “good music” that Reich refers to. I know it isn’t a definition that is pan-cultural, but I could imagine someone following that thread and making sense of it. Someone might argue that beautiful music is music that conforms to certain architectural ratios. I can agree, but the beauty needs a person who is ready to resonate with it.

And so I’ve come to value the beautiful over the new. Not because I think it is more important. But because I know it’s a healthy place for a person to have a nest. And because I know that as one perceives, the locus of that nest must change, as percept becomes concept. The thing, then, is always a balance among self, object, and sensory perspective.