Nathan Salsburg, "Landwerk"

While reading the profile of Salsburg in Toi , I wondered how many readers knew or understood the Caretaker reference.  Is it a number in the single digits? 

Naturally, I was intrigued.  "An Empty Bliss Beyond This World" is all about looping its source material precisely so, distorting the sound just enough to induce feelings of nostalgia and unease in equal parts.  It's deceptively simple, and yet copyists are nowhere to be found for the most part.  Kirby noted in interviews that the Caretaker "formula" was a lot tougher than it seemed, and almost dared others to copy him.  "Landwerk" is more about using short samples from old records as a springboard to improvisation.  The noise and static is there, but Salsburg's guitar playing emerges as the star of the piece.  As a parallel approach to the Caretaker, it's entrancing music, albeit somewhat anodyne.

Salsburg's comments about cultural appropriation were revealing about the cultural climate we currently live in.  Somehow it's OK for him to curate the Lomax collection for the past twenty years, but using the records as source material for his own recordings is problematic?  He probably understands those records more than anyone alive, he's the last person who should be concerned about accusations of exploitation.  The 20's klezmer recordings are surely all kinds of wonderful and it would be unfortunate if non-Jews felt uncomfortable turning to them for inspiration.  

A bad week for Beethoven's 7th

Teodor Currentzis released a preview of his recording of Beethoven's 7th Symphony.  It's the final movement and the full recording will be released next month.  Like many people, I wasn't a fan of Currentzis' now notorious version of Beethoven's 5th Symphony.  He claims to have uncovered some kind of hidden truth in Beethoven that others have ignored for nearly two centuries, placing himself on a pedestal as the genuine keeper of the flame.  He presents himself as a lone soul trying to preserve Beethoven, when it's kind of obvious to everyone that he wants his Beethoven to sound different from everyone else's just for the sake of being different.  Nevertheless, there was something compelling about his version of the 5th.  Its pugilistic fervor and bludgeoning, monotonous consistency made for a passable hulk smash version of the work, even though, as many have noted, it had very little connection to what Beethoven wanted it to sound like.  His 7th goes of the rails in the opposite direction, coming off as a jaunty pantomime, a teeny bopper roller rink version of a piece that should continuously ramp up the tension toward the finish.  Currentzis obviously likes his role as the maverick outside, and why not -- every musical genre has a place for novelty cover versions.      

And yet, it wasn't the worst version of Beethoven's 7th that I heard this week.  That honour goes to Gustavo Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic, who actually performed this piece at an empty Hollywood Bowl a few months ago, although I only heard it for the first time now.  I want to like Dudamel.  He's passionate about music, smashes the European mold of the stuffy concert conductor, and has an undeniable star quality.  He's a rock star and he's perfect for LA.  When he's good, he's brilliant but when he's bad he can churn out the absolute worst interpretations in the standard repertoire, and this Beethoven's 7th falls squarely into the latter category.  There is no middle ground with this guy.  

The reduced orchestra is badly out of sync in parts -- in particular, the timpani player is playing from another planet -- but perhaps that's to be expected when the players have to sit so far apart and behind screens and masks.  In one sense, you can't blame the conductor for the hand he was dealt by the pandemic, but on the other hand you can because he's the sole member of the orchestra who hears the music from the vantage point of the audience.  It's his job to make those key adjustments to timing and dynamics because what the players hear is influenced by those sitting nearest to them, he's the one tasked with making sure the orchestra is playing together.  

But Dudamel's main problem as a conductor is that he's clueless when it comes to changes in tempo.  If a piece is uniformly slow or has subtle adiabatic changes, he can be brilliant.  His performance of "Bolero" with the Vienna Philharmonic comes to mind, that clip is a youtube staple.  He's good with fast, energetic music too, he understands how to keep the piece moving and the enthusiasm high.  But transitioning from the slow opening few minutes of the first movement of Beethoven's 7th into the vivace section?  At around the five minute mark, the piece slows to a crawl, which is a Dudamel staple.  Whenever a piece goes pianissimo, his tempo drags and the music simply dies. Then he cranks the tempo abruptly in a jarring transition.  Yes, it's supposed to be an sudden shift but the conductor has to control the flow of the music, the two sections aren't supposed to sound as if they were stapled together from two different works.  From that point, the movement could still be saved if he could keep it the tempo rolling.  But yet again, the piece sags only for Dudamel to crank the engine again leading to the unison where the entire orchestra repeats the theme.  In the space of about a minute there were a flurry of unnecessary tempo shifts, I'm feeling seasick, and the first movement is barely half over.  

I could continue picking apart the performance in this way, but these are the kinds of mistakes Dudamel makes all the time, they're hardly specific to Beethoven.  In most instances, he can be counted on to nail the big finish of whatever work he's conducting, leaving a positive final impression and leaving the audience satisfied.  This is one of those times when he couldn't finish strong, as the fourth movement lurches toward the finish, no thanks to a number of sloppy asynchronous moments, and I was practically begging it to be over five minutes before it finally did end.              

Daft Punk are no more

 Add me to the long list of people who are skeptical that it's a true breakup, rather than one of:

1) a plot to reunite and/or make money on a comeback tour whenever big concert tours are possible again

2) a convenient "out" for business/tax reasons

3) a way to do pursue separate projects for a while without people pestering them about when the next Daft Punk record is coming out

It's been eight years since their last album, that's effectively the same as a long breakup, regardless of whether they "reunite".  They've remained relevant through collaborations and production work (most notably The Weeknd) but could continue without the Daft Punk name.  Portishead haven't released an album in thirteen years, sure they've toured and released a track here and there, but if they had in fact broken up and not told anyone, would we know?

Assuming this is the end for Daft Punk, they leave an astonishing legacy for an "electronic" band.  Each of their four albums was a mini-revolution of sorts.  "Homework" was perfectly timed for the 90's electronica boom and made them MTV stars.  "Discovery" was the dancepop smash that gave them a lifetime membership to almost any club or wedding DJ's playlists.  "Human After All" spawned the famous pyramid and a legendary tour that arguably launched the EDM craze. And "RAM" was the crossover megahit that ensured them radio play forever.  

By winning the Grammy for Album of the Year with their final studio album, they join Simon and Garfunkel as the only acts to accomplish that surprising feat.  Of course I'm discounting soundtracks/compilations, contemporary artists (e.g. I'm sure Billie Eilish will make another album), and Lauryn Hill (she won the Grammy with her first and only album to date, but she's never really gone away and a solo artist can't disband, so ...).  

  

Gilbert Kaplan and Mahler 2

This month, I learned about this remarkable story via a scathing profile in the NYT that was originally published in 2008.  Kaplan was a wealthy magazine publisher who lived out a dream to conduct Mahler's Second Symphony.  He lived out that dream about 75 times spread over three decades, despite not having any formal music training.  The NYT paints him as a talentless impostor that musicians hated working for, who lived out his spoiled rich guy dreams by having the right friends in the right places.

On the other hand, a BBC report from the 80's depicts Kaplan in a completely different light.  Here, he comes off as a patron of the arts who spent a small fortune to buy Mahler's original score, learn it by heart, and become a world leading authority on the symphony.  He later published the score, and seeing it as a near historical document, supported further scholarship on the subject.  Before his first time picking up a baton in front of an audience, he trained with a professional conductor for eight hours a day for months at a time.  His route to becoming a conductor was anything but typical, but nobody could say he hadn't put in some time to learn the craft and pay some dues.  

One could chalk up the BBC report to "LOL 80's" -- what characterizes the Me Decade more than showing sympathy on TV to rich yuppies?  It still isn't clear exactly how Kaplan broke into the conducting business.  Nobody will seem to admit that money/donations were the main factor, but it's hard to imagine that they weren't.  A guy who already has everything buys himself an orchestra for a night to fulfill a dream?   That could get play only in the 80's.  So yes, without the connections afforded to rich New Yorkers, none of this happens.  

Some rich guys consider owning a sports team as a vanity project and couldn't care less about winning. Kaplan wasn't that kind of person.  Conducting Mahler truly was his dream and he approached it seriously and with the best of intentions.  As a conductor, he was enthusiastic and probably quite a bit ego-driven.  Most conductors are.  He didn't have the charisma or technique to do the job well, but he could do it competently.  Whatever innate talent he lacked was partially compensated by his mastery of the score and his absolute sense of purpose as a conductor -- he never conducted any other piece, nor did he have any interest in doing so. His conducting was mathematical and had no real interpretive vision.  His performances could never touch that of a professional conductor who can speak the orchestra's language and use them to translate the sounds in his head to the stage.  

Outsider Music and Outsider musicians have always populated the fringes of pop music.  Usually they're disadvantaged people without the financial means to compete with well funded mainstream artists.  That wouldn't describe Kaplan.    And yet there's no denying that it's a remarkable story.  Kaplan conducted famous orchestras all over the world.  It's impossible to imagine this happening today.  Ironically, cronyism in classical music isn't like it was a generation ago.  Orchestras are more of a meritocracy than ever before.  The best people, male or female, stand a good chance of being hired via a rigorous process.  It's not about knowing someone who knows the conductor.  How many contemporary pop music stars got their start by posting videos to Youtube?  Where are the classical Youtube stars?  Fluke conducting careers like Kaplan's are impossible to envision these days.  Maybe that makes classical music a bit less interesting.  That made the NYT's cynicism a bit disappointing, even if it was totally predictable.         

 

Paying for digital music

 A little over three years ago, I wondered if I had bought my last CD.  I knew the likelihood was small, but more importantly, the roadmap was there.  Shopping excursions were becoming ever more infrequent, and could eventually stop, at which point I would hear new music exclusively via streaming services or blogs.  

Since writing that post, I have bought enough CD's to confidently declare that the format's demise vis a vis my spending habits was exaggerated.  My purchasing frequency did drop, but purchasing variety reached a twenty year peak.  With a mix of new, used, and bargain discs, and an increased breadth of genres (including classical, a genre I hadn't bought in significant numbers since the mid-90's), the end seemed nowhere in sight.  

And yet, I've been down this road before, where a peak turned out to be a last hurrah, bringing on a sea change in my purchasing/downloading/listening habits. 

I participated in the first wave of Napster, binged regularly on music through Kazaa and Soulseek, and had never paid to download music.  Until now.  It only took twenty years, but I finally paid to download music through iTunes.  What was the history making purchase?  Osmo Vanska's Complete Sibelius Symphonies with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra. When it comes to the frozen Finnish winter interpretation of Sibelius' music, Vanska can't be topped.  It's a classic cycle that came at a great price.  And given the difficulty in buying non-bargain bin classical music on CD, it seems that iTunes and other music services give me the best opportunity to hear the exact performances I want.  

My Roland DJ505 came with a three month subscription to BPM Supreme, a record pool site offering tracks and tools for DJ's across numerous genres.  I browsed through it, downloaded some solid tracks, but decided it wasn't really for me.  But then I found myself discovering more and more great music through the site.  I also became accustomed to the convenience of searching for tracks on a whim and catching up on years of great dance music that I hadn't been exposed to because for years, I have been listening via albums and podcasts, rather than individual artist EPs or single tracks/remixes. Of course I have known about Beatport and similar sites for ages, but didn't have the proper motivation to spend money there.  With two small kids at home, my mixing has been stalled, so I might just cancel my BPM Supreme membership and re-sub later when I'm ready to devote more time to it.  

This may be how the CD will finally die out in my collection.  The randomness of CD shops will be replaced by digital services offering niche versions of songs in the genres that I'm currently interested in.  

Phil Spector is dead

Spector was a brilliant record producer, perhaps the best ever. His influence is immeasurable.  He was also a spectacular failure as a human being -- and that was before he murdered Lana Clarkson.  

For me personally, Spector indirectly inspired me to start writing about music.  I had thoughts about comparing his productions with the dense, layered guitar music I loved in the 90's.  I picked up a pen (literally, there were no blogs at the time) and the rest is history.   

Rather than size up his complicated legacy (which I've already looked at in other posts over the years), I think I'll shine a light upon CNN's horrible excuse for an obit.  

Starting with the headline: "Grammy-winning producer and convicted murderer Phil Spector dies."  His Grammy win was inconsequential to his career, Phil Spector was not famous for winning Grammys.  It's a small footnote in any proper bio.

"Spector, who was originally from Bronx, New York, produced recordings by stars including The Beatles, Ike and Tina Turner, Cher and the Ramones".  When George Martin died in 2016, did the obits read "he produced records by Elton John, Neil Sedaka, and Gerry and the Pacemakers"?  

"Creator of a production style that became known as the "Wall of Sound," the influential producer formed the Teddy Bears and recorded the group's only hit, "To Know Him is to Love Him," while he was still in high school."  These are two unrelated factoids linked in the same sentence, not to mention that the implied timeline is reversed.  

"Spector's approach to record production -- the layering of instrumental tracks and percussion that underpinned a string of hits on his Philles label -- was a major influence on popular music in the 1960s."  This is easily the most benign and meaningless description of the Wall of Sound ever written.  There is nothing of substance in this obit, not even the slightest attempt to produce an informative piece of writing, it is clickbait, content for the sake of having content, and nothing more.   

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 45

 New era mix #3, 98 minutes

https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/new-era-mix-3/

Originally this mix had a slightly different tracklist and ordering (and was called "new era mix #2"), but I was unhappy with it.  After mapping out the mix a second time I re-recorded it completely.  The style is very similar to the previous podcast, and uses songs from some of the same older-school compilations.  It's a bit longer and more ambitious, I think. 

David Hurwitz

I have never been into video reviews or reviewers, it's a trend that I never became attached to.  It's the end of 2020, the most impossible and backwards year of our lifetimes, and my favourite music channel of the moment is David Hurwitz's on Youtube, it's an absolute treat.

I'm sure there are plenty of classical music reviewers who can communicate in this style, I am surely decades behind whatever the vanguard of classical criticism is these days.  I just love watching a guy who talks about classical music the way my favourite pop and rock critics always did, with pithy and cynical putdowns of conductors and orchestras, cheeky enthusiasm for his faves, and delightful overuse of the word "cosmic" to describe powerful performances.  He mixes a deep knowledge of the music with charismatic humour throughout, and effortlessly succeeds at the single most important task of a critic in any genre -- he makes me want to drop everything and listen to the music he's talking about.

And again I'm no expert, but I strongly disagree with him on the subject of a particular recording I have thought about quite a bit -- Furtwaengler's singular 1942 recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony in Berlin with many top Nazis in attendance.  Nearly everything Hurwitz says is true -- the recording is poor, and the performance has many noticeable flaws.  Despite this, I still love it, as do many of the people who posted in the comments box.  Hurwitz isn't a perfectionist and is happy to judge a piece more by "feel" if appropriate. He believes that if you strip away the context, it's not a recording that you would ever listen to more than once.  But stripping away the context is impossible.  The Nazis were there and nothing could be more important.  I believe, as many do, that Furtwangler decided to make an emphatic point by presenting the blitzkrieg version of Beethoven's 9th, spitting in the face of the Nazis in attendance, and telling them to shove their war in a manner that very few in Germany could have hoped to get away with while living to tell about it.     

Diary of Musical Thoughts Podcast Episode 44

New Controller, New Era Mix #1, 76 minutes 

https://www.mixcloud.com/bruiserfs/new-controller-new-era-mix-1/

It hardly needs to be said that 2020 was not a typical year.  I was so out of touch with contemporary music that I won't be publishing a top ten albums of the year lists for the first time since the early 90's.  I simply couldn't follow along with new releases with any enthusiasm this year.  I was continuously updating a list of new albums that caught my interest, but never got around to listening to most of them.  Having said that, Resident Advisor's best albums list overlaps quite well with many of my tastes (KMRU, DJ Python) and provided me with even more album recommendations that I really must listen to.  

Two themes dominated the year for me.  The first was the rekindling of my love for classical music, thanks to Alex Ross' "The Rest Is Noise".  The second was buying my first piece of DJ hardware in nearly twenty years, a Roland DJ-505 Serato controller.  Suddenly I feel like I've been transported out of the DJ'ing stone age and placed in front of a modern hardware/software combo that is indescribably better for translating my ideas into results.  After three months, I still feel like I'm barely scratching the surface of what this equipment can do. 

It's taken longer than I expected to start posting mixes made with the controller, in part due to an ear problem that put me out of action so to speak for a few weeks.  But finally I'm thrilled to post the first mix.  It feels a bit like a work in progress where I'm still finding my way around the controller, but the new era has to start somewhere.   

V/A, "In a Field of Their Own - Highlights of Glastonbury 1992"

This past week I noticed that I have never written a thing about my #16 album of the 90's .

It's a two plus hours survey of British indie music in 1992 and as expected, there's a mixed bag of gems, nostalgia, and iffy detritus that hasn't stood the test of time.  But with any festival, the ups and downs are part of the experience.  You can't expect to like everything, and the fun is in soaking up the atmosphere, discovering new bands, and confirming why your favourite artists are in fact your favourites.  That was all true when I first heard this album back in the 90's.  As a snapshot of they way things really were in 1992, this album is a priceless artifact that I never get tired of returning to.  

The running order is completely disconnected from the billing, this democratic presentation is a credit to the bands.  To anyone hearing these bands for the first time, as I was in 1992, there is no bias as to which bands you're "supposed" to like, the 2 PM openers who played to a mostly empty field are presented equal to the bands who appeared at night in front of thousands waving flags. For example, you would have no clue, from looking at the track listing, that Carter USM headlined one night and were the biggest act in British indie music that year.  In a strange coincidence, the final track -- an energized Blur playing "Sunday Sunday" to a nonplussed crowd -- is a window into the future, previewing was to come in the mid 90's.  But listening here gives no indication that Blur would become more famous and successful than any five other bands on the album put together, and within two years would banish nearly all them into irrelevance. 

There are two tiers of bands on the album, and the separation between them has become only more pronounced with time.  One minute you're listening to shouty, ramshackle indie punk-rap (Senser) and the next minute Curve descends from the heavens like a bolt of lightning and you wonder why 85% of these bands even bothered showing up.  Later on, it's guitar pop of the most forgettable kind (The Real People) followed by Spiritualized exploding my expectations with a mind-melting 11-minute performance of "Shine A Light/Electric Mainline" and kickstarting my decades long obsession with them.  And yet, nostalgia for this era runs deeper than I thought.  In writing this piece, I discovered that Senseless Things (arguably the most inoffensively mediocre act on the album) reformed in 2016, and  Thousand Yard Stare somehow released an album this year.  

A few more random thoughts:

James' "Mother Gold" is either an unlikely feminist anthem or one of the most inappropriate songs of all time.  Right now I'm betting on the latter.  This song encapsulates exactly why so many journalists found them embarrassing back in the day.

Kitchens of Distinction -- a terrible name for a great band.  

The Orb -- great band, so-so recording of "A Huge Ever Growing ...".  I guess you had to be there.

Flowered Up, "Weekender" -- the 14-minute epic that nobody remembers, playing this song in its entirely at Glastonbury has to be the most 1992 thing on here, with the possible exception of Ned's Atomic Dustbin still being popular.  

Th' Faith Healers, "Reptile Smile".  This recording was my introduction to the band if I'm not mistaken.  A hugely underrated band.  

Midway Still, "Better Than Before".  A killer tune, but the band was swept away by Britpop along with countless other semi-grunge acts.  The landscape was clear for their return by the end of the decade and they've released five (!) albums over the past ten years.