Currently Listening To...

[TeslaGuy]

---Fixed link to Synclavier picture in previous post---

Hi-Posi - あと何日？

[TeslaGuy]

Captain Sensible - Wot!

[TeslaGuy]

New Musik - Back To Room One

A song by Tony Mansfield, the producer of the previous track.

[thefro]

G- Outer Space

Genevieve Schatz (former lead singer of Company of Thieves) has released the first single from her side project "G", which is a collaboration with some other guy from an indie band I've never heard of (Jimmy Giannopoulos).

[TeslaGuy]

Hi-Posi - Only "I Love You"

[TeslaGuy]

La Monte Young - The Well Tuned Piano

Excerpt from A Guide to La Monte Young's Music
La Monte Young's magnum opus will have you entranced, bewitched and will change your sensory perceptions of the phenomenon we call music. It is a work for solo piano as you've never heard it before, and is simultaneously universal in its scope and intimate and enchanting in its effect, even as it opens the doors to new kinds of musical and psycho-acoustic experience.

Young, one of the fathers of American minimalism along with Riley, Glass and Reich, may have worked with and inspired everyone from Brian Eno to John Cale, once beaten Eric Dolphy to the second-alto saxophone position at the Los Angeles City College Dance Band, written pieces that require you to release butterflies into the auditorium and feed bales of hay to the piano (yes really; they're just some of the pieces that are part of his "Composition 1960" series), been among the first to realise and capitalise on the static time-flow latent within serialism – especially the crystalline pitch-structures of Webern – in a piece such as his hour-long Trio for Strings and founded the Dream House with his wife Marian Zazeela – a project/place/way of being in New York where time is based on a 27-hour clock – but even the ironically maximally long sentence required to sum all that up is only an upbeat to the perception-changing piece that will mean Young's music stretches into the cosmic infinite of music history: The Well-Tuned Piano.

Given that this piece has been one of the central pre-occupations of Young's life and work since the mid-60s, and given that you have the chance, here, to immerse yourself in it, The Well-Tuned Piano is going to dominate this discussion. So the first thing is: don't panic. The length of this piece is deceiving, dynamic and ever-changing. What I mean by that is that The Well-Tuned Piano exists as a template for Young's continual improvisation and expansion (although the filmed performance, with lighting by Zazeela, from 1987 is the last time he played the piece in public), and that listening to the recording or watching the video collapses your sense of scale and time so six hours pass differently from how you might expect. In fact, time seems both to expand as well as contract.

The piece so takes over your brain that it seems as if it has always been playing, that no other music apart from this has ever existed; and yet, because of the way themes and ideas return throughout the performance, you're aware of a structure, you become conscious of musical anchors in the ocean of pianistic time that the piece creates.

Kyle Gann, The Well-Tuned Piano's most extraordinarily perceptive critic and advocate, sums up the delirious temporal mind-funk the piece creates: "In an 'eastern', timeless way [Young, like Terry Riley, was a student of Pandit Pran Nath], the work can be listened to as a static articulation of a set tuning, a continuous present in which concepts of before and after are irrelevant. In a 'western' way, it can also be heard as a unidirectional time-pattern of thematic development in which earlier melodies return altered and at different pitch levels. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, avoiding quotation marks and over-worked stereotypes, that the WTP [Gann's abbreviation] manifests with equal emphasis both poles of the psychic qualities immanent in all musical listening. Few works so satisfy the desires of both structuralist and ambient listeners."

[TeslaGuy]

La Monte Young - The Well Tuned Piano

Excerpt from A Guide to La Monte Young's Music
La Monte Young's magnum opus will have you entranced, bewitched and will change your sensory perceptions of the phenomenon we call music. It is a work for solo piano as you've never heard it before, and is simultaneously universal in its scope and intimate and enchanting in its effect, even as it opens the doors to new kinds of musical and psycho-acoustic experience.

Young, one of the fathers of American minimalism along with Riley, Glass and Reich, may have worked with and inspired everyone from Brian Eno to John Cale, once beaten Eric Dolphy to the second-alto saxophone position at the Los Angeles City College Dance Band, written pieces that require you to release butterflies into the auditorium and feed bales of hay to the piano (yes really; they're just some of the pieces that are part of his "Composition 1960" series), been among the first to realise and capitalise on the static time-flow latent within serialism – especially the crystalline pitch-structures of Webern – in a piece such as his hour-long Trio for Strings and founded the Dream House with his wife Marian Zazeela – a project/place/way of being in New York where time is based on a 27-hour clock – but even the ironically maximally long sentence required to sum all that up is only an upbeat to the perception-changing piece that will mean Young's music stretches into the cosmic infinite of music history: The Well-Tuned Piano.

Given that this piece has been one of the central pre-occupations of Young's life and work since the mid-60s, and given that you have the chance, here, to immerse yourself in it, The Well-Tuned Piano is going to dominate this discussion. So the first thing is: don't panic. The length of this piece is deceiving, dynamic and ever-changing. What I mean by that is that The Well-Tuned Piano exists as a template for Young's continual improvisation and expansion (although the filmed performance, with lighting by Zazeela, from 1987 is the last time he played the piece in public), and that listening to the recording or watching the video collapses your sense of scale and time so six hours pass differently from how you might expect. In fact, time seems both to expand as well as contract.

The piece so takes over your brain that it seems as if it has always been playing, that no other music apart from this has ever existed; and yet, because of the way themes and ideas return throughout the performance, you're aware of a structure, you become conscious of musical anchors in the ocean of pianistic time that the piece creates.

Kyle Gann, The Well-Tuned Piano's most extraordinarily perceptive critic and advocate, sums up the delirious temporal mind-funk the piece creates: "In an 'eastern', timeless way [Young, like Terry Riley, was a student of Pandit Pran Nath], the work can be listened to as a static articulation of a set tuning, a continuous present in which concepts of before and after are irrelevant. In a 'western' way, it can also be heard as a unidirectional time-pattern of thematic development in which earlier melodies return altered and at different pitch levels. Perhaps it is more accurate to say, avoiding quotation marks and over-worked stereotypes, that the WTP [Gann's abbreviation] manifests with equal emphasis both poles of the psychic qualities immanent in all musical listening. Few works so satisfy the desires of both structuralist and ambient listeners."

[Inseu]

Cute song

[Inseu]

Hitomi Yaida - Not Still Over

[deadgrandma]

Man, I finally caught up with the new KIMBRA album, damn I've been missing out! GREAT! (and leaves Vows in the dirt if you ask me)