v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Oh Lord!!!

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - Vamos

Harmonious Blacksmith at An Die Musik

Great experience today at An Die Musik this afternoon as Harmonious Blacksmith presented assorted works by Purcell in an intimate and acoustically perfect environment. This is the way to listen to this precise and lovely music. The musicianship made the music extremely contemporary in that the emotions and rhythms transcended the centuries-closing our eyes we were there in another time. . .now I am rumaging through my early music collection to find those Purcell gems that speak so clearly to our basic emotions. Acoustic music has its appeals.

Interview with La Otracina from Tiny Mix Tapes

From TinyMixTapes.com:

From listening to La Otracina and your related works and side projects, I get the sense that you guys are psychedelic connoisseurs. Do you feel like La Otracina borrows from the specters of global psychedelic musics in your writing processes, and how do you synthesize all your varied influences?

Well, I see our music as a vortex of sounds, where various musical worlds become psychedelic and intersect with each other, and these form the basis of our explorations and studies. Whether its classical minimalism, sound-collage, atonal music, free-jazz, psychedelic pop/freakbeat/garage rock/mod, progressive rock, jazz-rock/fusion, hard rock, heavy metal, ambient, electronic music, eastern/asian music, African/jungle music, jazz, blues, folk, funk, etc, we somehow come up with cohesive methods of fusing these all (and other ideas) into a non-lame visceral psychedelic musical experience, both live and recorded. Our music had intense transportative qualities, and that is its unified psychedelic nature; its not just using a phaser pedal and a wah-wah! We take this music very seriously, almost to an academic nature, but with complete love and fun as we swim through all these sonic worlds! How we do this all and when or why is a complete mystery, but we do not shy away from risks and attempts to find new intersecting points between musical worlds, and this is why our sound has changed so much since I started the band in 2003, when we were instrumental, heavily into free-improvisation, and sculpting 20 minute prog epics. Every time we release a new album or EP, we are documenting yet another foray into our studies, if you will, and we hope everyone digs in, sparks up, and gets lost within our universes!

There’s no doubt you hear krautrock influences in your music as well. Can you speak to your appreciation of krautrock?

Well, I feel the the German rock movements of the ’70s are extremely relevant to us, both in methodology and aesthetic. The mixture of styles combining psychedelic rock with jazz, improvisation, and experimental music are what we’re all about. And also the gravitation towards taking risks in fusions of ideas, mixing/recording techniques, and general craziness of the Germans is another thing we feel greatly in tune with. I am also a German music collector from this period, it’s my specialty. I think the Germans, with their post-war rebirth as well as technological advances, and the hippie movements all aligned to allow such amazing things to happen, and that’s why so much Krautrock is of such high quality and so damn bizarre! I am listening to Klaus Schulze’s Timewind right now!

I get the sense that there’s an equal appreciaton of the repetive motorik of Neu! and the synth worship of Berlin School alum like Cluster and Klaus Schulze. Can you speak to that?

Well NEU! is of course an influence, but a bit benign at this point, as they’re embedded so much in pop music in general these days. My interest in German bands goes way deeper than that, and I don’t really do the NEU!-beat thing in my drumming, unless I am specifically trying to conjure up that vibe. As for CLUSTER and Klaus Schulze, okay, now we’re talking, as I am heavy into synth worship, although the current LA OTRACINA live show doesn’t reflect this, our mini-albums (Woven Wanderers, Gardens Of Blackness, Fauna & Animated Floral Arrangements, Spatial) all speak highly to the cosmic electronic space music universe. And also my side projects GREENWURM (formerly DRAGONFRYND) and VORG VESSEL are both cosmic keyboard-based, which is really exciting for me to do, to back off the drums and play instruments with infinite sustain! Of course, I an a devotee of TANGERINE DREAM, as their music is so truly blissed. Some other German cosmic/synth stuff I dig is HARMONIA, SFF (SCHICKE, FÜHRS, & FRÖHLING) Ticket To Everywhere, Achim Reichel’s Echoes album, as well as some great Italian and French groups such as PULSAR, SPACECRAFT, and the mighty HELDON!

But as far as LA OTRACINA’s current live sound, we are heavily influenced by the German hard-rock, jazz-rock, and proto-metal bands such as LUCIFER’S FRIEND, GURU GURU, BIRTH CONTROL (singing drummer love!), EPITAPH, HAIRY CHAPTER, ELOY (who also are a big influence because of their synth work!), DZYAN, NEKTAR, SCORPIONS, basically the heavier stuff.

Of course, we all love CAN, NEU!, KRAFTWERK, AMON DUUL, ASH RA TEMPLE, etc, you know the obvious ones, but they’re not so much our actual inspirations and influences. When I first heard LUCIFER’S FRIEND Where The Groupies Killed The Blues, man, THAT was what I had been waiting for my whole life, this was music that speaks to me on infinite levels and is so fucking bad-ass! I’m an obscurist, not an elitist, so I am much more likely to freak out on a lesser-known group than to put Yeti or Unlimited Edition on again. Or ELOY’s Silent Cries and Mighty Echoes — that album is a goddamned anthem for our band, like daily vitamins, it’s so important, haha — you think we sit around listening to SLEEP or MASTODON(?!). Not that there’s anything wrong with those groups, but we dig way back for magical sounds to blow OUR minds!

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Kaoru Abe

“Sound that stops the capacity for judgment. Sound that never decays. Sound that breaks free from every possibe image. Sound that comes from both death and birth. Sound that dies. The sound around me. Sound like the symptoms of eternal cold turkey. Sound that resists private ownership. Sound that goes insane. Sound that spills over from the cosmos. The sound of sound.”
–Kaoru Abe, on his musical concerns

“I want to become faster than anyone. Faster than cold, than man alone, than the Earth, than Andromeda. Where, where is the crime?”
–Kaoru Abe

From  Destination Out:

When Abe started playing weekly gigs during 1970 in the notoriou red light Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Word spread fast about the young marvel. “The speedfreak acceleration and heedless frenzy of his playing rapidly gained him rabid fans,” Alan Cummings notes in his indispensable article about the fertile Shinjuku free jazz scene of the early 70s (The Wire #261, Nov. 2005). Cummings also details how many of his peers were quickly turned off by their collaborations with Abe, as much by his bruising stamina and ferocious sound as by his confrontational posturing.

So it’s hardly surprising many of Abe’s recordings are solo recitals. The best ones stem from early in his brief career – between 1970 and 1973 – before pills and booze and the tragic cliche of the self-destructive jazz lifestyle dulled his incendiary musical blitz. He died of a ruptured stomach in 1978.

Cummings calls Abe’s playing an “urgent, lonely journey to the end of consciousness,” and you can hear some of that existential quest in this track from a 1972 performance. Abe has two speeds here: fast and faster. Favoring long lines, he explores the full range of the instrument without overblowing. He’s not “building” anything as much as dragging everything in the room out the door and down the street.

What’s interesting is that after all these years it’s easier to hear the jagged beauty and detonated lyricism in his playing than the sheets of sonic mayhem. It’s not until the 7:00 minute mark that he really cracks off some skull-scraping shrieks and wails. It’s the one moment where he hurtles past Albert Ayler into some new realm of pure ecstatic noise. And even this feels less like a shock tactic than a natural crescendo. It’s a manifestation of the convulsive beauty courted by the surrealists.

Good Brother by Peter Markus

Designed by Derek White

To say that I am a writer

Interview of writer Norman Lock at The Collagist:

1. Can you talk about the inspiration for Shadowplay? What was on your mind while you were writing this novel?

Life apart from the page has become difficult – this, I know to be the result of self-consciousness, which in my case is a flinching from the assault of consciousness on a sensibility insufficiently armed against its painful disclosures.  I’m sure this is true for many other sensitive people; I’m just one who has happened to make self-consciousness a subject of fiction.  I’ve written stories in which I imagine myself – a writer of stories – entering the text itself after having transliterated myself deliberately into words or some other descriptive, symbolic system such as mathematics.  It is a suicide neither more nor less deserving of censure than any other flight from reality.  In Shadowplay, the shadow master Guntur becomes the words with which he improvises his rescue from the afterlife – from death – of a young woman he adores, a woman who exists for him as a story exists: powerfully, vividly, and illusorily.  To possess her, he must interpolate her story into his own; he knows of no other way than by means of storytelling.  His enjoyment of her is necessarily doomed because it has no corporeal dimension: he can enter her only as storytellers do the heart of their characters.  Intimacy for Guntur is a play of shadows – a game for the mind – voyeurism and fetishism taken to their extremes, though he would not have thought of it in twentieth-century terms – is not entirely aware of his motivation.  It is for the novel’s narrator – an eighteenth-century Dutchman – to comprehend the significance of Guntur’s paradox, which is also that of Pygmalion: the artist creator who, by virtue of his artistry, gives to his creation so strong a semblance of life that he must inevitably fall in love with it.  Unlike the Greek myth however, Guntur’s love is not returned – is shown to be transgressive and is therefore punished.  A punishment given him for his arrogance and also for his having cut himself off from life.

While Candra lived, Guntur spoke to her only through the white, linen screen of his art – the translucent medium on which he projects, using the light of an oil lamp, the shadows of his hand-held puppets.  The artist’s estrangement, here, is seen as a necessary condition of his art.  Guntur sits among the throng of his characters – each flat leather puppet carved in the likeness of a Hindu god, demon, prince, or princess projected onto the dalang’s side of the story-screen, illuminated by the transfiguring light of storytelling.  On their side of the screen, the audience sees only shadows – sees the artist not at all.  Is this not the very essence of art and reason for the artist’s sadness?

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The Box

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - poses

Yan Nascimbene

The Naked Bosom

Calvino on Che

From The Words That Fail:

Whatever I have tried to write to express my admiration for Ernesto Che Guevara for how he lived and how he died, it all seemed out of tone. I feel his smile that beams back at me, full of irony and commiseration. Here I am, sitting in my studio, amongst my books, in the feint peace and prosperity of Europe, dedicating a brief interval of my work to writing, without any risk, about a man who has willingly assumed all the risks, who hasn't accepted the fiction of a temporary peace, a man who asked of himself and of others the maximum spirit of sacrifice, convinced as he was, that every sacrifice spared today would be paid for tomorrow with an even greater sum of sacrifices.

Guevara recalls for us the absolute gravity of everything that regarded the revolution and the future of the world, a radically critical view of every act whose purpose was to put in place our consciences. In that sense he will stay at the center of our discussion and our thoughts, as much alive yesterday, as today when dead.

It is a presence that doesn't ask of us any superficial consensus nor formal tribute; that would be equivalent to misunderstanding, minimizing the extreme rigor of his lesson. The "line of the Che" demands much of men, it demands much whether as a method of struggle or as a perspective of the society that was to be born out of this struggle. In front of so much coherence and courage in carrying to the ultimate consequences an idea and a life, let us ourselves be modest and sincere, conscious of what the "line of the Che" means--a radical transformation not only of society but above all that of "human nature", beginning with ourselves--and aware of what separates us from putting it into practice.

The discussion of Guevara with all those who approached him, the long discussion of his brief life (discussion-action, discussion without ever abandoning the rifle), will not be interrupted by his death, it will continue to flow. Even for an occasional and unknown interlocutor (that could have been me, in a group of invitees, an afternoon of 1964, at his Ministry of Industry office) meeting him couldn't remain a marginal episode. The discussions that count, are those that continue albeit silently in thought.

In my mind, the discussion with Che has continued for all these years, and the more time passed, the more he has been right.

Even today, dying while putting in motion a never ending struggle, he continues, always, to be right.

Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí Foto: Anna Riwkin. Image rights of Salvador Dalí reserved. Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres, 2009

Dancing with Your Funky Children

Vallejo Nocturno 2009 - in Philly

You can count them on one hand, those times when you become one with your children and savor the life as another child. For me it occurred last weekend at a good relative's wedding. Always a knowledgeable music nephew-the plan was to dance, dance, dance. My twenty-something children high on hard work and a mixture of latin and dance anthems got us pumped to dance four hours of our lives away. A more spiritual vortex I couldn't have experienced. My children, my god.

from Daily Dose of Imagery Blog

Toronto's flatiron building on Front and Church

Joint Base Balad

From NYRB blog, Charles Simic writes:

Back in September, I read an article in The New York Times about an American base in Iraq that I haven’t been able to get out of my mind. It describes a U.S. military installation in the Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad that houses 28,000 American troops and has a busy airport, two power plants, two sewage plants, and two water treatment plants that can purify 1.9 million gallons of water a day for showers, swimming pools and golf courses, and eighty to hundred buses any given moment crisscrossing the area on fifteen bus routes.

Joint Base Balad, as the place is called, is surrounded by towns and villages that lack working electricity, proper sanitation, and transportation. The Iraqis who live in them are not permitted to enter the base for security reasons, except in one designated area enclosed by barbed wire and blast walls, where they are free to sell pirated movies, discounted cigarettes, and electronics.

The fast food joints, the various stores, and three massage parlors are staffed by workers brought over from Uganda, Philippines, Bangladesh, India, and Kyrgyzstan, who are employed by private American security agencies. They live off base and are escorted to and back from work under guard. These neo-colonial, ethnically segregated little cities rose up all over Iraq while we supposedly sought to “win hearts and minds” of the local population. Their folly and their huge expense go unquestioned like so many other things about these wars; now we are building similar military cities in southern Afghanistan to house the thousands of new troops being sent there.

I know a bit about army bases having been stationed at one in Germany, and then in in Eastern France, almost fifty years ago. Except for the PX, with its inexpensive cigarettes and other American goodies which the locals craved, our living conditions were pretty modest. The Germans and the French, who worked on these bases, both as manual and office workers, could see for themselves how broke we usually were. Despite our open policy, the population in surrounding communities was not overly friendly. They at best tolerated us, because even former allies don’t like to see armed foreign soldiers on their soil.

from 35 to go

Cherry Roasted from 35 to go