Blectum, Willits @ Om Brink Series in S.F.

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On Wednesday, May 25, Blevin Blectum and Christopher Willits, two of San Francisco’s most charismatic and accomplished electronic-music performers, shared a double bill in a small back room at a bar in the city’s Tenderloin district. Blectum, whose laptop often dives headlong into cacophony, fiddled with numerous samples that would be suitable to a nightclub, though she didn’t chew on any given soundbite for longer than a few seconds. Willits, an electric guitarist who filters his playing through custom software, invited a guest vocalist on stage for two songs, which gave them the feel of a breathy trip-hop affair, and a drummer for his fifth and final piece, supplying a solid back beat he often intentionally avoids.

That the two co-headliners each played particularly accessible sets was welcome, if a bit of a surprise, given the sponsor if not the locale, the Hemlock Tavern. The show was part of a new monthly series called Brink, organized by Other Minds, which has held an annual Bay Area festival of outward-bound composition since 1993. Brink is planned to bridge the year-long gap between Other Minds fests, and also perhaps as an outreach program to a broader (feel free to read that as younger) audience.

The night began with a birthday sing-a-long for Other Minds board member Jim Newman (producer of Sun Ra’s Space Is the Place). Blectum, looking like she’d stepped out of a Vermeer painting, took the stage to play a solid half hour of seamless maneuvers between snippets of drum patterns, with occasional lapses into what felt like silence but was, in fact, a thick muffle of noise. She repeatedly suckered you into thinking that the moment’s given rhythm would be around a while, and then just as you got comfortable — heck, just when you got comfortable with the possibility of getting comfortable — she shot off in another direction. This didn’t keep folks from trying to bob their heads along, though it frustrated those it didn’t delight. If you think about Charles Ives’ relationship with John Philip Sousa, you have some sense of what Blectum does with the raw materials of drum’n’bass and other dance music. Toward the end of her piece, what sounded like birdsong entered the mix, and she tinkered with the natural melodies until they came to resemble pure oscillating waves.

Willits divided his set into five pieces, between about four and twelve minutes each. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the sort of wolf’s head you’d see on a black-light painting, he fingered figures on his guitar and then worked his laptop magic, sometimes opting for his characteristic abstract cascades of notes, and generally constructing song-like arcs of tension and release. One of the many pleasures in seeing Willits live is the disconnect between his motion on stage and the groove of the music that gets heard; he bobs and weaves, wearing his headphones in the style of a DJ (over one ear) to allow him to hear both his mid-process sound, and the post-processed sound that the audience experiences. For two of his shortest pieces that evening, the second and third, he invited singer Latrice Barnett to join him, and though her voice, a subtle haze of soul, provided a soft backdrop, it wasn’t amplified properly to have much presence. For the final piece, he called up a drummer (Gabriel Coan, of the band Continental), who suggested a strict, if swinging, framework.

Here’s hoping that Other Minds will post the recordings at archive.org, alongside the free downloads from its many festivals. More info on the various organizations and participants at the following addresses: Blevin Blectum (blevin.lsr1.com), Christopher Willits (christopherwillits.com), Other Minds (otherminds.org), Hemlock Tavern (hemlocktavern.com), Latrice Barnett (latricebarnett.com), Continental (thecontinentalwebsite.com).

Tangents (Robotspeak, Roc-a-Fella, Grateful)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Quick Links: (1) Robotspeak, the next-generation computer-music store on Haight near Fillmore in San Francisco (and which carries Chachi Jones‘ bent Speak & Spells) has launched its own print magazine: robotspeakmagazine.com. How will it distinguish itself? Says the website, “Our business plan involves sucking less and costing nothing.” … (2) Among the planning grants awarded by Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative this year, “Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia ($20,000) for the development of Sounding Site: Revisiting Historic Sites through Sound and Light Installation, in which sonic installations will be placed in under-known historic sites throughout the region” (link). … (3) Leonardo Music Journal, edited by Nicolas Collins, has put out a call for papers “on the expanded role of sound in art, science, business and everyday life” (link). … (4 – 8) Five via boingboing.net: how humpback whales play variations on each other’s songs (link); the sound of “solar wind termination shock” recorded as NASA’s Voyager 1 prepares to leave our solar system (link); two websites of communities that remix video-game music (vgmix.com, ocremix.org); a scientific study on listening to music as a sedative during surgery, “Music and Ambient Operating Room Noise in Patients Undergoing Spinal Anesthesia” (link) … (9) Among those awarded in this year’s Prix Ars Electronica international competition for “cyberarts”: Maryanne Amache, for TEO!, a sonic sculpture, conceived as a sound installation for the Esplanade des Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City; John Oswald, for a CD collection spanning his work from 1969 through 1996; and Finish duo Pan Sonic for their Kesto album. Among the honorable mentions in “digital musics”: Haco, Mike Cooper, Nicholas Bussmann and Martin Brandlmayr, skoltz_kolgen, Paul DeMarinis, Gilles Gobeil, Louis-Philippe Demers, Scott Arford, Jens Brand, Kateryna Zavoloka (Nexsound), Yoshimitsu Ichiraku and artificiel (Alexandre Burton, Julien Roy and Jimmy Lakatos). More info at aec.at. … (10) There are three volumes of 12″s derived from the Motown Remixed album, labeled “hiphop,” “chill” and “club.” The “hiphop” one includes a 2:20 track of “bonus beats” from Z-Trip‘s version of the Jackson 5‘s “I Want You Back” (motownremixed.com).

… New Releases: Among new releases due out this week: (1) Hazardous Materials (Consumers Research and Development) features tracks and mixes by Miles Tilmann, Atom Heart, Made, Cepia, Mr. Projectile, Single Minded Pros, Tstewart, Innerstance Beatbox and others (consumerslabel.net). … (2) Alio Die and Jack or Jive‘s Mei-Jyu (Projekt) is a collaboration between Italian producer Stefano Musso, aka Alio Die, and Japanese pair Chako and Makoto Hattori, aka Jack or Jive (projekt.com). … More new-release info at brainwashed.com/releases. … Commute Blues: On the morning bus ride, an increasingly common sight is impatient iPod Shuffle users pumping their gum-package-size MP3 players, thus resembling hospital patients self-administering morphine.

… Heavy Rotation: (1) Current hip-hop production macher Kanye West‘s “Breathe In Breathe Out (Instrumental)” (Roc-a-Fella) … (2) Amon Tobin‘s cinematic video-game score, Chaos Theory Splinter Cell 3 Soundtrack (Ninja Tune) … (3) AFRA‘s digitally enhanced human beatbox EP, Digital Breath (W+K Tokyo Lab) … (4) Various artists’s The Relay Project, a “magazine that you listen to” (therelayproject.com). … (5) Michael Nyman‘s pointilist three-piano Manhatta (Downstream entry on May 9, 2005).

… Quote of the Week: “What was new, of course, was electricity: Amplification of instruments and voices enabled nuances that once would have been lost in the noise floor to be clearly heard and developed further in a seemingly infinite progression.” That’s Phil Lesh writing in a purposefully comma-free stream in his new autobiography, Searching for the Sound (Little, Brown), of the night that changed his life, watching the Warlocks play in 1965; soon after he would join the group, which would become the Grateful Dead. Lots of interesting stuff early on in this book, notably on his work and studies with composer Luciano Berio at Mills College, where he pursued a course in composition, and his participation, with classmate Steve Reich, on musical direction for a local anarchist theater group.

DJ Krush, In Situ

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Belatedly, a quick mention of the DJ Krush show a month back in San Francisco. It was Japanese turntablist Krush’s second time through town (at the same venue, no less) in just over half a year, but those two shows couldn’t have been more different. On September 29, 2004, at Club Mezzanine, just south of Market Street, he’d brought with him performers who’d graced his most recent album, Jaku, doing a brief set each with a pianist, saxophonist, shakuhachi player and rapper. He’d mentioned in interviews in the past that his shows in Japan were much more involved than his U.S. shows, which tended to be DJ sets. The September performance finally brought that Japan format to the U.S., but the end result seemed a bit tentative; perhaps a nearby hall like Yoshi’s or Great American would have better served the music than did the cavernous Mezzanine. There were great moments, especially when saxophonist Akira Sakata chanted with deep concentration at the opening of their duet, but given the silences between each pairing and the low volume level, it was lacking.

On April 29, 2005, on his way to the Coachella Festival in Southern California, Krush returned to San Francisco for a solo gig, with the spotlight entirely on him, and the volume raised to earplugs-only extremes. He was directly preceded on stage by Relm (Mike Wong), a nimble DJ with the set list of a bar mitzvah (Jay-Z, the Peanuts theme, Michael Jackson) and an interest in mixing video live. Relm concluded his appearance with a light reworking of John Lennon’s “Imagine,” accompanied by a video in which he flashed the lyrics on cue cards, a la Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” Then Krush, a slight man in a wide-brim hat, appeared, continuing the theme by operating heavily on a jazz-fusion cover of Lennon’s “Imagine.” The contrast emphasized the two men’s differing concerns. Relm takes familiar music, often remixed to begin with, and sews it into a continuous, party-oriented routine. Krush on the other hand plays largely his own music, and when he’s playing someone else’s, such as the Lennon cover, he cuts and filters it until he’s taken full possession of it. He played for an hour, working in music from Jaku and focusing almost entirely on the album’s vocal-less material. Only in his encore did he pull out the rap songs, like “Nosferatu” (featuring Mr. Lif). Working almost entirely from one turntable and a mixer, he emphasized the lush, underlying rhythms of his music. The April show hit a promising balance, not as envelope-pushing as his live duets with non-electronic performers, but not as pop as his song-form material. He was very much in his element.

Now, a brief aside: I visited Japan for a week last year, in late December. It my first time, and I was on a business trip, which left no opportunity for a concert, just a little record shopping and sightseeing. I haven’t traveled without a copy of Krush’s album Kakusei since it was released, in 1998, though of course the arrival of personal MP3 players has made it possible to carry far more music with ease, so that essential record has since been supplemented with his Jaku, Strictly Turntablized and Code4109, plus some live recordings. I was listening to Krush when I had my third view of Mt. Fuji. The first two had been highly stylized photographs on advertisements for beverages whose contents and brands I didn’t recognize, but on the train from, if I remember correctly, Chiba into Tokyo, Mt. Fuji came into view for real, with the spare beats of Kakusei rumbling in my skull. (More on DJ Krush at his homepage, mmjp.or.jp/sus/krush.)

Evan Parker Remix MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Amsterdam-based musician Robert van Heumen visited San Francisco last month. He documented the trip with an overview of his stay and, all the better, nine MP3 files. On three, recorded at the Lab and at Mills College, he plays with Roddy Schrock (whose website, fundamentallysound.org, mentioned Heumen’s travelog, found here). Others feature Laetitia Sonami and Michel Waisvisz, together and solo. The highlight is a piece by Joel Ryan, in his own kind of collaboration, in that he’s mixing a recording of saxophonist Evan Parker. There are two versions, one recorded at the Lab, and one at Mills. Now, Parker’s a saxophonist who essentially mixes himself as he plays, virtually taking his instrument apart as he wrings sound of it by any means necessary. Midway through his eight-minute Lab dissection of Parker, Ryan appears to lay some of Parker’s music bare, a cycle of circular breathing in which a melody seems to peep its head out of the intense rhythmic patterning. Otherwise, there is even more in Ryan’s vision of Parker than Parker himself could accomplish on his lonesome. Snippets of sound bound against each other, echoes take loft like skittish birds, tones are warped and stretched like taffy, and harmonies develop as if in a pressure cooker. Check out RvH’s travelog and files here. (It being a small world, RvH has contributed to Aaron Ximm’s One-Minute Vacation series, the subject of several Disquiet Downstream entries, including yesterday’s; his was on Valentine’s Day of this year. Visit Ximm’s project at at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.)

Quiet American MP3s

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The latest from Aaron Ximm‘s One-Minute Vacation series, field recordings submitted by volunteer contributors from around the world: a beach in Korea on a moonlit night (May 23), a protest march from earlier this year in Boston (May 16), a pastoral scene in Greece (May 9) and some bagpipe jamming in Puget Sound. Those and more at quietamerican.org/vacation.html.