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Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Mark Lentczner, aka Electric Kitchen, performs this deep drone piece for the 50th anniversary of the Serge synthesizer instrument line developed by Serge Tcherepnin. Lentczner is one of numerous participants on a recent series of albums collecting Serge-centric works.
▰ The great film-score composer Hildur Guðnadóttir took part in the “What’s in My Bag?” video series from Amoeba Records. In it she talks animatedly about Gavin Bryars, Mortan Feldman, Ellen Fullman, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and other favorites. She’s currently working on Joker: Folie à Deux, the sequel to the move that won her an Oscar. (Thanks, Paul Ashby, for pointing this video out.)
Cindy Williams, best known for her role as the latter half of the comedy duo who comprised Laverne and Shirley (1976-1983), died last week at age 75. For those especially attentive to the way sound is employed by filmmakers, she is perhaps more specifically niche-famous as half of a quite different couple, the one at the center of the intrigue that was Francis Ford Coppola’s classic 1974 film The Conversation (the other half is the gentleman wearing a tie in this still — not the mime). To watch The Conversation is to hear their conversation over and over, each time the phrasing gaining new meaning, thanks in large part to the ingenuity of sound designer Walter Murch, who worked right around the same time with Williams on George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973).
It was in American Graffiti that Murch put what he called “worldizing” into effect. This meant that the sound of, say, a car radio was heard as if it were right there in the car seen on-screen, lending new realism to the storytelling, bringing the viewer ever more into the sensorium of the characters. In The Conversation, the potential of sound as a narrative tool emerged fully formed, at the behest of the character Harry Caul, played by Gene Hackman. To watch The Conversation is to hear the same sentence over and over — a sentence spoken to Williams (who infused the role, as Ann, with an essential tenderness), and scrutinized to distraction by an obsessed Caul: “He’d kill us if he got the chance.”
That the cello at the start of “Sit on the Floor and Wait for Storms” might be mistaken for processed voice says something about musician Lia Kohl’s modus operandi. “Sit on the Floor and Wait for Storms” is the first track to be made available from Kohl’s forthcoming album, The Ceiling Reposes, due out in late March. The music initially layers sawed strings and buzzing kazoo, the various waves like threads in a thick fabric that’s being woven in real time, right before the listener’s ears. When a voice arrives, a snippet of a weather report, our senses have been primed: the man’s tone fits in with the soft coarseness of what’s come before. The storm does appear, in that the music gets more and more erratic, the processed sounds fragmenting and frazzling, while also congealing — all until the man’s voice is lost in the enveloping, consuming mix — perhaps disappearing entirely. Perhaps becoming one with the other sound sources.
I’m getting back in the habit of posting brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ The opening of the new Earth album, Even Hell Has Its Heroes, the soundtrack to an upcoming documentary (directed by Clyde Petersen) about the band, is the perfect way to celebrate Droneuary. And then it evolves into something revelatory, as only an Earth performance can. It’s just Dylan Carlson, guitar, and Adrienne Davies, drums, though several other musicians do appear later on the album, including Mell Dettmer on Moog (what Moog specifically I’m not sure). Even by Earth’s subharmonic standards, this is an often rewardingly subdued collection. (Oh, and the striking cover art, featuring Carlson’s profile, is by Richey Beckett.)
▰ This cover of “I Put a Spell on You” by Alice Smith is an incredible rendition (veering-on-minimalist reduction when it starts) of the Screamin’ Jay Hawkins song, heard here as channeling the accusatory syllabic insistence of Nina Simone’s classic recording (Smith herself recorded it previously for the various artists compilation Nina Revisited… A Tribute to Nina Simone, back in 2015, and it’s clear that subsequent years of consideration have given her insights into every nook and cranny of the composition). It’s part of the Gagosian gallery’s ongoing video series (which included a Bill Laswell / John Zorn team-up I mentioned here last week). Smith is supported on piano by Dennis Hamm, who manages to stay out of her way without being utterly erased by the sheer power of her voice. It’s quite something.
▰ How Will I Know This Will Make a Memory, the latest from Cinchel, is gorgeous both sonically and conceptually. The title/opening track is a live concert recording from back in the middle of last year: layers of processed guitar achieving a cloudy, looping ambient quality that extends for three quarters of an hour. Two other tracks rework that material into even denser, at times downright orchestral, splendor. And the final track is a test run that precedes everything we’ve heard thus far: it’s Cinchel’s recording of his rehearsal for the concert performance that constitutes the first track.
▰ The Golden Gate Bridge has gained unintended renown in recent years because of how recent re-engineering has led to it emitting singing-like tones when the wind picks up. I live less than three miles from the bridge, as the (numerous and territorial local) corvids fly, and I can often hear it from my backyard. This tweet from during the recent storms captures that drone from inside a car as it crosses the bridge — and for bonus cinematic flair, it features an overturned tractor trailer. The footage is like a clip from a Michael Mann or Nicolas Winding Refn film, score and all.
It’s the start of a new year, and I want to try to get back in the habit of posting quick mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:
▰ Hildur Guðnadóttir already had committed some of the most remarkable film music of the year for Tár, Todd Field’s feature starring Cate Blanchett, and she’s followed it up with Women Talking (Deutsche Grammophon) Both scores veer dramatically from her often drone-based prior work (Chernobyl, Joker, Sicario: Day of the Soldado). Women Talking, in contrast, features a lot of staccato string work.
▰ If I had done a top favorites of 2022, guitarist Bill Frisell’s Four, his third album for the jazz label Blue Note, would have been on the list for sure. It teams him with Johnathan Blake on drums, Gerald Clayton on piano, and Greg Tardy on horns (saxophone, clarinet, bass clarinet). The key word is “team,” as this is a jazz album with essentially no solos; it’s all about constant interplay.
▰ Beth Chesser and Pier Giorgio Storti collaborate as Rathrobin. Their album Ear to the Ground combines strings, voice, and unidentifiable textures, including field recordings, into a sometimes aggressive but often ruminative sonic spaces. It came out almost a year ago, at the end of January 2022, but I’ve only recently started listening to it.
▰ Rplktr (aka Łukasz Langa) recorded half an hour using the Awake script, which comes as part of the Monome Norns musical instrument. It’s sparkling and lightly percussive. Just listen as the patterning unfolds.
▰ Embedding here won’t do it justice, so if you do use Instagram, check out Jorge Colombo’s (instagram.com/jorgecolombo) — specifically the short films he posts. The “NYC2” batch, for example, are black and white snippets, shot in cinematic horizontal mode — field recordings that evidence the keen eye and ear I’ve admired for decades.
