It was a nice public garden which I assume comes into being like every other public garden: an old couple owned a large company before labor laws and subsequently a mansion, and it was left to their kid that couldn’t or wouldn’t pay taxes on it and created a public garden out of it. It was very pretty.
They delivered the Tascam 488 that I left in their basement with a cassette I hadn’t heard since 2011
Listening:
Julia Holter
Have You in My Wilderness album - I think I listened to this album on average once a day this month. I got really into Aviary, her new album, after I saw Jessica Moss open for her. She has an ability to communicate what she wants to say with tone and pitch of voice extremely accurately.
Re: Betsy on the Roof: “’Betsy' is one of my favorites, because it is the one to which I've imposed the least clear narrative. To me, it's so much more about the feeling – desperation – than any kind of story at all,” says Holter. “There's very little imagery or character development, it's just about a deep and desperate search for something. It doesn't matter what it is.” That comes thru.
Nice version of Lucette Stranded on the Roof live:
Very slowly exploring old Fall releases I never heard. I started listening to The Real New Fall LP and I didn’t realize Sparta F.C. was on it. There’s always a Peel version that is at least as good as the album:
Shows:
Kobol Show : Little War, Somarai, Johnny Football Hero, Lost Boys Lottery: https://www.facebook.com/events/270803067155717/
Sen Morimoto
Aldous Harding
NOT And the Kids, because my ID expired and I was turned away at the door.
Read:
Part one of ‘The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming’ by David Wallace-Wells
Olivier Messiaen: Music and Color: Conversations with Claude Samuel
I heard Louange à l'Éternité de Jésus, Basilique Saint-Denis:
and read a bit about Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_limited_transposition so I picked this up. While reading I was more interested in his color synesthesia and how that correlates to the modes of transposition, and then moreso in how he uses bird songs in reference to composition. From another Messiaen biography:
And now I’d like to talk about the musical forms in which I use birdsongs. There are two different forms, one deceitful and one truthful. The deceitful one – I insist on the word ‘‘deceit’’ – employs the bird-calls as raw material after the manner of composers of electronic music, who use bird-sounds as a source which they constantly electronically alter so much that they almost forget the starting point of the process – so much for the first method. [. . .] I’ll now speak about the second method, which seems to me to be better, I think, also more original. [. . .] [It] consists quite simply of conforming to reality, not only to the bird-calls, but also to everything surrounding them: landscapes, fragrances, colours and, above all, the passing of the hours during the day and night’.
I spend, I guess, all day thinking about how to bake those things into a song- taking the pitches that a bird is singing, or replicating the repetition the bird uses, or replicating the environment (other birds, the sunrise, etc.), or the reverb of the environment. Messiaen would visit a place and transcribe a bird’s singing, and note other birds or aspects of the environment. Then he’d come back the next day and transcribe something from the environment, and so on. I’ve been trying to use that somehow, visiting either physical or mental (or emotional, I guess) spaces and trying to note everything that’s happening, and transcribing an element of it and coming back.