What’s new?

 

au revoir simone @qro

How lucky can one get? New things appear on the path as sound archaeology mixes and messes with varied eruptions so let’s hang out here and check what’s turned up.

The oracular backwards percussion that inhabits Strawberry Fields Forever was a bare inkling of what lay ahead for a curious boy on the threshold of becoming a teenager.

 

David Lynch later shared some good news in a dream sequence.

Twenty-five years after it reappeared with something new added as a plethora of a tasty language also summoned forth Brooklyn’s Au Revoir Simone:

Their joy in using analog synthesizers syncs into new graphic representations of David Borden’s The Continuing Story of Counterpoint.

David Borden with decoy and early Moogs.

Six parts that thrive with a vocal line that has its section busily bombinating within a modular tail chasing that clairvoyantly implies what may follow as inevitable or a drop down into a sudden revelation, accumulating a psychic interplay as these pieces proceed in time.

Trumpets with electronics have gone further. Grasshopper, from Brooklyn, brings in the right kind of modal terror:

Nate Wooley began mixing his brass with electronics much earlier and has a new large scale work in The Complete Syllables Music, of which this is an excerpt:

Overstimulation continues with Arbiter projects soon to appear that will divine pagan, wanna-be Westerner, and occult fairy tale in the origins of Russian music, the sage pianist Mieczylaw Horszowski will be heard

fathoming two bottomless Beethoven works that resonate in a foundation given to him by his teacher, whose own master had been Beethoven’s assistant, and two linked cellists Tibor de Machula with his teacher Felix Salmond astonish by revealing what has been hidden inside their otherwise well-known instrument,

 

and Veena Dhanammal, whose grandson T. Viswanathan (skip ahead to 2:38 for his performance)

was preparing liner notes but suddenly died three days after we began to reawaken her.

Dhanammal was a blind veena master who was recorded in the 1930s and was grandmother of the dancer Balasaraswathi:

New books appear and one came quite close. Alex Shoumatoff stopped in on the last day of his 69th year with more good news (in front of Beatrice Muzi’s recent sculpture):

An indefatigable explorer and environmental activist, Shoumatoff’s latest book has arrived to shake up any and every user of the insidious palm oil that lurks where you least suspect it and must lead to saving the deforestation of the planet’s lungs:

 

Busy time with nature and music on everyone’s mind. Let’s not allow culture and our Earth to spiral into a Totentanz.

 

 

Allan Evans ©2017

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