Do Your Ears Like Magic?

Test your ears to see if they're still receptive to magic.
Go see some electro-acoustic musical performances.


Just got this news from Josh Levi and Apop Records:

TUESDAY, DECEMBER 23rd:

BHOB RAINEY (of NMPERIGN)

at: LEMP NEIGHBORHOOD ARTS CENTER
3301 Lemp Avenue (at Utah)
St. Louis, MO 63118
8PM // $5 // All Ages

http://bhobrainey.blogspot.com/

I snatched this description from the interwebs:

"Rainey’s saxophone playing eschews standard techniques; in fact, it rarely involves what have become common extended techniques. Yet, his sounds have a peculiar directness, integrated into a music that is at once meditative and disquieting. The saxophone is forgotten as one becomes immersed in pure tones, metallic chords, palpable breath, and always that primal silence, both mesmerizing and volatile. Rainey’s music, although entirely acoustic, is in close kinship with electronic music, as evidenced in his collaborations with Gunter Mueller, Lionel Marchetti, Kevin Drumm, Ralf Wehowsky, Jerome Noetinger, and Jason Lescalleet, to name a few. With trumpeter Greg Kelley, he is the cofounder of the unlikely improv supergroup, nmperign, and is also the founder and director of the premier electroacoustic ensemble, the BSC."

If you find that your are receptive to this type of experience, I invite you to listen to KDHX on Christmas Eve because I'll be hosting Beep Beep, Boop Boop for Kate from 10 p.m. to Midnight.
I'm going to take some liberties, however, in swaying from the weekly gist of her dancy electronic and hip-hop offerings. For the last two hours before your beloved Christmas, I'll be spinning a sort of revisitation of The No Show, blending improvisational and experimental visitations of the holiday season with some remixes and two incredible spoken word pieces. Filling out the show will be plenty of local offerings from the likes of my friends from the late-great Fred's Variety Group, Grandpa's Ghost, The Bert Dax Cavalcade of Stars and Echolocation Recordings. I hosted The No Show for several years and always attempted to produce and deliver holiday offerings ranging from the sublime to the irreverent to the ridiculous and humorous. This will be more of the same. I'm like a lot of you: I quickly tire of obviousness.
The interminable barrage of holiday music delivers the faulty mythology of Christmas as a magical time of giving and happiness. There is an entire essay waiting to erect itself from the groin of that last statement but not quite now. I'll finish programming the show and let it do the talking for me.

Not only will that program be on the radio airwaves, but it will be streaming live from the KDHX website and will be listenable there as an archive for two weeks following the show, a feature true of all the programming on 88.1 FM.

We shall survive!

...and when we do, there is more magic in January:

Josh and Apop have more in store:

SATURDAY, JANUARY 17th:

TATSUYA NAKATANI
A special daytime workshop will take place followed by an evening concert featuring a collaboration including local performers

at: LEMP NEIGHBORHOOD ARTS CENTER
3301 Lemp Avenue
St. Louis, MO 63118
8PM // $5 // All Ages

I met Tatsuya the last time I was in Detroit at the late-great Bohemian National Home.

He is an incredibly gifted percussionist. One of many I've seeen at the BoHouse. What sets Tatsuya apart in my mind are two moments. The first moment came after I'd seen him perform twice. It was later on Saturday night after a long day of many different performances and sessions and the place was hopping to the sounds of an ensemble on the big stage upstairs. I was weary of walking up and down steps and standing, so I found a place on the floor against a wall at the far end of the auditorium from the stage and sat down to listen and enjoy a beer. After the ensemble had wowed the crowd, I introduced myself and told him how much I had enjoyed his playing. A couple other folks had gathered the pow-wow by now and various discussions opened up about Tatsuya's past as a sushi chef in Japan and his present life in NYC. We, of course, talked about the wonders of being at the BoHouse and seeing Detroit and Corktown with such incredible folks as Joel Peterson and Rebecca Mazzei (the couple who heads up the group that used to run the BoHouse). I mentioned that I found the festival through my friend Thollem McDonas and that Thollem had found me due to the fact that I used to host The No Show and then we spoke of his experience playing at the Lemp. It was the normal chit-chat between strangers and the language barrier was bridged entirely by his English, of course.

As we got through the first round of back-and-forths (and I'm not much of a talker in such settings, especially in the shadow of musical luminaries), I returned to the topic of his former life as a sushi chef. I probably mentioned that I'd worked in Japanese restaurants, but I for sure asked him what that life was like and if he still liked to indulge like most restaurant workers I know. So, he told us a story about various daliances in the night with sake'...and remarkably we didn't end up doing a shot later. I don't remember how he managed to escape.

The seond moment came at the end of a small workshop session early on the Saturday during last summer's Jazz and Improvised Music Festival at the BoHouse. Tatsuya had discussed various philosophies of the art of sound and the importance of minimalistic percussion instruments to the drummer who is travelling by bus or bicycle. I don't remember the rest of his talk exactly, not because it wasn't fascinating, but because I failed to document any of this earlier, but he went on to lead an impromptu improvisation session with a circle of those assembled. Some of them were master musicians and some of them had much less experience. I enjoyed myself as they played in that auditorium and I sat up near a window that was admitting a breeze to bath the whole experience in forgiveness for certain Friday night over-indulgences. There were various percussion implements and others of the string variety. Tatsuya employs a wide variety of "instruments" in his percussion including traditional drums, gongs, “singing bowls” ,common-place objects and more. He was closing out the collaboration, bowing a cymbal as he had some of the singing bowls and as the sound dissipated and completely vanished, there was a moment of silence. It lasted perhaps less-than-a second because all peace was ripped and blasted by the sound of a speeding motorcycle (a crotch-rocket, to be exact) screaming down the street outside.

To my mind, it was perfect!

What Was I Thinking?

I've spent the last 24 hours in my apartment. That is mostly my choice. I thought I might take a walk today at some point, but there is enough to keep me occupied right here if I don't get too restless or hungry and I've interrupted several activities preparing and drinking or eating tea, bread, carrots and various other tenants in my refrigerator in an effort to stay clean for an early-morning walk and late-morning massage. I spent most of the day resting and patching up the damage of cancellations in the entertainment schedule that I curate. There is always plenty of "catching up" to do online and if the phone rings a couple of times, I don't even want to go out, so I'll start digging a little deeper for reasons to stay home, something I don't get to do but (maybe) one-day-a-week.
A couple hours ago, though, I started rooting through a block of cardboard files that sit on the floor in the middle room where I don't spend much time. I found plenty to weed out. I found some amusing notebooks from the time when I was hosting The No Show and organizing events outside of my present confines. I found part of a collage that I will immediately turn into something more substantial as soon as I get back to cutting and pasting some collages from the piles of detritus...and that needs to happen soon, so I can send out some cards to the physical world.
Several minutes into the excavation, I found one page in a notebook that has me somewhat confounded and I'm going to type it up here, because I have no recollection of writing the words and don't remember why I wrote them either.
I am guessing that it was to be some mocking middle-of-the night diatribe to be performed on that late-night radio show of mine, but I honestly don't know. Perhaps I was riffing and scribbling in the hopes of getting on to something other.
At any rate, this is how it goes:
"Rock n' Roll consists inherently of a poopy nature as it is the excrement of rage that, when you trace its origins, reveals itself to be an embryonic and chaotic crapstream which is suckling at the poisonous tit of fear--the commercialism and hurried mess that is the Western Bowl.
The Western Bowl is a swirling cesspool of regurgitated acid which poisons everything in digestive fluids and man-made chemicals of the modern and post-modern age and carts it all around with the fuel of guilt and repression.
The tit of fear---an air-brushed spigot of enticing death with piglets, puppies, pedophiles and shoppers---yes, you the dumbstruck consumer---lapping at the alabaster secretions of nothingness held in its vacuous white noise."

Like I said, I have no idea, so don't ask me. I recognize "tit of fear" to be a fragment of something I read once about television viewers "suckling at the glass tit of fear" (Jerry Mander's FOUR ARGUMENTS FOR THE ELIMINATION OF TELEVISION?), or something to that effect...and The Western Bowl sounds like something Burroughs would write, but all-in-all it reads like something you might hear on a religious station through the static of an AM signal.
In other words, it sounds like something I've heard a lot of throughout years of insomnia.



After having sat in this chair for the better part of seven hours today, I think I'll go to bed and see what's happening on the airwaves. Kate is almost finished with a fine episode of Beep Beep, Boop Boop and I'm ready to read a book, play with the static and listen to various oddities before I doze off.

If you can't sleep watch this:
"God's Angry Man is a 1980 documentary film about Gene Scott, directed by Werner Herzog. The film was produced for television.

The film consists of footage of Scott on the set of his television program Festival of Faith and interviews with Scott and Scott's parents conducted by Herzog. The footage from Scott's television program focuses almost exclusively on his fundraising efforts and an elaborate rant against the FCC. Scott at one point refuses to speak until his viewers pledge an additional $600. After a minute's silence, he yells angrily at the camera until a production assistant informs him that they had already received $700. Scott represents the FCC on his show by a cymbal-banging monkey toy."