Gravity Wave

[drip]

Julia Holter?!
that's quite a surprise.

[Antoine]

fyi, the track provided by M.Pisaro for the Fukushima compilation, "The Bell-Maker, from Four Pieces for Recorded Percussion (Il faut attendre)" is dedicated to A.Tarkovsky & J.Holter.
http://the-open-space.org/site/wp-conte ... Pieces.pdf

[drip]

fyi, the track provided by M.Pisaro for the Fukushima compilation, "The Bell-Maker, from Four Pieces for Recorded Percussion (Il faut attendre)" is dedicated to A.Tarkovsky & J.Holter.
http://the-open-space.org/site/wp-conte ... Pieces.pdf

thanks a lot, antoine - i didn't know that.

[jon abbey]

yeah, I don't know the exact specifics, but they have a history together, she studied with him some and she is also on the recent Tombstones LP.

[Seth]

Here's an interview with Michael Pisaro and Julia Holter, dealing with the Tombstones project and how they came to work together:

http://issueprojectroom.org/drupal/news ... son-brogan

Just ordered the two latest Gravity Waves. Looking forward to them.

[drip]

yeah, I don't know the exact specifics, but they have a history together, she studied with him some and she is also on the recent Tombstones LP.

Michael Pisaro on vinyl, now that's a treat. the artwork looks lovely too, gonna have to get it.
it's kind of funny that the label is selling the record also as download in an edition of 500.
i also didn't know that it's possible to make FLAC in 24bit, great format.

[jon abbey]

there are supposed to be CDs of that soon too, with additional tracks, although no one seems to know for sure.

[drip]

there are supposed to be CDs of that soon too, with additional tracks, although no one seems to know for sure.

jon, after i read what you wrote above i, was wondering if michael pisaro has a preference for a particular format for his music. i personally think vinyl suits him quite well, but he seems to be so thoughtful about his compositions, that it just appeared to me, he might actually prefer the cd format.
maybe it's a silly thought, but i would be really interested in any insight in this.

[jon abbey]

he posts in this thread sometimes, he's on the road doing concerts now (Philly today and tomorrow, NYC Tuesday) but will be back home in a week or so and presumably will answer you here when he can.

I will say that a 60-70 minute piece (as a bunch of his discs are) is very hard to put onto vinyl, too long for a single LP and a bit too short for a double.

[jpeatt]

he posts in this thread sometimes, he's on the road doing concerts now (Philly today and tomorrow, NYC Tuesday) but will be back home in a week or so and presumably will answer you here when he can.

I will say that a 60-70 minute piece (as a bunch of his discs are) is very hard to put onto vinyl, too long for a single LP and a bit too short for a double.

That's actually perfect for a double LP, lengthwise.

15-17 minutes per side.

http://www.dubplates-mastering.com/faq.html#kap3_2

there is of course, the break up of continuous play, which may not be so perfect, artistically.

[jpeatt]

also, thanks for the reminder, just ordered the tombstones lp.

[mpisaro]

jon, after i read what you wrote above i, was wondering if michael pisaro has a preference for a particular format for his music. i personally think vinyl suits him quite well, but he seems to be so thoughtful about his compositions, that it just appeared to me, he might actually prefer the cd format.
maybe it's a silly thought, but i would be really interested in any insight in this.

Way back in 2009 when Jason Grier of Human Ear Music (now HEM Berlin) started talking about making a recording of the Tombstones it was clear that one of his main motivations for initiating the project was that he wanted to hear my music on vinyl. Among other things, Jason felt that the silences would have a very different character than they do on digital media. (Hard to dispute ...)

To be honest, I don't have a strong preference for one medium over another (though I'm no fan of mp3 compression of lossless files). It seems that each one, including cassette as well, has benefits and problems. But I do think the medium should be taken into account when making the recordings. Gravity Wave is very much a CD label, and the pieces are all produced and mastered with that in mind.

[mpisaro]

I hope to have all the Egger texts used on GW 008 posted in the next month or so. But for those who might be curious about what Oswald is actually saying, this is a bit of a head start. (I give the credits for both of the new CDs as well.)

http://michaelpisaro.blogspot.com/2013/ ... gw009.html

[Adrian]

Hello Michael, heard both pieces once now, and can't wait to get the actual discs (probably Tuesday). One quick remark, and I'm sure you already know this: 'Mittem in Leben...' is of course linked to the beginning of Dante's 'Divine Comedy'; Egger seems an interesting poet - I'll try and find some of his work hopefully in Dutch, as my German isn't up to much apart from enjoying the sound of it. Regards, Adrian

[mpisaro]

Adrian, thanks for your post. What's especially interesting about the Dante reference is that it occurs in a book on the relation between mathematics and poetry (i.e., Egger's Diskrete Stetigkeit). For me the reference is one of the things that connects The Middle of Life (Die ganze Zeit) to The Punishment of the Tribe by its Elders.

[mpisaro]

The first review of the two new Gravity Wave discs is up (written by Bill Meyer):

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/reviews/7546

[Uroboros]

Michael, is there a translation of Die ganze Zeit in the works by any chance? I'm intrigued by the little snippets you've translated on the GW website, I would love to be able to read the whole thing. I know you've translated one of his older books, and I think that is the only one available in English at the moment. I'm thinking of getting that (again, I've read some beautiful excerpts online), but I wonder if there's more coming up. And yes, I realise Die ganze Zeit is massive.

I've been listening to GW008 AND 009 today, I find them both extremely engaging in very different ways (for some reason, Tombstones didn't really click with me). I think the episodic structure of The Middle of Life makes it really entertaining for me - lots of contrasting things pop up at different times - the voices lost in the forest, the poetry fading in and out, the little song towards the end, the field recordings coming and going etc. - but then there's also this sense of a unifying something, as has always been the case (on previous records). It's exciting to put these things together in my mind, figuring out what they leave me with at the end of the day. The Punishment... on the other hand is so wildly different, it's ridiculous. Some truly scary shit, if I may say so. I'll probably end up putting this on my "best metal albums" list at the end of the year - I mean, I feel like I'm listening to Sunn O))), only the darkness doesn't hit all at once, but lurks in the shadows most of the time (those sine tones!) then occasionally jumps at you and eats a little bit off your face. The atmosphere in the first part of the piece, as I perceive it - and the way the vocal samples are used - reminds me a bit of that Absence and Forgiveness record by the Drouin/Olsen duo from a couple of years ago. I haven't been able to identify the Sabbath/Stones samples, although I think I kind of located one of them (there are some nice radio grabs of classical stuff at times that release some of the tension though, wonderful stuff). I need more listens. Really loving these new records.

[mpisaro]

Thanks for your comments Uroboros!

Perhaps someone will translate all of Die ganze Zeit at some point - but it would be an enormous project (a bit like translating Finnegans Wake). Oswald likes to say that one might as well translate his work into German (i.e., his use of the language is so idiosyncratic that many native German speakers don't get it). Just to give you an idea, Room of Rumor is only about a third of his book Nichts, das ist and that took me three years from start to finish (longer than it took him to write the book!). I am now translating the parts of Die ganze Zeit that are in GW008 - although this is still only a fraction of the whole. But who knows, it would certainly be worth doing, and I suspect the more one worked on it, the faster it would go. By the end one would be speaking a very different English.

The book is a compendium of three years of writing that intertwines many themes and includes a variety of styles. I mostly selected passages that applied to a certain idea of time that Oswald and I share, but there are several other books within this book. There are hundreds of illustrations, a few thousand four-line poems, many prose-poems and so on. We talked a lot when I made the recordings about how it was assembled and I had an image of Watts Towers, pieced together with shards of pottery Simon Rodia happened upon. In this case, while there are distorted quotes and references to an incredible variety of sources - literature, geography, history, mathematics, philosophy - Oswald wrote many of the 'shards' himself.

The samples in GW009 are mostly deeply buried and unless I would point them out, nearly impossible to recognize. In some cases I would use the word 'model' to describe the situation - the source of a sample would set the tone and/or structure for a section, and then I would compose the music around the tiny bit of sampled music.

[Uroboros]

Ah, thank you for clarifying things. I don't think I would like it if you spent the next ten years translating all that at the expense of making music! I may get a hold of Room of Rumor then and see how I like it. Still, looking forward to translations of those other bits that appear on the album - it may help me make (a new) sense of the whole thing.

[jon abbey]

Brian O on the new ones:

http://olewnick.blogspot.com/2013/02/mi ... ganze.html