robert linked to it in his post, it's here:
http://cageblog.blogspot.com/" onclick= "window.open(this.href);return false;
One month with Jeph Jerman
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Richard Pinnell
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Robert, Hi and thanks for the Cage link. I will check it out very soon, it looks good.
Chris thanks for the 'encouragment' always welcome
And Greg, thanks for the clarification regarding the window amps, seems I got things wrong, but I admitted all along I was guessing as it was hard to make things out. The bamboo windchimes make sense now listening back... at least I identified them as something a little out of the ordinary though, that pleases me.
About to play Memorial Day for the second time now, more about it later!
Chris thanks for the 'encouragment' always welcome
And Greg, thanks for the clarification regarding the window amps, seems I got things wrong, but I admitted all along I was guessing as it was hard to make things out. The bamboo windchimes make sense now listening back... at least I identified them as something a little out of the ordinary though, that pleases me.
About to play Memorial Day for the second time now, more about it later!
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Richard Pinnell
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Day 25 – Jeph Jerman & Greg Davis – Memorial Day Autumn Records Leaves Series CDR
Obviously Greg Davis has been following this series of reviews and adding helpful insight here and there to my guesswork, but I hope people reading this will realise that if I did not enjoy a recording of his work I wouldn’t have a problem explaining why not in a constructive and honest manner here. As it happens I don’t need to worry, this is a fine recording that betters the very strong Cottonwood, Arizona disc from Day 4.
Nicely recorded in May 2004 outside the front of Jeph’s house in Arizona, the first thing that grabs me here is the missing tape hiss, allowing the negative shapes between the streams of tiny events here to really stand out, the gentle twittering of birds in the trees the only background to this delightful improvised music.
And this really is music, instant composition created by the two musicians with remarkable control and dexterity considering the ‘instruments’ involved in its making. The Autumn website gives a brief but revealing description of how the music is made, the early parts of the recording are focused on friction sounds as the surfaces of assorted objects are rubbed against each other, and the later parts created remarkably by rubbing the end of long walking sticks against the front windows of the house...
I adore the intimacy of this music. Here we have minute events and everyday inconsequential percussive sounds collaged together in real time to create a finely detailed undulating sound world that pulls you in and involves you in the story it has to tell. The music is slow and careful in places, tumbling excitedly in others, but it works superbly as a whole, and ending at just the right moment, which unfortunately comes after only twenty one minutes.
There is no way you can tell who is making what sound, only during the walking stick moments late on is it easy to identify the number of musicians involved. There is a great respect for the items used to make sound here, I imagine that the precise sound made is not easy to predict when working with ‘instruments’ of this type. I can draw parallels between Jerman and Davis’ work on this disc and the improvising laptop musician that feeds a sound through a software patch mid performance, knowing vaguely how the result will sound, but often surprised by the result, throwing the improvisation off in another direction.
This disc is pleasing for me as it is concerned with textures and sound rather than instruments and musicians. There is a feeling of playfulness and discovery throughout the recording that sits happily alongside the obvious musicianship of the two creators.
In places I am reminded of the textural experiments of Otomo Yoshihide’s turntable work or Mark Wastell’s amplified textures, but also for some reason the jovial yet powerfully emotive music of John Stevens suggests itself. Then halfway through the disc the sound of the birds filters into earshot, and I am reminded of the source of these sounds and the true originality of this music.
I said early on in this project that I thought Jeph Jerman’s music could be divided into two, on one hand the straight field recordings, presenting sounds in a new context to be listened to with new ears, and on the other the improvisation of pieces like Memorial Day, where music is constructed using the potential provided by the natural objects involved.
I have noted that in places there is some blurring between these two generalisations, but they are basically still in place for me. I have gained great enjoyment from both sections of the music, but with Memorial Day and one or two other discs before it I am finding the most enjoyment from the latter categorisation.
It was noted with amusement by someone I was chatting with recently that I have a tendency to end these little reviews with a sales pitch urging you to go buy the disc. As the disc starts agin for the seventh time this evening on repeat play I have no qualms about doing so again...
Obviously Greg Davis has been following this series of reviews and adding helpful insight here and there to my guesswork, but I hope people reading this will realise that if I did not enjoy a recording of his work I wouldn’t have a problem explaining why not in a constructive and honest manner here. As it happens I don’t need to worry, this is a fine recording that betters the very strong Cottonwood, Arizona disc from Day 4.
Nicely recorded in May 2004 outside the front of Jeph’s house in Arizona, the first thing that grabs me here is the missing tape hiss, allowing the negative shapes between the streams of tiny events here to really stand out, the gentle twittering of birds in the trees the only background to this delightful improvised music.
And this really is music, instant composition created by the two musicians with remarkable control and dexterity considering the ‘instruments’ involved in its making. The Autumn website gives a brief but revealing description of how the music is made, the early parts of the recording are focused on friction sounds as the surfaces of assorted objects are rubbed against each other, and the later parts created remarkably by rubbing the end of long walking sticks against the front windows of the house...
I adore the intimacy of this music. Here we have minute events and everyday inconsequential percussive sounds collaged together in real time to create a finely detailed undulating sound world that pulls you in and involves you in the story it has to tell. The music is slow and careful in places, tumbling excitedly in others, but it works superbly as a whole, and ending at just the right moment, which unfortunately comes after only twenty one minutes.
There is no way you can tell who is making what sound, only during the walking stick moments late on is it easy to identify the number of musicians involved. There is a great respect for the items used to make sound here, I imagine that the precise sound made is not easy to predict when working with ‘instruments’ of this type. I can draw parallels between Jerman and Davis’ work on this disc and the improvising laptop musician that feeds a sound through a software patch mid performance, knowing vaguely how the result will sound, but often surprised by the result, throwing the improvisation off in another direction.
This disc is pleasing for me as it is concerned with textures and sound rather than instruments and musicians. There is a feeling of playfulness and discovery throughout the recording that sits happily alongside the obvious musicianship of the two creators.
In places I am reminded of the textural experiments of Otomo Yoshihide’s turntable work or Mark Wastell’s amplified textures, but also for some reason the jovial yet powerfully emotive music of John Stevens suggests itself. Then halfway through the disc the sound of the birds filters into earshot, and I am reminded of the source of these sounds and the true originality of this music.
I said early on in this project that I thought Jeph Jerman’s music could be divided into two, on one hand the straight field recordings, presenting sounds in a new context to be listened to with new ears, and on the other the improvisation of pieces like Memorial Day, where music is constructed using the potential provided by the natural objects involved.
I have noted that in places there is some blurring between these two generalisations, but they are basically still in place for me. I have gained great enjoyment from both sections of the music, but with Memorial Day and one or two other discs before it I am finding the most enjoyment from the latter categorisation.
It was noted with amusement by someone I was chatting with recently that I have a tendency to end these little reviews with a sales pitch urging you to go buy the disc. As the disc starts agin for the seventh time this evening on repeat play I have no qualms about doing so again...
Hey Chris, thanks for the heads up. I have to admit that while I still do enjoy the occasional rock gig you are correct in thinking this may not be my thing. Especially right now as I have been really into more acoustic music for the last couple of weeks. My fancies ebb and flow and I'm sure I'll be more obsessed with the electronics again soon enough, but for right now the acoustics are dominating my listening time.letchhausen wrote:Robert, if you're interested in some heavy noise rock from New York, the Heroine Sheiks are gonna be at the Funhouse this Tuesday. The singer is an old friend of mine from way back. Because of the size of the venue I'm probably gong to be watching from the sidewalk out front to protect my precious ears. Though somehow, I sense that this is probably not your thing........
"Please everybody, if we haven't done what we could have done, we've tried"
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letchhausen
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I understand completely. My friend wants me to review his new CD for the web site and I had a very hard time switching gears to get into it. It's starting to sink in after repeated plays but I'm looking forward to getting back to my regularly scheduled eai programming.....A bunch of friends from here are coming down to the show for some seriously blistering rocking out and I'm looking forward to that. And of course hanging out with the band etc. I did take the precaution of taking the morning off of work so that I could sleep in. Then back to burrowing into my taomud hidey-hole.......hatta wrote:Hey Chris, thanks for the heads up. I have to admit that while I still do enjoy the occasional rock gig you are correct in thinking this may not be my thing. Especially right now as I have been really into more acoustic music for the last couple of weeks. My fancies ebb and flow and I'm sure I'll be more obsessed with the electronics again soon enough, but for right now the acoustics are dominating my listening time.letchhausen wrote:Robert, if you're interested in some heavy noise rock from New York, the Heroine Sheiks are gonna be at the Funhouse this Tuesday. The singer is an old friend of mine from way back. Because of the size of the venue I'm probably gong to be watching from the sidewalk out front to protect my precious ears. Though somehow, I sense that this is probably not your thing........
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Richard Pinnell
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Day 26 – Jeph Jerman – Derelict 2. CDR
So tonight we have the second Derelict disc, following the rather nice first volume listened to on Day 11. There are four derelict ‘sites’ for the field recordings here, an old disused gas station, an abandoned mine, an old stage station (whatever one of those may be) and the Red Tank Draw we heard recently on the More Sound release.
The pieces are numerous and it is not identified where each is recorded, so I chose to try and forget trying to identify the sounds here, or compare one short track to another, and instead give an overview of how this music sounds, and the atmospheres and emotions it suggests.
The beginning of Derelict 2 contains a lot of short pieces that merge together easily so you barely notice the track counter has clicked over. These pieces are sparse in their make up, featuring the continual roar of cars passing on a nearby road, but low enough in the recording to just settle as a background to the piece, a somehow comforting hum and swell of sounds familiar to all of us that immediately provide the music with a context in which it can be heard. Above this there are scrapes and soft metallic moans that are made by Jerman and become part of the soundscape.
Knowing the site of these recordings tends to cloud the way I listen to and consequently feel about this music. The initial pieces particularly feel stark, empty and austere, but how much of this comes from the feelings imparted by the music and how much is my brain taking its expectations and laying them over what I hear is hard to tell.
Later the music becomes fuller and louder, the sense of echo and emptiness remains in these parts from the early tracks, but deep drones of stroked metal envelop the recording for a while, adding body and depth to the recordings, but perhaps losing some of the charged emptiness of the earlier pieces.
A little later on and we hear stones, wood and small pieces of loose debris being moved about up close to the mic, but in the rear of the recording we have deathly quiet, reinforcing the feeling of empty yet enclosed spaces.
This is then turned on its head as we hit track sixteen and the wind flies into the recording from the first clumsy release of the pause button, whooshing over the naked microphone, and reminding me of my early Sunday morning walks up in the hills of the English Ridgeway, unprotected from the elements but fully protected from the hustle of everyday life.
It turns out this track is where the CD ends. I have really struggled listening through this and also then trying to write about it without making reference to the source of the sounds. In fact I find it close to impossible. Force of habit and the everyday way my mind works forces me to place each piece of music, identifying its origins rather than just enjoying the sound.
In many ways I wish this had been played to me blind, without knowledge of even the title to see if I was capable of listening with an open mind to sounds rather than recordings of objects, but I have a feeling that under any circumstances this is close to impossible.
So tonight we have the second Derelict disc, following the rather nice first volume listened to on Day 11. There are four derelict ‘sites’ for the field recordings here, an old disused gas station, an abandoned mine, an old stage station (whatever one of those may be) and the Red Tank Draw we heard recently on the More Sound release.
The pieces are numerous and it is not identified where each is recorded, so I chose to try and forget trying to identify the sounds here, or compare one short track to another, and instead give an overview of how this music sounds, and the atmospheres and emotions it suggests.
The beginning of Derelict 2 contains a lot of short pieces that merge together easily so you barely notice the track counter has clicked over. These pieces are sparse in their make up, featuring the continual roar of cars passing on a nearby road, but low enough in the recording to just settle as a background to the piece, a somehow comforting hum and swell of sounds familiar to all of us that immediately provide the music with a context in which it can be heard. Above this there are scrapes and soft metallic moans that are made by Jerman and become part of the soundscape.
Knowing the site of these recordings tends to cloud the way I listen to and consequently feel about this music. The initial pieces particularly feel stark, empty and austere, but how much of this comes from the feelings imparted by the music and how much is my brain taking its expectations and laying them over what I hear is hard to tell.
Later the music becomes fuller and louder, the sense of echo and emptiness remains in these parts from the early tracks, but deep drones of stroked metal envelop the recording for a while, adding body and depth to the recordings, but perhaps losing some of the charged emptiness of the earlier pieces.
A little later on and we hear stones, wood and small pieces of loose debris being moved about up close to the mic, but in the rear of the recording we have deathly quiet, reinforcing the feeling of empty yet enclosed spaces.
This is then turned on its head as we hit track sixteen and the wind flies into the recording from the first clumsy release of the pause button, whooshing over the naked microphone, and reminding me of my early Sunday morning walks up in the hills of the English Ridgeway, unprotected from the elements but fully protected from the hustle of everyday life.
It turns out this track is where the CD ends. I have really struggled listening through this and also then trying to write about it without making reference to the source of the sounds. In fact I find it close to impossible. Force of habit and the everyday way my mind works forces me to place each piece of music, identifying its origins rather than just enjoying the sound.
In many ways I wish this had been played to me blind, without knowledge of even the title to see if I was capable of listening with an open mind to sounds rather than recordings of objects, but I have a feeling that under any circumstances this is close to impossible.
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Richard Pinnell
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Day 27 – Jeph Jerman – Chin (Progress) CDR
The title of this CDR comes from the 35th Hexagram from the I Ching. Not professing to have any real understanding of the I Ching (something I hope one day to correct) I will not pass any comment on why this title should be chosen. Perhaps others could shed some light?
Chin (Progress) is a series of mainly short recordings of music ‘played’ on or field recordings of, plants of one description or another. We hear the stalks, branches and spines of assorted yucca, prickly pear, sotol and agave plants plucked, struck, rubbed, dropped, blown through and vibrated amongst a host of other ways to coax sounds from the exotic foliage of the Arizona desert.
Again here though, the faintly ridiculous nature of the above paragraph only really matters if you know the source of these sounds. Without that knowledge the listener would assume here we have some form of obscure percussion, perhaps treated electronically to a degree. The last couple of tracks feature more obvious use of the plants as hollow agave stalks seem to be blown through in a primitive flute – like manner.
At first listen I told myself yet again that I couldn’t believe these pieces were recorded using natural objects, and that it didn’t sound at all like plants were used in their creation. But then I thought to myself, I have absolutely no idea what the sound of a rubbed and plucked yucca plant would be like, so where am I getting these assumptions from?
I suspect that one of the objectives of this music is to reveal the musical possibilities of beautiful natural objects that are sat before us. Well, sat before Jeph Jerman at least, not too many Prickly Pear plants around here.
In places the music is very nice, tracks ten and eleven resemble the sound of hundreds of tiny marbles tumbling down a marble staircase, though the hard to translate tracklisting makes it hard to figure out what we are actually hearing here.
Track twelve sounds like a hippopotamus snoring happily in the bath tub whilst a series of insects bounce off of the light bulb above. OK, an obscure reference, but thats half the point here, we could be listening to anything, as we have never truly stopped and listened to the sounds around us in this way.
Musically, Chin (Progress) holds less appeal for me than the likes of the Animist Orchestra recording or the duets with Greg Davis, there is less of the deliberate musicality and interaction of those discs, but as a vehicle to make me sit quietly and wonder at what sounds we are really all missing in the world about us, this works a treat.
The title of this CDR comes from the 35th Hexagram from the I Ching. Not professing to have any real understanding of the I Ching (something I hope one day to correct) I will not pass any comment on why this title should be chosen. Perhaps others could shed some light?
Chin (Progress) is a series of mainly short recordings of music ‘played’ on or field recordings of, plants of one description or another. We hear the stalks, branches and spines of assorted yucca, prickly pear, sotol and agave plants plucked, struck, rubbed, dropped, blown through and vibrated amongst a host of other ways to coax sounds from the exotic foliage of the Arizona desert.
Again here though, the faintly ridiculous nature of the above paragraph only really matters if you know the source of these sounds. Without that knowledge the listener would assume here we have some form of obscure percussion, perhaps treated electronically to a degree. The last couple of tracks feature more obvious use of the plants as hollow agave stalks seem to be blown through in a primitive flute – like manner.
At first listen I told myself yet again that I couldn’t believe these pieces were recorded using natural objects, and that it didn’t sound at all like plants were used in their creation. But then I thought to myself, I have absolutely no idea what the sound of a rubbed and plucked yucca plant would be like, so where am I getting these assumptions from?
I suspect that one of the objectives of this music is to reveal the musical possibilities of beautiful natural objects that are sat before us. Well, sat before Jeph Jerman at least, not too many Prickly Pear plants around here.
In places the music is very nice, tracks ten and eleven resemble the sound of hundreds of tiny marbles tumbling down a marble staircase, though the hard to translate tracklisting makes it hard to figure out what we are actually hearing here.
Track twelve sounds like a hippopotamus snoring happily in the bath tub whilst a series of insects bounce off of the light bulb above. OK, an obscure reference, but thats half the point here, we could be listening to anything, as we have never truly stopped and listened to the sounds around us in this way.
Musically, Chin (Progress) holds less appeal for me than the likes of the Animist Orchestra recording or the duets with Greg Davis, there is less of the deliberate musicality and interaction of those discs, but as a vehicle to make me sit quietly and wonder at what sounds we are really all missing in the world about us, this works a treat.
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Richard Pinnell
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Day 28 – Jeph Jerman – Grackles (Track from Xing – Wu Compilation)
As I said at the beginning, the original idea for this series sprung out of the fact I bought a pile of twenty four Jeph Jerman discs from Erstwhile Distribution and was wondering how to approach listening to them. When I decided on this project I had to pad out the remaining seven days of the month with Jerman discs I already owned. As I didn’t quite have enough full length discs I decided to use MP3 files of two albums I had downloaded from soulseek for the two days I was missing.
However, having reached the point that I was due to play these (coincidence placed them both in the last four days) I do not feel comfortable doing this, as the quality of the recordings is not good, and I do not feel confident enough that what I am hearing is what will have been presented on the original recording. When I began this project an issue like this would not have mattered to me. Having spent so much time listening so closely, I feel I need a better solution.
So I have decided to use two Jerman tracks from compilation discs I own for tonight’s and Sunday’s entries instead. These tracks may be short but warrant close listening the same as the others, and the shorter tracks give me space to think more about the experience of this month in general.
Grackles comes from the hard to find but well worth seeking out two disc compilation Insight on the fledgling Malaysian label Xing-Wu. This is a recording of a crowd of birds (presumably called grackles) that accumulate once a year in Jerman’s home town in large numbers. This five and a half minute recording was made of a bunch of birds that assembled on a telephone wire near his home.
Its hard to tell how many birds are involved here, but I sense several dozen as we are presented with an immediate wall of sound made up of masses of high pitched short squeals layered across each other to create the impression of one long repetitive drone.
Interestingly, the piece again resembles the recordings of running streams visited earlier in the month when you listen closely into the sound. The hundreds of single cries from the birds coalesce into the whole, but like the rushing water recordings if you forget the source of the recording and just listen deep into the morass of sound you can make out three or four different elements. Bird cries at different pitches and lengths underpinned by the faint sounds of the road here replace the different percussive sounds from the water.
Listening to this piece as a recording of some birds on a telephone wire has its worth, but closing your mind to that and simply listening to sounds rather than the call of grackles opens this piece up as a highly intricate collage of hundreds of similar yet never identical moments. The impression you are left with is off something created by a computer, the sounds take on an electronic feel as the ‘composition’ could never been performed in any way by a human hand.
This thought reminded me of an old Invisible Jukebox article in The Wire magazine. In this feature a musician or composer is played music blind and asked to identify the work and then pass comment on it. I remember someone (I honestly don’t remember who, I could look it up, but it really doesn’t matter) being played a recording of some seals roaring on a beach, taken from the somewhat eclectic BBS Radio Mixing It compilation from about ten years ago. The person identified the sounds as coming from some kind of 1960s electronic experimental composition, or words to that effect.
I mention this as I have often felt this way about Jerman’s field recordings. It is possibly just because of my listening background that is grounded in acoustic and electronic sounds worked together that I think this way, but I often have been able to transcend the subject matter of these field recordings and approach them as pieces of incidental composition, often with an electronic feel to the sounds.
Grackles begins disc two of the Insight compilation, crashing in without warning as with all of Jeph’s own releases, but interestingly it fades away here at the end rather than just coming to a dead halt, presumably at the instruction of the CD’s compiler. This simple difference stands out for me against the other pieces I have listened to, suggesting here that this should be considered as a piece of art in itself rather than just a presentation of recorded sound.
I guess after listening to this kind of thing for a month the slightest difference suggests a big difference...
As I said at the beginning, the original idea for this series sprung out of the fact I bought a pile of twenty four Jeph Jerman discs from Erstwhile Distribution and was wondering how to approach listening to them. When I decided on this project I had to pad out the remaining seven days of the month with Jerman discs I already owned. As I didn’t quite have enough full length discs I decided to use MP3 files of two albums I had downloaded from soulseek for the two days I was missing.
However, having reached the point that I was due to play these (coincidence placed them both in the last four days) I do not feel comfortable doing this, as the quality of the recordings is not good, and I do not feel confident enough that what I am hearing is what will have been presented on the original recording. When I began this project an issue like this would not have mattered to me. Having spent so much time listening so closely, I feel I need a better solution.
So I have decided to use two Jerman tracks from compilation discs I own for tonight’s and Sunday’s entries instead. These tracks may be short but warrant close listening the same as the others, and the shorter tracks give me space to think more about the experience of this month in general.
Grackles comes from the hard to find but well worth seeking out two disc compilation Insight on the fledgling Malaysian label Xing-Wu. This is a recording of a crowd of birds (presumably called grackles) that accumulate once a year in Jerman’s home town in large numbers. This five and a half minute recording was made of a bunch of birds that assembled on a telephone wire near his home.
Its hard to tell how many birds are involved here, but I sense several dozen as we are presented with an immediate wall of sound made up of masses of high pitched short squeals layered across each other to create the impression of one long repetitive drone.
Interestingly, the piece again resembles the recordings of running streams visited earlier in the month when you listen closely into the sound. The hundreds of single cries from the birds coalesce into the whole, but like the rushing water recordings if you forget the source of the recording and just listen deep into the morass of sound you can make out three or four different elements. Bird cries at different pitches and lengths underpinned by the faint sounds of the road here replace the different percussive sounds from the water.
Listening to this piece as a recording of some birds on a telephone wire has its worth, but closing your mind to that and simply listening to sounds rather than the call of grackles opens this piece up as a highly intricate collage of hundreds of similar yet never identical moments. The impression you are left with is off something created by a computer, the sounds take on an electronic feel as the ‘composition’ could never been performed in any way by a human hand.
This thought reminded me of an old Invisible Jukebox article in The Wire magazine. In this feature a musician or composer is played music blind and asked to identify the work and then pass comment on it. I remember someone (I honestly don’t remember who, I could look it up, but it really doesn’t matter) being played a recording of some seals roaring on a beach, taken from the somewhat eclectic BBS Radio Mixing It compilation from about ten years ago. The person identified the sounds as coming from some kind of 1960s electronic experimental composition, or words to that effect.
I mention this as I have often felt this way about Jerman’s field recordings. It is possibly just because of my listening background that is grounded in acoustic and electronic sounds worked together that I think this way, but I often have been able to transcend the subject matter of these field recordings and approach them as pieces of incidental composition, often with an electronic feel to the sounds.
Grackles begins disc two of the Insight compilation, crashing in without warning as with all of Jeph’s own releases, but interestingly it fades away here at the end rather than just coming to a dead halt, presumably at the instruction of the CD’s compiler. This simple difference stands out for me against the other pieces I have listened to, suggesting here that this should be considered as a piece of art in itself rather than just a presentation of recorded sound.
I guess after listening to this kind of thing for a month the slightest difference suggests a big difference...
interesting. what bitrate are these mp3s?Richard Pinnell wrote:However, having reached the point that I was due to play these (coincidence placed them both in the last four days) I do not feel comfortable doing this, as the quality of the recordings is not good, and I do not feel confident enough that what I am hearing is what will have been presented on the original recording. When I began this project an issue like this would not have mattered to me. Having spent so much time listening so closely, I feel I need a better solution.
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Richard Pinnell
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this just goes to show that nature can produce music that is as moving and wonderful and beautiful and complex as anything we could create ourselves. and we often mimic nature when we make music too (whether it is conscious or not).
-gd
-gd
Richard Pinnell wrote:Day 28 – Jeph Jerman – Grackles (Track from Xing – Wu Compilation)
h the slightest difference suggests a big difference...
hmm, I think I disagree. there's a distinct element of human consciousness in the music I find to be the most "moving and wonderful and beautiful and complex" that I don't think any field recordings can contain. not minimizing the beauty of well-done field recordings, but for me there's a limit there.gtd wrote:this just goes to show that nature can produce music that is as moving and wonderful and beautiful and complex as anything we could create ourselves.
jon, i think i found where we differ in our listening and enjoyment! 
so it seems that you need the human interaction / intention / ego / decisions in music/sound for it to have meaning, yes?
those things are not a requirement for me for music/sound to be deeply moving/enjoyable/etc.
the sound of the birds in the morning are just as beautiful and moving to me as an AMM record.
its hard for me to map human ideas/constructs/experiences/consciousness, etc onto the natural world of sounds and vice versa.
also i think that emotions and feelings about music/sound lie within the listener. because despite the best intentions of a composer/musician, its impossible for them to project the same specific emotion or idea or feeling to every different listener. so then it shouldnt matter whether the music/sound is made by humans or not.
-gd
so it seems that you need the human interaction / intention / ego / decisions in music/sound for it to have meaning, yes?
those things are not a requirement for me for music/sound to be deeply moving/enjoyable/etc.
the sound of the birds in the morning are just as beautiful and moving to me as an AMM record.
its hard for me to map human ideas/constructs/experiences/consciousness, etc onto the natural world of sounds and vice versa.
also i think that emotions and feelings about music/sound lie within the listener. because despite the best intentions of a composer/musician, its impossible for them to project the same specific emotion or idea or feeling to every different listener. so then it shouldnt matter whether the music/sound is made by humans or not.
-gd
jon abbey wrote:hmm, I think I disagree. there's a distinct element of human consciousness in the music I find to be the most "moving and wonderful and beautiful and complex" that I don't think any field recordings can contain. not minimizing the beauty of well-done field recordings, but for me there's a limit there.gtd wrote:this just goes to show that nature can produce music that is as moving and wonderful and beautiful and complex as anything we could create ourselves.
no, that's not what I said. your original statement was the one I disagreed with, this second post is weakening your original stance a bit. my position is that the best music created by humans is far more powerful to me than the best music created by nature, in my experience. it's not that natural sounds can't be beautiful in and of themselves, they can. but it's a bit like the monkeys typing Shakespeare (actually the correct analogy would be equivalent plays to Shakespeare), it's not especially likely and even if it did happen, the chances of me or anyone else actually hearing it would be pretty minscule.gtd wrote:so it seems that you need the human interaction / intention / ego / decisions in music/sound for it to have meaning, yes?
I think this is a faulty line of reasoning. just because every listener can't fully connect with work in a way that the composer/musician intended doesn't mean that none of them can. I also don't think that the listener has to necessarily grasp the specific emotion that the composer/musician has in mind for the music to be extremely powerful.also i think that emotions and feelings about music/sound lie within the listener. because despite the best intentions of a composer/musician, its impossible for them to project the same specific emotion or idea or feeling to every different listener. so then it shouldnt matter whether the music/sound is made by humans or not.
I don't quite understand how you can feel this way and continue to make music yourself. what's the point? why not just encourage people to listen to their surroundings more?
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Richard Pinnell
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For me the two areas of music making, field recording and composition (instant or pre-determined) are really quite different.
I have to agree with Jon though that my most rewarding listening experiences have been with music performed by musicians, and that the connection with the intent and emotion imparted by them is most likely to move me, but that's not to say that there isn't much to be gained from field recordings also (as Jon does state in that first post) and this is just my personal preference.
I will say that much of my enjoyment here has been involved with my learning to listen to and beyond the field recording pieces, and how this has affected the way I hear my everyday surroundings. I have always been able to listen selectively in this way and have made a few recordings in the past for my own enjoyment, but this month has had a pretty profound impact on how I listen in general.
This said, I have also stated that my favourite discs here have been the ones that contain the greatest amount of human involvement. (The duos with Greg, The Animist disc) The reasons these work so wonderfully for me is because to a degree they bridge the gap between field recording and composition. As Greg and Jeph sat on the front porch making the beautiful sounds contained on Memorial Day the birds in the background played their part, and without them the music would be lessened somewhat.
It could also be argued that there is a lot of human input involved with a recording such as Grackles. The decisions about what to record, how to edit, and the effect that the recording process has on the sound itself all add up to create a piece of music selected for presentation rather than a purely natural experience.
I think one of Jeph's aims is to help people realise that great sounds do not stop at the hi fi system... An evening spent on a rocky beach in Cornwall this spring as a storm broke all around me was an amzing aural experience I will never forget.
There is a lot to be gained from stopping and listening. However to compare the worth of this kind of experience to that of listening to a CD of improvised music is like comparing photography to painting. They each have their merits, some prefer one to the other, but ultimately the choice is yours. For me, I take different things from each and am just pleased to have the opportunity to do so.
I have to agree with Jon though that my most rewarding listening experiences have been with music performed by musicians, and that the connection with the intent and emotion imparted by them is most likely to move me, but that's not to say that there isn't much to be gained from field recordings also (as Jon does state in that first post) and this is just my personal preference.
I will say that much of my enjoyment here has been involved with my learning to listen to and beyond the field recording pieces, and how this has affected the way I hear my everyday surroundings. I have always been able to listen selectively in this way and have made a few recordings in the past for my own enjoyment, but this month has had a pretty profound impact on how I listen in general.
This said, I have also stated that my favourite discs here have been the ones that contain the greatest amount of human involvement. (The duos with Greg, The Animist disc) The reasons these work so wonderfully for me is because to a degree they bridge the gap between field recording and composition. As Greg and Jeph sat on the front porch making the beautiful sounds contained on Memorial Day the birds in the background played their part, and without them the music would be lessened somewhat.
It could also be argued that there is a lot of human input involved with a recording such as Grackles. The decisions about what to record, how to edit, and the effect that the recording process has on the sound itself all add up to create a piece of music selected for presentation rather than a purely natural experience.
I think one of Jeph's aims is to help people realise that great sounds do not stop at the hi fi system... An evening spent on a rocky beach in Cornwall this spring as a storm broke all around me was an amzing aural experience I will never forget.
There is a lot to be gained from stopping and listening. However to compare the worth of this kind of experience to that of listening to a CD of improvised music is like comparing photography to painting. They each have their merits, some prefer one to the other, but ultimately the choice is yours. For me, I take different things from each and am just pleased to have the opportunity to do so.
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user_827
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user_183
Without grabbing my I Ching or my Cage notes, I remember that there is in fact a piece, maybe two of them, by JC which features amplified plants where cactus is prepared in some of those ways you describe. I think this comes from the Mushrooms and Anarchy Period (aka The Bearded Phase) in the 70's. So this appears to be a clear and simple tribute piece. Could JJ have chosen the hexagram randomly, and did he get another I Ching out to do so?Richard Pinnell wrote:Day 27 – Jeph Jerman – Chin (Progress) CDR
The title of this CDR comes from the 35th Hexagram from the I Ching. Not professing to have any real understanding of the I Ching (something I hope one day to correct) I will not pass any comment on why this title should be chosen. Perhaps others could shed some light?
Richard, I'm eagerly awaiting your rankings and reccommendations at the end of the month.
there are a few cage pieces from the mid to late 70's that utilize natural objects as sound & compositional materials -
Child Of Tree (1975) - The score consists solely of performance instructions on how to select 10 instruments, using I-Ching chance operations. All instruments should be made of plant materials, or be just the plant materials themselves (e.g. leaves from trees, branches etc.). One of the instruments should be a pod (rattle) from a poinciana tree, which grow in Mexico.
Branches (1976) - The instruments used are amplified pods, cacti and other plant materials such as pod rattles from a poinciana tree, an 'instrument' Cage specifically mentions in the score. The choice of the other instruments is made by the performers, using I-Ching chance operations.
The cacti are played by plucking its needles with toothpicks, the sounds being amplified by cartridge-like attachments.
Branches is basically a series of variations of Child of Tree, strung together on a string of silence.
(there is a great CD of this piece on edition wandelweisser (sp?))
Inlets (1977) - The players tip the amplified conch shells (partially filled with water), in order to produce gurgling sounds. The music also includes the sound of pine cones on fire (live or recorded) and a single tone produced on a conch shell, used as a trumpet. The work was also part of the Sounday event. It is a composition Cage labeled with the word "contingency", meaning "improvisation using elements in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect"
Pools (1978) - This is a solo derivative of Inlets. It is a composition Cage labeled with the word "contingency", meaning "improvisation using elements in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect". (Cage in an interview with Stuart S. Smith)
Wilheim András states: "as I know (from John Cage, whom I asked about it), there is no written score. The only information is that he said that Pools is in the same relation to Inlets as Child of Tree to Branches".
id say that these pieces are ancestors & inspirations for alot of jeph jerman's recent music.
-gd
p.s. i will get back to the intentional vs. non-intentional discussion soon.....i find it very interesting to see where people stand on this.
Richard, I'm eagerly awaiting your rankings and reccommendations at the end of the month.[/quote]
Child Of Tree (1975) - The score consists solely of performance instructions on how to select 10 instruments, using I-Ching chance operations. All instruments should be made of plant materials, or be just the plant materials themselves (e.g. leaves from trees, branches etc.). One of the instruments should be a pod (rattle) from a poinciana tree, which grow in Mexico.
Branches (1976) - The instruments used are amplified pods, cacti and other plant materials such as pod rattles from a poinciana tree, an 'instrument' Cage specifically mentions in the score. The choice of the other instruments is made by the performers, using I-Ching chance operations.
The cacti are played by plucking its needles with toothpicks, the sounds being amplified by cartridge-like attachments.
Branches is basically a series of variations of Child of Tree, strung together on a string of silence.
(there is a great CD of this piece on edition wandelweisser (sp?))
Inlets (1977) - The players tip the amplified conch shells (partially filled with water), in order to produce gurgling sounds. The music also includes the sound of pine cones on fire (live or recorded) and a single tone produced on a conch shell, used as a trumpet. The work was also part of the Sounday event. It is a composition Cage labeled with the word "contingency", meaning "improvisation using elements in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect"
Pools (1978) - This is a solo derivative of Inlets. It is a composition Cage labeled with the word "contingency", meaning "improvisation using elements in which there is a discontinuity between cause and effect". (Cage in an interview with Stuart S. Smith)
Wilheim András states: "as I know (from John Cage, whom I asked about it), there is no written score. The only information is that he said that Pools is in the same relation to Inlets as Child of Tree to Branches".
id say that these pieces are ancestors & inspirations for alot of jeph jerman's recent music.
-gd
p.s. i will get back to the intentional vs. non-intentional discussion soon.....i find it very interesting to see where people stand on this.
Richard, I'm eagerly awaiting your rankings and reccommendations at the end of the month.[/quote]