Snail shells are homes — always in-progress, always excrescing, always spiralling & nautilising outwards homes — for the artists, musicians, songs, poems, writers, people, places, planets, plums that I regularly burden with gush.

At least this way all the shameless enshrining can be contained.

Think of them as cockle shells built for endless barnacling.
   

   
2-11-08

Banshee Birth
   

At Town Hall I wished
His cover of Cohen’s “The Guests”
Would never end.

And then he had us all hum –
To feel the ghost behind our heads.
& in our necks.

The massed chest-drones were
Soft yellow fibers
Being braided through everyone.

A year later,
At the Warsaw in Brooklyn
He talked about being rapt
Before old videos of Otis

And when Antony sang
He’d seize moments, notes,
And shake them into endlessness
Just like Otis:

With fearlessness
With tender madness
With grinning pain

So again come ghosts:
He wrings their necks
In exorcising vibrato

Just as he calls them forth:
The banshee birth
   
   
   
Antony & The Johnsons Cds

Essay by C. Way - Copyright © 2008 SnailCrow.com

To me, watching Ivo Pogorelich play Chopin as he does here in the 1980 Chopin competition in Warsaw is not much different to me than watching Otis Redding sing “Shake” or Iggy Pop writhe on stage to something off Funhouse. It’s like seeing Coltrane blow holy hell out of his sax. It’s like hearing Patti Smith sing stairs up into the night on “Birdland.” Or Howlin Wolf throttle his guitar neck and sing the rafters into splinters. It’s pure channeled soul: the kind that’s wracked and hurt & fearful and writhing but swept up and organized in a solid mountain of feeling. The heart’s blood, black and wild, captured & focused in a sealed vial of white glass.

From what I understand, Martha Argerich, a judge at the Chopin competition from which this video’s taken (and a legendary Chopin interpreter in her own right), walked out when Ivo was eliminated. I can see why. If for no other reason that these are two Chopin interpreters who capture what’s hardest to capture in this composer’s works: delivering all the massive shifts in feeling without making it seem fragmented, schizophrenic, and doing so with tremendous technique.

Chopin’s works speak to me in part because they depict extremes of emotion side by side as they really (and uncomfortably, sometimes) exist in the human heart; Ivo speaks to me because he seems to understand this intuitively in how he plays. He switches from the most delicate and aching touches to the most hammering fortissimos without making you think he’s just playing up contrast/shock-value. His rubato, his pacing, it all shows a piano player who feels (rather than has read) that Chopin was a revolutionary of the heart’s mapping as much as he was of the keyboard’s.

This is how he plays the Scherzo no. 3: as the story of one human heart struggling and battling, in tragedy and absurdity, unifying it all by making the emotional vicissitudes (which are so characteristic of Chopin’s Scherzos) seem less like hodgepodge extremes yoked together and more like different portraits of the same human face — like Monet’s haystacks seen in varying shades of light. All of a piece, despite the changes, despite the furious switching.

Anyone else out there a huge Chopin fan? Any other interpreters you can recommend?

Swans - “Sex, God, Sex” (From “Children of God”)
   

Swans’ “Children of God”– this album’s a musical crucible. These songs of Gira’s and Jarboe’s gather, compress, burn & reduce what we feel and what we experience to pure pale cores.

Flesh of melody flayed away and bone remains: a skinny piano line, a frayed ribbon of flute. Sheaths stripped from the blue glowing nerves.

Life and the complex relationships we form to endure it are boiled to nothing but: fear, power, desire, acquisition, redemption, violation, fury.

And the many rhythms with which we walk, run, breathe, leap are pulverized to one stark, cavernous beat.

And the many sights we see from waking to sleeping — the flashing panoply, the images, the objects, the colors, the faces — these too are stripped to their archetypes: fire, a child, a garden, a mouth, honey, blood.

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2008

   

The following are excerpts from an interview with Karlheinz Stockhausen in 1995, where he weighs in on his career and the works of modern artists influenced in part by him (Aphex Twin among them). Interview is found here:

http://www.stockhausen.org/ksadvice.html

“I heard the piece Aphex Twin of Richard James carefully: I think it would be
very helpful if he listens to my work Song Of The Youth, which is electronic
music, and a young boy’s voice singing with himself. Because he would then
immediately stop with all these post-African repetitions, and he would look
for changing tempi and changing rhythms, and he would not allow to repeat
any rhythm if it were varied to some extent and if it did not have a
direction in its sequence of variations.”

“The beginning of every art music development, in China, or in India or in European monasteries was always to relate the art of shaping composing sounds with the art [by which] the stars are shaped and composed. Astronomy, mathematics and music were the highest disciplines throughout the centuries since the beginning of European art music in the monasteries, let’s say in the tenth until the 14th, 15th century… I have studied all music of Europe as a student - I had to - and I at a very early age became aware, also naturally, [that] certain music, like the Art Of The Fugue by Johann Sebastian Bach or the Musikalishe Opfer, [has] always known about this relationship between the laws of the universe, astronomical laws, and the laws of the music of this Earth. “

I absolutely love the premise — have an establishment-throned, grumpy old-guard composer address the works of his progenitors (Aphex Twin, Scanner, etc). And I doubly love that the ‘children’ of the article got the chance to weigh in on old Stocky’s recommendations afterwards — famously Aphex Twin’s flippant (but unquestionably disappointed) rejoinder where he basically says “Stock, fuck off, you ain’t got no SOUL.”

So right after reading the interview I checked out some of the Stocker’s music, the first time I’d heard him since college. With all due respects to the now-deceased composer — I didn’t care much for him then (though I think as an idealistic 20-something it was easier for me to feel I wasn’t ‘up to’ the lofty sublime peaks of his craft) — & I realized quickly that I sure as hell don’t care for him now.
 (Read More . . .)

C. Way/ SnailCrow.com © 2007

   

    Still trying to understand why everyone creams giant buckets over Richter.
    Cupfuls maybe. Possibly mugfuls. But not buckets.
    I’ve owned the 1958 Sofia Recital on disc for a few years. The Mussorgsky is rightfully praised — the “Great Gates” is epic and always tremendously moving. The Liszt is sublime: athletic and deft and heroic.
    But his version of Chopin’s Etude in E is awful. True, there’s the requisite stately tenderness. And in terms of rubato, pacing, much of it succeeds. But the middle section, where *measured* hunger & ardor are called for — just as in the middle passages of many of the composer’s Nocturnes — Richter instead delivers a spastic and methed-up blitz that’s practically ridiculous. It’s as if he couldn’t wait to get to the four Liszt pieces immediately after in the programme.
    (I suddenly feel a little silly and petty carping on the flaws of a legend like this. I mean christ, the guy achieved a level of intimacy and virtuosity with his instrument that most of us can’t even dream of, let alone come close to even if we spent the next 100 seasons toiling in study.
    But this is the internet after all. Where any silly & petty humbug like me can armchair-quarterback about subjects minute & profound to everyone (& no one’s) irritation. So back to the carp.)
    I love Richter’s strength, intellect and passion, but there are lots of moments across his recorded works where I feel like his emotional radar is just flat-out off. In the case of the Etude in E, it can lead to bewildering results (based on this, I’d hate to hear him in the Ballades).
    Now if we’re talking loose & impetuous interpretations of Chopin, I much prefer an Argerich, or a Cortot — pianists who take emotional risks in their interpretations but who would never — and physically, perhaps, *could* never — pummel and throttle a score like Richter does in the Etude in E.

1957 clip of Billie Holiday singing with a band.

There are moments — at 2:55; at 3:53 — where the language of mouth, brow and eye rival and sometimes sing down anything that could come from throats or be blown through brass.

Where so much is untranslatably sung through skin — her lip half-sucked, her head jauntily cocked a half second before a dark note sounds.

Where her face, her dark liquid eyes seem barely able to boundary whole countries of emotion; barely able to fence sharded feelings jostling against each other behind and ahead of the beat.

Where lip-bites & pursings, languid head-shakes, coy half-smiles shuffle spectra of emotion — loss, joy, hunger, demureness, wistfulness, regret, swagger, nerve — everything & everything; Where skin, contour, wrinkle, tissue and muscle are all barely able to keep up with what the heart has to say –

& so over and over I watch her, the sound off, & she’s so vividly there it hurts to watch, clips the breath while you wait for hers to pour.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan - “Kise Da Yaar Na Wichre”

This voice sets your bones back into place.

This voice is a torrent heedless of seawall and sandbag, hungry beyond the coasts it engulfs.

This voice is the joyous smoking escape of geysers.

This voice is an orange cougar scaling a black tree and scattering the hundred larks that nest there into white cloudrivaling skysprays.

This voice is the fiery-wheeled outrage of prophets.

This voice carves & harrows the air in which it’s sounded & deposits in the hollows ash, seeds & dewy rich soil.

This voice is reverse lightning, infinite climbing fractal-branching, restless carving through the night from earth to sky.