Monday, December 30, 2013

LIVE UPDATE one to go... and it's a fast opener - !


it's not been snowing here in the u.k. - far from it, since most parts of the south-and-midlands at least, has been swept again and again with lashing wind and rain, and the odd bit of blazing sun, for what seems like weeks now, - most unxmassy xmas ever. (zmas.) the north hasn't exactly had it easy either, but for once the brunt was borne by the "posh bits" - or some of them at least: surrey, sussex, kent.

- no, the one choice was just a nice, apposite state-of-the-pagan-in-the-modern image-spell, captured a few arse-end-of-decembers ago when we actually did get a (lethally) white christmas. it is suitable, because:

- the weather has indeed turned horribly wintry, along with the bloody (nearly) endless rain, and whippet uno (now nine years old, or 55 (...))has been feeling it dreadfully. never mind the details of the consequences - either for him, for him-and-me, for the rest of the family and for the still-grieving mrs c, five years ago today.- ...
 (but tomorrow will look ... different, i think)

- and because a spell against the pernicious intrusions of this vile and insidious creeping cold is what is called for, here. and how delivered?

- lo, and behold, there came unto the western men and women the nine scorched-sayers, the nonuply-undelivering-twisting-open-fist, unwinding its cragged and barbed way back up through the earth which was violated, screwed in the shifting; violated because rudely and ruthlessly pushed aside, but as we will see, the excavation was required and has, has revealed incredible marvels, details impossible to unlock within rectilinear, mere straight-in-and-out "clean" switchblade-jobs.

- in-and-out storytelling. [i was always good at that (*)] - this is not what the ninetet came to tell us.

the actual full, explicable and written-in-sort-of-english version of this will appear in due course, but in the meantime i am nearly completed with it, onto the last piece as say in the title above, and i well and truly got more than i could have wanted out of doing it... but that will be a reflection, to be made in the new year, and not what has simply been the final LIVE UPDATE, for this particular journey...


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Sunday, December 29, 2013

LIVE UPDATE ... fire burn, and cauldron bubble/


comp. 209 is more than halfway through already, and the musical planes we have been exploring are most amazing. long, interestingly long and detailed inhabitings of refined artistic-conceptual subspaces... followed by complete change and transportation seamlessly into another such, entirely and utterly different from the next and previous. this type of essentially hybridised and multidimensional artistic experience... requires a new type of listener-reader--thinker. like it or not, i am it..., and if you'rereading this then you probably are too. (if it still says 2013 on your computer screen right now then you definitely are closer to me than the rest of humanity!  o pity us! - but in any case -

good lord it's not even new year yet, but i did embark on another little journey, before coincidentally finding myself in a situation whereby its essential for me to do what i am now; i.e. sit in the house, on the sofa, thus comforting and stabilising the injured whippet of the household (also ensuring that the uninjured one doesn't cause further inadvertent injury) - ... - and on and off, i have been (in human terms) alone in the house whilst doing this, so the yoshi's ninetets do indeed provide the backdrop. the always-underway-nor-ever-complete type of listening-exploring-inhabiting which we do in following gtm, - as opposed to "listening" to it as semi-background music (*1) - can, by definition, be switched on or off at any point, once one has entered the stream at its own natural pace (of course this term itself *pace* itself has to be considered differently "hereonafter", since it comprises many different and separable pulses or rhythms; meta-pace is not a term i can bring myself to use,  quel horreur - and i don't want to slow down enough to think of an alternative just at this second)

- and then switched back on again of course -

fuck, all three of these pieces have been wonderful to listen to, to follow as i say - very very hard still to write about! writing and imagemaking, and sequencing, over time... hmmmm, now there's an idea i could work with ;-)

- but yeah, just remember the twenty-ninth minute of the third piece (i.e. disc 3/8)  - 29 in 209, not exactly hard to remember that, which is good. we'll be coming back there, in due course... right now we are streaming...

... and just approaching the end of this piece, where i may as well finish for a bit (*2)  -

...


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(no really, see comments if you want to know what's actually going on behind the scenes in terms of philosophical self-discovery-through expression... which is what this blog is, duh. (*3)

Saturday, December 28, 2013

LIVE UPDATE the yoshi'nine-athon is underway...


sod it, whatever youse thinks at this (relatively-)advanced stage of proceedings, i am literally-figuratively revealing a whole tucked-up and -pleated little microcosmic world tunneled from within the confines and depths of my navel; subtitled the manifold explorations explored backwards along the spiral, the whole conducted in close (/distant) association and under the blessings of mr anthony braxton

[ - *** - and invoking also e.e. cummings, herman melville, alan moore and thomas pynchon (though n.n.i.t.o) ]

- i am asking you to share my (actually pretty modest) belief that my inviting the hapless reader thus into a (what is very nearly literally in this instance, since the next verb-derived noun  after the brackets ties back into the extended metaphor so flippantly and flagrantly paraded in the dizzy heights of the first sentence - ): complication seemingly (tho not actually) entirely of my own invention or devising... - you ask - ? well, the answer is simple: once you're here, regardless of how you done got there, y might surprise y'self by hangin out a lil longer than expect', and even come to dig the view.

i genuinely wouldn't offer it if i didn't sincerely believe it was worth it...  {{{guuuush}}}

- (though (of course (i've known for some time that (everyone else can see (clearly (yessss... clearly) the extent "to witch"  i've at least shown consistent pa
ce with previous years in terms of easily-measruable unfinished postage and gerenal fart-arsery)))))

;-)

uh yeah the ninetet hyperspin,  the ninetet hyperspin, it only took in one disc in the end, cos, well blow me down if it didn't seem at last about three and a half hours all on its own. by the time i actually got the pod out to check where we were, i was astonished to find us all with fifteen mins still live on the clock, in the first set of the opening night. so comp. 207 still and none other...

:))

a lot happens in there needless to say - ! hey GO LISSEN ;-) 

BUt i will check back with y'all in due course and soonmost. now, when were we all free again? does anyone at this level actually celebrate new year? (well... the hard-drinking hard-fighting celts obviously - !!)

remind me...


... to remem-berrr....

c..~ xx

 


*** numerous emendations and restorations were deemed necessary and were made today, the 29th. see the first comment

whether or not to revert to the use of british english for "draft" in the first line of said comment is currently bubbling away in my small intestine ;-)


Friday, December 27, 2013

... and a happy new year


- just time to squeeze out one last triple-triple-deep-distilled metafluid ounce ee({e}) -e - thanks, i needed that - before yet another one-a them pesky new yar thingies... which i always quite enjoy as the ultimate harmless private joke and amusement rather than as any act of self-politicking and/or promoting...

... in the meantime, i say: at the moment alexander hawkins' album of braxton rep is one possible album i (liver-mindedly(*1)) salivate over more than i would even steve lehman's - well, depending on the personnel i suppose and besides, the above is not meant disrespectfully to mr lehman at all, but rather to acknowledge the increasingly-imposing stature of mr hawkins, one of britain's few clear, strictly non-derivative composer-bandleaders alive as far as i am any judge ( [as far = some distance, if greater than most in the allotted time then at least partly thanks to some timely and knowledgable guides, i guess ;-) without them, as you can see by now, i would certainement never have done any of this (or this or this or this... whadadada...] )

- and nudge, nudge i think (and have indeed tonight slipped it into alex's cocoa, so to speak) that young ms-or-is-it-fraulein laubrock might be a good choice of co-explorer for the dense and super-populated pan-tropical jungles of anthony braxton's living-nay-thriving music/(s) - lehman btw has just been mining and refining his own coalfaces for long enough that a similar release from him in 2014 would bear a wholly different configuration of weights and stresses and angles and scents, flavours &c (*2) - i really do think that the young a.h. could knock 'em all flat with his offering if and when he chooses to do it - but in the meantime only he knows how realistic a project like that is in the coming (or indeed any other) year. lotta labels out there, few if any of 'em making any actual money as i understand it... and for that matter, only he knows if he wants to do it. i'm just sayin'... the man collects(-cted) braxton scores and charts (a.o.) and is living the great example in his own way. not for nothing does he play equal partners with the right-hand man after all.

...

and in the meantime meantime, some people really have been doing stuff which is, like, braxton rep upon another plane(t) or somethin', in the best possible way, which is to say that the leader a) knows full well that the influence is right out there for all to hear, and delivers a really convincing understanding of how to write within (what he perceives to be (some of)) braxtonian idioms or sound/mindsets, and b) has gerry hemingway on the traps, and indeed mr hemingway's old dutch master-wingman and longtime co-explorer wolter wierbos on the trombone, demonstrating (a.o.) (some of) what he has learned via george lewis and ray anderson, in particular... bassist dieter manderscheid is hitherto-unknown to me, but acquits himself marvellously well in such fast, fast company and is brave enough to invoke the spirit of mark dresser, right there in the middle of the album (*3) - and confident enough to pull it off with some aplomb. the leader himself, well - that's more than just one album doing this stuff and not the first time i've noticed the blatant braxtonian compositional flavoring - and while i'm aware the saxophonist has more to him than "mere" braxton-homage (*4*), it's still a remarkably good, powerfully cogent and successful outgrowth of a creative undertaking which (a.o.) keeps alive the braxtonian compositional spirit as tradition, and ... yeah, i've basically been enjoying listening to it (as i obviously and avowedly have to the output of mr hawkins, though on fewer occasions just recently)..!

***

yes, so happy new year everybody ***modest lo-budget fireworks***

 - and yes there is more on the way, but the promised 23c-athon will have to wait jus' a leetle bit longer... so let's round this year up now and look forward to that, at least ;-)


incidentally my latest meta-playlist consists simply of the eight (so far) ninetet gtm performances, in order (*4). i haven't got round to the actual immersion, not yet... it's on the way though...  :- )

hal c.. (x)



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