intro.

So we went to the Banff Radical Reels film fest the other night. The first film: Supervention. A Swedish ski flick shot on 4K. Music by a Brit kid J Sigsworth.

Uhh. Yeah.

we are sparks of light [but we hide it].

Another song for warm summer evenings twilight when things quiet down ...

Draw yourself a line and stand behind it.


(Blurry-edged, your mind can still refine it)


We are all sparks of light.


(We are sparks of light but we hide it)

in this self half-illuminated.

W H I T E N O I S E .

A walk to the library one evening to pick out CDs at random. A dozen this time. One by one. Listened to them. One by one. They did not interest me.

Until the last one.

Her voice ...

... it blew me away ...

 

the power of strangers.

t h e   P O W E R   o f   S T R A N G E R S .

A friend of mine over IM the other day about her burgeoning yoga classes without realizing it no doubt said something offhand that left me thinking about it ever since. Simply she wrote ~

i need strangers to know that i exist

We were talking about her website and the Facebook and how though only friends of hers had bothered to 'like' her page in fact none of those friends had yet to come to a single class (umm, myself included). I think of this as I get random suggestions or invites or such to like someone's photography or artsy or whatever page (I don't usually bother). Not that there's anything wrong with that. Sending out a suggestion that is. But I wonder do they not realize the uselessness?

I too in fact did that a couple of years ago. Sent out an invitation to a group of friends on the Facebook (I did at least take the time to handpick a couple dozen or so) to like my music page. Within a couple of minutes though of sending it sitting on the couch afternoon sun streaming in I quite literally felt sick to my stomach. And really really stupid. Cos I realized the uselessness of it. Right then at that instant. That it was not going to do me a bit of good if some guy I happen to work with listens to my music and likes it or doesn't.

And I do not mean to categorically dismiss small random acts of magic.

But the two key words in that phrase are 'small' and (more importantly) 'random.' The odds that Dude X from work happens to know someone who happens to know someone high up the food chain in the record business are fairly small and (if it were to be the case) would be very very random indeed.

Not to say impossible. Just statistically about as likely as me being able to fly to the moon by building a spacecraft in my garage.



So back to what she said. About strangers. And needing them to know she exists.



That is the reality in that one little sentence. It definitely takes more work. To get strangers to know you exist. It's easy to send out a silly Facebook invite and maybe a little ego-enhancing rub to get a bunch of (I'll argue meaningless) likes. And thereby definition of 'easy' by extension fairly useless. It's much harder to think bigger. To find ways to reach out to complete strangers.

I don't yet know how to do that for certain. But just as certain I need to with this music I must write if I want it to support me (I do). As does she if she wants her yoga classes to support her (she does).



I'll need strangers to know I exist.

oh my love.

It's sort of a juxtaposition the way this song is used in the film Drive (which is in fact a really cool movie) but it also just works really really spectacularly. And anyway it is just a really really crazy-in-an-odd-but-really-cool-sort-of-way-kind-of-song ...

Oh my love look and see

The sun rising from the river

Nature's miracle once more will light the world 

But this light is not for those men

Still lost in an old black shadow

Won't you help me to believe

That they will see a day a brighter day when all the shadows will fade away

That day I'll cry that I believe

That I believe 

Oh my love high above us

The sun now embraces nature and from nature we should learn

That all can start again

 As the stars must fade away to give a bright new day

benjamin zander.

So J's and my new tradition is to watch TED Talks on Thursday evenings. We scroll through our Netflix and pick one out typically at random. Netflix handily organizes a dozen or so of them into groups on any given subject. Humanity's Future. Faith, Fate Or Fear. The Capitalism Paradox. Environment: Project Makeover. Knowledge Is Power. Just For Kids.



Music Revolution.



Buried in that group of videos was one entitled 'Benjamin Zander on Music and Passion.' Classical music in particular. His point to make was that classical music is not dead. That in fact every single human being has a passion for it. They just may not realize it. And to emphasize this point he uses clever and infectious humour and crazy hair and a Chopin prelude in E minor.



I about died laughing and was in the same moments brought to tears.

Singularity in the key of E minor ...

We are like a star collapsing

beyond our understanding

beyond our comprehension

extrapolated rapidly-accelerating returns

integrated artificial infinite change

the world to pass ...

... to know the mind of God is to know ourselves ...

Now to just finish the laborious orchestrations ...

a snapshot of sixty-three bars.

I came across something a bit ago that - well - actually piqued my interest. Rare perhaps I don't know.

Well rare in the context it has to do with music (umm - cos I'm quite picky about the little amount of music I perceive to being acceptable to spending my time listening). And rare also as it has to do with perhaps my own music. Never easy to put out there and such but an upcoming composition competition for Seattle Rock Orchestra - whom I have been following for a while now as their style and direction seems to fall in line with my - well - symphonic rock-type of music project I am currently and continually obsessed a bit with - did catch my attention.

Already working on a song I have taken to calling 'Singularity' which is - yes - based on the theory of the technological singularity where mankind potentially evolves from carbon-based neurons to silicone-based hardware - it seemed at least partially logical to just step up its production and composition in order to potentially enter it in this somewhat unique opportunity-of-a-competition.




Singularity like a star collapsing beyond a point in accordance with the law of accelerating returns. Of integrated semi-conductor complexities. Event horizons. Feedback loops. Theoretical computations.

It was mostly just an idea in my head based on a simple harmonic minor tonic-fifth progression. Scrawled in my notebook five sections ... an introduction - middle one - middle two - orchestra - and finale. A piercing flute on the final E minor of the intro. Emphasis on the diminished A. An idea in four-part counterpoint amongst the strings during the orchestra section. A voice. Soprano-alto-tenor-bass choir. A rock ensemble and strings and flute and oboe and clarinet and bassoon and French horn and trumpet and trombone and percussion and timpani in E and B and ...

... and of course piano.

Of course piano. Three-four triplets up and down the keyboard for the first minute-twenty before a fortissimo E minor introduces the first of the middle sections.

And that is all I have for now.

Sixty-three bars. And much work to be done. So enough rambling and back to orchestrations.

bach and beauty and bureaucracy.

Johannes Brahms once wrote about Johann Sebastian Bach’s Chaconne in D minor for violin in a letter to Claire Schumann -

‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’

And it is with this piece that a dude in jeans, a t-shirt and ballcap started his forty-five-minute-long violin concert at a metro station in Washington D.C.

One thousand and ninety-some people passed by. Seven people stopped to listen.



'What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.'



W.H. Davies writes to begin a poem entitled Leisure (six stanzas later he ends it with ‘A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.’). What - of the nearly eleven hundred people that walked through the metro lobby that morning - only one single person realized was that the dude was in fact a world-reknown violin virtuoso who had just sold out a concert in Boston a few days before where tickets went for an average of a hundred bucks a piece. And his violin was a 1710 Stradivarius worth a reputed three-and-a-half million. Dollars.

It was a sociological experiment that the violinist - Joshua Bell - had agreed to when approached by the Washington Post. The idea of course was to see that if under less-than-ideal circumstances (a bustling train station during morning rush hour chocked full of policy analysts and project managers and budget officers and consultants and bureaucrats suits and ties and all scrambling to get to work) and cloaking the identity of the performer under jeans and shirtsleeves beauty so-to-speak could - as Emmanuel Kant may have envisioned - transcend it all.

But alas ... it did not.

People just said they were busy when asked afterwards. Had other things on their mind. Some who were on cellphones spoke louder as they passed him to compete with his 'infernal racket.' It seems perhaps the explosion in technology has in some ways limited - not expanded - our exposure to new experiences. Increasingly - with large thanks to the likes of the Facebook and Google and their filter bubbles - we get our news from sources that think as we already do. And cram our iStuff with music we already like.


No time to stop and listen to something that would have apparently made Brahms blow his brains out because of its beauty.


So it sort off makes me sad I guess. Maybe cos I’ve been on a Bach kick reading a couple of books and watching a couple more documentaries within the past few weeks about the late great Glenn Gould. Maybe cos even the pitiful and notoriously-retarded Youtube comments on a recording of Bach’s Chaconne by Itzhak Perlman are littered with things like ‘Not even Plato had the fortune to listen to such music’ and ‘Pure magic, plain and simple’ and ‘It is the sound of God when he cries.’ Maybe cos I hope that I would have stopped had I wandered through that particular metro station that particular morning even if I did not recognize the Chaconne in D minor.

Because hopefully I would have recognized the beauty and taken a moment or two to soak it in. Soak it up. Remember how Kant said ‘the beautiful itself is either enchanting or touching, or radiating or enticing.’

And leave then having been reminded ... it is everywhere.

Looking out over a sea of mountains rising above valleys of clouds immersed under a shimmering sun. My son when he smiles without inhibition before he realizes he is doing so his hair in need of a cut so it is starting to curl. A strain of a Bach melody held on the D string then taking off furiously building and building to some ultimate end that should be able to most certainly transcend it all.

first frost.

Happy Christmas ... time to listen to some Veils ...

lacrimosa [day of tears].

Holy shit.


Umm, sorry.






There was a statement that flashed on the screen upon hitting play on the Mini for the film 'The Tree Of Life' that said simply how the producers urged the viewer to turn up the volume very high to truly experience the film.


And this piece by Zbigniew Preisner is an utter testament to that statement.


It may be since I heard Sergei Rachmaninov's D minor piano concerto that a piece of music has so completely and utterly shocked and amazed me. Coupled with the vision in the film of the creation of Earth it is a powerful experience.


Umm, this video though will utterly not do it justice.


But the music is out there.


Find it.


Play it.


Unbelievably loud.


Play it unbelievably loud.


Crush all the air around you lying in a dark, empty space and let it wash over you.


The soprano voice rising ever-higher.


Joined by the choir.


And the orchestra.


Ever-higher.


Ever-higher.


Ever higher.

one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today.

I started the final term paper for my senior-year of high school advanced English lit class with a similar sentence that Harvey Sachs uses in his book The Ninth: Beethoven And The World In 1824 ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125, is one of the most precedent-shattering and influential compositions in the history of music.

To be precise, mine went something like this ~

Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in D minor, the "Choral," his one hundred and twenty-fifth work, is and will always remain his greatest, most monumental gift to all mankind.

Before anyone draws any conclusions - or calls me out for possible plagiarism that garnered me a perfect 'A' for my rather scrutinous diatribe of Beethoven's Ninth (beating the to-be valedictorian's grade by nearly a full letter and prompting his mother to insinuate to mine that she must have also helped me on my paper, to which my mom could both honestly say she did not as well as report back to me it seemed his mom had apparently helped him) - keep in mind I handed in that term paper in 1994, and Sachs' book was published last year. Maybe Sachs got hold of my term paper somehow ...

Regardless, it was one-hundred-eighty-seven years ago today that - in a small Viennese theatre named the Kärntnertor - that what was indeed to become nearly-unilaterally-thought as the greatest achievement in Western music (and dare I say all of art) was performed for the first time by a hack-by-today's-standards smattering of musicians and vocalists.

Similarly, Beethoven is just-as-nearly-unilaterally considered of epitomizing and in fact being 'the quintessential genius of Western culture.' About his last symphony, the Russian revolutionary and at-times-anarchist Mikhail Bakunin whispered to conductor and composer Richard Wagner in 1849 (a mere twenty-five years after its premiere performance), that 'if all the music that has ever been written were lost in the expected world-wide conflagration, we must pledge ourselves to rescue this symphony, even at the peril of our lives.' The Ninth is considered 'both an extraordinary, living musical organism and a milestone in the history of civilization.' And so on.

The superlatives for this monumental work and achievement can continue ad infinitum. I certainly spared none in that term paper that I perhaps somewhat pompously but honestly and affectionately titled -

Uhh, yeah.

To continue in my pompous-even-at-eighteen-years-old vein, I then indicated on the second page of said paper that the complete (emphasis used for real back then) orchestral score and a sound recording of the symphony (I did though leave out the terse suggestion of how only Zubin Mehta's live performance with the New York Philharmonic from back in 1983 could be considered worthy of listening) should be used when studying my paper, as well as that 'a thorough understanding of introductory music theory is assumed of the reader.' I was fun even back then. And apparently also just a smidge opinionated.

I included an English translation of Freidrich Schiller's An Die Freude ('Ode To Joy') and then - over the course of eleven carefully-typed, double-spaced pages (with no help from my mother, by the way) proceeded to prove - through at times a bar-by-bar 'critical analysis' of each of the four movements along with historic snippets much like what, over the course of two hundred pages, Sachs tries also to accomplish - that indeed this was Beethoven's greatest gift to mankind.

It wasn't hard.

I didn't use the term 'unilaterally' above (twice even) for no reason or without just cause (or at least not to my over-opinionated-self). I wrote about how Beethoven was never certain about the use of a choral finale or - for that matter - the theme of the 'Ode' itself. It is widely-known that he was what Sachs called a 'write, rewrite, and re-rewrite man ... not a wholly-spontaneous creator.' He went on to say that 'Beethoven knew that perfection was impossible.'

But back to my paper ... I wrote of its 'gigantic proportions' (before I had discovered the gem 'ginormous') and how it more-or-less was responsible for effectively bridging the gap between the Classical and Romantic eras of music history. I quoted Donald Tovey - a notable musicologist among other things - who once wrote 'of all the single works of art, of all passages in a work of art, the first subject of the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony has had the deepest and widest influence on later music.' To which I responded in my own attempt to back up his statement ~

The opening pianissimo fifths, subdominant and dominant in the key of D minor, gradually quicken and pile up into a colossal wave of the descending D minor triad ...

and how Beethoven masterfully built the tension through the use of a gradual crescendo lasting for six bars.

And on and on. And on. And on.

How the timpani comes in playing the dominant F to the key of B-flat. How the second movement ends on the major parallel triad of how it began (parallel keys share the same tonic, in this case the D) and how Beethoven again does this modulation in the fourth movement at bar 230 while seven bars later the movement proceeds to its second section and the tempo ups to the marked 'Allegro assai.' And how - as the movement draws to a close - 'Beethoven is unrelentless in his quest for power, piling tension on top of tension' while 'the chorus is nearly shouting, doubled rhythmically by the entire orchestra.' Of how the orchestra tries to bring the symphony to an end in bar 936, 'but it takes three more powerful, fortissimo quarter notes, enforced with pairs of triplets by the entire woodwind section and the rumbling thunder of the timpani, to finally conclude the symphony.'

How it all ends on the triad it sought to build way back in the opening bars of the first movement with those pianissimo descending fifths ... the D minor.

It should come as no surprise then that I - as a rather self-described precocious teenager - did in fact own a copy of the complete score of this symphony, and would listen intently sitting alone in my room on my bed thumbing through it bar-by-bar, line-by-line, page-by-page as the music unfolded. Unaware of my surroundings. Completely drawn in. Absorbed.

Beethoven was well-known to be scornful. Conceitful (there was only one Beethoven after all!). Pompous. Even hostile - constantly lashing out at friends and acquaintances only to come crawling back quickly after seeking their forgiveness for his verbal brutalities. But at the same time, he portrayed a perfect juxtaposition of a love for humanity but contempt for human beings. A sense of his own musical superiority but physical frailty. An affection for others 'inextricably bound up with affliction.' So on May the sixth, at the final rehearsal for the following day's concert, the composer 'stood at the theater's stage door and embraced, one by one, each of the amateur orchestra and chorus members who were participating, gratis, in the proceedings.' He was grateful. And humble. His own humility had crept in for a moment and taken over.

I could go on of course. More than I already have. My own history admittedly quite tied up with Beethoven. Like of how there is a reason I strongly feel - like the second movement of the Piano Sonata in C minor, op. 111, shows in that Beethoven took us so profoundly into his heart and - as Sach's put it 'into the heart of the Universe' - that anything that followed would have been 'impossibly anticlimatic' - be it Beethoven's Fate or ours that there is no tenth symphony.

That there is not because similarly - in his Ninth - he took us further into his heart than ever possible from any other composer or any other musical work before or after - that he simply had to leave this Earth before he completed another. From those opening pianissimo fifths of the first movement to the blistering Scherzo to the strains of the most-eloquent and beautiful of all slow movements to the grandiose finale and crashing end.

'What must have run through his mind as the ink dried on the last notes?' Sachs asks.

It is hard for me to imagine the mind that can come up with the idea that 'all uniform motion is relative, and that there is no absolute and well-defined state of rest (as in, no privileged reference frames) from mechanics to all the laws of physics, including both the laws of mechanics and of electrodynamics, whatever they may be' - otherwise known as Special Relativity.

But even more difficult for me to imagine the mind that can come up with two-thousand-two-hundred-and-three bars of music that can bring the whole of humanity to its knees.

It has been often said in various but similar ways that if everyone on Earth could hear (insert composer's name, be it Bach or Beethoven or Mozart), there would never be another war. Beethoven had no idea his last symphony - with near-exponential vigor following the premiere performance - would take on a life of its own and come to epitomize more eloquently than any other musical work this particular sentiment.

The summer following that historic evening one-hundred-eighty-seven-years ago today he - disgruntled and grumpy with his affairs and those around him - ran off to the country to escape the throngs of Vienna and take up residence alone as was his custom. To put the symphony behind him and begin working on his final (and again - thought nearly-unilaterally to be the most extraordinary in the genre) string quartets.

And of course then - unknowing of the Fate of the Ninth - Beethoven died just shy of three years later.

I think of myself - that kid sitting on his bed in the dark my ears wrapped with headphones listening painfully loud to Mehta conducting the New York Philharmonic to click on a reading lamp so that I could trace the notes of the score with my finger as it poured itself - as indeed Beethoven poured himself - out to me. To be wowed. Intoxicated. Absorbed. I thought then as I do now that - indeed ... the Ninth Symphony is Beethoven's most monumental work, and his greatest gift to all mankind ...

... then ... now ... and for all eternity.

ad infinitum finis.

"So I stumble across your blog and I'm astonished to the point of sorrow at how beautiful this stuff is. All of it. The music that is somewhere between the sound that the Universe makes as it spins, and the melody that exits two lover's mouths as they kiss. 

Incredible. All of it."

So it is finally finished. A piano sonata of sorts and a concerto and a rock song all rolled up together somehow. It is called Ad Infinitum. It is available in three parts (sans vocal line of course) for streaming/download on my reverbnation page.

---

And for some reason this one means something. I don't know why. Maybe cos I've been telling myself all this while that I needed at least three demos before I could start really putting this sh*t out there. Maybe cos this one stretched every fathomable ability I have performing, composing, orchestrating, recording, mixing and mastering. Maybe cos it seems to come closest to this mess I always hear in my head. Every day. Whilst walking back and forth between offices at work. Doing dishes. Running. Trying to sleep. Trying to concentrate on anything else.

And so this is the third.

_cheers

ca-den-za
n.
1. An extended virtuosic section for the soloist usually near the end of a movement of a concerto.
2. An improvised or written-out ornamental passage played or sung by a soloist, usually in a "free" rhythmic style and often allowing for virtuosic display.

[Italian, from Old Italian, cadence; see cadence.]




Cadenza often refers to a portion of a concerto in which the orchestra stops playing, leaving the soloist to play alone in free time without a strict, regular beat and can be written or improvised depending on what the composer specifies. It usually is the most elaborate and virtuosic part that the solo instrument plays during the whole piece (think 'classy predecessor of the guitar solo'). At the end of the cadenza, the orchestra re-enters and generally finishes off the movement on its own or with the solo instrument.

Some notable examples of cadenzas include the first five minutes of Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto in B-flat minor (with it's enormous chords), the beginning of Beethoven's Fifth Piano Concerto in E-flat major (where Beethoven in his typical style specifies the performer to play exactly as written rather than improvise) and - of course - the incredibly difficult and quite monumental toccata-like (or simply 'virtuosic') cadenza in the first movement of the infamous 'Rach 3' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra in D minor.

just about unbearable.

Last year at our annual bike-around-Lake-Tapps-Island-mega-garage-sale-extravaganza I picked up a burr grinder for five bucks (didn't work, needed a part) and a USB turntable (didn't work, needed a part). No worries for either. A twenty-dollar burr for the grinder and it was as good as new. And a seven dollar stylus for the turntable rendered it back to life.

The first reason: the receiver I got to replace my older one did not have a phono input (phono voltage is much lower than line-level - so-called RCA - so the receiver/preamp must have a dedicated input labeled for phono because it then takes the miniscule amount of voltage a turntable stylus outputs and transforms it to line level before sending it off to the amplifier). So my turntable I've used for years and years was more or less useless. And this new one had line-level out.

And the second reason: I love vinyl. Yes. I love vinyl.

I love evenings spent incense or candle burning one light flickering in the living room corner the crackle and ambience of a good vinyl recording filling my space. I love summer barbequeing running back and forth from the kitchen to the grill an old Neil Diamond record blasting windows open cos its warm and it fits for summer. A record of Mussorgsky's grandiose Pictures at an Exhibition cranked so loud even with the cover on the turntable flipped down the feedback loop starts to become unbearable the neighbors probably wondering what's going on in there all that classical music but because classical music can only be listened to at near-unbearable levels.

And that's why I am breaking back out the vinyl. Most of my classical collection is on vinyl. And I need to immerse myself in it to remember what it is I am aiming for while writing and to not get sucked into the hole of sameness where ninety-nine-point-ninety-nine percent of current music resides. Or something like that. Because I do not want to write a rock song. I want to write a piano concerto. A piano sonata. A symphony of sorts. All embedded in a rock song. With lots of dimished chords. And unconventional progressions. And ...

And anyway. I need to listen to more classical music. So I unburied the old wooden crate I scored back in LA that is my vinyl collection from under the Bechstein and moved it to the front corner of the living room.

And I thought some organization was, well, in order. So I flipped through my little collection ...

Ah yes. 1976. The. Greatest. Recording of Beethoven's monumental Fifth. Carlos Kleiber. He was the sh*t. The real deal. Viably one of the greatest conductors of all time. Hardly recorded anything. Fanatically particular with the works he did conduct. A perfectionist to the core. German. He knew Beethoven. Well, not literally. But he knew how to conduct Beethoven.

Kathy, Kari and I were browsing the vinyl section of the old Seattle downtown library when they lived on Capitol Hill back ten or twelve years or so. I was pawing through the Beethoven section and came across this twelve-inch. Checked it out and took it home. Gently placed it on the turntable delicately setting the stylus down as it spun up. Bumped the volume way up. Sat back. And there it was. From the first couple of bars I knew the tempo was brilliant. Perfection. The dynamics exactly as they should be. I had heard dozens of recordings of Beethoven's C-minor symphony over the years. None of them sounded like this. None. This was it.

Flipped through some more.

Suede's Dog Man Star. Best. Pop. Record. Of. All. Time. Songs the likes of The Two of Us. The Asphalt World. Still Life. Holy sh*t. Still Life. A symphony in itself the orchestrations incredible.

Lots of Suede 45s. Love 45s. Suede was always a band known for producing spectacular b-sides. I remember borrowing my friend's copy of Trash - the guy responsible for getting me into Suede a few months earlier playing Dog Man Star one day the two of us working out back at the Scottsdale Goodwill then The Two of Us came on and I hit repeat instantly and listened to it for hours the rest of the afternoon while the sun set behind the Maricopa Mountains west beyond the city of Phoenix me plopped on the open backend of a semi trailer - with the b-side Europe is Our Playground set to repeat for hours on end (yes, one turntable I owned year's past had a repeat function). Late nights putting on vinyl recordings of songs like High Rising and My Dark Star. Sweet F-A. Brilliant.

Not sure if any other recording of any other piece of music has ever effected me as much as Wilhelm Backhaus' playing from 1960 of these three particular Beethoven sonatas (coincidentally, the same three sonatas on Vladimir Horowitz's almost-as-perfect but still brilliant recording - which I also own on vinyl - made over a period of several years back in the early seventies). Listening to it one evening on headphones I discovered rather quite surprisingly how absolutely critical the symbiotic notion of imperfection is to the equal but opposite notion of perfection. How the two are intertwined. Balanced. And necessary. Backhaus was brilliant. And no coincidence he played a Bechstein ...

Then there is my signed vinyl by the three guys one gal of The Veils I picked up at their show in St. Louis. Missed them that summer three years ago when they played at the Crocodile in Seattle. Didn't see the news they were even touring until that had passed but in a week they were playing a tiny bar in St. Louis. I booked a ticket that night.

Got to see my family and drive into St. Louis just around the corner from the Budweiser brewery this dilapidated bar in a sorta-sketchy area got there too early so walked a few blocks to another slightly-less dilapidated bar and had a Guiness from the tap. Closer to show time I wandered back in time to see them pull up in their battered white van they had driven that afternoon from some hole in Oklahoma. Unload all their own gear and set up. There were eight people there. I had hooked up with the owner of the place beforehand to make sure I'd get a ticket. Told him I'd be flying in from Seattle. Guess I didn't need to worry about it selling out but he gave me a beer on the house for my effort anyway.

When Finn asked for requests my first was of course The Leavers Dance but he didn't seem too interested in playing anything from Runaway Found (the album I've labeled as the second greatest pop album of all time, right behind Suede). So I tossed out One Night on Earth which they did play. F-ing incredible. I was just about in tears.

After the show I chatted with them all a bit. Apparently I had bought their last vinyl copy. So they all signed it. I also picked up a t-shirt now all worn out ragged turned painting shirt mostly.

So I should probably also use this turntable for its other intention - converting vinyl to MP3 of course so I can have some of this stuff in a bit more portable format. But still. Nothing quite like putting on a vinyl record and turning up the volume to just about unbearable.

glenn gould 31/32.

Leaving.

"As the eyes are framed for astronomy so the ears are framed for the movements of harmony."

~ Plato, from the Republic

No single composer in the history of music portrayed a sense of harmony more so than Johann Sebastian Bach. And no pianist has ever performed Bach more perfectly than Glenn Gould.

glenn gould 30/32.

Voyager.

dice.

The new song I've found to bring to a close these final summer days is a song by Finley Quaye called Dice, of which I couldn't find a decent video on youtube so if you're really interested in knowing how it goes, it's on the first volume of the O.C. mix or all over youtube in various montage-esque videos people have thrown together.

I've had it on repeat all weekend. I can't believe today was the last day of August and (technically) now it's September.