First Lines of Rob Young's "All Gates Open: the Story of Can"

 "Can Studio, Weilerswist, February 1997.

It's the mattresses that strike you first. There must be scores of them, fixed to these walls, floor to ceiling. And the ceiling is a good eight meters above our heads."

- Rob Young, All Gates Open

This is probably the best musical bio I've ever read. Young combines the history of the band and interweaves it with the contextual story of the post-war German musical scene and cultural happenings. His insightful and poetic deep listens of album tracks help those of us who may not know what it is that we're listening to (even if we like it). Like all musical bios, it runs out of steam at the end as the musicians do, but Young combats this with a nice summation of the band's influence. The second part of the book is a series of interviews and journals from Irmin Schmidt, the last surviving member of the band, and is interesting but not essential reading. My only quibble with the book is that Young obviously relied a lot of Young - I didn't get a sense of who some of the other band members were as people. I would have loved to learn more about the upbringing and history of Jaki Liebzeit, Can's drummer and the engine behind their propulsive music. Regardless, I learned a ton about a band I admire and came away with an even greater appreciation for their work.

Here's a good overview of the Can story to wet your appetite.

Tab Dump 2021: Music

As with the 2021 in Art: The Tab Dump, this is a collection of interesting links both for you and for my personal reference. Enjoy!

Catching Covid in late 2021 gave me an opportunity to lay around and listen to all of the Can re-releases. More on this later, but for now, check out these summaries of their complication of The Lost Tapes - a collection of music they discovered when cleaning out their old studio. Like all albums of that kind, it's a grab bag, but both "Millionenspiel" and "Grablau" are powerful improvisational epics, and "Oscura Primavera" sounds like it could have been recorded by Sonic Youth 10 years before they were formed.

1. Freq's summary
   
2. Pitchfork's review
   

David Toop's Oceans of Sound  exposed me to a lot of new musicians and musical styles, including:

• The minimalist influence of Erik Satie. His Early Piano Works are absolutely compelling solo piano pieces, slow, halting and haunting piano sketches.
  
• Gamelan was a genre to which I had never been exposed. Listening to this long, rhythmic, pulsing music reminded me of Can or Stereolab. Lou Harrison is a good introduction to this type of music; his The Gamelan works of Lou Harrison is a great listen.
•  Edgar Varese: a composer who envisioned electronic music before the capability existed.
•  Luigi Russolo was an Italian Futurist who wrote a manifesto called The Art of Noise and invented a wide array of bizarre instruments. Bizarre but inventive!

I get a huge kick out of Børns' video for the Faded Heart sessions.

Growing up, my love of electronic music was sparked by "Headphones Only" every Sunday on WIZN. I used to record some of the shows onto cassette so I could listen to the music all of the time as opportunities to hear electronic music was limited in Burlington, VT. One of the cassette songs that I loved but never knew what it was - and finally realized this year was Yellow Magic Orchestra's "Computer Game" off of their eponymous album. Great music! (Note: some listings divide the song into the "Computer Game" and "Firecracker" tracks - but it's all one song to me.)

My favorite ambient artist is Tetsu Inoue. His classic Ambient Otaku LP is a perfect album; I only wish I could purchase a copy for less than hundreds of dollars. You should know more about him, so here's a collection of some writings.

Another good ambient album I enjoyed was Meg Bowles A Quiet Light - particular the track "Chant for a Liquid World." Here's Meg talking about her music.

Brian Eno's Neroli is perhaps one of the most relaxing pieces of music I've ever heard. The technical reason for this, as Pitchfork’s Chris Ott wrote is that “The hidden side of Neroli appeals to a select class of music theory buffs, fascinated by the flattened second and seventh of this Phrygian modal, and an insistent hang on the scale’s fifth.” 

Public Image Ltd (PiL)'s box set The Public Image is Rotten - especially the live tunes - reminded me of how much great music Johnny Lydon produced after the Sex Pistols. Streaming it while doing a woodwokring project inspired me to read up on what might have been the most powerful incarnation of PiL - the studio magicians who Lydon and Bill Laswell recruited for 1986's Album. It was always mysterious who exactly played what - this PopLife article details who did what. I mean: Tony Williams and Ginger Baker on the same album! You've got to give it a listen. Williams work on "FFF" might be my favorite power rock drumming of all time.

Running in Las Vegas recently I laughed at a street sign that literally read "Road to Mandalay." It immediately lodged Midnight Oil's "Mountains of Burma" in my head. Not being an Australian, I never knew what the song was about: mystery solved! 

 Related:

Time for another Tab Dump

Science Tab Dump 

Bride of Tab Dump

2021 in Art: the Tab Dump

Partly for your benefit, but also partly as a reference for me to come back to, please enjoy the Art-related open tabs I collected over 2021:

Shen Wei at the Elizabeth Stewart Gardner

1. This summer I went through a Paul Klee obsession. More on that later, but until then this is an insightful examination of his famous late work Death and Fire.

2. One of the artists Klee leaned on as he learned how to paint - it took him years to master the craft, was Robert Delaunay. This article about Delaunay's use of color was insightful in how he used color and how it was inspiring to others.

3. We took the family to see Shen Wei: Painting in Motion at the Elizabeth Stewart Gardner museum in the Spring. Such a creative and inspiring collection.

4. The collection Tom Thompson and the group of Seven contains some of the best landscape art I've seen in some time. While painting in diverse styles, the group captures the energy and finds a wild meaning in the rural areas of Canada that I find absolutely compelling. I've tried sketching landscapes like some of the pictures in this book it's much easier said than done.

5. I like the semi-cartoonish quality of Robert Dufresne's paintings. 

Someone pointed me to the compelling posters of Palestinian artist Farah Fayyad. Capturing scenes in posters is an interesting mixture of playing with icons while retaining the individuality of the scene that is quite challenging but powerfully resonant when done well. 

Hunter S. Thompson on Finding Purpose

Hunter S. Thompson was an incredibly intelligent and interesting person who wrote some fantastic books. His output also became sadly reduced to a shell of what it was after many years of drinking and drugging. However, when he was lucid, he was extremely insightful, and this letter to a friend on how he should find his purpose is essential reading. 

Money quote: “…a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES.”

 

 

First Lines of Jeff VanderMeer's "Authority"

 "In Control's dreams it is early morning, the sky deep blue with just a twinge of light.  He is staring down from a cliff down into an abyss, a bay, a cove. It always changes. He can see for miles into the still water. He can see ocean behemoths gliding there, like submarines or bell-shaped orchids or the wide hulls of ships, silent, even moving, the size of them conveying such a sense of power that he can feel the havoc of their passage even from so far above. He stares for hours at the shapes, the movements, listening to the whispers echoing up to him... and then he falls. Slowly, too slowly, the falls soundless into the dark water, without splash or ripple. And keeps falling."

- Jeff VanderMeer, Authority.

I put off writing this until after my second time reading the novel. Why? Because Authority is a strange book. Summarizing the plot makes it sounds either dull or pedestrian. But it's far from that - I'm convinced it's a masterpiece of mood, an elegiac study in paranoia that leads one to question everything, to assume a position of paranoia. It's also a slow burn; if not for a bout of insomnia I'm not sure I would have made it past the first few chapters as they are slow compared to the taught mysteries of Annihilation (the first book of the trilogy). But I'm very glad I prevailed - once the book picks up steam you ride along with Control on a ride of mysteries, of corporate secrets and plots, of scientific paradoxes, of business power structures, of clandestine organizations, all in service to uncovering the great mystery of Area X. In my first reading, I equated it to the alien detritus of Roadside Picnic, but it's more then that (as Acceptance, the final book in the trilogy, reveals). But looking for answers is besides the point. VanderMeer has spun a creepy tale that dramatizes our fruitful search for meaning in, well, just about anything, resulting in even the most anodyne of things potential objects of betrayal, horror, or confusion. It's a hell of a ride - and one that was even better the second time around. 

Related Posts:

First Lines of  Jeff VanderMeer's "Annihilation"

Book Review: "Road Side Picnic" by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky