From: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc
Subject: Return of the Son of the Non-Top Ten best (4 of 5)
Date: 15 Dec 92 23:34:46 GMT
Reply-To: gtaylor@vme.heurikon.com (Gregory Taylor)
Organization: Heurikon Corporation, Madison, WI

The idea of a top ten is not very useful. Rank is kinda blah blah blah
[insert disclaimer here]. Onward as we pass 10 and head for 15, w/out rank.
I've got a longer and slightly more detailed piece on Paul Lansky's
wonderful album in the works for rec.music.cd and a couple of other
places, but this is easier....

(artists unnamed) "The Tahitian Choir" [Triloka] 
One of the more interesting side effects of the current vogue of "World
Music" is that the market seems to have actually driven folks with 
recorders further and further afield in search of the "next big thing"
in world music, perhaps in the hopes of selling millions of copies of
their next release [a la "La Mystere des Voix Bulgares", which made a
tidy bundle for Elektra Nonesuch]. The side effect of this frantic 
search for novelty and the possibility of actually making money has
of late been the delivery of wonderful music to our ears - from the
more noble quarters of Peter Gabriel's "Real World" label, to the recent
Smithsonian Institution/Folkways releases from a 12-disc series of the 
Music of Indonesia [I said lots of nice things about disc 2 from this
series "Pop Music of Indonesia: Dangdut and Kroncong" in last year's
"best of" listing]. This year, for example, has brought us not one but
*two* discs from the Batak and Nias people of Sumatra [on Folkways and
a cleaner recording on New Albion] whose virtuoso tuned drumming 
has been written about for years but never actually heard unless you
actually knew someone who'd gone into the field. But the world music
category of my non-list for this year has got to be this CD from Tahiti
by way of a plucky Frenchman and the small and independent Triloka label..
It's all a capella, and a large ensemble (maybe 100-150?) people. The
work is, on its surface, really pretty recognizeable; you wonder when
listening to this work just how the traditions of Christian hymnology
might have either been grafted onto or been changed by the earlier 
forms of the music [listening to traditional African singing - particularly
Zulu - always makes me wonder about this]. Those of you who found
the aforementioned Zulu choir stuff to your liking and were also
impressed by either Bulgarian singers or music from Soviet Georgia
will probably recognize some of the more unusual harmonies and the
call and response antiphony here. The one vocal technique that I've
not heard anywhere else, though, is this eerie choral effect that sounds
like the entire choir does a pitch bend *down* in unison. The songs on
the CD all predate the arrival of westerners by ship (at least the texts
do. It's unclear to me that the actual tunes and intervals are preserved,
although there does seem to be something like quarter tone singing 
here and there) by some time. Some of the songs are so old that no
one even knows what the lyrics are about - they just sing on. Eerie,
stirring, and acoustic to the gills. Someone in the U.S. with a little
wider distribution should license this disc and market it like Nonesuch
marketed the Bulgarina Women's Choir - it'd be a big hit, I think.
Note: I found my copy at a Tower Records, so it's not impossible to come by.

Paul Lansky "Homebrew" [Bridge Records]
Don't you tire even a *little* of the big themes, the grandiose algorithms,
and the gnawing sense that you often have to hunt pretty hard to find a
piece of computer music to play for your aunt Mathilda? What if all those
High Culture computer chops were turned to the task of making music whose
subversion was "sneaky"? Well, here it is: an entire album of computer
music made by a highly respected practitioner in the field [I'm not
sure how long ago, but I think I did a short review of Paul's earlier
disc on New Albion "Small Talk"] that you can actually like. Paul Lansky's
"Homebrew" is a collection of 5 pieces of NeXT-generated computer music
whose roots are solidly in the domain of the "real" world; no

squiggly little cryptohorns careening around what sounds like concert
halls at lunch-launching speeds or the sounds of the carcasses of
some immense and protesting animal being dragged across broken glass
in front of a marching band trained in Tibet here, nosirree. Lansky remains
solidly committed to making music that originates in the everyday world,
and his tools are used in a way which "finds" music rather than invents it.
"Table's Clear" is perhaps the easiest to describe. Paul took a recording
of his kids making noise with the stuff in their kitchen, added a few
little side episodes, fed it into the computer, and then sequenced and
retuned some of the sounds into this huge, cheery wall of Minimalist
tuned percussion. The repertoire involves rapping on countertops, glasses, 
frying pans, and those rude little farting noises made by forcing air 
through your hands that your parents always hollered at you about. It 
is both simple, humourous, and it manages to evoke a more foursquare 
balinese "kitchen gamelan" kind of ambiance. It's great digital fun.
The raw material of "Quakerbridge" takes a montage of shopping mall site
recordings and then feeds them through a bank of tuned filters which
trigger ghostly clouds of twinkly mandolins and choirs, while clearly
retaining the original source material (the soundtrack for Moses looking
across the Jordan River and seeing the Promised Land as a crowded Mall?)
In another piece, Hannah MacKay's wonderful homey bedtime story 
voice creates this peculiar little poststructural fairy tale
populated with nothing *but* time phrases and their implied resolution.
It isn't compelling because of her terrific Sprechstimme technique or
the great huge wads of high-powered processing Lansky brings to bear
on her voice (in fact, the whole of "Now and Then" is very unusual in
light of Lansky's other compositions precisely *for* its simplicity and
lack of all but the most subtle treatment) - it's the connection.
"Night Traffic" takes a simple premise - the sound of periodic evening
traffic processed by the computerin a way that adds a little "chordal" 
material...the passing truck flashes by in D-Minor, followed by another
couple of tonal masses with four wheels on the pavement. And the piece
ends with another use of the "filters excited using plucked string 
algorithms" techniques [even *mentioning* or trying to paraphrase the
method used to make this work makes me cringe. I'm thinking "Gack. No one
will want to listen to if unless I just stick to the way stuff *sounds.*"]
on the sound of clapping - producing a kind of hybrid of something like
Steve Reich's "Clapping Music" with a tuned percussion ensemble. Technology
with a human face - a smiling face.

Arvo Part "Miserere" [ECM]
Not only does this recommendation come solidly into rec.music.misc from
the "Classical" lists, its content is located solidly in the tradition
of liturgical music. And I think that it serves much the same function
for me as the Gorecki Symphony I listed in posting #1. This disc is
interesting for the fact that there's a kind of sombre passion interrupted
by moments of high-volume full-throated howling. It's also a look across
Part's work. The Estonian-born Part, like the British Composer John Tavener
or (in some ways) the Italian Giacinto Scelsi, is one of a small family
of composers who were raised and schooled within the normal traditions
of 20th century 12-tone serialism/experimentation, and then turned to
musics with its roots in very old models of composition and religious
practice [Part's music has its roots in Russian Othodox music, Tavener
looks to the Greek Orthodox mysticism, and Scelsi looks to the practices
of attention and the minimal found in the religions of the far east];
The music has the eerie feel of being old and new at once. This CD
is the usual amazing ECM recording job, and a cast which includes the
early music group The Hilliard Ensemble and percussionist/improvisor
Pierre Favre. There is a setting of the traditional Latin "Miserere"
(it's the same text that you hear the kitchen boy singing during Peter
Greenaway's film "The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover"; Have
Mercy Upon Me/Blot Out My Transgressions...."), a shorter piece for
symphonic ensemble that succinctly lays out Part's particular variety
of Minimalist practice "Festina Lente" and a recording of the piece
that got Part in trouble with the Estonian authorities in the first
place - the first thing he wrote after his "conversion". It's very
simple - scored for a single beating drum and a solo voice which
interrupts the tattoo with these lovel spinning vocal lines. I suppose
that it also shares with the Gorecki piece that ability to superimpose
its own particular emotional/aural environment on the space in which it
is played; this is something I hear a lot from fans of New Age music.
Maybe I'm suggesting that this is a CD of music that *does* this.

--
The law moves quickly in the rain/and chokes the world with memorials./The
courts accept the lowest superstition/into evidence. And we embrace quickly in
the rain,/conceiving a hale infant with hands to wrinkle/the bedsheets toward
it, wave by trough by wave./Gregory Taylor/Heurikon /Madison, WI/608-828-3385
Newsgroups: rec.music.misc,rec.music.cd