Category: Field Recordings of the Future

We subscribe to a music streaming service but rarely seem to use it. Today we changed that dynamic. I called up some “Systema Solar,” a Columbian party band that we had read something about, then the recently remastered with extras version of Uncle Meat, the 1969 Mothers album that was on the turntable when Dave Mahoney’s stereo was stolen from the little house we lived in that year. I still have the empty album cover. It was intensely memorable because we tripping on LSD and it was no micro-dose. The band was at their peak, I gave up on them after it, and “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” sounded as good as it did back then.

Secret Keeper, Stephan Crump and Mary Halvorson’s duo is just amazing. Mary studied with and then performed with Anthony Braxton. She shares a mathematical approach to music making with hi but she is so wide open she is one of kind. She takes the guitar into unchartered territory and it is so refreshing. By chance her brand new octet album was voted “cd of the year” in the morning’s NYT. Stephan Crump is my favorite bass player. He’s been at theBop Shop withMary before and with his trio. He’s also played at Kilbourn with Vjay Iyer. With Secret Keeper on Sunday night he bowed his bass more often than plucked. And he started one song, a piece called “Planet,” scratching on the side of his bass while Mary Halverstand banged on the strings with her glass guitar slide. The song morphed into an extra-planetary walk. My favorite piece of the night was the mournful and beautiful “Disprortionate Endings.”

Tom really should do something about the small but nasty “No Public Restroom. Thank You” sign, visible in the enlargement this photo.

We’ve had tonight’s Ossia performance on our calendar for months but it just got bumped. Kahil El’Zabar’s Allstar Ritual Trio will performs at the Bop Shop with David Murray, a founder of the World Saxophone Quartet. Kahil has been here many times with both his Trio and his Ethnic Heritage Ensemble and we have seen every show. Tonight will be no exception. I took this video six years ago he played the Atrium in Village Gate.

CD Baby offered a Black Friday special on album submissions. The 50% off deal was good until midnight last night even if your project wasn’t ready to submit. Ours is not. We had to come up with a name for the cd. We chose “Seventeen,” for the year, certainly not the sequential number of Margaret Explosion albums, and not so much for the age but maybe a little.

We got together six times in small groups, and played. The amazing Pete LaBonne was here for a couple of those days. Twelve things rose to the top. Bob, our guitar player, has yet to contribute parts to many of the songs. He hopes to have time over the Christmas break.

Jim Jarmusch’s “Gimme Danger” is a pretty tame Stooges movie but it is still a must see if you are a fan. It sounded great in Little 1, the original and largest of their five screens, and the sound system in there is great. Jarmusch uses the Rich Stim playbook for animations constructed to illustrate Iggy’s stories and I like that. Funny to picture of Iggy, a Discount Records employee, playing drums in his parent’s trailer. And then kinda sad to see the band move back in with their parents after those first two brilliant albums.

We watched the “Soundbreaking” series on PBS. About 45 minutes into the “Four on the Floor” episode we spotted Vapourspace listed on a poster for the “See The Light” tour with Moby, Aphex Twin and Orbital. I texted Mark Gage to make sure he had seen it and he hadn’t. You can listen to Mark’s smash dancehall hit on this page.

A pile of cardboard boxes of my paintings separates the double bass from the drums. We have a snake running down our basement stairway and another under the rug in our hallway that ends in our bedroom where Peggi has set her amp up on our wicker laundry basket. We have been in record mode for the last month or so but the red light is only on when Arpad is in the house. Margaret Explosion is making a new record, a multi-track affair, and we’re doing it in our home where we are trying to get separation between the instruments by setting up in various parts of the house. We recorded six sessions of bass, drums and various combinations of sax, guitar or synth. Pete LaBonne was in town for two of those evenings and then he came back to add piano tracks on all but one of the tunes.

This is something different for us. Margaret Explosion recordings have all been live two track stereo mixes with no overdubs, mostly recorded at the Little Theater Café where we have had a weekly gig for fifteen years or so. And the music is all improvised. We don’t have any songs until we play them. This time we toyed with taking melodies from some of those songs as foundations for new recordings but we’ve found, in fact, “you can’t reheat a soufflé.” Paul McCartney said that. So we winged it but in a situation where we can pull an instrument out of the mix or redo the track without leaving trails on all the other tracks. Very little bleeding.

Arpad stops by two nights a week and we lay down overdubs. His pc and mixing console is set up behind me. Peggi is replacing a sax track as I write this entry. Arpad records with “Reaper.” It is available on the Mac as well and I may download a copy. I’ve been importing his tracks to Garage Band so I can do some editing and simple looping. Bob plans to do his guitar overdubs in his home. It would be simpler if everyone used the same software and we could work from files shared in the cloud but we haven’t got there yet.

The Women’s National Soccer team plays Switzerland tonight and three of the WNY Flash have been called up for the occasion. We’ll be at our gig but our hard drive is in record mode. That match is happening in Utah at the same time as the third presidential debate in Las Vegas. We’re recording that too.

Hope you can stop out tonight for Margaret Explosion’s special “Pre-debate Cleansing” performance at the Little Theater Café 7:00-9:00. We promise no politically tinged lyrics. In fact there will be no lyrics at all.

Margaret Explosion plays Wednesday evenings in October and November at the Little Theatre Café.

“Press one for popular music, two for classical and three for jazz. If you would rather hear silence while you are on hold, press four.” I called Apple to get to the bottom of my music syncing issues. I’m not sure if I got there but I got some guidance. With the “iCloud Music Library” button switched on on my iPad I could not sync a new playlist (live Margaret Explosion music from last Wednesday) from iTunes on my desktop to the iPad. Apparently you have to switch “iCloud Music Library” off on the iPad and then the iTunes syncing menu on your desktop will then allow you to add new playlists. I don’t think any of my music is in the cloud Apple is trying to sync my device with the desktop music library through the cloud and there is not nearly enough room so I a mess of partial playlists. I pressed “four” by the way.

In the car I generally listen to AM 137, the PBS affiliate, or the Spanish language Poder 97.1 on the FM side. But if I’m chopping vegetables I listen to “Deep Garage” on Vicious Radio.

We didn’t attend the event. We are outside of the whole singer/songwriter scene. But we did hear Bob Martin’s version of the song when we stopped by his place to drop off a hard drive with new Margaret Explosion songs on it. It makes me nervous, sitting in a chair as someone strums a guitar and sings carefully crafted songs. An informal call for entries goes out to songwriters to write a song with the same title. Last year it was “Don’t Go Drinkin’ on an Empty Heart.” This year songwriters gathered at Benunzio’s and performed their version of, “Someday, You’ll Thank Me.” I cannot think of a good reason to not go drinking on an empty heart but this year’s title is workable.

I never liked it when my mom made me send a thank you card. I appreciated the gift but the thank you part was forced and awkward. And it makes me uncomfortable when someone goes out of their way to thank me for something I did. I didn’t do it to be thanked. Love means never having to say “thank you.” Maybe sub-consciously I would just rather have the upper hand after helping someone but when I am thanked it just doesn’t ring right. I guess it supposed to make me feel better but it doesn’t. For me, it sort of cheapens the act of helping.

I don’t have the lyrics for my version or even a melody but I do have the hook. “Someday you’ll thank me but I wish that you wouldn’t.”

Our fifteen minute breaks at the Little Theater Café are usually noisy. It seems everyone in the place at once. But not not so night. A Chinese woman, here visiting her boyfriend asked us if she could play her pipa during the break. It is a traditional Chinese instrument but she made it sound really modern as she strummed the strings by opening the fingers of her right hand with incredible rhythmic precision.

The ushers handed us pink foam earplugs along with our program at Kilbourn Hall tonight. The first piece, “On and Off and To and Fro, was as loud as it was challenging. A board member thanked Home Depot for helping them construct a few the instruments. This was the beginning of the 20th season for Ossia, the student run modern music, small ensemble program. Of the five pieces the oldest was written in 2008 and one of them was performed here for the first time, a world premier. This music never swings but it often strange and beautiful. My favorite, “Of Being Is a bird,” featured soprano voice singing John Keats poems and harp.

You gotta stay up really late to hear DJ SinMin’s way cool “File Under Popular” show on WAYO. Either that or get up really early on a Saturday morning. I got an email that Jack would be playing some Personal Effects, Invisible Idiot and Margaret Explosion this week so we tuned in. He picked some pretty cool tracks and I was kind of blown away by how well “Bring Out The Jazz,” “Suitcase of Beer,” “1969” and “OK Corral” fit together considering they spanned about thirty years of bands Peggi and I have played in.

ESPN2 broadcast the US Women’s friendly with Thailand. It was Heather O’Reilly‘s last match with the national team and they gave her a great send off. She played well too but that is a given. She is my all-time favorite player. But the announcers spent way too much time talking about Megan Rapino kneeling for the national anthem. We almost turned off the sound but we didn’t want to miss any Heather tidbits.

As most people know, a soccer match is divided into two 45 minutes halves and the play is virtually uninterrupted. There are fouls and penalties, of course, but the clock doesn’t stop and the station can’t cut away to a commercial. It’s perfect. When the match was over, we tried switching to the Bill’s game. There they cut away every time the ball changes hands. And the play itself comes in tiny bursts of action. We gave it try. We can’t do it.

I wish this Kinky Friedman poster didn’t have to be in every shot I take at Abilene but I’m digressing already. Lydia Lunch returned to the town she grew up in and took charge of the place. She stopped her performance, the way Joni Mitchell did her when she played with Bob Dylan, and pointed her fingers at a bunch that were talking loudly at he bar and told them to shut the fuck up! And they did. Like I said, she takes charge.

She recited and read over low volume ambient tracks, Sonic Youth-like rumblings or free jazz, but she sounded best when she killed that and went solo. She has not changed in all these years and her bleak but funny world view seems more pertinent than ever. She was riveting.

Phil Marshal followed Lydia with a different band from his last appearance. Same drummer of course, his son Roy, but Dave Arenas on stand-up bass and Mike Kaupa on trumpet. We had heard Kaupa in a trio setting at the Little. The band was doing standards but Kaupa is such a great player you can’t take your ears off him. He sounded fantastic with Phil sampling his lines, playing them back and then playing on top of it all. This band spun Phil’s songs in a looser, rich and deep fashion, a picture big enough to feature Rick Petrie’s poetry in a few pieces. A most rewarding night.

Peggi was chatting with our teacher, Jeffery, after yoga class. I had climbed out on the big rocks that are protecting the docks at the Rochester Yacht Club. I was taking a photo of the Charlotte pier and I looked down at all these pieces of driftwood that had gotten trapped between the rocks. They were all about the same size but there was such beautiful variation in the color. I rounded up an armload and took them home. Each one is a finished piece of art.

The guy standing next to us was screaming so loudly at the tv in O’loughlins he must have bet the farm on “Gun Runner.” His horse was in the lead for a bit but only showed in the end. We were down there years ago on warm Spring day, watching the boats pass by, when we realized it was Kentucky Derby day. The bar owner was selling tickets for a pool and we bought a few but our horse didn’t come in. The Kentucky Derby was Peggi’s and my first date, the real thing, in Kentucky. We were there the year Secretariat won. Anyway, we come down to this joint every year to have a pint, watch the race and look out at he river.

If you are gonna come home with your ears ringing it might as well be for good band. We heard NRBQ in the park yesterday and just like dozen or so times we’ve seen this band, we got right down front, on Terry’s side. He had the same lineup as last time he was here but a different drummer, a young kid, and he sounded great. Couldn’t swing like Tommy could, but right-on otherwise. Even sounded great on “Sitting In The Park.”

Still in tidy-up mode I found this photo. Taken somewhere in the late seventies, I may not come across again for another thirty years. Dale Mincey, stretched out across the couch, was the lead guitar player in New Math when I was in the band. Robert, with the shades in his hand, was the bass player. And I found a yellow Post-It note with my father’s Spotify password on it. Not that we could forget. The Mayflowers, the May Apples, the Trillium and every other wildflower he introduced us to, remind us of his passing. And we are tuning into the birds.

I came across this this quote and it has fired me up. “Failure is my best friend. “If I succeeded, it would be like dying. Maybe worse.” – Alberto Giacometti

Margaret Explosion plays the four Wednesdays in May at the Little Theatre.

Margaret Explosion – Feminismo

We kind of thought the Spontaneous Duets event would be crowded so we said we would make a point to get there early. We didn’t and it wasn’t. The event was on our calendar so it showed up on my watch but the 4pm start time really caught us by surprise. The sound in the unlikely Eastman rehearsal space on the corner of East And Gibbs is really nice. Surrounded by glass, there is no need for sound re-enforcement and the grand piano sounds magnificent in here.

This year’s round robin started with a woman playing alto sax by herself. A six string electric bassist joined her after five minutes and five minutes later the sax player sat down when a vibraphonist joined the bassist. A piano player joined the vibraphonist and then a trumpet player took the vibraphonists’ spot.

The room got downright raucous when a tenor sax player reached for the sky with the trumpeter. A bass player, who we had just heard playing with Rich Thompson’s quartet, joined the sax player and the music settled down into pure beauty’s with long sustained notes. Then drums with bowed bass followed by trombone and drums. Finally a guitar with the trombone and then the guitarist solo. This is a really cool concept, part of International Jazz Day. Today.

We stopped over at the Little for the Prince event. Spevak was there to cover it and a WDKX dj was supposed to be spinning Prince tunes in the café but they didn’t show up. A women in line with Peggi said “I was just listening to the station in my car and they’re playing all Prince.” So Marian climbed up on the counter and pulled the rabbit ears out of the radio. We told Jeff we liked his recap of the local Music Hall of Fame event. He spilled quite a bit of ink on the Plasmatics and I told him Wendy was in my high school class. She lived over the right field line of the baseball field at the end of my street. Doug Klick was a lefty and he used to pull the ball into her yard where she was sunbathing. And then, of course we’d run in there to retrieve it.