“…We leap out of the sinful, lonely subjective and into something that’s somewhere else. In that place I am no longer subjective but subversive. In that place I can write. I can write because language is allowed to transcend and transform.”
-Jenny Hval, from ‘Girls Against God’
Mortar # 26 (3-year anniversary!)
A diffusion of feelings, a collection of drafts, scribbles, and some reflections. Long songs, many songs, short write ups, a few pictures. I really appreciate you friends and readers. This has been such a rewarding way to be connected in lieu of social media. SO MUCH has changed since beginning this creative outlet but my love of interpreting, investigating, sharing, and processing through writing hasn’t!
Tags: “Wonky metered”, “splinter-rhythms”, “Groovy-random”, “Glitchy ‘n’ Bitchy”, “Stitch ‘n’ Glitch”, “Sample-blizzard”
Source: Lolina, Brandon Juhans
Location: London, UK; Durham, NC, USA
File Under: Relaxin Records, Trans-Atlantic Collaboration, Electronic Music, Laptop wizardry, a DAW in AWE, Experimental music
See Also: 🔮, 🎹, ☄️, 🟡, 💀, 🎤, 🇮🇷, 😢, 🎸
Street Lights
a memory moves through a mist lights pass over my eyes swish one by one by one by one one one
Naomi Akimoto’s 1982 sophomore release bursts into the ballroom with schmaltzy big band and neon drenched funk covers of classic jazz, ragtime, and blues numbers. But tucked away amongst the groovy and sometimes gaudy pop whirlwind is a beguiling computer churned cover of the country classic “Tennessee Waltz.” The waltz was written by Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart in 1946 and popularized by the velvet candleglow recording made by singer Patti Page in 1950. By the early 1970s American country music had fully saturated the airwaves and record stores across Japan and “Tennessee Waltz” was the highest selling song in Japanese history by 1974. Akimoto’s debut release “Rolling 80s” even features several Honky-Tonk, Blues, and Country covers including an absolutely bananas take on “Bye Bye Blackbird” which sounds more like a number from the Crash Bandicoot OST than it does on a glitzy 80s Pop record. In “Tennessee Waltz” arranger/saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu splices ‘n’ dices Akimoto’s vocals into a clunky cyborgesang accompanied by pastel-colored synth. Careening into the verses are chaotic interruptions of synthesized horn lines and pop-fizz drum machine. Disparate elements blend oddly enough to create a digitally bastardized, exciting, and clever take on a once mellow oater ditty.
Russ Garcia’s sultry lounge sound squeezes every drop of nostalgia out of buzzing vocal harmonies, goldenhour horn lines, and the warm fuzz of analogue recording. Garcia, who is originally from Oakland, CA, spent his early career at NBC Studios in Los Angeles recording and conducting for films, TV and radio. Soundtracks to films like The Time Machine (1960), Atlantis- The Lost Continent (1961), and the TV show Rawhide (1962) showcased grandiose orchestral arrangement rich in dramatic shifting harmonies providing lush musical backdrops to the brushed and glowing silver screen. Garcia’s canon of soundtrack work aside, what he may be best known for are his vocal and jazz orchestra works. Mostly recorded outside the intent for the screen, the music is just as slinky, spectacular, and moody- a soundtrack for the cocktail lounge, moods, memory, and feel goods.
This era and style of music is often listed under the “Lounge/Exotica” sections at record stores or in the $1 bin alongside 200 copies of a Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass album, but there’s something to be said of the earnest warmth in Garcia’s music. He was very much in the same ilk as film composers like Lalo Schifrin, Henry Mancini, or Ennio Morricone but took his bow early in L.A, sold his house, and using film score royalties sailed globally with his wife before moving to New Zealand. He took up a teaching position and continued to tour regularly with his jazz orchestra while writing, teaching, and dedicating his music to the Baháʼí faith of which he had been a part of since 1955. At 92 years he conducted his own birthday celebration and continued to work up until his his 2011 death in New Zealand at 95.
Two recent recordings
🍽️ Kitchen Jam was made in June 2022 with my cherished friend Nathan Hewitt at his apartment in Ridgewood in sweltering heat. We improvised music using only kitchen utensils and materials and chatted about it for a bit afterwards.
📚 On November 22nd my friends Mitch and Cole joined me as a trio on a bill of improvised music at Adobe Books in San Francisco. Based loosely on a previous improvisation inside of Battery Townsley in Marin County, the results were spacious and pastoral.
I’m a huge sucker for relaxed electric keyboard music. What’s not to love about the simple joys in instant harmony conjured through 44-88 plastic keys featuring an array of value drum machine etchings and versatile midi instruments. r mccarthy is infinite bisous is Rory McCarthy, the British musician responsible for Dick Arkives, a collection of demos recorded in the Dick Ark studios outside of Leicester, UK. On Issue 1, he recorded “Melody 2”, a 3ish-minute long vibe surrounding a two chord vamp lifted off an upright piano. Layering it thick on top are microscopic swirls of modular synth, deeply backgrounded percussion tickles, some phat bass, a lil snare and kick drum, and a meandering glittery synth that curls through the room like a whisp of smoke.
Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s music can be largely credited to the folk music of his homeland as it can the absurdities of the Fluxus movement, post-modernist tonalities, and carrying on the torch of experimentalism in Hungarian classical music from composers like Zoltán Kodály and Béla Bartók. “Nacht und Morgen” comes relatively early in his career at 1955 (the date on the Youtube video is a typo) when Ligeti was fresh out of school at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest where he then taught. “Nacht und Morgen” doesn’t reflect his then obsession with 12-tone serialism. This is a music theory system developed and popularized by the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg where all 12 notes of the western tempered scale are used equally within a piece to try and avoid tonal centers, roughly meaning the music isn’t, say, in the “key of C” or “Eb Minor” or any key for that matter. The initial “Nacht” passage creates gently rolling waves of tone clusters, repeating in Hungarian, “thorny huge jungles, mystery forests, infinite wilderness.” Building to a shining roar, the volume jumps down with the word “still,” painted in close knit bell tones. In distant chimes, the chorus pipes “boundless, endless still”, accentuated by the haunting prayer of the sopranos, “heart in endless silence, still” before the piece fades quietly into the night on a solemn hold reiterating and engendering “still.” “Morgen” feels like the folk dance answer to the sweetdreamstate of “Nacht” as the chorus frolics to the notion of clocks ticking and the day beginning. The scurry of onomatopoeia still beholden to tight blurred tone clusters is embellished with vocalized rooster crows and reaches to the edges of the SATB vocal range for an epic and dramatic ending.
Operating Theatre is the adventurous and freewheeling musical theater troupe founded by Roger Doyle and Olwen Fouéré in Dublin, Ireland in 1980. Made up of a rotating cast of performers, actors, musicians, and artists, the group met regularly to make several records and experiment with the medium of musical theater, especially through electronic music. Doyle used the Fairlight EMI, an early computer synthesizer to accompany and soundtrack decades of Operating Theatre’s work. Amongst a milieu of more obtuse experimental bent soundscapes, Operating Theater also crafted a few of these incredibly moody no-wave bangers that have been on repeat in my life since discovering them. “Queen of No Heart” broods scenes of a shadow world where the Queen of No Heart’s “sea is the sky” and where “the dawn is the night.” Its beautiful twilighted imagery is conjured through Elena López’s gutsy vocals, accompanied by Sean Devitt’s churning drums, and the digital frontiers of Doyle’s Fairlight programming. Take me to this shadow place and leave me there to listen to whatever’s coming next.
I remember the sunset like it was a film fading and yellowing the edges turning a little crusty and folding in on itself sunspeckled wash into night a hush a quiver a warmth a sigh taking pleasure in straining the verse kind and mellow laundry softened cloth under tongue tasting mist on skin pencil seeking the paper again If we are here now, then how? Now is how we are here Then when are we here now?
I can’t honestly remember when I first heard Luigi Nono’s music but I certainly remember the first time I heard the haunting sounds of his 1985 composition dell’Azzurro Silencio, Inquietum. Contrabass flute, contrabass clarinet, and live electronics create a deeply haunting atmosphere out of the liminal spaces between pitch and harmonics, reverberation and silence. The groans of these two massive instruments are fed through the alienating manipulation of mixing board and spun into thick dewy webs of breathy creaks, bellowing moans, and a powerful lack of tonal gravity leaving you to float untethered through a fog of infinitely darkening blue.
Revisiting Nono is in tandem with revisiting listens to bassoon repertoire and hearing music that at one time was a daily and all consuming part of my life. Vienna-based bassoonist Sophie Devaux tackles arguably one of the most technically challenging modern bassoon concertos with a grace, singular edge, a musical fluidity, and understanding that breathes life into classical music which can often feel stodgy and uninspired. André Jolivet’s bassoon concert was written in 1953-54 and premiered in 1954 by the Orchestre Radio-Symphonique in Paris with soloist Maurice Allard. The piece clocks in at under 15-minutes making it a shorter concerto but in that time the soloist is subjected to dexterous kaleidoscopes of notes, register extremes, and a display of stylistic color and tonality that resembles the sprawling accessories of a Kandinsky painting. Devaux manages to straddle an exhilarating line between rubato and technical accuracy, giving her performance an edge that really matches the off-kilter atmosphere in the concertos faster sections. Honey is oozing down the walls in the Largo-cantabile movement where I’m gripped by her care to dynamic shading and lush romantic lyricism. It sounds like she wrote the piece and it’s in that performance of intimacy, play, and familiarity that I think her performance of the Jolivet shines.
2022
This year I’ve moved three times between two different places, held five different jobs, travelled to three other states, wrote thousands of words, made dozens of friends, grew inches of hair, smashed millions of grapes, and drank hundreds of wines. Change and growth are the constant and turns out that can be really difficult and confusing. More than ever before, in what feels like a betrayal of my creative freewheeling dreams, I want more stability. Five years ago I was fresh out of grad school where I studied music composition, played bassoon every day, played or attended way too many gigs a week, worked at a lame franchised coffee shop, lived in a crumby apartment where we made unmentionable music, and I had very different priorities. Now, in stark contrast to back then, I hate being busy, love doing things solo, don’t play much music, and seek balance and self-discovery in my life over an enveloping passion and ceaseless drive. But why does it sometimes still feel so uncomfortable to molt, to shed forms of your old self to transform into something new? To let go of things that didn’t work and pursue the things that do? And to just give less of a shit? When I reflect on the magnitude of change experienced in the past year I am thankful, proud of myself, and knowing that the change will continue- maybe I will face it with less trepidation. Maybe 2023 will hold new understandings, forms of stability, continued self-realization, emotional and mental growth, and permission to be.
have relaxing holidays and a happy new year! Thanks for reading and listening 💜
love and lunacy,
Cody