rostasi

I discovered that back in the early '70s!

Someone asked me for a John Cage interview that Art did and so I pulled a few of these issues out and i'm enjoying them again. One of them even has a handwritten letter that Art was going to send to an "Andrei", but I guess never did.

Thanks for this!

Review in June issue of The Wire: “We do things in our own scruffy way,” announced Madeline Rogero, mayor of Knoxville, opening this year’s Big Ears festival. ‘Scruffy’ might be this small town’s self-image, but it was looking spruce to me – not a candy wrapper in sight, traffic becalmed and a tightly managed schedule of 200 performances across ten venues. Since 2009, Big Ears has been an agent of cultural regeneration in this birthplace of Quentin Tarantino, James Agee, Cormac McCarthy and Johnny Knoxville himself. I came expecting Trump heartland. I found a welcoming, tolerant, cultural city that’s quietly going through an urban rebirth. Music, art, food and housing gentrification are all in the mix. Art, continued the mayor, promotes empathy, which in turn leads to justice. It was one of many statements over the long weekend whose allusions hardly needed spelling out – especially in light of the fact that two overseas performers had already been denied entry permits. Knoxville houses the University of Tennessee – a vast campus still spreading – and the future-retro sky tower set up during the 1982 World’s Fair still stands, a reminder of Knoxville’s utopian, outward-looking mentality. Big Ears director Ashley Capps also runs Bonnaroo and owns several of the city’s key music venues, including the Bijou and Tennessee theatres, and the converted warehouse the Mill And Mine, which hosted everything from Deerhoof to Oliver Coates (a rock crowd cheering solo Messiaen? Now I’ve heard everything). The programming was a mix of contemporary music, jazz, rock at the more creative end and a little folk. So, after Wilco’s sell-out at the Bijou, Jeff Tweedy – in hirsute Ozark Mountain phase – went into full “Machine Gun” mode, thrashed a wooden Strat and theremin along with drummer Chris Corsano and Darin Gray on horizontal guitar. Gray joined percussionist Glenn Kotche in the tropicana-tinged On Fillmore duo, more charming on stage than on record, with the two clearly enjoying each other’s company as they tease each other’s efforts (“I thought that was a pretty successful solo,” retorted Kotche to Gray’s goading). Pianist Frederic Rzewski prefaced MEV’s set by reciting the parable of the Gadarene swine. “There’s a lot of pigs here,” he appended, before embarking across a vast tundra, the audience parked up close to Richard Teitelbaum and Alvin Curran’s electronic tabletops. Variations on “What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor” spluttered from the piano before the fade out. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Drone Mass and Colin Stetson’s reboot of Górecki’s Symphony No 3 introduced sober and sombre notes, and the schedule in St John’s Cathedral was pitched towards reflection. With evensong embedded in the festival programme, the preacher took the opportunity to welcome all nations, creeds and colours to the pews. Richard Bishop, not known for his ecclesiastical bent, set up a cascade of modes and scales in folk guitar extemporisations that journeyed from India to Appalachia via North Africa, Arabia and Iberia, tracing similar folk routes to Davy Graham. Hans-Joachim Roedelius, who during an earlier Q&A spoke about being forcibly conscripted as a boy soldier into Hitler’s army and getting arrested by East German Stasi, flooded the space with tranquil piano preludes and the atmospheric buzz of electronics. Norwegian Hardanger fiddler Nils Økland and his five-piece band forced the crowd to their feet in appreciation of their fluid blend of meditative folk overtones and vibrating harmonics (Sigbjørn Apeland particularly effective on harmonium and the church organ). When Økland thanked the audience for coming “to hear alien music made by people you don’t know, speaking a language you don’t understand”, he received a warm and wild response. Økland was part of a Norwegian invasion package that included Frode Haltli’s Border Woods, an accordion driven composition that evokes spirits at play in the forests skirting Oslo; a 20th anniversary meltdown for Supersilent, and a crushingly powerful set from Helge Sten aka Deathprod. The Tennessee Theatre has surely never been subjected to such harmonic trauma, as wave upon wave of particulate noise and threatening drones drove a tungsten wedge of gravitas into the evening, and felt all the more politicised for that. Gavin Bryars Ensemble’s Sinking Of The Titanic, by comparison, sounded like Sunday afternoon on the boating lake. American minimalism comes in many guises. It’s implicit in the rippling undertow of Tortoise, who, roused from a ten year (s)lumber, blindsided the Mill and Mine with musclebound, gurning, funk-charged versions of their back catalogue. It’s been revived in the agitated threshing of Julius Eastman, whose curious outsider status is wittily celebrated in Jace Clayton’s Julius Eastman Memorial Dinner project, part Eastman showcase, part sketch show. And minimalism is the Molotov cocktail under the asses of New York meth rockers Horse Lords, with their hypnotic, die-cut double-kit riffage underpinned by cacophonic electric guitar airshipped from Mali with stop-offs at Tom Verlaine and Terry Riley’s Reed Streams. (Apparently they manage a mean Eastman cover themselves.) The deft curation extended to a running theme around Middle America, taking in Matmos’s rendition of Robert Ashley’s Perfect Lives, David Harrington Group’s live soundtrack to No Country For Old Men, Xiu Xiu’s montage of Twin Peaks scenes, and in Colleen’s singing of the lullaby from Night Of The Hunter (scripted by Knoxville author James Agee). But there was cosmopolitanism too, as Matana Roberts sang-spoke of her own struggles to affirm her identity amid her nation’s tangled racial and political history; Steve Lehman weaponised his conscious, pan-African future-jazz unit Sélébeyoné; and Henry Threadgill’s Zooid achieved harmolodic heaven. No scruffiness there."

Many of their regulars have been trying out the beta site since February and I've been reading their 7 pages of opinions on a forum that has broken off from it. It is coming along slowly but surely.

Ustad Rais Khan (1939 - 2017)

The MP3 Format is now Patent Free. from the Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits. "On April 23, 2017, Technicolor's mp3 licensing program for certain mp3 related patents and software of Technicolor and Fraunhofer IIS has been terminated. We thank all of our licensees for their great support in making mp3 the defacto audio codec in the world, during the past two decades. The development of mp3 started in the late 80s at Fraunhofer IIS, based on previous development results at the University Erlangen-Nuremberg. Although there are more efficient audio codecs with advanced features available today, mp3 is still very popular amongst consumers. However, most state-of-the-art media services such as streaming or TV and radio broadcasting use modern ISO-MPEG codecs such as the AAC family or in the future MPEG-H. Those can deliver more features and a higher audio quality at much lower bitrates compared to mp3. For more information about mp3’s successful history, please visit http://www.mp3-history.com/."

Erkki Kurenniemi (1941 - 2017)

"Col. Bruce Hampton dies hours after 70th birthday celebration at the Fox Theatre" He was kind of a cross between Beefheart and David Thomas. Liked his work a lot.

I made a suggestion earlier about moving forward (even if you're looking backwards musically) by establishing a new setup that's more public - something like the situation that more and more labels are using with Bandcamp for instance. Yeah, little return on downloads - even with a minimum purchase amount, but I've seen some labels really present great looking LP/CD packages with that same purchase minimum that seems to garner lots of interest. When Strut Records only makes 500 copies each of the various formats of the Sun Ra Singles collection and all of them sell out in just a few weeks (except for the 3-Disc CD, interestingly so, but with only 5 copies left), then there's something to say about dropping your limit from 3000 copies down to something more financially manageable like 500 or 750 or even a thousand. Free or improv jazz labels new and old have moved there and I see classic jazz labels there too. I think Mosaic can just look at their run as a good one that served a purpose for its time and they can just retire or if they want to continue, then they need to break out of their shell and start looking around and talking to some folks about rebranding for the 21st Century.