7/4

July 10, 2008 For Knitting Factory, Westward Ho (Brooklyn, Too) By BEN SISARIO, NYT Jared Hoffman has a vision for the Knitting Factory: smaller, leaner and outside of Manhattan. Far outside. For 21 years the nightclub has been a symbol of downtown New York music, gaining an international reputation for an eclectic, finger-on-the-pulse aesthetic. At the Knitting Factory’s original location on East Houston Street on the Lower East Side, and at 74 Leonard Street in TriBeCa, where it moved 14 years ago, jazz has mingled with punk, avant-garde rock, hip-hop and underground sounds of all types. But Mr. Hoffman, who took over five years ago, is betting on a plan for the future that will involve a lower local profile in Brooklyn and a big role in two cities distant from downtown New York in every way: Boise, Idaho, and Spokane, Wash. This week the New York club, the headquarters of a company that also includes a club in Los Angeles, won community board approval to begin moving into 361 Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the former site of the Luna Lounge. In TriBeCa the Knitting Factory has three performances spaces, the largest holding 400 people, but in Brooklyn it will have only one room, for 300 or fewer. Two weeks ago “Knitting Factory Concert House” signs went up outside larger halls in Boise (capacity 1,000) and Spokane (1,500) that the company recently acquired. “We don’t have to be the biggest kids in New York City to be the Knitting Factory,” Mr. Hoffman, 45, said in the Leonard Street front room one recent afternoon as a parade of tattooed young men lugged in the night’s cargo of amplifiers. “What we do have to have is a pipeline that brings us the most exciting new music from the cities where the newest, most exciting new music is being created.” The survival of the Knitting Factory may depend on a big change. The Leonard Street building was recently sold, and while the club’s lease runs through next July, Mr. Hoffman said it has no future in increasingly upscale TriBeCa. And though its once-renowned bookings have remained strong in niches like hardcore punk, noise-rock and independent hip-hop, the club has slipped down the status ladder as newer, sleeker rooms like the Bowery Ballroom have become popular. Blank spots have begun to dot the Kniting Factory’s calendars, along with once unthinkably unhip events like battles of the bands. “The Knitting Factory has struggled to define itself ever since it lost its emphasis as a center for avant-garde jazz,” said Tom Windish, a booking agent whose roster includes indie stars like Animal Collective, Hot Chip and Justice. “The quality of the lineups went down as the distance from their roots increased.” In New York competition for bookings has grown fierce with the rise of a turf war among the dominant concert promoters, Live Nation and The Bowery Presents, leaving less powerful clubs squeezed out. The Los Angeles branch of the Knitting Factory, which opened in 2000, is also struggling. Next week it faces a public zoning hearing over a building-use permit that could result in its closing, though Mr. Hoffman said he was confident that the issue could be resolved. “The Knitting Factory is very much a labor of love,” he said. “Not a lot of people are getting paid in full.” To secure a steady source of revenue Knitting Factory Entertainment, the parent company, bought a majority stake in a Boise concert promoter, Bravo Entertainment, in 2006, and acquired the rest last year. The deal included the clubs in Boise and Spokane as well as a touring business that has taken the company into head-scratchingly new territory. In the last year it presented Elton John, Lyle Lovett, James Taylor and LeAnn Rimes at amphitheaters and arenas in Idaho, Montana, South Dakota and other states. Those may be incongruous bookings for an organization that made its name with noisy fare by the likes of John Zorn and Sonic Youth. But Mr. Hoffman, the company’s president, said the business in the Northwest brings in about 60 percent of its annual revenues of $19 million, effectively subsidizing the New York and Los Angeles rooms. And in the Internet age the company says it is also developing an audience in a quickly growing region that most of the touring industry pays little attention to. “If it happened last night in London, New York or Chapel Hill, these kids know about it the next day, thanks to MySpace, Pitchfork, you name it,” Mr. Hoffman said. “The music is getting there, but no one is bringing the live music there.” Thin and clean-cut, with a nebbishy earnestness more common in tech support than among sharp-elbowed nightclub owners, Mr. Hoffman cuts an unusual figure as a rock ’n’ roll entrepreneur. He studied art at Harvard and has a graduate business degree from Columbia. But he is no novice in music. In 1988 he started Instinct Records, which released much of Moby’s earliest material. “He recorded three albums in my living room,” Mr. Hoffman recalled. Instinct was bought by the Knitting Factory in 2002, and in 2003 Mr. Hoffman took over the company from its founder, Michael Dorf. The programming in Boise and Spokane is more conservative than in New York and Los Angeles, mixing alternative acts like Otep and the Faint with decidedly mainstream offerings like Ted Nugent and Puddle of Mudd. Mr. Hoffman said his goal was to “continue to expand into the heartland” with more concerts and more clubs, and to use the Knitting Factory’s reputation to draw acts through its clubs in the Northwest. Michael Deeds, an entertainment writer for The Idaho Statesman, said that while the clubs have been successful, the company’s imprimatur is not necessarily the reason. “It just isn’t a household name outside of L.A. and New York,” Mr. Deeds said. “Obviously it’s known among huge music fans for its cutting-edge acts, but if you’re in the other 48 states, people don’t know much about the Knitting Factory.” The business in the Northwest may be keeping the company afloat financially, but Mr. Hoffman said that the programming in New York and Los Angeles remained important in maintaining the integrity of the Knitting Factory brand. Before it made a bid for the Luna Lounge space, the Knitting Factory tried to stay in Manhattan. Mr. Hoffman looked at a space on 14th Street between Avenues A and B, but there was a zoning problem, he said. The Williamsburg location, which Mr. Hoffman said he hoped to open in “four to nine months,” will bring the club closer to a young audience long ago priced out of Lower Manhattan. And to develop new acts it is deliberately getting smaller. As part of the renovations of the Luna Lounge, Mr. Hoffman said, capacity will be reduced, to lessen the pressure to draw big audiences every night, and bring the Knitting Factory back to its roots as a club that could take risks. “In very exciting ways it would be a return to the old Knitting Factory,” he said. “We want to do something smaller and more radical and more revolutionary again.”

July 10, 2008 Basics Turning Guitar Heroes Into Composers By JASON TURBOW, NYT FIRST came the theremin. In 1919, Leon Theremin, an electronics wizard who had migrated from the Soviet Union, created one of the simplest musical instruments in existence, all of two metal rods protruding from a base. It did not have to be touched to elicit positively ethereal sounds — spaceship noises invented before anyone knew what a spaceship was. Its sound — a cross between human voices and violins — is created by the musician’s hands’ disturbing electrical fields that surround the dual antennas — one for frequency, the other volume. Because it is played with precise hand movements through the air, the theremin is notoriously difficult to master. Nearly a hundred years later, theremins are still on the scene, with updated models and kits manufactured by established synthesizer outlets like Moog and PAiA. They range from less than $100 to more than $1,000. And just as Theremin did in his studio, modern electronic whizzes continue to create clever electronic instruments for the musically inclined gadget freak to play at home — with considerably more ease than Theremin’s device. The new breed ranges from the laser harp — arrayed beams of light that, when broken by a player’s hand, signal programmed MIDI processors — which was used in concert by the French instrumentalist Jean Michel Jarre, to the Beamz Music Performance System, more novelty than serious instrument, found in Skymall and Sharper Image catalogs for about $600. These electronica are the modern manifestations of musical progress: Jetsons-like technology combined with utterly simplistic interfaces in which the work has been loaded, beats and samples arranged, ready for someone to wave his finger through a beam of light. (“The Beamz lets music lovers be musicians,” shouts the Sharper Image catalog.) The popularity of Guitar Hero, the video game in which participants compete by playing a guitar-shaped controller along with the music on a screen, may also popularize new instruments to a wider audience. “Guitar Hero’s combination of an alternative controller, an alternative music notation and an interactive pedagogy has doubled the number of instrumental music makers in the U.S.A. in just two years,” said James Plamondon, chief executive of Thumtronics, maker of a keyboardlike device called the Thummer. Take the Buchla Lightning II ($1,995), which relies on infrared light to read the spatial coordinates of a pair of wireless wands that can be waved by the user as if conducting a symphony. Triangulating and mapping as it computes velocity and acceleration, the Lightning registers the wands’ every position to generate arranged notes and samples. This is the road, it seems, to the melding of music and dance, something until now strictly the realm of tap shoes. Modern musical development is not all about no-touch technology, however. The Haken Continuum Fingerboard ($3,390 to $5,290), the Doepfer R2M Midi Ribbon Controller ($299) and the Persephone from Monster Synths ($1,499 to $1,699) have pushed the one-touch idea, each featuring a long rectangular pad or ribbon that is manipulated by running a finger across its surface. It is easy, of course, to turn the idea of simplistic modern instrumentation on its ear — after all, technology inherently lends itself to complexity, not simplicity. If the artistry of the laser harp lies more in its programming than its manipulation, Aaron Andrew Hunt set out to create the opposite effect — and ended up with the Tonal Plexus (www.h-pi.com). Mr. Hunt, a pipe organ technician-turned-instructor of music theory and composition at Eastern Illinois University, was frustrated by the mainstream musical mandate that 12 pitches in an octave — a standard piano keyboard — are all one needs to make music. His solution was add more pitches. A lot more. His resulting keyboard is to standard 88-key pianos what Yankee Stadium is to a Little League park; they serve similar purposes, but on completely different scales. Mr. Hunt raised his pitch count to 211 from 12, each individually controlled, with a line of keyboards ranging in size from two octaves to eight. (That is a high end of 1,688 keys, for those scoring at home.) The arrangement of the keys on the Tonal Plexus — buttons, really — looks like a series of Legos laid side by side in staggered columns to play sharps, double sharps, triple sharps and the corresponding flats, 17 in all (plus six enharmonic keys an octave). But it turns out that mastering 1,688 keys is not 20 times more difficult than mastering the standard 88. Mr. Hunt created a layout in which the relationship between chords and scales is consistent, no matter which key one starts from; the fingering for a chord in C major, for example, can be transferred to any other major chord. “It’s based on research over the past century in psychoacoustics, or human pitch perception,” Mr. Hunt said. “Our ability to perceive pitch is much finer than our sense of touch or sight. It’s the finest human sensory discrimination.” The concept of the moving chord, however, is not unique to the Tonal Plexus. Other devices that use it include the Thummer (not yet in commercial production), which, approaching the concept on a much smaller scale, has 57 keys on each half of a split-plane model and can be hand-held. Somewhat larger are C-Thru Music’s AXiS-64 and Opal, each of which has 192 keys. Cortex Design, at www.cortex-design.com, has the Terpstra Keyboard, which is not commercially available, with 280 keys. Bigger yet, the Chromatone CT-312 has 312 keys and resembles an unmarked typewriter. One of the truly jumbo devices in the category is the 810-key Wilson 990 Generalized Keyboard — like Mr. Hunt’s creation, it is microtonal — from Starr Labs in San Diego. Starr Labs, at www.starrlabs.com, is also noteworthy for another of its creations, the 288-key ZBoard ($3,000), with a 12-by-24 key arrangement that looks more than anything like an array of black and white dominoes. Like the other boards, it has chord and scale shapes that are transferable to any note in the spectrum; one of the program options creates the equivalent of a double guitar neck running across the 12-deep keys, with each key down the scale serving as the equivalent of a fret. “It’s like playing a lap steel guitar,” said Harvey Starr, president of Starr Labs. “The main difference is that on a guitar, you can only play one note at a time per string. On this keyboard, you can depress as many buttons down the ‘string’ as you can reach.” C-Thru produces versions of its boards for $1,700, available through its Web site, www.c-thru-music.com. It calls the keyboard a “harmonic table,” and the honeycomb (or hexagonal lattice) pattern of keys allows for surprising simplicity. Major chords are simply triangle patterns that point to the right (any two stacked keys plus the key to the right between them, which can be played with a single finger pressing down at their intersection), while minor chords are triangle patterns that point to the left. Each note has the same relationship to its keyboard neighbors as every other note. “If you find music theory difficult to understand or you want to think of a different way to approach composition of music, it completely takes you away from how you’re used to playing and understanding,” said Jacqueline Kandalaft, C-Thru’s director. “It lays everything out in a very logical fashion.” And when it comes to producing ethereal sounds, logic is sweet music.

Some people like 'em. .

Pressed rat and warthog. .

Happy Birthday! ...............

Devo - Mongoloid (A film by Bruce Conner) America Is Waiting Breakaway (1966) Valse Triste (1977) .

Hubba hubba... .

Hell yeah...the albums with the Brecker Bros. kicked ass. The George Duke funk...eh...I don't think so. .

I did. .

Not that store! I think it was at one of the Tower, NYC stores...

http://www.artsjournal.com/postclassic/ It depends on the piece, it may even depend on the performance. There's so many of them.... That's where I got my copy.

76°F Humidity: 75% Partly cloudy with afternoon thunderstorms. A few storms may be severe. High 84F. Winds SW at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 50%. .

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Not sure if you're trying to be clever, but I think he is saying that issues of the magazine sold out due to the popularity of Lenny White, who is on the cover, and excitement for his reunion with RTF. It doesn't say that Lenny White sold out. If you think that is the case, that is something else entirely. But they're specific:

The Yellow Shark = I tend to like the computer and chamber music Zappa these days... .

Zappa was at least a gateway drug for a lot of people. I still go back and listen occasionally. .

I used to go to a lot of concerts in the Sculpture Garden...I'd stand in line, wait for the doors to open, then get a seat down front, then read and listen to my Walkman until concert time. It's too much trouble to sit for that long now, but it was a great opportunity to check out a lot of modern music for free. .

String Quartet That Also Whistles, Whispers and Wails By STEVE SMITH, NYTimes Published: July 8, 2008 The only disappointment about the opening night of Summergarden at the Museum of Modern Art was that it never rained. This popular free concert series is normally held in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, which has a capacity of around 600. But with gloomy skies threatening on Sunday, the event was moved to the entrance foyer, which seats only half as many. Caution was understandable. Instruments and electrical equipment are susceptible to damage, and the Sculpture Garden also has to be emptied of patrons when it rains. For those who got in, quiet surroundings and air-conditioning were bonuses. But some 200 people were turned away, a museum representative said. You wanted it to rain for their sake, because the concert was, in a word, sensational. As in recent seasons, the museum is presenting events programmed by the Juilliard School and by Jazz at Lincoln Center alternately. Sunday’s concert featured the Attacca Quartet, whose members — Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violinists; Gillian Gallagher, violist; and Andrew Yee, cellist — earned their master’s degrees at Juilliard in May. In another practice recently adopted at Summergarden, everything on the program received its New York premiere. The first two pieces had something else in common: each called on performers to do more than just play. In a striking moment early in Huang Ruo’s “Three Tenses” (2005), Mr. Yee whistled a high, keening melody while playing a low drone. Moments later Ms. Schroeder simulated a gust of wind by blowing into her instrument. The collision of past, present and future proposed in Mr. Huang’s program note wasn’t altogether evident, but the vivid, eventful music was no less effective for it. Melancholy smears and glassy whispers in the opening cede to a surging middle section, which ultimately closes with a sudden wilt, as if a plug were pulled. Near the end viola and cello offer a droning wail; the violins resist, fluttering like butterflies in a killing jar, then finally succumb. “Spiral X: ‘In Memoriam’ ” (2007), by Chinary Ung, commemorates Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge, including members of his family. The performers sing in Cambodian and Sanskrit, growl and shout while negotiating Mr. Ung’s meticulous bowing indications and dynamics. Even in the most violent and abrasive passages of this remarkable piece, a poignant melody hovers ghostlike. The Attacca players handled their roles with precision and passion, to deeply moving effect. Folk themes in the Polish composer Joanna Bruzdowicz’s intense String Quartet No. 1 (“La Vita,” 1983), paid homage to Szymanowski, but her dense harmonies and indeterminate counterpoint had more in common with music of a later forebear, Lutoslawski. Matthew Hindson’s “Industrial Night Music: String Quartet No. 1” (2003) opened like a roller coaster with two gears: very fast and crazy fast. You could just about catch your breath during a twinkling interlude; then it was full speed ahead to the end.

How do you feel about Ren and Stempy? .

This might be a good place to start: The 25-year Retrospective Concert Of The Music Of John Cage (Wergo) 05/15/1958, Live Town Hall, New York City

57 - Happy Birthday and many more!

Philipp Vandré/John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes (Mode) First recording using a Steinway "O"-type baby grand piano (as Cage originally composed on and designed the piece for). This piano always sounded a bit thin to me.

It's an Airline, probably made by Kay. Cheapo vintage arch top. .

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