back, unrest

i'm listening to the original recording of philip glass' 'einstein on the beach' days before having to leave my current living situation. i've moved most of my stuff to my mom's garage and have retained a bed, some clothing, a chair, and a stripped down stereo with some choice records. the minimal setup is nice, as i often feel as if i have too much stuff. my old roommate ethan was an ideal in this regard--his room was so ascetic. he even stripped out the carpet in favor of bare floorboards.

but then i go to get rid of stuff, and i'm all, but maybe i'll read this book again someday. and and, even though i haven't listened to this cd in years, i might get really into that sort of music again.

'einstein on the beach,' though, is a keeper. i have a long history with this piece of music. my dad purchased the 1993 rerecording a couple years after it came out from the blockbuster music that used to be up the street. i remember their display of pink floyd's 'pulse' with the eerily blinking lights on the spines. i would put the first disc of einstein on and think, i think i like this, but not really know what to think. like, it's an opera, but, like, there's no narrative? i was probably 12.

12, say, years later, i had been getting into philip glass again with my roommates adam and lee. i decided i needed to have a copy of einstein, but i wanted the original, and on vinyl. the cd was prohibitively expensive. and the original used REAL farfisa organs instead of korg representations of a farfisa organ, etc. the sound of the philip glass ensemble was so fat and heavy back then! the 1993 recording may have been more definitive as far as the composition goes, but as a record, i had a theory that the original would be better.

i was on the hunt for what felt like a year. i told ben, the vinyl guy at twist & shout (where i worked), to keep an eye out for it for me. it eventually came in. i bought it that day. after work, i went to my girlfriend-at-the-time bekki's house. we listened to about 3/4ths of this 4 record set while cooking and eating dinner and hanging out. it was everything i hoped it would be. we enjoyed it. i think we ate pasta. and probably got high.

it is an album that i have consistently returned to. i don't think i've ever sat down and listened to the whole thing straight through, but i'll often pick a few sides and put them on and enjoy. oh. and when i was in brooklyn en route to berlin a month ago, i stopped by p.s.1 and scoped their exhibition of performance and video art. they had a tv looping a grainy film of a european performance of einstein. i plugged in headphones, sat on the floor, and soaked it in for awhile. very nice to finally SEE the visual aspect of this opera--wish i coulda been there.

but one thing i really enjoy is the texts. there are two kinds:

1. solfege syllables and counting. a chorus will sing the beat numbers as the rhythmic structure goes through additive and subtractive processes, like "1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (pause) 2 3 4 5 6 7 8." or, they'll say the names of the notes they're singing in solfege, like "do si fa si do si fa si." it's such a simple, almost stupid idea. but i really enjoy it. you could say that it's a metamusical comment, and it probably is, but i also enjoy it on a sensual level.

2. recitations of strange texts that are no more plot-propulsive than the previous type of text. many of them written by an autistic poet named christopher knowles, like this excerpt: "Mr. Bojangles / If you see any of those / Baggy pants / It was huge." or the bizarre text that stuck in my preteen mind about being in a prematurely air-conditioned supermarket. that one is by lucinda childs.

and then there's that incredible chord progression that acts as a sort of 'chorus' in a pop music sense. fuck! ya know, the one that reappears throughout, the one part of this opera that actually has harmonic changes (even if just one sequence repeated ad infinitum with slight changes).

so. i got carried away on the philip glass trip. it was supposed to be briefer and tie in more with the opening and personal life stuff. this record is a comfort in what is, for me, an uncertain time. i'm exhausted after a week of moving, which directly followed 3 weeks of traveling/aushanging in a foreign country and will be followed by a week of trying to make a little money and figuring out a place to live in july, then 2 weeks of oblio's arrow tour. i'm having those weird post-traveling feelings of, 'but i don't wanna be back,' and wondering how to process the trip and how, now, i fit in back home. but also, things are awesome. i mean, i'm traveling, playing music with great people (thanks oblio's arrow and aaron and yuzo/zay/pink hawks and doo/pee pee and &c.), meeting people with common interests, all that good stuff.

museums

there are alot of museums in berlin. in fact, there is a place called museum island that holds a bunch of them. on thursdays, many of these, i guess mainly the art museums, are free from 6 to 10 pm or something. aaron took me to one in the middle of town. i don't remember the name, wanna say it was the gesemtemuseum, which is way off but sonically similar. anyway, it holds a shitload of renaissance and classical era paintings. wow! i mean, a lot of that stuff i don't care for. and seeing what the denver art museum holds from the same periods is unimpressive. but. i mean. they had great caravaggio and rembrandt paintings. they had some awesome bosch. lots of great northern renaissance stuff i'd only seen in repro, including, of course, many overly detailed still lifes. my favorite was the flemish proverbs painting by brueghel the elder. some of you may know it as the cover of the fleet foxes album. fuck that. it's a masterpiece on its own and shouldn't be sullied by indie rock bands who think its kuhl to put a little bit of culture on the front of their cd. seeing it in person was wonderful. it's large--roughly 8 or 10 feet square?--so all those little details that seemed so unnoticeable in the pages of an art history textbook stand out as very compelling. and, ya know, he's a master.

this place was massive. we didn't see anywhere near all of it cause we had to go to the niblock/dreyblatt concert. but wow.

and then a couple days ago, i went to the pergamonmuseum which is on the northern tip of museum island. it seems to be a kind of antiquities museum which was recommended to me by aaron and good ol' d. oppy. the kind of main feature is a reconstruction of the gates of ishtar, which were the northern gates to the city of babylon. pretty cool! glazed blue bricks with lots of decoration, including reliefs of lions and a mythical creature.

my favorite area, though, was the museum of islamic art. the shapes and colors on islamic art are so gorgeous. there were lots of beautiful brass bowls with intricate inscriptions. lots of unbelievably intricate wood carvings of arabic script. and the colors. and rugs. wow! one area was a temporary exhibition of stuff on loan from some rich german collector dude. every sign had quotes from him about his collection and his feelings on collecting. what a douche. oh well. at least he let us poor folk look at his nice things.

park/markt/records/food/movie

i don't even know what to talk about anymore. i've done a lot, been having a lot of fun, but nothing crazy has happened--nothing like, "oh what a great story that all my friends need to hear." but that's ok. writing long-windedly about quotidiana is kinda, like, what i do. all the publicizing of self-reflection that goes into a project like this makes me somewhat uncomfortable, especially as i don't have an aesthetic agenda here like i did in my old myspace blogs. there is a fear that introspection will turn into self-absorption and noone wants that!!

the day i got to berlin was sunny, warm and beautiful. aaron and i spent the afternoon drinking beer in the mauer park by his house. it's an area that used to be the wall. since then, the skies have been grey and sunless, the weather cold and rainy. it was starting to wear us out. then yesterday it was warm and sunny again. wunderbar! we went to the flohmarkt at mauer park, basically a flea market that happens every sunday. lots of junk, some of it good. lots of people selling records.

i was kinda looking for some unique records that i would not see ever or often in the states, maybe some krautrock. and helpfully, many of the vendors had dedicated krautrock sections. aaron asked one middle-aged dude with no sections if he had any of this music, that his friend (me!) was looking for, like, some can records. the guy was like, 'no can. but there were so many other good krautrock bands. you american kids and your can [essentially]! listen to this.' and he put on a live album by a band called jane. it wasn't very good.

aaron tells me this is a common attitude among the people who were around in the 60s/70s--they don't like can. it wasn't the real deal, they were seen as snobby upper class people kind of pretending to do this music. ok. that may be. but. most krautrock is not very good. and can is very very good.

so. more record shopping. one place had good, well-priced copies of can's future days and bowie's low. that's one that i don't see often in denver, and any time i did it was either a dirty copy or got snatched up by one of my coworkers. here it seems fairly common--it was recorded in berlin after all. so i had told myself, next time i see it, i will buy it. so i bought these, took them back to aaron's and did a little discogs.com research. looks like they're both originals (ooh!) in very good condition. benuk would be proud of me! i don't normally care about that shit, but i felt the need to justify my purchases to myself. since i had just found out my landlord sold our place and we have to get out like as soon as i get back and i don't have the money to get a new place. hmm. i feel like this should be bothering me more than it is. and maybe it will surface soon that i'm incredibly freaked out. but i feel ok about it right now. mostly i'm not happy about moving a-fucking-gain. we shall see how this plays out.

we listened to records, then went over to margareth's place for a dinner party. she had a couple of her and aaron's friends over and made delicious food. and this was the third night in a row she had done this for us! thank you margareth. the night before it was risotto. the other two nights there was kind of a korean theme, with lots of small dishes. that's her kick right now when it comes to cooking, and it's sehr gut.

then i came back to aaron's place and watched trans-europ-express, directed by alain robbe-grillet. as some of my readers may know, i was obsessed with his novels a year or two ago. and this movie of his is just about as good. it's got essentially the same aesthetic as the novels. time is fractured, reality is inconsistent and ever-changing (a habit of his that he makes fun of in the movie), events repeat in subtly different ways. the cinematography is gorgeous, with a brilliant use of mirrors. and it's fucking funny. i think i'm embarking on an a.r.-g. film kick.

shizow!

so i haven't talked about any of the shows i've seen. well, they've been great. my second night here, aaron and i went to club berghain to see a phill niblock piece performed by a saxplayer who did modular synth stuff as well, and the arnold dreyblatt ensemble. the place is, i understand normally a techno dance club-type place. often, apparently, men have to check their shirts at the door. none of that this night, but there was an exquisite sound system.

i know that using that phrase makes me a huge dork. but it was great. four giant speaker stacks that looked beautiful and sounded better. djs were spinning when we got there and it was loud and clear, but easy to have a convo with aaron. we didn't feel like beers cause they're more expensive out and we'd had a lot the day before, so we bought a couple bottles of club mate, this yummy energy drink that's a lot like the guayaki drink we have back in denver but half the price.

after some time passed, a young dude walked up to a table with laptop, mixer, and some kind of modular synth. he got some things going. phill sat down in front of the speaker stack near aaron and i to listen. several areas of synthesized sound went by. lots of close tones with some amazing vibrations helped along by the quality of the speakers. the dude picked up a sax and started playing long tones against the drones, walking over near a stack of speakers to make the difference in pitch between what they were putting out and what he played vibrate the metal of the horn and distort his overtones. it was very nice.

at some point he stopped. i couldn't tell what i thought of it in some ways. but in some ways, i knew it was amazing. djs played. good stuff too, including a fred frith song off of "gravity" and, i think, a skeleton crew song as well. a japanese dude that i sat down next to introduced himself. "what do you do? are you a musician?" "oh ya, ya know. you?" "yes. i'm here doing..." and he described to me an interesting-sounding sound art kinda thing, using non-traditional instruments and so forth. "...and what do you do?" "oh, ya know..." some attempt at a brief summation of my disparate musical activities. "oh, you do a lot [which is not how i meant it to come across]. do you have the myspace?" and we were supposed to, like, exchange info, but aaron and i split right after the next performance.

so ya! i should talk about that. arnold dreyblatt came out and played some of his modified bass. he bowed like, staccato eighth notes on one string the whole time, eliciting different kinds of overtones in a nice rhythmic fashion. after setting up an interesting pattern, he began to vary it by partially stopping the string at different points to make harmonics. he went up and down the overtone series. it was nice. then a drummer and guitarist came out and played a kind of "rock music" with him in this same vein. the tuning was gorgeous and the rhythmic feel was very hypnotic. it was one of those shows that, after it was over, you're not sure if you really liked it or just thought it was ok. but then you realize, as aaron pointed out, that you're in a really good mood. and then you decide, yes, this was a really good show.

more about other shows and other aspects of hangin' here later!

drei

so the next day, i woke up at some godawful hour. even now, as i write, the sky is lightening and the birds are freaking out. oh well. such is the artist's life in berlin. and at some point aaron and i went down to his practice space. his friend micky (not sure of the spelling--he's italian, so i think it's a shortening of michaelangelo) gave us a ride there. it was my first time in a car here. fun. micky plays trumpet. today aaron played drums and i guitar. we met up, at the practice space, with franco (sax) and toby (clarinet).

we played free a couple times and it was really nice. all the horn players had distinct personalities. franco is a young virtuoso type and did all these different things--i hear he's a klezmer dude, but he did a braxton thing and a efi thing and a eai thing. toby just kicked ass. lots of long tones and then weirdnesses. those guys blended well. micky, i guess, has only been playing a couple years and mingus is his bag. he seemed reticent at first. but his playing was concise and perfect for each situation. he would enter with some simple motive that just set everything in its place. and aaron, needless to say, was a motherfucker, as neil haverstick would say. i played alright. we have a recording, i think, of the second thing we did, and i'm curious to hear how it was.

then, we played this thai folk music that aaron is way into. franco brought a transcription of some of it and i (badly) read the chart. it was fun to play!

after that is when, as alluded to in the previous post, we went and recorded guitar parts at margareth's. it was fun. i am extremely self-critical, but aaron dug my playing, and i think it was apposite.

let me tell ya, for a sec, about this flat. it's very european. ya know in movies, like "frantic" by polanski starring harrison ford, where there's lots of action climbing stairs to flats with timed lights that go off after a minute and half? this was a lot like that. and the toilet was down the hall.

wow. it's very light out and i should go to bed. so we recorded some and then i walked home. en route, i bought some booze. aaron told me about the cheap beer, stirnburg. so, for variety's sake, i bought stirnburg diesel and some other kind. oops! diesel mean 'with cola' and the other kind was basically 'with sprite.' and neither had much alcohol. typical newbie mistake!

so. to bed. next time i'll talk about the amazing and quiet improv show i saw with axel dorner. he's great. guten nacht!

zwei

so. maybe i should correct a misconception about this trip. i called the first post "vaca," but this is not fully a vacation. i didn't lug my two volume OED to berlin, so dictionary.com will have to suffice. they say a vacation is "a period of suspension of work, study, or other activity, usually used for rest, recreation, or travel," and while i am in some ways taking a break from my usual routine and am traveling, i am still studying and working. aaron is keeping me busy with music, which is wunderbar.

yesterday we went to margareth's apartment and recorded aaron's bandmate mary. maybe that was the day before?? anyway, he plays drums in this band called mary and the baby jesus (it's been suggested to me it might be "...and the baby cheesus"). it's girl punk stuff. so mary came over and recorded vocals to some songs that had already been started, and did vocal/piano basic tracks on some new songs. all to 1/4" tape, then dumped into computer. it was fun.

i'm having trouble with chronology at this point. the days are bleeding together. but i think then we headed to ausland to go to a show that some people aaron knows were playing. en route we bumped into his roommates brian and andy who were leaving cause, they said, it wasn't very good. we got there and bumped into iggy who came out to send a text. we talked to him for a bit. he had just spent some time in the u.s., including a residency at a music school in a city on the west coast. there, he said, the students were doing interesting stuff but were not happy with the faculty. which was interesting to me cause i had just read an interview with one of their faculty who had had a rough time in his undergrad days and was now kicking a kid out cause they played indie rock on the side. wtf? anyway, we didn't go in. went back to margareth's place and laid down some tracks.

actually, now that i think about it, i'm pretty sure we just went back to margareth's place and drank a lot. and i laid down some tracks the next night. but the point is, this is what you might call a 'working vacation.' cause i spent one night of it playing music. aaron plays, and has written, these great country songs and he has asked me to lay down some lead and rhythm electric tracks on top of his recordings.

that's right. ok. so. recording mary was on the day of the last blog. then. i slept.

vaca, 1st post

around midnight, brian and i walked down to the bar where aaron was djing. en route, we stopped by a convenience store and bought some beer. one thing i like about berlin is the walking beer. when you walk somewhere, you drink a beer. it's nice! and the beer is cheap. normal prices are 1.20 euro for 50 ml. the cheap beer is only .60 euro. then we stopped by a middle eastern place and i bought a shawarma sandwich to eat as we walked. we finished our beers sitting on the patio of roberta, our destination bar. we left the empties on the table--street people collect and redeem them for the 8 cent bottle deposit--it's almost an act of charity to leave the bottles out.

aaron collects and spins only 45s. it's an interesting self-imposed limitation. within that umbrella he plays everything--bebop, fred frith, country, rock, neue deutsch welle, his own brand new 45 where he sings with his girlfriend margareth. so, suffice to say, the music was excellent all night. brian and aaron and i talked. we talked a bit with the bar owners, stefan and petra.

after a bit, toby and toby, who are roommates, came down. they're both german, live nearby. smaller toby is a writer. i asked him if people around here are into thomas bernhard and he said, i like him. we talked a bit about books. his dude, for fiction, is kafka. baudelaire and paul celan also big signposts.

'grosser toby' (cause he's taller) is a clarinet player. he had just been in buenos aires (which i guess is where everyone here wants to move now) playing and vacationing, doing cumbia music and other things. he and aaron and i, along with some more horn players, are going to jam tomorrow and see what comes of it.

around 4.30, the tobys left and brian and i walked home to the sound of amazing birds chirping. now i should go to bed so i can play music in 12 hours. ciao!