Monday, March 23, 2015

Bill Laswell

 "Music makes mutations audible"

Music is more than an object of study: it's a way of perceiving the world.  A tool of understanding.

- Jacques Attali

Bill Laswell at the board with pioneering turntablist DXT

The first session I worked on with Bill Laswell involved mixing an album called Taboo by Ronald Shannon Jackson. This was either at the end of 1987 or near the beginning of 1988.  I was assisting Robert Musso in the Platinum Island East room, the SSL room. Platinum Island was on Broadway just south of Great Jones St. (3rdSt) in Greenwich Village, New York.  I remember being told about the gig in advance, I didn't know anything about Laswell, but one of the techs thought highly of his work and considered this a prestigious and important session. The studio also gave it top priority. Though I was the senior assistant engineer at the time, I was out of favor with the Studio Manager who would rather have assigned it to his favorite assistant except that he was already booked with something else. I was also working with Fred Maher at the time on the Information Society record. He knew Bill from drumming with him in Massacre and Material. He dramatically told me in a very serious, hushed voice that Bill was evil.  I flashed on Ouspensky's break with Gurdjieff when he considered Gurdjieff evil and forbade his students from visiting him even though he taught Gurdjieff's system.  I later discovered from this and other experiences that what some people call evil is only a kind of energy or manifestation they don't understand. Aleister Crowley appears the prime cultural example of this misunderstanding.

Bob Musso seemed the most efficient engineer I had worked with, very tech savvy with a professional demeanor of a NASA scientist by way of M.I.T. He let you know in a friendly way that crucial business was going down here. The music was free jazz, by far the most progressive music I'd heard at Platinum Island which had a heavy dance music clientele. Bill would give Bob time to set up the mix. When a good balance was achieved, Bill would get behind the SSL and automate tracks one at a time while Bob operated the SSL computer. The automation was often quite radical creating a performance in itself as well as determining the final song arrangement when it was all done. Each automation pass was an improvised studio performance. The song was run straight through and there wasn't any going back to change something.  A free jazz mix, music born from intuitive technical operation right on the spot. It was the most interesting music I'd heard mixed in that room so far and the first time I saw the SSL “played” like a musical instrument.

The Ronald Shannon Jackson mix was a trial session, a studio audition for Bill and Bob. It worked out so they were back right away recording then mixing tracks for what became Asian Games by Yosuke Yamashita, Bill Laswell and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The style of music has been called Electro, Future Jazz which is about right. Here's an example … it's very atmospheric, a trip through one particular bardo. The piano playing, the guide through this sonic land of the dead is Yosuke. The Fairlight industrial sounds were programmed by Nicky Skopelitis and other metal percussion and bells by Aiyb Dieng. Bass and other sounds by Laswell. 



This album was mixed by Bill and Bob at Platinum Island using a process similar to how they mixed Taboo.  Arrangements and performances created in the mix via Laswell writing it into the computer while Musso was the tonemeister and knob spinner.  With these mixes I started to notice a fundamental difference between their approach and most of the other commercially minded clients.  It's hard to explain except to say that they were striving for utmost artistic integrity, looking to create the next thing in music, creating the future of music without thinking about it.   Doing it for no other apparent reason than it needed to get done, always in motion to go beyond.    A good example of what Crowley means when he writes, “For pure will, unassuaged of purpose, delivered from the lust of result, is every way perfect."  

A popular notion in esoteric circles concerns the Secret Chiefs or Hidden Masters, advanced Initiates who influence and guide the evolution of the human species or at least attempt to.  According to Robert Anton Wilson this works as a "useful metaphor."  Perhaps not all the Masters are metaphysical?  True artists, those that communicate transformational information or "data cells" through the medium of their art, help shape the culture and society of their times. 

Not long after Yosuke was the nearly ill-fated mix of Iggy Pop's version of Family Affair, the Sly and the Family Stone song which I wrote about here.  That was the session where the SSL computer crashed about 6 hours into it and lost all their automation.  Of course, all the sound processing and the basic initial mix balance was still there.  Bill and Bob appeared to take the crash in stride and said get it fixed, they'd be back upon the morrow to finish.  Well, the techs couldn't find anything wrong and I had to resort to more magick than usual to ensure it didn't crash again and thankfully, it didn't.

During the years I assisted on sessions with Bill he would introduce me to an incredible number of world class musicians some of whom became lifelong friends:

Aiyb Deng

Sengalese percussionist on any number of Laswell productions.  Responsible for unique
atmospheric sounds with his varied collection of unusual metals, pitched springs, ceremonial bells, gongs and the like.  Also the low liquid hand rhythm of his clay drum Chatans found its way on many records not the least of which is Public Image Limited's Album.

Bernie Worrell  

- keyboard virtuoso and string arranger with Parliament/Funkadelic, sideman with the Talking Heads, various solo albums of his own and Keith Richards, etc. Laswell's go-to for a Hammond B3 organ player and any kind of funk keyboards.

Nicky Skopelitis

 - session guitarist, solo artist, very knowledgeable about certain kinds of folk music from around the world.  At some point he took it upon himself to educate me in World Music with various recordings and concert recommendations.

Bootsy Collins

- played with James Brown at the age of 17 then later with Parliament/Funkadelic as well as being a solo artist.  Watching Bootsy record with his Star bass in front of a semi-circle of various pedals punching them in and out in time on a single pass through the song he seemed like the Jimi Hendrix of bass playing at that moment.  Bootsy is also the living embodiment of funk rhythm guitar playing right up there with or beyond Prince and Nile Rodgers.  We would begin recording Bootsy immediately as soon as the track was up because he would instantly come up with these great ideas for parts that he would almost just as instantly forget being as the music was flowing out of him 'bout as fast as whitewater rapids on the Columbia River.  But we got it all on tape.

L. Shankar

 - best Indian classical violinist I've ever heard, plays with incredible feeling, but that goes for all of these musicians.  A career highlight for me was working with him in Madras, India  for about 10 days.

Trilok Gurtu

 - a very unique drummer, I don't know what you'd call his style.  At a recent show he used 3 bass drums and a pair of tablas as part of his kit along with heavily processed water percussion.

The Ramones

 - didn't spend much time with them, just a few hours while they listened to some mixes of their album Brain Drain, but it felt good to be in the same room with these legends.  Dee Dee came separately as he wasn't getting along with the rest.  Joey was the only one who went to the mastering.  I saw that he was listening while I was speaking with Bill about Aleister Crowley.

Iggy Pop

 - needs no introduction.  Instinct was an important album for me in multiple ways.  I wrote a little bit about it at the end of this post, but intend to expand the comments on it.

William S. Burroughs

- also needs no introduction.  Wrote about working with him here.

Foday Musa Suso

 - griot extraordinaire; collaborator with Philip Glass, Herbie Hancock, and the Kronos String Quartet among others.

Anton Fier

- best known for his group The Golden Palominos as well as being a remarkably tasteful drummer.  I worked on 5 or 6 records with Anton starting as an assistant then engineering.  Also toured Japan and Central Asia with him along with Suso, Bill and Nicky mixing sound for the Flying Mijinko Band.

Akira Sakata

 -  premiere jazz sax player from Japan.  Played in Yosuke Yamashita's group in the '70s. Musical organizer of the Flying Mijinko tour which he named from his training as a marine biologist.
 
Brain

 - probably the best funk/rock drummer from the SF Bay area at the time, I first met Brain on the Limbomaniacs recording of their.Stinky Grooves record. It was one of the first projects where I started engineering for Bill.  Brain introduced us to Buckethead when they both came to New York to record Praxis Transmutation.  More on that later.  In the late '90's, Brain recommended my services to Tom Waits which worked out really well.  I worked again with Brain on Antipop when he was part of Primus.  After that he joined Guns & Roses for awhile.

Ronald Shannon Jackson

- played drums with Ornette Coleman before forming his own group, The Decoding Society.  One of the heaviest dudes I've ever met, a shamanistic musician.  I wrote about him earlier on the occasion of his transition.

Fred Frith

 - I  first met Fred when he played a violin overdub on something.  When I reflect back on it, back then and up to the present, he reminds me of one of the Invisibles ( part of the Invisible College) because at that session I had absolutely no idea of the respected stature of his corpus of work which included being a guiding influence to Brian Eno at one crucial point. 

Stevie Salas

 - a legitimate guitar hero, he astonished me watching him overdub on Shannon Jackson's  Red Warrior album. Played with Rod Stewart at one point.

Bernard Fowler

- incredible singer; background vocalist for the Rolling Stones since 1989.

Michael Gira

- leader of The Swans.  Their Burning World album was an important project for me especially during the mix because that's when I met Jason Corsaro.  Musically, it's  one of my favorite releases and I still listen to it from time to time.  It's an important record with multiple messages from the desert.  Gira was channeling Paul Bowles at the time.

Jason Corsaro

- working with him was a game-changer, the best thing that ever happened to this engineering career apart from meeting Bill.  I wrote about my experience working with him here and continued here.

This is a good selection of people I met through working with Bill Laswell at Platinum Island.  I recall early on Bill, Bob and Nicky had just arrived for a session and were sitting in Platinum Island West waiting for another musician.  They were talking amongst themselves passing along the latest news, all having to do with other highly respected musicians and projects.  Ryuichi Sakamoto, John Lydon, Ginger Baker, Sly and Robbie, Bootsy Collins etc.; speaking informally of familiar friends, colleagues and what they were doing.    I don't remember the exact details, but do remember a sudden realization when I grokked what they were discussing, a moment of crystal clarity, that this was the real deal.  In other words, this was the part of the music industry I had listened to but never had direct contact with until now.  Music that strives to go beyond boundaries to ever re-create and redefine, de-territorialize and re-territorialize its content and expression.  This experience was like waking up, i.e. a transition into a space of real intent and extreme awareness.  I was here, I had made it to the chamber where real music was made.  Not pop music or club dance music, rather music intended as a springboard into unknown territories; music with multiplicities of intention; multiplicities of becomings.

Later, I realized that through his work Bill had assembled an informal community and network of musicians and technicians that cohered around his endless forward motion in the studio and the dollar bills this evoked.  You can call this assemblage Material, an extension of Laswell's ever-changing group of the same name.  The money was a byproduct of serious shamanistic work in the realm of music, but it helped a lot of people stay alive doing what they loved and staying somewhat out of the Corporate/State economic slavery system.  Any group that gathers together regularly for the purpose of invocation - music, when it happens, can be a powerful invocation - is a "School" in the esoteric, Sufi-like sense.  It seems accurate to call Material an informal shamanistic School with Bill Laswell as the primary musical invocant.  The recording session spaces at all times had the cleanliness and sanctity of invocational chambers one associates with a School.  Everyone always reaching for maximum presence, attention and creative endeavor.  Setting new levels of penetration into the mystery, new tracks into the unknown, then stretching to go beyond that.  Maximum velocity and alertness, I felt totally in my element.

I would describe this Material network as a rhizome, a nonlinear, underground mass of roots branching out laterally in all directions as opposed to the arborescent model which would define it as a singular, static identity of some kind.

"A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.  The tree is filiation, but the rhizome is alliance, uniquely alliance."

- A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guttari p.25

The tree is filiation refers to the arborescent model and, in this case, means music derived vertically from its preceding caste and culture.  Bill liked to break those barriers and was all about alliance frequently coming up with unusual combinations that ignored genre boundaries such as, for instance, introducing Cecil Taylor to the Jungle Brothers; Pharoah Saunders with Moroccan Gnawa music; forming Praxis which combined a rapper/turntablist - Af, Next Man Flip Lord of the Paradox from Jungle Brothers, with a rock guitar prodigy - Buckethead, two funk legends - Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell with Brain to rhythmically tie it together, etc.

"...the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play very different regimes of signs and even nonsign states.
... The coordinates are not determined by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities."

- ibid

In NOISE, The Political Economy of Music, Jacques Atalli presents the idea that in times past, before it became a commodity, music commonly served the societal function of channeling and sublimating violence regulating ancient society as a result.  Atalli makes a good case though on one hand I am skeptical of his logic and conclusions, on the other hand, the height of the Axiom period, Bill's label courtesy of Chris Blackwell and Island Records, coincided with the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall.  The extreme fundamentalism of certain Islamic cults bans music, and those appear to be the most violent cultures of all.  You know there is no music scene in the Islamic State or probably anywhere in Syria to speak of.  Violence and music don't co-exist except when the music is violent and then the violence is taken off the street and turned into something else sometimes.  Turn up the music if we want less violence.  Fund music production and performance, increase funding to all of the arts and see what happens.  Building more efficient killing devices doesn't appear to be working to de-escalate the violence in the world, quite the opposite.  Anyone in a position to present good music of any kind might take to heart Atalli's idea that music reduces violence through ritual re-enactment.

Laswell released several significant recordings around the time of the dissolution of the Cold War and before Bush I invaded Iraq.  Hear No Evil - his solo record, Material's Seven Souls with William Burroughs, Ramellzee and Suso, Next to Nothing by Nicky Skopelitis, Middle Passage with Ginger Baker, Talip Ozkan's The Dark Fire, the list goes on.  The band Painkiller with Bill, John Zorn and Mick Harris which formed and recorded coinciding with the start of the first Gulf War definitely channeled violence in their music quite literally and psychically.  One only needs to hear any Painkiller recording to verify that.  I vividly remember recording Mick Harris screaming nonsense vocalizations hardcore style and he kept repeating this one sound: "scud, scud, scud, SCUD, SCUD!!!" and within a few days, the phrase scud missiles, something I'd hadn't heard before, was all over the news.  Harris hit a precognitive space with that one. A little more on Painkiller here.  That took place at Bill's Greenpoint studio.  More about that when we continue.










Tuesday, March 3, 2015

Massacre Live in Paris


 all photos from French blogs, provided by Yoko

On Friday the Thirteenth of October 1307, France's King Philip IV took down the Knights Templar with multiple arrests including its leader, Jaques de Molay, followed by forced confessions and executions.  It's been said that this gave rise to the Friday the Thirteenth superstition of bad luck.  History records the Knights Templar as a secret society originally formed to protect travelers to the Holy Land and to guard the relics at Jerusalem's Temple Mount, the site of the temple King Solomon built.  They were involved in the Crusades and later, after evolving into a wealthy organization, became the precursors to the modern banking system - probably a large contributing factor to why they were taken down.  Much folklore has arisen over the years regarding their esoteric activities.  It does appear they were strongly influenced by Hassan I Sabbah's Order of the Assassins.  Legend has it that the Assassins were the link that transmitted the knowledge and practice of ritual sex magick from the Sufis to the Knights Templar finally making its way to the O.T.O.   The Templars were accused of worshiping a pagan deity called Baphomet, an image later revived by Eliphas Levi then subsequently adopted with full gusto by Aleister Crowley who used it as his motto in the O.T.O. ( the Order of the Temple of the Orient.  The Knights Templar were originally simply known as the Order of the Temple.)  Crowley described Baphomet as an androgynous figure.  His occult research, consisting of communication with a disincarnate entity they referred to as "the Wizard" -  indicated that "Baphomet was Father Mithras, the cubical stone which was the corner of the Temple. " ( Confessions, p. 833)

Over 707 years later, on Friday the Thirteenth of February 2015,  Massacre, the free improvised music trio of Frith, Laswell, and Hayward played the Son le Hive festival on the outskirts of Paris.  Apart from the Friday the Thirteenth in France resonance, the connection between Massacre and the Knights Templar is that they both transmit esoteric information; the Templars with all the Holy Grail legends associated with them among other things.  In Delueze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus by Eugene W. Holland he says "the task of modern music is to render audible the silent forces of the cosmos."

Earlier, in the same book Holland compares Delueze and Guttari's philosophy with free jazz:

Free jazz, operating at the extreme without chord charts, and even without respect to recognizable key signatures, is an instance of continuous absolute de-territorialization of a song, while nonetheless maintaining its consistency as a piece of music.  Indeed maintaining or creating consistency without imposing unity, identity or organization - without resorting to bare repetitions of the same - might be said to constitute the holy grail of all of Delueze and Guttari's work, in ethics, politics, as well as aesthetics.

Apocryphal legend says that immediately after Louis XVI was executed a freemason leapt up, rubbed blood on his crown and cried out "Jaques de Molay, thou art avenged."  Massacre kind of did the same thing in concert.

 Deleuze and Guttari present a metaphysics of complex science, a metaphysics that accounts for the virtual as well as the actual.  It works well as a metaphysics of magick, alchemy and bardo training.  It  describes a metaphysics of free jazz, and of music in general.  One of the primary questions they ask is: how do you make a 'Body without Organs'? - a term they appropriated from avant garde playwright Antonin Artaud.  How do you make a non-organic body?  Parallels with alchemy seem obvious.  In  their magnum opus A Thousand Plateaus - Capitalism and Schizophrenia - my new Bible - Deleauze and Guttari massacre linearity and causality in an eclectic variety of subjects from Evolution to Sorcery, Psychoanalysis to Lycanthropy.  Theirs is a metaphysics of transformation, of the Process, and especially of Here to Go.  When searching the web for an introduction to D & G, I found one reviewer who suggested reading William Burroughs' cut-up novels and listening to Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica to get a feel for the nonlinearity of their approach.  Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous Zone has a strong D & G influence.They seem the ultimate guerilla ontologists, upending assumptions you never knew you had.

An assemblage forms the night before the show in the lounge of the Novotel Hotel on the River Sienne in the Bercy section of Paris.  The people who form the molecular constituents have arrived from New York, San Francisco, Sacramento, London and locally to assemble at this focal point for a brief few hours of unwinding, eating and catching up.  You wouldn't know it to look at it, but this place functions as a communication hot spot, a 'power spot' in the sense Carlos Castenada writes about.  I suspect this because seven years ago at this exact location, sitting in the exact same chair, Bill introduced me to Gordon, an Irishman with down-to-earth aristocratic bearing who sometimes traveled with U2s entourage.  He had just purchased a major Brion Gysin painting and I suggested it was very likely a reading artifact.  I asked him if he knew of a good English bookstore in Paris where I could pick up a copy of Moby Dick.  Gordon directed me to one in the Tuileries, the former residence of France's monarchy, where I found a copy.  Starting reading Moby Dick on the Metro ride back and saw the Tuileries mentioned on the first page.  I was at the beginning of the story both inside and outside the book.

Tonight's body without organs collective lounge assemblage ebbs and flows, changes shape, individuals and dyads depart/return, overseas calls come in with birthday greetings, news of art and music and soul development.
"Could you not have changed the name of the band Massacre for just this one show?," a Parisian asks still painfully mindful of the Charlie Hebdo brute world attack.  The question is answered with silence.  Take a violent signifier like massacre, de-territorialize it by putting it into a different context like a post-structural music assemblage, then re-territorialize Massacre as a progressive, life expanding music concert.  Massacre got its name by having its first ever gig on St. Valentine's Day.  The concert here in Paris is on February 13th so you could call it a birthday anniversary show though I don't know for how many years, my guess is that it's in the neighborhood of 30.  Figuratively speaking, if it was St. Valentine doing the massacring what would he massacre? 

A large flat screen constantly plays footage of advanced military planes and faces of generals gathered in their masses just like witches at black masses the whole time we are there.  A 50 billion euro sale of these from France to Egypt has just gone down and the media analysts can't stop re-reporting it; lots of talking heads and delighted hawks.  Perhaps this subconsciously contributes to an apocalyptic turn of the conversation: " gamma rays firing toward the Earth from deep space; the world is in a rough place; a child suggested that dystopian books such as Brave New World, 1984, and Farenheit 451 contributed to the reality of those bleak visions"
"But what are you going to do about it? .... keep playing, keep drumming."  Do the math on the word "drum" for the magick of this answer.  "Drum" and "Gurdjieff" are mathematically equivalent.

1984 reminded me of a scene from the movie JOBS, the Steve Jobs movie with Ashton Kutchner I recently viewed where he's introducing the Mac II with a famous ad that features scenes from the movie 1984 with Apple saying that would never happen because they made a tool, the personal computer, intended to bring out the heart in people (actually a conflation of two scenes).

Friday the Thirteenth, February 1970, Black Sabbath release their first, self-titled album which would reach #23 on the Billboard 200 music chart.  This Heat, one of Charles Hayward's early bands released their debut on a Friday the Thirteenth.  Music ignores human superstitions.  After soundcheck we have a few hours before the show, traffic is too heavy to go back to the hotel.  Backstage conversation:  "Lots of interesting things going on in physics, we're now picking up information from before the Big Bang.  The Universe appears structured like a Fibonacci Series.  CERN's 27 km Large Hadron Collider subatomic particle accelerator is partly in Switzerland, partly in France."  Subatomic particles ignore human boundaries. 
"Two books I tell all my students to read, Noise - A Political Economy of Music by Jaques Attali and Silence by John Cage."

Seb El Zin turns up around dinnertime with his cd Anarchist Republic of Bzzzz ( post- apocalyptic electro noise punk rap) looking for Bill.  He's putting together a recording studio in a mansion in Normandy with an old friend, Nicktus, the bass player for FFF,  Fédération Française de Funk whom I haven't seen for 24 years, but whom I have an appointment to visit with the next night at a small dinner party given by Martin Bergeaud.  Martin leads Dark Blue Orchestra, a group I mixed at Prairie Sun last year.

The opening band seems about as exactly opposite to Massacre as you could possibly get.  Sedate traditional jazz delivered inside the lines.  They seemed well received by the conservative audience.

Massacre ranged from soft aerial ambient spatialness to powerful rock without getting sonically overbearing.  It was a fairly large hall, maybe 1500 capacity, with a very high ceiling and clear acoustics without much reverberant reflection.  The sharply tiered rising rows does strange things to the low end from the front to back rows, but tonight it was sold out and all the people, with their collective sound absorption properties, made the low end just right.  At soundcheck, Pierre and his sound company had the PA dialed and all ready to go with more than sufficient headroom.  The stage was large and spacious, the light show very well done as you can see from the photos.  In other words, the perfect venue.  Mixing went well, I had a lot of fun and tried some different things with effects panning.  About 1/3rd into the show, an excited usher holding a device that looked like a tricorder with a wand on the front pointed to it and said it had gone up to 107 dB SPL exceeding the legal limit of 105 by 2 dB.  I apologized profusely and begged for forgiveness and not to be taken to jail ..., actually that's not true, I just acknowledged him and looked at the meter which read 102 at that moment.  I didn't have to change anything.  He walked away and didn't bother me for the rest of the show. 


Listening to the recording of this show, it completely blows me away i.e. de-territorialzation of all preconceptions about anything, purely here in this moment with all possibilities, parallel worlds, and alternate realities stretched out in all directions, hallways of choicepoints.  Infinity times infinity makes it's own Time playing with a drummer sworn to hele all.  Swiftnesses and slownesses, driving rhythms, dub rhythms and ambient space expanse.  There exist no words or literary writing style I know of that can adequately describe the experience with the music I'm hearing right now, Massacre in Paris 2015.  Music like this seems way ahead of painting and literature.  We'll let Deleauze and Gutarri have a go at it from A Thousand Plateaus, p. 313:

Chaos is not without it's own directional components, which are its own ecstasies.  We have seen elsewhere how all kinds of milieus, each defined by a component, slide in relation to one another, over one another.  Each milieu is a vibratory, in other words, a block of space-time constituted by the periodic repetition of the component.  Thus the living thing has an exterior milieu of materials, an interior milieu of composing elements and composed substances, an intermediary milieu of membranes and limits, and an annexed milieu of energy sources and actions-perceptions.  Every milieu is coded, a code being defined by periodic repetition; but each code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction.  Transcoding or transduction is the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another , or conversely is established on top of another milieu, dissipates in it or is constituted in it.  The notion of the milieu is not unitary; not only does the living thing continually pass from one milieu to another, but the milieus pass into one another; they are essentially communicating.  The milieus are open to chaos, which threatens them with exhaustion or intrusion.  Rhythm is the milieus' answer to chaos.



Or in other words:

BAS-AUMGN:  "Ye that are Gods going forth uttering AUMGN ( the Word that goeth from
                              (A) Free Breath
                              (U) through Willed Breath
                              (M) and stopped Breath
                              (GN) to Continuous Breath
                               thus symbolizing the whole course of spiritual life. A is the formless Zero;
                               U is the six-fold solar sound of physical life, the triangle of Soul being entwined
                               with that of Body; M is the silence of "death"; GN is the nasal sound of knowledge
                               and generation.
                                                                                    - Crowley from Liber Samekh



Fortunately, it's looking good that this recording and other recent Massacre shows will be released relatively soon.  These descriptions might be clearer when you hear the music.

Saturday the Fourteenth, February, 2015, Valentine's Day, was a relaxing day off to accommadate transportation schedules.  Breakfast with Charles before he catches a train to London, he being the exception to the day off.  Met Bill and Michael Lemesre at the lounge communication post in the early afternoon.  Lemesre still works for Alan Douglas's company making sure that projects Douglas started get properly taken care of and finished.  He kindly gifted me with one of these projects, a book about Jimi Hendrix called Starting at Zero told entirely in Hendrix's own words.  There's also a film coming out by Peter Neal with the same title narrated in his own words.  Neal made a film, Experience in 1967 the only film about Jimi Hendrix released during his lifetime and the only film made with Jimiʼs full collaboration.

After the show last night Fred gave everyone a copy of his new cd, The Natural Order, a duet collaboration with saxophonist John Butchner.  However, to say that Fred plays guitar and Butchner plays sax is a massive understatement as both instruments are thoroughly de-territorialized from their conventional uses and re-territorialzed in a huge range of sonorities, textures, articulated noise with wormholes tunneling and jaunts instantly transporting the listener somewhere outside known territory.  At times the two musical assemblages sound like extraterrestrial or extradimensional nonhuman entities in a dialog with each other, or sometimes telling jokes.  Highly recommended, it's on Northern Spy Records.

Earlier, Bill had presented copies of his new cd Space/Time Redemption, another duo album with Bill and Milford Graves.  This music can also take one very far out, but subtly and gently until you don't realize how de-territorialized out of habitual perceptions you get.  This music is powerfully shamanic, and that should get taken as a warning.  I hear strong African magic, ascension or "out-cension" through the sound of ritual forms, astral bells, hints of Coltrane circa Cosmic Music and A Love Supreme, a flavoring of Sun Ra, also Bas-Aumgn to a strong degree, panoramic sustainer and psychopomp.  It lives up to its name and song titles: Eternal Signs, Sonny Sharrock, Another Space, Autopossession, Another Time.  Also highly recommended for altering consciousness, this music could be used to accompany what some schools call Objective Prayer.  It can act as a carrier wave. Tum Records.

After lunch I headed outdoors to a cool, not quite drizzily overcast, sun spot, beautiful Paris day. Underground to the Metro to Montparnasse capturing local street/atmosphere assemblages on video for a future project.  Then again vectoring below the streets,  Metro to Opera, a historic building built in 1669 for the National Opera.  It's right around the corner from Cafe de la Paix which I also videotaped from a variety of angles.  This cafe is where Gurdjieff did a lot of writing.  It's also the site of the one plausible meeting between Gurdjieff and Crowley.  I thought it interesting that on the side of the Opera building was inscribed Académie Royale de Musique, its official name shortly after it was built, and that it was right beside a primary communication spot for Gurdjieff.

"For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come.  The book's title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders.  Noise is Attali's metaphor for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum that express structurally the course of social development."

- Ethnomusicology writing about Noise, The Political Economy of Music.