fave listenings of this month

*

in the pic: Charlemagne Palestine

"musica assoluta" (luglio 2023)

Friend, dialogue partner, & Australian new music improvisor extraordinaire, Simone de HAAN. A selection of tracks we have done together...

Works with Simone de HAAN, trombone

Amplitude (ambient-field)

Little excerpt from a gig a few weeks back. There was an old piano lurking at the side of stage so Dani wondered over and gave it a good bash mid set - i made some pretty average bass noises in the background : )  pardon the audio quality -  its a straight raw capture from my trusty zoom . Vibe is good though

Kirby/Ward Live @ The Polish Club (piano Improv)

Ymplera

This is my response to the 600th @disquiet Junto project. Many thanks to @marcus_fischer for the samples for this track.

More on this 600th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Reaching Out (The Assignment: This is a shared sample project. Rework a set of seven WAV files provided by Marcus Fischer), at: https://disquiet.com/0600/

About the Disquiet Junto: https://disquiet.com/junto/

Subscribe to project announcements: https://tinyletter.com/disquiet-junto/

Project discussion takes place on llllllll.co: https://llllllll.co/t/disquiet-junto-project-0600-reaching-out/

This project’s cover image is a detail of a photo also by Marcus Fischer.

Reaching Out (disquiet0600)

Rose petals

Just a playful simplexity free-for-all, with Australian New Music virtuoso doing all the hard work…

Stream Cliff Crego | Hör dir Playlist Works with Simone de HAAN, trombone kostenlos online auf SoundCloud an https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sets/works-with-simone-de-haan

TUMULTUS, an insurrection in 8 voices with claves, Simone de HAAN trombone

I’m not going to say that my good friend & tnewmusic mate, Simone de HAAN, played in this little improvisato. He did, but only indirectly....mostly backwards...all stiched together with a happy toss of my 12-sided die. 

VIDEO for this track is at https://vimeo.com/947075794

An homage on & for Mr. Cage, in sound & word.

POSTER of the John Cage 10 Rules text is here http://picture-poems.com/photoweek/cage_10-rules-for-students_teachers.html

JOHN CAGE: 10 rules for students & teachers, a soundpoem homage

THIS IS THE third of a growing set of short occasional pieces. I like to think of these as part musical diary, and part musical activism. The pieces are rather like MIRRORS MADE OF SOUND -- some would say shards of glass & barbed-wire -- mirrors that reflect in an open, honest, naked way the violent insanity of the present cultural, political moment.
 
The basic theme is simple: 

Humanity seems caught in a contradiction between the Demonic and the Divine, caught between, on the one hand, the self-destructive violence of war and conflict, and, on the other hand, the great promise of the natural intelligence of Nature, the Sacred, and the living Earth. Becoming aware of this contradiction and how it manifests as a formative force in our culture, our politics, our thought and consciousness -- and, indeed, our art and  music -- is, I think, a central challenge of our time.

The texts used are generally selected at random. Computer synthetic speech is preferred here as a way of mirroring how mechanical our actual human speech -- to my ear so loud, fast, aggressive, utterly without rhythm and breath -- has become. Individual words, phrases, fragments of public discourse, documents, outright lies, propaganda, etc. are distributed using chance operations which then go on to form complex, polyglot temporal vortices. At the same time, two historical source texts -- embodying this contradiction between the Divine & Demonic -- are juxtaposed with each other throughout the whole. (These are translations from the German, and are from J.S. BACH & Joseph GOEBELS.)

Other pieces in the new series are:

(2) DEVIL'S TRIANGLE https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/devils-triangle-wav

(1) SUNSHINE & KITTENS https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sunshine-kittens-a-musical-reflection-of-cultural-insanity-simone-de-haan-trombone

IMAGE: (Muted) Snake River, BROWNLEE DAM, present-day Idaho/Oregon border, USA. The prison-like grid of 39 mega dams on the great COLUMBIA WATERSHED is, in my view, a textbook example of the above-mentioned contradiction between the Demonic impulse to control by violent force, & the Divine intelligence manifest in natural, flowing, living water.

ENEMY OF THE STATE (O Lamb of the Lord), Simone de HAAN solo trombone

TRANCE, from the Latin transire "cross over, go over, pass over, hasten over, pass away," from trans "across, beyond" (see trans-) + ire "to go" (from Proto Indian European root *ei- "to go"). So this suggests a transition from the present dominant, outmoded, and largely false religious traditions which are everywhere causing so much suffering and violence in the world--one need only think of the three monotheistic beliefs that all arose in the desert around the Middle East, a kind of strident wolftone in the consciousness of the world--to something more true.

But it is also TRANCE in the musical YOGA / Alexander Technique sense of "a half-conscious or insensible condition, state of insensibility to mundane things," [SOURCE https://buff.ly/2EIFvF0] This is a trance state one might enter [en-trance...] with this particular Spatial / Temporal qualitative ground. 

Lest we drift off in some sort of dull New Age stupor, my mate, the AUSSIE trombonist extraordinaire, Simone de HAAN, turns his horn into a ZEN BUDDHIST wakeup or encourage stick, dancing in the second half of the pieces with a two-voice out-of-synch dialogue between the loud speakers. 

The low-level TRANCE VAMP note material was generated  w/ WOLFRAM Mathematica, always good when dogged quasi Minimalist persistence is called for.

IMAGE: A poster from the picture-poems.com 100 MINIATURES project: ONE image; ONE idea; ONE new way of looking. #nonviolence ALL RELIGIONS ARE TRUE / ALL RELIGIONS ARE FALSE #pdf http://bit.ly/TzNxN3  Order #prints online http://bit.ly/2h85Ssa

TRANCE (All religions are true / All religions are false), w/ Simone de HAAN, solo trombone

THIS IS THE fourth of a growing set of short occasional pieces. I like to think of these as part musical diary, and part musical bearing witness. The pieces are rather like MIRRORS MADE OF SOUND -- some would say shards of glass & barbed-wire -- mirrors that reflect in an open, honest, naked way the violent insanity of the present cultural, political moment.

The basic theme is simple:

Humanity seems caught in a contradiction between the Demonic and the Divine, caught between, on the one hand, the self-destructive violence of war and conflict, and, on the other hand, the great promise of the natural intelligence of Nature, the Sacred, and the living Earth. Becoming aware of this contradiction and how it manifests as a formative force in our culture, our politics, our thought and consciousness -- and, indeed, our art and music -- is, I think, a central challenge of our time.

The texts used are generally selected at random. Computer synthetic speech is preferred here as a way of mirroring how mechanical our actual human speech -- to my ear so loud, fast, aggressive, utterly without rhythm and breath -- has become. Individual words, phrases, fragments of public discourse, documents, outright lies, propaganda, etc. are distributed using chance operations which then go on to form complex, polyglot temporal vortices. At the same time, two historical source texts -- embodying this contradiction between the Divine & Demonic -- are juxtaposed with each other throughout the whole. These are translations from the German, and are from J.S. BACH & Hannah ARENDT, Victor KLEMPERER, & from the English texts of David BOHM. The avian soloists featured here are native to the borderlands, the Black-capped Vireo...back natural and modulated for our orchestra. 

In addition, there is a VOCAL OCTET background stream--a kind of isometric motet, if you will, based on one of my MINIATURES, a 32-step sutra that goes: 

"The simplest & most powerful of all possible freedoms,
is the freedom to stop doing what is contradictory or wrong."


(As always with sutras, this is a question which asks, "Is this true?" 32-steps means in THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE 32-syllables. In the TALKING HANDS/TALKING FEET technique/practice, we learn these like MANTRAS, by heart, singing, dancing. chanting, conducting, reciting...It's fun!)

ANOTHER VERSION of the BORDER WALL, recorded with Simone de HAAN playing all the many ensemble trombone tracks, is at: www.picture-poems.com/mp3/border-wall_2.mp3

Other pieces in the new series are:

(3) ENEMY OF THE STATE https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/enemy-of-the-state-m4a-1

(2) DEVIL'S TRIANGLE https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/devils-triangle-wav

(1) SUNSHINE & KITTENS https://soundcloud.com/cliff-crego/sunshine-kittens-a-musical-reflection-of-cultural-insanity-simone-de-haan-trombone

IMAGE: Rime on Barbed-wire, the good Earth gracefully healing the thought -- the illusion -- of finding security in isolation.

BORDER WALL (A mighty fortress is our...), bearing musical witness, w/ Simone de HAAN. trombone

This is more an audio documentary than actual  musical composition. My good friend and Australian trombone new music virtuoso tells us about his project to find resonance with the sound of whales. It is also a bit of an intimate window on how the two of us, he in FREO, WA, & I in Northeast OREGON, work together, sometimes on a daily basis, despite being separated by 15,000 km. After all, sound underwater moves four times faster. 

The header about us humans becoming in our hightech world increasingly 2nd-hand beings seemed entirely appropriate, that is, from the whales point of view.

POD, Simone de HAAN tells us about his project to find resonance w/ the living sound of whales

Composer. Writer. Photographer. Former conductor & founder of the ASKO ensemble.

On a bike/ski/hike trek of the Pacific Northwest studying native plants & climate breakdown 🌲 from sagebrush sea to whitebark pine. Composing off-grid the whole way.

#Sun2Sound 🌕 on Bluesky

THINKING LIKE A STONEPINE, a soundpoem manifesto https://vimeo.com/844665859

“LOVE & WATER, three thought poems w/ coda, PHAROS for small orchestra, “Nightwind”” https://vimeo.com/847079690 

CURRENTLY on mt bike/ski/climbing trek through Pacific Northwest, working on a photobook about WHITEBARK PINE COLLAPSE and CLIMATE CRISIS. BASES in the WALLOWAS | AMSTERDAM | ALPS. 

WEEKLY photo/poetry updates at www.picture-poems.com & THE CIRCLE IN THE SQUARE new music, poetry & dance performance project at www.cs-music.com

ALWAYS ON THE LOOKOUT for progressive, tech-savy, instrumental virtuosi interested in dialogue & collaborative undertakings.

CONTACT cliff@picture-opoems.com
Or on SKYPE or FACETIME @cliffcrego

MUSIC? The one thing humans do,
that makes the rest of nature jealous.