Interview by Luisa Cotardo conducted in 1995. Transcript and background: http://www.brainpickings.org/2014/09/11/jeff-buckley-interview/

Recording courtesy of Luisa Cotardo (http://luisacotardo.tumblr.com) for Brain Pickings (http://www.brainpickings.org)

TRANSCRIPT / CONTEXT

Jeff Buckley on music and life

A strange and lovely bricolage.

Nicolas Jaar, Dixon, Steffi, Ben UFO and Omar-S mark our 500th podcast.

Read more: http://www.residentadvisor.net/podcast-episode.aspx?id=500

RA Podcast: @nicolas-jaar

RA.500 Nicolas Jaar

From the album Anne.  Available November 16, 2018 from Western Vinyl.

Bandcamp https://josephshabason.bandcamp.com/album/anne
iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/anne/1427808233?ls=1&app=itunes
Spotify https://open.spotify.com/album/19FD6RN5K3xYFThAHM4fGy?si=0hUO0rFVQAigvSPTvJL_4w
WV http://westernvinyl.com/shop/wv182

Joseph Shabason
Twitter https://twitter.com/JosephShabason
Instagram https://www.instagram.com/josephshabason/
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/josephshabason

Anne, the second album By Toronto saxophonist and composer Joseph Shabason, is a tonal essay on degenerative illness. Delicately and compassionately woven with interviews of Shabason’s mother from whom the album takes its name, Anne finds its creator navigating a labyrinth of subtle and tragic emotions arising from his mother's struggle with Parkinson’s disease. Across the nine vivid postcards of jazz-laden ambience that comprise the album, Shabason unwraps these difficult themes with great care and focus revealing the unseen aspects of degenerative diseases that force us to re-examine common notions of self, identity, and mortality. 

Shabason’s uncanny ability to manoeuvre through such microscopic feelings is mirrored by his capacity to execute a similar tightrope-walk through musical genres. His music occupies a specific space that is as palpable as it is difficult to pin labels to. On Anne’s second track “Deep Dark Divide” rays of effected saxophone shine behind clouds of digital synthesizer that echoes the sound of jazz in the late 80s, but with a Jon Hassell-esque depth of sensibility that consciously subverts the stylistic inoffensiveness of that era. There is detail and idiosyncrasy beneath Shabason’s dawn-of-the-CD-era sheen that elevates the album far beyond a mere aesthetic exercise.

Still, the sounds on Anne are not so experimentally opaque as to stand in the way of the album’s through-line of sincerity and emotionality. When dissonance is employed it is punctual and meaningful, like on album-middler “Fred and Lil” where a six-minute cascade of breathy textures builds suddenly to an agitated growl, only to abruptly give way to Anne Shabason speaking intimately about her relationship to her own parents. Snippets of such conversations see her taking on something like a narrator role across Anne while the sound of her voice itself is sometimes effected to become a musical texture entwined into the fabric of the songs without always being present or audible.  The subsequent piece “Toh Koh” then drifts into playful disorientation as a lone female voice echoes the two syllables of the title, recalling the vocal techniques of composer Joan La Barbara, or even the light-hearted mantras of Lucky Dragons. From here the album veers back onto its aesthetic thoroughfare with “November” where Shabason lays muted brass textures atop a wavepool of electric chords provided by none other than the ambient cult-hero Gigi Masin, one of Anne’s many integral collaborators.

The serene tragedy of the album distils itself gracefully into the ironically titled album closer “Treat it Like a Wine Bar” wherein flutters of piano and mournfully whispered woodwinds seem to evaporate particle by delicate particle, leaving the listener with a faint emotional afterglow like a dream upon waking. There is a corollary to be drawn here with what it must be like to feel one’s own mind and body drift away slowly until nothing remains, while the collection of memories and abilities that we use to denote the “self” softens into eternity. On Anne, it is precisely this fragile exchange of tranquillity and anguish that Joseph Shabason has proven his singular ability to articulate.

Anne

Joseph Shabason - "Forest Run"

Brian Eno's huge back catalogue of work as a solo musician, band member and producer goes back decades, including high-profile work with Roxy Music, Talking Heads, David Bowie, John Cale and many others. He is often credited with inventing ambient music, but this conversation between Juliet and Brian does not talk about the past. Instead, we focused on how Brian has adapted to new music, new technology, and neoliberalism, and what responsibilities artists have to acknowledge and use their cultural capital.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Works by Brian Eno
Discreet Music (1975)
Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978)
Spore (2008, video game soundtrack) - https://pitchfork.com/news/30187-brian-eno-makes-interactive-music-for-spore/
The Ship (2016) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pn1riJSHhkY
Reflection (2017) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dwo-tvmEKhk
Bloom (with Peter Chilvers) - http://www.generativemusic.com/bloom.html

Berlin Horse (dir. Malcolm Le Grice, 1970) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDj8Tc6259o
Gavin Bryars, 'The Sinking of the Titanic' (1975, LP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oVMRADOq5s
David Byrne & Brian Eno, 'My Life in the Bush of Ghosts' (1981, LP)
Anna Calvi
Client Earth - https://www.clientearth.org/people/eno-brian/
Richard Dawkins
DiEM25 - https://diem25.org/brian-eno-people-are-rethinking-what-democracy-means
Mark Fisher (k-punk), 'Precarity and Paternalism' - http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011486.html
Forensic Architecture - https://www.forensic-architecture.org
gal-dem - http://gal-dem.com
PAOLO GERBAUDO, The Digital Party (2019) - https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745335797/the-digital-party/
Stuart Hall
Harmonia & Eno '76 - https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/20947-complete-works
Jon Hopkins
Long Now Foundation - http://longnow.org/seminars/02003/nov/14/the-long-now/
Lowly, 'Baglæns' (2018, song) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ydgJenbQA
Henri Matisse
Media Reform Coalition - https://www.mediareform.org.uk/
Tom Rogerson, 'Finding Shore' (2017, LP) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxWMlK31Mpw
Alexei Sayle
Superflux - http://superflux.in
Raymond Williams
Liv Wynter - https://i-d.vice.com/en_uk/article/pamn9v/hero-of-the-week-liv-wynter-who-resigned-as-tate-artist-in-residence

Suite (212) - series 2

An interview with Brian Eno

Ode - Single

Twitch livestream recording from April 16, 2020 - https://www.twitch.tv/againsta111ogic/

Hope I'm not breaking any rules by sharing this here. Enjoy.

april16.19.00GMT

Nicolás Jaar - april16.19.00GMT

yamakan.place/palestine/
www.radioalhara.online

Ode

Louis Prince