Tag: music

Sunday April 25, 2021

I sit in the yard staring at the sun on the western horizon, singing along to “Hermes Trismegisto E Sua Celeste Tábua De Esmeralda,” listening carefully to the sung nature of the Portuguese, longing to read Christopher Dunn’s book Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture.

The song’s author Jorge Ben is an interesting figure in occult or hermetic terms, having penned not one but two songs about legendary Egyptian sage Thrice-Greatest Hermes: the one above from 1974, and a second one, the one below, called “Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu” from Ben’s fabulous 1976 album África Brasil.

Tuesday April 20, 2021

Trees bloom, flowers grow wild in the grass as Bicycle Day gives way to 4/20. Cardinals alight on branches, visiting throughout the day. I delve again into World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love’s a Real Thing. The cover notes describe the compilation as “an African assimilation of the psychedelic revolution — distorted, political, hallucinogenic, and, of course, danceable. Thousands of miles from the Summer of Love’s utopian origins, yet somehow, not so far away…” It’s an amazing collection: twelve tracks of funky West African psychedelia from the early 1970s. Tracks like Moussa Doumbia’s “Keleya.”

External influences interact with indigenous traditions and vice versa. “Acid rock as something familiar if not entirely home-grown,” writes Ronnie Graham, who hears on the album “the African beats missing from Monterey and which Woodstock lacked.” One longs for a transnational history of psychedelia. Brazil, Japan, Germany, the countries of West Africa: let us tell of how minds manifested in these countries. In the meantime, though, let Luaka Bop and its World Psychedelic Classics series serve as our guide.

Monday April 19, 2021

On the floor of the hallway is a disco ball. At the end of the hall is a mirror. And the disco ball is not a disco ball; it’s a light projector. In the evening we dance. After the dance party, I retreat to the basement and listen to The Modern Folk’s Primitive Future / Lyran Group, a tape released last month from Eiderdown Records.

A track in and I remove the tape and replace it with Herbie Hancock’s Sound-System. When, a few tracks in, the latter album shifts frequencies and goes smooth jazz, I intervene again as DJ and swap in Healing Sounds by Dr. Christopher Hills & the University of the Trees Choir. As José David Saldívar argues in Border Matters, nation-states can be reimagined. Or as Raffi sings, “The more we get together / Together, together / The more we get together / The happier we’ll be.” It is with Raffi in mind that I attend an event: a series of “microtalks” hosted by a friend. Passcode to enter and we’re there. One participant asks “Can AI detect a new designer at Prada?” and shares his findings. Companies like Heuritec apply algorithms to “predict” new fashions. The Jacquard Loom is a kind of computer: a difference engine. Big data comes to fashion and biology. Properties and classes. “Zen koans for robo-cars.” Fluidity and nonbinarism allow for evasion of the predictors. The Ones Who Are Driven By Data. Expert Systems for the Design of Decisions. Blur the categories; Drive AI Crazy. Next up, a discussion of “Alchemical Chess.” The mysteries of the game’s origin in 6th century India. Chaturanga becomes Shatranj in 7th century Persia. The speaker wonders, though, what came before, like the ancient Greek game Petteia, mentioned by Plato, who claimed it came from Egypt, or the “Han Cosmic Board,” as described by Donald J. Harper. Think about the Lo Shu “magic square,” and the SATOR square, and the yantras. The latter means “machine” or “contraption.”

Tuesday April 13, 2021

A friend introduces me to Novos Baianos’s “Mistério do Planeta,” a brilliant bit of Brazilian psychedelia from 1972. After two initial listenings, I attempt the admittedly foolish task of trying to read the song’s lyrics through a Google translator. “I participate being the mystery of the planet / […] / That I pass by and be him / What is in each one.” The band’s vocalist admits to being no more than a malandro: “a street kid from Brazil.” “But I walk and always think,” he sings, “with more than one / so no one sees my bag.” We, too, are more than one. That is what we are here when we communicate via trance and song. The song is an anthem of psychic liberation. “I participate being the mystery of the planet,” sings the poet, “I’m showing how I am / And I’ll be like I can / Throwing my body to the world / Walking Everywhere.” Listening again while reading along, knowing the translation to be an imperfect one, I am awed nonetheless, both by added dimensions of meaning, and by that which is in excess of meaning: the angelic bebop scat / free indirect discourse that happens between chorus and verse.

Saturday March 27, 2021

Some of my students are writing brilliant papers. Let us celebrate. Ice cream truck: jingle jingle, dream big. The world is always-already enchanted, slips the confines of the automatized western. One is not at the end of history but rather its beginning, says Going In, a Brooklyn-based sub-label dedicated to long-form musical compositions geared towards meditation, psychedelic ceremonies, yoga, [and] massage.” The part of me that wants to write wants to listen. Entering the moment means watching The Croods, or staring at stars, or seeking copies of Verdant Gnosis.

Thursday March 18, 2021

Step into “Jam On It,” members of Newcleus rocking the mic, beat is fresh. Then read Lennon Remembers, a two-part interview with John Lennon conducted by Jann Wenner for the December 1970 and January 1971 issues of Rolling Stone. Lennon begins the interview a bit rancorous and sour grapes. The Beatles had broken up eight months prior, and Lennon seems convinced that the 1960s cultural revolution failed to produce real change. “Nothing happened except that we all dressed up,” he says. “The same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin’ everything, it’s exactly the same. […]. We’ve grown up a little, all of us, and there has been a change and we are a bit freer and all that, but it’s the same game” (12). The band’s final years were in Lennon’s view humiliating and awful. People were thrust on them and would touch them. To recover, he made his first solo album, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, released the same month as the interview. The album cover features John and Yoko relaxing under a tree beside a lake at Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park estate. A church bell rings in the opening seconds of “Mother,” the first track on Side A.

By the time of “Working Class Hero,” my thoughts are of primal scream therapy and psychic restitution. That’s what one seeks through psychotherapy, is it not? “Psychic restitution”? It all seems a bit too rooted in the past. It is time instead to re-read Eroding Witness by Nathaniel Mackey.

Sunday March 7, 2021

Grieving as I wander in sadness amid old records in my basement, or, while kneeling, I collect Crayola crayons and plastic mixers off the dining room floor. Frankie enjoys tossing these from boxes and jars. She also likes to make us pick up after her with her sippy cups. These she chucks from her high chair, big grin on her face, squealing with delight. I listen to Charlie Parker’s The Verve Years (1950-51) in the basement after she falls asleep. This has been my pattern of late. While listening, I read statements by a group called The Unseen Hand. On their website, the group offers retreats for those in need of its care. “The Songs of Creation,” they write, “are to humans what migration pathways are to monarchs or whales, warblers or the continents. They return us to true: true sound, true north, the position of prayer.” The group seems to be the work of alchemist-acupuncturist Laura Clarke Stelmok. Her words appear on the liner notes to Battle Trance’s Blade of Love, an album of tenor saxophones as opposed to Parker’s alto. Searching the stacks, I happen upon Jan Hammer’s The First Seven Days. I awaken to the album’s mid-1970s synthesizer wizardry by about Day 3, amid a track called “Oceans and Continents.”

Bored by what follows, though, I wander off into the stacks and peek at Kenneth Burke’s Language as Symbolic Action, interest piqued by the latter’s chapter on “Kubla Khan.”

Friday February 26, 2021

I met with a therapist yesterday. He posed questions and we spoke. My insurance doesn’t cover this treatment, so at the end of an hour, I pay a fee. I’m thus paying again for a service, as I did as a student. Given the debt I’ve accrued, I can only endure the therapeutic relationship temporarily. I can’t afford for it to continue beyond a few sessions. For those few sessions, though, let us exercise trust. Assume the path ahead an opportunity to speak and heal through conversation with a fellow head. Allow in the weeks ahead time for reinvestigation of psyche. Talking time. Speech practices. Adventures in neuroplasticity. Speaking of which: I imagine I could benefit from a re-encounter with French philosopher Catherine Malabou. I imagine, I imagine. Yet there is much to do. Consult with the Book of Job and be reminded, “the price of wisdom is above rubies.” Consult with “Deep Deep Dream,” an experiment from Ignota Books, and confront a question posed by a future epoch “now, in the present”: Audio or Visuals? Consult with David Crosby and be reminded of a child laughing in the sun.

Saturday February 20, 2021

Author seats himself and turns on to Funkadelic. “Why is everyone afraid to say ‘Kiss me!'” asks George Clinton on “Mommy, What’s a Funkadelic?,” the 9:04 opener on the band’s debut. It’s a sad song when heard in light of Fred Moten’s comments about the cries of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester, the black variant of Freud’s “primal scene.” Moten argues that those sounds continue; “Joy and Pain,” he says, are integral parts of black music, as in the track by Maze feat. Frankie Beverly, or the Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock version from 1988. The Funkadelic album is too much, a big ‘ol heap of “way back yonder funk,” “ancient old funk.” I’m reminded — reshaped, resounded — as the album proceeds. A description of “the songs of the slaves” follows the Aunt Hester scene in Douglass’s autobiography — and that’s what I hear when I hear “Music for My Mother.”