Category: Listen

Sounds Heard: Aaron Cassidy—The Crutch of Memory

Posted on February 14, 2012 by Colin Holter - Albums, Listen

In a way, I’ve been writing this review for years—since long before I first got wind that NEOS’s The Crutch of Memory, the first CD wholly dedicated to Aaron Cassidy’s music, was scheduled for release. In 2005 (or was it 2006?), Cassidy’s stance toward instrumental composition seemed utterly exemplary to this zealous young partisan of contemporary music.

Some of those early pieces that first captivated my imagination are on this disc: I think Frank Cox’s rendition of the title track (written in 2004 and played here by Graeme Jennings) must have been my first brush with Cassidy’s music. I also encountered 1999’s metallic dust and 2000’s asphyxia early on, two pieces that went a long way toward establishing Cassidy as a transatlantic composer to be watched. Listening to the two most ambitious new music woodwind players on the planet, Richard Haynes and Carl Rosman, blow through these pieces, it’s hard to imagine that ten to fifteen years ago Cassidy was laboring over these unbelievably painstaking scores (worth a look, if you ever get the chance) with little hope of a second performance, let alone a recording of them out on NEOS.

The more recent Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (2008-09) consists of three probably-somehow-related movements, each for a different solo or duo instrumentation. More things happen in these pieces than I’d anticipated from Cassidy, who once noted that his music doesn’t begin or end but rather starts and stops—is this still the case? I, purples, spat blood of beautiful lips and songs only as sad as their listener (both from 2006) show two quite different surfaces to Cassidy’s aesthetic. The first, for voice “with live, computer-generated pitch material,” gives the casual Cassidy fan a concentrated dose of exactly what he or she wants—an oral scrambling and grasping for purchase without letup. The second, for trombone, employs Cassidy’s familiar de-coupling tactic in service of an unexpected strategy—at least, I assume it does. More on this one later.

We could call Cassidy’s approach—those proliferating and always-changing approaches, rather—”extreme,” but that would be unfairly reductive: Not only (contra Cassidy’s critics) has their “extremeness” never been the point, but to label them “extreme” suggests that they occupy some remote point on a single historicist continuum of performed deconstruction. A listen through The Crutch of Memory, whose pieces show not only Cassidy’s growth as a composer but also the surprising multivalence of his pieces’ deliberately unstable material, will quickly dispel that prejudice.

And if the CD itself doesn’t dispel it, Evan Johnson’s enthusiastic and astute liner notes are bound to do the trick. Johnson identifies Bacon and Deleuze as Cassidy’s chief “extra-musical interlocutors,” but he hardly needs to: These influences are, like the score samples that decorate the inside of the CD’s packaging, integral to Cassidy’s branding as a composer. (A mutual friend once remarked that Beethoven could certainly have titled a piece Phänomenologie des Geistes, but chose not to.) The bottom line for us, as well as for Cassidy, is that fragmentation, instability, contradiction, and negation are the names of the poststructuralist game. Plenty of critics and bloggers have expended plenty of words trying to capture what Cassidy’s music sounds like, but in fact its whiplash changes and instantaneous contrasts are what make it unique. When you see a performance of it, you are seeing human behavior that strives not to cohere.

When you see a performance of it, that is. I’m one of the lucky ones: I’ve had the good fortune to see a number of interpreters realize Cassidy’s music, including on several occasions the musicians featured on The Crutch of Memory—the once-Australian group ELISION, avant-gardecore explorers (“The cutting edge of sound,” their logo proclaims) now based in northern England who have over the past few years kept Cassidy’s figurehead in regular rotation on the prow of their Santa Maria. Within the next decade, and maybe much sooner, new and unprecedented performance practices will undoubtedly emerge for technically dissociated music like Cassidy’s; for now, though, ELISION’s renditions of his pieces are, in effect, canonical. That every performance on the disc is superb goes without saying. It’s a great pleasure to hear them dig into this music, which they obviously esteem and—more importantly—enjoy.

Or, at any rate, to hear evidence of their digging. Let’s not kid ourselves: That’s what this CD is. For fans of Cassidy’s music who have had the chance to witness great performances of it in person, there’s something downright torturous about this disc. I’m listening to songs only as sad as their listener, whose “modest, mysterious, seemingly endless series of softly keening cries from the highest register of a heavily muted trombone” (well put, Evan) are as infuriating as they are beautiful; I know that there must be more happening here than 44,100 16-bit numbers every second allow me to perceive. If I could only see ELISION’s Benjamin Marks, no doubt that would go a long way, but even a Blu-ray DVD would rob me of that very poststructuralist fragility that Cassidy’s music generates with such tireless focus. This music, more than most, is supposed to be fleeting. A CD doesn’t fleet.

Cassidy’s work is a valuable contribution to an ongoing (and itself rhizomatic) project: to fracture the sedimented object-semblance of musical practices. Like those densely marked-up, multicolored, intabulated scores that everyone loves to marvel at on Facebook, The Crutch of Memory—which after all is the same every time you listen to it—is a capital-O Object. It doesn’t belong in Cassidy’s aesthetic-philosophical cosmos, no matter how many people are clamoring to hear it and how strong are the professional expectations that an early-mid-career composer Had Better Start issuing commercial CDs Or Else. For a man who takes so little for granted on the page, he sure seems pretty content with inherited channels and mechanisms of production and consumption.

And yet here I am, 18 euros lighter and fondling a luxurious gatefold cover. Maybe I could have wangled a free review copy from NEOS, but I decided as soon as I learned the disc was coming out to buy it myself instead—not because I especially want to own it (I don’t) or because I expect to listen to it again (I won’t), but because I want to support Cassidy. A recording of contemporary music is never more than a more-or-less informative document; in Cassidy’s case, it’s less, and it’s less in a particularly cruel way, to boot. Maybe it’s not his job to rethink our entire cultural practice—fine, so be it. I still consider his music exemplary, just as I did in 2005, and I know I’m not the only composer a few years his junior to feel that way. However, The Crutch of Memory is an impeccable answer to a tangential and distracting question.

You should still buy it.

Sounds Heard: Untravelled Path—Work in Progress

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Albums, Listen

Back in the autumn of 2005, a mysterious recording from a duo I had not been aware of before called Untravelled Path arrived in the mail. It was provocatively titled Sweet Heresy and the disc and its packaging offered only scant information—only the duo’s first names were listed and tracks were untitled and identified only by instrumentation, all of the homemade variety. But something about it called out to me from the piles of music I’m surrounded by and I felt compelled to listen to it. The more time I spent with this unearthly music—which was inspired by various world music traditions yet ultimately beholden to none—the more I wanted to know about it. Luckily in addition to the duo’s first names and the names of their instruments, a URL was provided. So I began surfing around their website and soon found out that Untravelled Path was the work of Mitsuko and Arthur Fankuchen, who are based in Taos, New Mexico. I read their philosophy of making music, which eschews specialization, aims to be different from the rest of the music around them, and is created specifically for dissemination via audio recordings rather than in live performance. I also learned quite a bit more about their instrumentarium, which includes a very low bowed monochord, a 48-keyed lamellophone even more elaborate than the largest Zimbabwean mbiras, and various end-blown bamboo flutes—all of which were built specifically to create music outside of the realm of standard 12-tone equal temperament.

This was truly adventurous music that deserved some attention in NewMusicBox, so I briefly jotted down my impressions about that recording—this was back when we were posting single paragraphs about recordings every week day. Soon thereafter I received both a very nice voice message and a letter from Mitsuko and Arthur thanking me for my words. And six years went by.

Then a few months ago, I received a second disc from Untravelled Path with an extremely unassuming title, Work in Progress, together with a note from Mitsuko and Arthur explaining to me how their music had evolved in the intervening years. In addition to the instrumental music they perform on their own hand-made creations, they also now sing—although to use the word “song” for the four vocal tracks on Work in Progress does not quite accurately describe these free-form mini-epics fusing words and music which last between 5 ½ and 7 minutes. (The CD booklet includes all of the lyrics.) The album’s nine tracks alternate between instrumental and vocal pieces.

The disc’s opener, “bbqq” (all the tracks now have titles, although the titles for all of the instrumentals are named either after specific instruments or are acronyms combining the instruments used), is an eerie soundscape in the spirit of Untravelled Path’s earlier work which I had described back in 2005 as “uncompromising, slow, and inward.” Single lamellophone pitches occasionally punctuate the long, low tones of the bowed monochord, which sounds like the breathing of alien life forms. “Dynasties Fall” introduces Untravelled Path’s new vocal gambit—Arthur’s quasi-sprechtstimme comes across as a latter day Harry Partch with the requisite accompanying plucks. The lyrics, though couched in poetic metaphors that seem more otherworldly than Partch’s corporeal concerns, reveal the duo’s anti-authoritarian, anti-establishment political agenda, e.g.

one more time those who never work
come home from vacation,
turn around, go out to grab a bite to eat
that’s cooked by someone else.

Next, “qdss” pairs various scrapes with the haunting shakuhachi-esque sounds of the Fankuchens’ homemade end blown flutes which they call shoki, their only appearance on the present recording. In “I’m a Little Worried,” Mitsuko sings a subtle microtonal melody over a series of stark, pointillistic instrumental utterances which punctuate her phrases. These musical punctuations, which function similarly to the cadences of a harpsichord continuo in a Baroque recitative but ultimately sound nothing like them, serve to further emphasize the message of her lyrics:

the too proud dude in the tailored suit,
stuffed from a power lunch, tired from a hardtrip on business class,
at home in jeans and a bandana, plays blues on his concert grand,
and dreams he’s right down there with the struggling masses.
he’s so much smaller than the humble glowing bloom.
if it’s humans like these who now truly hold the reins,
if such “masters of the universe” really are the ones in charge,
well I’m a little worried.

The ensuing instrumental, “bowus–quartus,” uses the “boardus quartus” lamellophone melodically, albeit for an extremely slow-moving melody that hovers over the sustained growls of the bass bowus. Isolated lamellophone and plucked bass tones accompany Arthur’s vocals in “Dark Clouds,” another missive about the ills of our society. Although the accompaniment retains its austerity throughout, the lyric ends on a positive, poignant, and downright romantic note:

twenty years now our shared life has grown in magic,
where she ends and I begin, we long ago forgot.

A portentous tremolo opens “bowus—bowus,” which stays predominantly in a very low register throughout. Mitsuko returns again for the final vocal track, “Hand in Hand,” which is almost a love song, albeit one of the strangest ones you’ll ever hear in your life. In the concluding “quartus—quartus,” various thuds in a variety of registers float in sonic space, conjuring the infinite.

Last month Arthur and Mitsuko wrote to me describing the reactions of people in their community to Work in Progress—grocery store cashiers, bank tellers, gas station attendants, postal clerks, etc., folks who are fall outside the usual “new music demographic,” to whom they gave free copies of the disc. According to them, everyone listened to the disc again and again, while driving or working, one even listened in a hot tub. They believe that “maybe we’ve created some of the very first New Music for the 99%.”

I, for one, am totally a fan of their work. But I hope they don’t wait another six years before making their next recording.

Sounds Heard: Michael Gordon—Timber

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

When the recording of Michael Gordon’s Timber dropped last fall, critics justifiably drooled a little on the impressively weighty, laser-etched, inch-thick wooden box (with magnetic closure, no less) that held the CD and its booklet inside. I’m a sucker for a pretty cover myself, but while I appreciated that the Cantaloupe label had effectively packaged the disc in a representative sample of the featured instrument (okay, not really, but I doubt I’m the first to try hammering on the case with my fingertips while listening, regardless), it was actually the recent experience of hearing Mantra Percussion play the piece live here in Baltimore that drew me more deeply inside the transfixing power of a score designed for six percussionists and lumber.

Slagwerk Den Haag, the ensemble that recorded and jointly commissioned the piece from Gordon, led the composer to the unique sound when they turned up a number of wooden simantras (a simple Greek percussion instrument) in their storage space during the work’s development. Gordon had embarked on the commission with the desire “to clear my mind of pitches and orchestration […] I thought of composing this music as being like taking a trip out into the desert. I was counting on the stark palette and the challenge of survival to clear my brain and bring on visions.” The simantras further inspired this concept.

The resulting five-movement, 55-minute piece puts the musicians in a circle of sound, literally and figuratively. In their recording of the work, Slagwerk Den Haag offers a sharp, precise delivery of the intricate rhythms and ever-undulating dynamics, haloed by the rich overtones the instruments generate. The sonic focus moves around the stereo field in a languid hula-hoop of generally dense, rapid-fire mallet-against-wood action. In live performance in a reverberant acoustic space, that constant spiral moves the sound around the room with almost spiritual power, perhaps harkening back in some ways to the whirling dervish who inhabited Bill Morison’s film for Gordon’s Decasia.

In their concert presentation, Mantra Percussion performed the work in near-darkness, with specially designed and timed lights to accent the movement of the piece. Out in the audience, the sensory deprivation added to the immersive effect and made the concert experience feel particularly intimate—even though the circular setup of the hall with the performers at the core meant everyone was staring at someone’s back. The shifting light emanating from the center of the room gave the impression of a campfire, the music as storytelling by firelight.

You might expect that nearly an hour of relentless pounding would leave your ears, if not you entire psyche, a bit bruised by the journey. In my experience of the work, however, time actually fell out of focus. It wasn’t until well after the last echoes of the piece faded from the room that the hypnosis drained away and the clock began its proper forward motion once again.

Sounds Heard: Stefan Weisman / Anna Rabinowitz—Darkling

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Alexandra Gardner - Albums, Listen

The transformations that opera is undergoing right now make it an exciting time for those working with the form. Composing an opera continues to be a major career goal for many composers, but the task of actually mounting a full production—at least as it has been traditionally defined through history—is daunting, to say the least. As of late, much contemporary opera has been reducing its footprint by relying on smaller forces for performance and documentation. Darkling, with music by Stefan Weisman and libretto by poet Anna Rabinowitz, is one such example of an opera that packs a punch even though served in a relatively small container.

The libretto for Darkling is a collage of text snippets culled from letters, photographs, and other memorabilia from Eastern European Jews that serve to illustrate the tumultuous period (both from a personal and an historic perspective) between the two World Wars. Twenty-three very short movements, ranging from less than one minute to a little over five minutes, are sandwiched between a longer prologue and epilogue. Layers of spoken word, singing, and the occasional chunk of archival audio are intertwined with a supporting bed of string quartet music that makes for an intimate listening experience.

Interestingly, for all of the work’s nonlinearity, both the text and the music are built upon the same very solid foundation—Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush.” While Rabinowitz created a book-length acrostic poem (!) from the text scraps with the poem at the core, Weisman found inspiration from composer Lee Hoiby’s setting of the poem, sprinkling tiny seeds of content from that song into his music. Perhaps this shared thematic element explains why the music so effectively supports the text without ever getting in the way. However, so crucial is the poem to this work that it is surprising neither it nor the acrostic are reprinted (or even excerpted) in the liner notes.

This 2-CD incarnation of Darkling (it was originally produced by American Opera Projects) is a compelling listen—the texts, given carefully nuanced deliveries by a cast of rich voices perfectly suited to storytelling, are so engrossing that at times I forgot that music was happening as well. But like a well-crafted film score, that the music is unobtrusive and sometimes melts into the larger dramatic structure is a positive.

It would be fascinating to experience a live production, to discover how the many layers and fragments are handled in three dimensions. However, this aural version of Darkling is beautifully recorded, strongly conveying the feeling of a radio play. Even though the fragmentary nature of the storyline means that there isn’t exactly an “ending” so to speak, the opera nonetheless paints a vivid and satisfying picture of a challenging historical period.

Sounds Heard: Florence B. Price—Concerto in One Movement; Symphony in E Minor

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Frank J. Oteri - Albums, Listen

Since yesterday was Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, I thought it was an appropriate day to listen almost exclusively to music by African-American classical music composers—a group of composers who all too often get excluded from the pantheon of our nation’s most significant creative artists even at a time when we make extremely valiant attempts to celebrate diversity. While a handful of African-American composers alive now have the opportunity to hear their music performed by orchestras and other large-scale enterprises around the country and the past giants of jazz, blues, and other genres are rightfully revered (some even on postage stamps), pioneers like William Grant Still (1895-1978), R. Nathaniel Dett (1882-1943), William Levi Dawson (1899-1990), Ulysses Kay (1917-1995), and many others have yet to enter the standard repertoire of concert halls. Probing deep into the history of American music, an intrepid musicologist will discover that long before Jerome Kern attempted to elevate the Broadway musical to the level of opera with his 1927 Show Boat (the plot of which is curiously about miscegenation) and George Gershwin attempted to bring Broadway sensibilities to opera with his 1935 Porgy and Bess (the plot of which focuses on African Americans), the African-American “king of ragtime” Scott Joplin created an opera that did both—Treemonisha—in 1911. Long before Charles Ives and Henry Cowell exploited the sonorities of tone clusters in their piano music, a blind composer-pianist raised as a slave named Thomas Wiggins (a.k.a. “Blind Tom” Bethune) was tossing out tone clusters in a tone poem about the then-occurring American Civil War Battle of Manasses as far back as 1862 (when he was 12-years old)!

And then there’s Florence Beatrice Smith Price. Born in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1887, she was admitted to the New England Conservatory as a keyboardist (performing on both piano and organ) at the age of 14 and wound up studying composition with George Chadwick and Frederick Converse, two of the leading American symphonic composers at the dawn of the 20th century. She returned to Arkansas and, in 1912, married a prominent Harvard-trained African-American lawyer Thomas J. Price, who represented Black defendants arrested following the 1919 Arkansas race riots and was a founding member of the Arkansas chapter of the NAACP. But following a gruesome lynching, they and their two children relocated to Chicago in 1927 where she remained for the rest of her life. While this was a tragedy for the people of Arkansas, it was a mitzvah to Florence Price whose music got to the attention of, among others, the prominent Chicago composer Leo Sowerby with whom she studied and who became a staunch advocate. In Chicago, she flourished as a composer, creating four symphonies, three piano concertos, and a violin concerto, plus numerous compositions for solo instruments, chamber ensembles, and choruses. By the time of her death in 1953, she had completed over 300 pieces of music, many of which received prominent performances—her Symphony in E Minor (her first), which Frederick Stock led the Chicago Symphony in the premiere of in 1933, was the very first symphony by an African-American woman ever performed by a major symphony orchestra in the United States and remains one of the few to this day. Yet after her death, performances waned and, aside from a few of her spiritual arrangements being championed by Marian Anderson and Leontyne Price (no relation) who sang one at the White House in 1978, the only recording devoted exclusively to her music is a now out-of-print Women’s Philharmonic disc released in 2001 by Koch International Classics (which is now owned by E1 Entertainment and which they ought to reissue). That disc, which should have made listeners eager to hear more of her music, featured performances of three of her orchestral works—the expansive Mississippi River Suite, her formidable Symphony No. 3 in C Minor from 1940, and a mysterious shorter piece called The Oak which was discovered in the Eastman School of Music’s Sibley Music Library and might have never been performed during her lifetime.

The most recent attempt to right the wrong of the current neglect of Florence Price’s music is the latest installment in an ongoing series of CDs entitled “Recorded Music of the African Diaspora” featuring the New Black Music Repertory Ensemble and released by Albany Records under the auspices of the Center for Black Music Research at Columbia College in Chicago. Like its aforementioned Women’s Philharmonic forebear, the latest addition to the Florence Price discography is also the result of some intrepid musical archaeology. The disc opens with Price’s Concerto in One Movement, a work which premiered in Chicago in 1934 with the composer as soloist and which was subsequently performed by another early 20th century African-American female composer-pianist Margaret Bonds, who later became a close friend of and frequent collaborator with Langston Hughes. Yet the original orchestral score for this composition is lost; all that has survived are three manuscripts (all in the composer’s hand): a solo piano version, a three-piano arrangement, and a two-piano arrangement containing some marginal notes about instrumentation (although it is not known if these were written by her before or after the completion of the original orchestration). The Center for Black Music Research commissioned composer Trevor Weston to reconstruct an authoritative orchestration from the surviving materials, and this work received its premiere on February 17, 2011, with pianist Karen Walwyn and the New Black Repertory Ensemble conducted by Leslie B. Dunner; the same forces appear on the present recording. The Concerto, in its current guise, is an extremely exciting and approachable work. Although it is in one movement, as the title makes clear, the Concerto is parsed in three clearly discernible sections. The opening Moderato section echoes the sound world of spirituals which were so important to Price’s musical sensibilities. The Adagio section, in which the rest of the orchestra is mostly silent, contains some extraordinary piano writing which is the most overtly jazz-tinged music of Price’s yet to be recorded. The concluding Allegretto is inspired by the Juba, an antebellum folk dance which also inspired the third movement of Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, as well as her very first Symphony in E Minor. The performance is crystalline, with Walwyn and the NBRE often sounding like a period-instrument outfit tackling one of Mozart’s fortepiano concertos.

The rest of the disc is devoted to that historic first Symphony in E Minor, a massive nearly 40-minute work. She originally intended to subtitle the work “Negro Symphony,” which immediately begs comparison to William Grant Still’s earlier Afro American Symphony from 1930 and William Levi Dawson’s 1934 Negro Folk Symphony which postdates it. But even without the verbal acknowledgement in its title, the work’s saturation with spiritual-like melodies belies its intent. Another symphony which casts a huge shadow on Price’s work is Dvorak’s 1893 New World Symphony which also uses spirituals, so much so in the first movement of Price’s symphony that her piece occasionally feels like something of a doppelganger of that celebrated work. But considering that Dvorak was borrowing his material, it is perhaps fitting that someone from the community from which it was borrowed should reclaim it for similar symphonic ends. Of course what is somewhat problematic is that Price was reclaiming this material a full four decades later, making her music sound something like a throwback to an earlier era of American symphonic music—the era in which a generation of composers responded to Dvorak’s advice to create a viable American symphonic music using native materials. This is a claim that certainly cannot be made of Price’s Concerto in One Movement, a work whose incorporation of jazz harmonies make it as up-to-date as contemporaneous attempts to do so by composers as diverse as Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, George Antheil, and James P. Johnson—a great African-American composer now principally remembered only in the jazz community for his exciting stride piano recordings. But thankfully the shadow of Dvorak that hovers over Price’s first movement is less obvious in the symphony’s remaining three movements: the second movement contains some assured brass writing (would that Price had composed for symphonic winds, maybe there’s a piece lurking somewhere in someone’s archives); and the fourth contains some exciting interplay between the strings and the woodwinds—though admittedly it too sounds like music from an earlier era. My favorite part of the piece is the Juba-inspired third movement, a rondo which includes orchestral imitations of folk fiddling and banjo picking and features a slide whistle which provides a few welcome moments of true musical weirdness. Once again the performance and sound quality of the recording are outstanding.

Now to find more of Florence Price’s music! In his keynote speech to the 2012 Chamber Music America conference on January 13, 2012, Aaron Dworkin, the founder and president of the Sphinx Organization (which advocates for a greater role for Black and Latino musicians in classical music) opined that less than one percent of music performed by American orchestras is by Black or Latino composers and that he only learned that such composers ever existed when he got to college. In the list of names he cited who became heroes to him as an adult (Still, Dawson, etc.), Price was conspicuously absent. Women composers have suffered similar neglect at the hands of orchestra music programmers. Florence Price is part of two underserved demographics in our repertoire. But if the music didn’t merit rediscovery, it would just have curiosity value. The fact that she created at least a handful of worthy repertoire candidates (and who knows what else is lying around in an archive somewhere)—I treasure the Mississippi River Suite and the Concerto in One Movement (which now, thanks to Trevor Weston’s re-orchestration, can re-enter the canon)—means that attention must be paid.

Sounds Heard: Alexander Berne—Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes

Posted on January 10, 2012 by Molly Sheridan - Albums, Listen

The opening moments of Alexander Berne & the Abandoned Orchestra’s Flickers of Mime suffocate the ear, a crush of sustained organ tones overwhelming the space with a mysterious and vaguely threatening assault. The puncture of a drum roll lets some air into the room, but the off-kilter trajectory doesn’t abate. It’s a disorienting plunge into dreamscape (or perhaps nightmare), tangled in swirls of soprano saxophone.

For indeed, the path through this 11-movement work—paired here in a 2-CD set with Berne’s equally fascinating Death of Memes—weaves in its course. Beginning with an ambient base layer of sound out of which distinct sonic events emerge and retreat, Berne creates the sensation that we are watching the landscape of a foreign country through the window of a moving vehicle, the sights only half glimpsed and even less concretely understood. The vaguely Arabic timbre to elements of the tracks—particularly noticeable in the woodwinds (which include a saduk, a very cool sounding Berne-built invention), though present in the strings and percussion as well—add to this exotic imagery. For as visually evocative as the music feels to the mind’s eye, however, the only truly navigable handrail available is by ear, of course, offering endless opportunities to hit delete on conjured images and begin the journey again.

As the work develops, it seems roused from its Nyquil haze, instrumental lines taking up more firmly pronounced physical residence in the aural space as the tracks progress. This is especially striking in the immersive “Flicker VII”, the placement and volume levels of the various instruments in the mix building an almost tangible structure around the listener.

If Flickers of Mime took the ear on a sonic safari, Death of Memes ships it off to Battlestar Galactica. The romance and anguish in Berne’s woodwind writing remain, but “Meme I” finds them singing in a metallic cage of percussion and marching drum beats. From there, however, the tenor of the following eight tracks turn away from the foreign odyssey that Mime suggested to concentrate on a meditative, inward-looking space. Though the overall vibe develops a more aggressive and ominous character as the work moves toward its conclusion, it maintains a certain atmosphere of introspective solitude.

On a closing note, though you perhaps shouldn’t judge a CD by its cover, it’s certainly fair to give props for a particularly excellent one, and Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes‘s hardback book-style packaging with its silver-inked text and cover art (design and layout by Shelter Bookworks/drawings by Karolien Soete) definitely puts a well-earned gloss on an exciting project.

Games Played: IV-V-I

Posted on December 20, 2011 by DanVisconti - Albums, Listen

With the holidays upon us, many of us musical types have been doing some last-minute shopping, racking our brains to think of any gift that is sufficiently cooler than a treble clef paperweight. So it seems like a good time to bring up IV-V-I, a new harmony-based card game created and designed by composer and educator Rafael Hernandez. The idea behind IV-V-I is easy to grasp: using their available cards, players compete to build the best phrase (where “best” means most daring and elaborate, not just technically correct), and then seal the deal with a cadence.

While one of IV-V-I’s strengths is how accurately the game captures the challenge of harmonic part writing exercises, the addition of several unique gameplay elements makes for a level of strategy and fun that far exceeds what can be derived from standard harmony exercises. Players compete with their opponents to score the most points with their phrases, yet they can also play “part writing error” cards to nullify an opponent’s points, or shake things up with “style cards” which have a global effect on gameplay; Beethoven, for example, doles out extra points for “special harmony” cards while that rascally Shostakovich makes part writing errors a virtue.

These details make for a rich and immersive experience that manages to teach and hone some of the most complex elements of music theory without becoming pedantic. Players are allowed to expand phrases from either the left or right, which provides for more playing options, as well as provoking a way of thinking seldom encouraged in classroom harmony exercises; and most importantly, the communal and interactive element of gameplay ensures that what might be many players’ first attempts at composing will be enjoyable and provocative.

In IV-V-I, it’s easy to change the game’s level of difficulty with a few house rules: the more complicated cards (augmented 6th chords, for example) can simply be pulled from a beginning deck and subsequently introduced at a later time, while more advanced players can ratchet up the intensity with additional restrictions. See below for a video clip of gameplay (other demonstration videos available at the IV-V-I website):

All in all, IV-V-I would be a welcome addition to most any music theory classroom while holding plenty of interest for music nerds of all skill levels. I hope that Rafael will turn his considerable game design talents to more projects; since IV-V-I targets a more advanced age group, I can’t help but think how a companion game targeted to even younger players—and one that readies them for the challenges of more advanced harmonic functions—would fill a comparable gaping hole in the K-6 bracket. The availability of more well-crafted games like IV-V-I to students and educators would go a long way to enrich and vitalize the appreciation of music in America—a country where it’s common for children 6 years old or even younger to study an instrument while rarely delving very deeply into how music is put together.

Sounds Heard: Peter Garland—Waves Breaking on Rocks

Posted on December 13, 2011 by Alexandra Gardner - Albums, Listen

I have absolutely no idea how anything could possibly follow Frank’s behemoth SMiLE essay from last week, and in fact I have been considering covering my CD pick of this week in a haiku, as way to bring the universe back into balance. Luckily, it turns out that the title of Peter Garland’s Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us) came to him in the form of a haiku. It’s reproduced in the disc’s liner notes:

Cold gray summer day
Waves breaking against the rocks—
Winter in my heart

Waves breaking on Rocks (Elegy for all of us) is a suite of six elegies commissioned by Garland’s long-time musical collaborator and friend, pianist Aki Takahashi. Each movement reflects upon the cycle of life and death, through the remembrances of lost friends or upon the progression of the seasons. Though it may seem like a rather dark proposal, this work is anything but; there is a strong sense of light and openness throughout the work, largely due to Garland’s distinctive harmonic language and sense of formal structure. Each movement has a clear “personality,” from the gentle chords of the second movement, “Elegy for All of Us,” composed in memory of the poet Laurence Weisberg, to the upward rippling scales of the final movement, “Waves Breaking on Rocks (2)/Autumn Again.” Takahashi’s performance discloses the close working relationship and friendship between Garland and herself in its fluidity and intimacy—this piece sounds as if it could only have been written for her.

After 35 minutes of beautiful, spare piano music, the percussion, strings, and vocals of The Roque Dalton Songs are a refreshing aural surprise. Composed in 1988, this work uses as text five poems of the Salvadorean poet, activist, and guerilla Roque Dalton, and is given a lively performance by tenor John Duykers and the musicians of Santa Fe New Music. Garland has intensively studied Latin American music for decades (and published extensively, including the book Americas: Essays on American Music and Culture, 1973-80), and The Roque Dalton Songs reveal numerous hat-tips to the music of various Latin American cultures. This is not the propagation of ethnic music as “other”; Garland has clearly assimilated core elements of different musics into his own compositional style. Santa Fe New Music’s instrumentation of violin, bass clarinet, trumpet, harp, piano, and percussion creates beguiling dance-like structures for Duykers’s voice to wander through, with thoughtfully chosen small percussion instruments that create a strong rhythmic foundation that fortifies rather than overpowers the other instruments. I keep returning to the clave and harp opening of the gently swaying third movement, “Como la Siempreviva,” a wonderfully simple yet effective means of punctuation that transforms into different rhythmic cells as the movement progresses.

The excellent recording quality of this disc deserves mention—the piano of Waves Breaking on Rocks has a bright, refreshing sound, and the ensemble performing The Roque Dalton Songs is aurally just close enough to conjure an intimate listening space without being too close or too dry. Garland’s music, which is clear, direct, and refreshingly devoid of self-indulgence or pretension, is engagingly represented in every aspect of this recording.

Sounds Heard: The Beach Boys—The Smile Sessions

Posted on December 8, 2011 by Frank J. Oteri - Albums, Analysis, Articles, Listen

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It might seem somewhat incongruous for the following musings about an album recorded more than 45 years ago by one of the biggest (and most financially lucrative) musical acts of all time to be appearing within this web magazine devoted to new American music that is outside the commercial mainstream. But The Smile Sessions—a total of 144 tracks (in its most complete available form) from the 80 sessions recorded by The Beach Boys between 1966 and 1967 for the never-issued LP SMiLE, finally officially released commercially on November 1, 2011—contains some of the most provocative musical ideas of the last half-century in any genre of music. Although these were recordings for an album by what was—for all intents and purposes—the most successful popular music group of its day, the project morphed into something quite other. Randall Roberts, in one of several pieces on The Smile Sessions that ran recently in The Los Angeles Times, has stated that “every library of American recording history needs this; university composition departments, music professors, budding recording engineers and composers should study it.”

In the extensive hardcover booklet that accompanies the collector’s edition of The Smile Sessions, Beach Boy Bruce Johnston boasts that back in 1967 he was wondering if The Beach Boys’ record label Capitol would realize that the music contained herein should be released on Capitol’s classical division, Angel Records. Of course, it was never issued in 1967 on Capitol, Angel, or anywhere else for a complex web of reasons that are still not completely clear at this late date. But these 144 tracks of music, many of which will be brand new to listeners despite their age, deserve an extensive explication or at least an attempt at one, so here goes.

Wouldn’t It Be Nice…

A photo of master tapes for various songs from SMiLE.

A tantalizing photograph of the original master tapes for SMiLE which is featured on the cover of the LP-sized digipack that holds the 5 CDs contained in The Smile Sessions.

The Beach Boys’ album SMiLE, scheduled for release in 1967 but never issued, has been touted for decades as one of American music’s ultimate what-ifs: the most momentous might-have-been in music history, the musical road not taken which would have irrevocably changed music’s subsequent direction. For decades it has inspired voluminous conjecture comparable to speculative fiction like Philip K. Dick’s classic The Man In The High Castle, a novel not about the future but rather an alternative present which was the result of the Axis powers winning the Second World War. Over the past nearly half-century, knowing about SMiLE’s existence made you part of a cadre of arcane music cognoscenti. There was particular satisfaction in being part of the minority who had been let in on the secret that this group—frequently dismissed even by those who believed that popular music could aspire to a level equal to anything coming from so-called high art—had actually created something that was perhaps even more full of high art aspirations than anything else done at the time.

Like Scott Joplin’s first opera A Guest of Honor, whose performance materials no one saw fit to preserve, or Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, which some of its champions have vociferously asserted can be completed from his surviving sketches while others (equally vociferous) claim was nothing more than a patchwork of unfinished and unrealizable sketches, SMiLE has become the stuff of legend and its legend has become larger than it or perhaps any work of art can ever be. Its pedigree certainly puts SMiLE in league with those Joplin and Ives pieces, as well as such music history would-that-they-weres as an opera by Giuseppe Verdi based on Shakespeare’s King Lear, which according to some accounts Verdi threw into the flames as soon as he completed it, or Sibelius’s Eighth Symphony, which its composer struggled in vain with for the last thirty years of his life and also ultimately destroyed. (Although some provocative fragments from what might be Sibelius’s 8th finally got their first performance in October 2011). Or closer to home, Charles Mingus’s Epitaph, which its jazz bassist creator was only able to record a portion of in 1962 and whose score was long thought to be lost, but which resurfaced in his papers after his death in 1979 (and only received its first hearing when Gunther Schuller led a performance of it a decade later in 1989).

The legend surrounding SMiLE also includes burning work, the release of less-than-complete portions of work, the music haunting its principal creator (The Beach Boys’ principal songwriter and musical arranger Brian Wilson) for decades, reconstructing a finished product long after that, and lost elements that miraculously resurfaced still later on. So what exactly is the story?

I Know There’s An Answer…

The cover for The Beach Boys LP Pet Sounds showing band members feeding animals.

The somewhat lighthearted cover of Pet Sounds doesn’t really reflect the serious music contained on the album.

In a nutshell (though admittedly one for a rather large nut), by 1966—when the recording sessions for SMiLE began, The Beach Boys were at the top of their game. Their now platinum-selling album, Pet Sounds, which took full advantage of studio recording techniques and was filled with dense contrapuntal layering and elaborate orchestration, was released in May of that year. That album was the first piece of evidence that The Beach Boys, and Brian Wilson as auteur, were capable of a lot more than just churning out teen fare marrying layered vocal harmonies (from low bass to high falsetto) reminiscent of contemporaneous East Coast groups like The Four Seasons to a somewhat less edgy, though way more popular, approach to the regional surf rock subgenre from their native Southern California pioneered by Dick Dale. Pet Sounds earned Brian Wilson respectability and offered concrete evidence that he might actually be—as the band’s acolytes believed and Capitol Records’ marketing department had promulgated—a musical genius. Among its most celebrated fans was Paul McCartney of The Beatles (who had yet to complete the recording sessions for their album Revolver, which was issued in August 1966). By McCartney’s own admission, Pet Sounds heavily influenced him and directly led to the creation of The Beatles’ subsequent LP, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (released on June 1, 1967), the album that has frequently been credited with the birth of the progressive rock genre as well as album-oriented rock overall. Pet Sounds is a clear precedent. Among its tracks are the astonishing songs “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “God Only Knows,” “I Know There’s An Answer,” “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” and (the Brian Wilson solo) “Caroline, No,” whose ending (also the end of the album) is a barrage of sound effects. But despite the sophistication of these songs (whose lyrics also mostly eschewed the Boys’ previous summer fun fare thanks in part to Brian Wilson collaborating with an outside-the-band wordsmith, Tony Asher) and the album’s two equally surprising instrumentals, Pet Sounds was ultimately still a pop album.

Brian Wilson wanted to prove he could create something more significant than that, a fully integrated opus that demands to be listened to as a multi-movement composition containing various permutations of the same thematic material throughout, a project he at one point began describing as “a teenage symphony to God.” To further prove his seriousness, he enlisted the help of even more high-minded librettist—the erudite singer/songwriter Van Dyke Parks—to fashion lyrics for him that would be even further away from the boy-meets-girl and let’s-go-surfing fodder that had dominated the lyrics of most of The Beach Boys’ repertoire. The other members of The Beach Boys—Brian’s two brothers, Carl and Dennis, a cousin, Mike Love, high school classmate Al Jardine, and Bruce Johnston, who had just joined the group in 1965—were frequently baffled by the new direction and Love was often openly hostile to it.

Before his collaboration with Parks got underway, in February 1966, Brian began recording an additional song—originally intended for Pet Sounds—that became so elaborate that he was not able to complete it in time for that album’s scheduled release. He ultimately worked on the song, “Good Vibrations” (whose infatuation-themed lyrics were, incidentally, by Mike Love), for more than six months thereafter. To perform his ornate arrangement of the song, Brian assembled an ensemble far larger than any he had put together heretofore which, in addition to the members of The Beach Boys included some of Los Angeles’s most in-demand studio musicians, such as Al De Lory on piano and harpsichord, Jesse Ehrlich on cello, Hal Blaine on timpani and other percussion, and—perhaps most memorably—trombonist Paul Tanner on an electronic musical instrument of his own invention. (Tanner’s instrument, which he had previously played on the Pet Sounds song “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times,” has alternately been named the tannerin—in his honor—and the electro-theremin. As a result of the similar name and a somewhat similar sound, Tanner’s instrument, which is played by controlling a knob attached to a slider with string, rather than hand movements over antennae, has been frequently misidentified by theremin discographers; “Good Vibrations” does not use a theremin.) Perhaps more importantly, “Good Vibrations” was not performed in its entirely from start to finish during these recording sessions, but rather in modular sections, each with different instrumentation. It was later seamlessly layered and pieced together in the studio from a purported grand total of 90 hours of recordings. As a result, “Good Vibrations,” which was released independently as a Beach Boys single on October 10, 1966, and was slated to also be included on their next full-length album (SMiLE), sounds like no other pop song that had been recorded up to that point.

Brian’s approach to the recording of “Good Vibrations” would serve as the blueprint for how he would record everything that was planned for the SMiLE album. While no other track intended for the album had such an extensive production history, some of his arrangements were even more elaborate, such as “Heroes and Villains,” alternate parts of which were recorded on October 1966 and February 1967. All in all, the remaining sessions for SMiLE (excluding the earlier “Good Vibrations”) occurred over the course of 13 months from May 1966 until May 1967, during which time Brian Wilson grew more and more despondent due to clinical depression and drug abuse.

The original Frank Holmes cover illustration for SMiLE which has graced the cover of countless bootlegs which attempted to reconstruct SMiLE over the years and which was finally officially released as the album’s cover in November 2011.Finally, the album was shelved despite heavy advertising and Capitol Records printing over 400,000 LP covers with an image that nevertheless became iconic. (This cover image, of a store selling smiles by Frank Holmes, is also the source of the typographical strangeness of the album’s title; it would have been among the earliest covers by a popular music group to feature original, specifically commissioned artwork rather than a photograph of the performers.)

The illustrated LP cover for The Beach Boys 1967 LP Smiley Smile.

The Smiley Smile cover also does not feature a photograph of the band, but rather a cabin in the middle of a forest that presumably contains the contents of SMiLE.

In order to fulfill their contractual obligation to release something in 1967, the remaining members of the group wrested artistic control from Brian and cobbled together an album containing “Good Vibrations,” “Heroes and Villains” (which they truncated somewhat, re-recorded parts for in June 1967, and issued as a single in July 1967), and several other (but not all) intended SMiLE tracks. That LP, officially released on September 18, 1967 under the name Smiley Smile, is still quite fascinating and frequently extremely odd. (One of its most notorious tracks, “She’s Goin’ Bald,” even speeds up The Beach Boys’ voices in a rare example of musique concrète in the band’s oeuvre, a feat which undoubtedly, along with the electro-theremin and the extensive electronic manipulations on the aforementioned “Good Vibrations” which opens Side Two of the LP, earned Smiley Smile a place in the discography of Paul Griffiths’s seminal A Guide to Electronic Music published in 1979.) Yet the end result is far less ambitious than Brian’s original plan and Smiley Smile proved to be their least commercially successful venture up to that point. (Van Dyke Parks, his input rejected by the other members of The Beach Boys, embarked on his own solo debut album, an inter-related collection of his own music as well as words, tellingly called Song Cycle, in November 1967; it’s a very nice record and it launched his successful career, but it never reached the kind of an audience that SMiLE would have.)

Here’s the official version of the story being told now…

God Only Knows…

As the time when Brian Wilson attempted to realize SMiLE and forever change the history of American music—popular or otherwise—recedes further and further into history, it becomes increasingly difficult to separate actual facts from the mythology that has come to surround that era. The 1960s remain a watershed period in the history of music of all genres. In classical music, it was the time when many composers desiring to keep up with the zeitgeist were torn between the rigors of integral serialism and the process-oriented experimentation of indeterminacy and conceptualism, while performing musicians began seriously recreating the sound world of earlier eras (the de-facto birth of the so-called period instrument movement). It was also the decade that spawned minimalism as well as a time when electronic music became a viable performance and compositional possibility—Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach was the most commercially successful classical album of its day, Morton Subonick’s Silver Apples of the Moon, released in 1967, was the first electronic composition created expressly for release on a commercial recording (on Nonesuch, which was then a budget label devoted almost exclusively to contemporary and early music), and Charles Wuorinen’s Time’s Encomium, another Nonesuch release from the end of the decade, was the first all-electronic piece to win the Pulitzer Prize. In jazz, the chord changes that had underpinned musicians’ solos from the earliest recorded manifestations of the music up to bebop and beyond, had already given way to modality inspired by non-Western musical traditions as well as completely free improvisations, but this music grew further and further out as the decade progressed. Rock and roll, ostensibly a music associated with youth culture, grew even more rebellious but also more sophisticated, morphing forever into rock and eventually myriad subgenres. Rhythm and blues, which was basically a racially charged code name given to the rock and roll-type music being made by African Americans, evolved into soul and later funk, also getting more and more experimental in the process. Even composers of film music and Broadway shows somehow seemed to be aesthetically tilting toward the avant-garde, or at least toward a consciousness that went far beyond Western musical traditions. And music from all parts of the globe—from North India and the Far East to Southern Africa—not only profoundly influenced much of music being made in the West but it too became available to the general public in the West through commercially available recordings as well as live performances by some of its greatest practitioners who finally were given opportunities to tour.

We will never know all the music that Brian Wilson had heard up to the point where he began work on SMiLE and how much of it influenced the new music that he was trying to invent. He has acknowledged his indebtedness to Glenn Miller and much has been made over the years about how Paul McCartney’s admiration for Brian Wilson was not only mutual but also competitive. Brian saw himself in a race with The Beatles to create the great rock record. He also fancied himself a latter-day George Gershwin since he, too, as a teenager had become a world famous songwriter but by his mid-20s aspired to be something more—a serious composer, though one working in a thoroughly vernacular American idiom. (In recent years, Brian Wilson even secured the rights to complete some of Gershwin’s unfinished compositional fragments and recorded them in 2010.) Rumored among Brian Wilson’s earlier compositions is a piano sonata that he never completed, another musical holy grail. According to comments made by the late Dennis Wilson, Brian’s brother and the drummer for The Beach Boys, Brian had heard Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 at some point and was completely floored and humbled. But could he have also heard Charles Ives’s Symphony No. 4, a work that finally received its world premiere in 1965, eleven years after the death of its composer, and a work that—all practicality be damned—was trying to redefine the symphony in much the same way that Wilson was attempting to redefine the popular song and the record album?

It would have been impossible for Brian Wilson to escape hearing the theme music for the TV show My Favorite Martian, which also featured Paul Tanner on the electro-theremin. As a Southern California native who knew many session musicians, he was probably also aware of Samuel J. Hoffman, who had recorded on an actual theremin for numerous film soundtracks including Bernard Herrmann’s score for The Day the Earth Stood Still. But could he have possibly also heard Honegger’s 1935 oratorio Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher or Olivier Messiaen’s massive 1948 Turangalîla-Symphonie, both of which use the ondes martinot, another early electronic instrument, similarly to the way Brian eventually used the electro-theremin on “Good Vibrations”? What about John Cage, the composer who completely redefined music, making it more inclusive than anyone else had acknowledged it to be previously? At one point during his work on SMiLE, Brian Wilson considered recording an entire album of various sounds to accompany the album of songs that would make up SMiLE, but this idea never got much beyond the conceptual stage.

Listening with 2011 ears, Brian Wilson’s experiments in 1966 and 1967 seem normative of the kinds of things most interesting musicians in any genre were up to at that point and even tamer than some of them. The blurring of boundaries between musical genres was pretty much commonplace at that time, as was the attitude, however real or imagined, that just about any musical undertaking was somehow an expansion beyond anything that had come before it. In October 1966, John Cage mounted performances of his Variations VII, an all-encompassing live electronic music environment which included the amplification of sounds received from ten telephone lines which had been distributed in locations ranging from lost dog holding rooms at the ASPCA to the press room of The New York Times. By 1966, La Monte Young, now acknowledged as the father of musical minimalism, was exploring extended duration drone installations that lasted for months. In 1966, Meredith Monk gave the first public performance of her music, 16 Millimeter Earrings, a work involving her now signature extended vocal techniques as well as tapes. Across the Atlantic, German serialist-turned-electronic music guru Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose face is among those portrayed on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s proving that they knew who he was) created Hymnen, a Wagnerian two-hour magnetic tape composition based on national anthems from all over the world.

Among the jazz community, John Coltrane was in Japan mesmerizing a live audience with an hour-long interpretation of the Rodgers and Hammerstein standard “My Favorite Things” in addition to his own expansive compositions. In Chicago, Roscoe Mitchell was joined by fellow members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians on the first recording of his free-form music, a forerunner of the group that would soon be known as the Art Ensemble of Chicago. On the East Coast, Cecil Taylor assembled his largest group to date to perform his gnarly atonal charts, and Albert Ayler was terrifying the denizens of the Village Vanguard with his otherworldly skronking. Before Miles Davis pioneered the fusion of jazz and rock in New York, another trumpeter, Los Angeles-based Don Ellis, outfitted the entire trumpet section of his latter-day big band with quarter-tone trumpets, fed his own instrument through a ring modulator, and made quintuple, septimal, and even higher prime-based rhythms sound perfectly natural. Around the same time, a seventeen-year-old trombonist Willie Colón went into the studio to record his first album, El Malo, blending Cuban and Puerto Rican music with jazz and soul, a style that would soon be universally described as salsa. For his score for the motion picture Wait Until Dark, released in October 1967 (but to this day never released on a separate audio soundtrack album), even the then dean of Hollywood composers, Henry Mancini, whose scores were tailor-made to please mainstream tastes, included two pianos tuned a quarter-tone apart in his orchestration.

At the same time, rock music seemed equally poised to break beyond listener expectations. Almost every other pop song from that time seems to include either a harpsichord or a sitar or some kind of oddball-sounding electronic manipulation. San Francisco-area bands like The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane were already crafting musical statements that went on much longer than three-minute songs, as were groups in England as diverse as Pink Floyd and The Who. Hair, the first evening-length rock musical, debuted on Off-Broadway the same month that Wait Until Dark opened in movie theatres across the country and would move to Broadway the following year. Jimi Hendrix proved the electric guitar could be the vehicle for virtuosity as intense as on any classical or jazz instrument. Even rock’s premier poet-songwriter Bob Dylan (who was a role model to many aspiring wordsmiths at the time, undoubtedly including Van Dyke Parks) released a side-long track, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” on his 1966 album Blonde on Blonde. And La Monte Young’s extended drones found their way into rock music via The Velvet Underground, a group whose original line-up included Young’s former musical collaborator John Cale (who several years later recorded a tribute song to Brian Wilson). Groups like Chicago and Blood, Sweat and Tears would soon be crafting rock albums scored for almost symphonic ensembles. (BS&T’s debut album, released in February 1968, is coincidentally titled Child is Father To The Man, after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, but its title is also eerily similar to “Child is Father Of The Man,” one of the key songs recorded for SMiLE that had never been officially released.)

Bigger, longer, and stranger was all the rage. While Frank Zappa’s band The Mothers of Invention arguably advanced rock music further than anyone else at that time, scores of now-forgotten groups across the country, who sometimes only recorded one single, were making music that sounds even more eccentric. Record collectors to this day scour the bins for these rare, unknown psychedelic rock recordings hoping to track down the ultimate transformative musical experience. What has gone down in history as the breakthrough, however, is The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Soon after its release, everyone seemed to have an artistic response to it, from The Rolling Stones’ Their Satanic Majesties Request to even Zappa and The Mothers’ We’re Only in It for the Money. Sgt. Pepper’s—with its eclectic mix of music hall, harpsichord, sitar and tabla, string quartet, and musique concrète—embraced a much larger musical language than most listeners thought possible in rock music. And since they were so famous, it made a statement that everyone heard. The only band that was anywhere near as famous at the time and poised for similar accolades from a broad audience was The Beach Boys. (They, like The Beatles, were even admired by Leonard Bernstein.) Despite how remarkable Sgt. Pepper’s was and still sounds 44 years later, had SMiLE actually been released, that honor probably would have, could have, and should have been accorded to it instead.

Heroes and Villains…

Undeniably the wide proliferation and relatively easy acquisition of a variety of mind-altering substances was part and parcel of the rampant experimentation that seemed ubiquitous in the music of this time. That many of these great ideas could ultimately not be sustained and developed into more substantive efforts is the creative chasm that the abuse of these substances took away from some extremely talented musicians; some fared worse, dying tragically young. Brian Wilson survived but nevertheless was one of drug addiction’s unfortunate casualties.

From Smiley Smile onward, Brian Wilson was no longer the de-facto leader of The Beach Boys. Although he still recorded with them and wrote new songs for them to perform until the early 1980s, he rarely appeared with them in live performance. Some of the subsequent Beach Boys’ albums have some interest, musical or otherwise. (Their 1969 album 20/20 actually includes a song that Brian’s brother Dennis co-wrote with the notorious Charles Manson as a result of Dennis hanging out with the “Family.”) But these efforts overall were rather lackluster compared with the band’s earlier output. Nevertheless, some of these albums occasionally contained a very unusual song which had invariably been intended for SMiLE. The bizarre closer of the December 1967 album Wild Honey, “Mama Said,” was originally created as a break for the SMiLE song “Vege-Tables” (released sans break on Smiley Smile). “Cabin Essence” appeared on 20/20 as “Cabinessence.” A less-than-SMiLE-monumental version of “Surf’s Up,” which Brian Wilson has described as the best song he ever wrote with Van Dyke Parks, served as the title track of a 1971 LP release.

The cover for SMiLE, featuring a cartoon drawing of a "Smile Store."

Many of the SMiLE bootlegs that surfaced from the 1980s onward sported some version of the iconic Frank Holmes cover. The cover above, interestingly, does not call attention to the song “Good Vibrations.”

Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, a variety of bootlegs of variable sound quality attempted to re-create Brian Wilson’s original SMiLE (based on the printed materials that had survived, such as ads and track lists) using unfinished masters that had leaked, plus the songs that had been released on Smiley Smile and other later Beach Boys albums. By that point in time, The Beach Boys had become mostly a nostalgia act, playing their famous early ‘60s hits for their aging fan-base, and Brian Wilson’s further degeneration and the exploitation of him by a megalomaniacal psychiatrist would occasionally make newspaper headlines.

The cover for the 2004 Nonesuch CD Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE.

The cover for the 2004 Nonesuch release Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE does not feature Holmes’s artwork, but nevertheless sports a similar font-style to the original.

Eventually Brian Wilson overcame his demons and embarked on a solo career which over the past decade has put him in the headlines for something other than his personal travails. In a live concert in 2002, he performed the entire Pet Sounds album accompanied by a group of ace players from a band called the Wondermints (and no one from The Beach Boys). Then in 2004, nearly 40 years after its original conception, Brian Wilson completed and performed SMiLE with many of the same players in front of a live audience and also recorded it for, of all labels, Nonesuch Records on an album titled Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE. It sold widely and appealed to listeners across generations; iTunes actually describes it as “indie rock,” a genre for which SMiLE indeed is ultimately the progenitor. Mike Love tried to sue Brian Wilson for performing the music without his permission; Love lost. Everyone thought that was the end of the saga, until earlier this year.

I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times…

Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE is a wonderful album, but it is also not quite right. It is not and can never be a substitute for SMiLE, even though it might have originally been intended to be just that. By the time he recorded it in 2004, Brian Wilson was 61 years old and was a completely different person from the seemingly totally possessed (by drug addiction as much as by passion and genius) Brian Wilson who was only 23 years old at the beginning of more than a year of sessions for SMiLE. The young man who attempted to corral his sometimes reluctant brothers, cousin, and other bandmates into going along with his crazy musical ideas got noticeably different results than the Brian Wilson of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, a revered elder statesman whose assembled session musicians were willing and prepared to do every last iota of his bidding. Whereas Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was the realization of a dream finally come true that came after decades of hardship and a great deal of hindsight, the original SMiLE was an innocent dream filled with youthful naïveté and vulnerability. Admittedly that original dream ultimately turned into a nightmare, but you can never quite dream the same dream again after you wake up.

Perhaps more importantly, the world into which the album Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE was released was a very different world than that of 1967. True, since the beginning of the 21st century there have been tons of people creating album-oriented music that mines the borders of rock and, for lack of a better term, contemporary classical music idioms—e.g. the music of Sufjan Stevens or Joanna Newsom, groups like Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, The Fiery Furnaces, Flaming Lips, My Brightest Diamond, and just about the entire discography of New Amsterdam Records immediately come to mind. And the LP, a format that requires sequential listening from start to finish, has been resurgent. But the zeitgeist (at least according to the pundits who control the spin) favors quick listening fixes packaged in non-corporeal files that get shuffled at the whim of their listeners. This is the antithesis of listening to an album which commands and demands attention for approximately an hour, sometimes longer. The very idea of an album is considered by some members of the my-laptop-contains-my-whole-life generation as needless clutter, the ultimate anachronism, and—perhaps worst of all—a quasi-fascistic attempt to force listeners to listen to what you want them to listen to rather than to rightfully allow them to determine that for themselves. SMiLE, to quote a lyric from Pet Sounds, just wasn’t made for these times.

But that didn’t stop Capitol Records (a subsidiary of EMI) from one-upping Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE by finally releasing on November 1, 2011 The Beach Boys’ actual recordings from the original SMiLE sessions in a variety of packagings, including what is destined to rank among the most lavish boxed sets in record history. For casual listeners, The Smile Sessions has been issued on a single CD or—for those who want to recreate a more authentically 1967 listening scenario—two LPs. This version attempts once and for all to present the album that would have come out back then, and throws in a few additional bonus tracks of out-takes for good measure. (The 2-LP package, like the 1980s vintage Original Jazz Classics reissues of classic Prestige and Riverside albums from the ‘50s and early ‘60s, attempts to eschew anything that might reveal it to be an artifact of now rather than then; it features Capitol’s originally album cover design and even their intended matrix number for it—T 2580—on the side of the sleeve jacket!) But folks wanting a broader context can get a 2-CD deluxe set containing even more out-takes from those sessions which reveal some of the real-time performances from which this music was assembled.

A wall of vinyl LPs with the Smile Sessions box lying horizontally on top of it.

The unshelvable collector’s edition box of The Smile Sessions stands out even in a large record collection.

For die-hard completists, however, Capitol released a massive collector’s edition that comes in a huge box sporting a three-dimensional simulacrum of the original SMiLE album art on its cover. Inside the box are the two LPs, presented as described above, as well as the single CD, giving listeners both options. Plus there are four additional CDs containing all the fragments released in the deluxe set as well as—they claim—every other sliver of audio that survives from those 1966-67 sessions, some of which are as long as eight and a half minutes, others as short as 24 seconds. (It’s actually not everything; a strange track called “George Fell Into His French Horn” which appears on several widely-circulated SMiLE bootlegs is missing.) The box also includes two vinyl 7″s containing what The Beach Boys had intended to release as singles during the time of The Smile Sessions (the songs “Heroes and Villains” and “Vege-Tables”), a poster, and finally a lavish hardcover booklet filled with discographic annotations, essays, lyrics, and photographs taken during the session. The box is approximately three-inches wide and is slightly more than 13 by 13 inches in length and height. It doesn’t quite fit on standard record shelves and calls attention to itself wherever it winds up being put. Its unabashedly unapologetic thing-ness is an object of wonder in our era of non-corporeal sycophancy. The box is not cheap: it comes with a hefty triple-digit price-tag. But if you weren’t aware of SMiLE before reading this essay thus far and you’re still reading it, you’re probably well on your way to becoming a SMiLE enthusiast (or at least I hope so) and you should therefore at least consider the possibility of acquiring the whole thing. (Admittedly, all 144 tracks contained in the five CDs have also been made available as individual mp3s or bundled together as an album at a significantly lower price than the physical box which is yet another option if you completely can’t bear the thought of owning things.) Even if you already own Smiley Smile, or one of the various SMiLE bootlegs that sometimes surfaces in collector’s shops, or even the Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE CD, there will be something new for your ears herein. While SMiLE did not get to be the first piece of album-oriented rock, The Smile Sessions is perhaps poised to be the last (although I hope not).

Wonderful…

The Smile Sessions’ attempt to recreate SMiLE is actually extremely convincing and sounds remarkably fresh, even after having heard all the other versions of this material over the years. The transitions from song to song (and the occasional instrumental interlude) feel completely natural, confirming the veracity of the track order of Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE which served as a roadmap with the original recordings for The Smile Sessions’ version of SMiLE. (The track order on the back cover of the aborted 1967 LP is of no help since it instructs listeners to see the disc’s label for the correct playing order.) While at times the performances are not as polished as those on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, the occasional pitch or timbre gaffes I perceived make this feel all the more like a real 1960s album by a young rock band, rather than a perfected rendering realized by seasoned professionals.

As soon as the needle drops on the first side of SMiLE, however, it sounds nothing like most rock records. The opening track, “Our Prayer,” is an unaccompanied wordless chorale. The music is reminiscent of Bach and even earlier polyphonists, but the voices are The Beach Boys and there’s something about the music that is vaguely reminiscent of the backing vocal tracks of “Good Vibrations,” a song you would have already undoubtedly had heard before, even if this disc came out in 1967 as planned. Here “Good Vibrations” comes at the very end of the album, so the thematic relationships between the two function as bookends for the record. It isn’t actually terribly different from the way an opening chorale prelude and a final chorale are thematically related to one another in many of the Bach cantatas. However, before you have an opportunity to completely absorb the ethereality of “Our Prayer” something very down-to-earth occurs as soon as it ends: an almost scat-like coda (separately tracked herein and called “Gee”) which leads directly to “Heroes and Villains.”

On Smiley Smile, “Heroes and Villains” is a remarkable chain of somewhat unrelated fragments which baffle and amaze for sheer audacity. (“Good Vibrations”—however remarkable—sounds like just a warm up compared to this modular collage of different instrumentations and textures.) Here it also baffles and amazes, but even more so because all the disparate fragments somehow fit together. They actually fit together even more cleanly on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, but perhaps there they fit together too cleanly. “Do You Like Worms” (a.k.a. “Roll Plymouth Rock”) flows directly out of “Heroes and Villains,” continuing and further developing some of the same musical material.

“I’m In Great Shape,” “Barnyard,” and “My Only Sunshine” (a.k.a. “The Old Master Painter” / “You Are My Sunshine”) all come off as somewhat fragmentary, but seamlessly flow into one another and feel like harbingers of the much longer, subsequent “Cabin Essence.” Next up is “Wonderful” which is a truly beautiful song, with some great harpsichord riffs, that deserves to be a standard in its own right. But what follows is perhaps more awe inducing: “Look (for the Children)” and “Child is the Father Of The Man” form a completely integrated two-movement exploration of counterpoint and elaborate orchestration.

“Surf’s Up,” whose title seems a throwback to early Beach Boys fare, turns out to be nothing of the sort. It contains some of the most perplexing lyrics in the entire album, such as “columnated ruins domino,” and the leaps and disjointed rhythms of the melody Brian Wilson created to match Van Dyke Parks’s words is perhaps the most difficult thing he ever composed. In almost every other version I have heard of this song over the years, it never quite comes off. Particularly jarring for me has always been the setting of the following lines:

The glass was raised, the fired-roast,
The fullness of the wine. A dim last toasting.

In the various bootlegs of this I had previously heard, as well as the only official previously released version by The Beach Boys (on the 1971 album Surf’s Up), the group doesn’t quite sound together during those lines. And on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, though the ensemble is spot clean, Brian’s diction is somewhat garbled. Yet on the recording included for these Smile Sessions’ completed SMiLE, it all comes off without a hitch. It’s a musical miracle that alone justifies acquiring this recording. (Test this yourself: on the recordings of “Surf’s Up” that appear on both Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE and the first CD of The Smile Sessions, this line occurs from 2:06 to 2:10.)

Then comes a brief, somewhat jazz-tinged instrumental accompanied by various sounds of hammers and other tools (“I Wanna Be Around” / “Workshop”), another of the album’s more experimental tracks. I wish it would have been longer, but I’ll take what I can get. Then comes the delightfully goofy song “Vege-Tables,” a song about the joys of eating vegetables containing a variety of appropriate sound effects worthy of the Vienna-based Vegetable Orchestra (which would not be founded until 1998). The inclusion of the song’s original break (the aforementioned “Mama Said” found on Wild Honey) is the only immediately discernible difference here from the song as it appeared on Smiley Smile (under the less typographically obtuse title “Vegetables”). The brief track called “Holidays” which follows foreshadows a melodic motif that will later re-appear as a countermelody in “Good Vibrations”; it also serves as a prelude to “Wind Chimes.” The arrangement of “Wind Chimes”—which is much the same as the versions on various SMiLE bootlegs, as well as on Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE—features some really nice mallet percussion. But for me it is one of the few instances where I actually prefer the less elaborate arrangement that was released on Smiley Smile. There it’s a sparse and somewhat creepy sounding track featuring vocals by brother Carl Wilson who whispers and at times clearly strains as he attempts to sing the tune Brian had composed for his own voice.

“The Elements: Fire” (a.k.a. “Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow”) is another peculiar instrumental with occasional wordless vocals. It was supposed to have been one of the movements of a four-movement Elements Suite that Brian eventually abandoned. Again, it shows a level of compositional and performance sophistication that few listeners are aware this group was capable of. Then another short fragment, “Love To Say Dada,” leads into the concluding “Good Vibrations,” a track which admittedly is difficult to listen to with fresh ears. But despite how extraordinary, as well as famous, “Good Vibrations” is and how some of its inner vocal lines parallel SMiLE’s opener, “Our Prayer,” which make it a fitting bookend for the entire album, it doesn’t quite sound right to me as the closing track. Brian Wilson was actually worried back in 1966 that “Good Vibrations” didn’t quite fit in with the rest of the album, even though it was created in much the same way and contains thematic allusions to other SMiLE songs. He asked Van Dyke Parks to write a new set of words for it (perhaps triggering the overall antipathy of Mike Love toward SMiLE), but Parks refused and the version with Love’s lyrics was released as an advance single. At one point, Brian tried to cut it from SMiLE, but it was so popular after it was released that Capitol Records insisted it stay on the album, so he opted to put it at the very end. But perhaps the fact that it doesn’t quite work as a finale to Brian Wilson’s sprawling sonic landscape leaves SMiLE perpetually sounding incomplete, which perhaps makes following it with tons of out-takes from those sessions the best of all possible worlds. The completed SMiLE fills three LP sides and a three-sided record would have been unthinkable in 1967. (Such things inevitably happened later on, perhaps most notably Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s 1975 The Case of the 3 Sided Dream in Audio Color!) So even the LPs include some out-takes. And, as stated above, the CDs include (almost) every last one of them.

These bonus tracks are admittedly, for the most part, not the kind of things that will wind up in heavy rotation even on my playlist, with the possible exception of a wonderful jazz jam involving some of the session musicians but ironically not Brian Wilson or any other of The Beach Boys, here named “I Wanna Be Around” most likely because some of it, or some other version of it, later was used as one of the ingredients in the aforementioned unusual SMiLE album track “I Wanna Be Around” / “Workshop”. But listening to every one of these fragments is revelatory nevertheless. There’s almost an entire disc devoted to various scraps that became “Heroes and Villains” and another collecting the bits and pieces from which Brian Wilson assembled “Good Vibrations” (though only about an hour’s worth, as opposed to the 80 hours that were said to have been originally recorded). These musical shards offer up many of the secrets of Brian Wilson’s recording processes, his aspirations, and his attempts (not always successful) to realize what he was hearing in his head with physical musicians in real time—there was no written score for any of this music and remember, in 1966 and 1967, there were no computer consoles and no ProTools. That more than 80% of the deluxe collector’s edition of this never-completed album is devoted to unfinished pieces of songs is perhaps the most appropriate way for this record to finally enter the official discography.

I Wanna Be Around…

A close up of a row of LPs on a shelf showing The Beach Boys' Smile alongside albums of Bartok, Basie, The Beatles, and others.

At least in my own home, the faux-1967 SMiLE LPs from The Smile Sessions have taken their rightful place on my wall of vinyl alongside the music of Bartók, Count Basie, The Beatles, and everyone else.

So will the release of The Smile Sessions and its carefully reassembled reconstruction of the lost SMiLE album finally earn Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys the same pride of place in American music history held by other great innovators like, say, Ives, Gershwin, Cage, Coltrane, James Brown, etc.? Sadly, probably not. But this has more to do with the vagaries of reception history than with actual history.

For many people, The Beach Boys will always be perceived as a light-hearted party band that drooled over “California Girls” while on a “Surfing Safari.” That image of the group has not been helped by the endless recycling of their greatest hits on recording compilations, their latter-day cover-band-version-of-their-former-selves concert appearances, and the lasting presence of these early songs as the soundtracks for countless commercials over the years encouraging revelers to have some “Summer Fun.”

I personally can’t remember the first time I had heard The Beach Boys. Their early pop hits were all around since before I was born, seemed ubiquitous when I was growing up, and have remained with us ever since. The first time I seriously thought about The Beach Boys was back in 1983 when a political brouhaha erupted after then-U.S. Secretary of the Interior James Watt cancelled an appearance by them at the National Mall claiming that their music encouraged drug use and alcoholism. Watt subsequently apologized after then Vice President George H.W. Bush claimed that The Beach Boys were his friends and that he liked their music, and then President Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan claimed they were also Beach Boys fans. After all, they were the all-American band; what was Watt thinking? Maybe James Watt had heard Smiley Smile or knew about the Manson Family connection. Perhaps he even knew about SMiLE.

I did not, so I couldn’t stop wondering why this wholesome—and to my mind innocuous—music had triggered such a strong reaction from a mainstream social conservative since the music of The Beach Boys seemed to me to be everything that interesting rock music was rebelling against. They were not counterculture rebels; he was picking on the wrong guys, hence the embarrassing apology. Then I read Paul Griffiths’s book, ostensibly to learn more about Stockhausen, and wound up reading about Smiley Smile. I tracked down a then out-of-print LP. It blew my mind. It truly was revolutionary. I gradually picked up their earlier recordings—if they had made something this interesting, the seeds for it had to exist in their earlier work. I became more open to those early songs; there are a lot of interesting voicings in the music that accompanies even the most insipidly worded narrative about meeting pretty girls at the beach. I even fell in love with their 1964 Christmas Album, which I pull off my shelves and spin every December without fail. Eventually I tracked down Pet Sounds, which to this day I think contains some of the most hauntingly beautiful music ever recorded. But then I learned that there was other music that Brian Wilson created in between Pet Sounds and Smiley Smile, music that was supposedly the most advanced music Brian Wilson and The Beach Boys had ever done. In an era before the internet, I scoured libraries and used record shops for more information, tracking down articles, and eventually a couple of bootlegs of attempts at reconstructing SMiLE, both of which sported the album’s planned Frank Holmes illustrated cover. I became one of those arcane musical cognoscenti, talking about the album whenever the subject of 1960s rock came up, or even whenever people talked about stylistic fusions between musical genres. To me, all the latter-day folks who thought that they were creating a new kind of music by fusing all of these disparate elements together were merely going down the path that Brian Wilson tried to take music to. But now, thanks to this ostentatious boxed set (or even one of the less complete manifestations of it now currently available from Capitol Records), you can be taken there as well.

Sounds Heard: itsnotyouitsme—Everybody’s Pain Is Magnificent

Posted on November 22, 2011 by DanVisconti - Albums, Listen

Caleb Burhans and Grey McMurray are two of the busiest and most accomplished musicians working in New York’s emerging experimental/indie community, equally at home in the role of composer, songwriter, producer, singer, or multi-instrumentalist. Their third release as electronica-laced violin/guitar duo itsnotyouitsme is the culmination of a long journey that began with their 2008 EP walled gardens, a loop-heavy debut with imaginative studio craftsmanship. By contrast, the duo’s second release, fallen monuments (2010), features live recordings, and now their third and most recent release finds McMurray and Burhans back in the studio with a double-disc of new tracks bearing the title Everybody’s Pain Is Magnificent.

For an album peppered with so many electronic sources, much of Everybody’s Pain sounds surprisingly earthy and organic (as suggested by Allegrea Rosenberg’s striking cover art, which features roots and branches framed in a kind of pixelated, psychedelicized landscape). It’s a good fit for an album in which electronic sounds and processing are frequently used to conjure textures that seem almost more “alive” than the sound of traditional acoustic instruments.

Some of the most interesting moments on the album likewise occur when the electronics come into contact with seemingly incongruous relics of the past. The album’s opening track (The Snake of Forever) explores a sound world influenced by early music, marked by slow-moving, chant-like violin lines suspended in a cavernous crypt of reverb. The simplicity of materials is balanced by a sense of space and distance. Recognizable elements—the grim sound of the harmonic minor scale luxuriating around its raised leading tone, a deceptive cadence to the warm, autumnal sound of the VI chord in minor—overlap, but these individual elements don’t line up as we have come to expect them to, lending depth and distance to a simple texture. Gardens of Loss is conceived in a similar vein and is one of the album’s standout tracks, a constantly evolving tapestry of ancient and contemporary sounds that expresses a fully imagined soundscape in only a few repeated brushstrokes.

Old Friends, Lost Relatives (the album’s third track) begins with equally unadorned acoustic guitar chords—just right for the track’s rootsy flavor, and another example of an implied distance from a few pungently connotative gestures. Bluebird (In My Heart) provides for a more extended exploration of acoustic guitar textures, with a simple but irregular strumming pattern set against a mounting backdrop of feedback. Meanwhile, Mammoth Super Column to the Towers Of begins with perhaps the most overly “electronic-sounding” stretch of music on the album, with glitch skips and snatches of heavily processed sound.

Vocals don’t emerge until the end of disc one (which is labelled—in what is undoubtedly a vinyl homage—”side a”), and their appearance in Little Wish feels less like the intrusion of a new element than simply another timbre to be incorporated into the instrumental texture. In the album’s final track, Always Look Up (Always Look Up), these subdued vocals mount a slow rise that hangs out over a tonic drone that pulses with affirmative constancy, finally revealing an organ-like sonority with a whiff of a plagal cadence and its host of benedictory associations.

Clocking in at 88 minutes, Everybody’s Pain manages to fuse a variety of influences to itsnotyouitsme’s essentially ambient/postrock sensibilities and succeeds as a mature and polished successor to the duo’s first two efforts. It is highly particular music, with a focused aesthetic point of view and an ear towards eccentricity, which could be either appealing and discouraging depending on one’s preconceptions and taste. Yet it’s hard to deny that Everybody’s Pain is an impressive culmination of Caleb Burhans’s and Grey McMurray’s musical vision, with lessons gleaned from the stage as well as the studio.

DanVisconti

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