Sunday, June 28, 2009

"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)


Here is another bit from James Joyce's Ulysses - one paragraph in the novel - that I think bodes well for a rock song. In this case, probably a ballad, almost certainly with some humming.
"She was humming"

Wait. The full moon was the night
we were Sunday fortnight exactly
there is a new moon.

Walking down by the Tolka.
Not bad for a Fairview moon.

She was humming:
The young May moon
she's beaming, love.

He other side of her.
Elbow, arm. He.

Glowworm's la-amp
is gleaming, love.

Touch. Fingers.
Asking. Answer. Yes.

No wonder this sounds so musical. As scholar Zach R. Bowen has noted, Bloom is remembering a charged moment when Blazes Boylan was flirting with Bloom's own wife Molly, a singer, while Molly was humming the song "The Young May Moon," which is misquoted here.

The temptation to quote from the melody of that song in our piece will be strong, probably irresistable. The river Tolka mentioned here also (perhaps inevitably) has its own polka, the "Tolka Polka," which could and should be quoted musically.

I also hear an opportunity for our own intertextuality here.

In our third completed poetry score, Go South for Animal Index (2007), Matt Fuller and I took one line of Stefene Russell's poem - "the old moon sleeps in the new moon's arms" - and scored it as a sleepy country ballad, with the exquisite Geoffrey Seitz on violin.

mp3

"The old moon sleeps in the new moon's arms"
(Matt, Fuller, Chris King, Stefene Russell)

Three Fried Men, with Geoffrey Seitz
From Go South for Animal Index (Poetry Scores)

More in this series


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Tolka River Bridge from JoyceImages.com. Dave Walsh has a Flickr set devoted to the River Tolka.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)


A newly volunteered guitar tape from my songwriting partner and coproducer, Matt Fuller in his little Hollywood bungalow, renews my courage to extract song lyrics, verbatim, from James Joyce's Ulysses.

This choice bit is one paragraph from the novel.

"Silly billies:"

Silly billies:
mob of young cubs
yelling their guts out.

Vinegar hill.
The Butter exchange band.

Few years' time
half of them are magistrates
and civil servants.

War comes on:
into the army helterskelter:
same fellows

used to whether on
the scaffold high.

So much to say here.

First of all, it sounds like a Twitter post on a punk gig. Even comes complete with a bandname, The Butter Exchange Band. (Here is a band of that name playing St. Patrick's Day 2009 in Courtmacsherry.)

Since I quite like the band name we use for band songs on Poetry Scores records - Three Fried Men - this suggests itself as a maybe name for the Joyce record. Three Fried Men: The Butter Exchange Band; Rock Songs from James Joyce's 'Ulysses'.

And, as any sentient being will have noticed, this bit has a phrase that already has been adopted for a rock song title, just the title of one of the most fateful rock song of all: "helterskelter".

Can't blame Manson on The Beatles, nor on the Dublin bard, but also can't help but point out that the man whose guitar part will anchor the song I make from this scrap of Joyce, my man Matt Fuller, lives a short walk from El Coyote, where one set of Manson victims ate their last meals that fateful summer night in 1969.

Can you believe there is more rock history to unpack from this?

"Whether on the scaffold high" is a line from "God Save Ireland," an Irish rebel song:

Whether on the scaffold high
Or the battlefield we die,
Oh, what
matter when for Erin dear we fall!
So, yeah, we've got to get a little Dublin rock in here, a little "This song is not a rebel song ...", a little very early and urgent U2.

By the by, I'm intending to leave the colon in the song title - "Silly billies:" as opposed to "Silly billies." - A colon has the syntactic effect of urgency, of suggesting something is about to come next - a feeling that fits this urgent little stab of action in the mind and streets of Dublin, ca. June 16, 1904.

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Butter Exchange Band sign from some tourism site.

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Also in this series

"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

Friday, June 26, 2009

"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)



My buddy Matt Fuller is talking new guitar tapes from his Hollywood bungalow. Says he has seen all these James Joyce lyrics I am posting.

Good. Need ya, Matt. Here's another.


"Happy Happy"

Swish and soft flop
her stays made
on the bed.

Always warm
from her.

Always like
to let herself out.

Sitting there after
till near two,
taking out her hairpins.

Milly tucked up
in beddyhouse.

Happy.
Happy.
That was the night ...

This is Leopold Bloom enjoying a mam's private thoughts about private moments with a woman, his wife. A paragraph in Ulysses, but it so wants to be a piano song with long pauses.

More in this series

"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
Image of corset with stays from Wikimedia.

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Brilliant Poetica podcast on Les Murray in Bunyah


Well, this is a gift.

Poetica - the Saturday afternoon poetry program produced by Mike Ladd for the The Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Radio National - has a poetry podcast series with an episode on Les Murray.

Les Murray is the great, living Australian poet we are scoring this year. We are scoring his long city poem, The Sydney Highrise Variations, though Les was born in the country and lives and works there now, in Bunyah.

"In this feature, producers Jane and Phillip Ulman visit the Bunyah home of Les Murray, his wife Valerie and son Alexander," Ladd introduced the podcast.

"Surrounded by winged musicians, frogs, insects and domestic animals, the participants walk and talk and share a meal. During the visit Les Murray reads his poems and reflects on poetry and place, knowledge, discovery, family and God."

That sums it up well. In a touch that closely resembles what we do in scoring poems, there is interspersed music, performed effectively by Hollis Taylor (violin), Joyce Chu (saxophone and flute), and Madeleine Slattery (vocals).

The sound engineer Phillip Ulman did a pristine job with all of these elements, very much including the Bunyah animals life, which fittingly is allowed to be as loud as the poetry and music.
There also is a slideshow (a rare treat!) featuring photographs by Les' wife Valerie. She is enormously important to his life and work, but very seldom makes this public of an appearance. In the show, she walks with Les and the producers and has her say throughout.

There also is a transcript of the program, so us poetry nerds can follow the all-important line and stanza breaks as Les performs.

This is simply the best introduction to Les Murray's work and character that I have encountered - as good as I can imagine, other than actually visiting the Murrays in Bunyah oneself.

By the way, Poetica's self-description is really close to the spirit of Poetry Scores:

"Poetica is dedicated to the performance of poetry and ranges freely among contemporary Australian and overseas work as well as drawing on ancient sources and from bi-lingual programs, live readings, studio-based poetry features and on-location recordings."

I think we have found a more accomplished Australian kindred spirit!

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Photo of Les in Bunyah by Valerie.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

In ambiguous battle at length with Adam Long


This is what Adam Long and I accomplished last night in his home studio in Midtown St. Louis as we resumed work on our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations.

mp3

"In ambiguous battle at length"
(Richard Derrick, Les Murray)
Another Umbrella, Les Murray

This reflects one of the less commonly employed technics of scoring poems: using a pregnant phrase in the poem as the title of an instrumental interlude. Though this is not, quite, an instrumental. It also features the great Australian poet, Les Murray, making what he called "mouth music".

When I first described this project to Les, during an afternoon at The Met, he said he always associated certain sounds with this poem. When I later recorded him reading the poem in an apartment in Long Island City, he also came up with this unusual performance by scanning the poem and translating it into these growls and whistles.

The musical bed I chose for it is Richard Derrick playing guitar at home in San Pedro, California on 21 March 1987, recorded on the homely medium of cassette. It is part of his vast Another Umbrella Archive that he has donated for use by Poetry Scores.

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Photo is of Adam at the home studio rig.

Sunday, June 21, 2009

There is no forgiveness when you ruin a child


Our first poetry score, Crossing America by Leo Connellan, includes one of the finest son's cries of pain to a father in poetry.

It comes late in the poem, in sections 26 and 27 of his epic, 29-piece poem. Here they are, followed by the musical interlude Lij and I imagined and recorded (by The Gateway Brass Quintet) to come after it in the flow of the score.

Free mp3s
"Crossing America XXVI and XXVII"
(Leo Connellan)
Leo Connellan

"Proudly on everybody's lips"
(John Philip Sousa)
(arr. Battles/Holcombe)
The Gateway Brass Quintet

We went for a John Philip Sousa march that has the bright, bouncy flavor of a college football brass band. The intention was ironic, given that Leo remembers in excruciating (and amusing) detail his father's disappointment that the boy was showing interest in poetry, rather than athletics.

Yet, this movement of the poem ends on a note of triumph, with Leo imagining his father's pride in his achievements as a poet, "with his last name proudly on everybody's lips," so Lij and I liked the bright, confetti-colored brass chords of the Sousa march jumping in just after this line of Leo's.

Still, nothing can undo the raw pain of the poetry here.

There is no forgiveness when you ruin a child
Not even if the child forgives you.
Happy Father's Day!

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Photo of Leo courtesy of his widow, Nancy Connellan.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)


I have now made personal history by finally cresting the halfway mark of James Joyce's Ulysses, a novel that has tormented and haunted me (like the fatherly ghost to Hamlet) for half of my life.
Since my artistic hobby is setting poetry to music, I am baiting myself to finish this thing by marking passages that would be fun to score as rock songs. Here is another:

Pineapple rock,
lemon platt,
butter scotch.
A sugarsticky girl

shovelling scoopfuls of cream
for a christian brother.

Some school treat.
Bad for their tummies.
Lozenge and comfit
manufacturer to His Majesty

the King.
God.
Save.
Our.

Sitting on his throne,
sucking red jujubes
white.

I have no choice but to dedicate this bit (paginated as a paragraph, not a poem, in the novel) to Richard Byrne, who years ago suggested to his then girlfriend Mary Alice Wood the ineluctable band name "Sugarsticky girl".

Just passing the midway mark, I note here lyrical fragment seven. This means I am on pace for fourteen or fifteen songs plucked from Ulysses, which happens to be a perfect number of songs for a rock record. I'll continue to imagine that future record the next time this thing starts to drive me nuts. Which should be in a hot minute here, as I am taking my nemesis to the dentist chair.

Now I just need to get with Matt Fuller or Lij or Tim McAvin or Another Umbrella - with somebody who plays guitar better than I do - to start turning these lyrics into songs!

More in this series

"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

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Picture from JoyceImages.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)


Before this Bloomsday 2009 comes to a close I do plan to curl up with my nemesis, James Joyce's Ulysses, and try to make more headway into the headache.

In the meantime, I am amusing myself by plucking lyrical and quizzical bits from the novel and lineating them as rock song lyrics, for future reference whenever I get to sit down with my collaborators - or for anyone else to pick up and run with.

These lines form about half of a paragraph in the subsection titled "AND IT WAS THE FEAST OF THE PASSOVER" that is set in the print shop at one of the newspapers Bloom visits on his rounds as an ad canvasser.

And then the lamb and the cat
and the dog and the stick
and the water
and the butcher

and then the angel of death
kills the butcher
and he kills the ox
and the dog kills the cat.

Sounds a bit silly
till you come to look into it well.

Justice it means
but it's everybody eating
everyone else.

That's what life is after all.
Bloom (who, famously, is Jewish) is remembering and garbling fragments of "an ancient parabolical hymn sung by the Jews at the Feast of Passover," as The New York Times described Joyce's source material for this passage in 1901 - three years before the events narrated in Ulysses transpired.

Henry Roth also had some fun with this traditional material in his 1934 novel Call It Sleep.

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Image of Marc Chagall's 1947 painting Flayed Ox from somebody's blog that has load of gorgeous Chagall.

Monday, June 15, 2009

"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)


All the cool kids actually understood Ulysses, or claimed to, and all I am getting out of it are some rock song lyrics.

A side-eye at my Hamlet hat
If I were suddenly naked here,
as I sit? I am not.

Across the sands of all the world,
followed by the sun's flaming sword,
to the west, trekking to evening lands.

She trudges, schlepps, trains,
drags, trascines her load
A tide westering, moondrawn, in her wake.

Tides, myriadislanded, within her,
blood not mine, oinopa ponton, a winedark sea.
Behold the handmaid of the moon.

In sleep the wet sign calls her hour,
bids her rise. Bridebed, childbed, bed of death,
ghostcandled. Omni caro ad te veniet.

He comes, pale vampire,
through storm his eyes,
his bat sails bloodying the sea,
mouth to her mouth's kiss.

This is one paragraph in James Joyce's novel; I have broke it up into verses and lines to suggest how it might be scored and sung. Every one of these lines has a phrase that would make a sparkling title.

*

Image from some Flickr set named after oinopa ponton, a winedark sea.

I am told Omnis caro ad te veniet ("All flesh shall come to thee") is a Latin citation from Psalm 64.2 in the Vulgate, incorporated in the Requiem Mass. I take it in this passage Stephen Dedalus is tripping on his death mother again.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)


I am now up to a part of James Joyce's Ulysses where Leopold Bloom is listening to singing in a pub, which reminded me to tunnel back and find another passage I had marked for setting to music. This is one complete paragraph in the novel; I have added the line breaks with a rock song in mind.

Cousin Stephen, you will never be a saint.
Isle of Saints.

You were awfully holy, weren't you?
You prayed to the Blessed Virgin
That you might not have a red nose.

You prated to the devil in Serpentine avenue
that the fubsy widow in front might
lift her clothes still more from the wet street.

O, si, certo!

Sell your soul for that,
do, dyed rags
pinned round a squaw.
Might tell me more, more still!

On the top of the Howth tram alone
crying to the rain: naked women!
What about that, eh?
There is just an awful lot for a songwriter to like here.

A line ("you will never be a saint") already scored, more or less, by Elvis Costello ("You'll Never Be a Man"); questions and exclamations (the blood and guts of rock lyrics); an evocative place name (Serpentine avenue); a suggestively taunting hook ("Sell your soul for that"), followed - no less - by a short word ("do") that doubles as a nonsense syllable the background singers can do ("do-do-do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do-do-do").

And the passage is all about the urgency of sex when we are young and don't really understand what it's all about - "crying to the rain: naked women!" - the core predicament for which rock & roll was invented in the first place.

There is even a snippet in a foreign language, O, si, certo!, which simply begs to be a bridge, maybe even one that breaks form and tempo, like a stand-alone little song within a song, with a different feel and instrumentation.

I think I'll get started right on this one - that is, unless John Cale, DevotchKa, or Andrew Bird comes along first and pitches in first.

More in this series

"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

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Image of Howth tram, where Stephen cried to the rain, from Ask About Ireland.

Friday, June 12, 2009

"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)


Stephen Dedalus is presenting his eccentric theories about Hamlet in the stretch of James Joyce's Ulysses I am reading right now, but I am backtracking to old passages I had marked as fun to score as rock songs.

I really like this bit. Stephen is daydreaming about the horse races as Mr Deasy types out a commentary on hoof-and-mouth disease, to be delivered to the newspaper. It's a paragraph in the novel, but I will lineate it as lyrics, with a suugested hook offset as a chorus:
Where Cranly led me to get rich quick
Hunting his winners among the mudsplashed brakes
Amid the brawls of bookies on their pitches
And reek of the canteen

Over the motley slush

Even money Fair Rebel: ten to one the field
Dicers and thimbleriggers
We hurried by after the hoofs
The vying caps and jackets

And past the meatfaced woman
A butcher's dame, nuzzling thirstily
Her clove of orange
It helps greatly that I have a thing for horse racing, having grown up in the shadow of Fairmount Park, once played a Derby Eve party in Louisville, and later lived a short walk from Belmont Park in Queens.

By the way, in his lecture on Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov cites this passage as a good example of stream-of-consciousness prose and connects it to other relevant moments in this difficult novel.

More in this series

"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

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Image of a French Steeplechase race from 1904 (the year in which the action of Ulysses is set, though here Stephen is remembering a day at the races from his childhood) from The Card Mine.

Thursday, June 11, 2009

A Turkish poet's letter from jail: 'Freedom has not been hurt'


Our friend Zafer Yalçınpınar in Istanbul, he of the Ece Ayhan revival, sends the following translation he made of "an important letter of Ece Ayhan" to İlhan Berk (friend of Ece Ayhan, another Turkish poet...)" which was "written from a jailhouse."
January 7th, 1969

At the day of arrival, I harmonized myself.

What’s strange? Here, a human, wants something. First; if it’s possible, would you send tolerable amount of money ( AyÅŸe Deniz, Dolaybağı I Anadoluhisarı - Ä°stanbul) at once or twice? Second; If there is an acquaintance of yours at Ministry of Justice, ask him to transfer me to “Åžile” – I‘ve put up a petition for that. Going into “banishment” is a distance.

I’m on trial for one year penalty, my brother… If it works, I lie in prison for eight months at all. I mean that I’ll come out by the middle of July. Don’t be afraid, freedom has not been hurt.

I’m studing The Cinematics.

I read Robinson Crusoe.

We are four hundred brothers here. We are increasing, decreasing… They all say “hello” to you, Ä°lhan.

(...) Friendly.

Ece Ayhan
I forgot to ask why the poet was in jail.

Ece Ayhan's prose poetic sequence Blind Cat Black, translated by Murat Nemet-Nejat, was the subject of our second poetry score and first Poetry Scores Art Invitational.

Interestingly, another great Turkish poet, Orhan Veli, wrote many verse letters, as well as a poem about Robinson Crusoe. Unfortunately, the manuscript of his poems I cotranslated is not with me at Fort Bragg. I will post them later for comparison.

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Sketch of Ece Ayhan from Zafer's website.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)


Well, it doesn't seem as if I am going to finish James Joyce's Ulysses by Bloomsday (June 16), since I have nearly 600 pages to go and nine days to get there, and I just don't see myself chowing down 66 pages a day.

Not even on a working vacation, which, for me, is always more working than vacation, especially with execution dates on stay of unknown duration and City jailors being indicted for distributing heroin in the jails and whatnot.

But I soldier forward, here on the outskirts of Fort Bragg, with my chief incentive being the hunt for passages that would be fun to set to rock music. Here is another. It is one complete paragraph of prose in the novel, but I will punctuate it as song lyrics.

like him was I
these sloping shoulders
this gracelessness

my childhood bends beside me

too far for me
to lay a hand there
one or lightly

mine is far and his secret
as our eyes

secrets, silent
stony sit
in the dark palaces
of both our hearts

secrets weary
of their tyranny
tyrants willing'
to be dethroned
This is Stephen Dedalus musing over Cyril Sargent, his student, doing sums.

I would title the song as "My childhood bends," use that phrase as a refrain, and use the "secrets" bit as a bridge. There is even a rhyme to exploit - "weary/tyranny".

ALSO IN THIS SERIES

Don't you play the giddy ox with me! (Joyce, King)

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Image is by Sam Richardson, age six, from Corbridge First School, from Newcastle Biomedicine. "I showed my brain doing maths and English, its got sums and pictures," Sam noted.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

Don't you play the giddy ox with me! (Joyce, King)



One of the ways I am trying to trick myself into finally reading James Joyce's Great Modern Novel Ulysses all the way through is by imaging that I will later score selections of it.

You know, the good parts. The parts, that is, that are good in isolation. Or would make good rock lyrics.

Here is one bit. On the page, this passage is two paragraphs. I will punctuate it like a lyric sheet.


And to think of your having to beg
from these swine. I'm the only one
that knows what you are.
Why don't you trust me more?
What have you up your nose against me?
Is it Haines? If he makes any noise here
I'll bring down Seymour
and we'll give him a ragging
worse than they gave Clive Kempthorpe.

Young shouts of moneyed voices
in Clive Kempthorpe's rooms.
Palefaces: they hold their ribs with laughter,
one clasping another
O, I shall expire!
Break the news to her gently,
Aubrey! I shall die

With slit ribbons of his shirt
whipping the air he hops
and hobbles round the table,
with trousers down at heels,
chased by Ades of Magdalen
with the tailor's shears

A sacred calf's face
gilded with marmalade
I don't want to be debagged!
Don't you play the giddy ox with me!


Half of this is Buck Mulligan bellowing at Stephen Dedalus, and the other half Dedalus' memories of (apparently) boys shouting. All that shouting begs to be shouted out in a rock song. I expect I'll use that last line as an outro refrain, then make that the song title: "Don't you play the giddy ox with me!"

My friend and songwriting partner Tim McAvin has a great song with "ox" in the title. Meghan Gohil recorded Tim playing it many years ago at The Senate apartment building in St. Louis, when we recorded Tim's contributions to the Blind Cat Black poetry score.

Tim told me the imagery in this song is based (if I recall correctly) on a Longfellow poem, so it, too, is a poetry score!

Free mp3

"The Ox"
(Tim McAvin)
Tim McAvin

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Ox image from somebody's blog.

Monday, June 1, 2009

Church organ, psycho chant, hall of mirrors kills meditation


As I was saying here right recently, St. Louis composer and musician Frank Heyer balked at a collage piece, "In ambiguous battle at length," I made by splicing together one of his fretless guitar pieces and what the poet Les Murray calls his "mouth music" translation of his own poem The Sydney Highrise Variations.

Frank, being a nice guy, was willing to register his dissastisfaction yet authorize the piece, not wanting to have wasted my time - and not knowing that I would enjoy the assignment of finding a different piece of music that would work just as well.

In that there post, I suggested using "Frozen Moment" by Poetry Scores' go-to outsider musicians Another Umbrella, those mad improvisers from Los Angeles County. But, the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should be looking only at pieces very near Les' "mouth music" in length - and, at 8:29, "Frozen Moment" was nearly twice as long as Les' vocal improvisation.

After all, I have twenty-nine discs of Another Umbrella's adventurous music to choose from, plus another one hundred discs or more of other archival source recordings at my disposal. I could narrow my selections down to pieces at or near 4:30 in length and still, no doubt, have a lot to choose from.

So, I went back to my Another Umbrella gigbook, and I made three picks based on my notes and track length. After close listening, a clear winner emerged:
Free mp3s

"Uncertain A/F" (5:09)
(Richard Derrick)
Another Umbrella

Richard Derrick * guitar
Recorded at home, 21 March 1987
Medium: cassette

My listening notes to this piece may be of interest. They come in sets, the first written in Matt Fuller's hand from a car jam when I was driving - I assume, in Los Angeles:
tape hiss, space station meditation, church organ, psycho chant, hall of mirrors kills meditation.
That all still sounds right, as does this, in my hand, from a subsequent solo listening session:

space station meditation, pygmy chant effect, hall of mirrors, schizo.
I have not yet superimposed this piece onto Les' mouth music, though here is that supremely odd excursion, for reference:

"Mouth music"
(Les Murray)
Les Murray

And for my own future reference, I will post up the other two Another Umbrella pieces that are the right length for Les' "mouth music," but not quite the right mood.

"Sync 3" (4:42)
(Crane)
Another Umbrella

Crane * keyboards
First two keyboards recorded at Crane's (Palos Verdes), June 1986
Synced at Art Asylum (San Pedro), 16 July 1986
Third keyboard recorded at Art Asylum, 16 July 1986
Mixed at home by Richard Derrick, 24 September 2007

"Keyboards" (4:31)
(Crane)
Another Umbrella

Crane * keyboards
Recorded at Crane's (Palos Verdes), October 1987
For use at KSPC, 9 October 1987 show
Medium: four-track cassette

My listening notes to both of these tracks by Crane make mention of the St. Louis rapper Toyy. I'll have to get together with my girl and listen to these and other Another Umbrella tracks. I know I made her a CDr of some options more than a year ago. Love to hear her sing and rap over beats constructed from this stuff.

*

The image is of Crane and Richard Derrick enjoying a repast on the Poetry Scores tab at Redondo Beach last year.