love to listen to this stuff but I'm not sure I really understand it beyond "that's a bunch of cool weird noises in a pattern"

and I think there is something to understand, usually, because these are generally Proper Composers, steeped in the tradition, inheritors of Beethoven or whoever - and most of them feel like they are contributing to that tradition - even if the recital hall middlebrow public doesn't agree with them - there's a lot of lofty themes and references to classical literature and so forth - or the nature of time... philosophical, spiritual, religious notions.... 

it might sounds psychedelic to us but I don't think many of these dudes were thinking "I'm going to make some good noises to get stoned to or trip to". They went about it with a sobriety and seriousness. 

feel like I can tell when it's done really well, and tell when it's done really badly, but there's a LOT in between that is kind of "well that was pretty cool, but why listen to that one again, and not this other one out of 1000s of other examples"

a lot of the best stuff feels like you are entering a non-naturalistic space, or perhaps a space that is part of the natural world but is very different in its acoustics and perspectives to the plane on which we normally exist

so there's one particular piece by Parmegiani that always makes me think of a speleological expedition - like you're going into a disorienting cavern system

the writing about it in serious books, or the liner notes of records is fairly useless  - tells you a lot about the technical ways in which the sounds were achieved, or the lofty intent behind the project, what it's official themes and meanings are - but it is pretty dry stuff - the books especially are almost entirely about the technology side and nothing about how it feels as sensations or as a moodscape or whatever

one thing that has struck me that is analogous with the musique concrete tape-snip stuff is animation as technique in the analogue era - like an arrangement of heterogenous audio objects brought into the same space and given eerie life - dreams built by ear and hand, as opposed to dreams built by eye and hand

this one always make me think of The Clangers 

even though it doesn't sound much like the actual (and delightful) music in The Clangers by Vernon Elliott

 “We don’t need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writers movement—assertive, militant, pugnacious.”

- Toni Morrison

via this fascinating article at Los Angeles Review of Books, about the archive of her rejection letters - not ones she received, ones she wrote when she worked as an editor at Random House 

Sterling Morrison, quoted in Rob Sheffield's Beatles book

I'm guessing the VU hated the Mothers ever since that period when the latter were based in NYC and playing on a weekly basis.  

It was kind of a battle of cools - but also between great music and shit music, the well and the ill conceived. 

 

 

C.S. Lewis

 

C.S. Lewis 

Or as David Crosby put it (twice on the same album)

 

Germaine Greer on Jimi Hendrix, Oz #30, 1970

Greer appears in this 1973 doc about Hendrix - about 59 mins in and sporadically after.

Snippets