Tarfumes

New review

from Foxy Digitalis:

In June last year, Barn Owl player Matt Weston's "Not to Be Taken Away" (7272music) was reviewed in these very pages, where Robert Oberlander wrote that "Weston's creations have an uncanny ability for getting under one's skin and scraping at bone and sinew, making the listener wince in pain". Not being overly famil' with Matt's work other than a drum contribution to one track on Smog's "Red Apple Falls" (!) and with that in mind, I was expecting an aural bludgeoning. I gotta say "Seasick Blackout" may be some kind of departure from his "schtick" since it don't come across that way at all; its more an exquisitely-crafted work of multitracked digital orchestration than an oppressive harsh noise scenario. 

For the first minute or so of the first track, with the neatly grammatically-woozy title "You're Not That's Right", you would be forgiven for thinking you were listening to a couple of kids goofing around improvising duos using sax mouthpiece and digitally-bastardised electric cello. And a little internal shudder, and setting your expectations accordingly. (If it's not a mouthpiece its a mic'd up balloon I reckon, or else the most fucked trombone in the history of ever). So when the dismantled-radiator piano-frame cymbal-stand percussion kicks in after another minute or so and you realise with a jolt it's not a couple of kids goofing, it's Lester Bowie and the Art Institute of Chicago weirdly playing through some ancient effects rack, and you relax a little; these dudes are pro, after all.

Now you find now yourself at 3:45 in and you're totally hooked but feeling a little creepy because the sound is morphing weirdly like your trip is shifting like rotating shards like helicopter blades; when a penny whistle and micro-cassette dictaphone voice jam come crashing in on the back straight just to piss off your mood you know you're in the hands of some kind of a master manipulator. BLAM hard cut straight into the next track #2 "I Just Saw Fog And Dust" (I did, too) and right up front an orchestra warming-up cuts to a lo-res mp3-player recording of some North Africa headfuck unit like the Master Musicians of Joujouka (no dis' intended) comin' on like a paranoid psychotic episode of 1,000 mutant clarinettes looped in unison and again BLAM there are two bad men fighting over that same busted-up trombone and the drummer is still flailing away on the dismantled-radiator piano-frame cymbal-stand but has added a couple of timpani to the setup. It's crushing. It's actually upsetting. It's fantastically, imaginatively evocative of something unpleasant and so I'm not displeased when it's 6min 50-odd seconds worth of hassle tails out in a flurry, a tumbling of temple bells.

A blast of lo-freq buzz announces the entrance of pt. 3, "This October, All Octobers" which honest-to-god rings with the grandeur of a granularised, reconstituted, 8-bit rendering of Mahler's Eighth Symphony. The drums are being drummed like the drummer's got somewhere to be, now, there's sinews of synth/electronic melodies looped over and over and shards of detuned string sections which blow on and on and on and on and on and on and start to resemble a train horn blowing at a level-crossing. And suddenly ends in a cold, dead stop.

Arg, enough gushing impressionistic batshit, now. What you need to know is that Matt Weston has pieced together this short suite of engaging electroacoustics in such a way that it has been imbued with the unusual ability to get the agitated listener feeling like a wretch, a fugitive; rather than wince in pain at the immediacy of a prolonged blast of white noise, "Seasick Blackout" has the uncanny subliminal effect of making one feel like something brutal and horrible is going to occur shortly, and its going to happen to -- oneself. Last night I fell asleep after playing "Seasick Blackout" and slept badly, enduring a succession of bad dreams about creeping, incremental, and ultimately utterly comprehensive personal failure. This morning when I awoke I knew that the secret my unconscious was trying to impart was that I needed to remind my conscious self to look beneath the veneer of sentimentality and nostalgia, remove the blinkers of aspiration to see the true nature of the horrorshow of this fuckwitted civilisation and our miserable existence. An existential, psychological cold-shower, if you will.

At just 17:10 min long "Seasick Blackout" is everything I ever wanted from a seasick blackout; you couldn't and wouldn't ask for a more or better queasy sonic pressgang escapade manoeuvres than Weston's proffered within. 9/10 --  Stephen Clover (24 March, 2010)

Weview Woundup!

Here are all the reviews (heh...that I know of...) of my new EP, Seasick Blackout:

I made DaveX's 2009 Top 12!  Thanks Dave!

10) Matt Weston — “Seasick Blackout” – I haven’t been this excited about an EP since… well, I don’t know when. I’ll grant you that I’m a bit manic, but my sustained interest usually means I’m on track. “Seasick Blackout” has got me riveted, and I’ve played it for anyone I can corner with a speaker and 20 minutes to spare. If I beat you over the head with one release this year, it’s this one– so go get it, and buy an extra for a friend.

From Moors Magazine (via Google Translator):

You can, if your music, very many different ways on adventures. Matt Weston has decided to open a container pokkeherrie attract and again to go mess and rampant slide.  And that rubs pinches and properly, may I say. But adventures do not always sweet juicy stories, and thus, you can sometimes end up in a rough storm. And the rough seas of Weston is really exciting to listen, because in all the wrenching sound carpets is still a lot of subtlety hidden in quiet shifting sounds, rhythms and abrasive sound awkward combinations. No background music this, because then you can ever really seasick, but if you're willing to listen with open ears, the musical adventure of Matt Weston definitely worth a listening.

Here's Vital Weekly:

As his new CD proves, american percussionist and composer Matt Weston continues to built on his universe of music of gigantic proportions by making little steps. Every now and then Weston releases a CD-single through his label 7272Music. We have reported earlier of his releases here as you might remember and because of this it may satisfy to encounter him again in Vital Weekly. And yes, there is good reason to it. Also "Seasick Blackout" is another outspoken statement by Weston. With his newest CD-single he presents his newest compositions that take about 5 up to 7 minutes. Three tracks only, "You're Not That's Right", "I Just Saw Fog And Dust" and "This October, All Octobers". Everything is composed, played, arranged, and produced by Weston himself. Although these compositions underwent considerable manipulations, at the same time the music has a strong live feeling, which is part of the secret. The acoustics of his drum and percussion sound very spatial. The noise and electronics are of a raw quality. Experimentalists like Weston not always have the talent to make music their music emotionally engaging and moving. In the case of Weston it is. Another part of his secret. Like in his earlier work Weston creates again big gestures and orchestral maneuvers from unusual ingredients. For sure Weston opens a new dimension to percussion-orientated music. (DM)

From Furthernoise:

Matt Weston’s Seasick Blackout is his fourth solo EP on his own 7272Music imprint, and I must admit I have been enjoying Mr. Weston’s prolific output of plaintive yet agitated sounds. Keeping each release paired down was probably a decision to deliberately allow us to absorb his sensibility without getting overwhelmed. You’re Not That Right, is the hardest to get through, and you may literally begin to feel vertigo set in less than halfway through. Only the clanking percussion loops provide stability to what feels like a falling scaffold.

I just saw Fog and Dust outlines Weston’s key sense of acoustic space and the room sounds live and breathing. A cacophony of reed instrument resembling what could be mistaken for a flock of migratory birds initiates Weston’s percussion technique of making his drum kit sound like a demonised horn ensemble or an Idiophone Hell choir. At least I am assuming he is scraping cymbals, snares and god knows what. The only other musician I know that comes close to this type of expressiveness is Hans Reichel. Reichel invented a thin wood electro-acoustic instrument called a Daxophone that when bowed, fretted, or struck expressed a wide variety of vocal like sounds. Unlike Reichel, Weston transforms his drum kit into tortured Idiophones expressing angst and melancholy.

The third and last track, This October, All October, begins with a sinister synth arpeggiation which follows a path of pure evil. The drums build, a sonic chaos reaches maximum level then what appears to be a train horn begins to blasts away at regular intervals. Perhaps this is Matt Weston’s homage to Italian Futurist Luigi Russolo's Intonarumori, only you are tied to the tracks as a wailing locomotive rushes toward you.

From Ragazzi (via Google Translator):

"Seasick Blackout" is a mini (?) Maxi (?) - CD, 3 songs on it, 17 minutes long. Matt Weston is a percussionist, modernists. What instrument bore the sounds that are heard at the three noisy tracks, it is not specified. Perhaps an electronically distorted saxophone? Percussion is, though not played as the instruments are designed and constructed. The onomatopoeic sound universe is quite nice, somehow understandable and certainly entertaining, but in its highly unusual and probably only feed ultraschrägen sound language for avant-garde beyond melody.
Music is it anyway, if it sounds. Sure. Live is what comes out of the speakers as involuntary, certainly witty as part of the performance of the musician and graphic so suddenly in the seclusion of the home sounds a little to awaken horror, simply because it is not clear how they are made, what they should talk (except inspire and) and what can be expected from a fully played CD.
"I Just Saw Fog and Dust" takes free jazz in itself, the ostensible Minimalschleifen however, could pass as straight parody, for metal guitar riffs. Then the awful grinding and scratching noises coming from drums, perhaps perched basins, confident and clearly fall into the room and nothing and no one has fear. The invasion has something threatening, albeit not in a bad crowd. Anyone who has courage and is looking for new sounds on every conceivable way out, which here has any idea how music can sound if you want to start from scratch. After 2009. And everything.
For music it is, although it sounds.

From Sea Of Tranquility.  And yes, my record does demand a lot from the listener.  It demands that the listener send me a box of Bugles.

American percussionist / composer Matt Weston obviously doesn't subscribe to the theory that his music needs to follow conventional forms. The music he records under his own name is difficult to categorize, but after listening to his latest collection of music, the three song EP Seasick Blackout, I think it would be safe to say his compositions contain a hearty and complex amalgamation of many different styles, that when blended together fall firmly into the avant-garde genre.

Seasick Blackout is a wild sounding, seventeen minute orchestral work composed and performed entirely by Weston himself. Don't expect your standard drum work or any straight ahead percussive rhythms because the music presented here is more akin to the type of metallic hammering and clanging one would find in an old shipyard. Perhaps that was Weston's intention when putting this together as these densely layered songs feature large amounts of said metallic percussion, combined with an equally as generous amount of textured and sometimes abrasive sounding electronic treatments. Either way it's not an easy listen.

I'll be honest and say that Seasick Blackout will demand quite a bit from the listener, and depending on your point of view these compositions will either be perceived as brilliant stabs at music concrète or just seventeen minutes of cacophonous noise. I'm pretty certain this disc is either going to be one of those 'you either love it or hate it' kind of listening experiences for most people, although there may be some listeners who like myself might find themselves sitting on the middle of the fence after all is said and done. I can certainly appreciate the overall avant-garde feel of Seasick Blackout and what he's doing musically on this three song sonic collage, and yet at the same time I wasn't entirely convinced that this is a disc that I'll need to return to on a regular basis. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Seasick Blackout is a bit of a head scratcher in the end. 

The One True Dead Angel...you are all of those things and more.

Considering Weston is primarily a percussionist, it's kind of interesting that this EP opens with muted, bleating sax lines on "You're Not That's Right." Eventually spare, metallic percussion does come in, but the sax remains the dominant element of the song, right up until the percussion fades out. There's a similar strategy at work on "I Just Saw Fog and Dust," where the saxophone is more focused on a repeating pattern, sounding like a sped-up bird call; when the percussion arrives, this time it's louder and more insistent, with a sound that's far more busy and active, and this time more forward in the mix (although it never completely drowns out the sax). The final track, "This October, All Octobers," features a reverb-heavy sound in which the booming drums are considerably more prominent than the trilling, buzzing sax work. Weston's free approach to percussion makes an interesting counterpoint to the highly controlled saxophone lines, and his latest compositions are among his most intriguing.

Delusions of Adequacy:

I like my experimental art noise to be an experience – something that happens to me, a statement I can bear witness to. Preferably, this happens somewhere else besides my house. Seasick Blackout, a short EP of performance noise, fails to connect as an album.

I can appreciate challenges to my role as a listener, Matt’s as an artist, and our turn from the traditions and contexts of listening to recorded sound. But in this case, left to my own devices, I didn’t get it.

Seasick Blackout is an orchestral work entirely composed, arranged, performed, and produced by Matt Weston. The sounds are largely unpleasant, the theme is tortured, and the feel is a bit horrific. The first  track reveals sparse, wailing instruments. The second comes like grating insanity, worse than birds chirping outside your window when you’re sleeping late. The third and final track is a scraping piss, an orchestra distant and a train approaching.

Pretty much no chance you’ll like this because most people who come here want something very different from Seasick Blackout.

[What can I say, other than that I don't make experimental art noise.  I don't even know what that is, nor have I ever heard any.  But "unpleasant," "tortured," and "horrific"?  Who are you, my ex-wife?  (rimshot)]

Ah, Monsiuer Delire...we meet again.

Experimental percussionist Matt Weston works on a small scale: Eps on his mcrilable 7272music.  Seasick Blackout is the first of those Eps that actually strikes.  In the course of three tracks, Weston unfolds treasures of noise ingenuity: rubbing, scratching, sliding.  And it's not overdone, and it's enjoyable, and it has artistic flare.  Bravo.

Smother Magazine...you make me want to smother you with hugs!

Experimental noise and compositions that is staggeringly different from most anything this side of John Zorn that you can find. It’s weird and different and sure and if you give it a chance (and you damn well better), can help propel your musical tastes into a whole new surreal chapter. Not for the feint of heart.

Just because it's not mean, that doesn't mean it's not true!  Or, no, wait...if it's mean, then it's true, because it's not mean...hold on...if it's not true, then the meanness is...

(last in the alphabet, first in our hearts, from Stanley Zappa's It Is Not Mean If It Is True)

Hey, how did Matt Weston get the sounds in my head on to that CD?  Seasick...blackout -- been there, done that, and now I know what it sounds like: scary, ubercontrolled in an out-of-controlled way, dark and loud.  A contemporary tone poem about Man cowering and pissing himself in the face of an/our/the ever increasing mechanized brutalization of society and the brutal mechanization of culture--and mechanized brutality's reaction.  The experience of listening on the way to work (catering a wake) in a snow storm, driving a traction-free Ford truck that not only wants to bankrupt me but kill me too, Seasick Blackout was so totally appropriate it was as if the CD wasn't even on.  Once it was over, in the silent din of my own thoughts amid winter driving conditions, I realized that should I ever find myself high on LSD, Seasick Blackout will either be the last thing I'll listen to or the only thing I'll listen to.  One of those kinds of records.

"These are questions that must be asked."

from "Where Do We Go From Here?", a speech given by Dr. King on August 16, 1967, at the Tenth Anniversary Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about "Where do we go from here," that we honestly face the fact that the Movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, "Why are there forty million poor people in America?" And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's market place. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, "Who owns the oil?" You begin to ask the question, "Who owns the iron ore?" You begin to ask the question, "Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two thirds water?" These are questions that must be asked.

New review

My new record "For Alexandros Grigoropoulos" (available from A Question Of Re_Entry) was recently reviewed in Holland's Vital Weekly:

In December 2008 15 year old Alexandros Grigoropoulos was shot by the police. US percussion player Matt Weston, of whom I think I never heard, created a tribute to Grigoropoulos' memory, which is a powerful, loud work of electronics, turntablism (it seems, it might also be the kaos pad), and percussive instrumental bits, all recorded loud, in your face, without becoming too obvious noise based. This is also only partly rooted in the world of improvised music, but perhaps owes more to old good musique concrete in the old analogue sense of the word. Quite a powerful work of heavy electronics for a heavy subject.

I have a new record out, part 2

A new orchestra piece, composed, arranged, performed and produced by Matt Weston.  Cover design/artwork by Plum Crane.  Here's an early review from Dave X at Startling Moniker:

This is not an EP. It’s a three-track, sixteen-minute treasure, filled to the brim with Weston’s signature percussion and electronics. If Tom Waits was an orca (a drunken orca, natch) then he’d make music like “You’re Not That’s Right,” which opens the disc. Off-kilter, sobbing kettle drum noises issue mournful wails amongst the careless clattering of tin. “I Just Saw Fog and Dust” brings us to a clearing in an electronic cuckoo forest, where Weston is a one-man Arkestra. Amazingly, this doesn’t seem too hyperbolic as I listen to it for the umpteenth time today. But really, nothing compares to the final act, which I have described poorly as sounding like an ocean liner AND a freight train capsizing in the Arctic. “This October, All Octobers” is Weston’s opus– an arresting and majestic work of musique concrète that not only evokes nostalgic disaster and sci-fi film, but simultaneously re-awakens listeners to the immense power of sound. Most highly recommended.

Seasick Blackout will be released on December 22, 2009.  It will be available on iTunes, in record stores, and through the 7272Music website.  You can hear excerpts here.

"Was this not part of show-biz rules?"

December 3rd marks the 30th anniversary of the Who concert tragedy in Cincinnati.  The what and how of the incident has been more than amply detailed elsewhere (starting with Chet Flippo's detailed and probing 1980 cover story in Rolling Stone).

More than any other band of similar stature in the 70s, the Who explicitly addressed class politics.  The key difference between the motivations of the Who and those of, say, Led Zeppelin is that the Who spoke for, to, from, and with their audience, always looking for the kind of give-and-take that defined them in their formative years as the favorite band of working-class London mods; Led Zeppelin only needed the audience as passive affirmation of their cool solos and pants.  No audience input beyond that was necessary, much less desired.  This difference in aims between the two bands (or rather, between the Who and nearly every other 1970s arena-rock band) was part of what sent the Who into a tailspin of frustration and confusion.  As Daltrey said in the mid-70s, "At one time, the kids told the musicians what they wanted.  Now they sit back and let the musicians preach to them."  The Who were more frustrated by this turn of events than any band of their era; indeed, such an arrangement was advantageous to many of the large-scale arena-fillers that now pervaded the scene.  They didn't have to challenge their audience, and their audience didn't challenge them (or, more accurately, the bands simply ignored any challenges from the audience).  Everyone was happy, or so it was assumed.

In an age when the demographics of rock & roll are symbolized in part by a Les Paul hanging on the wall of a CEO's office, the idea that a rock band playing at a sports arena once represented an unwanted and unwelcome intrusion seems difficult to grasp.  Yes, the rock fans who filled the arenas (and represented their surest draws, often keeping them in the black when sporting events couldn't) in the 1970s might have been as rowdy as the sports fans, but to the venue owners they still represented remnants of the counterculture, the younger brothers and sisters of anti-war activists (or Vietnam vets themselves), holdovers from the 60s wanting to test and stretch the limits of official tolerance.  The arena owners responded in kind by forcibly herding the audience into vast open spaces with shitty acoustics, treating them with the kind of contempt only workers footing the boss' bills could engender.  In the case of Cincinnati's Riverfront Coliseum, the policy seemed to be that only 4 out of 16 doors were opened for massive throngs who had been gathering for hours in order to get the best seats.  Previous incidents at shows by Led Zeppelin, Elton John, and Paul McCartney were ignored by the promoters and arena security.  Fuck these kids, right?  Their enthusiasm is annoying, and they don't deserve much better than to be shoved into dangerous bottlenecks.

In December of 1979 Pete Townshend was back on the road with the Who, about 18 months after he swore never to tour again, and 16 months after Keith Moon died.  As is largely forgotten now (understandably, given the lifeless shows on their early 80s tours), their 1979 performances, with former Small Faces drummer Kenney Jones on drums, were widely praised.  There seemed to be a renewed sense of purpose, though without new material, that purpose wasn't entirely clear.  Just how entrenched the Who were in what was quickly cohering into the new mainstream of mass entertainment didn't become apparent until the Cincinnati tragedy.  As Dave Marsh pointed out, "[the Who] were especially shaken not just by the fact that something like this could happen at a rock gig but by the fact that it happened at theirs."

Mike Royko wrote about the Cincinnati concert's attendees as "barbarians" (somewhat incredibly without affixing a shred of blame to the greedy concert promoters or inept police and security at the scene -- in fact, Royko didn't mention them at all).  This prompted a slew of angry letters from which Royko naturally chose the most poorly-written to bolster his case.  But this was a world that was utterly alien to Royko, under all circumstances (Walter Cronkite displayed a similarly embarrassing unwillingness to meet the culture on its own terms by lazily branding the concertgoers "a drug-crazed mob of kids").  Townshend spelled out the difference between rock audiences and the mainstream entertainment industry (which, at the time of this interview -- 1974 -- were still relatively distinct and separate) at :20 in this clip:

Five days after Cincinnati the Who played at Chicago's International Amphitheater.  The concert was broadcast via closed-circuit to movie theaters around the Chicagoland area (one of which was the Varsity Theater in Evanston, where as a kid I had my first exposure to Beatles films, Monterey Pop, The Producers, Plan 9 From Outer Space, and Ken Russell's campy deconstruction of the Who's Tommy -- and I still wish Russell had taken Townshend's suggestions and cast Stevie Wonder and, no kidding, Charles Mingus).  While the rest of the band is reliably solid, Townshend is coked to the gills and drunk off his ass.  He seems bent on wiping out any memory of the Cincinnati tragedy as self-destructively as possible, but at one point during "Music Must Change" he spears the camera with a look that says, "Is this what you want?  Is this what you, the audience, are willing to die to see?  Is this what you promoters are willing to endanger peoples' lives for?" and tears into a series of staggering windmills, determined to confront everything in that instant (at 6:32 in the following clip).

Sadly, subsequent concert tragedies are little more than footnotes in the histories of those bands, and even less of a part of what Greil Marcus called the "rock & roll frame of reference."  In January, 1991 three fans were killed at an AC/DC concert in Salt Lake City.  In May, 1996 a young Irish fan was killed in the mosh pit of a Smashing Pumpkins concert in Dublin.  And in June, 2000 nine concertgoers were trampled at the front of the stage during Pearl Jam's set at the Roskilde festival in Denmark.  In a way, it could almost be argued that the Cincinnati tragedy laid the groundwork for such incidents to be seen as commonplace -- and for promoters to continue the practice of "festival seating," conveniently blaming the bands and audiences for any problems, and absolving themselves of any responsibility, despite the greed that set the stage for these tragedies in the first place.  The more of these incidents that occur, the more promoters and other assorted music-business weasels can claim it's just something that goes with the territory.

Not that the bands involved -- and the Who in particular -- were entirely blameless.  In the aftermath of Cincinnati Roger Daltrey proclaimed they would do "everything we can" to prevent future incidents.  But not only did the band continue to play general admission shows, they played them in massive arenas and stadiums, some with several times the capacity of Riverfront Coliseum.  At a number of shows on their 1982 tour they had to urge the (sometimes 90,000+) crowd to move back.  In 2006 Townshend made reference to their "long time ban...with very few exceptions" on general admission shows, which was pretty disingenuous given that no fewer than eight of the shows on their 1982 tour -- in the largest venues possible -- were general admission, as were many of the shows on their 1989 tour.  I don't want to suggest that the Who were unfeeling or uncaring about the situation (and on numerous pre-1979 concert recordings you can hear band members asking the crowd to move back -- they obviously had some sense of the potential dangers of general admission shows).  But, like any business that puts profit above the health and well-being of people, the music industry simply couldn't sit around and wait for things to be properly sorted out.  There's a show tomorrow night, and the next night, and the next, and for the band to cancel the tour to stay in town and speak with the victims' families (something Townshend in retrospect regretted they hadn't done) will just cut into the loot.

Greil Marcus pointed out in his 1980 Rolling Stone interview with Pete Townshend that Cincinnati

"...has not become part of the rock & roll frame of reference, as Altamont instantly and permanently did.  It seems to me that it was an event that should have signified that something new about the relationship between bands and their audiences, or about rock & roll as mass culture, was taking place.  It ought to have forced people to reexamine a lot of assumptions, a lot of what they took for granted.  That hasn't happened."

As Dave Marsh wrote in Before I Get Old, "Nor would the new Who ever encourage it to happen.  That was perhaps the biggest tragedy of all."

I have a new record out, part 1

from the Absurd/Noise Below website:

matt weston

'for alexandros grigoropoulos'

cdr

it was early december 2008 when the 15 year old alexandros grigoropoulos dropped dead by the bullet of the cop, epaminodas korkoneas (an action that bursted into some of the most severe riots greece had lived for at least the last 3 decades). at that time we were nuts with the work of matt weston, the us percussionist whose sounds were recorded and then were given a more musique concrete approach turning his improvisations to more vital electroacoustics. under our enthusiasm for his work we asked him for a recording for 'a question of re_entry" which upon landing on our desk set our office in amphissa on fire with its intense electroacoustics but also astounded as it was recorded as a kind of memorial for the late alexandros which, as a tribute to his memory was issued on his name day the 30th of august 2009.

now available.

"I think this is a pile of shit while John Sinclair rots in prison!"

Woodstock for me has always uneasily see-sawed between solipsistic self-congratulatory hippie bullshit and a genuine political expression of struggle, solidarity, and liberation.  Of course, it could have been both.  But the most penetrating and enduring performances also wade waist-deep in the mud of the festival's contradictions.  For one thing, the pop festivals of the 1960s did not develop and evolve out of any adherence to some vaguely-expressed hippie ideals.  As Dave Marsh wrote in Before I Get Old: The Story Of The Who:

In the wake of Monterey, the festival had become the fashion among hippie promoters.  Replacing the package show concept, in which a group of performers traveled to small knots of listeners, the festival put together a lump of performers in one place and let the audience come to them -- in vast numbers.

There were few advantages for festival attendees over, say, a package-show type of presentation; those who most vigorously championed the festival concept were the promoters who earned vastly greater amounts of money than they would have promoting any other type of concert.  The promise of a certain level of tolerance for things like open pot-smoking was the promoters' justification for shafting the audience in every other possible way.  Marsh again:

The comfort and needs of the festival audience were afterthoughts.  Sound systems were barely adequate to fill the open spaces with noise, much less music.  Toilet and sanitation facilities were scant.  If it rained, the audience sat in mud and discomfort for up to three days; if it was beatiful and sunny and hot, backs and faces became blistered.  Outside of the promoter-controlled concession stands, there was no way to obtain food and drink.  The acts who came on before the stars were often lame or incompetent, leaving the crowd to entertain itself.

What the festival promoters were selling was, in terms of the entertainment industry, no less exploitative of the audience than other prior modes of presentation, and in fact, far more so.  As Marsh pointed out,

The festival audience came to celebrate a spirit that eventually disintegrated in their faces, and strangest and nastiest of all, they were willing to pay up for the privilege and resented anyone who questioned their wisdom.  This does not endorse the logic of the law-and-order Right, which wished to quell the festivals because they still represented a ghost of hope for the youth counterculture as a community.  But licentious opportunity was finally the only justification for the festivals, even if the drug-taking and sex were decadent in the long run.  Ultimately, the pop festival served to reestablish the old order of the entertainment business: Star time had come to the hippie generation.

The incident with Abbie Hoffman during the Who's set at Woodstock would seem to place the band, or at least Pete Townshend, firmly in the camp of the apolitical.  Not only had the Who not wanted to appear at the festival but, as Marsh writes,

The Who had no use for the rhetoric of hippie pastoralism that ruled at Woodstock.  ... They'd all paid enough dues to have rid themselves of any illusions about the nearness of glamour to squalor.  Townshend was naturally in sympathy with some hippie goals; Daltrey paid them lip service; Entwistle ignored them; Moon actively hated them.

Disturbingly, a 1967 radio spot by Townshend encouraging enlistment in the US Air Force at the height of the Vietnam war would, not unreasonably, have casual observers assuming that the Who weren't apolitical; they were downright right-wing.

While he later said he was mortified about the radio spot (which wasn't widely aired, hence the lack of audience backlash -- critic and Who fanatic John Swenson said, "If I'd heard that spot in 1967, I'd never have become a fan of the Who"), in early 2002 a confused and deeply reactionary Townshend wrote, "Maybe I was naive.  But recent events make me wonder who was right or wrong."  (Marsh -- who, in Before I Get Old, excoriated Townshend for the Air Force spots -- responded to Pete's right-wing revisionism here).

During their set at Woodstock, Abbie Hoffman jumped on stage just as they finished playing "Pinball Wizard," attempted to put things in perspective, and was nearly impaled by the headstock of Townshend's guitar:

In the immediate aftermath of the incident Townshend called it "the most political thing I ever did."  But he quickly revised his view and surprisingly (for Townshend, who has made a habit of contradicting and reversing himself about everything else in his past), that view has remained consistent in the ensuing decades:

1970: "Quite honestly, I mean knock for knock, everything Abbie Hoffman said was very fair." 

1987: "I deeply regret [hitting Hoffman].  If I was given the opportunity again, I would stop the show.  Because I don't think rock & roll is that important." 

1999: "My motivation was that people had come for music, not speeches -- and if Abbie hadn't been so stoned, perhaps I'd have reacted different.  But what he was arguing for was very valid." 

(In a recent piece in Relix, Marsh calls Hoffman's outburst "the only expressly political comment from the stage" during the festival.  This ignores not only Country Joe's "Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag," but also Joan Baez' "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill."  But it is true that Hoffman's statement was the only one that weekend to truly confront hippie navel-gazing.)

As for the performance itself, it was the typical Who performance of the day, which is to say, visceral on a level, and in a manner, attainable only by a handful of artists.  Roger Daltrey called it "the worst gig we ever played," fighting as they were against sleeplessness and their unwitting ingestion of acid from the spiked water, coffee, and soda backstage (the Who weren't exactly straight-edge, but they had all long sworn off psychedelics).  This is the Who playing, in their view, well below their standard:

One of the other obviously epochal performances of the festival was that of Jimi Hendrix.  As the festival naturally ran long, Hendrix went on Monday morning, instead of the Sunday night he was scheduled for.  So he "only" played for an audience of 25,000 (which qualifies as an "only" compared to the half a million or so at the festival's peak).  His band, the Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, included Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell and Jimi's old Army buddy Billy Cox on bass, in his first performance with Hendrix.  The lineup also included guitarist Larry Lee, and percussionists Juma Sultan and Jerry Velez.  It's difficult to say whether it was a lack of rehearsal or the fact that they'd probably sat around waiting 9 hours or so for their set that resulted in the somewhat shambolic nature of the performance.  Hendrix and Cox are heroic, but Mitchell tends to drag (the other musicians are inaudible, likely due to a combination of confusion on the part of the audio engineers and the fact that the engineers had been up for three days straight).  But "heroic" seems woefully inadequate in the face of this:

As for Hendrix' intentions, Juma Sultan recently said, "I think that it meant that we were all Americans and we were happy to be in a free country where we could express ourselves."  Given that Hendrix routinely introduced the national anthem in concert by saying, "Here's one you've all been brainwashed with" and interrupting it with "And the flag was still there, big deal," Sultan's interpretation of Hendrix' interpretation rings hollow.  As Charles Shaar Murray wrote in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Rock & Roll Revolution,

The ironies were murderous: a black man with a white guitar; a massive, almost exclusively white audience wallowing in a paddy field of its own making; the clear, pure, trumpet-like notes of the familiar melody struggling to pierce through clouds of tear-gas, the explosions of cluster-bombs, the screams of the dying, the crackle of the flames, the heavy palls of smoke stinking with human grease, the hovering chatter of helicopters ... "The Star Spangled Banner" is probably the most complex and powerful work of American art to deal with the Vietnam war and its corrupting, distorting effect on successive generations of the American psyche.  One man with one guitar said more in three and a half minutes about that peculiarly disgusting war and its reverberations than all the novels, memoirs and movies put together. ... it depicts, as graphically as a piece of music can possibly do, both what the Americans did to the Vietnamese and what they did to themselves.  ... Kurt Weill could have imagined it, Albert Ayler could have played it, but only Hendrix could have hefted the symbolic weight.

Some have interpreted an off-the-cuff utterance by Jimi to Eric Burdon in 1966 as Hendrix' unwavering support for the Vietnam War.  A nauseatingly willful misreading of Hendrix' national anthem, using his alleged support of the war as "evidence" that his "Star Spangled Banner" was purely patriotic, and praising its "radiant objectivity" (huh??) and Hendrix' "reverence" for the anthem (what??) appeared on his official website soon after 9/11.  It cherry-picked a few quotes from Murray's book and naturally missed this one:

Hendrix knew the score as far as the position of the black GI was concerned: in 'Nam they represented 2 per cent of the officers and were assigned 28 per cent of the combat missions.  When he dedicated "Machine Gun" to "all the soldiers fighting in Vietnam," he was neither jiving his audience nor indulging in games, and when he used the uncanny onomatopoeic power of his guitar to evoke the sounds of urban riots and jungle fire-fights -- as he did in "Machine Gun" and "The Star Spangled Banner" -- he used every atom of that knowledge.

Even in the face of how Marsh characterized Woodstock -- "some slick guys figuring out how to make a buck off...the social vision of the 60s" -- expressions like Hendrix' managed to burst through, working against the grain of the galloping corporatization and commodification of said vision.  

From Marsh's Relix piece:  

The real legacy of Woodstock Nation is felt in the battles to create an American health care system, to end the nation's various wars and to save the lives and communities devastated by the finance industry swindles and 40 years of benign governmental neglect. None of those has a guaranteed draw, either. That is what happens, it seems, after an attempt to organize a social transformation based around a group of people who are all for it -- as long as it doesn't inconvenience them or keeps them too stoned to notice.

Yet something did come out of Woodstock, and something may yet come out of the generation defined by the most exciting electoral campaign of my lifetime. If not the great lost rock festival, at least a reawakening to the best idea of the Woodstock generation, most recently expressed during that campaign by the candidate himself: "This isn't about me. This is about you," Obama said. When I heard him say it in my presence (I swear this is true) my mind immediately went to Roger Daltrey slamming home the same idea: "Right behind you I see the millions /On you I see the glory/From you I get opinions/From you I get the story." And though I've gone to innumerable Who concerts, the image in my head is Roger with long locks streaming, fringed vest and bare chest and that beautiful night sky framing the scene--an image I saw only in the Woodstock film.

TV On The Radio reconsidered

Based on their performances last month on "Saturday Night Live" and "The Colbert Report," I may have to do a serious reinvestigation of TV On The Radio's Dear Science,.  Everything that seems wrong with the record was completely right with the performance.  Tempos were reckless, the interplay was loose and frantic, and they were essentially the anti-Radiohead.  Radiohead's live performances frequently suffer from a overly strict adherence to the studio arrangements, which tends to suck the life out of their live shows.  Compared to Radiohead, TV On The Radio is the Band, joyously tossing firecrackers at each other.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

TV on the Radio - Dancing Choose

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor

Rap Battle
NASA Name Contest

Tunneling outta there took longer than expected.

Huh?  What?  Um, (cough) nothing.

Anyway, I just finished -- I mean, just finished, as in one hour ago -- recording my new record (can one record a record?  Can you sleep on a rainbow?  Can you drink the sky?).  It's a piece in three movements, where I overdubbed myself many, many times, and I managed to resolved the issue of how to get a saxophone sound out of a rototom.  Also, tuba and brass sounds out of tympani.  Anyway, this record should be out by October at the latest, but I'll be posting excerpts on my MySpace page before then.  I will now commence recording on another piece, which will be released on the Greek label Absurd Records.  As if in anticipation of this new recording, my computer (um, which I record on) has been so nice to me lately by accepting things it really shouldn't accept, like playing back twenty-plus overdubs without crashing.  It's also stopped making that horrific loud fan noise.  I...(sniff)...I promised myself I wouldn't cry...

Barn Owl made a studio recording recently, with the capable and pirate-hat-wearing Chris Cooper at the helm.  We recorded a few hours' worth of stuff, so we're not yet sure what form that'll take, but rest assured, it'll take one form if it takes a thousand.  Also on the recording front, the concert that Ben and Roger Miller and I played in Cambridge last year was just mixed (unfortunately, without my participation, due to a head full of cement...at least, that's what the doctor told me), and should see release fairly soon.  I also recently did an interview with the Rice Thresher, the Rice University paper.  Generally speaking, e-mail interviews aren't my favorite, as they don't allow for follow-ups or challenges (shouting "I was cleared of those charges!" doesn't have the same impact in an e-mail as it does in person or on the phone), but I enjoyed this one.  

And finally, merci beaucoup to Noel Tachet his review of not to be taken away in the French magazine Improjazz:

matt weston
Not to be taken away
7272music #004
www.7272music.com, iTunes
Matt Weston dr, traitement du son
Il existe encore des musiques inécoutables, Matt Weston en est la preuve, c'est un improvisateur punk sans souci de mesure ni égard pour ses auditeurs. Ce qui l'intéresse ce sont les tourbillons du son, dans la lignée de Cecil Taylor mais assis non pas derrière un monument de la culture musicale mais à une batterie et devant des bidouillages électriques/électroniques. Matt Weston se fiche de l'histoire, il raconte la sienne et il la raconte fort, il fait du bruit comme une cigale qui se secoue les élytres. C'est naturel et parfois insupportable mais on y revient. Comme le dit le titre choisi par Matt Weston, "not to be taken away" ça ne s'emporte pas, ça ne se déplace pas, et sans doute ça ne s'emporte pas au paradis ; c'est lourd, indifférent, agressif et dépourvu de censure.
Noël TACHET