The Clarinet Summit, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” Southern Bells, 1987.
The Clarinet Summit, “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore,” Southern Bells, 1987.
Years ago, he used to catch himself thinking about what he was playing, conscious of his own technique, and while this distracted it also reassured because it meant that in between these spasms of self-consciousness he had simply been playing — and he played best when least conscious of what he was doing. At a certain point, playing became a wild amnesia of technique.
— Geoff Dyer, But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, p. 174.
Julius Hemphill, “Skin 2,” ‘Coon Bid’ness, 1975.
Julius Hemphill, “Dogon A.D.,” Dogon A.D., 1972.
Jamie Saft Trio, “Sturiel,” Astaroth: Book of Angels Vol. 1, 2005.
The various reductions I have been describing are fairly directly the results of the ongoing revolution of applied science known as “technological progress.” This revolution has provided the means by which both the productive and the consumptive capacities of people could be detached from household and community and made to serve other people’s purely economic ends. It has provided as well a glamor of newness, ease, and affluence that made it seductive even to those who suffered most from it. In its more recent history, especially, this revolution has been successful in putting unheard-of quantities of consumer goods and services within the reach of ordinary people. But the technical means of this popular “affluence” has at the same time made possible the gathering of the real property and the real power of the country into fewer and fewer hands.
What Are People For?, 185-6.
St. Peter & the Holymen, “Bofoo Beye Abowa Den,” Ghana Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-Sounds & Ghanaian Blues 1968-81, 2010.
The Ex + Tom Cora, “Dere Geliyor Dere,” And the Weathermen Shrug Their Shoulders, 1993.
Max Roach, “Freedom Day,” We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite, 1960.
Talk Talk is probably best known in the U.S. for their early ’80s hits, ‘Talk Talk,’ and ‘Dum Dum Girl.’ Some remember ‘Life’s What You Make It’ from the transitional The Colour of Spring LP but for the most part that’s the end of it. What goes largely unacknowledged is one of the most intriguing progressions in popular music history: Talk Talk, due to the mutual influence of keyboardist Tim Friese-Greene and singer Mark Hollis, became a band whose aim was, apparently, to not make any sound. The group went to great lengths to accomplish this goal, most notably, effectively, and perhaps paradoxically, by way of improvisation and expanded instrumentation.
[Edit, 2011] The effort towards silence succeeds in large part because of an equally extreme dynamic ceiling; that is, if the group was able to achieve stretches of near-inaudibility, they were also committed to periods of alarming saturation and volume.
Talk Talk, “Myrrhman,” Laughing Stock, 1991.