Music is connection, made of sonic events connected through time via people connecting with each other. People make music together, it’s a social activity that often has a social purpose. This column connects styles and ideas from the past and present by following the connections between musicians and composers from album to album. Follow the names because, like stars, they make constellations.
This installment goes from one extreme to another, not just in genre, but in time:
Cocaine Piss
My Cake
Vinyl LP
Cocaine Piss is a pretty fine name for a punk band, and this punk band makes pretty fine music. On the spectrum of attitudes in the genre, Cocaine Piss falls firmly on the gleeful end. Everything is exploding with one shade or another of joy, even the anger is full of a sense of positive energy. That energy is leaping and bounding, matched by the vivid, punchy recording engineered and mixed by Steve Albini.
Thurston Moore, Farida Amadou, & Steve Noble
M.A.N.
Farida Amadou plays bass in Cocaine Piss, which barely scratches the surface of her music making. She has tremendous technique to start with, and the feel of a totally organic approach. Everything she plays sounds authentically, naturally her own, whether it’s punk or jazz; experimental étude-like forms and structures; or explorations of the basic possibilities of sounds you can get out of the electric bass. That range and naturalism are a beautiful fit for this atmospheric and often heavy session with ex-Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore and British percussionist Steve Noble.
Stephen O’Malley
Peacemaker Assembly
Noble is another versatile musician. On this album his drumming and cymbal washes add detailed physical motion to the crunchy, buzzing drone that Stephen O’Malley massages out of his electric guitar. Drone music holds a place in time but it can also be full of motion and even drama—the movement of the trees and the drama of the Earth turning.
Oren Ambarchi and Stephen O’Malley
Alvin Lucier: Criss-Cross/Hanover
Vinyl LP
O’Malley is one of the principal members of Sunn O))), which, depending on your point of view, is either the heaviest doom metal band around or one of the most visceral experimental ensembles on the scene (the point of this column is that all music lies on a continuum, so of course they’re both, and more). Sunn O))) is nothing if not intensely dramatic. O’Malley is joined here by another important experimental guitarist, Oren Ambarchi, a pointillist to O’Malley’s brutalist. There’s a third figure present, too, the great experimentalist Alvin Lucier, who composed “Criss-Cross” for the pair. So much more delicate than the previous points in this constellation or Sunn O))) and even most of Ambarchi’s playing, the musicians use patience and care to produce beguiling difference tones, using e-bows, as they slowly push a small interval past each other.
Charles Curtis
Performances & Recordings 1998-2018
2 x Vinyl LP, Compact Disc (CD)
Lucier had multiple collaborators through the decades in his sound experiments. One of his most important was cellist Charles Curtis, who premiered several of the composer’s works. Curtis came to Lucier from the classical tradition, and this collection shows that side of him, along with how vital he’s been to new music. There are pieces from the Baroque era, originally written for the viola da gamba, and modern and experimental music from Anton Weber, Olivier Messiaen, Morton Feldman, and Éliane Radigue. All those names belong to a practice with roots that go back to before the Renaissance, represented by the medieval master, Guillaume de Machaut and his longing love song, “C’est force, faire le vueil.”
Blue Heron/Les Délices
Guillaume de Machaut: Remede de Fortune
Compact Disc (CD)
As much as technology has advanced since the 14th century (the lute and theorbo are now the guitar and bass) the way we think and feel are hardly any different. Machaut, an important poet as well as composer, was a defining artistic figure of his era, composing music for the church and also music for everyday life and experience. This live performance is something like a medieval concept album, weaving Machaut’s Remede de Fortune, a combination poem and group of songs about how to endure the ups and downs of love found and lost, together with other songs and dances from the same period. The steps may have changed, but the subject matter remains the same.
