Arcane Candy

Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Pole position at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

I took it easy today to rest up after my long flight yesterday from Los Angeles, California to Buenos Aires, Argentina. Enjoy a few photos I snapped when I took a short stroll down to the Plaza de Mayo. “Argentina is a country located mostly in the southern half of South America. Sharing the bulk of the Southern Cone with Chile to the west, the country is also bordered by Bolivia and Paraguay to the north, Brazil to the northeast, Uruguay and the South Atlantic Ocean to the east, and the Drake Passage to the south. With a mainland area of 2,780,400 kilometers (1,073,500 square miles), Argentina is the eighth-largest country in the world, the fourth largest in the Americas, and the largest Spanish-speaking nation. The sovereign state is subdivided into 23 provinces and one autonomous city, Buenos Aires, which is the federal capital of the nation.

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Tuesday, July 30, 2019
Buenos Aires, Argentina

Looking east on Avenue Corrientas in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The night before my flight from Los Angeles, California to Buenos Aires, Argentina, I got maybe four hours of shut eye. Likewise, during the 12 hours I spent trapped inside that big aluminum tube hurtling through the sky, I acquired maybe two more hours of semi-unconscious non-bliss peppered with lower back pain from sitting so long. (I guess you could say my butt was asleep, but I wasn’t.) So, by the time of my arrival in South America, I was fully delirious. After shuffling like a zombie through a massive hour-long Disneyland-like line for immigration, I caught a shuttle bus which passed by a seemingly endless amount of semi-dilapidated high rise projects to the Buenos Aires city center, where I got my bearings and trundled over to a hostel called Porta del Sur.

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Ruby G. Schulman Auditorium
Carlsbad Library
Carlsbad, California
Saturday, April 22, 2019

Dancers perform at Sri Purandara Dasa Day 2019.

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Bread & Salt
San Diego, California
February 3, 2019

The crowd assembles for the screening of Oulaya’s Wedding.

On February 3, 2019, Hisham Mayet from the international music label Sublime Frequencies graced So Cal with his presence once again for the first time in several years. On the program tonight was a screening of Oulaya’s Wedding, “an impressionistic account of love, family, gender roles and ecstatic music in the Sahara desert. It’s an intimate portrait of a family of wedding musicians, their court of extended friends and peripheral misfits, who are giving away their eldest daughter’s hand in marriage. The film portrays the emotional and logistical maelstrom of a Sahraoui wedding. Presented are candid and sincere accounts by the residents, hosts, guests and artists that make these weddings a foundation of Saharan culture in the city of Dakhla.

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On Discogs, there are surprisingly at least 13 artists called Seppuku. The tenth one, an improvising post modern classical trio from the UK, offered up exactly one CD way back in 1998, then apparently disappeared. Approprately titled The Awesome Houses of Earth’s Innocents, the album boasts 11 awesome tracks. Three of those tracks make up an opening suite called “Credo: 3 Tombes.” It all starts quietly with “Heart,” which is comprised of super spare and simple melodic figures on electric guitar and stand up bass that offers up a pleasant atmosphere of contemplative restraint. Barely there cymbal washes with long bouts of silence continue the quiet mood with “Sun,” while “Prayer” proffers a deep one-note bass riff with guitar far off in the distance. Leaving the mellow mood of “Credo” behind, “What a Cast Iron Spoon is Good For,” is what busy, skittering free improv is good for, while “Water Glass Philum” is good for a pensive guitar line over a bed of cello drones.

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After offering the music listenin’ public a (non) Self Portrait on CD back in 2017, Grant Cutler is back with Dust, the title of which is (or at least should be) a tribute to that faint yet ubiquitous material that nearly every surface on Earth collects in spades. Hell, dust even plays a prominent role in outer space. Galaxies are chock-full of the stuff, and as every music nerd knows, vinyl records boast even more of it within their micro grooves. Cassettes, though, are a different story. Housed within a plastic shell, they don’t really attract as much dust as other formats. How ironic, then, that Grant Cutler’s album of heavy ambience, Dust, would be released on cassette only.

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A musician who employs synthesizers and computer music in his work, Jesse Whitney is also in a band called The Blight. Many of the tracks on Jesse’s cassette Aegis are comprised of simple, spritely synth lines with background washes and supporting melodies. Other tracks are more slow and contemplative, while some might add a boom beat with corroded twittering, some squeaky door-like sounds or deep underwater burbling. Sometimes, clouds of dissonance and noise elements overtake the proceedings, imposing an increasing density. Aegis is strongly recommended for fans of Mother Mallard’s Portable Masterpiece Company, David Borden’s Music For Amplified Keyboard Instruments and Terry Riley.

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Modify is one of several musical projects operated by Minnesota’s Dean Berlinerblau; Modify’s debut album, Transformational Variances, also enjoys the distinction of being the first release on the newly-minted Æther Tapes label, which specializes in ambient music. Opening the album, the first track, “The Obscurantist,” builds layers of corroded drones that could almost rival the massive ambience proffered by Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS. Flowing seamlessly into the short “Informational Conformity,” the maelstrom adds a slow metal guitar riff in “Reactive Whirlwind,” with synth flourishes buried within the aural detritus. In “Energy Toward a Working State of Growth,” a quiet, relaxed atmosphere opens up with a simple, gently strummed guitar chord accompanied by the breathing of a reptile, while another mountain range of scuzz gradually fades in and takes over as a ponderous bass riff underpins it all. Then the gentle opening theme suddenly re-appears. Next up, “Network (Order)” and “Network (Chaos)” add more outsized noise, while “Autopilot” quiets back down to offer up some gentle, contemplative ambience for the perfect respite.

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Straight off the bat, we’re going to have to deal with the name of this outfit: Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble. Believe it or not, it measures in at a whopping 15 syllables, which almost qualifies as a whole sentence, if not a short story. Yeah, the name is pretty much way too long for its own good. It’s so painfully long, I’ll bet no human has ever uttered it out loud because it would require too much energy; like you would have to eat three meals during the course of saying it. Let’s give it a try. Come on, repeat after me: “Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble.” Whew! I got tired just typing it right then. The name also sounds generic, kind of like if I started a rock group and named it Rock Group.

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Modart
Oceanside, California
September 27, 2003

Yogi Proctor’s Total Confusion is Popular art show flyer.

Yogi Proctor is a fine artist and art director / graphic designer who has been working since the 1990s. Yogi has done graphic design for musical artists and skateboard brands, among many others. His fine artworks are often conceptual with a lot of deep thought behind them. In the fine art world, perhaps Yogi’s most well-known works are the fake photocopy machine he built by hand, and other similar pieces he calls decoys. “A decoy is a copy that, when placed in proximity to the original, reconfigures the perception of both…destabilizing notions of ‘artist’ and ‘originality’ with wit and agility.”–Yogi Proctor. That concept vaguely reminds me of Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes. Enjoy a few photos from one of Yogi’s early art shows, Total Confusion is Popular, back in 2003. (Note: The pieces in this show are not decoys.) (Additional note: This note is not a decoy of the previous note.) (Final note: This note is not a decoy of any past, present or future notes.)

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