"Escape Artist"

A happy Sunday, everyone. & 鸡年大吉, jī nián dàjí, that is, Happy Year of the Rooster! (& the Fire Rooster at that!) 恭喜发财, gōngxǐ fācái, in other words, Happiness & prosperity!

We’re here with the final installment of January's  Sunday music, which has featured avant-cellist Zoë Keating performing at MacWorld in 2011. Today’s selection is “Escape Artist” from her 2010 Into the Trees.

Please support Zoë Keating’s music! You’ll be doing yourself a favor, as her music is masterful & wonderful & is a rich world to explore. You can visit her website & buy her music at the links provided.

Next month: the music of Montserrat Figueras.

Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:

photo by Kris Krüg. 21 October 2009

Zoe Keating - Pop!Tech 2009 - Camden, ME

PopTech from Camden, Maine and Brooklyn, NY, USA

This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. 

"Exurgency"

For your Sunday listening pleasure: more Zoë Keating from MacWorld 2011.

Today’s selection is her performance of “Exurgency”, originally released on her 2004 EP, One Cello x 16. “Exurgent” is an old word, from Latin “exsurgere”, & it means “coming to light”, “arising”. It’s one of my favorite Keating pieces.

Please do yourselves a favor: visit her website & buy her music. Zoë Keating is an independent musician who does all her own recording, producing, & promoting in addition to composing & performing her music. She richly deserves our support!



 
Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:
Zoë Keating at eTech in 2009 (12 March 2009)
originally posted to Flickr as zoe keating by Ed Schipul, who makes the image available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

"Sun Will Set"

A bit behind schedule, but here’s Sunday music at last! We’re continuing our series of videos from Zoë Keating’s performance at MacWorld in 2011.

“Sun Will Set” is from her 2005 album One Cello x 16: Natoma. Please do yourselves a favor: visit her website & buy her music. Zoë Keating richly deserves our support, & her music is sublime, as you will hear.

Enjoy!




Image links to its source at Wiki Commons:
Zoë Keating at eTech in 2009 (12 March 2009); originally posted to Flickr as zoe keating by Ed Schipul.
This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

"Tetrishead"

We return for more wonderful music from Zoë Keating, as we shall every Sunday this month. Today’s selection is “Tetrishead” from her 2005 album One Cello x 16: Natoma. This piece is also currently being used by the Brazilian television series Felizes para Sempre? (“Happily Ever After?”). Keating has worked on a number of soundtracks, including Manhattan & the recent A&E series, The Returned (based on the French series Les Revenants).

Please do yourselves a favor: visit Keating’s website & buy her music. As I’ve mentioned previously, Zoë Keating is an independent artist who composes, performs, & produces her work. She richly deserves wide support for the great artistry & vision she’s sharing with all of us.

Enjoy!



Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:
Zoë Keating at eTech in 2009 (12 March 2009)
originally posted to Flickr as zoe keating by Ed Schipul, who makes this file available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

"Frozen Angels"

 
We have some very special music for your January listening pleasure. For each of the five Sundays this month, a video from Zoë Keating’s performance at MacWorld in 2011.

Those of you who know me &/or have followed the blog for some time are aware that I hold Zoë Keating’s artistry in very high esteem. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Zoë Keating’s work, a few words, however inadequate, as a brief introduction.

Zoë Keating is a cellist who uses looping software to create richly layered soundscapes with her compositions. This is simple in the telling, but the results are some of the best contemporary music I know. Keating has been described as a “one-woman orchestra”, but recently she has been a bit critical of that term—which makes sense. Her sound is much more about polyphony than symphony in the strict sense of the word. Originally Keating envisioned her compositions as being played by a consort of 16 cellos, but when this proved impractical, she used her technological expertise to perform them as a soloist.

“Frozen Angels” is from her 2005 album One Cello x 16: Natoma. Please do yourselves a favor: visit her website & buy her music. Keating is an independent artist who manages not only to compose & perform all this amazing music, but also to produce & promote it on her own. She deserves a wide audience & wide support. Also: if you ever have a chance to hear her perform live, do not miss it.

Enjoy!



Image links to its source on Wiki Commons:
Zoë Keating performs with Rasputina; Concert at La Sala Rossa, Montreal, Quebec, 26 October 2005.
Photo by Wiki user Simon Law, who generously makes it available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Ullambana in Portland: The Review - Part 3

[The third installment of Sheila Graham-Smith's review of my book Ullambana in Portland; the series will conclude tomorrow.]

PART 3

In the short biographical note included in the book the author calls himself, among other things, a flaneur. The word flâneur, with all its associations of wandering, observing, synthesising the city, is perfect. According to Baudelaire and Victor Fournel, the flâneur understood the city, and for Walter Benjamin his perambulations facilitated “a way through significant psychological and spiritual thresholds.” (1)  Ullambana in Portland is built on the understanding gained through wandering, observing, and synthesising, but the poems in the second section especially find their various ways across those significant thresholds.

There are 16 poems called sutras in the collection, each of them dedicated to some particular person or persons, except the final one, “walking sutra”, which is the poet’s own.  Sutra means, literally, string, or thread, from the root word siv, that which sews or hold things together.  Wikipedia, quoting A History of Indian Literature, says “In the context of literature, sutra means a distilled collection of syllables and words, any form or manual of "aphorism, rule, direction" hanging together like threads with which the "teachings of ritual, philosophy, grammar or any field of knowledge" can be woven.” The definition is important as it points out the connecting role of the sutra poems, all of which explore, one way or another, themes related to the idea of tending, whether to people, to the world, to life, or to the ideas and thoughts that help in the struggle to make sense of any or all of this.

 
“cloudy day coffee sutra”, for instance, poses a series of questions that wrestle with the way language both opens and closes possibilities in the way we relate to people and the world.

what would you call that sky?
what would you call that tree?
what would you call those passersby?
what would you call that?

Why would someone ask such questions about the view from a coffee shop not far from their home? They sound as if they might be things asked by someone learning a new language, but that isn’t the case. The poet himself – plainly a more than adequate English speaker – is putting the questions to some unnamed you he is having coffee with, at the same time as he puts them to you, the reader.

what would you call that sky? dissolving to
mist unfit for paper birds all falling
ash-gray slate-gray nickel-gray falling in
counterpoint with yellow leaves—what
would you call that tree? gray limbs in taijiquan
gestures reaching & reaching—that low sky
can’t be grasped those folds upon folds of
clouds this massive origami not what it seems this
tonnage of ice & water as if the Pacific mirrored it
self in what some call heavens—

vapor rising from
two cups of coffee on this counter, trans
muted liquid: you know, language is like that
too paper birds afloat in the mind &
folded with no beginning no end the speech
of birds in an ash tree scissoring loose its
leaves, gray branches the lichen mottled cream
white milk-white what would you call those
passersby no two alike no two different all
looking for something not apparent you said
god is like that too the water droplet within the
ocean seeking the ocean  -
                 that sky lowering, that
bird in silhouette that Chinese character’s
brushstrokes tracing black green blue in one
syllable what would you call that? quadrillion
raindrops paper birds imagined branches this
coffee steam rising up these people walking it
goes without saying all one all undiminished

A poem as intricate and complex as the origami birds it mentions, folded with no beginning or end, but one of its themes is caught in the vapour rising from two cups of coffee – “trans-/muted liquid: you know, language is like that/too”. Transmutation - the action of changing or the state of being changed into another form. “cloudy day coffee sutra” plays with this idea of change, both as it applies to the world and as it applies to the language we use to describe that world. Hayes is a self professed “dimestore Buddhist” and the poem reflects the idea that, as he puts it, “the phenomenal world is ever arising & ever renewed; just as the only actual time is ‘now’, so the only actual existence of the 10,000 phenomena is in the current instant. As such, the phenomenal world is radically dynamic, whereas the act of naming is radically static. It accounts for things in a sort of Platonic sense, but not in a dynamic sense of ‘becoming.’(2)

That ungraspable low sky, for example, a tonnage of ice and water shifting before our eyes, but captured, however imperfectly or momentarily, in “the folds upon folds of a massive origami, not what it seems, the Pacific mirroring itself in the heavens”. Not, notice, ‘as if the Pacific was mirrored in the heavens’, but ‘as if the Pacific mirrored itself in the heavens’. Lacan claimed the ‘real’ is un-representable and supersedes any attempt to give it a coherent and comprehensible form, including in language. (3) It can only be defined through paradox. According to Kierkegaard the ultimate paradox of thought is the desire to discover something that thought cannot think (4), and the “cloudy day coffee sutra” discussion of the interplay of language and reality is riddled with just that sort of thought – “the water droplet within the ocean seeking the ocean”, for instance, or “those passersby no two alike no two different”.

The tension here, is between the idea that the truth of things is inherent in their particularity, that the particularity itself is ultimate, and the idea that the truth of things is in their oneness; an issue not really resolved in the context of the poem - it couldn't possibly be – but suspended there, held up in delicate balance to be examined. Hayes has pointed out elsewhere that “as a poet one is also trying to conjure reality back into its real existence by naming it. So there is both the distancing of reality from the one, or…what is, but also the reconstruction of reality.” (5) In other words, “there are always these people walking it goes without saying all one all undiminished”.

The problem of the one and the many, reflected in the stream of images garnered from day to day life in the city, runs like another thread through much of the collection, nuancing thoughts about time and art, about memory and loss and love and desire and death, constantly challenging the reader to consider, and then to reconsider. 

“new moon cello”, written after a Zoë Keating concert at the Aladdin Theatre in Portland, states its thesis in the opening line - Loss is constant across dimensions - and gives a series of beautiful examples supporting its claim –

loss is constant across the dimensions:
an entire Chinese bestiary achieving form & gone:
waning crescent moon melting to new moon’s
hollow, this improvisation soaring beyond &
beyond the vanishing point in this theater’s
                     sapphire light, that flock of
crows rising off a frozen pasture in March, grass
stubble ragged amidst corn snow: faces
taking form & gone—the helicopter blasting
cherry blossoms westward off 
                        boughs in Waterfront Park that perfect
blue Thursday, sun a halo of
grief: now May, & ghostly
                        rhododendrons nod—notes swell
& fade & swell & fade, the sinews drawing
                        pangs travail transcendence across
four strings to that foursquare city built beyond time

“It’s in the nature of things”, as Ms Keating said after she played a beautiful improvisation to open the concert, only to discover the sound man hadn’t recorded it. Another loss, and if you know Zoe Keating’s work, you know it was a significant loss, however true her response may have been. Meanwhile, outside the theatre, in the wider city:

                                                black Willamette
rolling past bridge lights, polyphony rolling past
stage lights now violet now emerald opal amber;
the heart’s daily shattering

There is a clear parallel between the way Keating’s music and Hayes’ poetry is constructed. Lou Fancher, in her article "In the Loop with Zoë Keating" uses the word ‘polydimensionality’ to describe the effect created through the layering of music saved and looped through a computer and the music being produced in any given instant of a performance, (6) and it applies perfectly to the way Hayes’ simultaneously produces and builds on a relentless flow of imagery. In a 2010 interview, he mentions that “if you have these very fluid & rarely ever end-stopped lines & you rely a great deal on sensory data (as opposed to abstract concept or pure language) to construct a poem, that sensory data may seem overwhelming”; but he also connects it explicitly to “the idea of poetic writing as improvisation” and the need “to start at a point & develop the idea in different directions”. (7)

There is meaning embedded in each image, in the juxtaposition of images, the layering of images, in the memories evoked by the images and the thoughts provoked by them, in the echoes, the trajectories of joy and the half life of pain, in the restless ghosts and the quiet ones. Analysis fails to do justice to either Hayes poetry or Keating music. Its significance is as much in the flow and shift as in the unified whole that emerges in the end.
“new moon cello” moves to a close with an allusion to another moment of personal loss, and then, significantly to the mention of two women bent over great pieces of art;

you absorbed in a poem where a butterfly disappears
                  within crimson blossoms: dark cello,
waxing crescent silver hair wave, eyes closed in unlit
night amongst such profusion of quavers our incarnations
brief & brief then brief again

Significantly, the lines of the Du Fu poem that absorb the poem’s you are left in the darkness at the margins of Hayes’ poem and Zoë Keating’s performance, but they comment beautifully on both the poetry’s and the music’s profusion of quavers and on their incarnations brief & brief then brief again.

the wind & light proclaim flow & shift as one:
why should we not enjoy time’s brief passage?
     crooked river #2, Du Fu 曲江二首 (translation by Jack Hayes)

 Sheila Graham-Smith
© 2016



1. Bobby Seal, “Baudelaire, Benjamin and the Birth of the Flâneur”, Psychogeographic Review - http://psychogeographicreview.com/baudelaire-benjamin-and-the-birth-of-the-flaneur/
2. Jack Hayes, private correspondence
3. Stephen Ross, “A Very Brief Introduction to Lacan”, University of Victoria. http://web.uvic.ca/~saross/lacan.html
4. Soren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments Chapter 3 The Absolute Paradox - A Metaphysical Caprice
5. Jack Hayes, private correspondence
6. Lou Fancher, "In the Loop with Zoë Keating" - https://www.sfcv.org/events-calendar/artist-spotlight/in-the-loop-with-zoe-keating
7. Sheila Graham-Smith, “An Interview with John Hayes, Author of The Spring Ghazals”, Tangerine Tree Press and the Tangerine Tree Press Review. November 12, 2010. http://tangerinetreepress.blogspot.com/2010/11/interview-with-john-hayes-author-of.html


Please check back tomorrow for part 4 of Sheila Graham-Smith's review.

Information on the Images:
1. Steel Bridge & Chinese junk: photo © John Hayes
2. A Sanskrit manuscript page of Lotus Sutra (Buddhism) from South Turkestan in Brahmi script. Public domain. Image links to its source on Wiki Commons.
3. Aladdin Theater Sign: photo © John Hayes
4. Cherry blossoms at Waterfront Park: photo © John Hayes

“The Path”

A rainy Saturday in Portland—January, as we experience it in the Pacific Northwest, is very much upon us. What better music for this than some cello music by Zoë Keating?

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Zoë Keating’s work, she describes her music as being a marriage of “classical music & information architecture.” Coming from the diverse backgrounds of both a classically trained cellist & a technology wiz, Keating has broken ground with her compositions & innovative use of looping technology to create a sound that is fresh, unique, intriguing—& also familiar, in the sense of the music you might hear in a dream being familiar—you can’t place it, but you understand such music existing; it sounds “right.”

“The Path” originally was recorded for Zoë Keating’s 2010 release Into the Trees, which I reviewed previously on the blog; I also had the chance to hear Keating perform live at the Aladdin here in 2012, a show that I also reviewed on Robert Frost’s Banjo. If you get the chance to see Zoë Keating perform, I urge you to take advantage of the opportunity! You can also find her recordings on her website at the link provided above.

Enjoy!





Image of Zoë Keating at eTech in 2009 is from Wiki Commons; its author is Ed Schipul, who makes it available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license.

Magic at the Aladdin

A gray Friday afternoon—too chilly for May it seems, & the afternoon has opened up to a real driving rain—not the persistent drizzle for which Portland is known. The cool air takes my breath away as I hustle between buildings at OHSU, trying to avoid the downpour & get under cover after my weekly appointment; meanwhile, planning my route home, hoping to avoid this soaking rain as much as possible.

But it lets up by the time I’m waiting for the MAX train by PSU, & I take my usual springtime route, walking home from the Overlook Park station in a light drizzle—the rush hour traffic roaring under the Failing Street bridge, the air still cold & wet in a way that causes my lungs to balk.

I have a ticket for the Zoë Keating show at the Aladdin Theater over in the southeast—a show that’s excited me since I first found out about it on the internet a couple of months ago. But by 4:30 there’s another hard rain, & I know there’s going to be walking & standing out waiting for buses, so this weather has to calm down within the next hour or so.

Which it does. I wait for the bus in a light drizzle; by the time the #9 bus has dropped me at the corner of SE Milwaukie & Powell, the rain has stopped, & since I’m early, I talk a walk thru the Brooklyn neighborhood, a quiet corner of the southeast just barely removed from the bustle of Powell: gardens, a little league ballfield, a neighborhood tavern, an old Hires root beer sign in a parking lot. For the first time in a few days, I begin to feel something like contentment.

The concert itself is a revelation. The Aladdin is a large & beautiful old theater, opened as a vaudeville house in the 1920s, then later as a movie theater—at times with a rather unsavory reputation. Now it’s back to its old glory as a live music venue.

The first act, FearNoMusic is an avant-garde string quartet that also brings in a percussionist for one song & a pianist for another. The song involving the pianist is the third in their set, a duet between piano & the first violinist, the piece by a Japanese minimalist composer; the impossibly keening tone of the violin over the rippling piano arpeggios draws me in, & from that moment on the concert transports me.

Zoë Keating herself is everything I expected & more. If you’re not familiar with her work, I did review her album Into the Trees a while back; briefly, Ms Keating is a classically trained cellist who uses looping technology to deploy a virtual cello orchestra when performing her intricate & moving compositions. Self-effacing onstage, she explains that she suffered from severe stage fright as a teenager, & it wasn’t until she got “off the page”—composing her own music without the need to use a score—that she was able to get beyond this. When a song crashes, she handles it with aplomb, & with genuine emotion—“damn,” she exclaims as she cuts the loop feed from her foot strip; then she plays one of her compositions with FearNoMusic, & takes us all back into the deep & complex soundscape. Her announced last song, “Optimist,” a composition dedicated to her young son, brings a rousing ovation, & she returns to absolutely nail “Exurgency,” the piece during which she & her technology had come uncoupled earlier.  All in all, it was an evening of transcendent music.

By the time I wait for the bus on Powell, there’s not even a hint of rain—I feel like for once I somehow beat the odds & discovered beauty.

 

“Into the Trees”

Happy Monday all!  & it’s another musical Monday here on Robert Frost’s Banjo, tho I am taking the week off from the Monday Morning Blues—I like to mix things up just a bit!  & in that spirit, I’m presenting you with some music you may not know but I think you’ll find intriguing.  That’s the music of cellist Zoë Keating, whose second album Into the Trees was released in June.

It’s a wonderful album, simply put—a series of 11 soundscapes with richly layered sound, gorgeous melodies & harmonies & shifting rhythms—& such rich layering is possible because Ms Keating has constructed multiple tracks, so that she becomes a one-woman cello orchestra.  As a studio production, this would be impressive in itself—however, Zoë Keating is able to reproduce these performances live by simultaneously playing two instruments: her cello & a MacBook Pro.  In the second video below, Ms Keating explains her looping technology in an interview with Wired.  Suffice it to say that Zoë Keating’s compositions are all of a piece, from the melodic lines to the percussive effects.

The compositions themselves are the kind of music that seems at once familiar & completely fresh—the music one might hear in a dream—you believe you know it, & yet in the light of day, you realize you’ve never heard anything quite exactly like it, it seems, too, both ancient & modern.  This is “classical” music, for all its indebtedness to more contemporary sounds—but classical music that could be comfortable in any number of surroundings—from concert hall to dance club.  

The music is also narrative in the best sense of the word—it moves us to different points on an emotional spectrum while all the time leaving space for our own; they allow for stories without insisting on them.  Another way of saying this is that Ms Keating’s music is like the river that’s changed each time you step into it.  It shouldn’t be surprising, given this characteristic, that Zoë Keating has also composed several film soundtracks as well as ballets.

Listening to music that’s built on a looping foundation, like Zoë Keating’s or that of guitarist Matt Stevens, puts me in mind of one of my favorite jazz artists, Rahsaan Roland Kirk.  It’s not that the music itself—the melodies, harmonies & rhythms—are similar, but that Kirk, like these performers, was literally a one-man orchestra.  Because of his mastery of circular breathing, he could play three wind instruments simultaneously.  Some dismissed this as gimmickry, but to me, Kirk was the proptype one-person orchestra—different than a one-man-band in that the overall effect becomes symphonic—tones melded together in a harmonious whole, yet distinct in themselves—tones that create a complex aural vision.

Ms. Keating’s album (as well as her first album, One Cello x 16: Natoma) are available from her website, both as an actual cd & as digital downloads; her music is also available on iTunes.  Hope you enjoy “Escape Artist” (the first video below) & stick around to listen to Ms Keating’s interview with Wired (also set to her music!)