Spotify Playlist: Chaos x Chaos

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: John Cage - As Slow as Possible (1985/1987)

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship returns with another thing you could just read about on Wikipedia.

"As Slow as Possible" is both the title and the pianist's instruction of this John Cage piece, but the mandate is more like "as slow as you want". It was written as "ASLSP" for piano in 1985 and later adapted for organ so that the ability to sustain notes could take the idea even further.

Some of the longer piano performances exceed an hour; pieces of music as long as this are uncommon, but not unheard of. In 2011, The Flaming Lips recorded the six hour long "I Found a Star on the Ground". In 2015, Thom Yorke was commissioned by artist Stanley Donwood (the man responsible for all of Radiohead's artwork since The Bends) to write music for "The Panic Office", an exhibit of his art in Sydney, and wrote a piece that lasted 18 days, no two minutes being exactly the same. Erik Satie's "Vexations" from the late 19th Century is a precursor to Cage's piece which includes cryptic instructions that can be reasonably interpreted as "play 840 times" - no speed is given. Cage organised a performance of "Vexations" that lasted 18 hours using a large tag team of pianists that included his similarly named protegee John Cale. But in the late 90s, a group of musicians in Halberstadt, Germany conspired to take "As Slow as Possible" to absurd extremes - you have to remember that we didn't have smartphones back then and we had to make our own fun.

A performance of the piece using a purpose-built organ with the pedals held down by sandbags commenced in 2001 and is scheduled to end in 2640. The performance actually started what was effectively many performances of his better known "4:33" (minus the page-turning), as the piece starts with a rest which, for this performance, was interpreted as being two years in length. Right now it's most of the way through a rest which began in 2013 and will end after almost seven years in 2020.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/As_Slow_as_Possible
https://universes.art/en/magazine/articles/2012/john-cage-organ-project-halberstadt/
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/06/arts/music/06chor.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vexations

Los Kowalski - Dejarte Ir

Mexico's Los Kowalski has had the labels Krautrock, shoegaze and psychedelia attached to it, among other genres. It's accurate yet reductive. Many inventive bands are described as familar-yet-original, but Los Kowalski really does have a knack for evoking the past to its advantage while seamlessly blending its influences in a way that defies comparison. Take two of the best songs on Dejarte Ir ("Let You Go"), for example: "Puente a la luna" ("Bridge to the Moon") is Krautrock on downers, coasting by on a slowed down motorik beat and a two note bass line and eventually subsumed by a wall of enveloping guitars; "Albatros" employs a faster, more elastic beat, and seems to be another one chord affair until a change that hits like Mjölnir. Dejarte Ir is a rare album that can somehow lull listeners into a reverie and keep them on their toes at the same time.

Spotify Playlist: Songs That Are Not About Tennis

Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship: Lucille Bogan - Shave 'Em Dry (1935)

This new recurring feature looks at odd footnotes in musical history. It's called Dr. Giraffe's Cellophane Cruise Ship because I decided to call it that. For the first installment, I shine a (flesh)light on this filthy 1935 blues number by Lucille Bogan.

People were as dirty-minded in the 1930s are they are now - it was just harder to get away with it in public. The pre-war blues singers would record innuendo-laden come-ons in the studio, but these would turn into bawdy single-intendres in the clubs at night. These were the sort of rowdy places where, legend has it, people would regularly try to beat up Memphis Minnie and she'd break a bottle over the bar and give them what for.

For this song and some others Lucille Bogan just said "fuck it" and jettisoned any commercial pretense. It exceeds the 3 minutes typical of pre-war blues songs in case it takes you that much longer to see what she's getting at. Indeed, whatever she was trying to communicate through such abstruse lyrics as "I fucked last night and the night before, and I feel like a wanna fuck some more" is lost to the ages. It also includes the line "I've got something between my legs that'll make a dead man cum", imagery that would show up in 1976 on Tom Waits' "Pasties and a G-String" and then again in 1981 on The Rolling Stones' "Start Me Up".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucille_Bogan