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

Petal - Magic Gone

The "confessional" album is sought after, but the human desire for secondhand absorption of the artist's personal turmoil allows empty posturing to slip through the net. Formless angst became an aesthetic, an affectation, because we let it; we made it profitable. Still, we know the real deal when we hear it. We treat such an album like a cipher through which the artist's psyche can be decoded.

Kiley Lotz would save you the trouble. She's been upfront about her struggle with mental illness which intensified in between Petal's debut Shame in 2015 and Magic Gone. The lyrics don't sugarcoat it and it's not a stretch to say you can hear it in her performance. In "Comfort", Lotz details in real time the point when she realised a long term relationship was over, and when she wails "I don't fucking care anymore!", you believe her. And yet Magic Gone never feels like a confrontational exercise, staring at you to see who blinks first, because Lotz's melodic acuity won't allow it. It's more downbeat than Shame, - never dirge-like in a way that would make a line such as "I wished the truck on the overpass would tumble down upon me" relentlessly morose, but never trivialising it either.

The Breeders - All Nerve

The Breeders are not a band burdened by the idea of a legacy. All Nerve comes ten years after the middling Mountain Battles and is just the band's fifth album in 28 years. It also makes this lineup - the same that recorded 1993's Last Splash - the first to record more than one album (although, including The Amps, everyone involved has appeared in at least one other iteration). Last Splash was commercially successful in large part due to a confluence of factors such as how "Cannonball" fit in perfectly with MTV's alt-rock agenda at the time and British label 4AD doubling down on its decision to sign American artists, but it endures because of Kim Deal's songwriting and the band's musicianship. 25 years later, there's still so much to unpack in "Cannonball", not to mention the sublime power-pop of "Divine Hammer", the batshit dirge "Mad Lucas" and the alternately boiling and simmering "Roi" and its brief reprise, the latter ingeniously placed at the end of the album after a cover of Ed's Redeeming Qualities' country & western song "Drivin' on 9". But for all that, All Nerve is no attempt to replicate past glory.

Free from expectations and historical context, All Nerve is free to take its time. Opening track "Nervous Mary" uses the same slow-fast structure as Last Splash's opener "New Year", and could have been recorded the day after that album's last session, but the album soon carves out its own identity and indulges in slower tempos more than any other Breeders album, never more so than "Dawn: Making An Effort", which creates a wall of noise out of delayed guitar and cymbal splashes. Josephine Wiggs' bass is prominent without being overbearing, and supplies an intangible, nervous energy, but her standout performance is on "MetaGoth", which puts her in front of the mic and pairs her on guitar with Kelley Deal. Co-written by Wiggs and Kim Deal, it recalls Deal's Pixies contribution "Into the White" in tone, but transplanted into darker, plodding Breeders territory and replete with ominous guitar figures. Wiggs' untarnished English accent and deadpan delivery only amplify the effect. A cover of Krautrockers Amon Düül II's  "Archangel's Thunderbird" keeps the album's back half from slipping from languid to sonorous, and is perhaps the highlight for Jim MacPherson, whose raw, spirited drumming has truly been missed. In fact the interplay between these four musicians has been missed, and it's easy to point to them collectively as the proximate cause for All Nerve being the most vital Breeders album in 25 years.