Ulaan Khol: I and II

Much of contemporary music is an encyclopedia of sorts, a text comprising definitions on myriad entries with a consistent voice, at least stylistically if not sometimes ideologically. Encyclopedias tend to take their sources and distill them into easily digestible bits, often with just enough garnish (maps, photographs, charts) to give it the shadow of flavor. Experimental music, however, is a very different kind of encyclopedia. Sometimes its interpretation of the entry is even more like hagiography than an objective presentation, but it has the freedom to bend the definition beyond all recognition until you find yourself having to quickly flip back pages to make sure you remember where you started. This is what makes the listening often so exhilarating.

Ulaan Khol is like A First Encyclopedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr, the mysterious text in Borges' story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, which purports to describe a world that can't exist, except that since there is a encyclopedia about it, it must exist. This tension is what drives the vaguely unsettling, but wonderfully strange, theme of the story. It is also the tension that pulses below the surface of two very beautiful and challenging first releases in a planned trilogy by Steven R. Smith.

To annotate a world, you have to first create one, but some would say you can't create in a vacuum. You need raw material, maybe even a precedent of some sort. Smith is certainly working in a tradition, but there is nothing derivative. Like Tlön, some things are familiar, but they are placed in a context that makes them appear like phantoms. Smith's Ulaan Khol is haunted by something, by some possible creation that moves in and out of the periphery. This is not creation ex nihilo. It's more like the construction of a dream, where what is recognizable is made new and a little bent, a little frayed around the edges. Like static. Or feedback.

Smith has some serious pedigree, having associations with a number of underground outfits including Thuja and Hala Strana. Ulaan Khol is of a heavier sort than his previous incarnations, layers and washes of guitar and percussion. It's not burdened by noise, but rather uses noise as a palette. Because it's underground music of a particular variety there is a tendency to want to attach some esoteric meaning. I wouldn't call it magic, because there is no sense Smith is trying to conjure something, and it's not quite mysticism because there is something too active and participatory. And yet it can't be ritual because there is something a little lonely here. I would prefer to simply call it art.

Ulaan Khol II: Untitled 3

A Field Guide to the Birds of Cambridge and Surroundings

I hope you love birds too.  It is economical. It saves going to heaven.
-Emily Dickinson

Birds are beautiful and graceful creatures. Not only do birds satisfy our aesthetic sense through their handsome plumage and their sweet voice, but they are marvelously adapted to their respective fields of activity.
-Red Book of Birds of America: Illustrated in Color, 1951.

From the corner of Oxford and Beacon Streets to the edge of Harvard Yard, this highly populated and congested area is home to a fair number of birds. Most are quite common, such as the pigeon, starling, crow and blue jay. But with patience and a keen eye, it's easy to spot some surprises, such as grackles, terns, and red-tailed hawks. I have, for the purposes of this guide, extended the area to include the Anderson Bridge that crosses the Charles River, as well as some portions north of the city so as to give a more complete picture of the birds of the area.

Before you venture to go bird watching, please take note of the following suggestions. When you think you have spotted an interesting bird, take a deep breath. Then, when you are centered and relaxed, follow it carefully with your eye and try and take note of its color, shape, and size. Listen for its song and begin to attach the sound to the bird so that later when you hear the bird again, its image will come right into your mind. Other times, when you see a bird in the distance, you will immediately hear its voice in your head. In this way, the bird will always be with you and you can bring it into your consciousness whenever the need strikes you, even when you are alone and there are no birds around. But if there is anything you can count on in this world it’s the birds. Wrap your heart in twine and clip it to the feet of birds. They will never let it go. Read more
(originally appeared in American Journal of Print)

Strange and Wonderful Discoveries at Project Gutenberg

The Project Gutenberg online library is a Wunderkammer of books in the public domain available in a number of different formats, some of which include images.

Some recent interesting discoveries:
The Planet Mars and Its Inhabitants, a psychic revelation, in which the author describes the various cities, canals, and moral principles of our red neighbor and explains that "Printed books are used, but mostly for the very young, as information is usually transmitted impressionally."

Electricity for Boys, in which we are given many hands-on experiments because, "A boy does not develop into a philosopher or a scientist through being told he must learn the principles of this teaching, or the fundamentals of that school of reasoning. He will unconsciously imbibe the spirit and the willingness if we but place before him the tools by which he may build even the simple machinery that displays the various electrical manifestations."

Of Natural and Supernatural Things : Also of the first Tincture, Root, and Spirit of Metals and Minerals, how the same are Conceived, Generated, Brought forth, Changed, and Augmented, in which we are taught that "the Magnet and true Iron perform almost a like benefit in Corporal Distempers, having almost one kind of Nature in and with them, as it is with it in the Celestial, spiritual, and Elementary Intellect, between the Body, Soul, and the Chaos, out of which the Soul and Spirit went, the Body at last was found out of the Composition."

Half-hours with the Telescope: Being a Popular Guide to the Use of the Telescope as a Means of Amusement and Instruction, in which we are warned that "The feeling experienced by those who look through a telescope for the first time,—especially if it is directed upon a planet or nebula—is commonly one of disappointment."

Searchlights on Health: Light on Dark Corners: A Complete Sexual Science and a Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood, Advice To Maiden, Wife, And Mother, Love, Courtship, And Marriage, explains that "Dissipated single men, professional libertines, and married men who are immoderate, often pay the penalty of their violations of the laws of nature, by losing their vital power."

United Bible Studies: The Jonah

Our myths live in the past, but when we tell stories about the end of things we treat them as literal. What we need is a myth of the future that can act on the same unconscious triggers that myths of the past are able to do. The best modern myths rely on both the language of earlier stories and the a vision of our own human situation. We are not the ancients, and yet the symbols that activate those parts of our religious and spiritual imaginings have not changed that much. In fact, the only thing that has really changed is how we have sucked all the mythic power from them by making them literal, what Umberto Eco calls "Turning metaphysics in mechanics." Talking about chakras or 2012 as literal is no different from a reading of Genesis that says the world really was created in seven days.

So thank God for music, where we can continually play out all the contradictory and strange and wonderful meanings that our myths provide. But even here there is the danger of musical ideas taking on literal weight. Or worse, in an attempt to capture something of the mythology of the ancients, there is the potential for seeming a parody of oneself.

But not with United Bible Studies remarkable new album The Jonah, who use to their advantage every musical style that has recently been capable of devolving into silliness (psych- and outsider-folk, doom, prog) and uses them tools to carve a new myth onto the stones of our psyches.

A line in the title track,"We sleep in the skeletons of large animals," is one of the most perfectly crafted verses in apocalyptic-leaning underground music I have heard. Not only does it invoke the whale of the title's Biblical namesake, but it recalls the human experience of all our stories. The world doesn't come to an end without witnesses, and no matter who we think we are, we will always need to rest. The song continues: "We rise with our back to the sun/ we live in the shadows of waterfalls..."

Myth implies cycles, and eternity. Literalism is the death of myth but there is no better place to remain inside those cycles than in nature. United Bible Studies builds mythology out of the real, and in doing so makes that human part of us that is born from the woods and the rivers and sky into something eternal as well. There is no death when at every immeasurable moment something is transforming, something is being released, being born, emerging.

--United Bible Studies: A for Andromeda

Valerio Cosi / Enzo Franchini: Conference of the Aquarians

My mother knew something about jazz, but I didn't want to know what it was until I was much older. I can't quite remember the moment that I decided that not only was my lack of knowledge an impediment to really understanding anything essential about music, but it was also an impediment to knowing something essential about my mother.

My mother grew up in Brockton, Mass. and whenever she was able, she escaped to Boston to go to nightclubs like Wally's and the Jazz Workshop. She always stayed after hours when, she once told me, all the really great music was played. All the people had gone, and it was just the musicians and some good friends. I have signed photos dedicated to my mother from Stan Getz and Billy Eckstine, proof that she was really there.

Educating myself, with my mother's help, was a long excercise in listening to everything until I could start to understand it. But it was the language of improv that I found most difficult. Negotiating a standard made sense, and there was a sense that no matter how out-there you went, there were still some boudaries to keep it all in check. You could veer away for a long time, but eventually you were pulled back toward that recognizable core. Even though I had spent years lisetning to experimental music, I was still not much of a risk taker. The standard was a way to keep it grounded. I could do with a little free jazz, such as Love Supreme, but that was because Coltrane was still reminsiscing bop. Eventually I found my way to avant garde klezmer, particularly the music of David Krakauer, who is certianly one of the best living reed players.

The new wave of klezmer experiments with free jazz, but it uses traditional Eastern-European music as its standard, and so no matter how noisy or improvised, there is this kind of spiritual tether that anchors it that peculiar mix of melancholy and joy that only klezmer can evoke.

Recent explorations of experimental have led me into some avant-garde jazz territories, but I have still been a little skittish. Recently I was sent a package in the mail from Italy and sat down to listen to the CD with the most intriguing title, Conference of the Aquarians. And then my third-eye turned on.

Valerio Cosi is a young saxaphone player of considerable talent, but his real genius is in his ability to use noise and electronics as stitching. His compositions seem deeply influenced by a vast array of Eastern sounds, not only klezmer, but raga as well. The mix works and they serve as that standard core. I felt for the first time that I understood what free form music could be, and why it's important. I was always skeptical that it couldn't offer any real emotional resonance, that it only pretended to some kind of transcendence. But Cosi has converted me. There is something graciously human about this record, and while there are moments of extreme noise, they eventually give way to certain kinds of temperate and even lovely expressions of mind and heart.

--Valerio Cosi/Enzo Franchini: Part One