Category Archives: music

Dual Preoccupations

Bacchus from The Animation Workshop on Vimeo.

The coniunctio happens in the underworld, it happens in the dark when there is no light shining any more. When you are completely out and consciousness is gone, then something is born or generated; in the deepest depression, in the deepest desolation, the new personality is born. When you are at the end of your tether, that is the moment when the coniunctio, the coincidence of opposites, takes place (Mary-Louise von Franz).


Mary Halvorson and my friend Susan Alcorn, the latter among a handful of pedal steel guitarists playing experimental jazz.

A Brief Schema of the Reformation of the Contemporary Dark Egregore (2018) Stephen Calhoun 36x36a

A Brief Schema of the Reformation of the Contemporary Dark Egregore (2018) Stephen Calhoun 36x36a

A track was created and dedicated to Ms. Alcorn, in 2011, on the Kamelmauz (my) recording Poor City.

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Filed under analytic(al) psychology, creative captures, music, psychology, visual experiments, my art

Guitars vs Erasure

Henry Grimes-bass, Chad Taylor-drums


Trump’s great political insight was that Obama’s time in office inflicted a profound psychological wound upon many white Americans, one that he could remedy by adopting the false narrative that placed the first black president outside the bounds of American citizenship. He intuited that Obama’s presence in the White House decreased the value of what W. E. B. Du Bois described as the “psychological wage” of whiteness across all classes of white Americans, and that the path to their hearts lay in invoking a bygone past when this affront had not taken place, and could not take place.

That the legacy of the first black president could be erased by a birther, that the woman who could have been the first female president was foiled by a man who confessed to sexual assault on tape—these were not drawbacks to Trump’s candidacy, but central to understanding how he would wield power, and on whose behalf.

Americans act with the understanding that Trump’s nationalism promises to restore traditional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality. THE NATIONALIST’S DELUSION, Adam Serwer, The Atlantic

Kurt Seligmann 1938

You cannot tale what you have not given, and you must give yourself. You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere. —Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed

h/t Desperado Pbilosophy’s writing on Ursula LeGuin, Words In Freedom .

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Filed under current events, dada, death to fascism, music, zeitgeist 2018

Almost Random MadLib

Imagine if academics sat down with ordinary people like you and me and ironed out some real solutions to our capital gains crisis.

With the election season over, maybe you’ve forgotten about capital gains, but I certainly haven’t. It would be easy to forget that the problem even exists, when our headlines are constantly splashed with the violence in Tajikistan, the authoritarian crackdown in Canada and the still-unstable democratic transition in Somalia. But the capital gains problem is growing, and politicians are more divided than ever. Republicans seem to think that capital gains can just be ignored. Democratic politicians like Dianne Feinstein, on the other hand, seem to think that unproductive rhetoric will substitute for a argument.

But the Democratic party of Dianne Feinstein is not the Democratic party of Bill Clinton. Clinton wouldn’t refuse to budge, he’d break ranks with members of his own party because he’d understand that the fate of the country, and his own political career, depended on a lasting solution to the problem of capital gains. The Thomas Friedman Op/Ed Generator

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Happy Birthday Thelonious Monk

I first heard Thelonious Monk in 1970, several years before I put my jazz head on. Probably it was my classmate Warren who auditioned an LP track. I don’t recall which one. I didn’t care for it. However, in the winter of 1971 I began working part time in a record store next to the post office in Cleveland Heights. In Budget records and Tapes’s collection of vinyl promos were two Monk records, Monk’s Blues, the big band record arranged by Oliver Nelson, and, Criss Cross, a quartet record from the sixties with tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse. The former record was one of the owner’s favorite records. At the time the available discography of the master was quite slim with the exception of the Columbia recordings, all of which dated from the sixties beginning in 1963.

“To be nobody but yourself in a world that night and day wants to make you like everybody else is to fight the greatest battle you will fight and never stop fighting.” – E. E. Cummings

The iconic Cleveland jazz maven Harvey Pekar scoffed at the big band record one day while in the store, and lamented the unavailability of the “class Blue Note sides.” But, never mind, Harvey, despite your influence on my tastes and your insistence on the store bringing in the Black Lion trio dates recorded in 1971 and released in 1972, it would not be until those Blue Notes were issued in a stirling twofer in 1976 that I got bitten by the Monk hard.

How hard? ‘Life-changingly hard.’ Monk is second to no one in my estimation and surely in my experience. Happy 100th birthday to the khidr of sound, Thelonious Sphere Monk.

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Sound of the Spontaneous

Psychedelic Blues from Drew Christie on Vimeo.

Captain Beefheart was asked what the greatest concert he ever saw, and he answered something like this:

Thelonious Monk was to play a solo piano concert at an old Victorian theatre in San Francisco. I got to my seat and waited for the concert to begin. On the stage was a glistening Steinway. On it was stood a beautiful bunch of flowers in a large crystal vase. The lid was open and framed the vase of flowers. The lights softened and from stage left strode the tall Mr. monk. He slowly approached the piano, stopped, looked out at the audience, took a few steps to the piano, grabbed the prop for the lid and set it down. The lid of the Steinway came down and it caused the vase to tumble backwards onto the piano’s strings with a striking eruption of sound.

Monk took a step back, turned to the audience, turned away and walked off the stage. The sound was still reverberating.

Voiceworks -Singing at the Cistern from Al Bergstein on Vimeo.

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Sound and Sense

Music of the Spheres from Emic Films on Vimeo.

I say we are obviously as nature around us is. So that is also how our music is. But then our music must also be as we are (if two magnitudes both equal a third . . .). But then from our nature alone can I deduce how our music is (bolder men would say “how the cosmos is”). Arnold Scho?nberg

When I began, I had a very weak voice although with some melodic quality. I did not feel at all in touch with my body.

Through the use of the various sound practices, I occasionally developed a vague sense of being enlivened and having more energy, but this sensation came and went. About one year after beginning, in a group musical practice, I experienced feeling as though sound were coming, not from my vocal box, from my a place in the middle of my chest, near the pulmonary center. At the same time, I heard a ringing sound above the musical notes. These, I later found, were called overtones. I also felt a warm, expanding feeling from the heart and a kind of emotional release of joy.

This condition came and went for another 6 months. Then I had another “heart-opening” experience, which was felt as both massive pain and release of tension around the heart; I cried uncontrollably and felt I was coming apart.

Following this, I began to use the primary sound/music practice of finding a note that resonated in the heart, and singing that note every day for 15-20 minutes, using various mantric sounds. At the end of about 8 months, I could always find my way to this sound. At the same time, any catches in my throat, voice or breath that came up I began to re-experience as inhibitions and old memories that prevented me from intoning a natural sound (that is, saying who I was). report of a client of Dr. Klotz; The Key in the Dark: Self and Soul Transformation in the Sufi Tradition Neil Douglas-Klotz

A Beethoven string-quartet is truly . . . a scraping of horses’ tails on cats’ bowels, and may be exhaustively described in such terms; but the application of this description in no way precludes the simultaneous applicability of an entirely different description. -William James

Rana Gorgani – Sufi dance – Auditorium Musée Guimet – Paris from Rana Gorgani Official on Vimeo.

What we call music in our everyday language is only a miniature from that music or harmony of the whole universe which is working behind everything, and which is the source and origin of nature. It is because of this that the wise of all ages have considered music to be a sacred art. For in music the seer can see the picture of the whole universe. (Pir H.I. Khan)

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Filed under adult learning, creative captures, experiential learning, music, psychology, science, sufism

Synchronicity and Wheels

Monday, February 13, I was driving to Wadsworth, listening to a CD, thinking about my livelihood as an artist–such as it is–and a tune started up from my single most favored rock record of all time, The Gilded Palace of Sin, by The Flying Burrito Brothers.

The song was Wheels.

We’ve all got wheels to take ourselves away
We’ve got the telephones to say what we can’t say
We all got higher and higher every day
Come on wheels take this boy away
We’re not afraid to ride
We’re not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today
So come on wheels take this boy away

And when I feel my time is almost up
And destiny is in my right hand
I’ll turn to him who made my faith so strong
Come on wheels make this boy a man
We’re not afraid to ride
We’re not afraid to die come on wheels take me home today
So come on wheels take this boy away
Come on wheels take this boy away

The record was released February 11, 1969. I would hear it for the first time at the Amazing Dynamo Man’s house, draped over his bed, in September 1970. He, Jamie Cohen, and I, had just met, just begun tenth grade as first year sophomores at Hawken School in Cleveland. We fell into each other like rain drops into the ocean.

Me, Hoon, atop the Amazing Dynamo Man

Me, Hoon, atop the Amazing Dynamo Man, 1972

Forty eight years later, I’m reflecting on art matters having to do with commerce, Wheels comes on, I glance out my car’s driver-side window, and see a flatbed truck passing me on I71.

It’s badged with this logo:

arts-way3col

I chuckle, then laugh heartily. The moment was not just a gilded moment of synchronicity, it was a text book synchronicity!

Shit.

“We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the wheel depends. We turn clay to make a vessel; But it is on the space where there is nothing that the utility of the vessel depends. We pierce doors and windows to make a house; And it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the utility of the house depends. Therefore just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognize the utility of what is not.” ? C.G. Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle

Kabir's Sobriety #2(16x16base)

Kabir’s Sobriety 2016 Stephen Calhoun

A synchronicity worthy of the term is required to be deeply disturbing, or deeply disruptive, or deeply derailing. What I have to offer are my happy delusions! I’ve been revisiting Kabir. #326 of his Bijak:

No customers for the word:
the price is high.
Without paying you can’t get it,
so move on by.

In January I had a very simple dream–simple as far as its arc.

(1) I’m on the side porch of a gothic church. It’s a fall day, and the church’s porch is the scene of a rummage sale. I’m picking little costume jewelry pieces up and putting each one back down. I notice some nice oak chairs and old brass floor lamps. I say to the lady, “You have some nice stuff.” She answers back, “I see you’re not in a buying mood, but the prices are right.”

(2) Walking down the steps, with the front of the church rising to my right, I cross a lawn and walk toward an old Chevy station wagon. I walk to the driver’s side and their is a man with a hat, and his wife is to his right, and his son and daughter are in the back seat. The rear has suitcases. I think to myself, ‘It’s an all American family.’ The man asks if I will help him get unstuck. I put my shoulder to the frame of his window to push, and, without much effort I push and feel his car rise a bit and become unstuck.

(3) The car gathers speed and then veers slightly across the front lawn of the church. It crashes into the wall of the sanctuary. I run toward it, but am halted when I see a bloodied brown panther or mountain lion, seemingly crushed between the grill and limestone wall, pull itself out of its predicament and jump over the hood. It stands on the grass and shakes its head once vertically, runs off.

Yes.

The-Guilded-Palace-of-Sin

My favorite track from my favorite record.

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Legacy Art Works #8 Desert Blues

Figure Two

inspiration:

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All Aboard

alchemical_narrative-768x994

The Topological Media Lab (TML) was established in 2001 as a trans-disciplinary atelier-laboratory for collaborative research creation. In 2005, TML moved to Concordia University and the Hexagram research network in Montréal, Canada.Its projects serve as case studies in the construction of fresh modes of cultural knowledge and the critical studies of media arts and techno-science, bringing together practices of speculative inquiry, scientific investigation and artistic research-creation practices. The TML’s technical research areas include: realtime video, sound synthesis, embedded sensors, gesture tracking, physical computing, media choreography, and active textiles. Its application areas lie in movement arts, speculative architecture, and experimental philosophy.

monkeys_cards_boel_teniers

Ice Cracking, Einstein's dreams, 2013 from Topological Media Lab on Vimeo.

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Floating Gestures

IDEO: Each sphere is equipped with inertial motion sensors—acceleration, rotation, and the Earth’s magnetic fields—enabling the spheres to act as a gestural musical interface. The gestures are interpreted through machine learning and used to control an evolving soundscape.

via Synthtopia

taches (excerpt)

taches
to obscure
to reject
to uninhabit
to destabilise
to be reborn
to erase
to pin down
to spill memory
to depart

coda: “I was possessed by movements, on edge with these forms which came to me rhythmically.”

Henri Michaux

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Eno On Cybernetics and Music Making

https://vimeo.com/55969912

This video is new to me and it provided a big wallop.

In my framing of fortuity, contingency and fragility, I have only roughed out some of the implications for music making. B.E. helps move this forward during a really essential 15 minutes.

He mentions Stafford Beer. (He, along with Ralph Stacey, Gordon Pask, and Gregory Bateson, probably did the most to extend cybernetics to human domains in the first wave of cybernetic thinking. Largely from Beer and Stacey we gain the concept of soft systems, and from Beer we gain the Viable Systems Model (Trevor Hilder’s presentation – pdf).)

What Is Cybernetics?

Leonod Ototsky’s fond archive and research on Mr. Beer is a terrific old style web site.

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Filed under creative captures, experiential learning, Gregory Bateson, music, my research, science, serendipity

Old Music Renewed for the Adventurous Listener

Glori-selects-some-sounds-of-Kamelmauz

My most accessible musical work, compiled into easy listening medleys; aimed at friends, the neophyte, the intrepid, and the unsuspecting.
Plus: FREE DOWNLOAD genre: slow music, experimental, ambient

Medley I.
1 (2001) Ancient Sanabad 4:29
2 (2009) Heldonsket 6:10
3 (2011) Come Over 2:12
4 (2011) And Over 2:15

Medley II.
5 (2012) Wunderbare Momente 8:30
6 (2000) Turquoise 5:06
7 (2009) Moon Cave 5:38

Medley III.
8 d (2013) Although Others Weigh In 3:41
9 d (2013) Still Not Final 4:36
10 c (2010) Poor-City 9:58

11 a (2001) No One Knows the Weaver’s Dreams (excerpt 2014) 11:47

Kamelmauz: compositions, improvisations, sound design pedal steel guitar, lap steel guitar, synthesizers, keyboards, percussion, sampler, small instruments

This recording is dedicated to Kenneth Warren, 1953-2015
“Kamelmauz is sounding the audible id of Lake Erie’s depths and surroundings.”

COme Over /and Over is dedicated to Roger McGuinn | Poor City is for Ken
Know One Knows the Weaver’s Dreams is for Deborah

Producer: Stephen Calhoun
Produced at noguts noglory studios, Cleveland Heights, Ohio | Cover Design: Hippie Goat

hat tip to Apple Computer, Native Instruments, Leo Fender, Gestrument, Moog Synthesizers,
and all the other audio design toolmakers – KAMELMAUZ.BANDCAMP.COM
special thanks to, as always, Susan

Sampler is free until September 1, 2015.

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Moon, Other Side, Sound

Moon Gathering
Eleanor Wilner, 1937

And they will gather by the well,
its dark water a mirror to catch whatever
stars slide by in the slow precession of
the skies, the tilting dome of time,
over all, a light mist like a scrim,
and here and there some clouds
that will open at the last and let
the moon shine through; it will be
at the wheel’s turning, when
three zeros stand like paw-prints
in the snow; it will be a crescent
moon, and it will shine up from
the dark water like a silver hook
without a fish–until, as we lean closer,
swimming up from the well, something
dark but glowing, animate, like live coals–
it is our own eyes staring up at us,
as the moon sets its hook;
and they, whose dim shapes are no more
than what we will become, take up
their long-handled dippers
of brass, and one by one, they catch
the moon in the cup-shaped bowls,
and they raise its floating light
to their lips, and with it, they drink back
our eyes, burning with desire to see
into the gullet of night: each one
dips and drinks, and dips, and drinks,
until there is only dark water,
until there is only the dark.

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Music – a year, a very good year

Wus

The greatest rock band of 2014, Wussy.

Hoon the Muso has posted a series of blog articles highlighting some of the music that brought him pleasure and provocation in 2014. the series of posts, the so-called yearly recap

I have several alter-egos. These other meez each serve a purpose.

music.

Kamelmauz : my creative counterpart invested in and dedicated to doing sonic or musical experiments utilizing ears, steel guitars, synthesizers, odd instruments, percussion.

Kamelmauz put out a recording last year, his seventh. It consists of odds and ends from 2010-2014.

Hoon the Muso : coming from my high school nickname, Hoon #2, then from 1971-1992, Hoon. Hoon the Muso was the record store, and music biz close confidante, and radio broadcaster, engagements that ate up chapters from 1970-1974, 1976-1987, 1995-2000. This morphs into Hoon the Muso, ace record collector and colleague of the last muso circle with Dusenbury and Dr. Bill.

Dub Collision: compiler of cassette and compact disc compilations–starting in 1976.

oh, yeah. . .

polymath or dilletante, charlatan or simpleton?

Dr.Puck : thanks to Ken, my post-professional and faux-academic pretensions, mercurial personality, promethean aspirations, and counter-cultural background are nicely summed by this naming, one that comes in handy in meta-logues, for which Dr.Puck is interlocutor, and, for blog commenting.

 

 

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Confessions With Becker & Fagan

http://youtu.be/dimyNC1BytY

Forgive the snake handler for not knowing the distinction between Steely Dan and Duke Ellington.

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chaosmosis: the emergence of order from chaos, engendering new autopoietic entities

Aesthetic paradigm
1. In Guattari’s work, as opposed to scientific paradigms, paradigms that are schizoanalytic, rhizomatic, and chaosmic, involving processes rather than structures.

psychoanalysis, which claimed to affirm itself as scientific, […] has everything to gain from putting itself under the aegis of this new type of aesthetic processual paradigm. [CM 106 CM=Chaosmosis]

2. A schizoanalytic approach to clinical treatment which, instead of describing the psyche in terms of structures or stages, views the production of subjectivity as a creative process.

Grafts of transference […] [issue] from a creation which itself indicates a kind of aesthetic paradigm. One creates new modalities of subjectivity in the same way that an artist creates new forms from the palette. [CM 7]

3. The creative capacity of chaosmosis, the emergence of order from chaos, engendering new autopoietic entities; this ontological process is exemplified by but not limited to artistic creation.

art […] engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being. The decisive threshold constituting this new aesthetic paradigm lies in the aptitude of these processes of creation to auto-affirm themselves as existential nuclei, autopoietic machines. [CM 106; see also 112] – J. W.

The Deleuze and Guattari Dictionary


Tu v dome:
Ladislav Durko – piano
Ali Kobzova – voice, violin
Bronka Schragge – cello
Ozo Guttler – drums
Martin Sutovec – banjo
_______________________________
text original:
The Heart asks Pleasure – first –
And then – Excuse from Pain –
And then – those little Anodyness
That deaden suffering –
And then – to go to sleep –
And then – if it should be
The will of its Inquisitor
The privilege to die –
Emily Dickinson 1830 — 1886

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musicians with guns – overstepping artifacts

musicians with guns – overstepping artifacts from ricardo montalban on Vimeo.

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Kamelmauz Update

IF

Nogutsnoglory Studio set up for live video and audio recording. The project for Jesper Nordin and Gestrument features three tracks, two of Gestrument for iPad, and one looped, processed 2 bars of pedal steel guitar, plus steel guitar atmospherics. I am may well be the only audionaut in the world deploying pedal steel and Gestrument to make soundscapes.

Gestrument 1

I gave notice on the music blog, but, here’s the direct link to the page featuring IOS Music Pioneers, including yours truly in his Kamelmauz mode. (Gestrument iis a deep gestural, generative sampler, synthesizer, controller.

Kamelmauz-Gestrument-399

 

Kamelmauz and Duty Free Records, released two records in December recorded on Gestrument, made the demonstration video for Gestrument, compiled older outtakes into a single album, Unity, revitalized the Soundcloud nogutsnoglory site, and, also started an endless album on Kamelmauz-soundz at Bandcamp. As always, the music blog and Kamelmauz twitter @kamelmauz are there to help you keep track! And, there’s a Facebook stone too.

 

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New Music From Kamelmauz – Apparently

Apparently

My music making alter ego is: Kamelmauz. He does sonic experiments and lets me produce and issue them on Duty Free Records. Finally, these records are issued on Bandcamp, in one of two locations.

Got it? There today exist fourteen different audio productions. Each can be downloaded or auditioned at Bandcamp.

The vein of music I create is variously reduced to categories–experimental/avant-agarde/ambient/industrial/dark ambient–which miss the personal point of my efforts. Oh well. ‘we’ make music for the sake of my enjoyment of the process of making music, and, to actively support my enthusiasm for learning, novelty, and experience.

Full length: Kamelmauz.bandcamp
EP’s and single tracks: Kamelmauz-soundz.bandcamp

As you should know by now, my musical activities and interests are documented on the blog of noguts noglory studios.

no guts no glory

I go meta about my creativity. Meta means: I make stuff and I reflect on making stuff.

There’s a video for the new ep, Apparently There’s More.

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Mandorla: Trailer

Mandorla – working trailer – CA from Roberto Miller on Vimeo.

Mandorla Movement

>>via Robert Rich Facebook; Robert is doing the music.

comment:

Life is a system of ‘now you see it,’ and ‘now you don’t.” Alan Watts

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