Buckethead:
First Master/Splinter Pool from
“Cobra Strike II – Y, Y+B, X+Y <hold>” (2000) [6.56]
Giacinto Scelsi: Uaxuctum: The Legend Of The Mayan City Which
They Themselves Destroyed For Religious Reasons - 1st Movement for
large orchestra, choir and Martenot waves (1969) [6.33]
Zulie Banda from “Voices of Haiti recorded by Maya Deren” (1953) [3.09]
Masahiko Satoh and the Soulbreakers: Amalgamation
Pt. 2 from “Amalgamation (Kokotsu No Showa Genroku)” (1971) [21.18]
Triocton:
Hizuru from “Triocton” (1998) [3.46]
Kecak (Chanting) from “Music for the
Gods – The Fahnestock South Sea Expedition: Indonesia” (1941) [5.27]
Makoto Kawabata: excerpt from “Subjection of
Drone” (2008) [21.15]
John Zorn: Chronology
from “Spy Vs Spy – The Music of Ornette Coleman” (1989) [1.04]
This
podcast is dedicated to Maya Deren
Brian Patrick Carroll (born May 13, 1969), better known
by his stage name Buckethead, is a
guitarist and multi instrumentalist who has worked within several genres of
music, spanning such diverse areas as progressive metal, funk, blues, jazz,
bluegrass, ambient, and avant-garde music. Best known for his electric guitar
playing, he has been voted number 8 on a list in GuitarOne magazine of the
"Top 10 Greatest Guitar Shredders of All Time" as well as being
included in Guitar World's lists of the "25 all-time weirdest
guitarists" and is also known for being in the "50 fastest guitarists
of all time list". Buckethead performs primarily as a solo artist. He has
collaborated extensively with a wide variety of high profile artists such as
Bill Laswell, Bootsy Collins, Bernie Worrell, Iggy Pop, Les Claypool, Serj
Tankian, Bill Moseley, Mike Patton, Viggo Mortensen, That 1 Guy, and was a member
of Guns N' Roses from 2000 to 2004. Buckethead has also written and performed
music for major motion pictures, including: Saw
II, Ghosts of Mars, Beverly Hills Ninja, Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation, Last
Action Hero, and contributed lead guitar to the track "Firebird" featured on the Power Rangers Movie Soundtrack. (from Wikipedia)
Giacinto Scelsi, Count of Ayala Valva (La Spezia, 8 January 1905 –
Rome, 9 August 1988), was an Italian composer who also wrote surrealist poetry
in French. He is best known for writing music based around only one pitch,
altered in all manners through microtonal oscillations, harmonic allusions, and
changes in timbre and dynamics, as paradigmatically exemplified in his
revolutionary Quattro Pezzi su una nota
sola ["Four Pieces on a single note"] (1959). His musical output,
which encompassed all Western classical genres except scenic music, remained
largely undiscovered even within contemporary musical circles during most of
his life. A series of concerts in the mid to late 1980s finally premièred many
of his pieces to great acclaim, notably his orchestral masterpieces in October 1987 in Cologne, about a
quarter of a century after those works had been composed and less than a year
before the composer's death. Scelsi was able to attend the premières and
personally supervised the rehearsals. Dutch musicologist Henk de Velde,
alluding to Adorno speaking of Alban Berg, called Scelsi "the Master of the yet smaller transition," to which
Harry Halbreich added that "in fact,
his music is only transition."
In the
early 1940s, Katherine Dunham engaged the future experimental film-maker Maya Deren to act as her personal
assistant. Deren toured with the Katherine Dunham Dance Company doing secretarial
work for Dunham as the latter wrote up the findings from the anthropological fieldwork
she had done in the mid 1930s in Haiti
and other parts of the Caribbean. Dunham, a mixed
race African American born in Chicago,
sought to educate black and white Americans through writing about and choreographing
with the rich dance culture which had developed as a consequence of the African
diaspora. Deren, born in Kiev into a Jewish family
who migrated to the United States
in 1922, discovered ritual through her contact with Dunham and subsequently used
it as a key device in her pioneering experimental film work. In a 1946 pamphlet
Deren wrote about the importance of ritual in her films, two of which had been made
with dancers who had been members of Dunham’s company; the following year she made
her first visit to Haiti
to study and film vaudun (voodoo) rituals that had been the subject of Miss Dunham’s
research a decade earlier. (from “Catherine Durham and Maya Deren on ritual,
modernity, and the African Diaspora” by Ramsay Burt professor of Dance History
at Department of Performance and Digital Art, De Montfort University,
Leichester)
Born in Tokyo in 1941, graduated from Keio University,
Masahiko Satoh studied music
composition and arrangement at Berklee School of Music from 1966 to 1968. In his fully fledged
professional life after returning to Japan, he received the “Japan Jazz
Award” by Swing Journal Magazine with his first album “Palladium” in 1969 where he led the making of the album. Later he
was also awarded twice with the Award of Excellency at the National Art
Festival of Japan
with his original masterpieces of “Four
Jazz Compositions” (1970) and “Yamataifu”
(1972). He released numerous albums he led the making of such as the U.S.
release “Amorphism”, recorded in trio
with Steve Gadd and Eddie Gomez, and “Randooga”,
born from the occasion of “Select Live Under The Sky ‘90” (“Japan Jazz Award”
by Swing Journal Magazine) which was released in France. His jazz festival
appearance includes Berlin, Donau Eschingen, Moers, Montreux, and East Meets West In New York, and the
concert tours in Africa, Australia,
Russia, and Latin America. As music composer and arranger he
participated in recordings of many well-known musicians such as Nancy Wilson,
Art Farmer, Helen Merrill, Nakagawa Masami, Itoh Kimiko, and Miyamoto Fumiaki.
He composed and produced two releases of a new direction “Ranmon for orchestra and three improvisers” (1987) and “Concerto for the WAVE III and orchestra”
(1988) and pavilion pieces as “World
Exposition - Local Governance Memorial Hall” (1970) and “Flower and Green Exposition - JT Memorial
Hall” (1990). He also works on TV programs, movies, and CM in Japan. He
composed and arranged the pieces combined with the traditional buddhist monk
music for “BUDDHIST MUSIC with 1000 Syomyo
Voices” at Budokan in Tokyo
in 1993. This work attracted attentions from different disciplines. He created
his own production label BAJ Records in 1997 and his activities continually
grow and diversify. (Biography from SuperFM.com)
Maurizio Suppo (Turin, Italy, Dec. 26, 1970) started his
musical journey in 1987 with a thrash metal band, changing their music toward a
crossover style in 1989, as Producers of
Absurdities. The band split up in 1991, then he joined another musical
project called Human Contrast in 1992,
doing crossover funk with experimental touch. After this project end, in 1997,
Maurizio Suppo did mainly improvisation units with people like Hoppy Kamiyama, Harpy,
Kirirola (ex Girl), Xabier Iriondo, Chris Iemulo, Stefano Giust, Ivan Pilat,
Alessandro Cartolari, Daniele Brusaschetto, Luca Torasso (Sandblasting), Eriko Suzuki, Dominik
Gawara, and many others. After being featured in compilations for Snowdonia
label and an album with Hoppy Kamiyama called Urabami still unpublished, Maurizio Suppo has two projects in solo
with collaborators: Triocton
(avantgarde metal) and The Nuns Of
Telekinesis (experimental dark ambient). Triocton is a solo project done
with guitar, drum loops, samples and guitar synthesizer, it is deeply inspired
by the graphic works of Jack Kirby and the Lovecraft's novels, with guests Forbes Graham (ex Kayo Dot) and Chuck Stern (ex Time Of Orchids). It is
a mixture of progressive influences, extreme metal, avantgarde and expecially
improvisation. All tracks have a theme and then there are solos totally
improvised.
Music for the Gods – The Fahnestock
South Sea
Expedition: Indonesia. The second release in Mickey
Hart's Endangered Music Project captures the shimmering music of Indonesia as it existed in 1941, when the
Fahnestock brothers set sail to record the indigenous musics of Bali, Java, Madura and Arjasa with state-of-the-art
Presto disc-cutters. Music accompanies all aspects of Indonesian life -- the
work of farmers, the play of children, royal ceremony, theaters, or rituals of
birth and death. The most important form is the gamelan, ensembles dominated by
magnificent bronze gongs and metallophones ( bronze-keyed xylophones). The
gamelan is characterized by what might be called a sacred geometry --
everything from the number of beats to the arrangement and design of the
instruments adheres to a precise symmetry and cosmology, reflective of a
worldview rooted in Hindu Buddhism. In contrast to the driving energy of the
large gamelan ensembles are simple and gentle performances featuring haunting
voices, bamboo flutes and reed instruments, and one featuring nothing more than
an Indonesian Jew's harp played by a young girl. And there is the legendary kecak, or Monkey Dance, the complex counterpoint of interlocking chants by a
two-hundred man chorus, building to a kind of ecstatic, otherworldly frenzy. These
recordings provide a window on a world radically different from our own -- one
which has been changed almost beyond recognition in the intervening years.
"Music, for me, is neither something that
I create, nor a form of self-expression. All kinds of sounds exist everywhere
around us, and my performances solely consist of picking up these sounds, like
a radio tuner, and playing them so that people can hear them. However, maybe
because my reception is somewhat off, I am unable to perfectly reproduce these
sounds. That is why I spend my days rehearsing. Where do these sounds come
from? Who is sending them out? That is not something for me to know, and
neither is there any way that I could find out. I simply believe that they come
from the 'cosmos'. (Maybe other people would call God the source). Since I was
a small child I have been prone to hearing ringing sounds in my ears and other
sound phantasms. At the time, I believed that these were messages aimed
directly at me from a UFO, and so I would gaze up at the sky. But once I
started playing music myself, I came to feel that these noises were a kind of
pure sound. And I promised myself that one day I would be able to play those
sounds myself. It is only recently that I have begun to feel that I have been
able to come close to reproducing these sounds in my solo guitar work, and in
my INUI project. However, in June of 1999, I finally discovered my own 'cosmos'
and I experienced an instant of total union with it!! That 'cosmos' is still
tiny in size - although any cosmos can, by its very nature, be infinitely huge
or infinitely small. The energy and vibrations contained within that it far
exceeded my imagination in scope and beauty. I can only describe the miraculous
instant when my 'cosmos' accepted my consciousness as MAGIC.” (Makoto Kawabata)
John Zorn
(born September 2, 1953 in
New York City)
is an American avant-garde composer, arranger, record producer, saxophonist and
multi-instrumentalist. Zorn is a prolific artist: he has hundreds of album
credits as performer, composer, or producer. He has had experience with a
variety of genres including jazz, rock, hardcore punk, classical, extreme
metal, klezmer, film, cartoon, popular, and improvised music. Zorn brings these
styles to his work, which he refers to with the label avant-garde/experimental.
Zorn has stated: "All the various
styles are organically connected to one another. I'm an additive person - the
entire storehouse of my knowledge informs everything I do. People are so
obsessed with the surface that they can't see the connections, but they are
there." Zorn has led the punk jazz band Naked
City and the klezmer-influenced
quartet Masada, composed Masada Songbooks
(written concert music for classical ensembles), and has produced music for
film and documentary. Zorn
established himself within the New
York City downtown music movement in the mid 1970s and
has since composed and performed with a wide range of musicians working in
diverse musical areas. By the early 1990s Zorn was working extensively in Japan, attracted by that culture's openness
about borrowing and remixing ingredients from elsewhere, before returning to New York as a permanent
base in the mid-1990s. Zorn has undertaken many tours of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, often performing at festivals with varying
ensembles to display his diverse output. (from Wikipedia)
To listen to the podcast, go to Podomatic website and search for 'completecommunion'.
To send me material to be featured on the podcast, email me at galasi.g [at] virgilio.it or gianpaolo.galasi [at] gmail.com