Podcast Episode 4 - East Meets West. Pt. 2: Buddha, Dharma, Sangha

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)

http://www.bucketheadland.com/

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."

http://www.scelsi.it/

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)

http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/deren-2/

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)

http://www.mmjp.or.jp/m_satoh/English/E_index.html

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.

http://soundcloud.com/maurizio-suppo

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.

http://www.loc.gov/folklife/guides/fahnestock.html

"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)

http://www.acidmothers.com/

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)

http://www.tzadik.com/

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