Once upon a time, many years ago, I visited relatives in Finland. During my stay, they gave me the run of a small camp by a river for a few days. In the wee space was an old foot-pump style organ…maybe two/three chords wide…very basic. No electricity at that cabin, so whatever music I would play those days would be from personal effort. As we know, I’m not a musician, so the notes drawn from those evenings alone in the Finnish forest are blessedly in the ether of a past time. But are they?
What drew me to the compositions of Low Anthem over the past few months, and what made their concert in Portland like a hand on my heart, was a reminiscence. The simplicity of the frames of their songs, the raw chords, music lifted only by voice and word, simple to the point of complexity. I’m not saying the concert was a weird solo acoustic foray by a deranged half-Finn, not at all. But one could tell from the listening that the song was built of very simple stones. Then colored with clarinet, oboe, keyboard, saw, fiddle.
I have no setlist to work from, so sequence is gone as a referential tool. I have all their lp’s, but I have spare knowledge of specific songs and wordplay. Yet some works still stood out within the time……an a cappella “Charlie Darwin”…..a plunky “To Ohio”, the eerie “Ghost Woman Blues”…. The odd love song of “Matter of Time”, mellowed with the heartbeat of that weird farfisa pump-organ….so like summer as a child, a dreamy harmonica undertow. And older reflections like “Burn”…when they played that crazy-amped saw, and spoke of memory and regret. And songs like “Golden Cattle”, so close to an early American hymnal, with full-throated harmonies. As we spoke earlier. the concert created its own “space”…whoever was ready to “be there” that night were present….it’s hard to explain a moment unless you’re there (or perhaps you’ve been to one of those times when time sweeps/shifts into a different plane…..)
An example that I cannot explain…..Tom could give a better clue/explanation…. At the end of the concert, the band asked the audience to dial their cell-phones to a specific number and to then hold their phones up…..the result was a buzzle of sounds, like crickets and peepers and odd night voices from the dark of night…..but the nice sounds. It was a grinning dissonance…this weird “old school” plunkety banjo band, suddenly arcing into “social networking as music source”……
Other songs played…..apothecary, love and altar, smart flesh, home I’ll never be, god damn this house, cage the songbird, ghosts who write history books, etc etc etc …..
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The Low Anthem – Portland April 18
Posted: April 27, 2011 in Music ... reviews and ramblings, Uncategorizedexcuse the experimentation but I have to see what I can do off-line and what i cannot.
…later…..it appears, not much!
so…..there have been a few wooly moments with wordpress so far….for some reason it needs me to validate my blog occasionally and will not allow off-line writing/editing until i hit a website and can “validate” myself……and don’t we all need validation ??? Sorry.
Not sure exactly where my interest in doors came from. i’ve always put the blame on this massive door at the first library i ever belonged to. The door was truly something from a castle (and honestly, that library, the Arthur Mann library in West Paris, Maine is known as “the castle”). Anyway, i have more than a few pictures of doors, a couple of which I will attach to this blog entry as a starter kit.
Today, I’m catching up on the woodpile, and spinning Wagner’s complete Ring of the Nibelungen from LP to digital (how-to lessons on this transfer process, complete with photos, will be forthcoming). I don’t know from whence the sudden Wagner interest comes (probably the usual serendipitous convergence of events….a friend has a bunch of LP’s, a recent bio of Sibelius notes his admiration and resentment of Wagner…things like that)….it’s not like I’m Teutonic or Aryan or any of that. Normally this collection would be suspect. I mean it’s a Time-Life collection of about 40 or so LP’s…..and I sometimes worry about the “least common denominator” aspect of Time-Life….but the editors seem to want to be taken seriously on this endeavor. There’s a massive set of informational booklets, and 3 LP’s of nothing but introductory “lessons” on the whole Wagnerian effort. They seem to feel this guy could be important? Yup. From my take on it, the fact that Sibelius and others felt that the concept of using music to present concepts of nationalism (in this case of Sibelius, nation-building) will make this an educational exploration of the uses/abuses of Music…..I will keep you posted (or blogged) or whatever…….the first thing will be today’s downloading and spinning of the “lesson plan”….what will it mean and why am i doing this ?? More later….in the meantime, a brief interlude of comfy photos
laters
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But not this time….the NYT section is a little dry and I would rather just do another picture or so. so…….a couple natural pictures from the world around us……as an homage to one of my idols, a picture of ferns a la Ansel Adams from a forest close to where I live…..and a field picture that somehow reminds me of the yellow that Van Gogh used in his paintings around Arles and the French countryside. These fields are actually from last Autumn, on a drive along a side road that I use a lot, just ’cause the main road is boring…….ever read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance? That’s where my appreciation of side roads first began…then, as i took up a camera, i discovered that side roads are just more interesting…..
enjoy the day
e
well…..due to a severe lack of inspiration and enthusiasm, i figured i’d just post a couple more pics and call it good. it does look like i can recover some writing and stuff from the website, so there’s hope that this blog might actually become engaging on some level….in the meantime, a
couple more pictures from the vault…..
From 1904, a picture of my great grandfather’s cattle…..no, I did not take the picture
And…..
A distorted picture taken by an old Argus camera
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a couple pictures to start off the week. We’ll see what really happens. You may notice i’m new at this whole thing….not so much the concept of blogs and websites but more the “how to” of it all. i’m jumping from same-o same-o dial-up into this new universe of Apple and wi-fi. The I-Pad part is the steepest learning curve, just figuring the moving of files from here to there, the posting and updating etc. But hey, learn or die…right?
once i get used to the platform, my intent is to bring out a bunch of writing, photography and maybe even some old website material from the early 2000’s, when my nephew Tom and I first cranked up luxbndr.com……wouldn’t that be special?
So…..it looks like I can attach photos once I hit a wifi spot….two pictures attached to indicate my form of exercise (wood splitting) and my fascination with form and light ( snowdrifted table)
Enjoy?!
byefernow
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Today I decided to break out the old Jim Lahey book “My Bread” and try out the Olive Bread recipe…… it turned out magnificent!! (okay I’m not humble here, sorry)….but really it’s kind of simple if you follow Lahey’s recipe….and it really does help if you WEIGH ingredients instead of measuring them by cups/teaspoons and such….I highly recommend this book and encourage you to use scales! You’ll be happy with the results…..and so will everyone else!
ciao!
So…….the concept behind this blog is not a series of “I-Say Essays” …. Egotistical drivel disguised as commentary…but more a sharing of what’s out there in terms of thought, politics, essay, cooking, music, photography, art….. Yes, I will have my photographs, words writ large and yes, the sieve that strains the data into this blog will be ME……that cannot be avoided. But “it’s not about me”. It’s about the way light strikes each of us and an attempt to show the many gleaming shards of light that fall upon the rod and cone of the eye……and each eye is struck by rays of light that do not fall upon any other eye…..to me, that is significant….we are all seeing something different….yet somehow we ” agree” on what is reality…..mostly.
If there is such a thing as a “mission statement” or “artist’s statement” under this blog then that’s it
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Starting off, though, with the expected…..photos of that which interests……
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