When someone is sent to find the old man, all else has already failed. If he’s not out in the boat, he’s out walking, some way off the paths, in-turned, but aware of each sound and scent, and each combination. He’s always just wrapping up as you arrive, tucking bundles in his bag. What do you need then? Cordial, willing, he is, and not surprised to see you.

Letters Home

This record is one remarkable artifact from a distinct group of like-minded musicians that has assembled and disbanded in various configurations for about 40 years now. Those various groups, like Henry Cow, Slapp Happy, Art Bears, Cassiber, Skeleton Crew, Naked City and Massacre, are too diverse to categorize, ranging from giddy, wry pop tunes, to ear-splitting maelstrom, to complex, variously dissonant and delightful orchestrations, laced with some of the most sensitive, intricate group improvisation that has yet occurred on Earth.  The threads that link them are the distinctive voices of each of the players, and what I hear on this disc is shaped by my own ear’s history with this circulating cast of characters.

There are several guests on Letters Home: Robert Wyatt’s voice always moves me, in practically any context. Dagmar Krause and Sally Potter’s voices are, as ever, agile, lovely, fierce. Yes, a fierce album, for all its humor and bounce. This isn’t the disc to put on for the hot tub or the massage table.

The core of this particular group consists of Cutler (percussion), Lindsay Cooper (bassoon, sopranino and alto saxophone, piano, other keyboards), and Zeena Parkins (harp, prepared and electric harps, accordion, E-Bowed
guitar). Other guest artists: Bill Gilonis on bass & guitar, and Phil Minton, singing. As I understand it, Lindsay Cooper composed the score to Cutler’s poetic text, and she makes this peculiar instrumentation sound inevitable and essential.

Chris Cutler’s lyrics are shrewd, heated, and often silly, with political roots on the anticapitalist Left. (“I nailed a banknote…to a tree. But it did not…nourish me.”) Playful, angry. It’s not that Cutler is in any way the center of this continually transient, ever-persistent musical community,though. (He does run Recommended Records, a crucial outlet.) He’s a brilliant musician, an articulate voice, and happens to be my starting point here, because I pulled his book, “File Under Popular” off the shelf for the first time in a while. More on that in a later post. Get a copy and read it to prepare for my upcoming lecture.

If one thing ties together the many groups I’m putting under my leaky umbrella, it’s a sense of close listening, criticism, collaboration, and the creative tension of sharp, agile minds, each with their own idea of where things should go. Argumentative, respectful, thoughtful community, with various ensembles splitting, merging, collaborating, and performing together over the last 4 decades throughout Europe, the US, Japan, and diverse elsewheres. Ego, critical community, sure, but on the whole, this is the sound of smart, skillful fun. Play on the the highest possible level. Wish I was on that stage, too, was my feeling at many shows. What joy, when it all works.

In the best examples of this vast body of work, audible tensions are sauteed into formally graceful wholes, and Chris Cutler and his various musical allies have made dozens of works that reward repeated listening. There’s nothing else quite like it, and this area of music never took categorization all that well. You could find it filed under jazz, rock, post-rock, progressive, avant-garde, pop, experimental, “downtown”…  None of these really work, though. It’s music that deliberately invites in the whole history of innovative composition and improvisation, from Weill and Eisler to Berg, Varese, Gesualdo. Ligeti, Hendrix, Messaien, Nino Rota, Roland Kirk,, and, oh, I don’t know, really. Henry Cowell, one might suspect.

All of this is audible here and there, but their main influences are, in the moment of playing, each other. You can hear them hearing and responding. I’m at a loss to describe Cutler’s intricate, staggered layers of rhythm, the hilarious fervency of some of these songs, the penetrating ache of others. Lindsay Cooper’s carefully honed, odd-shaped melodies.

These (broadly speaking again) are musicians who know music and strive to steer it into unfamiliar territory whenever possible. For the most part, they’ve evolved their work onstage, in settings where you’re allowed to have a beverage and don’t need to dress up too much. I heard Fred Frith’s First String Quartet premiere at the old Knitting Factory (NY), and the ensemble had to wait for a few drunk persons to quiet down before they could begin.

I don’t know, but I’m thinking that the persistence of this community must have a lot to do with the ties and loyalties formed over years in diverse living rooms and kitchens by Henry Cow and transient affiliates as they relentlessly toured Europe. Most of the people I’d put under my umbrella collaborated or consorted with the Cow in one way or another, even if they never “joined.” People who’ve lived together for a long time under pressure have a bond, and in a tour van that rarely stops for long, people get to know each other better than they’d like, perhaps.

I love this record, and it was the one that started me writing, but I like their first, Sirens and Silences,  just as well. Both are included on a Compilation (from Recommended Records), and since it costs about the same as Letters Home alone, you might as well get them both in one. The download version will cost you even less (a lot less), if you can cope without the supporting materials.  I might actually start you off with Henry Cow, the mother of much of this, if I were to prescribe a programme.

If this is your first visit to this broad area of music, Slapp Happy is also a delightful way in, with sophisticated pop songs that get both funnier and funnier, and darker, as you gradually catch all the lyrics on repeated listening. Shimmering voices, cutting voices. Again, if you’re ok with just the music, download Slapp Happy’s  Casablanca Moon / Desperate Straights right here (another “double album”).

If you’re interested enough that you want to actually hear one of these recordings, please do use one of my links. Writing is hard, and you will, in effect, be leaving me a tip. I’ve got more time and care into this site than any waiter in your life ever gave to your table. In any case, write a few words below so I know you came by, so I know there’s someone in the room with me. Thanks…

While never straying from the work that is emerging under his hand, the artist also never stops observing himself. To possess this kind of self-consciousness is to no longer be a simple artisan.

A return to painting is not a return to tradition in order to resurrect the forms and tastes that were amply expressed by the ancients. It is rather a return to discover the remaining and far from exhausted possibilities and to unearth a personal means of expression.

A return to painting means to paint where one cannot paint, to paint what one has already painted, , and to begin painting anew.

A return to painting means to return to the point where modernism began more than a century ago, and find another path.

Part of the charm of this book comes from the fact that it’s a compilation of thoughts from Gao’s notebooks, written for himself , then later shared and translated. It’s certainly not academic, either in its broad tone or in its sincerity. He’s not trying to convince an audience – he’s trying to inspire himself, and remind himself of core beliefs. In his own private notebooks, there’s no need to provide specific evidence for his attitudes, so one reads between the lines. Looking at this book again always reminds me to confound my own unexamined rules and habits, reminds me to remember that my own whole impetus here has to do with those moments of clear vision that art-making brings about, sometimes. That form and vision have some real substance,  that wisdom is still worth pursuing in a jaded world, and that depth is perhaps possible, though it may well be a laughing matter.  Gao deliberately tries to bring some of the tone, the fluid ambition, and the spiritual intent of “the ancients” into the present. For more about Gao’s paintings and biography, have a look here.

If this sounds like a book you’d like to have, please do use my link (goes to Amazon) to order a new or used copy, and they’ll send me some tiny part of what you pay, though it won’t change the price you pay by even one penny.

Several monoprints from the same intaglio plate.

Each Wednesday (Woden’s Day) night this Spring, when possible, I would go over to the studio and make prints. I had several etched plates lying about, each of them suggestive of image, while not quite readable without interpretation. The ways in which an intaglio plate can be inked, and stroked into art, are infinite. Each of these shuffling images is a “reading” of the same etched printing plate. You can see the traces of a common origin, if you care to pause and look for a moment. If this is no interest, if this kind of transformation isn’t your cup of tea, well, then, by all means, you’d best move along and not waste any more of your time here. I like this kind of thing, though, and if you do, too, don’t be shy about leaving a comment.  A moment’s attention means a lot to me, in a busy world.

To a drive-by glance, Denver’s Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) is a massive block of dark glass with several overhanging elements, broad angular articulations, and rectilinear protuberances, striking in a neighborhood of older structures.  If one pauses, one immediately notices a clear panel, off-center in the greenish-black grid of panes, and a look down the side courtyard on the left reveals a wood-covered overhanging room, also with a clear window. Cantilevered to hang out over the side “alley,” this prominent feature helps set the tone for a building that signals institutional authority while reveling in its own design quirks.

With modest lettering indicating “MCA DENVER,” a neighbor could easily pass by without realizing that this was a museum. The current exhibitions are listed, but the signs are partially hidden behind the outside wall of an entry tunnel that spans most of the building’s façade. They are also listed vertically, so one needs to tilt one’s head sideways to read them. It’s frankly difficult to perceive this as a warm welcome, and one needs to go down a tunnel and up a ramp if one wants to learn more.  One is greeted by a ticket seller before reaching the top of the ramp, so that one is standing sideways on a significant slope as one considers purchasing admission.  The newcomer seems deliberately thrown off balance, and the cashier is positioned slightly above the nervous art lover.

Once one is admitted, the space opens up, with large openings linking the lower and upper floors, and the entry area feels surprisingly airy, considering the forbidding exterior. Light streams in from skylights throughout the building, and there are more large, clear windows than the MCA’s most prominent exterior face would suggest.  Most of the dark glass in the building is concealed behind panels of off-white, translucent MonoPan, a polypropylene paneling with a subtly textured fiberglass skin.  Air trapped between the glass and MonoPan surfaces holds heat. Indeed, Adjaye’s design wears its “Green Building” intentions on its sleeve, showcasing its structural elements, high tech materials, and straightforward efficiencies, including open columns of air that bring natural light deep into the building’s center. Efficiency is important here, because there’s a lot of air to heat, with upstairs galleries that seem to tower several stories high. Hallways are off-white canyons. A window about 12 feet wide looks down on 15^th Street (this is the clear block in the opaque grid of windows one sees from the street). A nearby bench, one of very few places to sit at MCA, faces not the city view or any exhibition, but a corridor wall. White space is emphasized, and there is plenty of it. Whatever the exhibition, one never stops being aware of the building.

I was struck by MCA’s sonic architecture. Sounds carry far in its multi-story airspaces, and from the stairwell I could clearly hear conversations in galleries above and below me, distorted by echoes. The metal stairs thunder and reverberate. Tempted to tap out rhythms in the complex acoustic space of the stairwell, I became self-conscious, knowing that every tap or footstep would carry through the whole building. One could say that this creates a sort of intimacy, tying the building’s entire social space together.  On the other hand, one could say that it makes a large space seem paradoxically small, with every conversation public.

The penthouse level  opens up to the sky and the city with a large outdoor patio. There is a garden area, with a literally flat selection of ground-hugging plants, with very little elevation from their metal trays. I was reminded of the icons that architects use to indicate foliage in their drawings. Planted in square and trapezoidal  boxes, some plantings are raised on pillars, too high to see in.  These are not plants to coo over and immerse oneself in, and this is an exceptionally controlled vision of nature.  Wood paneling appears both on the penthouse level and in the ground floor library, two spaces designed to connote a more intimate setting. Nature is more a reference than a presence, though, with metal surfaces and hardware clearly visible through the gaps in the vertical wooden boards.  A reference to nature and to non-industrial materials is perhaps essential in an emphatically Green building, but nature feels like more like a design criterion than a friend here. A gorgeous plant would seem somehow uncouth against this backdrop.

The brightest indoor spaces are the rooftop café and a workspace for kids programs and art classes. The Idea Box, a sort of theater with a sloped floor and beanbags for seats, is the structure that seems to hang off the edge of the building’s outer face. A large window provides a good view of Clark Richert’s organic-geometric design for the outdoor patio, inlaid into concrete down below, on street level.

MCA is a relatively new museum that has high ambitions as a player on the international art scene. The building certainly asserts its difference and its nerve in a rapidly changing neighborhood with few structures to compare it to. Its architecture seems to suggest an institution that is deliberately, emphatically separate, and one that is oriented toward a fairly specific, sophisticated clientele. It is a very smart building.  For the right audience, it is a calm, spacious, refuge of clean, spare design and controlled perception, well-suited to frame the shrewd ironies and in-jokes of contemporary art.  Adjaye’s building sets a very different tone on the inside than it does from the street, and its gleaming, doorless façade helps filter out the kind of untutored public that might break the spell.