Imitation of Life, Los Angeles. 31. x. 12

So a couple of days ago  I steeled myself and drove to Amoeba Records on Sunset and Cahuenga in Hollywood. I had been told that Amoeba would ‘blow my mind’ but I thought this was just a bit of Cailfornian hyperbole and I was sceptical. The underground car park below the store allowed for 1 hour free parking and I thought that would be plenty. In fact I have not seen so much vinyl in one place since the Oxford Street Virgin Megastore before the advent of the CD. There were two huge rooms on the ground floor full of new and second-hand CDs and records. Mostly pop and dance in the front with jazz and classical in the back. Faced with so much stuff I suffered the usual indecision and ended by buying what seems like a random selection of things:

‘Jazz Jam 4’ on vinyl for the beautiful cover by David Stone Martin. (With Count Basie, Benny Carter and many others)

‘The World of Harry Partch’ on vinyl to represent ‘weird’ America.

‘Heart Failed in the Back of a Taxi’ mixes CD single by Saint Etienne because I am a fan.

Three 7″ singles plus a CD as a package by the Nels Cline Trio called ‘Ground’ – for some local colour.

‘Imitation of Life/Double Indemnity’ on CD by Steve Beresford and Tristan Honsinger (with David Toop and Toshinori Kondo) because I thought it would be great.

Peter Brotzmann Clarinet Project, ‘Berlin Djungle’ for the same reason.

Heinner Goebbels and Heiner Muller, ‘Der Mann im Fahrstul’ because I thought ‘Stifters Dinge’ was wonderful.

Two Luciano Berio albums – ‘Epifanie/Folk Songs’ and ‘Laborintus 2’ because I love them both.

Then when I took everything to the counter I spotted a copy of Talikng Heads ‘Speaking in Tongues’ in the Robert Rauschenberg cover. On the plastic sleeve was written ‘Clean Sealed Orig! No yellowing!’ so I succumbed and bought that too.

My one hour time limit was probably useful as I might have just gone on and on juggling possibilities and ultimatley buying far too much. (There are still a couple of things that I wonder if I should have not put back.)

I thought that the perfect follow-up to this spree would be to go and look at the metaphorical stack of platters that is the Capitol Records Building on Vine. (‘Take me down to Vine Street. Stop when you hear that Bad Beat…’). Looks like just the number of records for a 12-stacker…this is Los Angeles after all.

Capitol Records Tower. Welton Becket Associates, 1954-6.

I have been having some difficulty finding things to listen to on the radio in the car in LA. Mexican and Korean pop (the seemingly ubiquitous ‘Gagnam Style’) are ok for a while. I’ve bumped into very sober and patchy classical stations too but none have seemed to fit my driving in LA mood. I thought that on the way back from the record store I would play some of the new CDs I had bought. First I played the Saint Etienne single and that was fine…mixes of a song that I already knew well with some added bad beats. The Nels Cline CD was sealed into a bag with the 7 inches so that left the Beresford or the Brotzmann. I thought the latter might be a little too ‘full-on’ for driving so I put on ‘Imitation of Life’. It begins in quite polite mode with something like a chamber ensemble then slowly begins to fall apart. At some point as I was driving I realised I was probably breaking the law in the US by driving without carrying my license with me. I am fairly new to the roads of LA so these factors added together made me feel a bit anxious. As the music developed so did my anxiety and when there was a sudden crash followed by whistles I was momentarily confused only to discover that these were on the CD and not on the street. Soon after there was a man shouting his innocence (‘I didn’t do it!’) followed by the sound of sirens and my paranoia returned in spades but I made it home safe just as the music ended.

Then yesterday at LACMA I saw this image in a small exhibition on Expressionist cinema:

Otto Dix. ‘Larm der Strasse’ (Street Noise) from the portfolio ‘Neun Holzschnitte’, 1922.

A perfect evocation of the urban sound field made in Berlin in the 1920s; just as relevant to the streets of Los Angeles in 2012.

Ron Carter…two ‘blind’ drawings.

(Ron Carter Quartet at Royce Hall, UCLA, Los Angeles. 27. x. 12)

Record Surplus, Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica, California. 27.x.12

Las Vegas…some saving graces.

1.

On my first morning in Vegas I walked into the hinterland behind the Strip to visit Record City. It was a long, hot, dusty walk and because of the particular geography of Las Vegas Boulevard I ended up just a couple of blocks east of the Strip. While I was in the shop the owner talked on the phone to various people about new picture discs that had just come in – either this is how he makes a living from the shop or he just doesn’t really like old vinyl with which the shop is full. The music in the shop all comes through the computer. The second hand records were marked down by 25% and the floor was covered with $1 crates. Here are two finds from digging through these crates.

2. The Beat Cafe

Downtown on Fremont, east of the Fremont Experience, Las Vegas becomes kind of normal. The Beat is a coffee shop and record store with tiny art galleries attached. The music they play is all on vinyl – the record deck sits on the counter where you place your order. They play old Beatles and Hendrix records and they stick and jump. That’s ok…that’s what records do. I bought a Brian Auger and Julie Tippet record here.

3.

In the Interzone between the southern half of the Strip and Downtown, old Vegas surfaces in dilapidated form. There are motels that have seen better days, strip joints, vacant lots and now some galleries. This area is a lot less ‘scripted’ than the controlled fantasy managed by MGM and Caesar Entertainment. At the hottest part of the day I stopped under a tree for shade and realised the tree was full of birds chattering in the same kind of repetitive weave of sound as the slot machines in the casino. But the birds were so deep within the foliage that they were invisible.

Las Vegas. 21. x. 12

This is the situatonist city gone wrong. The Las Vegas Strip is an urban environment characterised by traps, snares, dead-ends, labyrinths and false tracks. But the labyrinth here is a means of control rather than a way of getting lost. There is an illusion of density caused by the artificial lighting of interiors and the abundance of mirrors but, as Calvino would have it, this is really a ‘Thin City’. Heading east away from the Strip the walker quickly enters a hinterland of car parks, low-rise housing and service buildings.

Thousands of people negotiate the Strip as best they can on foot but are blocked and manipulated; steered more or less willingly into casinos and shopping malls. The exteriors of these buildings refer to ‘real’ places, Rome, Paris, New York, Venice. The theatre is continued indoors with ‘canals’ and versions of the Forum. Last night I ate a Mexican meal in a Morroccan street in the eternal twilight under a painted cartoon blue sky. From my seat at the bar I could see 5 different TV channels on 12 monitors. There were too many sources of music to be able to distinguish one from another. Right now I can hear the rumbling of a band playing at a pool party 25 floors below (‘Hotel California with added echo and reverb) and at the same time there is the tinny background sound of canned music from an adjacent pool.
Sound becomes a kind of fog that adds to disorientation. Occasionally this fog is punctured by a burst of noise – a ‘volcano’, a spectacular explosive fountain display or the dull sound of recorded bells broadcasting from the campanile of St Marks. Speakers along the meandering disjointed sidewalks spew out a barrage of invitations to experience the particular novelties of certain casinos. Music and traffic noise fill any sonic gaps that might appear. The music is anything from Parisian accordions to the B52s. I have heard the latter 3 times in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel and the lyrics – ‘Roam, if you want to, roam around the world…’ provide an ironic commentary to this place that acts as a replacement for travel, a replacement for anything that might be unexpected.
This attempt to replace the unknown with a set of pre-scripted experiences is ultimately melancholic. The things Vegas doesn’t recognise are decay and death. But no matter how many relics are swept away and how much is effaced there is the lingering suspicion that this city embodies a kind of grim futility.

slots

Venice unsilent

Found paper. A walk around San Polo. 5. x. 12 (Grazie Arrivederci)

The bells of Sant’ Antonio, Castello, Venice. About 5:30 pm, 6. x. 12.

Sant’ Antonio

Supplement to ‘Found’ 25.09.12

I discovered today that I had taken a photograph of the cassettes I found. The blank Beatles cassette must have been in the closed box. I left the Barbara Dickson tapes.

Venice. 4. x. 12

A child passed whistling. When he saw the two gazing at the closed windows, he also stopped to look with wide, wondering, curious eyes. They were silent. The constant twitter of the sparrows could not overpower the silence of the walls and the trees and the sky: its monotony sounded in their ears like the roar in a sea-shell, and through it they could hear the silence of surrounding things and a few distant voices. The hoarse hoot of a siren prolonged itself in the misty distance, becoming, little by little, as soft as a flute note. It ceased. The little boy grew tired of gazing: nothing visible was happening; the windows did not open; all remained motionless. He went off at a run.

They heard the flight of his little naked feet pattering on the damp stones and the rotten leaves.

From ‘The Flame of Life’ by Gabriele d’Annunzio, translated by Kassandra Vivaria. 1900.

http://archive.org/details/flameoflifenovel00danniala

This city is, obviously, not like others. Whereas the usual transport pattern is a two-dimensional network of streets with a parallel network of pavements, here the pattern is three-dimensional – a net of paths overlaid on one of canals. But the fact that the only traffic apart from walking is by canal makes it a very particular aural space. It is an urban environment characterized by quiet and even, at times, silence. Walking through the city streets it is the human voice that is the dominant sound. Snatches of conversation – some of them understood: ‘It’s not what I expect of a man…’- most of them not. So sitting outside a bar at 7 in the evening I heard:

Footsteps on stone.

-A police motor-boat moving away from me on the canal to my right.

-Conversations in various languages (but mostly Italian).

-Wheeled suitcases rolling over stone pavement.

-The radio from inside the bar.

-Bottles rattling around inside a wheeled shopping bag passing by going from right to left.

Earlier in the afternoon as I walked around the Sestier of San Polo I remember hearing:

-Intrusive street musicians playing a violin and an accordion.

-Echoing footsteps.

-Many motor-boats.

-A bird singing in a garden.

-Guitar music inside the Scuola San Rocco that I thought was piped in order to give ‘atmosphere’. It turned out to be a busker in the square outside.

-A church door creaking.

caged bird:steps:voice

Calle del Fumo, Cannaregio. 7. x. 12

Miss Havisham presents. Old Cholmeley Boys Club, Dalston. 30. ix. 12

Lore Lixenberg solo.

Not the usual sort of interior for a music venue. It’s a long hall with a gallery around 3 sides. There is a table in the centre of the room and a u-shaped arrangement of sofas at one end. There are paintings on the walls and some propped against the gallery balustrade. A chandelier hangs from the ceiling (there is also one lying on the floor) and palms in ornate pots on plinths are dotted around the room. There are various sculptures on tables, a large timber framed vitrine and numerous stuffed animals. This is clearly a ‘set’ but most strikingly it is a set in which someone lives. The racks of clothes and stacks of books are used and not just there to create an effect.

Tonight the big centre table is set up with a sitar and effect boxes but the last time I was here the audience could sit at the table as if attending a meeting. The musicians on this occasion play in the half of the room nearest the entrance. This means that the audience has to walk through the performance area to reach their seats. But in reality there is little distinction between the two spaces and the musicians and audience overlap to reflect this. There is no ideal place to perform and no ideal spot from which to listen and see the performances. It is a relatively small space with a lot of soft surfaces so there is very little decay in the sound and this suits the shifting dynamic nature of the programme. There are 6 musicians tonight who play in various combinations and alone. The evening ends with a piece performed by all the musicians. This is, in many ways, an ideal way to experience live music. It is immersive, immediate and unpredictable. Sound/music here takes on some of the characteristics of the space. Just as the performers and audience mingle so too there is a merging of the visual and aural elements of the environment.

John Butcher – saxophone

Tania Chen – piano

BJ Cole – pedal steel guitar

Poulomi  Desai – prepared sitar and electronics

John Edwards – double bass

Lore Lixenberg – voice

Audience

This was the last in a series of events organised by Steve Beresford and Tania Chen for this space. More are planned for early 2013.