21 November 2011
Significant Music #5
"Significant for you, significant for us"
This Monday is the fifth edition of Significant Music, where a specially selected group of Amsterdam-based musicians, artists, curators and designers each play 1 significant piece of music from their collection.
This is of course not an easy task, making a single selection from a lifetime's listening. As an audience member, what you experience is an intimate offering of music played on vinyl, tape, cd or digital means. These offerings could represent important moments, identity or epiphanal discoveries and are always revealing and surprising.
All choices are limited to a maximum of ten minutes and the evening has a structured but informal setting taking place at NIMk.
Participants:
1/ Melanie Bonajo
Grouper - Alien Observer
2/ Stefan Wharton
Ghedalia Tazartes - Un Amour Si Grand Qu'il Nie Son Objet
3/ Koen Nutters
Alvin Lucier - Crossings
An electro acoustic masterpiece. When I heard this for the first time the structure totally caught me by surprise. So conceptual and straight forward yet so beautiful. enjoy.
4/ Stephen Serrato
The Congo's - Congoman (Carl Craig Edit)
5/ Mark Bain
Kurt Schwitters sound poem - Ursonate - Three minute excerpt (1922–32)
- a translation of the title is Original Sonata or Primeval Sonata
The German artist and poet Hugo Ball's final performance at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich marked the beginning of a new genre variously known as sound poems, poems without words, or abstract poems. To construct them language is broken down into its abstract parts (syllables and individual letters) and then reconfigured as meaningless sounds. Simultaneous poems—poems in which multiple languages are read at once rendering each unintelligible—offered an alternative approach to abstract poetry. By destroying everyday language, sound poems offered both a metaphor for the destruction caused by war and a commentary on the deceitfulness of language. Wariness of the competing nationalisms that fueled the war also led dadaists to resist any particular language, a primary indicator of national identity.
-from nga.gov & wiki wiki wiki...
6/ Per Tornberg
Neophyte - We Like Marihuana (Physical Therapy Edit)
7/ Angela Serino
Ennio Morricone - Cinema Paradiso (1988)
This is a piece of music taken from a tape by Ennio Morricone. I used to listen to it over and over when I was a kid. I got the tape from my father who was (and still is) a fan of Sergio Leone’s western films. I have now seen most of the movies for which Morricone composed the music – very often being disappointed by the story depicted by the images on the screen. ‘Cinema Paradiso’ was an exception.
8/ Jan Hopf
The Ex + Tom Cora - State of Shock
The spirit not of life but of living.
9/ Sagi Groner
Withheld
Several short numbers form one of the most innovative avant-garde artist groups, who are celebrating 40 years of unconventional mastery of the surreal, the cinematic and the enigmatic. I can't state their names as they have successfully maintained their anonymity throughout the decades.
10/ Charlott Marcus
Jan Johansson - Vallåt från jämtland
Album: Jazz på svenska (Jazz in Swedish) (issued 1964)
In my late teenage years I rediscovered Johansson's music, rediscovered since he was also the composer of the lead theme to the original Pippi Longstocking which was my favorite song as a child. A theme that was played on my small tape recorder until my mum's ears bled (hearsay). Pippi and Jan, as significant as can be. Jan Johansson still plays piano for me, minimum once a week, while I am working.
Jan Johansson was a Swedish jazz pianist little known outside Scandinavia. His records are not widely available. Between 1961 and 1968 he produced a string of classic albums, defining his style of re-imagining traditional European folk tunes via jazz and the avant garde. 'Jazz in Swedish' comprises variations on sixteen Swedish folk songs with Georg Riedel playing acoustic bass. In 1968 Jan Johansson died in a car crash aged 37. His sons, Anders and Jens Johansson, run Heptagon Records which keeps their father's recordings available. (Jens Johansson plays keyboard in Stratovarius and Anders Johansson plays drums in Hammerfall.)
11/ Seamus Cater
William Kimber - Morris On, Bean Setting, Constant Billy (traditional)
This recording has significance on a few levels; I grew up in a family where this music was to be heard most of the time, I am currently learning to play this instrument, and I am exploring ways to make music which refers to this tradition. William "Merry" Kimber (b. Headington Quarry, Oxford, 1872) is playing and recounting his meeting with Cecil Sharp in 1899. Sharp was mostly responsible for the folklore revival in England. In brief, Kimber is saying, it was a cold Christmas (1899), too cold to work, so they went out to dance (morris dance), in the snow, to get some money. Sharp was watching them dance and he asked if Kimber could play him some tunes because he would like to notate, or collect, them. If you happen to see men dancing with white handkerchiefs or sticks in pub car parks in England, it is surely a result of this meeting.
12/ Laurenz Brunner
Michael Jackson - Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough (Demo Version)
It's the 1978 demo version of "don't stop till you get enough", played at home by Michael, Randy and Janet Jackson (on the bottles). The song was later re-recorded by Quincy Jones and became the lead single of Off the Wall and MJ's first #1 billboard single, certified platinum and grammy award. It's also the first time where Michael does the signature hicups and gulps.
A full length mp3 compilation of Significant Music #1 can be heard here.
Location: NIMk
Keizersgracht 264
1016 EV Amsterdam
Door open 20:30, event begins at 21:00
Free entrance.
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