Charlemagne Palestine

been meaning to check out those early works on alga marghen.

I've heard two extended works for pipe organ, sustained chords, liked them but did not keep them. majestic & brutal but also... easy? I'm all for being wasted but I also like the music to work when I'm sober & I'd already heard Jon Gibson's similar 'Cycles', which I love

Palestine's 'Strumming Music' for grand piano is rippling magic though, barely even music anymore

i'll second "strumming music" absolutely fabulous.

http://media.hyperreal.org/zines/est/intervs/palestin.html

Intermittent musical activities included a 1982 carillon concert at the New Music America festival, which Lee Ranaldo (who digitally remastered Four Manifestations) described as "very beautiful - shimmering clusters of bell-tones ringing out across green lawns from the bell tower of a church" in the Sonic Youth fan magazine "Sonic Death". A 1988 concert on a computerised Bösendorfer was recorded by Glenn Branca's Neutral label but never released (Neutral went bust before it could happen). Dutch label Barooni now plan to release the recordings later this year. Palestine says: "I took several pieces from different periods from the early 70s to early 80s for piano, and condensed them into 20 minutes each, and then played them on the computerised Bösendorfer that the company offered me to experiment with. After they were encoded, the sound engineer used the computer versions several times in the middle of the night to record the works when traffic noise was least disturbing".

Has anyone heard Four manifestations? I really enjoyed it when the more obscure Minimalists were rediscovered.....

Neutral. Thats a hip label.

WOEBOT said:

Has anyone heard Four manifestations? I really enjoyed it when the more obscure Minimalists were rediscovered.....

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it's probably a better introduction to palestine than strumming music because you get both approaches - his idiosyncratic piano style and electronic drones in one package.

i was lucky to catch a performance of strumming music at the arches in glasgow last year. a little disappointing that he didn't draw blood from pounding the keys (as the legends recall), but the stuffed toys (and accompanying religion!) and copious amounts of cognac were there, and it was a mesmerising performance. everyone crowded round the piano making use of every bit of space. he started with a long winded, eccentric, and thoroughly enjoyable rant about himself and the history of the piece. then began to 'play' his cognac glass with his finger. followed by a 45 min rendition of strumming music, surprisingly similar to the performance captured on the '74 shandar release. a boot is floating round, if you know where to look. of course i don't.

i tend to play his droning piano and organ pieces - schlingen blangen and schlongo da luvdrone!!!! more often. admittedly, often to go to sleep! i like the idea of the electronic pieces more than the music, though holy 1 and holy 2 are monumental - two records of electronic drones that you're invited to play simultaneously to create your own interference patterns.

WOEBOT said:

Has anyone heard Four manifestations?

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Four Manifestations is fantastic. Although "One+Two+Three Fifths in the Rhythm Three Against Two For Bosendorfer Piano" is prob. more about method than outcome it's still an okay listen in that maddening early Steve Reich way. (Later Steve Reich is maddening in an entirely different way...) The pure electronics pieces are lovely, and the final cut for piano is gorgeous, dense, huge clouds of overtone. I'll copy it for you Matt.

Strumming Music, Godbear, SchlongdaLUV!!!drone and Schlingen-Blangen are all highly recommended.

WOEBOT said:

I really enjoyed it when the more obscure Minimalists were rediscovered.....

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Yeah, we've still a ways to go though. I don' t feel that Jon Gibson has really been sufficiently rediscovered as yet - his Two Solo Pieces is one of my fave records. The knowledge that there are people out there sitting on recordings of Terry Jennings from the era is quite frustrating. And I think a lot of heads would turn if Michael Snow's Music For Whistling, Piano, Microphone and Tape Recorder was made available. (Art Metropole have copies of the orig. pressing for $120...) I heard there's going to eventually be a Remko Scha box set on Table Of The Elements, which is good news - his Machine Guitars is awesome.

once saw a video of his called Island Song (1976), which consisted of him strapping the camera to the handlebars of a motorbike and racing around an island repeating "gotta get out of here" endlessly and shouting at people. awesome.

nice tale reposed and thanks jwd (stick that one on my pile)

i saw charlemagne palestine play once at the royal festival hall (teddy bears in effect) and he was great. very humble.

my friend the black dog was a big fan of strumming music (which i introduced him too). ken used to marvel that palestine drank cognac and favoured certain lighting conditions. i remember us both thinking it was some kind of divine coincidence as that was how ken liked to play.

(somewhat autobiographically, indulge me) i used to be fascinated with palestine's animist approach to cuddly toys. i was kind of brought up in isolation as a child and my closest "friend" was a toy penguin called "ping". came to look at toy animals as being like guardian spirits who bring children from the world of the universal unconcious into our world. i still view toy animals as sentinels at the outposts of conciousness, indeed i hand made both my children stuffed animals before they were born. lulu a rabbit and sam a polar bear.

at one point in my life, shortly after hanging out with the black dog. i was extremely keen to get a job at the manhatten toy company, whose toys i thought were extremely special.

that video looks great! what a precise madman.

a close cousin of 'strumming music' is terry riley's 'the harp of new albion' for just-intonation piano from the early 80's. riley's following from young, but I find myself playing the riley record more often. five star album, easy.

palestine's piece is much more minimal & relentless, nicely leviathan, but the equal-temprament means that he has to stick to some fairly basic intervals in order for the rippling effect to start up, whereas riley's tuning allows him to introduce slightly more variations without sacrificing _that sound_. there really isn't anything in the world like it.

Yeah, Palestine is groovy....

Listening to Three Fifths from 'Four Manifestations...' right now, beautiful. He faded into obscurity and alcoholism for almost two decades before people discovered him again. Glad they did. I had a rather beautiful experience listening to Schlongo DaLuvDrone once, at the sleepy end of a quiet night with a close friend in a bungalow in Melbourne's eastern Suburbs. When it finally finished after 70+ minutes, now being left alone as my friend had fallen into sleep, it was as if i had been reborn. The rain had stopped, and i sat there in suspended silence for who knows how long. Certainly seems, from hindsight, like a rather symbolic step out of the Wintery painful abyss of 2004 into the warm embrace of Summer. Ahh Minimalism has been my savior on so many occasions...

La Monte Young?

Palestine has done some incredible stuff, especially his pieces for organ. Didn't he do a Motorlab set with Pan Sonic? However, I think La Monte Young's Well-Tuned Piano (5 hours of shimmering sound) work is better. Throw in Morton Feldman (Rothko Chapel, For Philip Guston) as well. All part of that '50's-60's Modernist, Post-Modernist New York sound.

different ball-park, brother...

Interesting to note Palestine's response to peoples' questioning of whether or not he was influenced by Young. Apparently he had no idea about it, yet was basically influenced by the same combination of things.

Also Palestine drank cognac where Young took acid, another interesting comparison. In my opinion only really resulting in difference in theory and 'hipness'. Don't think Palestine ever talked about universal structure or wore a cape...

I think I attended the same Palestine gig as Woebot - CP managed to snap a cpl of strings on the piano during the course of his performance, at first I thought some of the toys had fallen in the piano! at times you cld swear that CP was using backing tapes to generate his clouds of sound, but it was all abt incredible stamina, dexterity, concentration - at the end, CP's hands were shaking when he took a well-earned swig of cognac

i went to the Atomium in Brussels a few years ago and he'd done a redesign of all the interiors, which were full of little baskets of toys and bears, with his music in strategic places. the escalators in the atomium are very rickety, and its a very steep and claustrophobic place in some ways, his bits seemed to try and soothe that somewhat. like there were speakers up and down the escalators, all playing different little melodic figures. very nice.