Rothkamm – “Just 3 Organs”

I’m blogging through aftershocks here, so I figured I’d review something appropriate. For the past week or so, I’ve had Frank Rothkamm’s “Just 3 Organs” laying about in my computer, enjoying the somewhat random intervals VLC will decide to spool up and start playing it. With the nice subwoofer I have hooked up, it’s pretty apparent when the album starts; the ultra-low rumbling kicks in like some sort of ominous film cue. The track, “Kris Kristofferson of the Avant-garde,” is quite physical– the sort of thing that demands attention, and receives it.

In an earlier playlist, I described “Just 3 Organs” as “hypernumerally-obsessed,” which is true… due to my general ineptitude with mathematics, I’ll let Rothkamm show you why:

“Just 3 Organs is 33 minutes and 33 seconds or a 3 times 3 tracks long long-player played with 3 times 2 hands and feet on the 3 times 2 manuals and 3 pedals of 3 vintage Yamaha 205D Electone home organs each assigned a primary color and tuned a micro-tonal 33 cents apart then amplified with 3 speakers for each organ suspended in mid-air in a triangle just in front of the observer with a monophonic reverberation phantom channel circling at 3 rotations per minute between all speaker triangles.”

Got all that?

The fact of the matter is, though, that “Just 3 Organs” is far more than a mathematical gimmick. There’s also a bit of fate, combined with an artistic openness I love to find in others. While on holiday with family, a young Frank Rothkamm had an opportunity to play a reed organ he found in an unlocked chapel of a Swiss village he was visiting. Finding nobody about to tell him “no,” he did what I would have done: played that organ like it was nobody’s business, finishing with some held tones. As he left the chapel behind, the idea of floating “tone shapes” occurred to him, a concept that stuck until 23 years later when he encountered an organ in a thrift store– an organ that had been built exactly nine months following the conception of his tone-shape idea.

What listeners end up with is a compelling album filled with odd shapes, bold movement, and a wide range of unusual technique. In “Sleepy Bullet,” a large portion of the track is played on the lower third of the keyboard, allowing for a bumpy low-end filled with key clatter. A few tracks make extensive use of the fast release available to the organ, with a chirpy and intermittent sound not irreminiscent of a skipping CD. Spacial effects and phasing play a large part in the final track, “B and B plus 33.”

All in all, this is a masterfully-rendered work, with excellent sound quality. Drone fans may find a leaping-off point here, especially in regard to reproduction quality and nuance. Recommended.

Preview \”Just 3 Organs,\” courtesy of Frank Rothkamm

Earthquake!

I was awakened last night by an earthquake– pretty much known to be the only thing that can wake me up at night, haha. My wife, the former Californian, gave a mid-yawn guess that it was a 6.0 and that we weren’t too far from the epicenter. Not too shabby, Miss Information!

What I’m reading this morning says it was a magnitude 5.4, and that we’re about 100 miles off the location of the quake. I’ve spent some time reviewing the surely-underutilized Illinois Emergency Management Agency “earthquake safety and preparedness” pages, seeing as how I really didn’t know what to do in such an event. In Illinois, earthquake readiness is kind of like planning for a manatee attack… not exactly the first thing on your mind.

I’ll grant you, living on the New Madrid fault comes up now and again. It’s sort of an elephant in the room among Southern Illinoisians; a ticking time bomb we all tend to accept with a certain fatalistic “what can you do?” attitude. Doubtless, it will be popping up in conversations around the area all day.

Still, the eyewitness accounts from the 1811-12 New Madrid earthquakes are terrifying. In a series of quakes peaking at magnitude 8, an area ten times as large as that affected by the famous 1906 quakes of San Francisco was beaten for a span of two months. For a short time, an uplift underneath the river actually caused the Mississippi to flow upstream!

Gold Record Studio – “Live at Laney Flea Market”

Up until now, I thought Negativland had the market cornered on bizarre covers of “My Favorite Things.” That was true until I heard Mary, Jon, Jonathan, Priya, Elembe, and Lisa do their version. Alongside a plodding waltz beat; the sextet calls out global warming, noses, and schnitzel-covered space geese. Are they poised at the brink of fame? Probably not– they just happened to be down at the Laney Flea Market last year, when some fun-loving folks decided to set up the Gold Record Studio.

The studio, in reality a record cutting machine plopped in the midst of an otherwise-mundane flea market, offered free recording to anyone who wanted it, and the instruments to make it happen. From the presence of the “sales pitch” opening the first disc (it’s a double set!), it is clear that most market attendants were in capitalism mode. “What’s the catch?” was surely heard many times over by all involved.

Enough about that– there’s a lot of fun music here. I can’t pick out all the names, but there’s more than one track sporting a known musician or two. Rent Romus, Eddie the Rat, Inca Ore, and a former DJ for the Ghetto Boyz all make appearances. Completists take note!

Now I don’t know about you, but if something like this happened in Southern Illinois, you’d have one disc of people singing “Jesus Take the Wheel,” and another split between wannabee rappers and some guy trying repeatedly to pick out the opening bars to “Sweet Child of Mine.” This doesn’t seem to be the case in Oakland. Aside from a handful of American Idol castoffs who go for the “big finish,” and the tone-deaf guy absolutely butchering “Let It Be,” the 83 tracks of “Gold Record Studio” are filled with nothing but originality.

Naturally, there are numerous sub-audiophile moments– bass guitar peaking, a dog barking at one bit of electronic improvisation, and at least one stubborn youngster who will only sing when the art moves her– but that’s all part of the fun. This is a weird ride through eight weeks of Sundays, surely one of the more entertaining compilations you can get your hands on.