Manafonistas

[Ruth hands her headshot photo]
Sam Sylvia: Ruth Wilder. Looks like you.
Ruth: Yeah. It’s a headshot.
[Sam looks at Ruth’s credentials]
Sam Sylvia: Oh, Strindberg. Who the fuck is that?
Ruth: Oh, it’s a playwright.
Sam Sylvia: I’m kidding. I know who Strindberg is. I’m not an idiot. So what are you, like a … like a real actor?
Ruth: Yeah. I’ve done a bunch of plays in Omaha. At a little spot called the Blue Barn Theatre. I did a film a few years back. I’ve also done extensive mask work and clowning workshops.
[pause]
Ruth: How much acting will there be on this show?
Sam Sylvia: As opposed to what?
Ruth: Hair pulling?
Sam Sylvia: You don’t like wrestling?
Ruth: Well, I don’t really know wrestling.
Sam Sylvia: You don’t think wrestling is acting?
Ruth: It’s not, is it? It’s… It’s more like a sport with costumes? Or… sorry, are you… Are you hiring actors to play wrestlers or are we the wrestlers?
Sam Sylvia: Yes.
Ruth: Which one?
Sam Sylvia: Do people think you’re pretty? Because, like, I’m looking at you. One second, I think, ‚Fuck yeah, she’s hot.‘ And then the next second, I’m like, ‚I don’t know. Is she? Really?‘ I mean, you just have one of those faces that kind of … changes. Like, ‚Ehh … Hmm.‘ I don’t know.
Ruth: What the hell does that mean?
Sam Sylvia: It means I don’t know … Ruth. Ruth. Ruth. That is not a great name.

Birthdays go along with memories. Even with memories beyond nostalgia and general consent. Harold Budd’s „Bandits of Stature“ isn’t the most immediate of listens. Not because it’s like not any good, obvz. No, more because it is so advanced that listening to it involves a degree of neuroplasticity. Your brain has to form new neural networks in response to it. It is, literally, a mind-expanding work.

I immediately set up my equipment on a dry pile of bricks that was reaching up to the roof. The panorama view over the valley was incredible and as the storm took shape rain and thunder was building up. Lightening was striking both horizontal and vertically. One lightening hit a nearby peak creating a rock avalanche that threw head size boulders down the same path as we ascended from. Truly mesmerizing event that went on for at least half an hour, the thunder rolling around in the valley was creating the most incredible real time phasing effects.

Is music pre- or post- or super- or meta- or ultra- or sub-linguistic? Does it project senses onto the listener or do we project senses into the music? Does it tell a story? I don’t know, and I don’t much fucking care. What I get from this is what I get from it. And what I get is a sense of noir placed in blinding light, aridity and blazing heat. Of mystery hiding in plain sight. Of wide streets at the edge of the desert. Of illumination so intense that the inner self diving further ever further downward to escape the glare, only to resurface in the time of gloaming.

I could not believe my ears when I suddenly heard the farmers bringing out the cattle from the larger farmhouse behind us, trying to navigate them onto the grassy knoll for grazing. I looked to the side and there a huge bull stood majestically looking out the valley, 10m away. I wanted to use the whole version but felt too long so I edited it down and decided to add some underlying electronic manipulations, bringing it somewhere else.

„Brian Eno would probably be the first to say that the design behind his albums can often be more interesting than the music. His first purely ambient work, 1975’s Discreet Music, notably featured a schematic of the equipment he used to create it; on his most recent, 2017’s Reflection, he stressed the “generative” properties of allowing the systems he’s devised to unfold naturally, removing himself from the process almost completely. Finding Shore, his new collaborative album with pianist Tom Rogerson, has an equally fascinating blueprint: Rogerson’s piano keys were overlaid with infrared sensors that were set up to trigger vintage Moog equipment, creating new tones that Eno could fiddle with and improvise around. Here the self-proclaimed “non-musician” once again acts as conduit for the flow of Rogerson’s ideas, and if the actual product doesn’t always measure up to that quirky ingenuity—or if it is, on the whole, just a touch too chamber-music stately to reach the mind-expanding heights of Eno’s ’70s and ’80s team-ups with Robert Fripp, Cluster, Harold Budd, et al.—Finding Shore still contains moments that are plenty interesting, even downright beautiful. In those, it doesn’t really matter how they were created.“

(A.V.Club)