March 3, 2003
Coltrane, J.
Transformative music listening experience for March 3, 2003: "My Favorite Things" from John Coltrane's performance at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival. If you listen closely, you can hear the audience talking among themselves and clapping at all the wrong moments deep down in the mix; I can imagine they were five times as stunned by the beauty of what they were witnessing as I was by what I heard this evening. The nine to eleven minute mark features some of the best saxophone playing I've ever heard in my life. I am not critically equipped to tell you what kind of playing it is, nor do I think I want to. I'm still reveling.
Transformative music listening experience for March 2, 2003: Seeing Stephan Mathieu perform live in a one-off date at Experimental Intermedia, Phil Niblock's loft in Chinatown. He performed what sounded like an extended, forty-five minute remix of the sixteen minute piece from the Mutek 2002 festival. This rendition maintained the slightly shifting high-end tones throughout (three notes alternately shifting into and out of harmony with each other) but was marked by a greater number of glitches, clicks, pops, and general digital detritus filtering in and out of the multi-channel sound setup. The music was accompanied by a video projection that started off solid purple, and, with equal parts delicacy and patience, subtly flickered its way across the spectrum to pink, red, orange, yellow, and blue. Amazing.
I also had some great art experiences this weekend. More on those later.