DE STIJL RECORDS

Our own @thismikewolf is spinning recs that you don’t have tonight at this @avantghettonyc curated gig featuring Pat Murano’s excellent Decimus, check it out ..

RIP (Taken with instagram)

Bob Feldman’s Triplicity
Zebulon, Williamsburg
Thursday May 10, 9PM

Bob’s baffling resume includes early dates w Charlemagne “Charlie” Palestine,  a stint w San Francisco’s Sopwith Camel, a cameo in Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Conversation”, a sideman to Nico, a couple of Sam Shepard plays, + most recently as a mainstay of Richard Maxwell’s New York City players (notably playing the shadow opposite Jim Fletcher in the infamous “showcase”). Tonight will see Bob leading his own jazz meditation with Triplicity, in swing and sway, an amalgamation sure to take you there…

Yeh and Ikue (Taken with instagram)

Messages, Intersoular Blues (Taken with instagram)

Poetry Out Loud and Heavy Friends at Issue Project Room (Taken with instagram)

Better Chanted Than Read
By AMANDA PETRUSICH
Published: April 26, 2012

It starts with a man’s voice: “Ocean,” he intones, stretching the final consonant. There’s an echo, another presence. A woman begins to talk-sing, her vocals growing high and furious, building to a wail; someone pants, more voices appear, everything is louder and more frenzied. A wild, sustained choral shriek. Then, six minutes after it began, the man again: “Ocean.”

From 1969 to 1977 two young couples, one from St. Louis and one from Nashville, teamed up to push poetry “off the page,” recording and releasing 10 privately pressed LPs of their immersive, deeply rhythmic chant-poems. The four writers behind Poetry Out Loud, as they called their project, composed orally, relying on harmonics, breath and melody — an elaboration of what the modernist poet Charles Olson called “projective verse” — to make poetry a more auditory, three-dimensional experience. (They once rejected a tape from Allen Ginsberg because it skewed too traditional.) The results are mesmeric, odd and enthralling, comparable to the drone of the composer John Cale or the hill country blues of north Mississippi. The critic Robert Palmer, writing in Rolling Stone, described one release as a “revolutionary masterpiece,” arguing that “the rhythm is the meaning of the poem.”

Next Friday Klyd Watkins and his wife, Linda (joined, they hope, by at least one of their former writing partners, Peter Harleman or Patricia McGarry), will stage their first public performance as Poetry Out Loud in nearly 35 years at the Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.

Mr. Watkins and Mr. Harleman met in the early 1960s; Mr. Harleman was visiting his mother in Nashville, where Mr. Watkins worked the night shift at a bookstore. (Mr. Harleman asked him to help find a copy of LeRoi Jones’s “Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note.”) “We recognized each other as kindred spirits,” Mr. Watkins said. They began corresponding, exchanging books and poems. “He introduced the idea that we should be using a tape recorder to make poetry instead of a typewriter,” Mr. Watkins recalled. The two enlisted their wives and started eschewing text altogether, recording abstract, sometimes improvised, often hallucinatory poems. They used rudimentary tape recorders at first, eventually acquiring professional equipment that allowed for studio tricks like overdubbing and slapback echo, which led to stranger, deeper sounds. The experiment lasted nearly a decade.

Mr. Watkins cited the bluesman John Lee Hooker, Gregorian chants, American Indian music and jazz as significant influences, as well as “breath-sucking preachers — Southern preachers, black and white, who scream, and because they’re screaming they use up their air.” Those breathless, turbulent cadences are palpable in Mr. Watkins’s work, and repeated by contemporary bands like Animal Collective and MV & EE. “Our audience today is almost entirely experimental musicians,” Mr. Watkins said. “If there are poets who like us, it’s because they like the records as experimental music,” he added, laughing. “We didn’t convert the world of poets.”

In March, De Stijl Records reissued all 10 volumes of Poetry Out Loud digitally (Tres Warren of the New York band Psychic Ills was brought in to master the release), and is distributing the few remaining LPs (around 1,000 copies each were pressed of Volumes 2 to 10, and just 500 of Volume 1). “There are maybe 50 copies left of certain volumes,” said Clint Simonson, the owner of De Stijl. “They won’t be around long.” The records — newly rescued from Mr. Watkins’s closet — will be available to buy at the free show.

Mr. Simonson first encountered Poetry Out Loud in Los Angeles in 2001 or 2002, when he bought a full set of LPs from a record dealer. “I was drawn to the artifact,” he said. “I took a gamble and bought all 10 albums.” Mr. Simonson described the subsequent moments — after the needle first slipped into the groove — as profound. “Records like these just aren’t made,” he said. “There’s nothing else like them. There are some touchstones in European sound art or sound poetry, but there’s a very American earnestness to these, a very Midwestern quality — this indefinable thing.”

Poetry Out Loud, next Friday, 8 p.m., Issue Project Room, 22 Boerum Place (between Livingston and Schermerhorn Streets), downtown Brooklyn; (718) 330-0313; issueprojectroom.org.

Marc Richter’s Black To Comm is performing in Finland and Sweden next few days ..

25/04 Kattilahalli, Helsinki, FI
26/04 Titanik Gallery, Turku, FI
28/04 Gerlesborgskolan, Gerlesborg, SE

Streetdate 22 May

DAVID KILGOUR
Here Come The Cars
IND 121 LP / FNLP527

A year after the Clean’s reunion LP Vehicle (also their first proper album ever) put them back on the international-pop radar in 1990, guitarist David Kilgour retreated with his new Revox tape machine (which he’d been singing about rapturously in his side-project Stephen and elsewhere: “Have you seen my new tape machine?!”) and cut his first solo album, Here Come the Cars, issued by Flying Nun in 1991. From the jarring cover image of David through to the last note, Here Come the Cars is a special pop album, even on a label that had no shortage of them. A sparkling gem cloaked in achingly atmospheric production (courtesy of Nick Roughan), Here Come the Cars has haunted us since its release — it’s just one of those albums that exists outside of time, the opening chords of the title track never fail to draw you out of the world you’re in and into its own magical space. The album was remastered and rereleased on CD by Flying Nun in 2004, but has never before been on vinyl — which De Stijl is happy to rectify here in 2012.

Video courtesy of Flying Nun, 1991