Program #75, October 18 2001: Unthemed.

This was one of those "what in the hell?" sorts of playlists. I had been thinking about various directions to go with this particular program, when I happened to be listening to Nirvana's zillion-selling album Nevermind -- first time in a couple of years, actually -- and all of a sudden, upon hearing again the hidden track at the end of the album, my gut seemed to demand two things: first, for me to play that track this week, and second, for me to accompany it with the other pieces shown listed below. I didn't really have a clue why. Nevertheless I went ahead and folowed my gut anyway.

But what was it all about? and how do all of these pieces go together? I'm not sure -- my gut is notoriously reticent to divulge its secrets -- but I can think of a few possibilities.

First: all of these pieces have, whether publicly or in one-on-one audiences with others, received decidedly mixed reviews, and so perhaps this program was my attempt to make them into a whole greater than the sum of their parts, by bouncing them off one another. The Nirvana noise jam is seen by some as sheer genius, by others as a hopeless rockinroll sell-out guitar wank. Similar for the Einstürzende Neubauten, except that opinion seems to split on whether it's (a) a pointless noise wank on an album that otherwise shows EN finally coming to its musical senses, or (b) a too-little-too-late gesture by a once-vital outfit that's now Lost It. McGee's very album title invites derision, and its subtleties can be passed off as Sensitive Piano Wank by the unsubtle listener. Even I didn't care much for the Radigue on first hearing, although I've now come to like it almost as much as I like the other pieces listed here -- you can't have enough droning and Tibetan chanting for me, and Robert Ashley's "hang on while I put down the bong"-style English translations of Lama Kunga Rinpoche's singing are to die for. So maybe I just wanted to share all my good feelings about these pieces all at once, and/or engender more.

It could have been as simple as a set of textural connections that reflects my mood in some (aaargh) Manfred Clynes-style "sentic" construct: we went from noise, to less noisy noise, to large blocks of piano music that weren't noisy but also weren't strongly melodic, to droning sounds with occasional verbal overlay. This could be seen as just a kind of descending slope, a view of the musical landscape as flattening out toward some distant zero -- and this would be reflective of some of the kinds of things I've been fixating on lately.

Or, to put a different spin on it... perhaps these pieces trace out a kind of lifecourse, a description of one's journey toward awakening or enlightenment: from a kind of primordial angst (the noise of Nirvana) to the routinization of noise and the first confrontations with life (the repetitive thudding of "Pelikanol", and its lyrics which seem to me to underscore the necessity of existential choice), to the fragmentations which inevitably result therein (McGee), to the final drive for transcendence and actual cessation from suffering (which is more or less what "nirvana" is getting at).

Maybe one, maybe all, I dunno. I only thought them up after the fact. Who's to say? What do you think?