Days Start Getting Longer Now

If Philip Glass's early minimalism is hectic, kinetic and primary-colored – a Mondrian painting come to life – and Steve Reich's compositions for mallet instruments are like gentle sun-dappled rivers, listening to Phill Niblock's pieces is like standing on a runway waving those colored flashlights as jet planes roar over you. I enter Niblock's Chinatown loft (for his annual winter solstice festival) to the sould of three notes, just above middle C, ever so slightly out of unison so they beat in great seismic sine waves – 20 minutes or so without a pause. This is carried on in similar increments for the next three hours, though occasionally live musicians wander around the large, crumbling loft space, playing along. The intense volume of the music from the speakers renders the live instruments the subtlest possible additional element – one strains (delightedly) to hear exactly where they fit in, though one viola player was good enough to hold her instrument directly over my head for a couple of minutes (as I reclined in a black canvas butterfly chair – by far the best seat in the house, which I recall from prior years), so I had the full electro-acoustic experience.

The music, despite its intensity, does tend to move to the background of awareness and films from Niblock's series The Movement of People Working, projected on two walls and half a dozen TVs become the focus of attention. His wikipedia entry describes them as well as I could - interesting that they (if I'm reading right) date mostly from the 1960s, as it's a bit hard to tell. The predominance of rather fancy wristwatches on the wrists of peasant manual laborers provides an interesting (and welcome) contrast to the somewhat timeless quality of the (in many ways pre-Industrial revolution) rural rhythms on display. The more repetitive actions, coupled with the style of the music, inevitably bring to mind Godfrey Reggio's films with Philip Glass, but Niblock's work is considerably less edited and far less heavy-handed in making any points that might be there to be made. The extended time scale of the work itself, and its presentation (6 hours at a time, every Dec. 21st for years), contributes to the undoctrinaire quality.

Brass Monkey

There was a flurry of rediscovery around here centered on The Acoustic Folk Box, which was inversely inspired by missing Martin and Eliza Carthy (and Norma Waterson) at Symphony Space a couple of weeks ago.

The box itself has many pleasures, one of which is a track from Martin Carthy's early 80s quintet called Brass Monkey. The group combined Carthy's guitar and voice with fellow Albion Band alumnus John Kirkpatrick on concertina, along with percussion and brass instruments, trumpet, trombone and saxophone (sorry not to list everyone's name and dozens of other affiliations). They made two vinyl records on the legendary Topic label in 1983 and 1986 and the two were combined onto one CD, The Complete Brass Monkey, in 1993.

The Acoustic Folk Box includes "The Maid and the Palmer," the single best piece from their eponymous first LP, and the second LP, See How It Runs, has one equally astonishing song, called "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid." On both, Kirkpatrick's playing on the various small accordion-type instruments (concertina, melodeon, button accordion) has a remarkable propulsive quality - you can feel the air pumping in and out of the device, urging on the rhythm like a bellows stoking a fire. The brass parts, lending throughout an air of the concert hall or military band which takes us away from the farmyard, have an almost modernist edge, with their repetitiveness and the slightly off-kilter folk metric patterns - lots of dropped crochets and two beat measures. The parts, to my wildly free-associative way of thinking, are reminiscent of Rhys Chatham's marvelous "Waterloo, No. 2" (try this snippet on Last.fm which should give you the idea).

Finally, the lyrics to "The Handweaver and The Factory Maid" are intriguing as, according the liner notes, the song was originally titled "The Handweaver and The Chamber Maid." The change of focus from petty rural class rivalry to the industrial revolution, the factory maid now representing the new class that is replacing the handweaver, is quite brilliant. Furthermore, despite his family's disdain for factory girls, the narrator seems only too happy to give up the "wearisome trade" of the weaver who is "so bent that he's like to crack" and instead "trudge to the mill in the early morn", where the girls are!

The other big reminder upon revisiting the box was find out more about Eliza Carthy - her closing track, "10,000 Miles," is one of its high points and her 2002 release Anglicana, currently digitally unspooling for my delighted ears, suggests that was no fluke - more to come!