Michel Portal – Dejarme Solo! (1979)

Though hardly deterministic, the links between culture and territory are, understandably, integral to the interpretative repertoire that commonly informs our musical (pre)conceptions, even in the more abstract and individualized realms of creation. At least, that's what came to mind when I first listened to this solo improvisational effort by Michel Portal, in the overdubbed-one-(hu)man-ensemble category, and took it as a companion piece to methodologically similar (and equally admirable) albums (like Westering Home, from 1972) by John Surman (who even partnered with Portal on Alors!!!, appropriately issued by the troublemaking Futura label in 1970): whereas the gentlemen from old Albion delivered somber exercises in insular restlessness, le monsieur de l’Hexagone offered a set brimming with a sunny playfulness that fully embraces mediterranean sonic tomfoolery. Go figure. Of course, many examples of the very opposite could easily be invoked, but lacking that sense of confirmation we can get from certain music emanating from certain locations sounding the way we (more explicitly or implicitly) expect it to, which is a tell-tale sign that, for better or for worse (as an expression of both a valuation of the sociogeographical diversity of musical creation, and of the cultural constraints we can then place on how that localized music should sound like), even for the most receptive listeners, music appreciation is never an even playing field.

 

Christodoulos Halaris - Tropicos tis Parthenou (1973)

I certainly don't mean to take anything away from other greek artists I so greatly admire, some of whom, like Nikos Xilouris, were vital contributors to Christodoulos Halaris' first records (which felt simultaneously the product of a musical community and of a singular artistic mind); but when I hear any of those 1970's albums, the infinitely vast and detailed tapestries of sound he weaved around the warp of melodies that may very well have been passed on by Odysseus after hearing them from the sirens (as I would happily crash my ship into some rocks just to follow their uber-beckoning call (not being a sailor, I just go around parroting them phonetically instead, with no idea of what I might be missaying)), drawing on his scholarly knowledge of antique music while not being held back by any scholarly adherence to strict musical prescriptions (that would come later), and orchestrating into a shining whole a constellation of arcane instruments and of instrumentalists who were surely having their way with the muses, the only way my mind can process all that insurmountable brilliance, elevating greek folk music to a whole new plane of aesthetic existence, is by paraphrasing one of those lapidary Godard sentences, that managed to be simultaneously hyperbolic, given the big picture they willfully dismiss, and perfectly just, considering the transcendental exceptionality of what's in front of you. Et la musique grecque, c'est Christodoulos Halaris. Simple as that.

Elena Papandreou - Guitar Recital (1998)

It is more complicated than that (not to get into a whole discussion on the validity of the establishment of aesthetic canons, which is an inevitability in any social world; it's more a matter of how they get established, and by whom), but one of the mind-numbing proclivities of the classical musical world is clearly the rigidity of the repertoire musicians are supposed to devote themselves to, to prove their stuff and to please the more stuffy concert-going crowd, who tend to like their music as they like their furs: moth-balled. 
One of the hopes of accelerating the glacial pace at which that repertoire is renewed is precisely when artists and composers not at the center of that world tap into their distinctive local resources, and that is exactly what Papandreou expertly did in this recital, with exciting pieces by Nikos Mamangakis, Mikis Theodorakis, and fellow guitarist Vangelis Boudonis (first I've heard of him, and I would gladly hear some more), that make it one of the best in this long series of guitar records released by Naxos. But hey, by all means, you guys keep on playing your transcriptions of always the same Bach lute suites (not the best example, J. S. 4ever, but you catch my drift); I'm not yawning.

 Mikis Theodorakis - Electra (1962)

I'm not sufficiently familiar with Theodorakis' music to hold any solid opinion on it, but like a lot (not all) of music heavily entangled with its times (in his case, ranging from politicized oratorios to Hollywood soundtracks), most of what I have heard (regardless of my own political views) tends to be a bit too emphatic for my taste (again, not all; Το Άξιον Εστί, for instance, is interestingly weirder than what I would have expected), particularly when it assumed the form of some sort of symphonic folk, which constitutes something of a musical oxymoron if you ask me (I know you didn't, so I'll leave it at that). This, however, is on the other side of the spectrum; a side to which I didn't even know Theodorakis travelled (so he may have had other surprises up his sleeve). Being a soundtrack to Michael Cacoyannis' film adaptation of the classic tragedy Ηλέκτρα [Electra], it assumes a very sparse and slightly verisimilar approach to the diegetic context of the play (in contrast even with other work of the same genre he did; for instance, for Ιφιγένεια [Ifigenia], also by Cacoyannis, in which he followed a more orchestral route). More than full compositions, this harbors essentially a collection of cryptic sonic gestures and ominous dramatic cues, mostly made with an assortment of traditional instruments, winds and percussions, to conjure an antique soundworld assimilable to greek tragedy, and in that may reside both its virtues and limitations: taken by itself, this hieratic approach might not make for an entirely self-sufficient listen (while I seem to remember it being quite effective in the film); but, unlike melodic content, which has much more associative power, getting attached to specific experiences and contexts, that's precisely what can make its soundtracking qualities more easily transferable to other artistic objects, whose immersive enjoyment it can also complement and enhance. As such, when you feel like dusting off your Euripides, don a chiton, and sip some retsina (oh, is that not how everyone reads the classics?), why not put this on, let its archaic atmosphere set in the background, and maybe take the opportunity to acclimate yourself anew to the chthonic chaos the world is hellbent on devolving into? It might work like a charm.

Octant – Shock-No-Par (1999)

Futuristic pop, played by a true "mensch-maschine" consortium (yes, that is a (post-Ralf & Florian) Kraftwerk slam), that included, among many other self-made gadgets, not a drum machine, nor electronic beats, but a real drum-kit played live by a robotic device (or Jaki Liebezeit's dream come cybernetically true); an idea that should have earned Octant an immediate cult following by itself, but which, as a most welcome bonus, was then put at the service of proper catchy tunes, whose sound profile reinvigorated the increasingly impaired perception, in post-industrial societies (more precisely, societies which have offshored their industrial production), of the magnitude of real world resources and physical infrastructures our daily lives (including its artistic manifestations) depend on. 

It is easy to realize that the advancement of any civilizational process entails the expansion of socially invisible dimensions of social organization; that greater expands of everyday life are taken for granted, as if everything we need to go about our way materialized everyday out of thin air. Yet, that is something the non-survivalists of us are only briefly reminded of when systemic shit hits the fan, after which we immediately go back to sublimating that stress-inducing awareness via whatever alienating means at our disposal, including doomscrolling, binge-watching apocalyptic fiction, or writing amateur music reviews; and that obliviousness can be felt in musical creation too, as an expression not only of individual creativity, but of social dynamics and technological conditions as well. 

Not to disparage specific genres or modes of musical production wholesale, what differentiates this record for me is the way it actually incorporates the materiality of mechanisms and circuit boards, of the hardware involved in making it, instead of just relying on the abstraction of code, zeros and ones. That gives it a real analogical feel and weight that a lot of electronic or (more to the point here) "indietronic" (ugh) music increasingly came to bypass with its digital software and sampling shortcuts, lacking any kind of physical grounding to make it feel real and alive instead of a form of simulated escapism into some sort of musical metaverse (particularly when it tries to mimic that physicality, as in the turn of the century overuse of samples of scratchy vinyls played in old turntables to automatically evoke times gone by; nothing as ever sounded more lifeless and artificial to me). 

So, to gratuitously trash another band in this context, I'll be repeat-listening to this long before I succumb to the latest retro-space-age dilettantism of the likes of Stereolab. 

More than that, if this were any indication of how life under our future robotic overlords would sound like, I might even be willing to let Skynet (or whatever we're calling it these days) take over already, no questions asked; though it is more likely that this record was rather just an endearing glitch in the matrix.

Whatever the case, I do at least hope there is one last thing humans and machines can firmly agree on before the fall: no more Terminator movies, please; they have been useless.

 Meira Asher - Dissected (1997)

I remember reading somewhere, at the time this came out, that Robert Wyatt wrote to Asher congratulating her for it, and if that happens to check out (which I can't be bothered to confirm, perhaps by willingness to print a harmlessly pleasant legend), that should obviously be all the recommendation you need. All I can add is that that highest of accolades is, or would be, a well deserved one indeed. 

If, thematically, Asher was already fully committed in this, her debut, to discussing beyond partisan bias (but in no uncertain terms) the practicalities of the problem of evil in the world, in its manifold manifestations (war, incestuous pedophilia, AIDS, take your pick) - something which the confrontational title and cover clearly announced -, her aural strategy to call on us to listen to her was still somewhat based on seduction, not the all-out aggression that would ravage most of the following Spears Into Hooks - and apparently the rest of her work up to the present; logically, as history has yet to deliver the human condition from being shaped at best by an ebb and of flow of cruelty, suffering, and indignities. 

In fact, while always fraught with some tension, and relatively stark in its resources, the music here can still be reasonably described as quite engaging, with its highly effective rhythmic pulls and instrumental mood setters, like a didgeridoo here, or a harp there. It's only if and when you start to realize what's going on underneath (which means you either understand Hebrew or have the booklet at hand) that its musical appeal begins to reveal itself more clearly as something of a deceptive device, a way to slowly confront you with hidden or distant horrors, instead of making you immediately turn your ears away - like we turn off with our fingers, or not even that anymore, just tune out in our desensitived minds, all the massacres, tragedies and bombings that have long become a visual side dish to the daily bread of those privileged to be exclusively on the receiving end of those images. 

Perhaps there is then a theodicy inherent to Asher's aesthetic trajectory: to begin by presenting us a thing of apparent beauty, to then scratch and forever forsake it, as if saying this is what humans do. I suppose that could make this the Paradise Lost of her oeuvre. That the remainder of it seems to have become a more literal and endless iteration of Une Saison en Enfer (though it's Artaud's Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu that she's turned to more recently), can't help but feel both regrettable and inevitable. We may not 'like' that - as we are not supposed to -, but maybe the foremost question - before any purely aesthetic considerations -, when by design, denial, or omission, humankind continues to afford art so much pained material to work with, is whether we deserve any better in the first place.

François Tusques - Dazibao N°2 (1971)

When it comes to prepared piano music, I think there are mainly two ways to go, and none of them exactly your more academic John Cage way (even if it got the ball running), or Pascal Comelade's disingenuous musique naïve: you either go for atmospheric timbral explorations, forfeiting notation and composition in any rigid sense of the word, or you go for real childlike abandon with a brand new toy. 

The joy of more or less arbitrarily sabotaging a highly evolved musical instrument is not only to extract different sounds and textures, but to really open it (and the music it can offer) to happy accidents, embracing unpredictability. To then reign it all back in, in the controlled form of written music, and pass it off as a studied form of art, seems to me close to an inherently fraudulent proposition. When you add to that the puerile sounds most 'preparations' tend to emit, producing an artistic blend of calculation and children’s toys, then the whole thing threatens to turn into a most perilous social enterprise, a musical breeding ground for evil geniuses. 

François Tusques' approach, thankfully, does not feel calculated for a minute, despite its heavy-handed political pronouncements and imagery, which don’t really have any sort of musical bearing. He just seems to go for it and see where it leads him - which is often to sound like a drunken one-man gamelan ensemble, thanks to all the microtonal deviations of the piano notes that he hammers non-stop, in a sort of rhythmic trance, while playing with different ranges and thingies and such. That’s it. 

It might not exactly be revolutionary (pun intended), but it does make me feel like a toddler watching a buffoon magically draw wacky sounds out of a large piece of furniture, and apparently I am still not mature enough not to be reasonably entertained by that.

Bowling for 47

School of Language - 45 (2019)

This might be one of the catchiest pieces of satirical agitprop you might ever come across, but as its subject, the 45th POTUS, returns to the ballots forcefully hoping (to put it mildly) to be recast as the 47th, it also seems to be objective proof of how ineffectual the genre can be, regardless of its artistic merits. 

Regardless, or because of them? I wonder.
Like humor (as Henri Bergson unwittingly proved, trying to come up with an unfunny explanation of how it works), despite millennia of applied ridicule of others, there's hardly a general theory of satire to be had, not least because its social uses are not restricted to the field of art, thereby muddling the criteria used to determine what makes a good piece of satire: one that is aesthetically interesting (whatever the criteria used to determine that as well) or one that effects a desired social change (and how does one measure that)? 

At a first glance, it might not be too unreasonable to pit the modern effectiveness of satire against its very artistic merits. In modern society (though, perhaps, not for long, in a post-modern, social-media escalated world, where people like me can pretend to have informed opinions to legitimize their subjective taste, and publicize them, however ineffectually), with its specialized critics and art history departments exercising authority on what gets to be defined as 'art', and how is it to be socially ranked, to appraise something as art tends to take on a bourgeois bent - privileging distanced forms of judgement, filtered by historical selection and theoretical apparatuses, to upkeep a certain aesthetic status quo, certain standards of (good) taste. 

Contrary to that, the satirical impulse tends to be primary and distasteful, like things you shout at the news on tv (if you're old as me), born out of disgust with a state of affairs, which entails that, for a piece of satire to be welcomed as an artwork, it probably has to sacrifice its immediate emotional urge to object and ridicule, until it becomes something the good society can be comfortable with, something witty rather than blunt, perhaps scathing but self-reflexive, provocative but not too edgy. 

However, that might be too narrow a view of what satire can do; for instance, tying it up to an immediate scale of events, and a single-handed causal effect over them; when it might be much more likely for it to participate in the shaping of wider and longer cultural processes, for which its artistic merits, while not guaranteeing instant instrumental rewards, might grant it more of a lasting influence. 

Furthermore, when the manichaean impulse that first drives satire begins to inform the majority of public discourse; when apparently no one seems to recognize themselves in the status quo anymore; and when the role of democracy in human affairs seems to be increasingly deformed, from being a way to achieve forms of compromise that accommodate the diversity of human prospects and constituencies, to a utilitarian way (among undemocratic others, if need be) for some to achieve supremacy over others, what is there even left for satire to do? 

I wouldn't know, otherwise I'd be paid for it, but one answer might be what this record seems to do. 

First of all, of artistic merits, it seems to have its fair share. The first one lies in the formal device employed to effect said satire; one that circumvents the easy route of simply looking down on the object of its scorn, by avoiding explicit commentary. Not only does it embody verbal discourse in specific, real-life characters, but further draws on their own, all too familiar, public words, to make them recognizable and produce something of a collective portrait in music of Trump's (first?) presidency. 

Of course, the splitting and splicing of that discourse, and the musical choices to soundtrack it, amount to a form of commentary themselves, like montage in a documentary; but by eschewing the equivalent of a voice-over (à la cinéma vérité, so to speak), even while sporting a point of view, you do afford the material some measure of autonomy to speak for itself. So much so, that while the satirical rationale for this might have been the proverbial 'give 'hem enough rope' - for people to call themselves into to question by highlighting their own words and actions -, as Trump's specific appeal is by now proven to be all but immune to that type of social checks and balances, he himself could probably endorse this record as a flattering musical fluff piece on himself (well, minus the "f#&$+=% moron" bit; perhaps).
The other main reason for the artistic success of the album is not only the obvious musical talents of Mr. David Brewis - one half of art-pop savants Field Music, and the whole of School of Language -, who is able to infuse these songs with the exact amount of detail and intelligence just this side of going prog, but also his specific aesthetic choice to adopt a funky r&b aesthetic for this. Surprisingly, that significantly furthers the embedded satire of (specifically) Trump's discourse, as it matches with musical swagger his brash rhetoric, to the point where the satire boldly risks to turn on itself, and make you glimpse some of what might draw in at least part of his acolytes; and while that could make this a self-defeating venture, maybe the end goal of a good satire in these circumstances might no longer be the lost hope of changing the hearts of those it opposes, but to give others insight on them. 
There are too many, too wide-ranging variables, both old and new, converging on the perfect political storm that is making it rain cats and dogs all over Fukuyama's globalized liberal democratic dreams - which makes the compilation of a grand theory impracticable and too sluggish to face a systemic state of political emergency; and the singling out of certain explanatory mechanisms a sitting duck for accusations of simplistic thinking; all of which might easily lull us into being spectators of our real-life rendering of how the world is doomed. 
Obviously, to work that out is not Brewis' or this record's burden, but that doesn't mean it can't contribute to the general figuring out of things - which is all anyone and anything can, to varying degrees -, and it might not be too out of place to argue that this does effectually (however a-theoretically) touch on and enact a critique of the contemporary society of spectacle, with the generalized commodification of human life in a reality tv / social media culture reconfiguring all of existence as an ongoing show, where constantly entertaining and being entertained becomes the primary mechanism of ascribing value to individuals and social interactions - and are we not 'entertained'? 

More than that - even as certain strands of political discourse, however well-meaning, seem to be tentatively pushing the social world to resemble the inside of a catholic boarding school, chastising the public into imposed virtuousness, while signposting their own -, what the spectacle of unconscionable narcissism and unfettered vitriol laid bare in these songs, along with a groovy beat, can bring to light, is how that might actually be perceived as liberating or inspirational by anyone who, in the face of all the frustrating intricacies and moral quandaries of working social and political systems, might increasingly pin for someone, however unfoundedly, to just validate our individual needs and unchecked opinions, to hold them as the things against which all others must be measured, make us believe in the logical impossibility that all social arrangements should and could be made in one's own image, to the detriment of all others.

Someone, simply put, giving us license to listen to the worst angels of our nature - which some's rousseaunean optimism might have been too naive in believing could be simply shooed away, instead of having to be bargained with, in political life, as we do every day in our personal one. 

In that respect, however critical, this record could be the closest anyone with no sympathy for Donald Trump might ever come to understand his mass appeal, without needing to make any apologies for it. Whoever turns out to be 47 (worst case scenario (from where I stand, anyway), in lieu of the Titanic ensemble, we might at least hope for a funky follow-up to soundtrack our drowning in the water from the icebergs we won't be able to crash into anymore), in the certainty that whatever brought us to this stage won't simply go away, maybe what this record ends up doing is what most political and social actors of all kinds increasingly can't or won't, and that is, in a sense, in the very least, to keep your enemies closer. 

Maybe that's the scariest omen of all; that the only relevant role left for satire to fill in the world right now is to be the adult in the room.

This Heat – Health And Efficiency (ep,1980)

I suppose one can come to accept (it is harder to embrace) the flip side of this EP, "Graphic/Varispeed", as a kind of zen-inducing aural mechanism, but it's one of those pieces of sonic art I think most people need to find a rationale for, to somehow appreciate (these days, calling it drone apparently helps). 

The concept of designing a vinyl track that could be played at different turntable speeds, artistically exploring the physical properties of the record medium itself (as others have with, say, locked grooves or scratching; albeit with widely varying degrees of artistic success and cultural traction), was certainly valid - suffice to think of how the very physical properties and specs of film stock and the cinematograph, which (quite incidentally) allowed for that continuous strip of sequential photographic images to be projected backwards, all of a sudden (right from the pioneering Lumière brothers, with Démolition d'un mur) visually shaped and materialized the conception of literally turning back time for human culture (and the psyche of anyone who has ever called out an ex's name during sex with their next ex). 

Unfortunately, in this case, as Graphic/Varispeed plays out, not only is it hard to identify any revolutionary or particularly (un)pleasant cultural takeaways from it, but time itself, or more precisely the technological transformations in music distribution that accompanied it, have rendered the experiment largely anachronistic, lest you can get your hands on a vinyl pressing, and even then, it can't make the same sense under so different a material musical culture. Some CD reissues only feature the track at 45 rpm, implicitly recognizing that as the standard speed (and even more implicitly suggesting that spending the extra time required to listen to it at 33 rpm was somewhat akin to getting caught in a cultural ruse), other digital releases feature it played at different speeds as different tracks; but as its entire rationale was predicated on the technical specificity of phonograph records and players, at a time and place when and where that medium was (still) dominant in that culture, those workaround versions can only stress how this has essentially become something of an archaeological artifact, requiring historical contextualization and adaptation to make some sort of sense and be experienced today. 

As such, in this day and age, I would mostly take it as an example of the type and array of experiences these guys had to go through to produce unique sounds and then (like turning musique concrète into song) be able to technically coalesce them into the disjointed complexity of pieces like the title track, which very much is a clear example of just how evolved This Heat must have sounded back in the post-punk primordial soup (to say nothing of the 'pre-post' one - and with their legacy still going 'post-post' strong).

Nonetheless, as the imposing availability of music being force-fed to humanity has turned so many of us into sonic bulimics, ceaselessly consuming musical products, mostly without considering for one second how they came to be and came to us, it's good that, once in a while, a musical head-scratcher like this can still stop us in our tracks, make us briefly contemplate some simple but sometimes willfully ignored notions - (good) music is (usually) hard work; our aesthetic perceptions are as culturally/historically contingent as all the works of art we so often briskly appraise regardless of how equipped we might be to properly appreciate them; the medium through which we experience a piece of music affects the nature of that experience and its conditions of existence - and leave us to ponder how that should be present in the way we relate to it. 

And now, here "it" is on youtube...

Telectu - Ctu-Telectu (1982)

Future veterans of portuguese experimental music, Telectu, kick-started things, the year Philip K. turned astral, with a dystopian Dick-inspired improvisational new-wave soundscape, that expanded on what 1/2 of Telectu, Vítor Rua (Jorge Lima Barreto being his academically savvier half in the group) was up to at the time with then pop experimentalists GNR (no apostrophe) on Independança, also from 1982. 

What's interesting is that, just as in that record GNR pushed their experimental tendencies to the edge - particularly with a side-long track, Avarias (which I find historically significant, but not entirely successful in itself), that sounded like an approximate answer to the question 'what if Can were a new-wave band' -, it could be argued that, while much more abstract, Telectu's debut, which even featured GNR's drummer, might in turn have been tempered by some of this group's parallel concerns with accessibility and engaging with the 'now' - concerns that would often elude a less immediately welcoming part of Telectu's subsequent career path and notable avant-garde collaborations, with the likes of Chris Cutler, Jac Berrocal or Louis Sclavis (not to say that Ctu Telectu - which is not some literary crossover wordplay on Cthulhu; I checked - could be accused of bearing any particular sympathy for success either). 

Does all that mean that artistic virtue lies in the middle? I don't know; nor, more importantly, do I know if one rule fits all, at all (well, that's rhetorical; I don't really think it does; different talents require different strategies to operate properly in different conditions, and figuring that out is a big part of their struggle). Either way, I also couldn't say how the tiger with the tie ties in with all that monkey business, but he sure looks snazzy. Isn't that its own reward?

GNR - Psicopátria (1986)

The defining portuguese new-wave group (probably), with a frontman (not Axl Rose) full of literary swagger (maybe more like a Lloyd Cole gone off the rails), bringing on the sound of a fun night out in the alternative eighties with their breakthrough album, with a great title, and a great cover! They were on a (cocaine-fuelled?) roll. They were also soon to run out (right after their fine mid-career-summation live album, In Vivo, from 1990) so, if you are looking to score some more, I would backtrack to their more avantgarde days (however hit-and-miss they could be) instead of the generic pop act they would morph into in the following years, which, as I seem to recall, saw them getting blander and blander, as their then chubby drummer Tóli got thinner and thinner. Correlation or causation? Unless we can convince him, in the name of science, to regain a few pounds and have the band record another album, I guess we'll never know.