The open sentence of John Philip Sousa’s panicky and prescient 1906 essay on the business of recorded sound “The Menace of Mechanical Music” begins 34-year-old article titled “Record Industry and Egyptian Traditional Music: 1904-1932″ in the journal Ethnomusicology, written by composer, performer, author and musicologist Ali Jihad Racy:
“Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang or panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence and soul.”
Fun, chuckly stuff, cause we all know records won and Sousa died so fooey on him. But what is it doing at the beginning of a scholarly article on Egyptian music?
Two answers:
1) Racy’s article concerns itself with the circumstances through which some monumentally great and almost supernaturally refined singers like Abd-l Hai Hilmi (who fits the phrase invented by Will Schofield for people like Kevin Ayers, “Toxic Dandy”), Ahmad Idris, Zaki Mourad and Yusuf Al-manyalawi, had their performances etched in stone during the first three decades of the twentieth century so that they can still sweep the hearts of human beings into the clouds. This would have been impossible without the “mechanized menace.”
and 2) The music that these singers performed at then end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century went extinct in the 30s, partially because of the radical world-wide economic changes of the 30s and the accompanying proliferation of entertainment media which were both higher-tech and cheaper, namely radio and movies. Racy concludes his study in 1932: “The choice of this date is prompted by several historical and musical factors that had crucially challenged the efficacy of the disc in Egyptian musical life. For example, April 14, 1932 marked the premiere of the first Egyptian musical film … In Egypt the musical film functioned as the most popular and effective medium of musical dissemination that drove the disc to a second position.” So, in the 30s, Where people once sat by the the speaker and reveled in the sound for a few minutes, they now sat in a dark room and stared at a shadowplay which served as context for songs.
When Racy writes that “in a sense, the early 30s may thus be regarded as the beginning of a new post-phonograph era in Egypt,” it doesn’t mean that Egyptians stopped buying or listening to records. He implies that what it once meant to be a musician and what it once meant to listen with one’s ears to music changed. Naturally, the music in the films was different than that on the earlier records, both sonically grander and formally simpler, and the records which were made after the ascent of film music reflected that shift. The most important case-study of this transition in Egypt is also the most important musician of the past century for the entire Arab World and one of the greatest singers ever to record, Oum Kalthoum, who began recording as a classical singer in the old style in 1924 and changed with the times, transitioning to film stardom in the 40s. But she is another story for another day.

All of this, in fact, is prologue to this short and beautiful clip from an Egyptian film of the 40s – I don’t know its name – depicting the magic of listening to records, the projection of wishes into the sound, the drawing of the listener’s inner life into communion with the sound through memories – the ever-changing memories of the listener and the fixed memory on the disc. In the 40s, it was depicted through the film medium which undermined the record. And now you’ll see it on your computer screen as it similarly undermines film. Even so, the human need for that moment of communion is completely transparent. Some say that half of the world’s languages will go extinct in the next hundred years and with them, countless concepts and modes of thought. No one has tried to quantify the impending changes in music, but in a hundred years, someone will dream into sound. What dreams?

From the beginning of the 14th century through the following five hundred years, the Ottoman Empire spread from Anatolia north through the Balkans, east through Persia, south through Arabia and west across nearly the entire North Coast of Africa, expanding across just slightly less land than the Roman Empire at its peak. After collapsing slowly through the 19th century and early 20th century, the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923 dissolved the last of the Empire and formalized the successor state of Turkey. The cultural and political fallout of five centuries of Turkish administrative and cultural domination over the Eastern Mediterranean lands will continue through generations still to come.

Coincident with the waning years of the Ottoman Empire was the birth of the sound recording industry, and thousands of recordings were made of the music of the Turks and the ethnic minorities that they governed within the Ottoman territories. Two juicy websites offer substantial collections of the sounds of the musical art of the Turks and Arabs before the radical cultural shifts of the early and mid-20th century (and two decades before the invention of the microphone!), all gratis.

Twenty-two stunning recordings made in Constantinople and Cairo ca. 1906-07 are available for download here:
Archeophone.org Collection of Turkish and Arabic Zonophone Discs
And twenty-one cylinder recordings made ca. 1900 (!) of Turkish and Arabic music are available here:
University of California, Santa Barbara Collection of Middle-Eastern Cyliders

To top it all off, there is plenty of the great master Cemil Bey to be had on the internet, but this flabbergasting fiddle performance from the 10s on YouTube is absolutely not to be missed. (I have no explaination for the groaning, atonal, gestural passages which bear stunning resemblance to “radical” developments in mid- and late-20th century jazz and Western classical music, although I’d be grateful for any information on this piece that anyone can offer.)
Tanburi Cemil Bey – Janik Nini

I guess that it’s pretty well known by now that Baltimore has a lot of good zonked rock and experimental music happening. Arthur’s pages have, in the past couple years, sung the praises of Celebration, Dan Higgs, Beach House, Dan Deacon & Jimmy Joe Roche, Teeth Mountain, Wzt Hearts and Trockeneis, and there are Needle Gun, the Lexie Mountain Boys, , Jana Hunter, Lo Moda, Jason Willett, Arboretum, Zomes, Nautical Almanac, DJ Dogdick, , Sejayno, Bonnie Jones, Dan Conrad, the Wham City , MT6 and High Zero crews and much more. Not bad for a crumbling, podunk backwater best known as a case study in the doomed drug war.

But in the unlikely event that anyone ever holds a gun to my head and demands to know, “who is your favorite musician in the city?” I’ve got my answer all ready: Susan Alcorn.

Alcorn is a Texas native who plays the pedal steel guitar. The journey from playing country and bluegrass and straight jazz to her mature style has aided by advice from Muddy Waters and Paul Bley. The wide-open ears, keen intellect, emotional sensitivity and rigorously-honed skill as a player that she has developed has brought her into collaborations with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Kowald, Eugene Chadbourne and Jandek among many others. But it’s her solo work as a composer, improviser and interpreter of songs, which are more aching sequences and clusters of crystaline sounds than tunes, that always blows me away.

With clarity and precision and a gift for invoking sweeping landscapes, Alcorn is able to perform arrangements of Curtis Mayfield or Olivier Messiaen highlighting both their structural and spiritual aspects simultaneously and then attacking the strings zen-slap-loud or hovering stained-glass mobiles of sound-clouds. Dreamy stuff, full of emotion and one of the more Universalist twists on Americana.

The way to introduce yourself to her work is to see her live and solo, if possible, or to track down a copy of her utterly superlative LP And I Await the Resurrection of the Pedal Steel Guitar, released by Olde English Spelling Bee a couple years ago (or, if you can, her Curandera CDR). But until she and her work are more readily available to more households, this short group of video excerpts from a solo concert in Baltimore earlier this month where she presented a musical autobiography will act as a sampler of her sound palate, if not the emotional arc, of her performances.

Susan Alcorn at the Los Solos series, Baltimore

“The strong emotions and social disruption engendered by death have always given grief a potential for politicization, whether it finds its voice in the laments of village women, the gay poet’s elegy, or the war memorial.”
-Gail Holst-Warhaft, The Cue for Passion: Grief and Its Political Uses (Harvard, 2000)

During the 90s Adrianna Amari was photographing statuary in Baltimore cemeteries, where she discovered images of foundational human experiences – sorrow, loss, myth, memory, the need for tradition and ritual, and the interconnection of sky, earth and weather with man-made craft. Her empathic photos waited through a series of personal meetings with mortality in her own life until meeting Father Daniel Berrigan, the poet, peace activist and Catholic priest who famously napalmed draft files outside of a draftboard near Baltimore in 1968. Amari suggested to Berrigan the publication of a volume of his selected poetry in juxtaposition with her images. When he agreed, she writes that she noticed that she “had unknowingly been taking pictures for his poems all along.”

The result was published in 2007 by the student-run Apprentice Press (also in Baltimore) as Prayer for the Moring Headlines: On the Sanctity of Life and Death. It’s an extraordinary collection melding the most deeply personal, immediate, overwhelming and little-talked-about feelings of grief with a broad view of which acknowledges the value of all of that seemingly chaotic intensity in justifying and reordering the world – in art, politics, social change and the day-to-day interpersonal action. Howard Zinn describes the subject of it in his introduction to the book as, “life and death, the prayer that comes with commitment, the hope that comes with resistance, the visions of a world where peace and justice prevail.” Inspirational and core stuff to find in a graveyard.

Berrigan’s “You Finish It: I Can’t”

The world is somewhere visibly round,
perfectly lighted, firm, free in space,

but why we die like kings or
sick animals, why tears stand
in living faces, why one forgets

the color of the eyes of the dead–

Iran isn’t going anywhere. We know the Iranians bring us thousands of years of cultural history and nearly daily news headlines, but what else do we know about them? After reading Kapuscinski’s book on the Iranian Revolution Shah of Shahs, there are the decidedly more vernacular travel journals of Kevan Harris, Sociology PhD, ‘Merican of demi-quasi-Persian extraction and wayward prog DJ, who has spent the past three summers studying in the belly of a country where the goverment is, well, let’s just say NOT allies of the U.S. and its allies.

In his writings you’ll “meet” strongmen, magicians, the Iranian Frank Zappa, globo-talking blowhard Swiss academics and leftist philosophers as well as tender, juicy and very chewable lessons on the ins and outs of global economics, the problem of fat babies and the inside dirt on whether or not Freddy Mercury can truly be thought of as part of the Axis of Baddies.

Click on the five spot for the site (hosted by hot Chicago rockers No Doctors).

This sexy truffle of psychedelia is from Baltimore video-maker Anne Everton.

Happy Valentine’s Day.
Enjoooooy.

Drughes RAWK by Anne Everton

Philadelphian Will Schofield’s monumentally great A Journey Round My Skull blog (named for the first-person Hungarian account of early 20th century brain surgery) of “Unhealthy Book Fetishism” has long relished in the intensity of the gaze, a combination of fascination and repugnance which is almost psychedelic in its insistence.

His most recent posts have artfully combined lustfully sought-after images with utterly maniacal texts, so that the image here is given with with a longer section of this text called “The Process of Slow Digestion” by Mileton Barba.

“Dr. Spasmodeus Smugglington shrank back, his skin shriveled and every hair on his body bristled, his nerves contracted, his guts drew taut, when he saw the little red eyes, brilliant as rubies, and the shiny, bifurcated tongue, its movements accelerated by excitement, darting, zig-zagging wildly in a bold, vertiginous arc”

Dig through the archives and be jealous, amazed, confused and sickened in turns or simultaneously by Schofield’s research. But watch for whatever he does next.

Proud Flesh is a 30-minute Western shot mainly in the Dakota badlands by Jenny Graf Sheppard and Chiara Giovando and starring their mothers. It’s a remarkable film, even if it hasn’t been seen much outside of Baltimore.

Until it’s more widely released, there is this trailer: 

And last month, Baltimore’s Ehse Records released the entirety of the soundtrack as an LP in an edition of 300 copies.

It’s a beautiful thing, made from a private, internal symbolic system and some amazing tweaking of the idea of the Western film and, by extension, America itself.

(Disclosure: although this writer made small contributions to the film and soundtrack, my hand is neither in the till nor on the tiller.)