Zu Zu Zu Zu Zu Zu ZU
07/14/2010 · Grant Davis
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Chilling In Lahore Itself
06/30/2010 · Grant Davis
Tafo Brothers – Plugged in Pakistani Pops
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As leading exponents of Lahore’s vibrant self-contained film industry the Brothers Tafo gave Lollywood its first Rock Group in the form of its expanded Sexet commonly known as Tafo or Taffoo to Punjabi and Urdu listeners. Mostly instrumental in composition the sibling writing team emerged in 1970 providing incidental music and sonic variations for Lollywood love storys under the direction of Pakistans freakish equivalent of RD Burman, Mr. M.Ashraf with whom they would enjoy over a decade of film scoring and musical experimentation at the expense of the hi tech EMI funded recording studios in Lahore. State of the art echo-plexes, primitive drum machines, analogue synths, fuzz pedals and man-made mayhem provided many otherwise mundane film-scenes with playful and infectious freak-rock courtesy of these ‘behind-the-scenes’ uber-legends who would also be the first Lollywood group to record their own rare pop LP.
Babla
06/22/2010 · Grant Davis
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The Violin Sings
06/01/2010 · Grant Davis
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In this album, Van Shipley once again plays his magic Violin surprising a host of his admirers who have known him as The Man with the Golden Guitar. The success of his previous album “THE MAGIC VIOLIN OF VAN SHIPLEY” (S/MOCEC 4197) inspired Van to bring out this one for the entertainment of his numerous music fans.
SUPERUNA
05/23/2010 · Grant Davis
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S. Hazara Singh
05/21/2010 · Grant Davis
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Non Veg
04/21/2010 · Grant Davis
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Honey Singh – Choot Vol. 1
Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan: Raga Darbari, ca. 1930
03/29/2010 · Alexander Keefe
There is a shrine in one corner of the current location of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House, at 275 Church Street, in Manhattan’s TriBeCa, dedicated to two individuals without whom the Dream House would not exist: their teacher and guru Pandit Pran Nath, and above him, on the wall, one of the few extant photographs of Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, who was Pandit Pran Nath’s own teacher.
But perhaps “teacher” isn’t the right word. When Pandit Pran Nath first left home in Lahore, in his early teens, and approached the Ustad, who lived in the same city, he was roundly rejected. Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan, for one thing, was not into taking on Hindu students — he is on record as having objected vocally to his more famous cousin and contemporary Ustad Abdul Karim Khan’s unusual practice of accepting Hindu, especially Brahmin students to his innovative neo-gurukul, the Arya Sangeet Vidyalaya, in Poona. For another, he was just extremely old-school and of a markedly quietist Sufi bent: he refused to be recorded (the music in this short clip is from a radio session secretly recorded by a sound engineer at All India Radio in 1947), rarely performed publicly, resisted the modernizing, reformist adaptations and adjustments that Ustad Abdul Karim Khan embraced, and was just a generally thorny individual. Pandit Pran Nath used to say to his students — not without a sense of pride — that the poor hearing he had in one of his ears was due to the beatings that he received regularly during a very rough apprenticeship — one that began with years of menial service to the household and only gradually moved into explicitly musical matters.
Ustad Abdul Wahid Khan’s style, like Pandit Pran Nath’s, tends toward the epic and glacially slow: he preferred the ati vilambit (or super-slow) and the alap, or unmeasured introductory section to a raga. For singers of the Kirana gharana, the alap section is infused with a deep and esoteric mysticism that, by both its very nature and by the stringent demands of discipleship, is not something that can be or should be discussed openly, on the internet or anywhere else. Sound is God, said Pandit Pran Nath, and that much you may know just from listening to this brief sample of his rendition of the austere, architectonic nighttime raga Darbari. This is precisely the sort of raga that Kirana khayal singers excel at: grave and powerful, and extremely difficult to master — and when mastered capable of delivering intense emotional and physical effects. When I spoke with La Monte Young about my interest in the Kirana gharana, the first question he asked me was whether I had heard the recording of Abdul Wahid Khan from which this is taken. I know he considers it one of the most important recordings ever made by any artist. According to gharana lore, the reclusive Ustad only practiced two ragas: Todi in the morning and Darbari at night, and that when he was asked why, he answered that if morning were to last forever he would drop the Darbari.
Slow tempos, sustained tones, sonic sacrifice to the Unseen, discipleship and soul-shattering aural gnosis? Thank God the sun sets, and night comes.
Walter De Maria: Ocean Music (1968)
03/24/2010 · Alexander Keefe
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Walter De Maria: “Ocean Music” (1968) via UbuWeb
This is the first installment of what will be a series of posts to music I listened to and learned from during months of researching my piece on Pandit Pran Nath in the current issue of Bidoun. There will be everything from deep dhrupad to raucous No Wave, with much time spent in the middle, not to mention along oxbows and the trackless backwaters… However, no time will be spent linking to file-sharing sites, except in the case of recordings that have passed into the public domain somehow or other. The reason is that I owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to many of these artists, sometimes directly and personally, for their help and inspiration. I know that many of them feel stolen from because of the file-sharing that’s done by people who, after all, usually are ardent fans of their music. It is a weird paradox. Please support these artists by buying their work! They deserve no less.
I’m starting in medias res — like Dante — and in a peculiar corner that nevertheless invokes, I think in a beautiful and completely trippy way, an entire scene and sensibility. It is something of a prelude to the main event, just to test the engines, although like the “chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun.” This is Walter De Maria’s “Ocean Music” from 1968, available on Ubuweb. De Maria is usually known as the “Lightning Field” guy, and this is understandable because the Lightning Field, from 1978, is incredibly sublime and, in my opinion, is easily one of the most important art works of the post-war era. That said, De Maria did a lot of other very interesting, and completely different things, including his two well-known permanent installations in New York from the late 70s, both of them in Soho: Earth Room, and The Broken Kilometer. What is less well known is that he was also a musician and composer, and came to New York from Berkeley about the same time as his friend La Monte Young, around 1959, did some sculpture and early conceptual works (the term concept art was coined by his friend and sometime band mate Henry Flynt), organized happenings, and performed on drums with the proto-Velvet Underground band called The Primitives, as well as with La Monte’s seminal and intense mid-60s group the Theatre of Eternal Music alongside Angus Maclise, Tony Conrad, and John Cale. De Maria’s drumming pulses without apparent time meter — achieving a kind of stasis-in-flux that you see in a lot of La Monte’s music as well — much more so than Angus Maclise, whose music tends more toward neo-pagan psychedelia and ritual frenzy.
By the time Pandit Pran Nath took up residence in New York, in 1971, De Maria had stopped playing music, but he was part of the same circle, and must have seen him perform many times. Like I said, this is an oblique beginning to the Pandit Pran Nath music series, but I think it is a really great example of where avant-garde music was headed, at least among the New York downtown composers, musicians and artists associated with La Monte Young, just on the eve of Pandit Pran Nath’s arrival on the scene.
In “Ocean Music” from 1968, we start with a very mundane, ambient field recording of ocean sounds, but it doesn’t linger there long, at least not only there. The sound begins to blend, at first imperceptibly, with De Maria’s wash of percussion. Then things start to get fairly psychedelic with some overtones and other apparent effects kicking in and taking it to a whole different place. Like a Hindustani alap, it starts slow but builds in intensity toward a full-on secular re-enchantment, an aesthetically induced state of kenosis, an exhilaration mingled with awe. The music so clearly points at the impending Land Art scene — in which he was about to play a major role — and toward the Earth Room, the first iteration of which was installed in Heiner Friedrich’s Munich gallery in 1968, the year of this recording. This was the last sound recording De Maria made, to my knowledge — I would love to find out that I am wrong — and it was used as part of the soundtrack to his 1969 film Hard Core a post-Spaghetti Western that itself slowly builds from mundane realia to post-minimalist freakout — a film that stands quietly alongside, or somewhere between the space-cowboy post-westerns of Jodorowsky and Hellman.
But De Maria is a Thoreauvian at heart, perhaps by way of Wallace Stevens, an American gnostic and desert-rat, a searcher after the effectual Real hidden behind appearances, an advocate of moments of rupture, of earthquake epiphanies and transcendent states of consciousness. His invisibility on the present day art scene is self-imposed and deliberate, but from what I hear he is not a recluse, and he visits the Earth Room regularly in Soho. So should you! I’m writing about his work as part of a forthcoming Bidoun piece — the follow-up to the Pandit Pran Nath profile — an essay that takes on the rise and shattering fall of the first ten years at Dia Art Foundation, from its cryptic founding in 1974 to its very public collapse and rebirth in 1985. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more music!
Pandit Pran Nath and the American Underground
03/20/2010 · Alexander Keefe
Shameless self-promotion: please check out my just-published story on Pandit Pran Nath, written for the wonderful folks at Bidoun Magazine, who were kind enough to post it in its entirety online, along with some great photos shared by the incomparable La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela. Here’s the teaser…
First comes the drone of the sci-fi supercharged tamburas, fluxing and oscillating, too high up in the mix for the bureaucrats and professors at All India Radio, way too high. It’s like the rush of a marsh on a midsummer night with a million crickets, or the howling wind stirring the power lines outside a cabin in backwoods Idaho, or the hushed roar of the stream in front of a hermit’s cave above Dehradun: see the blue-throated god lying there, recumbent and still, his eyes shut, the dangerous corpse of the Overlord waiting for the dancing feet of his bloody, love-mad consort.
Stay tuned for more, including a playlist of the incredible music I listened to for this piece very soon. And I’m researching the follow-up, another story for Bidoun on the first ten years of Dia Art Foundation, which funded La Monte Young and Pandit Pran Nath, along with a (very) few others you may have heard of: James Turrell’s Roden Crater, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, Donald Judd’s Marfa project, Dan Flavin’s one-man museum in Bridgehampton… Time to take a fresh look at this history and the forces behind the stunted version of it we’re now stuck with.
Spoiler alert: a young Mr. Deitch is one of the bad guys.