revolutionary blues
: rules are made to be broken!
Like blues cut open añd the entrails rearranged. .hurts, memories, longings emerging as the listener looks for meaning
That's a very interesting point too, Nick; the search for meaning per se, and then the searching for meaning in sound, and then the search for meaning in certain musical *phrases*. The phraseaolgy of the blues follows the call and response pattern: each phrase has an answer. However, when the context is altered and the syntax of the phrases disrupted, what is a question and what an answer becomes confused etc., and yet, as you say, the phrases still betoken memories, images, feelings
what? blues? no 1 4 5? ha! enjoyed! - think I might get done under the trade description act!
Also brings me back to some chemically induced states of mind in which I (mostly) no longer indulge. I mean it as a compliment, to be able to evoke such things, and not just their trappings.
That is a very interesting point, Jonathan. One might take these experiences as singularities which create new neural pathways. I suppose we are overshadowed by Rimbaud's 'ordered disordering of the senses' - but the will to create order is so strong that even maximum chaos can be comprehended as a form of some kind of order. But within all this lay the eternal truths of psychedelia. Or a proper reversal where dreams are real, and reality is best slept through
It's rare that this music "reminds" me of anything, in terms of pre-existing bands, but this does take me (back) to some times and some places (which I will not name) (and one of which I actually played in)
Well I'm pleased this triggered some remembrances of things past [providing they were pleasant] - you are so mysterious Jonathan! There may be some synchronicity floating around ... well, I believe the so-called 'past, present and future' are all actually happening at once, eternally - we need to prevent a constant mash up
- strange, the first version of this got to the final 'mastered' stage, but it lacked something. I was really disappointed, but I think that as I edited it and added more guitars etc., I'd taken out a lot of lower and middle sounds. It sounded top heavy. So I got the 5 string bass out and added another bass part [that really flapping squirty one] and that made it.
oh, i do like this. all this bluesy floating through space.: good - the blues is usually firmly anchored to the Earth, so it took quite a bit of fuel to get it off the ground and into the sratosphere - lots of cosmic juice!
- just realised that I have positioned blues as incidental music to the post-revolutionary period ....
Almost veering into incidental music of spaghetti westerns.
: strangely, I was thinking of movie music when doing this, I was reading an interview with Artemiev in recent Wire magazine, and also thinking of early Floyd stuff like More and Obscured by Clouds. In terms of improv and experimentalism, how that notion of making sounds that 'fit' might fare. How about sounds that don't fit? And how about all sounds being a soundtrack at some level or another? Sound is always 'incidental' to some degree. Feeds into Eno's view of the ambient, of muzak ... but sounds always accompany something else ... it is actually unusual to focus purely on sound .... ah this is all so rich ... surfaces barely scratched
: Everything "fits", it's just how. Not fitting is fitting, even if it's chaos. The question, of course, being whether or not one wants to inhabit a world of nothing but veering collisions!
We are getting ti the heart of this philosophy ... your rhetorical question is followed by an ominous pregnant silence .... does one have a ... choice? That's why the sort of sounds you do [my own are much lesser] are so important - they uncover that philosophy, a philosophy that we prefer not to confront most of the time.
The question of choice and surrender is pretty well at the core of a lot of art - I'm thinking of the (not very applicable to my own work, but more descriptive of many artists) lessons in Townshend's "Psychoderelict" of all things. Personally, I can argue that I had a choice, once, and I traded that choice for a willful focus on one thing. Now I just do that!
Jazz to Devo, if only more modern blues incorporated their lessons.
: It's always an education with you - just listened to their first three albums - I can see some parallels. In that, on this track I felt I was increasingly putting the blues elements in quotation marks, in parentheses. Isolating them from familiar surroundings - this was the theme of the piece, on how revolutions shake things up, change the order, but everything quickly returns to a norm.
: Makes sense! And I just have the luxury of my brain connecting dots that are there on an odd tonal level - I doubt I could explain it if it I was forced to!
Going down to the wind-swept crossroads, wherever they may be.
: I had that Strat lick looped and in the background throughout, with the other guitars and bass moving towards and away from it - metaphorically and tonally - whole thing has that slow hobo drifting feel
Sweetness to inspire !
There are certain sweet tones that only appear in blues - it's coaxed sweetness
lyrics
Blues after the Revolution
Blues is not a music *of* the revolution, but rather a music that comes *after* the revolution.
It expresses that post revolutionary feeling; that, ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’.
The bluesman is therefore philosophically a Stoic, a resigned fatalist, but one who embraces life in all its contradictions.
Revolutions come, and revolutions go,
But the Blues, they live on for ever.
Even so, every blues bears the imprint of the revolution which preceeded it.
This blues track here is rare – it is a window into a future revolution.
credits
from Light Worship,
released September 23, 2017
Bill Boethius; guitars, bass and synth.
Straddling the threshold between studio performance and digital technique; the NYC artist applies "fake jazz" principles to synthpop. Bandcamp New & Notable May 2, 2024
A collection of tracks from the singer and multi-disciplinary artist's 111 collaboration series, featuring KMRU, Laraaji, and others. Bandcamp New & Notable Apr 25, 2024
