Friday, Sept. 19, 2007 ... noon - 3:00 p.m. ... KZSU, 90.1 FM

KZSU's Day of Difficulty, a 24-hour precursor to the 24-hour Day of Noise. The latter focuses on live performances and is an old KZSU tradition, being revived this year by DJ Smurph. Soy Ricardo, another DJ, came up with the Day of Difficulty idea, where we DJs would spin experimental music for 24 hours as a Day of Noise preface. Great fun.

Format:
ARTIST -- "TRACK TITLE" -- ALBUM TITLE (LABEL, YEAR)
Horizontal lines denote microphone breaks.

Pat Metheny -- "Part One" -- Zero Tolerance for Silence (Geffen, 1994)
Prof. C. Northcote Parkinson -- "Some Negative Aspects of the Administrative Process" -- Contemporary English Literature (Folkways, 1962)

Aaaand, they're off! A guitar blast to start the Day of Difficulty/Day of Noise, from an unlikely source. The album features five tracks, but I consider Part One to be "Zero Tolerance for Silence," with the other, shorter, less ambitious tracks acting as B-sides. One long blare with as many as four overdubbed guitars; it sounds like Metheny improvised the first track, then played it back to "follow along" as he overdubbed the others. It opens with just a flailing blur of guitar, fast-strummed with angry abandon. The piece opens up for "solo" spaces, where each guitar moves into single-note mode, but keeps coming back to that forceful blur of noise.

Metheny claims an affinity for this sort of music but doesn't actually listen to it. He wasn't aware of who Derek Bailey was, for instance, when they recorded The Sign of Four.

I wanted to overlap tracks several times during the show, creating even more of a "noise" ethic out of noisy sounds. For this one, the staid, academic words of Parkinson made a nice non-sequitur blend. It's from an LP that consists mostly of readings from British writers Laurie Lee and Christopher Logue -- neither of whom I've heard of.

See the comment above; I figured it would be respectful of the noise/improv genre to play one of the true masters to follow up Metheny's well-meaning but relatively childish exploit. Don't get me wrong; I love Zero Tolerance, but it's not coming from the same place as Derek's stuff. Moreover, this track is solo acoustic guitar, so it's a more "pure" distillation of Derek Bailey. Vintage.

Sublime, ghostly electronics from DiMuzio, topped by the more skittish violin soloing style of Rose. The Rose track is particularly fun because he triggers samples by increasing the bow pressure. It ended up adding a rustling undercurrent to DiMuzio's piece; it's a mixing that worked rather well.

Previously noted here. This is a piece for solo vocalist, and its sparseness made for a nice segue after fading out DiMuzio. The singer -- mezzo-soprano Molly Wilmot -- goes through a series of vocal and mouth sounds, hitting several possibilities including whistling, clicking, words ("I hate you!"), growls, whines, actual singing, and, yeah, a small orgasm. Hubbard adds some vibraphone chimes to an actual operatic melody that appears late in the piece. It's a fun piece that fits very well with the "Day of Noise" aesthetic.

An album of long solos for soprano saxophone, featuring plenty of Parker's trademark circular breathing, producing continual high flutters. Very tempting to compare this to the monochrome slate of Zero Tolerance, above, but there's more texture and subtlety here. It's quieter and "organic," as you'd expect from a solo sax performance.

Previously noted here. A placid quietness to follow up Parker's fast flurries.

Solo oboe recordings, with lots of squeaks, whines, and air through the horn. It adds up to a sparse effect, due to the number of whispery sounds Bruckmann produces. Very interesting CD from a guy who's now local to us, yay.

Doug Carroll -- "Cataclysm" -- V/A: Live at KZSU 1998 (Outer A, 1998)

Solo cello with a ton of electronic processing, creating big, slow sounds not unlike freight-ship horns. From a compilation CD of performances recorded live in our studios. I thought I was being clever by remembering this track; turns out Smurph remembered it, too, and played it later. Oh well, it's a deserving track, anyway.

Previously noted here.

Brainchild of GX Jupitter-Larson, The Haters are a noise group that works with amplified sound. For instance, the one time I saw them, they did things like put contact microphones on sheets of paper -- then destroyed the paper bit by bit, using hole punchers. Nice and noisy (but visually unsuccessful -- after about two minutes, you basically had two people standing there leaning over these pieces of paper... it got old fast). This piece takes the form of a formless electronic rumble.

Can you just hear me chuckling to myself in the studio? 69 Love Songs was Stephin Merritt's tour de force, and what made it great wasn't just the lyrical cleverness -- that's available on every Merritt project -- but the swath of song varieties he packed into there. He's got a punk song, a reggae song, baroque, country, a "generic" World song, improv jazz -- and this, the Phillip Glass/Robert Wilson-styled "experimental" one. It consists of the words "Experimental Music Love" overdubbed multiple times with a 0.1-second delay each time, creating a shimmering interference effect.

The actual sounds of a glacier: Small, deep cracking noises, and a gentle clicking that resembles carefully held billard balls quietly tapped together. From a CD of field recordings from Antarctica, with sound sources including seals and penguins (both on ground and underwater). There's also a twanging sound, almost metallic, that comes up later; I'm assuming that occurred naturally, but I don't know what it is. Wind through a glacial crevasse, maybe?

At this point, I started using the test-tones LP as my soundbed between sets. It's noted at the end of the set.

Splatter Trio -- "Ace Dag Bee and Counting" -- Hi-Fi Junk Note (Rastascan, 1995)

* = Item in KZSU rotation
! = Pop anomaly
? = Item not in KZSU library

-- Go back to Memory Select playlists.
-- Bay Area free/improv music calendar: http://www.bayimproviser.com.