Music history part 3: Vienna Etc.

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Viennese Eclectics and EveryDayArt Being sick of Duke after two years, and wanting to go to my other home and see the family again, I went to Vienna for a year. Though I tried to become involved with pirate radio there, I never really did anything about it. That was the year that I started going to the opera (hey, $1.50 to see Mozart or Rossini? dude, I'm there!) and started listening to non-normal genres of music. My friends were completely eclectic in their tastes, rituals, and lifestyle, something I had never experienced outside of the radio station at Duke. I spent my time learning (again) about reggae and jazz, going to avant-garde performances, hearing and taking part in "happenings," doing wild and crazy things like that. Also, after a trip a bunch of us took to Spain, we had our theme song: the truly amazing Slim Gaillard "African Jive." (By the way, he's described really well in Kerouac's On the Road.) That song is the best and silliest song one could ever dream of listening to while barreling down ahighway in Spain, late at night, a jug of wine being passed around to all but the driver, and 7 non-drivers laughing and singing along. If you've never heard the song, then I can't really explain how the music vibe I felt there belongs to it. Every time one of the crowd there said "Uh-huh," the rest would break into the "mm-hm-m, mm-hm-m" rhythm, and we'd be off with someone (usually me) doing the idiotic spoken gibberish that Slim Gaillard spat out on that record. Wow. That's my Vienna for ya'....

Jazz, Pop, sheets of sound, and radio mixing... When I got back to Duke for my senior year, my radio show changed. I played lots of world music, and I started to play more jazz. It was schizophrenic, either really noisy, or thoroughly structured and rhythmic (a mixture that I've carried around ever since). For a long while, inspired by an old DJ who had been on the air before me during my sophomore year, I explored the realm of spoken word recordings, and my best show at Duke was the one where I played instrumental tracks in the background as one spoken word segment after the next was played. The music was independent of the words, and yet they kept fitting together in ways that were really just amazing (and lucky). Totally awesome. I had a similarly weird idea, where, for example, I played the 2001 soundtrack (with its 12-tone moments by Ligetti) during hollow remixes of tunes I liked. This gave a Phil-Spector-Wall-of-Sound-feel to things, and you ended up only hearing those parts of the 12-tone music that fit the chord; it's really curious how ears work that way. I started doing a lot of mixing and playing things at the same time. Sometimes it was totally hideous, but after 3 or 4 years of doing it again every now and then, I can pass it off on people who have no idea that it's happening. Kinda neat. Evolving eclecticism... the lasting Vienna influence... Since then? A friend turned me on to Philip Glass while in Austria (Glass has always struck me as vaguely baroque, nicely structured but horribly technical at the same time), and the same friend (Niccy) turned me on to Prince. Wow, I never knew what I was missing. When I got back from Austria, I heard John Zorn for the first time, and he's been an addiction ever since.This was also the time that I came out of my vehement anti-pop phase. I learned to admire the hell out of Madonna, and I started listening to Public Enemy again. There are fine groups out there, as long as you don't condescend to hate them without a listen. On the other hand, I've listened to Hootie, I can't stand those trite frat-crap bands. Frat-hippie music gets on my nerves, too, while we're at it. Frats in general are pretty damn annoying... Read the next section (overview of listening tastes as of 1995) here. The pictures included in these pages are by Juan Miro, Pablo Picasso (Guernica and Les Desmoiselles d'Avignon), Jasper Johns, Rene Magritte, Oskar Kokoschka (the sketch of Webern), and Wassiliy Kandinsky. I also found some pictures of Tom Waits, Coltrane, and somebody making a drum...

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