Mick Barr is a fucking national treasure. And Derek, if you're put off by the fast 'n' spazzy stuff, may I suggest checking out Orthrelm's OV, which is a single 40-minute track of some of the most maddening metallic minimalism you'll ever hear.

Mick gave Weasel a copy when we were in NYC last week, it was good driving music. It is very clear, not at all tough to listen to,
and there is nothing "spazzy" about it, it is all about precision.

mick barr's medium is speed. if you can deal with an overwhelming amount of information, there's an overwhelming amount of variation and structure in his music. not everyone is prepared to deal with this because all they can hear in it is "a lot of notes".

with repeated listening, the detail and imagination of mick's music becomes quite obvious. i wouldn't say this is the case with any of the zorn projects mentioned!

ww

mick rules. that's my boy right there, word em up. cant wait to hear this one.

Hugh Dickey did it all ten years sooner.

I dig this disc; hopefully that feeling is conveyed in the piece above. I’m just not sure I’ll be spinning it too often or in the company of my girlfriend, parents or small mammalian pets. Damon’s comment about it being great driving music strikes a chord: I was listening to it the other day on a commute, one of those brightly sunny, but bitterly cold days that are so common here in the Twin Cities, and found myself continually becoming hypnotized by the modular structures such that I kept having to remind myself where I was going and how to get there. Weird.

W, I disagree with you regarding Zorn’s projects, plenty of “detail and imagination” in all three mentioned, IMO. I hear the same in Barr’s compositions, but there’s something about the mercilessness of the medium (light speed electric guitar & 1000 beat/minute drums) that numbs me to the minutiae after awhile (why I used the qualifier “semblance” above).

Walt, I only know Dickey from your Screwdriver! project, but based on that I’d say he’s got nothing on Barr.

points taken, derek.

that said, i come from the generation of death metal, so mindnumbing sameness (ha ha ha) isn't a big deal to me.

ww

Walt, I only know Dickey from your Screwdriver! project, but based on that I’d say he’s got nothing on Barr.

He was also in Pie and currently leads Richard Bitch (which is more of a song-oriented group). I didn't say he "has anything" on Barr--just that he did similar stuff many years earlier. I've got hundreds of cassettes to prove it.

i must hear this "screwdriver!" of which thou speaketh . . .

my favorite cecil taylor band was the 1978 one with shannon jackson on drums. that group had a very orchestral, spacious vibe, heavy on piquant dissonance and tense outbursts of blunt force violence.

ww

You can download a great bootleg of that band at Church Number 9 right now. Cologne, 1978.

Weasel, if Derek will email me your address, I'll send you a copy.

mr. horn, my address can be found at http://nowave.pair.com/ugexplode. you are a gentleman and a scholar!

ww

please post your opinion here after you check it out, WW.

Walter H., have you heard much Mick Barr, or are you just going from the review/discussion here? just curious...

Not much. I've heard one disc from a few years back with Barr and a drummer. Don't remember the name. It also had some duos by another group on it. The Barr stuff reminded me a lot of some of Hugh's obsessiveness. There was one tune we never released with this (about) 25-note run that Hugh would play over and over at roughly half speed of light. Gary K. would barrage along with him, and I really didn't have anything to add (and I can't play that fast), so I'd mostly sit out.

the record mr. horn is referring to would be the split release with mick's orthrelem backed with touchdown. it's well recorded and a fine representation of the orthrelm "non repetitive music" aesthetic. those particular titles were some of the few compositions by orthrelm that were written as a duo (the other half being drummer josh blair).

ww

the most fully realized example of mick's genius is his album "annoint" made under his new solo "ocrilim" moniker. it's a suite of music - an ice cold tunnel of pure melody and harmony with more space and nuance than his usual stuff. there are no drums in the way, just 5 overdubbed guitars. he made this project while playing in the flying luttenbachers. the structural and harmonic influence my own material (which he was playing in the band) can be clearly heard in in this recording. it's sort of a companion piece to "the void" by the luttenbachers.

ww

Yeah, Anoint is great stuff. My personal favorites among his discography include Iorxhscimtor (because it was the first thing I ever heard - bought it the night I watched Orthrelm open for a different lineup of the Luttenbachers at Brownies in NYC), Anoint, OV and OR: 12r3, a 2-disc set by Octis on Peterbilt.

Maybe Phil has a different definition of "spazzy" ... language being mutable and constantly evolving ... but then I'm still waiting on his argument about how there is no such thing as "simplistic pop music."

[i]You can download a great bootleg of that band at Church Number 9 right now. Cologne, 1978.[/i]

I think church number nine and all the 'music blogs' that upload on rapidshare are fuckfeces.

great to make out of print music available; BS to not even attempt to get money to the musicians or labels that released it, but INSTEAD give it to a company like rapidshare. you ride my middle finger when you support places like that

but it doesn't cost any money to upload or download from a place like rapidshare. they're not necessarily making a dime off this situation.

furthermore, the cecil boot (which has been circulating for a long time - i've had it for years) was a friggin' radio broadcast. it was free in the first place. get off your high horse, bro.

either that or go paypal cecil taylor 100 bucks (and support paypal).

the world is evil - we are all complicit in the horror.

ww

Yeah chill out Steve - if you want to save up your shekels I'll give you an address of a great record shop in Stockholm where any one of the Ch9 LPs would cost you more than your airfare to get there. Noone denies the quality of an mp3 ripped from old vinyl is shite compared to a proper reissue, but if the downloading thing proves to the people who own the masters that there is sufficient demand for a proper reissue, albeit a limited edition one, it might bear fruit. Still, if you want to deprive yourself of the pleasure of hearing this stuff, it's your choice. Sure, if it was one of mine (ie one I'd PAID for myself to release) and still in print I'd be pissed off to see it ripped (I'd also make it my business to direct people to the real album and the people distributing it) - but if it's OOP it's fair game.
If anyone wants to stick a free download of my first Return Of The New Thing disc (formerly on Leo), GO FOR IT. Leo has scratched it from his catalogue and I'm sitting on the last 50 copies in the world, but I'd be happy to know someone was checking it out for free. So I'm with Weasel on this one. If you're feeling guilty about not supporting the musicians, tell me which ones and if I know them I'll send your their address and you can send them a Western Union money order if that'd make you feel better.

Should a used record store pay royalties to artists?

Should a used record store pay royalties to artists?

Good question - I'm guessing it's an ethical/philosophical question rather than a legal one. Something similar was one of the major planks of the Art Workers platform back in the 60s and 70s - that visual artists should receive royalties or commissions on future sales of their work (e.g. work purchased from a gallerist or dealer for $500 then flipped at auction for $50,000).

A really extreme case is Rauschenberg. He was selling his combines for $1000-1500 in the early days, not bad money then and he sold them as fast as he could make them.
Recently, he really wanted to have at least one again, and had to shell out a few million ( still a bargain at what they go for now) to get one.

I'm sure he still had a few pence left over. I'm as big a Rauschenberg fan as the next man, but I'm sure he's not living on the poverty threshold in a council project on the south side of Paris like a very famous jazz musician I could mention..

If artists want to receive royalties/commissions on future sales of their works, I'd think they'd have to make binding legal arrangements. No different than inventions, I don't think. The thing is, these creators generally aren't in a position to strike hard bargains when they make their first sales.

Keep in mind, though, that, especially in the case of artworks, it's hard to sort out the portion that's due to artistic merit. Suppose, some work becomes valuable because all pieces made in Philly between 1900 and 1915 get hot for some crazy reason. It can be as much like neighborhood land values as it is a matter of finally recognized genius.

And, of course, there's always the question of what the artist's obligations might be when a painting he or she sold for $50k ends up being worth only $5K ten years later. ;>}

thanks for going to the trouble to send me the screwdriver! cd, mr. horn. much appreciated. i appreciate the energy and velocity of the music. these are very unhinged improvisations.

now, the matter of comparing mick barr and hugh dickey, as if dickey has "done everything mick barr is doing already" - gotta call a little BS on that statement.

hugh dickey, judging from the screwdriver! cd, has very fluid shredder chops a la allan holdsworth or what have you. there are a lot of players like this on the planet, especially in heavy metal or fusion. i'm not saying there's anything average or pedestrian about this particular skill - on the contrary, it's something that takes discipline and practice. the net result generally can't be simply dismissed.

however, dickey's playing has a very cultivated smoothness that mick barr totally eschews in his playing, partially because mick is primarily self-taught and largely uninformed of traditional music theory. dickey's choice of harmonic diversions are very well thought out and tend to move in very deliberate scalar, modal or modulating fashions. mick's guitar playing is primarily - almost singularly - concerned with the development and transformation of melodic fragments, generally not related to any particular harmonic plan and most always extremely chromatic or anti-scalar.

so here's my analysis:

mick barr - very raw, angular but fleet articulation of intensely chromatic fragments of material transforming at an intense rate, generally with little repetition (cf. pre-OV orthrelm)and not related to any specific harmony.

hugh dickey - very smooth and fluid guitar shredding based soundly in theory, modulating intelligently in relation to harmony.

these two guys are doing something completely different. they don't sound alike at all beyond their ability to play very fast strings of 16th notes. neither mick nor hugh were the first (or last) to play fast guitar.

i still posit that the music of mick barr is a very unique and particular language of its own . . . he is an innovator, if not an iconoclast. if anything he has more to do with bartok than the average shredder.

ww

Well, as I said I haven't heard that much of Barr, and (though you haven't heard that much Dickey either) you may be dead right about their dissimilarities. But as for Hugh having all this deliberativeness and schooling and all that, though he was in the process of dropping out of Berklee when we were playing together, he was only about 20 and had only been at Berklee for about five minutes when he realized it wasn't his thing. He was basically self-taught too. I've never heard much of a Holdsworth connection myself, but maybe I've missed it.

Kendig, OTOH, who was about 30 back then, was college trained in jazz performance. (I was the old fart of the group, being about ten years older than Gary, and having a background mostly in classical composition.)

Anyhow, thanks for the comments. Glad you enjoy the disc.