Making My Own Mojo #1

Yesterday I sent in my proposal (15 pages!) for a book in the excellent 33 1/3 series. It's interesting to think about what records you want to spend that much time with, and what records you can write 30-40,000 words about. I chose the Fiery Furnaces Blueberry Boat for two reasons: I love the record, and I don't understand it. But I do think it's understandable. And in truth, I've come a fair bit of the way toward understanding (or creating my own understanding) it by writing the pitch.

It'll be a couple of months (or more) before they announce books they're accepting. I decided to make my own mojo here by collecting the articles and broadcasts I've done about and with Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger over the past five years.

The first time I saw them was in 2007 (already late to the game!). It was a free concert at Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, Queens, and at that time I didn't know them that well. I may have had an album or two. I know I had been transfixed with the song "Single Again" (as is everyone who hears it, I think) since hearing it on WFMU (before I had a show there -I wish I could remember who I heard play it!). I wasn't prepared for the way they reinvent and force fit their songs live. That was the first time I felt like there was something I had to "figure out" about the band. The first time I tried was the following year, in the pages of the Brooklyn Rail.

Making My Own Mojo #2

Later, in 2009, I got to broadcast my first Fiery Furnaces concert on a poscast I was doing for WFMU. It can be streamed here. Thanks to NYC Taper for providing the tape and to the Friedberger siblings for permi ssion to webcast it.

Making My Own Mojo #3

In February, 2010, Matthew and Eleanor played on my show on WFMU. (Stream it here.) It was great to see the strategies behind their work - or perhaps the lack of. Their albums and concerts are so methodical, but once they were in the WFMU studio it was all trial and error, switching instruments, encouraging each other and abandoning new ideas for songs they've played dozens of times. It was also my first time sitting down with them. It was fun to see how much they're still siblings, and it comes through in the interview. Twenty months later I broadcast (with their permission) outtakes from that session, which can be heard on this episode of Miniature Minotaurs.

Making My Own Mojo #4

I wrote about the Fiery Furnaces again in 2011 for the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever. It was another attempt to unravel the mysteries I see in the band. The weird thing is that I'm not even sure what the mysteries are. I could talk to Matthew and Eleanor all day but I still wouldn't know what question it is I wanted to ask, which stone to turn. I don't know which book on the shelf will cause the wall to spin and reveal their secret sanctum. And really, I'm not sure they know what questions should be asked either. Really they're just writing songs, doing their work. But there's something strange beneath the surface. Something I'm still trying to understand.

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whistling noise under-going the air, adding some excitement into a standard game from catch.



Text found at the useless Entertainment News aggregator site.

from "The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz (1934)

"There are people who liken these days to an apocrypha, put secretly between the chapters of the great book of the year; to palimpsests, covertly included between its pages; to those white, unprinted sheets on which eyes, replete with reading and the remembered shapes of words, can imagine colors and pictures, which gradually become paler and paler from the blankness of the pages, or can rest on their neutrality before continuing the quest for new adventures in new chapters.

"Ah that old, yellowed romance of the year, that large, crumbling book of the calendar. It lies forgotten somewhere in the archives of Time, and its content continues to increase between the boards, swelling incessantly from the garrulity of months, from the quick self-perpetuation of lies, of drivel, and of dreams which multiply in it. Ah, when writing down these tales, revising the stories about my father on the used margin of the text, don't I, too, surrender to the secret hope that they will merge imperceptibly with the yellowing pages of that most splendid, moldering book, that they will sink into the gentle rustle of its pages and become absorbed there?"

Also Kurtág's Homage to Verdi

At first it was a CD
of Shostakovitch quartets
nos. 10, 13 and 14
on replay until I switched
to a sequence of all Derek Bailey.

The sentence keeps repeating in my mind:
"My father's dead." Those three words as
a statement of fact, as if my brain were trying
to convince me. I am not without remorse,
but my brain is dealing with nuts and bolts.
"Do not forget: Your father's dead."

Tonight at a recital of piano music of György Kurtág,
a 90-second song with a libretto taken from
a Hungarian turn of phrase. "We are only flowers,
mere flowers." William Parker too sings of flowers.

My brain is not yelling at me. It is speaking softly,
if insistently. It senses I am working to distract it
and is worried I'll forget that my father's dead.
And so it must, it thinks, repeat: Your father's dead.

The sole single-movement
quartet on the CD
bears the opus number 13.
A baker's dozen, my father taught me.
And now my brain reminds me
that my father taught me.

The delicacy of Kurtág's
"Homage to Verdi: Caro Nome,"
four hands playing what two,
indelicately, could do;
The amplified and distorted delicacy
of Derek Bailey's guitar.

In truth my brain is
taking pity on me,
doing the best it can
to keep me in check
without upsetting me.
We are only flowers,
mere flowers.






Thanks to Katherine Stephens for the photo.