moon traveller herald

i. Forewarned is Four Eyed This blog was posted just a few days before Jerry Lee's passing. This timing was just by chance or something more weird. I do remember thinking he was the last of a line and was still alive. I was thunderstruck by the intensity of his performance on a less than minor hit of his: Papercup. With his leaving, leaves the last king of rocknroll.  I had also posted to Facebook, and that incurred some kickback. One of my friends who worked in the music business and had to deal with the Golden Haired Louisianan's Inflated Sense of Destined Self took this as an irritant. I sure don't blame him on that. He wrote: 'I’m sorry, but I can’t even watch. Based on personal experience on two occasions, he’s the biggest jerk in the business. He doesn’t deserve attention or accolades.' ii. With Poet Friend Jeff DeMark My friend Jeff DM as I recall had written a poem about Jerry Lee’s ranch. A guy he met had been up there. Was high or drunk and described the...

Excited to introduce the writing of Cecelia Estrada Vaughan to these pages! - J.V. About Luigi Russolo - 1885 – 1947 Machines that scream: inventing Futurist Music … “Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibilities of men.” Luigi Russolo writes, “Each sound carries with it a nucleus of foreknown and foregone sensations predisposing the auditor to boredom, in spite of all the efforts of innovating composers.  All of us have liked and enjoyed the harmonies of the great masters. For years, Beethoven and Wagner have deliciously shaken our hearts. Now we are fed up with them. This is why we get infinitely more pleasure imagining combinations of the sounds of trolleys, autos and other vehicles, and loud crowds, than listening once more, for instance, to the heroic or pastoral symphonies.” This futurist manifesto, “The Art of Noises,” became, perhaps frustratingly, t...

Sanders was aware of the work of John Cage and Harry Partch. Shown here, Partch's homestyle percussion instruments. Credit... If I pull together 12 of these, that's a dozen. Enough to call a stake. Take 12 The media was the message. And the artists dearly contemplated the media. Poke it. Glom it. Yes, the stuff held magic. There was John Cage silently scaling the New School, or there on CBS on I’ve Got a Secret, with the bathtub bathroom symphony of found sound. A pantheon of sorted musical inventors formed in the 20th Century, and some of the pantheon rolled on wheel on the side walks on the the same streets as Sanders. John Cage, Robert Moog, Leon Theremin, Raymond Scott. Harry Partch.  The music fell from the saucers or rose fog-like in field mushrooms. Invention on trash can lids and water streaming gamelans. Along with Cage, and Spike Jones, I'd venture that Partch influenced the Performance Art movement in New York in the '60s -- Happenings, like a rush of wind. N...