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[mark-mahoney]

California Dreamin as sung by Marvin the paranoid android

[mark-mahoney]

I tend to agree that the blowback against Robert Glasper’s original comments (sloppy and stereotypical generalizations about how women listen to music, which can be found here) is out of proportion to their actual significance, but Ethan’s defense of them seems tone-deaf to me on a couple of levels. Ethan writes,

There is genuine and serious oppression of women in the world. Glasper (and I) are not part of that serious oppression.

Actually, we’re all complicit in this oppression. That’s how patriarchy works. We pay taxes that go to our overwhelmingly male elected officials, billions of which then get funneled to our ally Saudi Arabia, one of the most hostile countries on Earth for women. We buy products from companies run by men with actively hostile attitudes towards women (see: the latest Uber fiasco). etc.

Anyway, Glasper’s most important musical influence is his mother, and his manager is a smart woman. Fervently proclaiming that Glasper is against female intellect or female power is ridiculous.

This line of defense belongs to the same category as, “I have black friends, therefore nothing I do or say can be racist or contribute to racism in any way.” ...

What is potentially problematic is that a big part of Glasper’s style is informed by black dance music mostly about sleeping with young hot chicks. The “Thong Song” is old at this point, but the summer it was the big hit, I walked around with a slack jaw. “This is really an OK song?” I kept wondering. As far as I know, the politics of music in that thread have not gotten better since.

If anyone thinks black dance music is ‘mostly about sleeping with young hot chicks’ they are missing so much context I don’t even know where to begin. Sex plays a vitally important role in some of that music, yes, just as it plays an essential role in most opera and in just about every genre of popular music. And what’s wrong with the ‘Thong Song’? I just googled the lyrics to be sure I wasn’t missing something because I really can’t figure out what would bother anyone. Is it considered ‘crude’ or ‘vulgar’ to talk about a near-universal human experience like sexual arousal and physical desire? (And it’s always worth reiterating that jazz was also considered ‘crude’ ‘unrefined’ and ‘vulgar’ in its early decades and that white folks have dismissed contemporary black music on those terms for most of American music history.) 

 One Facebook post complaining about the interview begins: “The jazz world needs to speak out RIGHT NOW. The vile sexism in this interview is beyond disgusting.” I’m a liberal and I’m feminist: this is a case of other liberals and feminists seeing a weakness and attacking. This is part of why Trump won.  ...Again, this petty stuff is part of why Trump won. Again, the right loves it! They are a monolith. They back their insane fascist, no matter what, in a situation where the phrase “beyond disgusting” could be used with total accuracy.So many on the left try to gain small victories by making the nearest lefty take a hit. But there have been too many hits and the ship is going down. Now we wonder what the hell comes next.

This is a matter of opinion, but I don’t see the need to bring Trump into this and I think that’s a pretty facile analysis of why Trump won. There are very concrete economic realities (globalization, deindustrialization, the decimation of unionized labor and concomitant anger at immigrant labor for ‘taking our jobs’) behind Trump’s ascendance and I find it rather difficult to believe that internecine feminist squabbling on Facebook really had much of an impact on anything, one way or the other.

[mark-mahoney]

my review of Seaside

John Tilbury, John Lely, Dirar Kalash — Seaside (Another Timbre)

John Tilbury and John Lely (Dirar Kalash not shown)

The importance of place anchors Seaside, musically and conceptually. The album was recorded at clavichordist John Tilbury’s home in the English seaside town of Deal, and it bears both sonic and visual insignia of the sea. Take the album cover: at first glance, one might assume that it depicts the coast of Deal. The sleeve notes, however, reveal that it is actually a photograph of the coast of Jaffa in Palestine, circa 1900, near where oudist Dirar Kalash was born. Topographical commonalities become a way of connecting disparate places, much as the moments of synchronicity that occur in free improvisation become ways of connecting disparate musical approaches. In this music, connections are manifold but rarely obvious.

Keep reading

[mark-mahoney]

Bill Morrison & Michael Gordon: Light Is Calling

[mark-mahoney]

morning mustard

This is the first issue of a collaborative art magazine my friends and I created

[mark-mahoney]

Henry Threadgill’s Zooid plays this twisted, kinetic music in an amazingly restrained, patient way. As with all of Threadgill’s output, the music becomes richer and more rewarding with each listen.

[mark-mahoney]

Saxman Curt Oren also stopped by the studio!

[mark-mahoney]

Cyrus Pireh bringing down the airwaves on Sound Grammar last month

[mark-mahoney]

COULD MARK MAHONEY GET ANY HOTTER FUCK I’M IN LOVE WITH HIM LOOK AT THOSE EYES

[mark-mahoney]

“Todo ser humano es un artista, un ser libre, llamado a participar en la transformación y la reorganización de las condiciones, el pensamiento y las estructuras

[mark-mahoney]

The ongoing Re:View series shares a diverse array of independent voices and opinions; it doesn’t reflect the views or opinions of the Walker or its curators. Today, Walker Intern Mark Mahoney shares his perspective on Douglas R. Ewart’s recent Sound Horizon performance

[mark-mahoney]

I made a piece that I called This Piece Is its Name in response to a lot of the people around the Fluxus scene who were writing scores that often took the form of instructions, like “boil the telephone.” Often very cool things to do; but I was not sure that I was happy giving people instructions of what to do because I didn’t want to be instructed to do things. And I wondered what the function of these scores was anyway? I thought maybe there’s a way to get away altogether from the principle of instructing someone to “do something,” which is what I disliked about music lessons and playing checkers…. I felt that it might be interesting to make some “pieces” that did not require fulfillment by a performer. This Piece Is its Name went into a kind of black hole of tautological space where the piece became self-sufficient and didn’t bother to have the qualities of institutional support or neediness.

Tony Conrad

[mark-mahoney]

A Villager from Aricakoyu Arriving in Mahmutbey-Istanbul, September 1997