Lie Low

One of the first tools I created when I combined a MIDI controller with the Oddity (an Arp Odyssey emulator made by GForce) was a set of patches of pure intervals. I did not set these intervals in any fixed intonational scheme, but took a more simple approach. I tuned the two oscillators in the Oddity using the 128 steps available in MIDI to obtain the best beatless intervals as possible. I performed the tuning entirely by ear, listening for the absence of beats while tuning a unison, octave, major second, minor and major thirds, perfect fourths and fifths, minor and major sixths, and two minor sevenths, one above and one below the tonic note.

The title "Lie Low" comes from a fragment of a folk song recorded in 1930 in Manchester Center, Vermont, by Helen Hartness Flanders.  Flanders included this song in her book The New Green Mountain Songster.  I found the book years ago in Brattleboro's Brooks Memorial Library.  I was drawn to the fragment "Lie Low" because it is the sole entry in the volume in the Mixolydian mode.  In my own performances of "Lie Low," I take the original melody, stretch it out over an extended period of time without rhythm, and place the melody over a drone.  "Lie Low" is performed using the Oddity/MIDI controller.  The melody's intervals, as they relate to the drone, are taken from the purely tuned intervals that I stored as patches.  I then manipulate ring modulation the filter's frequency and resonance to emphasize various harmonics and difference tones in the intervals.

Soundcheck with children playing

"Lie Low" received the heaviest editing of all the tracks on Panic and Anti-Panic. The old train yard at Engehavej at which the Festival of Endless Gratitude took place was a cavernously resonant space. Since I don't tend to like to work with high volume, I didn't play my set particularly loud. Nearly 30 minutes of music were filled with clanking bottles, dragging chairs, children laughing, and one rather loud cell phone conversation; removing these distractions reduced the track down to a little over nine minutes, so the version on Panic and Anti-Panic does not represent a complete performance.

View of the stage; Zhaeng Zhaeng performing.

Unrock

The track "Unrock" refers to the record store of the same name, located in Krefeld, Germany. Krefeld, the birthplace of the artist Joseph Beuys, was the first stop on the trip. The store Unrock presented the concert, the last one to take place in the old store, as an event to mark its move to a new location.


Before the show, we hung out with Bernd, a friend of the owner, who reminded us that Krefeld sits not far from Düsseldorf, the home of Kraftwerk, Can and Neü. Bernd's words stuck in my mind, and in the mid-section of "Unrock," with its insistent LFO-based pulse, and in the final section's bursts of white noise, I pay my respects to the traditions of the region.


A document of a complete performance, "Unrock" is the only track on Panic and Anti-Panic to appear in an unedited form.

Up the Gravity Well

The tracks on Panic and Anti-Panic flow in reverse chronological order. Although "Up the Gravity Well" appears first on the album, the performance occurred at the end of the trip, in Den Haag, the Netherlands. "Up the Gravity Well" was recorded in the basement performance space of the Villa Grijpsheert. Actually a squat in the embassy section of town, The Villa Grijpsheert stood at least three elegant brick stories tall and housed a variety of artists and their studios.

The title refers to a phrase that William Gibson uses in his novel Count Zero to describe the location of a burnt-out hacker, Wigan Ludgate, who is squatting in the remains of the Tessier-Ashpool family's orbital mansion, the Villa Straylight:

Wig, I said, times money but tell me what you intend to do now? Because I was curious. Known the guy years, in a business way. Finn, he says, I gotta get up the gravity well, God's up there. I mean, he says, He's everywhere but there's too much static down here, it obscures His face.

Concert poster by Samantha Rees.

Up The Gravity Well - Excerpt by johnlevin

Panic and Anti-Panic

When I put a record out into the world, it should have a life of its own, separate from me and my ideas. Ideally, it will travel to far away places where I lose all control over its reception. At the same time, I think it's important to leave a trail in the world so that someone who finds the record can, if, they desire, follow it home.


In the spring of 2009 I received an invitation to participate in The Festival of Endless Gratitude. The Festival, organized by a group of musicians, visual artists and producers, came together in Copenhagen, Denmark, during the third week of May. The organizers located the festival in an former trolley repair station, a space in the early stages of a transition into an arts center. In this rough but impressive space they installed a stage, bar and art gallery, and devoted four nights to celebrating the connections between a group of artists and musicians in Copenhagen and western New England.

I took Sunday afternoon to explore the city by myself, with the Botanical Gardens as one of my destinations. The day began overcast and with a cold rain, but by the time I arrived at the Botanisk Have the sun shone warmly. On one of the garden paths I chanced upon a bronze of the goddess Athena and the satyr Marsyas. As a player of reedpipes and shawms, I have felt a sympathy for Marsyas' misfortunes involving the gods and musical instruments ever since I first encountered the stories. I took several pictures of the statue while thinking to myself, "here's an album cover for some future day."


Upon my return, I decided to release the recordings of my European performances, and to use this picture for the cover. All I needed now was a title. The god Pan often takes the form of a satyr in visual art, and the word "panic" is derived from his name. The two Olympians with whom Marsyas had unfortunate encounters are Athena and Apollo. Pan and satyrs, to me, conjure the Dionysian aspect of the life, while Athena calls to mind life's Apollonian aspect. So I considered this jumbled complex in my mind of Marsyas-Satyr-Dionysian and Athena-Apollo-Apollonian and came up with Panic and Anti-Panic. The idea of going on a brief tour of Europe to play music in places I had never been before would ordinarily strike me with, well, panic. Yet on this trip I remained, to my surprise, quite relaxed and in the moment. Panic and Anti-Panic. Following the festival in Copenhagen, I hopped into a late nineties Volvo with the duo Aeth'r Myth'd and hit the road, opening for their concerts in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands. Both musicians in Aeth'r Myth'd are also members of Sunburned Hand of the Man. If I imagine my music on a continuum with the music of Aeth'r Myth'd (or Sunburned, for that matter), I'd place them more towards the Dionysian end of the spectrum, and myself more towards the Apollonian. Panic and Anti-Panic.