The ending is a dud (in the 'fizzled out instead of exploding' sense), though. Too bad fadeouts weren't widely used on jazz recordings of this time. Cyclic/droney twenty minute songs require good exit devices.

At the moment I'm entranced by the long sort-of-Spanish modal number from Coltrane's Ole Coltrane album, "Ole". One way it's obvious that there's "rhythm everywhere," like Coltrane liked: if I try to follow Elvin's pattern on the snare, I get a little tripped up, unless I focus very explicitly on it and not the rhythms from the two bassists, the piano, Trane or Dolphy, or the other things Elvin is bashing.

The most touching thing I have heard today: the way Kurt Cobain says 'thank you' at the end of 'Aneurysm' on the live album.

The most exhilirating thing I have heard today: the sped-up intro to 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' on the following track.

The preceding is Ludwig Wittgenstein, from Philosophical Investigations. Note to self: don't forget, you want to walk.

107. The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict beetween it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty. -- We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!

Alex commented recently on how I seem to be 'listening with my brain' rather than with my ears lately. I don't really think that's accurate (and the possibly implicit anti-intellectualism bothers me slightly, mostly because it makes me think I am being misunderstood, and I do want to be understood). But it would be accurate to say that lately I have preferred to write more abstractly about music and listening, if that means to write less about jumping up and down and sweating and whatever else it is I am supposed to be properly writing about. I am listening differently, too, but not a whole lot differently - I'm just not writing about it in the same way.

So what's the difference? For a while before, but especially after moving, I think that I've felt a little down, and especially not in the mood to do the kind of listening or thinking that I am more accustomed to. Almost everything I have listened to has been for comfort, and hearing it has made me comfortable, without much desire to disrupt things. When I do think, it's about things that I've been thinking about for a while, with time to turn them over in my head, thinking about thoughts rather than what-I'm-hearing-and-experiencing-right-now. Maybe.

So anyway, hang tight.

Yes that's right this is a song about a superhero named Tony. Can you guess what it's called?

Imagine what it would be like if the fussiness, the daintiness, on Larks' Tongues in Aspic were replaced by the kind of messy noisiness that the music seems it could accomodate easily. (Variously: tiny-instrument quiet-music, monster funk, 'shrieking' guitar leads, cod-eastern grooves...) But the fussiness is what makes it prototypical art-rock, I guess.

Even though I think John Wetton is a bad singer, 'Book of Saturday' still sounds beautiful.