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Beefheart 2013

Having read John French’s book “Through the Eyes of Magic”, I thought I’d finally get a copy of the remastered “Trout Mask Replica” from around 2013. There are a few different CD pressings over the years, but the one remastered from a tape copy Frank Zappa had made from the original tape was said to be a big improvement over the original pressing. The Zappa family had it remastered in 2012 by Bob Ludwig, and released in 2013 on CD, and in 2018 on vinyl.

I heard about it in 2013, but at the time wasn’t interested enough to pick it up. When I looked for it a couple of weeks ago, I found that it had been a limited release, and wasn’t available. So I went to Discogs, and after much searching found one 2013 copy. Great.

I copied the CD to my hard drive, and started listening on headphones, eyes closed. Yeah, it works great. The instruments are clean and easily distinguishable, with one guitar panned far left, bass, voice, drums and horns to the center, and Zoot Horn Rollo’s guitar to the right. Some variations from track to track, as not all tracks had the same instrumentation or musicians.

Odd to listen to this so closely, so many years after first hearing it when it came out, and after just reading French’s book. The instrument overlaps are not really polyrhythms in the standard sense, as one instrument doesn’t try to fit, say, five beats into the same duration as a second instrument plays four. That approach to polyrhythms give a kind of smoothing of the beat, it resists one instrument taking over as dominant, instead the music moves like a ribbon of sound.

With the Magic Band’s approach, the tempo for all instruments is kept the same, and for the most part the beats fall on the same place for all instruments. However, the phrases the instruments play are of differing lengths, so that when one phrase ends another continues. French counted the beats in each phrase, and multiplied the phrases out so that each repeated until their patterns ended together. Thus, a five beat phrase and a four beat phrase each repeated until the musicians had played 20 beats (4 X 5). Then they could either start the pattern again, or switch to a new pattern. So, a different flavor of polyrhythm. This is why, say, Balinese gamelan sounds like a river streaming by, but the Magic Band sounds like ten trucks driving by with square tires.

The instruments hide behind each other, then one darts out when another is between notes. There are silences so much a part of their sound, silences appearing seemingly at random that you can fall into, then booting you out as another instrument’s phrase steps up to claim its place.

Van Vliet’s desert lyrics are still striking, and his voice is a thick brush gone wild on the instrumental canvas.

Great stuff. I’m going back to listen some more. And play.

Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic

I’ve worked through John “Drumbo” French’s book “Beefheart: Through the Eyes of Magic”. 800 pages by perhaps the musician most responsible for Trout Mask Replica, and who Van Vliet didn’t even put in its credits. 

Robert Polidori and I discovered Beefheart and TMR in 1969, when it was released. At that time, after years of playing in a grade school garage rock band, I was listening to Cage, Stockhausen, Terry Riley, Reich, Roland Kirk, Ravi Shankar, Zappa, Coltrain, Varese, and others, including much music from other cultures. I was ravenous for new music. 

When I heard Beefheart, I heard: short single-measure phrases, often repeated for four measures. Each instrument had its own phrase, rhythm, and sometimes of different length, and similar to Steve Reich’s phrase shifting compositions, they were composed to play themselves out, and then all end together on the same beat. Played together they were cacophonous, so you had to listen to each phrase separately before you could understand the structure of a single moment. Similar to Indian music, all of the instruments were synched to the same beat and tempo, which was a major default for all the songs on the album.

The instrumental music didn’t keep to western scales, they were often polyphonic, and usually if they were mostly within a scale, jumped out randomly. However, the singing for any given song would usually stay within a single key and scale. I’m sure that this is because Beefheart grew up listening and singing to blues and R&B, and that was how he knew to sing. 

French’s book is fascinating to me for many reasons, and part of it is that he articulates exactly how TMR—as well as Beefheart’s earlier albums—were constructed. His earliest recording, Safe as Milk, was blues songs all the way, and French gives Ry Cooder credit for pulling the music together so it could be recorded. His next couple of albums were really blues jams, and sounded like it. A couple of songs from that period crept into TMR, such as Veteran’s Day Poppy, and while I always liked them, they were oddly conventional compared to the other music on the album.

Polidori, my friend David Swatling and I went to hear Beefheart in NYC in 1971, touring on their next album “Lick my Decals Off”. I had memorized the album before hearing them live. I was amazed by the band’s ability to play every note as it was on the album. Understand that the album—like TMR—sounded both structured and cacophonous, and that many if not most people just thought it was noise, with no structure at all. But hearing the guitar solo “One Red Rose That I Mean” live… and hearing that every note and hesitation was exactly as it had been played on the recording—was a confirmation (for me) of the musicality of the band. For myself, having survived the overplayed improvisations of Cream, Grateful Dead, and so much of the rock/blues of the late 1960s, I didn’t need to hear any improvise within a given scale. I wanted to hear new composition, which is what they delivered, bravely.

French details how, in 1968-1969, TMR was born. First of all, Beefheart couldn’t play any instruments other than a harmonica. 95% of harmonica playing requires zero knowledge of music theory. Beefheart would bang out a phrase on the piano, which French would either record or, later, transcribe onto notation paper. This would be repeated for every instrument’s part in a song (except for drums, which French usually provided himself). French would then teach each band member their part. As they practiced a piece together, French or the other musicians would revise their parts so that they would fit together, in the ways I explained above. The other musicians did know how to play their instruments, and like French, knew enough music theory (or at least, the logic of their instruments) to map the notes to their fretboards, and find a way to make non-fretboard generated riffs playable.

Beefheart, knowing no music theory or even how to explain the limitations of western musical practice, would lay down rough phases that were not generated from a western theory. So it is not surprising that his phrasing doesn’t sound as though it came from a Berkeley or Julliard. If you started from music theory in the late 1960s, you wouldn’t get to where he got. For instance, no one else did. 

Beefheart was able to do what he did because of what he didn’t know. 

What was also needed was someone to use standard construction tools to put the pieces Beefheart generated into a structure that would hold up, and that could be repeated. This is the role that French played in TMR. The third requirement was someone who could (and would) learn the music from French and French’s notation, and play it back from memory. That is what the other musicians in the band did. 

Van Vliet was several years older than the teenaged TMR musicians. French relates in detail how Van Vliet bullied them using cult-leader cruelty into staying in the band, and dedicating years of time to learning and performing this music. It breaks your heart to read the stories. But it was what was missing in each of the TMR musicians, and Van Vliet, that allowed the music to be constructed and recorded. If the musicians had been older and had more knowledge of both music, they would have left like Ry Cooder did. If Van Vliet had more musical training, he wouldn’t have approached composing like he did. 

French makes the good point that it isn’t enough to simply work from intuition without any musical background. Van Vliet couldn’t repeat what he banged out on piano, and he had a lot of trouble even coming in at the right point when performing on stage. What he supplied was something the musicians couldn’t, and what they supplied was something he couldn’t. Music was bigger than each of them.

-Sunnyvale 2025

Radicondoli

Robert Edgar 2025

Did this flower expect me? Look, it’s blooming, all the light it has absorbed

is radiating into my face, into my eyes. And the scent. 

It says, I’m here, I’m sharing with you, and seconds ago you were lost.

This is how we are born, you and I. Now give me what you brought me, what you collected because you have lived.

You’ve walked all this way. You’ve lived all these days.

The pavement is just stones. The words just bones. 

This street continues every street you surfed down,

Every street you ran down,

Every stumble you fell down.

There is just one street, and there are all of you, you fragmented man.

The village is one street short. Girl with a hoop, grey man with two canes.

Wooden steps worn smooth, you don’t land on them they are not land, you slide across them and follow their lead. Now grab at the sky, now fall to the rush of their river, swept by straw brooms, there are no shadows here that have not been maintained for centuries; melodies notated in architecture.

Now sing of this moment, the flower says. Of the time that has no sequence.

Time, Cinema, Consciousness, Being.

I was constructing a digital optical printer for my friend Robert Polidori to use. One function I worked on was what I thought would be a simple frame duplication system for video files.

I used  a MAX/MSP/Jitter software tool to allow me to multiply video and corresponding audio “frames”, so that, for instance, something that had an original frame could be doubled to have two of every original frame.

So I could have a 1-second video clip of 30 frames per second copy into a 2-second video clip of 30 frames per second. Every single frame would be doubled. With video, no problem.

But the audio duplication gave an unexpected problem. I loaded the audio track into a buffer in RAM, which is addressable per sample–48000 per second. And II copied each sample, so that the new file will have two samples for every one in the original file.

The thing is… duplicating it had the result of cutting the perceivable playback frequency by half. 

The duplicated sample didn’t register as a change in audio. Instead, the duplication doubled the time that the initial sample was held, which cut the frequency in half. So the pitch actually dropped.

Remember that if a simple sine wave is played at 60 cycles per second, the speaker that plays it moves back and forth sixty times, making pressure waves in the air that match that back and forth frequency,

But this isn’t a full sample of a sound wave’s cycle. It is an audio sample of 1/48000 of a second, Essentially, the speaker cone doesn’t move. The cone won’t move until it has a new, different sample. 

The model this has for sensible time is striking to me. Following this model: a visual stimulus can have its duration extended without changing the nature of what is perceived. However, a sound stimulus is RELIANT on time to exist… sound is the registering of the differences of air pressure through time. If there is no change, there is no sound.

So our senses at once live in two temporal modes: the atemporal, where nothing changes, and the eotemporal, where there is sequence. Our awareness, our consciousness, is always positioning our self across these two. 

Thus: simultaneous opposites.

Between Analog and Digital

Another posting in response to posts by Tom Sherman and others, on Tom’s website, on May 18.

I’ve noted above the divisions between film and video that I noticed from the beginning of consumer video technology (I put this at the arrival of video porta paks from Japan in the early 1970s). At that time, no one saw video at Anthology Film Archives, and it was well over a decade before I saw it at the SF Cinematheque, either.

But what excited me in the mid 1980s was the introduction of two technologies: interactive video disc (analog) and Truevision’s “Targa” video graphic card.

The Targa card took analog video input and output RGB analog video synched with a digital overlay. In 1985 I started a company with old friends and new, integrating hardware and software to produce interactive marketing systems using videodiscs, touchscreens, and Targa boards. By 1987 I’d learned enough C programming to make my own authoring and performance system that also used analog, interactive video discs, computers, Targa boards, and video screens. I called it “Living Cinema”.

My goal with Living Cinema was to create cinema in real time. It wasn’t film, and it was both analog and digital. It had prerecorded elements, but also real-time elements. And the aesthetics reached both into film and video history (as well as music and other audio histories). If you’re interested, some samples are archived here: https://www.robertedgar.com/cinema-performance/

The thing is, at the moment when the personal computer appeared, there was a period of time when the analog and digital smeared into each other.

A couple of years later, I was at Commodore working with Amigas when the Video Toaster was released. Another hybrid, but one that landed more solidly in the video editing studio.

If you look back to the writings of the Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, you find that his concept of montage overlapped his concept (and practice) of writing. He didn’t want to write linearly, he wanted to create a “circular book” where words and texts had multiple links to other words and texts. This is like a big video disc, just awaiting the cinematographer/viewer to leap from shot to shot, frame to frame. Thus Living Cinema. And thus hypertext: just below is a long URL that is a hypertext link to my 1986 article on this subject–preceding the web.

Sorry about all the self-referencing, but I’ve been navigating down these exact paths since I was at Synapse… film/video, analog/digital, art/business, and preconstructed/live performance. And all of these paths I find fecund… not academic really, but because when you mess them all up they provide a lot of juicy play… between the lines.

Art and Film and Video and Synapse

This was first published (May 18 2024) as a note to Tom Sherman, replying to a posting he made about Syracuse University’s VPA and Newhouse Schools.

Tom,

Well-thought, and well-written. This is a huge subject, one that has a long and important history at Syracuse, and one that is still developing at the speed of light.

have a lot to relate about the subjects you bring up here. And even more in the doing, every stroke of the way. I will respectfully keep it as brief as I can, as your text already invokes so much. I’ll provide some teleological history, about the early cleaving between film and video at Syracuse University. It’s personal, as I’m describing what was happening while I was part of it.

I entered Syracuse in 1970, in liberal arts. Within a month I switched to VPA, as I couldn’t stand the huge lecture class format. I entered VPA with an Independent Study major… I was the only person I knew with that designation. I took a film class from Newhouse, as Newhouse had the only film equipment. In the class we used 16mm film and equipment. My learning was primarily through hitchhiking down to Manhattan, where Anthology Film Archives had just opened, and my high-school friend Robert Polidori worked, and would show me hours of films during my visits… augmented by the formal shows at night.

In a couple of years VPA hired Owen Shapiro and announced its own film major. We continued to use Newhouse’s 16mm equipment (and B&W processing). Owen showed us hours of Godard films, which we’d never see through Newhouse. While in New York I’d visit the Kitchen and hear early Steve Reich and Phil Glass performances, my Newhouse film teacher contemptuously referred to them as the “maniacal edge” of music. No one at Newhouse would know who Michael Snow or Paul Sharrits were.

Meanwhile, a handful of brilliant, late-1960s Syracuse alumni (Lance Wisniewski, Bob Burns, Carl Geiger, Gail Waldron) put together a project proposal to simultaneously offer the University a plan to build and manage a local cable system that would offer students, staff, and faculty their own access to video production and presentation; and an offer to the New York State Council of the Arts to provide access to video production facilities and services to artists in New York state who want to get involved in the new video medium. Note that up to that moment, video production required access to television studios and their procedures, which was prohibitively expensive, not open to outsiders, nor accommodating to experimentation with the equipment.

Thus Synapse Video was born within Syracuse University. Newhouse provided access to 2” tape facilities for broadcast-quality production, and the cable head end provided access to ½” portable and 1” studio-based equipment, along with both portable and studio cameras. Here’s a link to a post by Synapse editor Paul Daugherty about the Newhouse side: https://avideolife.wordpress.com/…/editing-area-used…/

and a link to an early announcement of the Synapse visiting artist program: https://www.vasulka.org/…/MediaPoli…/VisitingArtProg.pdf

At the beginning of the program, there were three of us who were both SU VPA students and part of Synapse: myself, Pam Shaw, and Bill Viola. For my part in this, I designed and taught two classes offered through VPA: a visiting artist class that trained and provided crew for the visiting artists, and a class in “Video Aesthetics” which was a hands-on class where we all experimented with the equipment and tried to understand what we were doing in relation to the history of art.

Film majors had very little to do with Synapse, which was purely video-based. I was really the only one with a foot in both. In 1972 VPA created a Film Major, and I switched from an Independent Study major to a Film major. However, my daily practice was in both: video art (or, as you say, art video) at Synapse, and film art through my major. Note that after graduating with the first VPA Film Majors in 1974, Synapse paid my tuition for the next two years, so I continued to teach the two video courses as I was then one of the first group of students who earned a Film graduate degree through VPA. Again: a foot in both worlds, but both were in VPA.

The thing is, this all happened so fast, and the media were developing so quickly, that the University gambled that it was doing the right thing. We all did the same thing—it’s easy to see that people involved at the time in film or video art were not looking at their long-term financial prospects. There wasn’t a business there to be learned. There were just lives to be invented.

One more historical note: all of us at that time were informed by the ever-present art education department, which insisted that art education focus on the first six years of life… before the child learned to read. And the title of that department was Synaesthetic Education. VPA put an end to that a few years after I left.