Goose :: OK, They're Good! (Plus Trey Anastasio!)

I’ll be honest: I’ve tried to dig Goose several times. I’ve watched several live sets and lots of people I respect dig them. I don’t know why, but I just didn’t connect with them. I think it may have something to do with the moustaches and my own biases. You see, my Dad had a mustache, and any time I try to grow one, I just see my Dad in the mirror, and I love my Dad, but that’s not what you want to see when you look in the mirror.

Anyhoo: (as always), I’m on a big Kurt Vonnegut kick, and I just watched the 2021 documentary which included the quote from Cat’s Cradle: “As Bokonon says: 'peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from god.” That’s when Pitchfork decided to review the bands newest album Dripfield and I decided to give them another try.

Brady Gerber’s review includes this short section:

Watching their viral set at Peach Fest 2019—which, like many Goose sets, you can stream in full on YouTube—I thought wow, these guys can play. But it wasn’t just their virtuosic performances: Between the sprawling solos, they had actual songs that I walked away humming.

So, like any good Bokononist would, I went and watched that “viral'“ 2019 Peach Fest set. And I ended up digging it. A Lot. I sent it to my brother and a friend with the caption: “I think I might have been won over.” You see, they too had tried Goose before and found it not to their taste. But this set won them both over just like it did me. Maybe it will do the same for you. Maybe not. Either way, I hope you enjoy and occasionally stop along to remember that “I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'If this isn't nice, I don't know what is.”

The Deets:

Goose plays Peach Fest 2019 in Scranton, PA.

Setlist:

1. Madhuvan

2. Time to Flee

3. All I Need

4. Wysteria Lane

5. Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodeloo

6. Arcadia

7. The Way It Is

8. Hot Tea

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Trey Anastasio of that band from VT sat in the other night with Goose in NYC and thanks to the wonders of the technology, you can watch it right here right now:

The Deets:

• Goose - Hungersite → Arcadia (feat. Trey Anastasio) - 6/25/22 Radio City Music Hall, New York, NY

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Here is the band’s official video for Hungersite:

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EOTO Live at Sonic Bloom (2014)

EOTO is the electronic improvisational duo of Michael Travis and Jason Hann (Both of String Cheese Incident). Sonic Bloom is a CO music festival. This was 2014. It’s all live and improvised, so I don’t think there’s a setlist. That’s about all I know. You?

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Wordless Flight Emerges

Caleb Nei bills himself as: “Washington DC Area Event & Cocktail Pianist,” usually playing “about 180 jazz dates each year throughout Virginia and Washington DC.”

Nei’s newest project Wordless Flight. “Emergence,” Nei’s first release under the new moniker is a collection of improvisations “Recorded on a felted upright piano, a Mason & Hamlin reed organ, and a collection of analog synths.” Nei says that “Emergence” is the first of several releases in this vein, with lots more music already recorded.

“Recorded in the early-morning hours before the family wakes,” Nei’s improvisations are meditative pieces walking the border between minimalism, new age age, and contemporary classical.

Opening track “Another Morning” is representative of the rest of the album in all of the good ways. Interesting melodies over ambient background noise unfolding and swirling up and around to greet the day before folding back into itself.

“Murmur” propels these themes forward, while “1997” begins to push into Ambient territory and “Landscape From A Bus” pulses with an Ambient loop and “Moored Boats” makes you wonder if this wasn’t an electronic album the whole time.

This is music created with the sun rise to fill your while day.

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Elkhorn's Acoustic Storm

I don’t live somewhere with seasons. I live in a place that is hot or less hot. In the middle of a desert and I don’t understand why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to build a major metropolitan city here, Phoenix (or its adjacent suburbs.

But I still have a soul. And I miss seasons. I mean, I have experienced them, they’re just currently part of my imagination and not my life.

And even though I don’t like Christmas music, music, music often has a strong seasonal element for me. Not that this is Christmas music, but it was recorded in the midst of a snow storm. Elkhorn (usually a guitar duo made up of childhood friends, Jesse Sheppard and Drew Gardner was scheduled to play a show with (third guitarist) Turner Williams Jr. but the show was snowed out as the group was snowed in (see what I did there?). Making the most of the night, the group hunkered down in Gardner’s home studio and improvised some jams. The first installment, The Storm Sessions was released earlier this year and we are now treated to the acoustic counterpart, The Acoustic Storm Sessions.

The resulting two pieces evoke the crispness of winter and the crackle of a first snow. Meditative but not lulling. Meandering but not lost. These are musicians at ease with themselves and the music flowing through them. Slowly unfolding, the first song plays with interlocking and intertwining patterns that sometimes resolves themselves and sometimes simply morph into something else.

The record is hitting mailboxes this week and I can’t wait for you to hear this one.

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Grateful Dead: Playing In The Jam (A Holiday At The Sea Mix)

Ever wonder what “Playing In The Band” might sound like as an extended instrumental free-jazz-space-rock suite? Well, I did.

Inspired by Save Your Face and their various Grateful Dead mixes, I edited six different performances of “Playing In The Band” into an instrumental suite.

I’m not entirely happy with a couple of the transitions, but I dig how it turned out overall, seeing as how I am not a professional, I didn’t actually spend that much time on this, and I really only made this for myself to listen to either while I work or commuting. Enjoy.

Here are the deets for the six pieces making up the Suite:

• 00:00 - 11:39 :: 09.21.72 at the The Spectrum in Philadelphia, PA (released as Dicks’s Picks 36)

• 11:39-25:45 :: 03.24.73 at the The Spectrum in Philadelphia, PA

• 25:245 - 34:47 :: 11.10.73 at Winterland Arena in San Francisco, CA (released as part of Winterland 1973: The Complete Recordings)

• 34:47 - 44:09 :: 05.17.77 at Memorial Coliseum, U of Alabama, MS (released as part of May 1977)

• 44:09: 52:31 :: 05.28.77 at at Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT (released as To Terrapin: Hartford '77)

• 52:31 - 56:27 :: 05.28.77 at at Hartford Civic Center, Hartford, CT (released as To Terrapin: Hartford '77)

I chose these performances for no real reason other than that this is the time-period of the Dead that I listen to most and these shows happened to be on my laptop when I decided to try out this idea.

And if all that weren’t enough goodness, here’s an instrumental edit of the mammoth “Playing In The Band” from the Pacific Northwest '73-'74: Believe it If You Need It (Live) set (Live at Hec Edmundson Pavillion, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 5/21/74).

Enjoy.

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Terry and Gyan Riley Live At Oval Space (Not At the MIM Where I Saw Them)

Thanks to a friend of mine, I had the opportunity to see Terry and Gyan Riley at the Musical Instrument Museum.

Of course I was familiar with the elder Riley’s work, and I have the The Book Of Abbeyozzud album (which Amazon tells me I’ve owned since 2003), but I didn’t really know what to expect since the evening was billed as an evening of improvised music. The website for the evening’s performance quotes Terry Riley as saying:

“Nothing I have done in this life has given me more satisfaction than improvising on these songs with Gyan. Nothing I have done can match the intuitive synchronicity we have shared, many times, on the stage.”

The evening’s music was sublime, challenging and rewarding. It spun circular rhythms and balanced scales as each player was propelled by the other. I have never seen another night of music quite like it and I will be forever grateful for the experience.

Here is video of Terry and Gyan Riley from a totally different 2018 performance presented by NTS; Live At “Oval Space.”

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