Some Live Albums I Adore
And a wee update on The Cemetery Tapes
I’m so happy to announce that The Cemetery Tapes will be released… soon! This live album was recorded on May 18, 2024, at the events that concluded my artist residency at Mount Auburn Cemetery. It features Aboriginal Sensible Muchness and Lux Æterna along with an additional live B-side of ASM.
I’m incredibly grateful to The Friends of Mount Auburn who provided this live recording opportunity and collaborated for a fresh independent release.
What I can share right now is what’s happening:
Mixing has been completed by Luke Damrosch who recorded it live, and mastering by James Plotkin will begin after a tornado passes through his town.
I commissioned Vermont artist Hannah Carpenter Pitkin to create tintype/wet plate collodion photographs using objects and themes native to the Cemetery’s culture during its Victorian era inception. Her work is awesome, look!
I’m going to press a very limited run of cassettes and make it available for digital release as well. Folks who pre-ordered using the exclusive code at the May 18 events will get theirs before the official release of course.
In anticipation of The Cemetery Tapes, here are five of my favorite live albums. Thank you to Jessica B. for the idea!
5. Bloodbath: The Wacken Carnage (2005)
Pure nostalgia. Dan Swanö twice shouting at the audience, “Is everybody doing… alright?!” has become a meme for me and my bandmates in Angel Grinder, along with Åkerfeldt repeatedly referring to his “other band” (Opeth) while on stage at Wacken with Bloodbath. It’s very goofy, authentic, and the white shirts with splatters of stage blood uniform are absolutely adorable and iconic.
There’s really not a lot of great live death metal albums, mostly because it’s simply not a genre that favors deviation from studio recordings and there’s no real reason to make them. It’s tricky and cumbersome to record it well live, and it ends up proving redundant. This album is a fabulous exception.
4. John Coltrane: Coltrane Live at the Village Vanguard (1962)
I feel like expounding and waxing poetic would defeat the purpose. It’s Coltrane.
3. Tom Waits: Glitter and Doom Live (2009)
So goddamn good. It smells of cigarettes and stale whiskey, the brownest, silveriest live album that ever was. A crooning Bukowski clown-devil who saws and nails his way down a delicious memory campfire palace.
Glitter and Doom is the perfect name for this record which was recorded at a bunch of different shows throughout a tour. He’s in confrontation and in harmony simultaneously. His music is impossible. It’s like opening a dusty old occult volume and finding a silly anecdote. This is like a greatest hits album.
2. The Bali Sessions: Living Art, Sounding Spirit (1999)
One of the primary inspirations behind argent & sable’s design and the 13-toned pitch system I built for Lux Æterna is gamelan along with some of the newer tuning systems of Indonesia. The feeling of hearing gamelan for the first time and being totally and utterly shocked is something I’ve been chasing ever since, and something I strive to impart on my own listeners; A shove straight into the deep end.
This is an album I often share with my composition students who have been marooned on the inhospitably convenient island of 12-tone equal distance octave (12-EDO) for too long. The quickest means of escape is often immersing in Javanese or Balinese music, traditional or contemporary.
For a glimmer of context: In the late 90s, Indonesia was among one of the most impacted countries of the Asian Financial Crisis. Their currency’s value crashed, there was widespread panic and rioting, and the economic and cultural impact sent shockwaves across the world.
As a reaction, artists created functional music that called for peace and unity. A lot of this isn’t traditional Balinese gamelan at all, this is art music that served a very specific purpose for a very particular period.
I also found it super interesting that the Grateful Dead’s Mickey Hart recorded this entire box set over three days in Bali. This sent me down an alternate rabbit hole of the ethnomusicological influences of the greatest stoner band of all time. Good fun.
1. Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour le fin du temps: the First Recording (1956)
The Cemetery Tapes could not have existed if not for Messiaen. I’m not totally sure if I would have either. Messiaen has had perhaps more impact on my music, my psyche, my approach than any other artist. The English translation of his Treatise On Rhythm, Colour, And Ornithology was effectively my bible during grad school as a young composer with synesthesia.
This may be one of the most important western music recordings of the 20th century, and I revere Canary Records for their remastering and release of this work.
The Quartet for the end of time was composed in 1940 at a true apocalypse while Messiaen was imprisoned in Stalag VIII-A where he lived without solid food for a year while doing forced labor. A sympathetic-enough guard dealt the 32-year-old Olivier a shred of mercy by giving him access to paper, a pencil, and a piano so he could compose this masterpiece. The cellist heard here on this recording, the great Étienne Pasquier, premiered the piece with Messiaen and two other prisoner-performers on shoddy yet functional instruments in an ice-cold barrack for fellow prisoners and guards.
In the composer's words, “A tribute to the Angel of the Apocalypse, who raises his hands to Heaven saying: ‘There will be no more Time.’”