Luke Gullickson

Let's have another post about outsider art, deal? Deal.

My latest interest is Adolf Wölfli, an amazing Swiss artist who lived in a mental institution and produced books and drawings that often included musical notation. He was an inspiration for composer Per Nørgård. As so many times before with self-taught artists, I was taken by the drawings' striking atmospheres. And I started to write music.

Songs, this time. Simple songs. Naïve melodies, strange Ivesian chords, clipped forms, drifting meters.

Naïveté is key here. Modern music is often about surface ambiguity underset by intense structural logic. What I get from outsider art is the opposite -- simple, even "naïve" surfaces that belie structural ambiguities and subtleties.

(The drawings that grace the popular Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck, though not an example of outsider art, draw their magnetism from the same formula.)

So in my Wölfli Songs the melodies are simple and short, the sort of things you might hear someone casually humming or whistling on the street. It's what lies beneath them that is strange, mysterious, inscrutable.

The wonderfully evocative and whimsical titles are cribbed from his drawings:

1. Telescope
2. London-North, 1911
3. Poli-Chinelle, the Plum Queen
4. Saint-Mary-Castle-Giant-Grape

Everyone asks how to survive the winter in Chicago. The only way I've determined is by repeatedly fleeing it. I'm in the middle of a flurry of trips that has led to continual reinterpretation of my present home city and situation. None of that much helps an already unsettled guy who is juggling a horde of scenarios for mid-to-late 2012, most of which rely on decisions no longer in his hands. Life is confusing but remains agreeably unpredictable. I can flow with that.

On a far more interesting note, I met up with some Cottonwood Gulch friends in Albuquerque last weekend and drove to Cumbres Pass just over the Colorado border. Once there, amidst a developing snowstorm, we skiied four miles into the woods until we reached a nicely furnished yurt with a front-porch view down to Trujillo Meadows and the mountains across the valley. It dumped a foot or so of snow on us the first twenty-four hours; after that it was clear, sunny, and just generally spellbindingly beautiful. We spent two nights in the backcountry cooking and eating delicious food, drinking whiskey, playing a homemade version of Apples to Apples, and exploring the area on our skis. Winter is fine if you can get out and do something.

I found the yurt an excellent place to continue my rereading of Talking Music, William Duckworth's collection of composer interviews. As usual, John Cage says a bunch of awesome shit all the time; no big news flash there. I was particularly struck by Lou Harrison's description of his lessons with Arnold Schoenberg. Not surprisingly, they involved heavy counterpoint study. What I loved, though, was Schoenberg's advice to Harrison before the latter left for New York:

"You don't need to study with anyone now. Study only Mozart."

How about that, eh.

I could use a little more Mozart myself these days, a bit of immersion into melody. My listening/study diet has been particularly strange of late. (For the record, I had this in my head the whole weekend skiing.) After an expansive autumn of listening, composing, and playing that stretched me from Scelsi to the Microphones to Charlemagne Palestine and writing a big paper about a Kyle Gann disklavier study, I must say I've reined it in a bit. Since early December I'm pretty sure I haven't listened to anything but

1) Trout Mask Replica,
2) Pink Moon,
and
3) Motown.

I guess it kind of makes sense. It's a winter frame of mind, retreating into a few familiar obsessions as the solstice nears. Now we're moving toward spring. As usual for late January, I'm restlessly awaiting the re-opening of things that's still weeks away, but I can't quite push myself to step on too much unfamiliar ground. So for now I guess I'll continue my musical hibernation until it's time to do some sowing.

Two big projects -- Yoakum and the next set of Golconda tunes -- are awaiting this spring. Some more cover songs will probably appear on the Golconda soundcloud page before long.

Here it is -- Lost Horse vol. 2, five previously unreleased songs from my time in Joshua Tree in the fall of 2009. Enjoy and happy new year!

••• Note about album length and the idea of "albums" in general •••

Apropos of the continuing conversation about modes of music distribution, classical concert ritual, solitude and leadership, etc. :

They're telling us it's all about short bursts of digital information these days; people have small attention spans, they tweet, they watch Youtube videos, and they download, if anything, tracks and not full albums.

First, one encouraging thing about my chosen distribution service, Bandcamp, is that albums outsell individual tracks there. Cool. Obviously they cater to listeners who are interested in the whole statement.

I'm one of those listeners, too. I love the idea of an "album," a collection of pieces that have some sort of thematic connection, explicit or not, sometimes emergent and highly personal to the listener.

Yes, we have to acknowledge that our current idea of "tracks" and "albums" is not a priori stone-tablet business, but arose from the physical facts of vinyl records. You'll notice that the songs on Lost Horse vol. 2 stick close to the normative 3:30 duration that's been with us since the 10-inch 78rpm record. We didn't have the "album" as an artistic category until the LP record came along, with its 20 minutes per side.

I grew up primarily in the era of CD-defined albums. CDs, of course, can hold about 80 minutes of music, twice as much as those LP records. I've always felt that this is a bit much for an album. Sufjan Stevens' albums that sit around 65-70 minutes are too much to take in. I prefer the 35ish-minute LP format that I find in older records.

However, while the reasonable length of the Beatles' Revolver, for example, made it a digestible listen when I first heard it, I didn't have the complete experience hearing it on CD. Even in that relatively compact "long form," we miss the psychological punctuation of changing sides. I love that this process involves volition; we have to physically acknowledge that we want to hear more by standing up, walking to the turntable, and flipping the record.

This is impossible to replicate in digital formats. It's been a pleasure to start buying vinyl records again recently and experience the feeling of a temporary pause after Side One followed by a new beginning on Side Two. I hear Nick Drake's Pink Moon so, so differently now that I know the relative length and complexity of "Things Behind the Sun" ends the first side and "Know," with its stark and simple material, opens the second. This punctuation is essential to understanding the construction of the composite piece. (And how much more meaningful is it when I hear the final strains of "From the Morning" and think "I want to hear all of that again" and find myself flipping the record back to Side One...?)

I hate concert intermissions, like many modern listeners. They're just kind of awkward. I can't believe people used to go out to the opera regularly and spend so many hours, subject themselves to so many intermissions. But wow, think of the formal possibilities there. I'm forced to admit that a degree of submission to the experience has been lost.

Anyway, I consider all of my Golconda releases so far to be "albums." Not "EPs" or "LPs"; those terms I consider outdated, but not the "album," which again is an artistic category as essential to my musical conception as the symphony was to composers of the European nineteenth century. So I'll keep using that term, and if my albums are a little shorter than what you're used to, it's not because I consider them any sort of miniature form, but because I'm presenting pieces of the size and dimensions I myself most enjoy--until, perhaps, I find the syntactical strategies to satisfactorily expand them (as I find it thematically necessary to do so).

Please enjoy.

As I've been diving back into these Lost Horse tunes, I've also tried to listen deeply to a few favorite singers with special attention to their time-feel. It's an odd list: Frank Sinatra, Nick Drake, Chet Baker, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan. Somewhere along the way I fell hard for the old Dylan tune "Tomorrow is a Long Time." Written in 1962, it was recorded by several other musicians before Dylan himself released it. Nick Drake has a demoy version; Odetta knocked it out of the park. Even Elvis sang it. Here is my humble addition to the list.

Keep an eye out for Lost Horse, vol. 2 soon, soon, soon.

I'm hard at work on the remaining movements of Five Drawings by Joseph E Yoakum, and rejoicing in the completion of grad-school applications. (Flattening of being? Referendum on life's path? What a process.)

Another project just around the corner is a small Golconda release. Friends and followers are aware that in 2009 I chased my Master's degree with an artist residency at Joshua Tree National Park, where I lived off the grid in a place called Lost Horse Valley and wrote a pile of songs. A year later, six of these songs became Lost Horse Porch Music. About a year ago I wrote a new batch and made an album called Book of Rain.

I wrote another desert cycle last summer in New Mexico, while I was working outside and leading wilderness trips at a beautiful place called Cottonwood Gulch. That music is still in the works, to be recorded in early 2012.

First, for the end of '011, I have a smaller release. Lost Horse Porch Music featured only six of the twenty songs I wrote at Joshua Tree. I figured the others weren't doing anyone much good sitting silently in old notebooks, so I picked out five more favorites to make a short album, Lost Horse, vol. 2. It'll be on your digital doorstep on 12/24.

Tracklisting:
1. Caroline
2. On the Limb
3. Glacier Air
4. Whispers
5. Pedernales

Ben and I have completed our long-term dream of covering Beck's entire One Foot in the Grave album. The autoharp/guitar double solo in "Girl Dreams" has already surreptitiously appeared at one Chicago-area new music concert.

1. He's a Mighty Good Leader
2. Sleeping Bag
3. I Get Lonesome
4. Burnt Orange Peel
5. Cyanide Breath Mint
6. See Water
7. Ziplock Bag
8. Hollow Log
9. Forcefield
10. Fourteen Rivers, Fourteen Floods
11. Asshole
12. I've Seen the Land Beyond
13. Outcome
14. Girl Dreams
15. Painted Eyelids
16. Atmospheric Conditions

You can now hear a demo recording from the Five Drawings by Joseph E Yoakum project. The second drawing, "Mt Huron Range Near Marquette Michigan," is now streaming here. The other four drawings are on their way.

Certain musicians don't seem to be a person playing music, but to actually be music themselves. When I heard Paul Motian had passed away I went not to his classic recordings with the Bill Evans Trio, but to the trio album Storyteller (2004) with Marilyn Crispell and Mark Helias, and Motian's tune "Flight of the Bluejay." His drums speak a language of their own on that record, speak to something so ineffable and deep. Outside form, outside rhythm, outside expectation. When Motian struck that ride cymbal it wasn't about jazz, or even music; it was enormous and yet self-contained, expansive and yet utterly simple. 

Motian was a musician who embodied authority as much as he did mystery and ambiguity. And a little mystery is a powerful, powerful thing. 

No time for philosophizing or polemicizing of late; I'm hard at work on a couple big musical projects. For some time I've been wanting to write music based on the landscape drawings of outsider artist Joseph E Yoakum. As a young man, Yoakum ran away to travel widely with the circus. Late in his life he began drawing to chronicle those travels, though it was increasingly questionable to what extent his memories were based on reality. I chose five drawings to work with, increasingly fanciful in their style and conception. I've sketched out all five, and for right now I'm polishing up just one of them to make an initial recording. It's the second piece, "Mt. Huron Range Near Marquette Michigan."

The music falls somewhere in the vicinity of Castle Rooms and Landscapes and the chamber pieces I wrote in Banff. John Fahey fingerpicking and freakout slide mandolin will coexist with mystic piano chords, harmonium, violin, viola.

Another Golconda record is also in the works. It's become a familiar pattern for me to head out west someplace, get away from the piano and my normal life-patterns, find myself writing boatloads of songs, and then get back to the Midwest and get distracted with other pursuits before I bother playing them for anyone. I wrote eight songs in New Mexico over the summer and plan to record them in December/January. Expect tarot references, desert thoughts, tuning forks, and an old Stella guitar.

Besides that it's all falling leaves and War and Peace these days. (Believe the hype. The book is long.) Slonimsky's Thesaurus and the WTC are both sitting on my piano right now. E Major Book 1, friends and neighbors. Sit down and play through that Prelude and check out those cadences.

Recordings when I've got 'em... for now, I'll sign off with this: