The Brooklyn Rail
Critical Perspectives on Art, Politics and Culture
November 2005
Music
Bill Fay: Bill Fay and Time of the Last Persecution (Eclectic Discs)
by David ShirleyMusic
Peace be in your breath and in your sighing.
Peace be in your jack and in your blade.
And peace be in your Sunday picnic
And your old school friends who’ve passed away.
But tell it like it is.
The Fall: Fall Heads Roll
by Donald BreckenridgeMusic
Mark E. Smith—a well-read dockworker and the self-professed psychic son of a plumber—had his brain lit up by the seemingly endless possibilities of punk’s first wave and, more important, its American roots in the late-sixties sonic garage assaults of The Stooges and the demonic blues howls of Captain Beefheart. In addition, he brought in the heady repetition of German krautrock pioneers Can and the crafty dubwise tracks being laid out in Jamaica by a host of revolutionary producers and DJs. All played vital roles in shaping a musical revolution that would gradually sweep over the sleeping music industry and its comatose mainstream audience in the next decade, and inspired Smith to form a band with a handful of equally disenfranchised co-conspirators in late ’76. The group took their name from the title of Albert Camus’s aching post-war meditation on the futility of existence and performed their first gig the following April in a cramped Manchester basement.
Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, Finally
by Richard KostelanetzMusic
The premiere of Johnny Reinhard’s realization of Charles Ives’s Universe Symphony, at Alice Tully Hall on June 6, 1996, is still justly remembered as counting among the great concerts of the 1990’s. It included dozens of “downtown” performers, including flautist Andrew Bolotowsky, percussionist Slip La Plante, violinist Tom Chiu, and pianist Joshua Pierce, most of them working out of an appreciation of Reinhard’s effort to produce Ives’s final, purportedly unfinished piece.
