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May 2005 Archive

Friday, May 27

Lyrics for Gang Gang Dance: God's Money

Before My Voice Fails

Chorus
Give me silence / No more talking / Give me patience before I fail / Before my voice fails

Oh delightful, oh delightful laborers / When the rattle, when the rattle crows / Hunger into poison weed / Eat the rock, eat the rock a beggar breaks

Before I fail—
Before my voice fails

And the children of the flood / And the stones, the stones of the church's / runs, then the wind will howl / all around

—Chorus—
Before I fail / Before (3X) my voice fails / Before my voice fails / The cockleshell and sure / he has a way of knowing— / But I'm deaf to his part / But I'm deaf to—his—heart


Glory in Itself

PART I:
Tipping on the thunder / of a paradigm / Soaking on the thread / of a nursery rhyme / Oh my a dandy indeed

With a shiver of mint or rotten hay / Worthy only of rancor / Thy light and shed thy light / Ooh how it possesses me

2X Chorus
Glory in itself, any and anyone / But the self / Glory in itself, anyone and anyone else

Oh my a (3X) a dandy indeed } (2X)

Cunning on the tiptoes of a leash / Ooh—the carnal and boyish / my time is already spent / Thru juvenile thoughtlessness

—Chorus—>I've seen it with my eyes / I felt it with my hands

Ending (several times)
Ooh it was merely a sight / when you came down to me / when you came

PART II: EGPYTIAN
What a testament / to my dorsal spine, a slave / 'Not' an outcast, a victim / When you follow

2X{ You make me empty / You make me empty and lean / For another page in a magazine


Nomad for Love (Cannibal)

Chorus
{ Oh my darling won't you pity me / When I'm reaching / When I'm reaching for you heart
{If sins were gold I'd cover my eyes / If heart was forth I'd water my mouth

Oh by the sea, stand next to me yeah (4X)

—Chorus—

Oh how fate solves our problems / To not go back in time / And pain the ones you love / Please please tell me why

You see what happened was / he bathed in her lacquer / And it was scented by the sun / There were waves / And they were crashing all around / And I was drenched in drink / And I covered myself in foam / The wind was whipping the window / See she was alone, like a nomad / And remember / She was scented / She was scented by the sun


Egowar

She flirts with disaster / Always conscious, timeless pastor / Her presence enigmatic / No senseless time to waste

She juggles mime with laughter / Like a war / But exists in a silicone breed / There's only time for judgements / For others she needless say

Oh I'm tired / Of wanting some space / By myself / With no one lurking around

Repeat

5:17 PM | Comments ( 0 )

Friday, May 27

Links for 05/27/2005

11:26 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Thursday, May 26

Revenge of the Meme

Even though I wasn't passed the baton , I've decided to take it up before it gets dropped. Memes and polls are usually for fifteen-year-old girls, but since this is a music blog, my responses to this particular chain-letter meme-poll-thing are all fairly relevant. Trrill loves opera, yes; but it's high time we bring light to the full picture of our musical obsessions. Here goes…

Total volume of music on your computer? At home, where I have all my music, iTunes says I have 19.85 GB, which is the work of 3511 songs. And I have only a tiny portion of classical music collection ripped to mp3, so… there.

Last CD you bought? Actually, the last time I bought CDs was Monday, and I picked up three in one trip:
  • Ezio Pinza: The Golden Years of Ezio Pinza. Of course I can't get enough of the voice and the musicality, but I have confirmed my suspicion that you don't actually have to be able to sing French properly to have a career.
  • Birgit Nilsson: Nilsson Sings Verdi I was thrilled to find this and a number of other albums Decca's new "Classic Recitals" series. Some brilliant mind at the label has reissued a number of operatic LPs and opera recordings that had either been dropped from the catalogue or broken up onto other recital discs. Decca has restored the original tracklistings and given the CDs a vintage feel by employing the original cover art and reprinting the notes from the back of the LP on the inside of the [digipack!] jewel case. As for Nilsson herself, whoa.
  • Renée Fleming: Haunted Heart Shut up. It's really good. I love Joni Mitchell. I love Paladilhe's "Psyché." And I love it when rich white girls play Cultural Appropriation Dress-up! Really though, the singing is exquisite and the arrangements are delicious and textured. Everyone on this album feels at home. And I take a certain joy in knowing that the most famous soprano in the world is one degree away from the psychotic experimental vocalist Mike Patton [thanks, Sr. Menses!].


Song currently playing? "Lufuala Ndonga" from the album Congotronics by Konono N?1. Sometimes I close the blinds and do a little tribal arms-control dance. I have no loincloth or lip plate, but something about this song makes me feel like I've arrived home in a land that I haven't visited since many lives ago. Oh. nevermind; it's the thumb-piano.

Five songs I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me? I consulted my iTunes "Top 25 Most Played" list at home and work and found that most recently, I've not been able to get enough of:
  • 2A. Glory In Itself 2B. Egyptian, from the album God's Money by Gang Gang Dance. It's one track on the CD, but it's actually a straight mix from one movement to the next. Pyschedelic island prison dreaming of whirling dervishes and honey wine interwoven with noise and the atopical warblings and incantations of Liz Bougatsos. A voodoo musiquilt straight outta Brooklyn. Whatthefuckisthis?
  • Din Da Da, George Kranz. An Old Way Vogue and ballroom classic and a breakdancing hit? Well deserved, I say. A rhythm track composed of tooth hissing, shouting, and gogo toms; a bassline of thoom-thoom-thoom tongueing; and an unbearably glamorous synth-and-string line riding it all. The only lyrics: "din daa daa" and "ra-ta-ta." Something must be up if it's been remade and remixed several times since 1983, most recently by The Roots. God knows why.
  • Cycle, by Montréal-via-Michigan artist Peninsula. Inspired by the cleanliness of Kompakt (and the chaos of an LOL-life), this little schaffel track is so ridiculously good that I listened to it three times in a row while walking to the grocery on a sunny day last week. Don't be fooled by its simplicity; it scales perfectly from an iPod to a speaker system, making it an excellent way to get the asses at a houseparty moving. And just listen to those high-and-tight Midwestern vowels! Snyaack attyack!
  • By Your Side, from the album La Maison de Mon Rêves by CocoRosie. Don't you simply adore a song in which the vocalist fantasizes about and glorifies domestic abuse?
  • Qual guerriero in campo armato, from the album Arias for Farinelli, with mezzo-soprano Vivica Genaux. GOD. FUCKING. DAMN, you FUCKING GODDAMN tremolos straight from FUCKING GODDAMN GOD HIMSELF.
Five people to whom I'm passing the baton? Sieglinde, Mezzo Gregory, James Jorden, AC Douglas, and Monsieur C-. Work it out, boys and girls.

6:52 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Saturday, May 21

Wagner: der Letzte Squischer?

As evidenced by AC Douglas and his "Eurotrash-innocent" friend, Wagner triumphs over banal productions, across all cultures, in houses great and small, even in the most suffocated reaches of society.

When Wagner's work first came to America in the mid-1800's, much of the concert and opera-going public, whether casual and fashionable or erudite and ensconced in the Italian and French schools, reacted with repulsion to his disregard for immediately palatable theater and music, often citing difficulties in everything from the haughty contrivances of the stories to the lack of melodic set pieces. Of Rienzi one Cincinnatian remarked that the overture was

"very much like the performance of a brigade of bedlamites in a rolling mill with a nail factory attachment."


Talk about a florid passage!

It took forty years, but eventually the feats of courage in Wagner's composition and concepts joined with the indefatigable devotion of conductors like Leopold Damrosch and the virtuosity of execution by singers like Emil Fischer and Lilli Lehmann into an macro-Gesamtkunst that transcended the vulgarity and self-satisfaction of a tested but tired tradition, as well as a the conventions of a conservative and dismissive audience. The sweep of change, though slow, was all-consuming, in many cases converting the otherwise unwilling.

Even Nietzsche, ever focused on critiquing decadence (of which he saw in Wagner the high priest), could not but offer a beholden, if reticent, genuflection:

"When in this essay I assert the proposition that Wagner is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable?for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Wagner; but the philosopher is not free to do without Wagner. He has to be the bad conscience of his time: for that he needs to understand it best… I understand perfectly when a musician says today: 'I hate Wagner. but I can no longer endure any other music.' But I'd also understand a philosopher who would declare: 'Wagner sums up modernity. There is no way out. one must first become a Wagnerian.'"


Today on the toilet I wondered what sort of slanted compliments and gratitudes writers and philosophers forty years from now will be paying to the musicians and thinkers of today. Will we be praising the sanctity and ritual of elegant repetition in Satyagraha or aching for the early exploration of the "extended vocal technique" of Meredith Monk? Will we place miniature busts of Bj?rk and Jandek next to our Precious Moments curios on the mantle? If the notion of new reverence for new music is unreasonable, then perhaps we already on a path to a new collective unconscious that recognizes and values impossibility and impermanence over novelty. Terrence McKenna talks about this a bit in his…

Gerechter Gott! I had one too many gins tonight. Nevermind about damn McKenna.

1:12 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Sunday, May 15

About Trrill

An embarrassment of glitches

The Assolutas by nightTrrill began when Alex Ross made the suggestion that I begin a "scurrilous opera blog" after he'd seen several mentions of opera (in between a lot of fluffy posts about Björk) on my old site, Opacodex.com. I thought it sounded like a marvelous idea, but I knew that La Cieca sort of had dibs on the intersection of "queer," "opera," and "internet" (even before he moved to weblogging proper). I didn't want to be a rip-off artist (but honestly mimicry is my modus operandi), so I opted for a format that would include plenty of pictures and links and mp3s. Trrill became a shooting star in no time, partly (I think) because it originally purported to be authored by three pseudonymous multiples of a dissociative crack whore who was bent on upsetting the status-quo in the painfully stale world of opera.

Some people have asked where I got the name of this site and what the tagline means. Well, I think the title is obvious, but originally, the site opened to the glorious sound of Ernestine Schumann-Heink's trill on one of her recordings of the drinking song from Lucrezia Borgia.

Trrill, like all things, is constantly in flux. I change the layout and format more often than I change my clothes sometimes. Still, I try to make it readable, useable, and enjoyable. I use Movable Type for production. There are archives, an RSS feed, and a podcast (which is really just a feed of the MP3s I post in order to expose some very decent [and sometimes overlooked] music).

You can definitely contact me. But I can definitely go weeks without responding. Zing!

Czk it out

I think I was thinking that this is the part where I show you some of what other people have said about Trrill, as if you care.

Dave Segal, from The Stranger:

One of my favorite new (to me, anyway) music-oriented blogs is Trrill, curated and smartly designed by an original aesthete—Nick Scholl… Trrill is a bonanza of esoteric epicureanism.

Pierre Ruhe, in the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Trrill.com. With slanted opinions and reckless enthusiasms—performances, CDs, diva worship, insults hurled at other bloggers—this is among the most literate and amusing of the many, many fanatical operaphile blogs.

Tuning:

MARIA CALLOUS: Trrill… is an mp3 blog that pushes opera like you need it. I don't particularl[y] like opera, but this one's well done. Flippantly furious as only angry fags can be - they demand that opera get its props (Propera?) - Now that part I like. Winner of Tuning's coveted "Whythefucknot?" Award for 2004.
Manolo:
It is the two parts of the opera news and reviews, the one part of the pop culture, combined with the heaping dash of the snark. It is indeed the most tasty confection.

Writer, designer, singer, & tender shut-in

Nick Scholl

Ok, seriously now. About me:

  • A member of the Global Village, in the Age of Communication—but based in New York City.
  • Full-time web developer (and sometimes music critic) for Seattle's (very) alternative weekly, The Stranger.
  • Freelance web developer/designer for various musicians and fashion folke.
  • Singer, formerly with the Seattle Opera, now on the walk to and from work everyday.
  • Sort of a mystic [sorry, Mom].

You can find me on:

11:12 AM | Comments ( 0 )

Thursday, May 12

Trrill Trendwatch: IDs!

Trrill, always on the forefront of the up-and-coming (stop it), is scooping this hot new trend that's so mind-blowing that it was essentially ignored and discarded by the mainstream media.

From the same people who brought you this:



and this:




… now comes this:
In the words of the fortunately mortal Paris Hilton, "That's hot."

For more hot hotness like this, visit:

4:08 PM | Comments ( 4 )

Thursday, May 12

LOLipops, LOLerskating, and LOL-ympia

Hoffmann is such a struggle.

  • Trying not to imagine Marilyn Horne when Linda Pavelka sings the Muse's opening aria with glorious vocal texture.
  • Trying to understand Vinson Cole's French diction.
  • Trying to snap myself out of hypnosis from Helen Schneiderman's gorgeous Niklausse.
  • Trying to banish from my memory the sounds of Harrowing Blackwell's LOL-eratura in the Olympia scene (she's cute as hell, but it's "la chanson mignonne" the second time; "la chanson gentille" the first time; ).
  • Trying to figure out the wig and makeup department's choices for Dean Elzinga's Lindorf; who knew that "diabolical" meant "cross between Mick Jagger, Andy Warhol, and Christopher Walken"?
  • Trying to keep myself from pinching Julianne Gearheart ("Silver" cast) on the arse after her masterful interpolations in the Doll Song.
  • Trying to keep my heart from racing every time John Uhlenhopp dances atop the bar as a totally believable drunk Hoffmann who throws vocal pacing to the wind and gives us spit, spinto, and squillo for the entire show.
  • Trying to keep my jaw off the ground every time John Relyea opens his mouth to sing; he's far and away the best singer and performer in the cast; from his timing to his gestures to his perfectly even and easy voice, he's a consummate artist and a force of nature.


And when this is all done, I hope to return (with friends) to our regularly scheduled programming. Expect more updates, more features, more sounds, more content from a broader spectrum of topics.

Trrill: not just zealous about opera!

2:59 PM | Comments ( 0 )