Thursday, March 1, I accompanied open source software inventor and exponent Richard Stallman on a visit to the composer, musician, ethnomusicologist, humorist, philosopher, and musical instrument inventor and builder Kraig Grady at his home in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, otherwise known as the North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island. (Anaphoria is the name of a medical condition inwhich the eyes look up.)  “Everyone here is an exile,” noted Kraig, adding that, in the one and only article of the Anaphorian constitution, if you are harmonious with everyone and everything else on the island, you are thereby a native.

Kraig produces a world ethnic music show on KXLU 88.9 FM in Los Angeles called The Wandering Medicine Show, specializing in music from traditions that regard music as medicine. It’s on Wednesdays from 8-9 p.m. Pacific Time, live streaming at kxlu.org. Naturally, his shelves bulge with music books, sheet music and recordings, and you can’t get through the kitchen door without inadvertently playing the hanging chimes. Richard Stallman and I are both world music fanatics, so we all listened to and traded recordings for a couple of hours. I came home with recordings of Inuit throat singing, Georgian choral music, a Ruth Crawford Seeger song of social commentary, songs from Latvia, Spain, and South India, plus three Anaphorian Island music CDs by Kraig Grady: The Stolen Stars, Beyond the Windows Perhaps Among the Podcorn, and Anaphoria: The Creation of the Worlds. An embarassment of riches!

My favorite of his instruments is the bass vibraphone (also referred to as meru bars or low bars), with eight inch in diameter sections of PVC pipe as resonators.

Kraig also takes existing instruments and modifies them to produce microtonal scales. The pitches of the vibraphone keys can be lowered by shaving off from under the center of the keys, and raised by shaving away at the ends, Kraig explained to me. He has also retuned a small foot pump organ (larger than a medieval portative organ and smaller than a contemporary full sized organ), taking it out of well tempered tuning so that it can be played with the microtonal vibraphones.  

This vibraphone contains a twenty-two microtone scale, recalling the instruments of Harry Partch.

Kraig performs not only his compositions on his instruments, but shadow puppet dramas which he writes, and for which he creates the puppets in traditional Indonesian style. Owing to the complexity of setting up these shows, he offers them once per year, at the end of May. For a schedule of his performances, go to Kraig’s concert schedule page and email him to join his mailing list.

Last night I pilgrimaged to the Echo night club in Echo Park (just northwest of downtown LA) to witness Nels Cline and Glenn Kotche channeling the Divine. That’s what free improvisation music is to me when it’s performed by musical masters like these two. I’m a veteran listener, having been the consort for two years of one of the founders of the San Francisco Tape Music Center and co-inventor of the Buchla Box (Ramon Sender) and who has spent significant time partnering with the one of the first people to play the MiniMoog in jazz performance, and who also test drove the Moog Drum fro Robert Moog (Joe Gallivan). Joe introduced me to Nels at the Bell Atlantic Jazz Festival in June 2000 at the Knitting Factory in New York City, on the night both of their bands played.

I set my new Canon Power Shot on a slow shutter speed and ignored the manual’s warning that this would require a tripod. I was rewarded with the distortions promised, which I think evoke the spontaneity, abstraction and texture of the music.

The Echo’s oft used for DJ shows, and there are no chairs. Since almost all of the audience was under forty, no one minded. No sign out front, low lighting and shabby-chic interior, a gen x boho bar in the genre of, say, Galapagos Art Space in the Williamsburg arts district of Brooklyn.

Bunny art in the powder room!

Nels opened the first set, solo, modestly introducing it with “I have no idea what I’m going to do.” He switched on a tamboura box (analog drone synthesizer) with a half-step drone, and over it played an electric lap steel guitar, massively distorted by a crescent of large and small pedals, and other gear on a nearby table that comprise his synth without a console that kept him moving constantly. It was gorgeous.

Later, he used a sequencer that recorded and repeated his riffs as a background drone, while he induced every sound except a guitar from two electric guitars while conjuring a storm, a choir, a war by singing into a vocal effects processer. From his back pocket protruded a metal spring and an egg whisk for alien strum effects. Nels Cline is a force of nature.

Second set was a drum solo. Really. Well, OK, a one-man band solo. Glenn Kotche’s kit includes a glockenspiel, a small gamelan, an electric kalimba, a recording sequencer, a wild collection of cymbals including two cut into hanging spirals, at least four different kinds of sticks including a set of two bamboo sections, and a bunch of long skinny springs he pulled for their shrieks. I was most blown away watching him play a complex rhythm with a shaker in his right hand while playing a melodic solo on the gamelan and glockenspiel with his left. He encapsulated the Ramayana while dedicating one piece to the monkey armies of Hanuman. Glenn’s pieces were mostly original compositions from his recent CD, Mobile, but one piece was by avant-garde composer Steve Reich, who I met through Ramon Sender back in the early ‘seventies. Joe knows him, too.

For the third set, Nels and Glenn inprovised together. During the entire two hours of music, not one person in the sold-out house of three hundred people whispered to one another or looked away from the stage. Everyone was enraptured. Joe and Ramon both used to complain about the small demand for avant-garde improvisational music, but I realize now that their audience simply wasn’t born yet.

I met a dozen new friends that night, including lovely Shawni D., born in Hilo, Hawaii.

After the show, Nels told me he’d reviewed What Living’s All About on his website. I was touched. All genius, no arrogance, that man. I happily copied his review over to the WLAA reviews page of my site when I got home.

My website and blog run on cutting edge free software, set up by my friends and webhosts, Dumpling Feed, aka Richard Schave and Kim Cooper, whose wedding you saw on this blog last June. Fittingly, when the inventor of free software, and its biggest promoter, Richard Stallman, came to Los Angeles to lecture at USC and Caltech, Richard and Kim honored him with a stay in their home and a dumpling feed at their favorite dim sum restaurant, 101 Noodle Express, in Alhambra, a suburb east of downtown Los Angeles that is home to many Chinese-Americans and their businesses. Standing between Richard and Kim is Iwa, who was managing 101 Noodle Express the night of our feast.

We discussed election fraud at length, including the proprietary software of the voting machines. Richard Stallman maintains that the USA should use nothing but paper ballots, since they are recountable. “Even if the optical scanners are hacked, we can count them by hand,” he said. I concur. On the left is software developer and musician Lucas Gonze, on the far right is web and computer consultant Josh Cain. I forget the other two guys’ names, and hope someone will email me and fill me in.

So here I am with Richard Stallman: the Queen of the Freaks meets the King of the Geeks.

Before we all went out for dim sum, I gave Kim the gift I’d bought her at Tata Bazaar in Naha City, Okinawa on Halloween – a shisa (an Okinawan gargoyle) made of fabric (most are made of ceramic or stone). It looks great with her collection of Naugas. Photographer Meeno Peluce, on assignment photographing Richard Stallman, took the shots above of her playing with it.  I took the one below, of the Nauga and the Shisa living toothily ever after in Kim and Richard’s library.

My friend since infancy, Benida Solow, and I took advantage of post-rainy day clear skies to walk along the geologic fantasyland that is the tide pool area below the seacliffs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula yesterday.

In the words of geologist Ron Merritt Morris: “The Palos Verdes Peninsula is a tectonic fault block of seafloor sediments and volcanics draped atop a submerged mountain of metamorphic rocks that began rising out of the Pacific Ocean 1.5 million years ago.”

Or, as Earth Science World put it, “California’s Palos Verdes Peninsula contains more than a dozen distinct uplifted wave-cut terraces. Folded Miocene sedimentary rocks are exposed in the sea cliff.”

Although the tidepools did not teem with life…

…the abundance of mussel, snail, clam and abalone shells and fragments along the shore and the great swaths of beached kelp indicated a thriving community off shore. We did see a sea lion swimming nearby, a gaggle of cormorants on an offshore island, and a colony of well-fed semi-ferral cats living among the boulders between the shore and the parking lot.

Although most signs of humans having been there disgusted us (graffiti on the seacliffs and litter along the shore), one passerby left a pleasing sculpture of stacked rocks in a tide pool.

Benida found a magical rock, the size and shape of a human heart, and striated with sparkling quartz that suggested a jumping sea mammal. A fitting valentine from the earth and sea that she honors in so much of her work.

In 2006, in the Netherlands, about 100 horses were trapped by a flood in the middle of a rushing river on a tiny island. 18 of the horses died while the local fire department and the Dutch army both tried unsuccessfully to rescue them. Then four women on horseback rode to the rescue. Watch the movie.

My friend Lynn Nakkim, who owns a ranch with one hundred horses, and has midwifed and trained most of them, told me, “Horse whispering is the name men gave to the horse-training technique women have been using for the past  8,000 years.”