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On the first of every month I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to remember where I parked my car. Amongst other things, parking spaces are systematically rotated due to this institution’s ‘defamiliarisation’ policy.

Eliza explained it to me one time. The consensus in the sociology department is that both the ‘first come, first serve’ and merit-based models of parking lot design fail to meet the egalitarian principles which we strive to represent.

They proposed several different models before settling upon this one. First, they researched the historical usage of the word lot – as in, to cast one’s lot – and considered allocating spaces randomly. This would have resulted in some employees needing to cross the entire parking lot. If two employees had equally inconvenient spaces, perhaps they could have traded – but fears this system would devolve into a deregulated economy of lot trading ruled out this model.

Next, they looked to large-scale urban planning and considered constructing a ‘ring-lot’. This model proposed to surround each building with a perimeter of equidistant parking spaces, permitting each employee to park as near to their office as possible. However, if a sudden influx of users needed to access the same building – to attend a conference, for example – a hierarchy of ‘ring-parkers’ and ‘non-ring-parkers’ would develop.

Only the members of the sociology department are allowed to know how the current algorithm works. Today, I’m in Lot C.

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...my favourite was born John Roland Redd in St. Louis, Missouri. His mixed European and African ancestry lent him an ambiguous complexion, permitting him to join the higher-waged union for non-black musicians under the guises of the Mexican Juan Ronaldo and the Indian Korla Pandit. Until his death, he continued to wear a turban and speechlessly interpret the Music of the Exotic East on his electric organ.

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Private.

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What I’m listening to: bangpret and the wonderful Aural Archipelago.

My classical imagination brings me back to the harmonic parallel motion and 'freedom-to-move' ushered in by Debussy, recalling his quote on seeing and hearing the Javanese Gamelan at the 1889 Exposition Universelle:

Thus Javanese music obeys laws of counterpoint which make Palestrina seem like child’s play. And if one listens to it without being prejudiced by one’s European ears, one will find a percussive charm that forces one to admit that our own music is not much more than a barbarous kind of noise more fit for a travelling circus.

If our music historians are to be trusted, we may surmise that the continued subversion of classical harmonic concepts throughout the 19th and 20th centuries brought us to musique concrete, minimalism, and even to techno and house. Considering how mundane I've found techno recently - I would prefer the content of 120 Days to contemplating the texture of its toilet paper - hearing this house-inspired performance makes dance music seem interesting again. This isn’t just because of its more varied textures and melodies, but because of the fascinating social circumstances which compose the event:

What about those “concert-like” bangpret dance parties? In Sundanese culture, such an egalitarian dance scene is quite an oddity (after I shared some bangpret videos on Instagram, many local friends expressed shock that such a scene existed.) While bajidoran groups often have female sinden or ronggeng singer-dancers up on stage, it's fairly rare to see women in the audience dance. Like so many Sundanese arts, bajidoran and jaipong concerts are by and large a man’s world. If Sundanese women are to casually dance in West Java, its usually to dangdut or Western pop music. Despite all this, everyone dances at bangpret shows, from your typical middle-aged males to grannies and jilbabed teens. So what is going on here?

The key, I think, is in those gembyung songs at bangpret’s core. A friend in Ciater told me offhand that late night dangdut concerts in the area had been banned for years by local government officials. Such events, and to an extent bajidoran shows, had garnered a somewhat seedy reputation, with many folks drinking and fights sometimes breaking out. And then along came bangpret. The same sexy, modern grooves, but with a pious, Islamic core. There can’t be anything seedy about singing devotional songs to Allah, can there?

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What I’m listening to: Jonathan Sterne. His book ‘The Audible Past’ provides a fascinating account of the origins of sound reproduction technology and modern listening techniques. Especially fascinating is his account of one of Alexander Graham Bell's inventions before the telephone, a sound writing machine with a human ear.

Bell’s phonautograph. Media objects like this and their materiality have been preoccupying me lately. Sterne provides a thorough explanation of how the provenance of this ear is linked to medical research/corpse exhumation legislation and the exploitation of the poor.

Ruins upon ruins, Scotland in Berlin: die Abtei Treptow auf dei Insel der Jugend. The fake Scottish-style ruins on the Island of Youth no longer exist, but a handsome bridge and gatehouse are still there.

Arifin M’s vocal strength, relaxation, and intimacy reminds me of the microphone-centric singing of crooners, and of course other gambus/oud performers. As usual lately, language gets in the way of deeper understanding - Google Translate works very poorly with Indonesian languages.

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What I’m listening to: Toog’s new release, the Prepared Public, a Satie-esque jab at Cage; the reaction to dreams.

The self-exotica of Josephine Baker and Anna May Wong, the dreams of music and its origin:

The self-as-Jacques Brel/Jarvis Cocker dreams of Meilyr Jones.

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https://soundcloud.com/lucianmy/improvisation-after-the-spanish-pavan

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Insensitive.

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What I’m listening to: Michel Magne’s satirical socialist songs for the 1973 film Moi Y’En A Vouloir Des Sous. The most topical song, though slightly annoying: ‘Fight for the common market’.

Still of revolutionary action from the film (utopia).

The most enchanting song on the album is undoubtedly Pétrole Pop, appropriating exotic postcolonial glissando effects, the chorus as petite bourgeoisie.

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I’ve just finished designing the website for Jack Fawcett’s Roof Garden Records, which recently appeared on Tiny Mix Tapes’ favourite labels of 2016.

I’ve also updated my website with some recent work, particularly for organs.

I discovered France Musique played an excerpt of a sheng (Chinese mouth organ) recording I made of La Monte Young’s Composition 1960 #7 on a programme covering Steve Reich. I wrote a bit about this recording in 2015.

I’ve also added excerpts and scores of my compositions Organ Dance Suite / Dance Organ Suite (2015) and Breath Piece (2016) to my website:

Inspired by the network modelling of Cornelius Cardew’s The Great Learning Paragraph 7. Each performer plays a note at random from the first chord, sustaining it for the length of one’s breath. The performer rests to breathe in and then repeats this process until one has played all of the notes of the first chord. The performer applies this same process to the remaining three chords. This piece has flexible instrumentation and notation, is easy to perform, and permits each individual performer a wide degree of control. The rhythmic element of the piece is always changing, subject to local and collective variations in temperament, patience, audience, and space.

Slightly less grave, I’ve also added my organ arrangement of Eric Prydz’ Opus for Tomas Palmer’s club night Odyssey Above.

What I’m listening to: more mouth organ possibilities, especially this great French recording of gagaku court music:

And enchanting folk musics:

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What I’m listening to: lots of noise. 

Richard Chamberlain singing Burt Bacharach’s Blue Guitar, 1963.

This BBC video presents what seems to me a very anglophone mode of listening. Regarding the top-selling history of English recorded music, the anglophone listener can approach any unfamiliar culture of music and construct an economic model of listening.

The 200-CD collection which the presenter equates with Mozart’s complete understanding arrives in an archival box. Listening to 9 consecutive violin concertos or the CD collection is an arduous task to be completed and checked off. Music becomes a form of work. The value and reward for this work is reduced to the gratification of ‘Understanding Mozart’ and the moment-to-moment pleasure of music.

Music like Mozart’s The Magic Flute has a widely agreed cultural value, but one might not value a piece as highly. Rather than supposing a ‘good piece’ is supported by a network of patrons, political agendas, economics, and ideas, music is reduced to individual pleasure and boredom. The presenter is supposed to have completed ‘Understanding Mozart’ by buying and passively listening to this CD collection.

‘Relaxing, better than any meditation course... He wrote music for people like you and I, to entertain, to touch us, to lift us up, to make us feel better, and that’s all you can ask of a musician.’

With this vapid specialism, one transforms music from a social interaction to an antidepressant. Sure, all recorded music can become elevator music, but it can spread profound voices or revolutionary ideas too. Music is, after all, the aestheticization and performance of social organisation.

Also on the BBC: the multi-talented Theresa May, looking dangerously fashionable. Music trendspotters: British music hall revival when?

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What I’m listening to lately: Skyscrapers by Bruno Nicolai with Edda dell’Orso on vocals.

It was composed for the 1970 Jesus Franco sexploitation film Eugenie de Sade (subtitle: Marquis De Sade's Philosophy In The Boudoir).  I’m drawn into the architectural metaphor of ‘Skyscrapers’ and the film’s tagline: ‘To reach the ultimate in pleasure she must experience the ultimate in torture!’

In the Radley Metzger film Camille 2000, the ultimate in pleasure is experienced through reflection and repetition, almost a postmodern gesture:

Camille 2000 is half space age bachelor pad, half Roman villa romp. This film seduces the viewer with the emerging free world of global capitalism: our protagonist arrives on a business trip but first must ‘see the sights’ and pick the romantic commodity of his choosing.

He spends his time mostly making love, partying in villas, and decorating his apartment to elevator music. The sound of bourgeios leisure, Brasilian bossa nova, is easily at home in Rome or wherever.

The film ends with our female love interest being slapped in the face with money and presumably dying. Our protagonist carelessly descends into the same orgiastic staircase scene we saw at the opening of the film, continuing some hopeless repetitive cycle.

The Situationist student was alienated from power and confronted with knowledge. Now educational institutions spend millions on signifying erudition, not just producing it. Perhaps for these reasons I'm obsessed with the photography of Daniel Faust (currently on display at Norma Mangione in Turin.)

Over the past 30 years Faust has captured the still, taxonomic quality of the museum in a practise described as ‘extraterrestrial anthropology’. Faust examines the human peculiarities of the museum with the same curiosity with which the museum gazes at beasts.

Faust photographs the museum with detachment. He attempts to place the narrative power of the museum back into the hands of the image. By taking a picture of an Ames room, the histories of science and the museum collide with the entire art historical game of perspective: making some things appear bigger than others.

Contemporary art is a place which allegorises the real world. It does not try to become the real world through physical contact, emotive music, the ‘immersive’ simulations of video games, real violence or true love: it prefers the simple contemplative mirror.

I would never have obtained this kind of complexity with technological objects, whose singleness condemns the mind to monomania: minimal art, robot, computer.

Marcel Broodthaers as quoted by Rosalind Krauss in A Voyage on the North Sea.

Painting is fine art; the Venus Grotto is architecture. In a contemporary art space where representation seems more important than reality, are photographs not predisposed to supersede painting and physical artwork? Louise Lawler’s work asked similar questions, but paid too much deference to the market of contemporary art. Daniel Faust looks with critical distance at the societal images, models, and characters we are indoctrinated with as children.

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Arc de Marc Augé, 2016.

This monument was erected to commemorate the passage of the artist through the ideal 'non-place' in honour of the 81st birthday of the writer Marc Augé. The frieze represents the stock characters of architectural renderings: the Venus of Bjarke Ingels and the Discobolus of Vizpeople.

In the arch, movement is rendered still and tangible. An arch collapses until the precise moment when the keystone is set into place.

The arch: any part of a curve. Curvature in the shape of an arch. From the Latin arcus, bow.

Yet the semicircular arch is structurally flawed. The forces at the base of the arch do not push straight down. The pointed arch is more effective, but the arch is about transforming the movement through space into a rite of passage, not efficiency.

The arch is an architectural question mark, a comparison between places or times.  It provides an axis for movement and perspective, but it is the surrounding manipulation of space which provides direction.