An enjoyable, if too short and rather fragmented, trip to Los Angeles – saw dear friends (and missed a couple who couldn't get in to see me); met a lot of new academics among the old ones; and gave, if I say so myself, a good presentation of a sexy topic.
Almost everyone in LA looked tanned, relaxed, attractive....
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On the stereo is a CD, the first of a set, the Cold Blue Complete 10-Inch Series. This was a set of 10-inch LPs (a witty if not particularly practical size) of young composers from the Cal Arts (California Institute of the Arts, in the far desert enclave of Valencia) gang of the 1980s – Peter Garland, Barney Childs, Michael Jon Fink, Chas Smith, Daniel Lentz – mostly students or associates of Harold Budd. Not many of them continued famous – the Cold Blue label didn't have much of an afterlife either – but they made delicate, shimmering musics while they were in their prime; it is a sort of intellectual refinement of new age music, a good example of what John Rockwell called the 'neo-impressionism' of the 1980s. I still own several of the old 10-inch records – I'll give them to our library, I think – and it is nice to have them rereleased in toto.
I wrote biographies on some of these guys for Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Music & Musicians in the late 1980s; some of them I faxed, or wrote letters asking for information. Others, like Fink, lived near me in Los Angeles (he gave me the scores for his lovely piano pieces, like uncynical Satie, which I still have in my office); or the strange and imaginative Chas Smith, who lived with his 'pedal steel guitar', elaborate tattoos, and plumber's truck over the hill in the San Fernando Valley. The only one I saw often, for a time, was Lentz, who was a friend of Laura's – rather unfortunately, to be honest; he was the unhappy, obnoxious alcoholic of the bunch, accustomed to heckling guests at dinner parties and pushing his girlfriend around (she sang on this record – and has since left for a happier life without him); but he did indeed write beautiful sounds.
For me, these musics, plus the more musically sophisticated side of commercial new age music (i.e. William Ackerman, Philip Aaberg, etc.) have vast resonance – they mean, for me, the hopes and pleasures of being a Californian in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the days seemed to shimmer with light, and the streets seemed always filled with cheerful, social people, all different, and many of them very unusual indeed. Like a LeGuin cityscape, or a utopian vision from a Sturgeon novel.
These delicate, isolated, gentle notes are a (utopian, nostalgic, fantastic) kind of healing music. A good thing, that...
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