Re-invasion begins

After getting to DIA ridiculously early, we found a nice spot to gawk at the gargantuan hotel building project outside the south window before riding through security.


DIA's new hotel. Not quite finished.

We were told that some Spanish company was building this thing - odd, I thought the Spanish were broke.

At the gate, Sharon went off and got a turkey-wrap thing about the size of a football. I had a bite.

We took off from Denver a little late and got to O'Hare a few minutes early, hustling over to the London-bound gate which, thankfully, was nearby. More waiting.

There was a State Department Travel Advisory in place - apparently the US  had (again) angered somebody somewhere to the point where they issued one of those "advisory" warnings, presumably something along the lines of "you probably won't get blown to smithereens or hijacked off to some god-forsaken shithole someplace, but your chances are just a little higher than usual." Of course, should you be unlucky enough to have overseas flight reservations during one of these advisory windows, there's pretty much nothing you can really do about it except worry a little extra. So, being stubbornly skeptical of flying anyway, it was easy enough for me to comply. What better way to start a two week vacation than marinating in some irrational fear?

The girl at the gate announced that all travelers on the Heathrow flight needed to come up to the desk and have their papers re-checked, which seemed a little pointless as they barely glanced at the boarding passes and passports before dropping their stamp. At least they didn't make us take off our shoes again.

The flight over was another endless nothingburger.

 

I had picked out a few books and loaded them up on Sharon's first-gen Kindle: a book about the pre-Conquest nobility ("The World Before Domesday: The English Aristocracy 900–1066" by Ann Williams), a book about the Norman Invasion itself ("The Norman Conquest:The Battle of Hastings and the Fall of Anglo-Saxon England" by Marc Morris, and a third about the Domesday Book ("The Domesday Quest: In Search of the Roots of England" by Michael Wood). I had taken along Ian Mortimer's terrific "A Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England" on the last trip, and just about finished it, so I thought some more reading on the period might be in order.

 Well, ok, start at the beginning. The first of these treatises, Ann Williams' book about the pre-Conquest nobility was utterly pitiless. From Chapter Three: "A fourth discifer, Ealdred, attests a diploma of 958 in favour of the propincenarious Cenric, whose witnesses include the regis picerna, AElfwig. A diploma of Edgar, dated 968, is attested by three disciferi, Eanulf, AElfwine and Wulfstan, and Eanulf is among four disciferi who attest a diploma of the same king in 971." It was a lot of this.

To her credit, Williams delves deep into the meticulous substrata of nobility and the dizzying complexity of land ownership, social structure and regal ass-kissing that existed in pre-1066 England - her sources, presumably, were gleaned from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and whatever has been recovered from musty church records that have survived into modern times. The thing reads like a graduate thesis, however, and I was left, after four and a half chapters, mentally exhausted and acutely conscious that I was hopelessly out of my depth. The thing didn't revoke my inexplicable later-life interest in English history and (a probably callow) fascination with medieval history specifically, but it just wasn't a very good place to start.

After a three hours of barely-pronounceable proper names and hazily defined Latin-based terminology, I waved my white flag, suitably chastened by my smallness in the face of Williams' scholarship, and turned over to Morris' book, a far more approachable and neophyte-friendly treatise on the origins and execution of  The Norman Conquest. Alliances, betrayals, strategic marriages, misbehaving bastard children, murder most foul, ransoms....the pre-amble to the Conquest reads like a medieval fantasy novel, and Morris kept my Williams'-weary mind going for a couple more hours.

I gave up on reading about two hours before landing. Figured I'd try to get a little shut-eye, but it was a hopeless task. Body clock said it was late evening, local time had us at about 5 in the morning, and the big 767 engines just outside the window groaned loudly and relentlessly, even audible through my purportedly 'noise-isolating headphones.' I just listened to Max Corbacho and some Roach, and ticked the minutes away.

 

Our arrival gate seemed like a mile and a half walk from baggage claim - Heathrow is enormous - but we eventually got there, retrieved the bags after a longish wait, got through a long line at immigration, passed through customs and met our pre-arranged driver. It was raining lightly, the remnants of a downpour (we were told) that nearly drowned London the day before. Eerily, the weather that morning was virtually identical to that of a year ago. Yeah, big deal, it's drizzly in London a lot of the time, right?

You're not allowed to smoke in the parking garage, or it appeared that way anyway, so I burned a quick one in the half-hearted drizzle just outside the temporary parking area. Our cheerful driver loaded us up into the waiting car, and we headed off on the grey and dimly familiar ride into Chelsea.

Back in London. Here we go again.

Roach clips

I went ahead and ordered a couple of new Steve Roach CD's - SoundQuest Fest, which is a live recording made at his tribal-synth-New Age musical gathering just about a year ago in Tuscon, and The Road Eternal, a collaboration with Scandanavian guitarist Erik Wollo, who is a frequent co-conspirator with Roach in his various experiments trimming expansive synth excursions with more traditionally melodic instrumentation.

I'm about halfway through SoundQuest, it's not bad. We'll scribble a line or two about both when we get around to spinning them more thoroughly.

In doing a little search on the SoundQuest show (specifically, if this was going to be a regular event, and so so far it doesn't appear so) I came across a review of the SoundQuest "experience" (calling it a concert may be appropriate shorthand, but probably understates the vibe) by a writer for Sonora Review named Mike Powell. It's actually a two part piece, the second half is here , although I found Part 1 a better read.

If Powell strikes a somewhat ambivilent posture toward Roach's music, or at least the cheerful audacity of hosting an essentially melody-less, lyric-less concert of eight hours duration, he at least thoughtfully approaches and confronts the probably arcane distinction between ambient music and New Age music.

Structurally, both new age and ambient music are a rejection of time. They go nowhere by design. In ambient, I usually read the defiance as intellectual; in new age, it’s usually cultural—Steve Roach has talked about his music as a way of liberating its listeners from the “bondage of Western time.” One good way to do this is to get your friends together for a concert that lasts for eight hours (including dinner break.)

Steve Roach is 55 years old. He has released nearly 50 albums since 1982. Three of them are called Quiet Music; many of them have cover photos that document portions of the natural world so expansive that they look abstract. Steve Roach is a mini-deity to fans of music like this, and when he gets on stage to welcome us to SoundQuest Fest 2010, we clap, we hoot. We have worn breathable fabrics for the occasion because we are ready to sit for hour after hour and do absolutely nothing.

One complaint I might lodge is Powell's seeming implication that Roach straddles both New Age and ambience disciplines, applying the Brian Eno ethic of ambient music (“as ignorable as it is interesting”) to New Age's barbitual pleasantries and higher-power conceits.

The fact is that New Age music (if we're using the tag taped to record-store bin dividers) has a significant tradition in folk and classical underpinnings - you'd be challenged to find much relationship between Roach and the coterie of Windham Hill artists from 25 years ago, playing vigorously melodic and usually structured instrumental music on acoustic guitars and grand pianos - while the electronics sustaining Roach's music harkens back to the lengthy and largely improvised sonic forays of Tangerine Dream and (especially) Klaus Schulze of nearly forty years ago, both of whom staged brutally long shows of tonal abstractions coaxed from primitive sequencers and Moogs.

If you find musical comraderie between George Winston and Steve Roach, you may looking at both from too far away. A more deeply cynical observer might suggest that both music's ability to bore the average listener to stone reveals a common DNA - we're not sure if Powell hates the stuff that much, but he at least has the tact not to suggest it outright.

For me, I see Roach as more purely a product of the latter tradition - true, he borrows the ancient-culture/tribal influences like drumming and didgs reflective of the New Age lost-wisdom gestalt, but musically they usually seem to be textural dressing, secondary to the electronics.

Maybe it all seems a little different when experienced live - a lot of things do - and certainly a generous strata of gem-gazing New Agers at the concert likely influences the casual observer's perceptions of what they came to hear. For my part, while I like Roach's music and actually buy it and listen a lot to it, I don't care for all of it. The didg-'n-drumming thing usually doesn't do much for me. And whether or not I could sit through several hours of it, percussive or not, remains a speculation not likely to be tested in the near future.

Powell, at least, took a lengthy break to go home and fry up a couple of eggs. For now, all I need do is hit the Stop button on my CD player, and if whatever Roach is doing fails within that lamentably earthbound constraint, I'm not persuaded that it will be because I heard three hours too little of it.