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From yesterday’s The Saturday Paper - breaking news - New Dirty Three studio album coming soon !!!

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Dirty Three’s first album in more than a decade, Love Changes Everything, is a transcendent reaffirmation of the trio’s refusal to obey the conventions of music. By Chris Johnston.

Dirty Three return with Love Changes Everything


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Warren Ellis and Jim White of Dirty Three.


Love Changes Everything
is Dirty Three’s new studio album, the first from the Australian trio in 12 years. Out this month, it consists of six songs/compositions/outré jams titled “Love Changes Everything”, from “I” to “VI”. The record has no words, no literal indicators – just 40 minutes of extraordinary musical freefall.

I say “freefall” because there’s no tether attaching the band to what we might call rock music, no line between Dirty Three and convention. When I began to listen to Love Changes Everything last month, I also happened to hear a philosophy scholar, Professor Glen Pettigrove, on the radio talking about the idea of obedience in music, particularly classical music. He cited the composer and conductor Igor Stravinsky, who thought it a sin to deviate from the composer’s score, and used that as a way to discuss whether there was virtue in obedience, and obeying tradition, in music.

There are certainly many traditions within Dirty Three – classical music definitely, Mediterranean folk, punk, free jazz, post-rock. But they don’t obey anything. Much of the time it’s unclear whether they even worry about obeying each other, or whether they even need to, or whether there is anything as base as instructions. Their singular music is driven by the magnetism and mind-reading between them.

Dirty Three, whether live or recorded, are always, always startling – always with dramatic little supernovas going on. It’s music that would fail in others’ hands. It has been this way since their first cassette giveaway in 1993, recorded in guitarist Mick Turner’s house during a wild era of unhinged gigs through Melbourne’s inner north. That cassette – simply titled Dirty Three – formed the basis of Sad & Dangerous, their first proper album, released in 1995. Since then there’s been seven – the most recent of which, Toward the Low Sun, came out in 2012.

Love Changes Everything, out on June 28, is the same Dirty Three, thankfully. There are no tricks or changes. This makes it, in and of itself, a wonderful winter gift. If anything, it’s calmer than Toward the Low Sun or Horse Storiesbut not as calm as Ocean Songs or as mournful as Whatever You Love, You Are, although it has moments of all these.

So much of what we hear is so middle ground and careful, so obedient to form. This is where magic is lost.

It begins, as much of their work does, on “I” – in a storm, a dark industrial noise in this case, interfered with, disobedient and overloaded until breaking point. Is it a guitar? Or is it something else? Jim White’s mysterious, idiosyncratic drums arrive and disappear again in the distance, greyed-out, as if they’ve fallen off some anomalous strata. Then comes the final signal that, as a Dirty Three enthusiast, you have arrived. The violin starts up.

I’m certainly not the first to cite Niccolò Paganini in relation to Dirty Three’s Warren Ellis, also of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds, and the Cave–Ellis soundtrack partnership. Paganini was the rebel Italian violinist of the early 1800s – a musician with wild hair who refused sheet music, lost a rare violin in a bar bet and also played mandolin. The links are strong. Paganini was prone to disobey and labelled ungodly. “Reviews of Paganini’s concerts in Italy regularly characterized him as a sorcerer, charlatan, or wizard,” writes Dr Robert Riggs, musicologist and violinist, while discussing the violin’s links to death and the devil in the book The Violin.

Riggs describes a very Ellis caricature of Paganini from the times. “With intense visage and hair flying, [he] seems either to be dancing or indulging in extravagant body language … encircled by powerfully symbolic objects: a human skull, a black cat, a snake coiled around a staff, a pyramid, and several items used in alchemy and astrology.” Despite being – by all accounts – a lovely man offstage, this is Ellis’s onstage vibe: unhinged, possessed. There’s more. Paganini invented new ways of playing the instrument, explains Riggs, via “fiendishly difficult” compositions – “double harmonics, left-hand pizzicato, fingered-octaves, ricochet and slurred staccato bowing”.

Listen to Ellis on “VI”, the 10-minute abstract symphony and closing track. His electric violin is rendered down to a swarming, dangerous loop low in the mix, like an evil, disintegrating William Basinski loop, the instrument as far removed from obedience to its rich “tradition” as it ever could be. And while Turner’s guitar is the centrepiece, each member is as mind-blowing as the other in this trio. White is the kind of drummer who will drop his sticks or his mallets because it sounds good. Here, on “VI”, he’s at his unique best – a little militaristic, a little drunken Balkan wake, a little Gene Krupa. The way a simple set of piano chords works against the threat and uncertainty of the rest of “VI” is peerless.

With the merest of fuss, too. One of the reasons to love Dirty Three is they seem to have a utilitarian, workmanlike approach to making cosmic music – get it done, jam around certain ideas, press “play” on ideas prepared earlier. “II” is a beautiful track, after “I”, which is chaotic and explosive. “II” resembles The Bad Seeds’ “Bright Horses” from Ghosteen, awash with Ellis’s Korg synths and sad piano, and Turner’s impressionistic guitar. White’s snare merely rattles occasionally. The rest is a great moaning king tide of sound, pushing in, washing away, the centre uncertain. Likewise “III” – the drums here have no right to be placed where they are, the violin is plucked and deeply weird.

Later, “V” begins with the type of odd high-hat rhythm you might expect, which shifts and changes tempo almost imperceptibly for six minutes and ends on it too, isolated again.

The order of the songs is also formless. It’s not noisy song begetting quiet song, or even noisy-noisy-quiet-quiet. The sequence of this strange dreamscape has a chaos about it, with elements of surprise and even shock – another partial dismembering of convention.

An accepted wisdom in so many forms of music is that everything must be in its place. You hear so many strands of it through pop, electronic and classical music, where the score is followed and it’s very mannered. In electronic music the human is often subservient to the machine and its templates. So much of what we hear is so middle ground and careful, so obedient to form. This is where magic is lost.

The great appeal of Dirty Three is their revocation of all that, in order to reach something greater and more universal, without words. Freedom, disobedience and transcendence are what they’re all about. It feels more than ever as if Dirty Three have built an enormous pyre from entire canons of music and rebuilt a core from the ground up through these deconstructed, defiant approaches to guitar and drums and a supernatural violin with a pick-up.

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Sneak preview ……...



 
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Some Ornette - first from the album “The Shape of Jazz to Come” (1959).



From the 1960 album “Change of the Century”.



Town Hall, 1962 is a live album by Ornette Coleman, recorded on December 21, 1962 at New York City's Town Hall and released in 1965 by the ESP-Disk label. It was the first recording of Coleman's new trio, featuring rhythm section David Izenzon and Charles Moffett.[1]



The Empty Foxhole is an album by the American jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman that was released on the Blue Note label in 1966.[1] The album features Coleman's untutored violin and trumpet as well as performing on his usual instrument, the alto saxophone, and marks the recording debut of his drummer son Denardo Coleman, who was ten years of age at the time. The album cover features Coleman's own artwork.



Crisis is a live album by the American jazz saxophonist and composer Ornette Coleman recorded at New York University in 1969 and released on the Impulse! label.



From the album "Soapsuds, Soapsuds" recorded on January 30, 1977.



"In All Languages" recorded 1987.



From the 1988 album “Virgin Beauty”.



“Tone Dialing”, recorded 1995

 
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Two songs here that juxtapose the so-called traditional man / woman relationship where the man takes a vulnerable
and subservient role/posture for a change (mostly The Reels actually). Not often seen in Pop Music is it > Funny about that.





Dave Mason’s genius will be duly acknowledged here soon …….
 
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A Ghostsign at 150-152 Glenferrie Road, Malvern * via Gideon Haigh.

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On the south side of the building at 150-152 Glenferrie Road, Malvern, revealed four years ago by the demolition of adjacent former Commonwealth Bank building. Apparently Louis William Holmes was so keen to show his handiwork that the entirety of the text reads:

L.W. HOLMES,/HOUSE PAINTER & PAPERHANGER/ON SALE/GLASS FOR WINDOWS & PICTURES/VENETIAN BLINDS RE-TAPED & PAINTED/ON SALE/CARRIAGE VARNISH/WAGGON VARNISH/COPAL VARNISH/RUSSIAN GLUE/ENGLISH GLUE/GOLD PAINT/MACHINE OIL/PIPE CLAY/CHEAP SIGN WRITER/HOUSEHOLD/PAINTS 5D PER lb TIN/ESTIMATES FOR/GENERAL REPAIRS.

Holmes was seventeen years a Malvern councillor, and also served a mayoral term. The business, passed from father to son, lasted about six decades, and merged into an ironmonger. And his cheap signwriting then vanished again, sealed up behind a new construction, for the delectation of generations to come.

 
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How does this have 3 pages already?

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