4. “Blue” Gene TyrannyDegrees of Freedom Found
I was so happy to hear that this record was coming out. Five CDs of “Blue” Gene Tyranny is wonderful – it could be 30. I adore his music so much. His work with Robert Ashley was my entry point, and then his solo piano playing and his strange kind of rock music that he was making in New York. He was of the generation of folks maybe one or two generations younger than John Cage and Morton Feldman, and he’s so unabashedly beautiful in what he plays. I don’t think he has any problem with something emerging that’s almost saccharine, with a DX7 sound, a washy keyboard. And it’s not ironic, he really means it. Yet it’s strange, it’s not just beautiful.
Whatever he’s tapping into there is at the centre of what I love about music. I’m very interested in finding strangeness in not the obvious places. Finding strangeness in beautiful places, and beauty in strange places. Also widening what is strange – like “Blue” Gene Tyranny playing a G major chord, the triad is just weird. Robert Wyatt’s a genius at that too – he knows how to make super simple things sound strange, and I think that comes out of curiosity in a radical sense, that allows people to show beautiful and strange things in a new light. “Blue” Gene Tyranny’s music will do that. He’s just a monster, and I really wish he were still around making music.
