#benjamin lew

happy birthday Steven Brown (born on August 23rd, 1952) born in chicago area1970s SF CA becomes member of theater group Angels of LIght forms Tuxedomoon with Blaine L Reininger.

Tuxedomoon is an experimental post-punk new wave band from San Francisco, United States, formed in the late 1970s at the beginning of the punk-rock movement. Capable of combining punk vehemence and orchestrations of modern, dark environments and pop references, Tuxedomoon were one of the most original experiences of the new wave period of dominance. With influences from punk and electronic music, the group, originally formed by Steve Brown and Blaine L. Reininger, used electronic violins, guitars, strident vocals and synthesizers to develop a unique "no-wave cabaret" sound. Unlike New York, San Francisco's new wave had its roots in theatre and dance, and Tuxedomoon were the group that best represented this multidisciplinary context, showcasing their surrealist futurism, icy chamber music and European romanticism.

Better known on the European continent than in the United States and the United Kingdom, since then they have been practicing a kind of post-punk with gothic reminiscences, all very experimental and always providing hypnotic overtones. One of his best-known works was a remix of Marvin Gaye's soul classic, Heard It Through the Grapevine. His home publishing house was called Angst Music.

Tuxedomoon is an electronic-oriented avant-garde collective with a musical range ranging from new wave pop to jazz fusion or experimentation with electronic landscapes (usually including saxophone and violin). Listening to them implies entering an entertaining fabric of sounds, textures and unconventional resolutions of music.

There is never aridity in his songs, which border on the minimalist, but it is also not usable as ambient music while chatting. Although their ability to crystallize a certain dark and romantic zeitgeist quickly made them one of the most influential bands of the time, and their music transcended all genres. Their style can be categorized under adjectives such as: alternative rock, new wave, classical, indie.

Among all the groups that left the San Francisco scene around the mid-'70s, Tuxedomoon were undoubtedly the ones who had the most feedback from the audience. And not because they were the spokesmen of a popular musical recipe, but, rather, because they enjoyed greater visibility, mainly due to their famous interpretations in which they mixed expressionist cabaret, romanticism of Central European descent and shreds of humanoid futurism. With them, the forms of classical music were bent to reflect the industrial psychological devastation of the time, coining a strongly characterized and innovative genre.

This collective of unique artists, capable of creating a strictly personal, magical and hypnotic sound language, absolutely recognizable and endowed with a profound fascinating effect, from the mixture and experimentation with references as eclectic as no-wave, punk, classical music, electronica, jazz, funk. A mixture and conjunction of references passed through the optics and attitude of post-punk, also wrapped live in a more that meansA multimedia concept in which film, video, light and scenography have always been integrated into the final musical message. Futuristic, romantic, lyrical, visionary, electronic and acoustic, using drum machines, violin, sax, minimal keyboards.

Dark, surprising, endowed with torrential inventiveness, Tuxedomoon have been since their birth at the end of the 70s, a cult group among the circles of experimentation, the most daring electronic music and music, in short, less conventional and difficult to label.

In June 1977, Tuxedomoon formed from Angels of Light, an artist collective and commune, a group in which Steve Brown was involved. He met Blaine L. Reininger in an electronic music class at the City College of San Francisco. Brown worked with Tommy Tadlock, of Angels of Light, to create the final project of the course, who would

become Tuxedomoon's manager. Reininger and Brown began playing music together at Tadlock's house. Reininger played guitar and electronic violin, and Tadlock was a multi-instrumentalist. He also created tools for the band, including a "treatment mountain", which was a pyramid made of plywood that contained all of Reininger's pedal effects.

They began playing music together in the mid-1970s, when punk-rock was becoming popular in the underground music scene. "The only rule was the unspoken understanding that what sounded like anyone else's work was taboo," Brown said of the band, aiming to create music that sounded different from anything else that had been done before.

The vocals were strident and inspired by punk-rock, and the band would use all the instruments around them, including saxophones and a polymoog synthesizer, lacking a drummer. During their early concerts, Brown's connections with local theater collectives led to a supply of equipment, but they were not very successful in their performances, with the audience throwing beer bottles at them. Bassist Peter 'Principle' Dachert, singer and performance artist Winston Tong, occasional vocalists Gregory Cruishank and Victoria Lowey, filmmaker Bruce Geduldig, joined the band during the concerts. Tuxedomoon created new performances for each concert, creating theatrical performances, and being described as "electronic theatrical cabaret". The band performed frequently with Pere Ubu, The Residents, Devo and Cabaret Voltaire, while also releasing their first single, Joeboy's poo experiment the electronic ghost, and the funk neurosis of Pinheads on the move.

In 1979 they released the EP No tears, which fuses fragments of classical music, synthetic rhythms and vocals by Tong declThe single No Tears, the latter being described as one of the greatest electro-punk anthems in history, remains a post-punk cult classic today. Michael Belfer (guitar) and Paul Zahl (drums) collaborated on it. The EP is dominated by keyboard sounds and rhythms, though the song recited by Tong gives the songs a decadent feel (No Tears is a classic violin solo with slow' dissonance, and New Machine is a menacing futuristic anthem). That same year they signed with Ralph Records, The Residents' label, with which they finally gained exposure abroad.

Meanwhile, their concerts stood out for their genuine multimedia shows. In an interview with New Musical Express, Reininger claimed to have met people who had literally left his shows terrified. He may have been quite right, given that some of his songs were constructed using the tritone, a fourth interval forbidden in medieval times because it was believed to be the devil's music. However, the band would use these shows to obtain a cathartic liberating effect from the public.

The next EP, Scream with a view (Pre, 1979), a glacial and somber work, where the existential component of the sound is filtered by an intellectual tension, shows a more aseptic and rarefied sound. Nervous guy develops a synthetic rhythm that roams repetitive guitar chords, electronically treated vocals, synth turns, and moog spirals. In the same vein is Where Intersts Lie, a wounded funeral litany of depressive synthesizer fragments. Experimentation becomes the voice of the unconscious in (Special treatment for the) Family man, perhaps his first great masterpiece. Aseptic waves of moog reproduce withered scenarios; The sad declamation of the sax accompanies the listener towards the dark silence of his own fears. Closing the album, Midnite stroll's babble, with synthesizer and sax bubbles. The single What use (Ralph, 1980) returns to rhythms and metronomic with an easy pop chorus, but its B-side, the instrumental Crash, confirms the trend towards a more dissonant and apocalyptic style.

In 1980 the band released their first album, Half-mute, on Ralph Records, which attracted praise for its unique alchemy of electronic new wave, alternately ambient and full of angst. This work completes the transition that the group was operating in their music, chiseling complex and unusual scores with orchestrations and far from a classic rock quartet.

The hybrid instrumentation, the cerebral climate, the violent harmonic contrasts alienate the sound to a level of emaciated and synthetic chamber music, especially in the instrumental solos and without rhythm accompaniment, such as Nazca, a dreamlike reverie of somber electronicaand introspective curled by Brown's soulful sax; James Whale (a tribute to the director of Frankenstein), for concrete and slowed sounds, and horror-psychedelic altmospheres; the mechanical ballet with a high rhythm of 59 to 1 colored by the bass of Principle, prepares the ground for Fifth column, a lament summarized in the style of Eno; and Volo vivace, an intense romantic delirium of Reininger's violin against the woody bass of Principle, which shows a taste for classical inflections, in this case rock. On the album Tritone (Musica diablo) stands out, a convincing harmonic synthesis for the contrapuntal play between the minimalist and atonal accelerations of the violin and the pointilism of the keyboards, sliding between keyboard counterpoints and a reckless violin frenzy; and KM, a long passionate dirge from Brown's sax, punctuated by Principle's bombastic bass, and full of whimsical little dissonances. Electronica, free jazz and psychedelia are integrated into a rarefied atmosphere, in an inert tranquility that becomes the most characteristic element of their sound. Most of them are fairly conventional electro-pop songs that are linked to the first test: the dark ballad 7 years, which takes place between synthesizer wails and violin accents, the Brechtian litany Seeding the clouds that seals everything in an apparently relaxed atmosphere, and the paranoid and depressive Loneliness.

Tuxedomoon toured Europe in 1980, joining the group Tong and Bruce Gedulgig, and moved to New York, where they moved around giving several concerts, appearing on the soundtrack of the film Downtown 81, centered around Jean Michel Basquiat, and in which Blondie appears. James Chance, DNA and Tuxedomoon.

They followed the tour in Europe, where they got excellent reviews. Surprised by so much success, Tuxedomoon decided to settle in the old continent, establishing their headquarters in Amsterdam, Holland, and six months later they settled in Brussels.

Their second album, Desire (Ralph, 1981), recorded in London, is not at the level of the previous one, and contained a darker punk sound resembling a more epic and desperate Roxy Music, which marks a return to the standard form of a dance song. In the songs they combine cultured electronica, decadent post-punk and rabid pop that achieves very interesting notes, as in the case of the sinister ballad Jinx, the animated psychodrama of Desire, the grotesque anthem for androids of Victims of the dance, Incubus (blue suite), or Again. And in the end, an intellectual variant of the old music-hall, the theater of the absurd and the cacophonous fanfare of creative jazz. In this psychodrama, Winston Tong's passionate voice on the dissonant mat created by the trio becomes emotional and visionary (in Again, for example), anguished delirium in the void, full of metaphysical meaning.

In Belgium, after coming into contact with the local scene, they were commissioned to compose the soundtrack for Maurice Béjart's ballet, Divine (Operation Twilight, 1982), a tribute to Greta Garbo, rediscovering the verve proposed by Half-mute (for example in Grand Hotel, contaminated with the classical structure of violins and keyboards with tapes, and in Ninotchka), but without revitalizing the formula.

The suite in sous-sol (Expanded, 1982) in five movements confirms the multiplicity of sources: chamber music and dilated expressionism (Allemande blu, a rarefied piece of the absurd, for a slow and obsessive bass chord, anemic gypsy violin, and lycanthrope blues), popular dance and disco music (the crescendo of Courante marocaine, with funky bass lines, Arabic violin, sax trills, muezzin dirge, and tabla-sitar delirium), skewed psychedelia and surrealism (Sarabande en bas de l'escalier), Chopin and industrial music (Polonaise mecanique, with Indian howls, distortions, and out-of-tune piano), medieval and baroque music (L'etranger, raga in the form of a traditional closing suite).

At the same time, their theatrical activity was more intense than ever, now that they had established themselves as a quintet: Principle, Brown, Reininger, Tong and the choreographer-filmmaker Bruce Geduldig. Three singles released on the Belgian label Crepuscule in 1982, Ninotchka, Time to Lose and The Cage, confirmed the state of grace of violinist and singer, but shortly afterwards the two left the group, joining the group Frankie Lievaart and trumpeter Luc van Lieshout. Tuxedomoon had become Brown's jazz-rock band, who in fact dominated the following albums of the 80s.

In 1985 they published Holy Wars, an opera with a pretentious surrealist sound, depressed in the style of Canterbury, which became their greatest commercial success. Wim Wenders used the theme Some Guys in the opening scenes of his film The Sky Over Berlin. The album also contains more classical pieces such as In a Manner of Speaking, later covered by groups such as Nouvelle Vague. Winston Tong left the group in 1985 and was replacedby multi-instrumentalist Ivan Georgiev.

Later they released through the CramBoy label, a sub-label of Crammed dedicated to the Tuxedomoon catalogue, Ship of fools (1986), with a flavour of exotic jazz (Break the rules) and ambient impressionism (the piano concerto in four movements) and You (1987), oriented towards jazz-fusion, which accentuates this fatuous and slight classical and danceable fusion (the disco You; The train, a ballad of existential turn; the fatalistic Neverending story). Tuxedomoon also appeared on the soundtrack of Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire. They subsequently performed in Athens, Greece, for the first time in December 1987, with a sold-out Pallas Theatre twice on the same night.

The band stopped recording together in 1988, and the various members continued solo careers, becoming as geographically disparate as sonically, with Steven Brown living in Mexico, Peter Principle in New York, Blaine L. Reininger in Greece, and Luc Van Lieshout and Bruce Geduldig in Brussels. However, Reininger returned that same year for a triumphant tour of Europe and Japan, spawning the direct double LP Ten Years in One Night.

After the unsuccessful albums of the 1980s, dedicated to atmospheric pop-jazz music, Tuxedomoon returned to a level of excellence with The Ghost Sonata (Les Temps Modernes, 1991), which was a multimedia show originally conceived in 1982, the recording of which was the opportunity to reunite with the original line-up.

The 14-movement suite is an austere collage of dissonant gothic music (The ghost sonata, A drowning man), impressionistic chamber music (Music numbre two, The cascade), electroacoustic symphonic poems (Les odalisques, An unisgned postcard), fragments of neoclassical loops (Licorice stick ostinato, Basso pomade), nostalgic polka orchestras (An affair at the soiree), musique concrète (A mystic death) and, unfortunately, tedious pieces of recited song. It was the first album in a decade to resurrect the passion for decadent rage of their early days.

The band did not reunite until the late 90s, to perform at the Next Festival in Tel Aviv, due to Brown calling the members of the group to reunite for the concert.

They rehearsed in a studio for 10 days, in Tel Aviv, before the concert. They later published Joeboy in Mexico (Opción Sónica, 1998, without the name of Tuxedomoon appearing on the packagingOn the album), which went quite unnoticed.

Although the quartet did not meet in the studio for a long time, their solo projects were often inseparable from the group's efforts, with the result being able to choose from an extraordinarily rich catalogue of over fifty albums.

The various violin and piano ensembles played by Brown and Reininger are particularly noteworthy. Of the solo discographies, Peter Principle was perhaps the most serious and measured. In Sedimental journey (Made To Mesure, 1985), in his ten Tone poems (Made To Mesure, 1989), or in the monumental Conjunction (Les Temps Modernes, 1990), he tried to renew ambient music through the collage of found entrances, jazz-progressive harmonies, electronic mixes and funky rhythms.

Steve Brown recorded with avant-garde musician Benjamin Lew several works of electronic world-music in the style of Brian Eno, perhaps finding his calling in Music for solo piano (Another Side, 1984), which was actually chamber music for piano, violin and clarinet. His highly dispersive character, capable of alternative readings of John Keats to imitations of Wes Montgomery, with Zoo Story (Soundworks, 1984) began what would be his most important activity, the composition of soundtracks for plays. In this field he provided evocative works such as Searching for contact (1987), Lame (Materiali Sonori, 1993), and was assisted by Reininger in his shows Croatian variations (Materiali Sonori, 1993) and One hundred years of music (Materiali Sonori, 1993), Half out (Crepuscule, 1991) was a collection of surrealist vignettes ranging from chamber music to jazz-electronica.

In 1995 he launched the Nine rain project in Mexico, which he later launched Rain of fire (Opción Sónica, 2001). Subway to Cathedral (Arteria) and Decade (TM, 2002) are anthologies of his career.

Blaine L. Reininger returned to play the part of the deranged troubadour in extravagant compositions such as Broken Fingers, from Broken Fingers (Crepuscule, 1982), Night Air, Ash and Bone and Mystery and Confusion, from Night Air (Another Side, 1984), surely his best work, Burn like Romede Paris en automne (Crepuscule, 1985). He has also collaborated with avant-garde musicians for Colorado Suite (Made To Measure, 1984) and the Instrumentals (Interior Music, 1987), recorded between 1982 and 1987, but his passion is the songwriter, almost transformed into a chamber song. This search has taken him from Byzantium (Crepuscule, 1987 - LTM, 2004) to Book of Hours (Crepuscule, 1989), or to the maturity of Songs from the rain palace (Crepuscule, 1990), passing through the anthology of Expatriate journals (Giant, 1989).

His first work after a long hiatus was The More I Learn the Less I Know (MaSo, 2000), which is the work of a folk music singer who has been hit by tragedy after tragedy and reflects on the meaning of life. Night Air 2 (LTM, 2004) is an anthology of pieces composed in the 1990s.

In 2000, Tuxedomoon played several acoustic and electronic concerts of previously recorded material. DJ Hell released a remix of What Use (2002) and No Tears (2003). Soundtracks (TM, 2002) collects music for films, such as The Urban Leisure Suite (1981).

His album Cabin in the Sky (Crammed, 2004), with a line-up consisting of Brown, Principle, Reininger and Van Lieshout, would become his comeback album. Most of the album is instrumental, and it is a very sentimental and reflective work, with romantic, rebellious and unlimitedly imaginative Tuxedomoon, showing that they were in absolute top form, as never before, where the influences acquired from artists as disparate as Pollock, Bacon, Miró and Dalí are recreated.

The album has intriguing atmospheres (A home away, Chinese Mike), although most of the songs sound unfinished and some are too faithful to the traditional song format. A work of experimental pop halfway between the languor of Air or the ambient pastiche of Brian Eno or Robert Fripp.

 DJ Hell is also present in Tuxedomoon's life with the electro pulse remix of the song Here til Xmas. Tarwater, John McT Entire of Tortoise, Marc Collin of Nouvelle Vague and Juryman also contributed their grain of sand by proposing a more modern touch to the subtle textures of the group's work. Reininger's voice, which was compared to David Bowie's during the early years of Tuxedomoon's career, was described as "evolved into the voice of Tom Waits and a wolf from Tex Avery'sBaron Brown" by music critic Rod Smith. The Filmmaker Bruce Geduldig performs backing vocals on the album.

In Home Away they start with a bass line very typical of the group, and the lilting voice travels between saxophone swirls. Baron Brown is a song of identical wavelength, but more articulate, with beautiful clarinet and violin openings, quite catchy.

 Annuncialto, five instrumental minutes with a Harold Budd-style liquid piano floating indolent in a pond of electronic noises anchored to the floor by an ineluctable bass line, with sentimental openings of clarinet and accordion (probably a keyboard set). In the instrumental Cagli five-O they test the atmospheric space without infamy, but it is also unmemorable. DJ Hell collaborates on Here 'till X-mas, but it is a song declaimed in a cabaret tone and destroyed by the usual synthetic rhythm.

 Chinese Mike, instrumental in nu-jazz style, with a pleasant finale with unreleased acoustic guitar that accompanies a melancholic sax, revives the album, as well as La piú bella (reprise), which comes immediately after. The Island is practically an ambient introduction to Misty Blue, with Steven Brown singing almost like a crooner in a song that may not be very intense, but very pleasant in its performance. At the end, Luther Blisset, with John McEntire in the mix, inserts an interesting instrumental, and they close with a reprise of Annuncialto.

In 2006, Tuxedomoon released Bardo Hotel on Crammed Discs, perhaps their best work in a decade, which struck an almost supernatural balance between dissonant chamber music, (the 6 minutes of Effervescing in the Nether Sphere), postmodernist folk music (the grotesque march of Soup du jour, The show goes on - Baron Brown, Carry on circles), minimalist iteration (the 6-minute song Triptych), musique concrète (Needles prelude), orchestral impressionism (the eleven minutes of Volcanic Combustible), and cool jazz (Invocation of), along the model of his The Ghost sonata, but with a wider use of wind instruments and therefore stronger jazz nuances. Recorded in San Francisco, the album is a soundtrack to a film by George Kakanakis, which at the time of the album's release remained unfinished. The album and film took their title from the book Beat Museum - Bardo Hotel, by Brion Gysin, about the Bardo Hotel inParis.

The soundtrack and film were influenced by Gysin's cutting method, which was co-developed with Burroughs. The recording includes samples of airplane sounds, BART announcements, and other found sounds. New Orleans opera and jazz also influencedThey were in the sound of the album.

Tuxedomoon released the album Vapour Trails, on Crammed Discs, in 2007, another elegant rehearsal of interplay between acoustic instruments, electronic keyboards and backing vocals. The album was recorded in Reininger's home studio.

The band used instruments such as clarinets and flugelhorns alongside their standard equipment of instruments. In 2007, they also released the 7707 tm boxset to celebrate the group's 30th anniversary, consisting of Vapour trails, along with a CD of previously unreleased songs, a DVD containing 160 minutes of rare unreleased videos, and a live CD recorded in early 2007. Several members of Tuxedomoon have collaborated with the British band Cult With No Name.

Steven Brown cites artists and bands such as Eno, Bowie, Kraftwerk, Gong, John Cage, Bernard Herrmann, Nino Rota, Igor Stravinsky and Ennio Morricone as early influences. Later his current influences include Radiohead, Claude Debussy, Miles Davis, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and the Velvet Underground. His music is also influenced by genres such as punk-rock, jazz, funk, tango and post-punk, but Tuxedomoon are more sophisticated than that sum, perhaps because of their theatrical, dramatic and always brilliant outings.

June 27, 2020: a new episode of The Anatomy Lesson at 11pm EST on CFRC 101.9 FM. In isolation, volume 16 - ‘back to isolation because re-opening didn’t work out so hot.’ Music by Heaven Copy, Mnemonists, P.C.R., His Name Is Alive, Naked on the Vague, Legendary Pink Dots, The Fall + more. Tune in at 101.9 on your FM dial, stream at http://audio.cfrc.ca:8000/listen.pls or listen to a special archive here: https://www.mixcloud.com/cameronwillis1232/the-anatomy-lesson-june-27-2020/

Benjamin Lew and Steven Brown