Notes on Notes: Performance/Music/Records

N ElTOW1 0TEai BY JOHN HOWELL Airwaves (110 Records). A prescient (1977) 2 L.P. music/performance anthology . Brainy fun all around with tracks like Laurie Anderson's tape bow violin pun/sound songs ("Ethics is the Esthetics of the Few-Ture (Lenin)"), Terry Fox's tape collage of amplified cats ("The Labyrinth Scored for the Purrs of 11 Different Cats"), Julia Heyward's ululating vocalese ("Mongolian Face Slap"), solo and group sections of Meredith Monk's Quarry, and more, more. Good notes, good production. Robert Ashley, Private Parts, Perfect Lives (Private Parts), and Music Word Fire and Would IDo ItAgain (Coo Coo) (Lovely). Different takes of Ashley's ever-evolving, ever in-progress performance "opera," a zany yet sincere '80s Spoon River Anthology about stream-of-consciousness life in the Cornbelt (see LIVE 3 for details). The progressively de-constructed, colored-up cover art clues you to the changes. PP is brown titles and credits on yellow; Ashley speak/ sings in a low, quiet monotone over Blue Gene Tyranny's drifty neo-cocktail/trance piano improvs. Effect: meditative. PL (PP) lays out white lyrics on deep blue with red borders; Ashley and chorus (Kroesen and Van Tiegham) sing with zip over the bigger beat of a full band and layers of prerecorded tracks. Effect: engagingly energetic. Music is purple and turquoise with torn-out newspaper titles and credits; these are 'lessons"-capsule versions-extracted from the opus and jazzed up with lots of electronically altered voice, synthesizers , synare and other burbly percussion . Effect: sci-fi/disco spacey. 18 David Byrne, The Catherine Wheel (Sire). The soundtrack to Tharp's dance is greatly altered in the mix-it's brighter, harderedged -and edited in sequence: after you buy the album, a card insidesays the whole score is available only on cassette. Although this isn't the sound heard at the Winter Garden, it's tough stuff-the collaboration with toughie Tharp cured Byrne's numbed Enoui. Byrne's open-ended structures, subtle shifts in tempo and layering, complex polyrhythms, and tightly controlled violence matched up perfectly with Tharp's style. Comes with Byrne's tasty jacket photos of the elaborate Wheel set. won't-it's a real performance piece (seeing a guy swing a sledgehammer at an anvil in front of the band is better than the actual sound it makes). Ascension captures all of Branca's sonic overload; it's superbly structured, thundering transcendence, just like he says. Y Pants, Off the Hook (99 Records). Threegirl band with tinny underwater/Japanese sound (ukelele, toy piano, bass, and spare drum kit), and stripped-down arrangements (Virginia Piersol's drums are bass/cymbal with little in-between, Barbara Ess' plucky bass and Gail Vachon's hamJust Another Asshole. #5 of Barbara Ess' mered keyboards stick to basics). Deadpan punky boho mag is an album of 77 performers with occasional nod to flash (a 45-second aural acts by 84 artists of all Super 8 "Man Who Fell To Earth" protypes , known and unknown, who produced jected on the wall). They're stranger than crude to sophisticated cuts. A true urban they seem, like schizy kids, and this E.P. treasure: $5 buys a world. gets the sound/picture right. Glenn Branca, Lesson No. 1 and The Ascension (99 Records). Play Lesson loud enough and its accelerating drums and majestic guitars will take you out just as it does live. "Dissonance," on the other side Jill Kroesen, Kroesen, Jill: Stop Vicious Cycles (Lovely). Upcoming L.P. blends moaning, wavering, alto Kroesen vocals (she digs into drawn-out vowels like a downtown Cher), and punny lyrics ("I'm Sorry I'm Such a Wienie,'' '"Secretary [Wayne Hays Blues]") with busy arrangements in several styles. "Ride Your Pony" is gritty rock, "I Am Not Seeing That You Are Here" is uptempo, rhythmic jazz, "Fay Shism Blues" is slow, densely layered blues. Live, much is lost in her fallapart , giggly performances, but her recordings , like her solo shows and cracked, soulful voice are weirdly moving. Laurie Anderson, 0 Superman (110 Records and Warner Bros.). A sci-fi political electronic statement that's really moving, and that's rare. Electronically altered vocal, soaring synthesizer lines...