MUSIC REVIEW
Folky Strokes, With Dabs of News, Video and Static
By JON PARELES
Published: December 8, 2010

Mikel Rouse adds performance arts flash to his searching compositions.

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Mikel Rouse, the composer, guitarist and songwriter, performing “Gravity Radio” at the Harvey Theater.

For a composer generally described as contemporary classical, Minimalist or avant-garde, Mikel Rouse has recently been getting almost folky.

His 2009 album, “Gravity Radio,” and two he has just released, “Recess” and “Corner Loading, Vol. 1” (all on Exit Music), are collections of verse-and-chorus songs featuring his voice and guitar picking: songs about the state of America, love, aging and uncertainty. Within the songs and connecting them are the patterns and metrical structures Mr. Rouse has always enjoyed.

Unleashing a Creative Deluge
By STEVE SMITH
Published: December 6, 2010

Perhaps not, but both his new CDs — the dizzying “Recess,” on which Mr. Rouse incorporates sounds of the outside world into the music’s structure, and the spare, bluesy “Corner Loading (Volume 1),” in which his voice and guitar shift in and out of phase almost imperceptibly — were recorded entirely in his one-room studio. Inspired one evening to make a video for “Great Adventure Jail” (a track on “Corner Loading”), Mr. Rouse shot in stark black and white from five angles, edited the clip and uploaded it to YouTube in roughly five hours — entirely with his iPhone.

Mikel Rouse: Recess

Posted by Jay Batzner in CD Review

To commemorate the 10th anniversary of ExitMusic Recordings, Mikel Rouse is releasing two new discs.  It might make sense to talk about these two discs (Recess and Corner Loading Vol. 1) together since they share some connective tissues except the exteriors of the discs are so drastically different it can be hard to believe that one man is the creative voice behind both.

Recess is a dense and mesmerizing collage of disperate sonic elements elegantly tied together by Mikel Rouse’s signature vocal style, harmonies, and metrical/temporal play.  Where Gravity Radio‘s aesthetic was closely aligned with a “radio-friendly” sound, Recess drifts back across the complexity spectrum adding layers of audio collage and found sounds on top of the immediately understandable grooves and hooks.  The iPod experience with this album plays on the blend of the ambient recorded sounds with your own environment and often I had to question whether what I heard was “live or Memorex.”  The sonic space of the album is huge and I think frequent iPod listening would be a mistake.  This album sounds BIG and the production level of the disc is a technological and artistic marvel (a marvel which is not properly communicated as mp3s). Recess is such an immersive experience that I have a hard time doing anything else but listen when it is on.

The disc begins with what sounds like a cash register scanning an item and this ubiquitous bleep from our society quickly morphs into a rapid-fire texture.  It is as if the disc takes me sonically backwards to its purchase and then distorts and expands the sounds until the relaxed groove of “Dolls & Dreams” starts up, making this a delicious 21st century updating to Pink Floyd’s “Money.”  Since this album and Corner Loading Vol. 1 were recorded between October 2008 and November 2009 one would expect the topic of finance, wealth, economics, and retirement to be on the front burner.

Everything you want and have come to expect from Mikel Rouse is there in Recess. Sophisticated and nuanced textures and grooves are the DNA of this record.  Poignant lyrics and spoken text elements are also in play.  Recess might be quoted less as Facebook status updates as Gravity Radio but there is a lot to be said for these lyrics which are consistent in their truth and profundity.  Rouse’s word play in “Cutting Class” is especially present with the lines “Being old is like being young, but not as young today” and the inverse “Being young is like being old, but not as old today.”  ”Failure” contains lyrical gems such as “You make me believe that the problem is me and not you,” and “I wake up every morning/Cheating death most of the time.”  The sentiment of “Courage just got laid” in the final track helps close the disc in a lighter, brighter place than where we began.

This album’s density is one of its most mesmerizing features.  Where Gravity Radio and International Cloud Atlas were certainly thick it is safe to say that Recess ramps things up a notch further.  The spoken elements often found in Rouse’s works are woven more directly into the musical fabric instead of being used as focal or relief elements.  Rouse fragments speech and transforms it into musical motives similar to Reich’s Different Trains except the adoption and transformation of these spoken elements happens at turbo speed.  Mundane phrases such as “I like the bread, the bread likes you” become earworms of the highest degree.  The number of times I’ve woken up with that specific phrase running through my head cannot be counted.

The thick layers of the album are carefully managed.  Songs have their own life and growth and tracks play well off of each other.  If you are overwhelmed by the first few tracks of the album, Rouse relaxes the tensions with “Plug Nickel” and its quirky three-bar phrase verses and metrical modulation chorus; a good tune that is the kind of thing I wish was on commercial radio more frequently.  After the soundscape “Family Dollar,” “Coward” begins with a mellow, spacey choral sound reminiscent of “Soul Train” from Dennis Cleveland. Once the title emerges in the lyrics in a pseudo sing-song name-calling manner, Rouse hits us with the line “Everyone’s a coward until they get around to it.”  Couple that with the chant “Everybody’s waiting around” and you’ve pretty much described the human condition.

Cyclic elements are also threaded through the disc.  ”Empty Nest” launches off the lyric “We end up where we started” and brings back a groove reminiscent of the “Dolls & Dreams.”  The connections from beginning to end are not necessarily as strong as those found in Gravity Radio which makes Recess more of a linear sonic journey than a rounded whole.  The entire album works well as a single composed event but there are ample opportunities to drop in and pick up different subsections of the work as well as songs that lift out independently.

The album is being released on December 7 but you can get at it now via Bandcamp.

Mikel Rouse – Recess – ExitMusic

Pop music for the post-millennial era.
Published on November 27, 2010

Mikel Rouse – Recess  – ExitMusic 1013, 64:57 [12/7/10] ****:


(Mikel Rouse – vocals, arranger, composer, producer; includes field recordings from various locations).



Media manipulator, post-millennial composer, pop imagineer and audio technician: there really is no single role artist Mikel Rouse fits into. The modernist uses whatever he can find to re-examine the obsessions, nightmares and promises of humanity and mirror them back to us in his divergent viewpoint.



This year has been a busy one: Recess is one of several studio or stage projects Rouse has released or offered. Recess is an urban conceptual pop album for those familiar with Peter Gabriel, Roger Waters and others who have tried to cope with information overflow in the present-day age. The twelve tracks embody a concentrated collage of found sounds, re-contextualized conversations and other sonic components tied together to form a loosely connected post-modern pop parable. Rouse breaks up and recombines speech and transmutes spoken word splinters into musical patterns similar to Steve Reich or Nico Muhly, fellow artists who also have adapted and distorted oral elements into speculative works. 
 


Hearing Recess on an MP3 player while strolling down city streets, or in a car stereo while driving, can be disconcerting. Songs such as “Dolls & Dreams” and “What You Want” mix birds, traffic noise, covertly recorded chats and Rouse’s often overlaid Gabriel-esque vocals into a schizoid template where a listener cannot tell if sounds come from the outside environment, inside the headphones or from speakers. Tunes like “What You Want” can suddenly veer from lightly ambient to pounding electronics, which adds to the unsettling nature.



Lyrics are a fusion of surreal and strangely poetic. The dense “Designing Women” employs wordplay and juxtaposition. Rouse solemnly intones, “So my computer crashes when I crash it” or “And here’s a lesson: what’s more is less than. Less than waking up dead.” In Rouse’s perspective, there is a dizzy logic where reality is skewed but hyper-real.



If there is a thread through Rouse’s tilted pop narratives, it’s the hopes of desperate people who try to maintain sanity in an oversaturated, unfocused world. “Family Dollar,” for example, merges a blues motif, a repeated chorus, multiple overlapped voices and an indie rock arrangement while phrases about money, health issues and leisure time tumble in and out of the mix. The lengthy piece “Coward” – which is comparable to Philip Glass’ most pop-oriented ventures – utilizes repeating acoustic guitar, strings and Rouse’s chorused singing to survey the choices individuals make that may lead to terror or violence.

While Rouse’s 64-minute undertaking is meant to stand as a single entity, each track can be listened to individually and that is one way to approach Recess: heard together the music can be a taxing experience, but there is beauty and perfectly-honed pop music unveiled within the hour-long structure. For instance, “Failure” is a refined number with an elegant arrangement and album-ending “Courage” has a mid-1990s Pink Floyd-like framework (think Pulse or The Division Bell.)



Audiophiles will appreciate the mixing and engineering. Rouse’s arrangements exploit the sound spectrum in sometimes complimentary and sometimes contrasting manners where voices, instruments and field recordings pan left, right, up and down and where portions rise and fall: determined listening is often the best way to absorb Rouse’s hallucinatory vision.

TrackList:
1. Dolls & Dreams
2. Cutting Class
3. What You Want
4. Plug Nickel
5. Designing Women
6. Everything
7. Family Dollar
8. Coward
9. Is That Money
10. Failure
11. Empty Nest
12. Courage

-- Doug Simpson

Mikel Rouse – Corner Loading (Vol. 1) [12/7/10] – ExitMusic

Conceptual acoustic blues that is straightforward and entertaining.
Published on November 28, 2010

Mikel Rouse – Corner Loading (Vol. 1) [12/7/10] – ExitMusic 1014, 36:03 ***1/2:
(Mikel Rouse – writer, arranger, producer, guitar, vocals, harmonica)

The last thing someone might expect from composer, performance artist and multimedia exploiter Mikel Rouse is an acoustic blues release but that is what he has created for his newest venture, Corner Loading (Volume 1), a 36-minute, 13-track album of country blues. In typical Rouse style, there is more than meets the ear here. Rouse’s version of Southern blues examines early microtonality, shifting polyrhythms and off-the-beat cadences instead of the constraints of 12-bar blues. It is a reconceptualization of Depression-era blues akin to keen artists such as Mississippi John Hurt or Charley Patton who later influenced other forward-thinking musicians such as John Fahey or Robbie Basho.

Rouse’s blues has a refined simplicity that is transparent – his voice and acoustic guitar are upfront and nothing is hidden by dense orchestrations or digital maneuverings – but there is subtle intricacy beneath the graceful surfaces. On initial listening, Rouse’s originals appear no different than material by Keb’ Mo’ or Corey Harris. But listen closely and Rouse’s technical inventiveness comes to the fore. “Active Denial” is one example. Rouse sings his opening line in harmony with a six-string blues motif.  Then, as he repeats the guitar riff, he vocally adds a beat pause between his lyrical phrases, which slightly puts his voice out of sync with his guitar.  Rouse then elongates his melodic line by another beat so everything comes back into the same time signature when he reaches the chorus. Rouse deftly undertakes variations of this same rhythmic evolution on other tunes. During “My Tide” he sings a cappella with handclaps as the sole rhythmic accompaniment and again changes the beat: it’s the equivalent of patting a hand on your head in one tempo and a rubbing your stomach at a somewhat separate beat. Try it, it isn’t as easy as it seems.

Lyrically, Rouse takes a mostly secular approach – without denying religious hope – while dealing with themes of faith and belief. This is apparent on the call for peace, “Busy Humanist,” where Rouse states, “Take a lonely road on the way to amnesia/In a country where they let go of all reason/It’s like a swan dive into a sea of confusion.” On this and other songs, Rouse’s earnest and unassuming voice echoes the personalized political and social discourse championed by early Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs or Woody Guthrie. Rouse’s character studies are equally compelling. He discharges quick lyrical stabs on “Lonesome Shoeshine,” which combines surreal lines (“Hail this magic moment, put your hot wings on hold”) with rapid blues licks. The first-person tale of the “Ad Man” has a slicing harmonica, the record’s most furious guitar parts and a confessional Madison Avenue profile, “I am an ad man and I’m drowning people every day/Making sure every inch of airspace promises to pay” and the telling couplet, “I am an ad man and I broke the bank to buy more time/Packaging children I’ll do anything to make a dime.”

Rouse’s interpretation of acoustic blues may not convince die-hard blues fans – he’s a long way from being Robert Johnson or Eric Clapton – but Rouse’s measured blues experiment is musically and lyrically persuasive, is undeniably rich in context and he hits his mark even with an underlying conceptual method. Potential buyers should be aware that a digital download is already available via http://mikelrouse.bandcamp.com/album/corner-loading-volume-1, which is also the only place Rouse’s lyrics reside: it would have been nice to see them included with the CD as well.-- Doug Simpson

Mikel Rouse: Corner Loading (Volume 1)

Posted by Jay Batzner in CD Review, Jay Batzner,

The second half of ExitMusic’s 10th anniversary celebration, Corner Loading (Volume 1), will be released on December 7 alongside the album Recess (my review of Recess can be read here).  Where Recess lives and breathes with Rouse’s density and complexity, Corner Loading is a lean, mean, stripped-down exploration of his musical core.  The musical language, on the surface, sounds like a fairly straight-ahead country/blues singer/songwriter but as soon as you listen past that surface you are rewarded with an intimate portrayal of what makes Rouse’s music really tick.

Each song features Rouse as a solo performer, usually voice and guitar, so at first listening Corner Loading sounds like something you can comfortably put on in your local coffee shop.  The only problem with that scenario is that this isn’t passive music.  Rouse’s language has a way of focusing your attention the same way that a magician makes you wonder how it is all being done.  The layers which Rouse usually uses are right there in Corner Loading but in a much more transparent package.  It is easier to hear deep into the musical structures of this recording and that exposed nature makes the disc even more hypnotic to me.  You hear exactly what he is doing and it still fascinates and draws you closer into the music.  If this was on in a coffee shop I don’t think I could do much but sit and listen in slack-jawed fascination.

An example of this elegant simplicity hits you right up front with the track “Active Denial.”  Rouse sings the line “Maybe I want to do it again” in melodic and rhythmic unison with the guitar.  He then repeats the lick on the guitar but inserts a single beat rest in the voice between phrases shoving the voice out of phase with the guitar ostinato.  Even better, instead of keeping this phase process as a gimmick for the song, Rouse finds important times to stretch out his melodic line by a beat so he can come back in phase with the guitar for the chorus.

This phasing procedure gets used throughout the disc but in enough deft variations that no track sounds stale.  Regular and irregular phrases are spun out in a natural manner.  Accompaniment patterns change and break up any possibile monotony.  A few tracks, like “My Tide” and “Great Adventure Jail” are accompanied by simple clapping (which isn’t nearly as simple as it sounds).  Great care has also been taken towards the pacing of the CD.  The more repetitive songs “Be Real Bad” and “Trouble Making” are followed up by the quick-fire verses of “Lonesome Shoeshine.”  Songs are very short and focused.  They create their world, do it very well, and then get out.  Tension is also built throughout the disc, too.  The final track “Ad Man” has the thickest and most frenetic guitar texture and the most driving harmonica interjections which makes this song sound like a culmination of all that came before it.

Rouse’s husky vocals are expressive and perfectly matched for this sound world.  There is soul and emotion in each track.  Rouse’s gift in lyrics is also spread all over the songs.  Unlike Recess, Corner Loading doesn’t include the lyrics in the physical disc (they are available on his website) but this never troubled me.  The intimacy of the disc makes the lyrics and their poetic meanings rather clear.  His ruminations on the current societal conditions are just as targeted, poetic, and salient as you would expect.

The whole disc has an immediate appeal that I find runs throughout all of Rouse’s music and there is not an ounce of pretention on the record.  This is a disc I spin a lot.  Beyond the deep post-minimalist structure that is driving each song, the tunes are just damned catchy.

Mikel Rouse – Corner Loading (Vol. 1) – ExitMusic

Oliver di Place Musings on music. New Discoveries and Old Favorites
Published on Thursday, February 24,2011

Let’s talk about the blues for a moment. Before World War II, many blues musicians played guitar and sang, maybe they accompanied themselves with a harmonica, and that was it. Blues was a musical form that was still taking shape. The conventional 12-bar structure we know today had not yet taken hold, so these old-time blues players were free to manipulate time in their songs. Lightning Hopkins, for one, used to add or subtract measures, stretching or condensing time as the mood struck him, but in a way he always controlled. Also, there were blues songs that had numbers of bars, or even time signatures, that just wouldn’t make sense to today’s blues audience. Think also about John Lee Hooker. Most of his music was made after the war, and he mostly used the 12-bar structure. Hooker would play intricate patterns on the guitar, but a pattern would go on unchanging for the length of a song, without even a key change. In the hands of many artists, this would be deadly dull to listen to, but Hooker makes the repetition insistent and powerful.

Mikel Rouse shows, on his album Corner Loading Volume 1, that he knows this history, and that he has the skill to apply it in his own work. On two songs, Rouse accompanies himself only with handclaps in unusual rhythms. For the rest, It’s just Rouse and his guitar, plus harmonica on two songs. Unlike any of the music I featured in my last post, all of these songs could be recorded in one take, with no overdubs. And here we learn that Mikel Rouse is a great guitar player. He creates intricate patterns and plays in a rhythmic style that frees him from the need of a band. So Corner Loading can be considered to be his first solo album. (Technically, as I discussed last time, that would Quorum, but Corner Loading is the first album I have heard from Rouse that would require neither a dance troupe nor other musicians to perform live). The rhythmic experimentation of the early blues artists is here, and so is the insistent power found in John Lee Hooker’s music. Years is one song that sounds more like early jazz to me, with its clustered notes making unusual close harmonies.

The lyrics are another matter. Rouse is not one to tell his own story, as blues musicians do. Rouse can filter someone else’s story through his own perceptions, or he can create a character and tell his story in a long form work. But Rouse is usually looking at a bigger picture, even in these cases. Corner Loading is not a long-form work, but simply a collection of songs. So here, Rouse is not telling a story at all. Even so, these songs are heartfelt. Beginning with Active Denial, and ending with Ad Man, Rouse is commenting on the state of the world. He is interested in how people are able to deceive themselves, or be deceived, so that they can pursue their self-interest, and somehow not see the pain of others. Lonesome Shoeshine has wealthy and powerful men wondering why the man who used to shine their shoes cannot now find work. The chorus is a single line, and the only mention of the title character, but it gives the song all of its power. Made Up, Oh Lord is the lyric that is closest to the blues in the lyric. The song is a prayer and a cry of pain, and Rouse’s performance really puts it over. There are two songs that have minimal lyrics, and they are together on the album. The only words to Be Real Bad are, “ You know I ain’t gonna be real bad ,” sung over several times. This has a certain hypnotic power, but I could see someone adding additional lyrics for a cover version, and that could really work, because Be Real Bad does have a great melody. The lyrics of Trouble Making are slightly less skeletal, but the shifts in musical mood are what make this one work. Elsewhere on the album, Rouse shows himself to be an economical but eloquent lyricist.

The last piece of the puzzle on Corner Loading is Mikel Rouse’s voice. This is an album that Rouse could not have made when he was younger. His voice used to be high and smooth, and that would not have worked. But now, Rouse’s voice has deepened somewhat, and it now has a gravelly quality, and that is what this album needs. Rouse sing s these songs in his weathered voice, but with great emotion. The title of the album implies that there will someday be a volume 2. Rouse’s career indicates that there may be several fascinating detours before that happens. Either way, I will be looking forward to seeing what he does next.

MIDWEST RECORD
Volume 33/Number 354 , October 22, 2010
CHRIS SPECTOR, Editor and Publisher
Copyright 2010 Midwest Record

EXIT MUSIC RECORDINGS
MIKEL ROUSE/Recess: Take the journalism art rock of Phil Ochs and move it into a real art realm with backing from an uber art patron (when it serves their purpose) and you have what this east coaster is all about. Taking this opportunity to reflect on the crumbling state of the world, it's earnest and hard hitting but not for the listener that likes to keep it light. Almost folk music for the electronic age, this young vet could be the voice of a new generation of malcontents that want someone to do the heavy lifting for them.
1013

Best known for his cycle of edgy multimedia pop-culture operas (Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland and The End of Cinema), Mikel Rouse scales things down a bit with Gravity Radio, a beguiling, melancholy new song cycle newly issued on disc by Rouse’s Exit Music label. Rouse’s singing and songwriting here amount to heady but approachable pop songs, played by his band with a string quartet and a constant din of shortwave radio interference. New-music cognoscenti will relate to the ambitious construction and provocative themes; for pop explorers, think of Rouse as the next step past Mark Everett.

Rouse: Gravity Radio
By Jay Batzner 
November 23, 2009
Gravity Radio
Mikel Rouse
ExitMusic Recordings

“For those who lunch alone, welcome to radio.”

Mikel Rouse’s Gravity Radio song cycle is instantly understandable yet inexplicably hard to explain.  I was incredibly psyched to get this disc and have listened to it quite regularly over the last 6 weeks or so.  It is a favorite of mine (and the whole house, for that matter, but I blogged about that already).  Playing this album for some of my students, they asked “Who is Mikel Rouse?”  I think the best answer would be “Mikel Rouse is today’s Schubert with better operas.”  That just about covers it.

“Love comes to those who wait.  Those who wait for me.”

The songs that make up this cycle all sound like effortless, high quality popular music.  Why songs like “Wait For Me” and “I’m So Blue” aren’t on the radio, I’ll never know.  Binding the songs together are several AP new reports enmeshed with lyrics and other wonderful statements spoken with perfect inflection by Veanne Cox.  There is a veritable Gordion Knot of material here.  The disc is cyclic with melodic, textual, and rhythmic returns of events.

“If you multiply my disappointment by the world, you’ll see what I mean.  Multiply that by the animals eaten.”

The sound quality on the disc is amazing.  What sounds effortless is actually some of the most nuanced and intricately orchestrated music I’ve encountered recently.  Every listen brings out something new, like Christina Pawl’s trumpet playing.  There are times when you hear the trumpet but there are times when she is tucked into the texture.  With the exception of those that I’ve already mentioned and Penelope Thomas’ backing vocals, Mikel Rouse performs everything.  Not only is he Schubert, he rivals Wagner in gesamtkunstwerk.

“I look at human beings and I see a freak show.”

The best thing about this music is how complicated the songs are without sounding Complicated.  “I’m So Blue” is a rather weird song in many respects but you don’t know that when you hear it.  Rouse’s lyrics are so smart and tight in the verses that when the chorus is a simple “I’m so blue/that I love you” you can rest assured that he has exhausted any other way he might have had of saying the same thing.  “I’m So Blue” is also in a 7 beat meter but I didn’t realize that for about a month of repeated listening.  Other favorites of mine are “Wait For Me,” “Silence of Sound,” “Star Chamber/Rose Woods,” “Stay in School,” and “The World Got Away.”

The songs are catchy, appealing, and detailed that you will be singing them to yourself for a while (my 4-year-old daughter was singing “Silence of Sound” in the tub the other night).  You will also be mining the lyrics and such for Facebook and Twitter posts.  Chuck Norris wins.  Some songs are harder to get into.  “Yawn Factory” was a tough sell on my ears but I’m into it now.  I’m not a fan of “Blue Book,” but I couldn’t quite tell you why.  When I try, I end up telling you everything that I LIKE about “Star Chamber/Rose Woods.”  Galen Brown’s testimonial from last month can shed more light on this excellent disc.

“I’ve traded knowledge for tape decks and beer.”

I will point out that, with the holidays coming up, you have a music lover that would dig this disc a lot.  Everyone knows someone who will love this.  Do them the favor and pick up a copy for yourself.  Chuck Norris wins.

Tuning in to Gravity at Galapagos

Posted by Galen H. Brown in Contemporary Classical, Downtown, Minimalism, New Amsterdam, New York, Post Modern

Last Friday I finally made it down to the new DUMBO location of Galapagos Art Space to see the release party/performance of Mikel Rouse’s haunting new album Gravity Radio. Mikel Rouse, whose album Gravity Radio may at first glance seem like a straight-up rock record, but which has deep roots in the classical music and theater traditions as well.  Mikel himself is clearly comfortable in the netherworld between pop and classical, moving effortlessly more into one area and then into the other.  In 1978 his band Tirez Tirez opened for the Talking Heads in Kansas City; in New York in the 80s when postminimalism’s highly rhythmically and structurally complex offshoot Totalism was emerging, Rouse was at the center of the movement along with composers like Kyle Gann and Michael Gordon.  In 1984 he wrote a 12-tone piece called Quick Thrust for a rock quartet, which features dizzying polymeters that somehow seem tightly controlled and completely haywire at the same time.  Mikel’s rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic instincts all seem grounded in rock, but he tends to deploy those materials much more like a classical composer than like a popular song writer.

Take “Black Cracker,” which is track three on Gravity Radio.  First, almost all popular music in 4/4 time has four-bar phrases, but for Rouse’s lyric that fourth bar is unnecessary and he leaves it out.  The whole song is perfectly seamless, and yet because every cycle is one bar shorter than you expect the whole thing feels constantly off-kilter.  Then part way through he cuts the tempo of the descending hook “When I’m bored I can’t be bored with you/When I’m blown I can’t be blown in two” by half. After establishing the half-tempo version he brings back the full-tempo version over top of it, making the chorus into a prolation canon.  That half-speed hook then becomes background for the next verse.  Later an ascending scale adds yet another counterpoint to the mixture, and the whole thing fits together like a puzzle.

The danger of emphasizing these elements of complexity, of course, is the risk of sending the message that complexity is inherently virtuous, or that the complexity in this music somehow “elevates” it above other less complex popular music.  Writing in Gramophone, Ken Smith once said that Rouse’s music is evidence that “pop music can sustain serious interest with the right person at the helm”–the implication that most pop music can’t “sustain serious interest” is the kind of thing that tells me the writer doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  The complexity in Gravity Radio is interesting and enjoyable, and connects the music to the classical tradition, but ultimately the music has to stand or fall on its surface qualities, and in this case it stands tall.  I’ll take a well-crafted Britney Spears tune over a tortured post-serialist brain-dump by a composer who cares more about combinatoriality than musicality any day of the week, and while I haven’t asked him I suspect Mikel Rouse would feel the same way.

If it sounds like I’m avoiding telling you what Gravity Radio is, exactly, the truth is I’m not sure what to call it.  It’s part song-cycle, part concept album, part theater piece.   It’s a series of thematically and musically related, country-inflected, infectiously memorable rock songs of ambiguous but evocative lyrical content, connected by interludes of spoken recitation of news headlines and fragments of lyrics from the songs delivered in an astonishing newscaster-kunst voice by Veanne Cox.  It has something to do with superconductors and gravity waves.  It’s abstract and catchy and deep.  It’s 52 minutes and 14 seconds long.

The beauty of the internet is that I can just tell you to go here to listen to portions of it and read Mikel Rouse’s description and the lyrics. The performance at Galapagos was a stripped down version with just guitar,  string quartet (members of ACME), Mikel singing, Veanne reciting, and some background sound effects.   It worked well even in that format, and the absence of drums and other rock elements showcased how deeply integrated the string arrangements are into the composition.  The band fought a little against the acoustics of the space, which had a tendency to muddy up the sound, but overall the performance was tight and intense.  Rouse modestly sat among the ensemble rather than standing front and center like a rock frontman.  The headlines in the news recitations were updated with recent news, as they will be for each leg of the international tour that begins in January.

Gravity Radio ends with one last set of news reports from which I draw one final observation: Almost any statement is improved by the addition of the phrase “Chuck Norris wins.”

Avant-Garde in the City - Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, and Mikel Rouse by James C. Taylor

One other avant-garde figure to make a welcome return recently was Mikel Rouse, who’s latest work was seen and heard for one-night at the new Galapagos art space in DUMBO.  Rouse’s operatic works, Failing Kansas, Dennis Cleveland, and The End of Cinematics, were seen around town a few years back, but in recent seasons, he’s been touring with those large-scale theater-pieces across the continent.  His latest, Gravity Radio, mixes news wire feeds (read with ram-rod straight, just-the facts conviction by actress Veanne Cox) and jaunty, melancholy songs of love.  This “unplugged” version was captivating, but it whet the appetite for one of Rouse’s full-blown stagings—hopefully to be experienced at a familiar theater soon.

Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone Blog

Mikel Rouse unveils Gravity Radio at Galapagos
November 1, 2009 ·

Mikel Rouse, the Saint Louis-born composer who lives and works in NYC’s Hell’s Kitchen,  probably is best-known for his multi-media operas, particularly his trilogy of Failing Kansas (1995), Dennis Cleveland (1996) and The End of Cinematics (2005). So it was a bit of a surprise to get a first peek at the songs for his latest show Gravity Radio, in a stripped-down concert format at Galapagos Art Space in the Dumbo section of Brooklyn on Oct. 23. (Sorry it took so long to post this!) It was a special CD release party that turned into a well-mannered, deeply affecting chamber-rock concert.

Mikel Rouse
The CD is officially released this Tuesday, while the full-blown Gravity Radio show will go on tour starting in January, hitting New York at a yet-undetermined date. The songs that make up Gravity Radio are interspersed with dialogue (read at Galapagos and on the CD by TONY nominated/OBIE Award winning actress Veanne Cox) ripped from the news of the day, touching on topics like Afghanistan, the tanking economy and such. (When the full-blown show hits the road, these news dispatches will be altered and updated with the news of the day).

The material has a topical feel, like all of Mikel’s work that I’m familiar with. But each number is shaped more conventionally like a song — which creates a different feel, more of a song cycle than a through-composed work. Gravity Radio is crammed full of memorable tunes, the most memorable of which is “Wait for Me,” a jaunty tune that on the surface is a devilish seduction song. The CD is chock full of tunes that the audience could easily leave the room humming. That’s marked contrast to the songs from Mikel’s ambitious operas, which although I loved them, were not nearly a full of discrete songs, but were more through-composed pieces. That’s not to say that Gravity Radio won’t take on a different aspect once it’s fully staged, but the songs themselves are essentially in their final form.

Mikel presented the new material in an intimate setting, with members of his band and string players from ACME seated in a line onstage, with no set decoration or videos. When the piece is fully staged next year, you can rest assured that it will involve many more people (in the pit and onstage) and will include videos and other multimedia features. “Perhaps it is an attempt to recapture or update my first memory of radio in the late 1960s – Motown and British rock fading in from a faraway Chicago station as the local news faded out on my transistor radio, which I put between my head and the pillow late at night,” Mikel says of  Gravity Radio’s concept.

John Fleming's CD picks: Mikel Rouse
By John Fleming, Times Performing Arts Critic 
In Print: Sunday, October 11, 2009

Mikel Rouse
Album: Gravity Radio (Exit Music) In stores: Nov. 3

Why we care: Searchers for the elusive nexus of classical and pop will want to check out Mikel Rouse's latest production. Actually, there isn't much classical, but the best of the pop is catchy and brainy.

Why we like it: Rouse does it all, singing (in excellent soulful style) and playing almost all the instruments in a control-freak studio tour de force reminiscent of John Fogerty's one-man show, The Blue Ridge Rangers. There's a wash of psychedelic Beatlemania to the sound texture that is remarkable. Unfortunately, Rouse's song cycle is broken up by tiresome radio news reports meant to constitute a commentary of sorts on media culture and politics.

Reminds us of: Laurie Anderson
Download these: Wait for Me, Star Chamber
Grade: B