For overcast mornings, proof that good things come from Georgia:
Quiet Evenings – Finality from Motion Sickness of Time Travel on Vimeo.
Well, that and Gullah:
Fuck it, I like Georgia. I should go there someday.
Tag: Music (Page 2 of 3)
It’s a shame that the timpani isn’t used more outside of classical music. A well placed timpani can be extremely effective. For instance, Roy Orbison’s use of it in his famous song You Got It:
To me, the timpani makes this song feel epic (along with simply being a great song otherwise). It adds a sort of drive to the chorus that simply wouldn’t work if a crash or something else was used in its place. In fact, a crash is used at the same time but it doesn’t serve to separate this section from the pre-chorus because it’s already been employed. There’s nothing novel about the sound of a crash at that point in the song.
I thought about this because of CocoRosie’s song Lemonade:
They use a timpani throughout and it immediately jumped out of me. It wasn’t that it was out of place, it’s just that it works so well. They manage to use it in a melancholic way and a more aggressive way. It adds atmosphere, maybe because it’s so reverberant, and capable of augmenting the chord changes because it’s actually pitched.
What I’m trying to say is, “I like timpanis.”
There’s a linguistic tidbit to this. Timpani is actually the plural form from the Italian word timpano. I’m curious about how often this happens with Italian loan words. Another obvious example is panini which is the plural of the Italian word panino. I’ve heard people complain about the pluralization of that one but even when I lived in New York I never heard anyone order a panino.
All that is to say that it’s fun to just add an s without any regard to the origins of these words. Fuck it, English is a plural imperialist. We’ll conquer your words and add our s’s.
And I’ll leave you with another famous timpani piece from a more traditional genre used in a non-traditional way:
I am obviously not prone to buying music but I’m honestly considering buying Ashtray Nagivations’ new release Cloud Come Cadaver. Why? Because there aren’t nearly enough people listening to this stuff to make it find-able online for free. I’ve tried already, and I’m good at this; I’ve been pirating software since BBSes (I’d say music since then but this was before MP3s existed).
This creates a weird sweet spot in selling-your-music land. On the one hand, if you’re just completely unknown, you’ll be lucky if people find your music to begin with; while if you’re fairly well known but not being played in shopping malls, your music will probably be too easily accessible to the people that listen to it for them to buy it. (I’m leaving out if you are one of those people whose music is played in shopping malls because they’re part of a whole different world of music business issues.)
But you have this place between completely unknown and well known among music lovers only that allows you the option of actually selling music. I come across it more and more as my tastes continually lead me to noise, glitch, and contemporary classical music. The last category is almost uniformly inaccessible to the file-sharer, with the exception maybe of Nico Muhly and the NOW Ensemble, the latter of which has actually offered their albums for free at one point. Nope, when my Soundamus feed tells me a new Kaija Saariaho release is coming out, I don’t even bother adding it to my calendar because I know I could only listen to it if I bought it.
That last point typifies a couple issues. First, Ashtray Navigations is only selling the album for ₤3 and I imagine they’d be pretty lucky to get even 500 sales (correct me if you’re in the know). That’s ₤1,500. I’m not sure how they go about their recording process but if it’s anything like what I’ve previously described about packaging and distributing music, that money could be 100% profit. Even at that, though, it’s not enough to go into making music as a full time job by itself. They could maybe raise the price but it’s likely that a curve would be created where the more the music costs the fewer people there are that will buy it and so the profits will even out. I certainly wouldn’t pay $10 for the album, because I can still listen to their old music and save that money for bus fare. This is reality for a lot of consumers, which is the second issue typified here. I get probably 10 newly released albums every month but there’s no way I could afford a $100 bill each month. I buy store-brand peanut butter. I can afford $3 a month for a single album that I particularly want to listen to that isn’t available through any others means, though.
I think Ashtray Navigations’ Bandcamp is pretty fair, but the above often leads me to the “lets just make all our music free for fuck’s sake” conclusion. It reminds me of a thesis project a classmate of mine was recently proposing. She’s an economics major and wants to look into altruism in the market and one of the points she made while discussing it is that studies have shown that people will offer their resources much more willingly when it’s not made into a business deal. Blood donors, for instance, were more willing to donate if they weren’t offered cookies or money or anything in return. Maybe this is why those pay-what-you-like albums seem to be turning into a thing these days.
It may not be too obvious what’s going on in this music but all those sounds are coming from one person and mostly from that one person’s voice. She uses a loop station which allows her to record short bits of sound and have them to continue playing immediately after. They can be left alone or stopped and started back up and additional sounds can be recorded and looped over top the loops that are already playing. Essentially, she has the ability to be a whole acoustic band through electronic means.
What seems important here is process. Minimalist composers like Terry Riley or Steve Reich have been playing with this idea since the 60s at least but not in this way because the technology just wasn’t there. What I mean by process is that we’re essentially hearing a song being composed on the spot. In fact, Julianna Barwick has explicitly stated that her music starts out as improvisations. Improvisation is a bit different though. In that form, the music can change drastically at any point whereas, in process music, that’s not possible/wanted. It’s repetitive instead. She can’t suddenly change everything that’s being played all at once, say, if she wanted to modulate to a different key. What you’re hearing is simply one musical phrase that repeats and only changes subtly as layers are added and removed. It creates a sense of calm, because you know what to expect, but also a sense that something is happening.
To me, more poetically, it’s like breathing. Very long, deep breathing. The music naturally builds, each new layer both hides and is supported by the previous layer until you end up with a mass of sound that tends to gradually dissipate as layers are then removed again until all that’s left is that original line of sound in isolation. I imagine each song as one incredibly drawn out breathe. I’ve been thinking a lot about breathing lately.
For those who want to see how she does it:
That phrase is only vaguely intelligible to me even with context so I’m not gonna try to explain it. It comes from Recanati’s Deixis and Anaphora:
The point, though, is pretty clear, and interesting. Apparently some five objects in your perceptual field can be held in some sort of automatic index that can be drawn from when making sense of your surroundings. Recanati brings this up when talking about pronouns and how it’s possible for us to make sense out of a sentence like:
Yesterday, my brother talked to the policeman about the burglar we saw. He told him he thought he had escaped, but the policeman would not believe him, arguing that someone was awake, and he would have seen the burglar if he had left.
The pronouns used here are somehow not confusing even though they could each refer to various people in the context. Recanati suggests that there is a tracking mechanism for indexing pronouns analogous to Pylyshyn’s visual tracking mechanism. What interests me more is the last sentence about an auditory analog, though. I’m pretty sure I’ve come across ideas like this for music as reasons why 12 tone music sounds completely random to most people, for instance: a melody that arbitrarily hits all 12 pitches of an octave before repeating is simply too long to keep in memory and build a gestalt from. It might explain why noisy busy music, with many things happening at once, is sometimes unnerving as well.
Think I’m gonna file this as yet another thing I’d like to look into but will never ever have the time for.
From around 4 minutes in until the end, this track feels like it’s massaging your eardrums. It only works if you’re using headphones or have your speakers angled so that stereo sound actually sounds stereo. (Excuse the palindroming.) I imagine this is how deaf people can enjoy music.
Belong originated in New Orleans, by the way. Sooo, if anyone has any idea whatsoever where this kind of music gets played in NOLA, please let me know.
I’m a big fan of last.fm. I’ve discovered so much amazing music through the related artists section and it helps me generate RSS feeds for shows in my area that I’d like and even feeds for new releases via Soundamus. It’s the perfect organization tool for someone who listens to entirely too much music (seriously, it’s difficult to keep track of all 1,500 artists I like). It also occasionally teaches me something I didn’t know like it did the other day when I came across this picture:
You probably don’t recognize this guy. Hell, I wouldn’t recognize him if I didn’t know who I was looking at beforehand. He’s Anton Webern: early 20th century Viennese composer of works such as this:
You may notice that he looks a bit different in the image used for the video. That’s how you normally see this guy, as a stoic intellectual writing music based purely on theory and dissecting stray cats for the sake of science in his spare time. (The latter never happened, but shouldn’t it have?) Even the name of the composition is sterile. Five Pieces for Orchestra? Yes, I guess that’s what they are. He’s not someone we’d expect to be creating flower arrangements.
This is what’s so striking to me about the picture, though. This one image summarily destroys all our preconceptions about what this guy must have been like. It’s tempting to listen to his music and read about him and look at the pictures most commonly used to represent him and determine that he has no soul, that’s he’s barely human, but he clearly is.
This is something that I think happens every day to just about everyone. You look at the people around you and instantly develop ideas about what they are, often overlooking who they are. Even the ugliest, most hateful people are still human; there’s simply no escaping it.
Beating: simple waveforms standing close enough together to create unsteady vibrations.
You don’t really notice that each one exists until they get that close.
Don’t ask me what the tree has to do with anything.
I’m obsessed with time. I’m very nostalgic, constantly afraid/excited about the future, and I get lost in reading about history, particularly personal histories. I like how time seems to stop, how it seems to pass so quickly. I like/hate how each new year feels shorter, how weird it is to compare how much time has really passed with how much time has really passed for people who are younger than me or older than me. I check my phone constantly and set alarms for all sorts of little things then I ignore them all day. For someone without a career or many obligations, I have a pretty elaborate calendar that has things scheduled for up to a year from now. Even my 2011 project is intimately tied up in how time is experienced: it both aims to condense a year into an hour or two and at the same time trap me in that year for probably the next decade. I like time.
I thought it would be interesting to play around with how music fits into this for me. I was going through my collection and came across Ben Folds’ Evaporated and just had to listen to it and immediately it was 2001 and I was walking down the street to the Wawa in Cape May, New Jersey on a sunny fall day on my break from Acrat, the head shop I was working at which was perpetually empty during the off season. I was listening to that album a lot at the time and that song would play in my head constantly on those walks. This sort of thing happens really often for me and I imagine it does for many others as well so I thought it would be interesting to put my whole collection on shuffle and post a few tracks that come up with a description of when and where they take me. I’m no narcissist, though, I’d really like others to do the same. So here, I’ll start off with the Ben Folds song:
The next is Che Gilda Manina from Giacomo Puccini’s La Boheme. This is one of the first operas I ever watched. It brings me back to around 2006 or so, sitting in my bedroom at my mom’s house where I was unfortunately living at the time. There’s sort of a double time travel thing going on with this one for me because I’m both at my mom’s house and also in a run down apartment in Paris in the middle of the winter of 1890. For those who don’t speak Italian, Rodolfo just met this girl, his neighbor, and has fallen in love with her and is explaining his bohemian lifestyle. He’s saying how he doesn’t have a thing but he has everything he needs:
David Lang’s Little Match Girl Passion brings me to 2011 in San Francisco. My ride to work included a bus trip (on the 28 for those who know, it’s a really nice route) that went up to the Golden Gate Bridge then along the bay to The Marina district where I’d walk another mile over hills which gave me great views of the Coit Tower and all the staggered and colorful houses of North Beach. I listened to this piece for the first time on one of those trips on a sunny day and I remember being transfixed. I hated going to work to begin with but this made me want to stop on one of those hills and just stare out and listen. To hell with work. (Incidentally, this performance is at the San Francisco Conservatory’s Hot Air Music Festival which I’ve been to before and even wrote a little review on. You should listen to other versions if you’re interested, though, as this one is pretty stripped down.)
Ironically, the next thing to come up was Philip Glass’s 5th String Quartet, which I first heard at that very festival in 2006. It was really a nice piece but it actually brings me back to a Missy Mazzoli piece that was also played there called Lies You Can Believe In. It’s a trio piece which was played by a high school group with such vigor and enthusiasm I could hardly believe they were just teenagers. Or maybe that’s why they could play it so well. I think I brought my friend Beryl to this event. These pieces remind me of nights at The Revolution Cafe in San Francisco, too, where you could drink sangria and listen to spontaneous open-mic style classical music: casual as all fuck. (The Mazzoli piece is near the bottom of the link underneath the Glass piece.)
Missy Mazzoli: Lies You Can Believe In
Ah, the Foo Fighters. I really love their first two albums but they sorta crashed into generic pop nonsense after Pat Smear left them. Good Grief isn’t my favorite song on the album but it came up. In this case, it’s really the whole album that transports me, not one particular song. I end up back in junior high in 1996 or so, listening to my friend Mike tell me about how the Foo Fighters are gonna be the new Nirvana. He was wrong, but that’s okay. I also associate it with fall. I associate a lot of music with fall.
This source is even broader than the Foo Fighters album. I started listening to the Mountain Goats after they had already released numerous albums so I just got all of them and listened straight through. I would always listen in the middle of the day, between classes at City College of San Francisco. I had to take a bus from the the Ocean campus to the Mission campus. I’d try to do homework on the way but the ride was so bumpy that I’d mostly just listen to music. It was fall, again, so of course it was always ridiculously hot (fall is summer in SF). I’d have to kill some time after the ride so I’d just wander around The Mission, taking in the people and sights. There was always something new to discover whether it be a cool looking house or some interesting plants or a mural that I never noticed. I really enjoyed those directionless hours.
This one is a little more embarrassing, but what the hell. Elemeno P’s Urban Getaway brings me to 2004, when I was in the midst of an addiction to the MMO Dark Age of Camelot. I say addiction in all seriousness. I loved that game but it stole two years of my young life and I’m not happy about it. I would literally play whenever I wasn’t at work or school. I once spent the entire week between Christmas and New Years without leaving my studio because of that game. (Point is, don’t be like that. It’s bad.) Anyway, I would watch a lot of videos of other people playing the game at the time, for pointers I guess but they were also just entertaining. The one below I watched quite a bit and it’s where I first heard Urban Getaway (it’s the first song he uses). The song actually places me not in any particular physical space but in a digital space. It’s strange feeling such an attachment to a world that doesn’t really exist. (Incidentally, I just now realized that the second line in the song is “Feeling Shostakovich.” I like that.)
It’s kind of interesting to me that my associations don’t necessarily have anything to do with what the music is about. I could go on and on, and I will, but I’m not gonna share the rest. Seriously, though, share some of your own. I’d love to hear what other peoples’ associations are.
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