Josh McNeill

Tag: Music (Page 3 of 3)

So it goes.

October 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

image

Here lies the last two hard drives I’ll need to finish recording a year of my life.

My roommate mentioned to me the other day how it didn’t seem like I had been doing this for almost a year. It hasn’t seemed like that long to me either; it’s behind just part of my routine. Wake up, change the batteries, download yesterday to my computer while I shower, transfer data from the computer to hard drives while I eat breakfast, format, record.

I think I’m gonna feel a bit naked when this recorder is no longer in my pocket; it’ll be like walking around without a cell phone. But all things must end I suppose and make way for new beginnings. In this case, the new beginning is facing what I’ve gotten myself into by trying to organize and convert 12 terabytes of sounds from the last year into music.

Manga + laughter = …music?

October 9, 2011 / / 0 Comments

image

It’s hard to tell which is more strangely humorous: this anime/manga image of a character laughing or the guy I recorded repeatedly laughing out loud on the bus while reading a manga. In any case, I couldn’t help but chuckle to myself regardless of the fact that I had no idea what the joke was.

This got me thinking, what the hell makes laughter alone so funny? Maybe it’s just the situation that the laughter occurs in. This nerd was laughing in a public place, by himself, over something many people wouldn’t even admit to reading. That’s humorous to me. Then again, I know certain people who make anything that’s already funny ten times funnier with their laughter.

There must be some scientific literature on laughter that could shed some light on this, right? Bill Nye or some other “scientist” who’s supposed to be funny has probably done a whole series of experiments to decipher the effects of laughter. Nope. The science guy seems to have failed me. I did end up reading a bit about how you can seemingly understand someone’s emotional state by their voice even if you don’t know their language, though. (If you’re interested, see: Cross-Cultural Recognition of Basic Emotions Through Nonverbal Vocalizations, Sauter et al.; Recognizing Emotions in a Foreign Language, Pell et al.; Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures, Bryant, Barrett.)

In any case, I’m hoping that I can use laughter as a compositional device. If the rhythm is the culprit, I can use that maybe to create false expectations and then resolutions. Even if not, it will at least be highly useful for creating rhythms in general. Just think of how many crazy laughs I’ve recorded that can be turned into a frightening army of stupid.

Singing about bombs.

October 14, 2008 / / 1 Comment

I know there aren’t many people who like opera or even know anything about it but I like it a lot. That being said, I feel the need to expose people to tidbits here and there that might break the stereotype of opera being some boring, stuffy, old crap with funny singing.

This, the Batter My Heart aria, is probably the most moving part of John Adams’ opera Doctor Atomic. This premiered in 2005. That’s right, people still write new operas. You might notice, if you bother to listen, that this sounds nothing like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven. Contrary to popular belief, classical music comes in many flavors and the well known flavors tend to be very old and out of use.

Adams is a post-minimalist composer. Essentially that means rhythm is very important to his sound as well as lingering on a chord for long periods of time. For anyone who’s into jazz, it’s a similar idea to modal jazz. For anyone who’s into rock, Sigur Ros is a good example of something in the same vein. The “post” part means he’s allowed to travel out of the boundaries of the rules that minimalism created that I’ve mentioned already.

Anyway, this aria is pretty high on energy which is not what one would normally think of when they hear the word “opera”. The words are taken from a poem by John Donne. What’s happening is Oppenheimer is combating the moral issues created in himself while creating the atomic bomb. Take a listen:

Just for fun, I think I’ll post one of John Adams’ early works for piano. This one I just like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3abjsYUkk4 (embedding was disabled for this one)

Wagner is cool, really!

June 21, 2008 / / 0 Comments

Some of you that know me probably know already that I’ve been getting really into the whole classical music thing for the last year or so. It sounds kind of ridiculous to listen mostly to a genre that the great majority of people out there would consider background music at best but there’s very good reason. There’s real depth to classical music and it isn’t as hard to grab onto as you would think, it just takes time. Modern pop music is all about instant gratification and while that’s great, there’s a lot to be said for art that forces you to slow down and get caught up in the whole story that’s unfolding in front of you.

A great example is Richard Wagner. You know, the opera guy with all the valkyries and whatnot. He was a master at building tension and suspense in his music. One of his operas, Tristan und Isolde, spends the entire opera building up tension and only finally releases it at the very end. Unfortunately this mastery is also why most people can’t bother to listen to his stuff, we’re too impatient. So, I’d like to invite anyone who is willing to listen, and I mean really listen, to Wagner’s Prelude to his last opera Parsifal to give it a shot. It’s very slow to pick up but, if you allow yourself to get caught up in it and see it through to the very end, it’s incredibly rewarding.

Small country, big talent.

June 8, 2008 / / 0 Comments

It amazes me how good the music that comes out of Iceland is. There aren’t many people there, some 300k, and as a result there aren’t an enormous amount of well known musicians from the area. The ones I do know of are pretty amazing though. I’ve been a pretty big fan of Bjork for a while. Sigur Ros comes from Iceland, obviously as they sing in Icelandic and Icelandic gibberish, and are pretty mind blowing. Now I’ve come across another group who has impressed me quite a bit: Amiina.

Amiina was originally a string quartet but the stuff they do now is all original. It reminds me a lot of CocoRosie without singing. I also hear a hint of traditional chinese music sneaking its way up there in how they use some percussive string instruments. Basically they’ve switched from 2 violins, a viola, and a cello, to a multi-instrumentalist spectacle complete with everything from synths to toy bells. They play in a minimalist style that goes a long way into painting a scene that you can sit back and relax in.

I don’t know what it is about Iceland but they’re doing something right. Not only are the aforementioned musicians highly effective at what they do, they’re also intensely original sounding. Maybe that comes from being stuck on an island many miles out in the ocean. Whatever it is, it’s worth a listen.

I don’t know anything about Lee Hazlewood but the addition of his poetry to this track works perfectly.

Newer posts »

© 2024 Josh McNeill

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑