When I meet someone new, and they ask what I do, and I respond that I'm a composer, the conversation typically takes an awkward turn, if it doesn't simply go moribund at that exact moment.
The following are mentally-noted excerpts of initial conversations I have had with countless people.
Case Number 1:
I'm a composer.
Oh... So, you write music?
(taken slightly aback) Yes... Yes, I do.
[if the conversation continues here, this is usually what happens]
So, are you in a band?
No.
Then... How do you write music?
Case Number 2:
I'm a composer.
Oh, you write music?
Yes.
What sort? Classical?
[there are far too many reasons at this critical juncture to explain the semantic nuance of the word "classical" to a person, typically lay, but I generally make that mistake, anyhow]
-OR-
What sort? Classical? Like Beethoven?
[At this point, I can't fault people for what they know. Music education in this country is abysmal, at worst, and routinely undersupported and underappreciated, at best, so I cannot hold these answers against the responders, even if I feel superbly cantankerous that day and really, really want to. The responder, in most circumstances, is at least a little earnest and attempting to meet me halfway - but can't, for reasons I theorize later.]
Case Number 3:
I'm a composer.
Oh, so... What do you play?
[see bracketed statement above]
Once in a while, I've made the conversationally-fatal mistake of doing the following:
I'm a sound artist.
[suppressing a chortle, grimace, or other facial expression as a means to remain polite] (quizzically) So, you... paint... with sound?
Well... Yes and no...
[and by this point in the conversation, I've lost them forever, unless it's that one person in 982,000 who is interested]
Composers and sound artists are the only creative artists who, I believe, have this problem of nomenclatural proportions. We are the only ones whose tasks and crafts are not etched permanently within the minds of the laypeople. What I mean is this: a person will have a general idea about what an artist does. Most visual artists I know differentiate: I'm a photographer; I'm a filmmaker; I'm a painter; I'm a sculptor. (Rarest of all species is the wily videographer.) Individuals have an exact knowledge already borne in their minds from experience with visual media about them in their daily lives and from the education obtained - typically informally - over their lifespan. The same could be said for the literary arts: individuals make automatic, instantaneous connections, conscious and unconscious, and cognitive leaps to envision what it is a writer does, what a playwright does, what a poet does, what a journalist does. There is even a prompting for differentiation from the uninitiated party: they may, and frequently do, ask the "writer" if they write fiction or non-fiction, short stories or novels, biographies, or (erroneously) poems or plays. There is a kernel of truth within every reasonably-educated person's mind about what each of these occupations entail.
The biggest problem, I think, is not that composers don't reach out to audiences: I think the problem is visual, primarily. This isn't to belittle other things, but from a purely cognitive standpoint, it's major. We have etched into our brains and popular imagination via film and TV and museums the sight of Jackson Pollock painting. We have the sight of photographs themselves - we don't need to see Avedon or Ray, but we have their work. We have footage of visual artists creating, of filmmakers peering through their viewfinders, of sculptors turning pottery wheels or wielding welding torches or chiseling away at stone. Obviously, humans are much more visual animals (unfortunately) than sonic or auditory ones, but that's really subservient to the idea that we have very little footage of composers in the process of creation. The few we have are iconic but all staged: Stravinsky peering into a score, Bruno Maderna poring over a score while chain-smoking and listening to a rehearsal. The most famous portraits of Ravel, Debussy, and Ligeti, for example, may have them at the piano, but this is mere suggestion - and at least in Ligeti's case, many of his famous photographs are emblematic of the typical visual representation of composers: wholly divorced from the act of creation, clad in a cardigan or suit, in the company of other composers, or at some symposium, or in a context removed in sum from the act of composing. I know of no footage that has made it into the pantheon of artistic documentation that shows a composer actually changing pitches or trying out motives on a violin. Of course, the fact that those few (though elaborated) portraits of composers at work exhibit composers with lines of strain in their faces, hunched over score paper in what looks like dim or unforgiving conditions does us no favours, either. Admittedly, my favorite depiction of Hindemith is one of Papa Paul playing viola - not composing; it goes without saying, too, that the most remembered and easily-comprehended visual renditions of Mahler are those of his conducting - despite being the last great post-Romantic voice.
There is, too, paradoxically a visual element that completely does not work in our favor: that is to say, a printed score. Without invoking the hoary discussion of whether it's a universal language, printed music in the Western tradition is an elitist language: it's the Latin of art forms. Few can read it passibly, and fewer still can tease out all of the nuance and delicacy in an interpretive manner that commands respect. I want to make clear that I am speaking of the entire Western population as whole, and the actual reading of music - not performing or the auditory transmission of music. I want to democratize the ability to reach a literacy level in music, as do music educators everywhere, but our resources are meager and our ability to make inroads is kept constrained. So, the ability to read music beyond a very rudimentary level still belongs to only a comparative few. While I bemoan the fact that we still in 2011 do not have universal literacy, 99% or so in the United States ain't bad. And, yes, many of the same problems of subtlety and intricacy exist in written language, but there are a few sociolinguistic and developmental factors at play: there is constant speech around us; we all have a base-level literacy and, evolutionarily, are much more easily adapted to learn and relearn spoken language when confronted with a visual analog if and only if there has been adequate exposure before a certain age; words, despite the many ways can be wielded, have exact definitions that are made contextually clearer in writing; everyone is taught to read (under normal circumstances); everyone is taught to write.
There is, of course, a visual-accessibility component, as well, which is fairly obvious: transmission and mutability. I can pick up a pencil and write a poem. It will most likely be awful. Same deal as with a short story. But I have a base level knowledge of rhythm, diction, syntax. I can write. I can pick up a book and read it. I can take the book with me anywhere. I put the score for Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in my father's hand, and he can do nothing with it until he hears the recording or performance - and even then, the score does him no good.
This lack of visual-cognitive stimulus is even more pronounced when we get into electroacoustic music - a subject too big for this blog post. (Though not for a future one!)
We also - collectively, as trained musicians in the Western tradition - lack a vernacular common to experience that will allow us to communicate succinctly and efficiently without either speaking beyond the layperson's knowledge or experience, or - worse - insulting them by toning down and diluting how we describe what we do, why we do it, and what sort of art we make. Say what you will about untrained folks discussing visual art - I count myself among these - or, even better, film: there is an accessibility level of describing some technical aspects (I will not say all) that arises organically, almost generically, from repeated contact and experience and from limited visual art education or bits and pieces learnt along the way. I see brushstrokes on a canvas and can describe them as such; I may not know the proper technical terms beyond "vanishing point" in a landscape painting, but I can remark on something approximating it. At the very basic level, the elementary particles of visual art can be discussed almost universally. We don't have that ability in music or sound art. We end up with onomatopoeia or end up discussing visceralities or emotionalities rather than the sounds or music themselves. Certainly, these reactions are valid - but if we're talking about a Miró painting, we have exact language to describe it. Exact language in the world of music happens to be argot.
Debatable to an extent, the dimension of time itself is the only plane of existence for music and sonic art. We create a representation of thought which in turn becomes a simulation of a representation in performance or on a recording; divergent as those two could be, they are essentially the second status of removal from origin; we have the listener's memory, whose variety is mathematically wild; we have the retransmission from the listener in some fragmentary manner. And it all exists within primarily the realm of time. We have the object (score or recording or...) in our hands, but it is indeed just an object-intermediary. The visual aspect has zero bearing. The auditory aspect does have bearing, but it is not frozen in dimensionality, not firmly rooted to a place or a singular moment - a painting, a sculpture (especially a mediocre one), a visual referent: this is something permanently etched and tied to a place, a moment, a history. It can exist anytime; I can recall them at will now, and now, and now. A Takemitsu chamber work? It has to unfold. It takes time. And that's all it takes.
Which leads me back to why I decided to muse over this initially. There is no set visual re-cognition of the composer, her craft, or her process, or her end result. Aside form the transmission issues, lack of more holistic education about what composers do, lack of exposure of of newer - much newer - artistic trends in art music, and lack of visual elements in the composer's art, what else am I missing?
Other than the composer himself, who may or may not be able to communicate effectively what he does, regardless the pseudo-romantic images a layperson may see, regardless the naive and hurtful stereotype that a small but vocal minority has about composers (and musicians in general) being deadbeats, the responsibility doesn't lie completely with the lay audience or everyday people: it lies within the musical community as a whole to, without exoticization, exhibit composers as often as possible1, encourage composers to take more active roles in orchestras, schools, and the like (there is only so much composer-fostered groups of composers can do, for obvious auditory-transmission reasons), and (this is the killer) somehow place composers alongside writers and visual artists in the public eye (pun intended) (and with no intent to disparage or remove renown from artists in different media) and allow them to receive respect and due credit - first, from the musicians who perform their work (I think here of a relatively recent orchestra commission where the composer was given billing far below a featured soloist, no headshot, no introduction or pre-concert talk - way to go!); secondly, from educators (and this is not accusatory to educators, but pleading for those who shape curricula); thirdly, from an investment by listeners and the general public; and, finally, from composers ourselves. It's hard to make listeners and audiences believe us, understand us, support us, tolerate our existence, and appreciate us when we have to explain exactly what it is we do in an almost-defensive manner. It's hard to justify our existences when a wide swath of Americans don't know we exist to begin with and are then skeptical of our cultural place.
I know I leave out a lot in this discussion, but something tells me we're not done discussing this yet. I am, right here and now, but as a culture, we've got some speaking yet left in front of us.
I would like, though, in the future, to have a conversation with someone new and not have to explain what it is that I do as a defense mechanism or to clarify doubt; I'd like to explain it meaningfully, beyond eradicating uncertainty, and allow it to just be part of my identity - and not a conversational or interpersonal liability.
***
1. But not in ways that force the composer to spend down the entirety of his savings account when, without the composer, there is no performer, and there is no audience, and there is no art.
Showing posts with label post-structuralist dodderings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label post-structuralist dodderings. Show all posts
25.1.11
16.1.11
in which I give too much credence to the History Channel
I’m taking a short break from what will hopefully be more posts on music and music-related matters to enter a piece of dismay toward a select population of human beings. I try not to dwell upon the foibles of my fellow sentient, carbon-based, hairless ape bipeds, but there is one in particular that is nothing more than irascible: the idea or suggestion that humans are not responsible for such things as the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, or other ancient wonders of the world, but alien beings, extraterrestrials, are.
On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.
The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.
The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.
As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.
This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.
As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.
But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.
On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.
The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.
The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.
As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.
This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.
As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.
But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.
21.8.10
They never taught me how to focus
Throughout graduate school -- the part of it where I had direct, weekly, and human contact with my mentors -- I was encouraged to have one main project on my docket at any given time but to dabble and keep working on sketches and other works-in-progress. One composition instructor actively challenged me to write as much as possible and find ways to write material quite different from the primary endeavor for the month / term. Retrospectively, this was to force me into modes of thinking to divorce my first responsibilities from any other ideas or brainstorms and to collect a back-catalog of sketches I could use for other, later projects without being tempted to work on too many things at once.0
If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,1 a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.
How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.
Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.2 I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.
At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.3 I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.
But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.
And too crippling.4
And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...
A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.
So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.
I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.
All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.5
0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.
If I were a visual artist, there is no conceivable way I could have just one easel set up in my studio; no conceivable way for me to keep simply trucking away upon one idea. Part of this is a long-standing problem I have with artistic patience. Part of this arises from the high lack of feedback necessary to younger composers on works of music: it doesn't necessarily matter how it looks, and if I'm composing a work for large forces, I don't get the luxury of hearing whether some element "works" until rehearsals -- or in the case of some dormant, unperformed works, not at all. Part of this also stems from my natural knack to be engaged in many activities at once, despite my quiet and easy-going (typical) behavior,1 a curse from being a "Jack of all trades" personality.
How soon I forget the lessons of past instructors; how soon (and for the past 15 years) has this become a perfect storm.
Many years ago I was relatively prolific. In 2008, by contrast, I didn't finish a single piece I was composing.2 I finished (I think) four pieces last calendar year. While I would love to become more like Villa-Lobos and less like Henri Duparc in terms of compositional output (minus the "Frank O'Hara syndrome" of not revising anything), I don't think it is going to come to pass any time soon.
At last count, I have sketches for nearly 20 pieces in my notebook, most in the very early stages with only a few measures. Some works have several pages of notes, but all rather rudimentary -- and I get into a habit of criticizing and analyzing my sketches (my sketches, for crying out loud!) and putting them aside after I've made my dour notes and changes and called into question what it is I'm doing. I have pieces that I know must take priority: an orchestral work, a wind ensemble work, a few chamber works. I have older pieces in various states of "completion" that need to get revised before I foist them upon an unsuspecting performer or choral director -- that is to say, I want them up to my standards: right now, they're not, and I hate putting my name on something inferior, much less opening myself to criticism for it.3 I have a commission for a saxophone orchestra piece I seriously need to get started on.
But all the possibilities seem endless and too tempting.
And too crippling.4
And I wonder how much of a composer's "voice" is bound up with how many pieces she is working on at one shot, how many ideas are on back burners yet sneaking in...
A lot of my old sketches came about as sporadic, or better impulsive, attempts to capitalize on an upcoming conference, contest, or performance call. (Case in point: I have a cello-piano piece sitting 10% finished in my notebook, a sketch I haven't looked at in over two years) I realize, of course, this is a foolhardy approach to writing. But with so few people asking me to compose works for them, and with a lot of time on my hands, this is the ultimate result: a lot of aphorisms when there should be a philosophical exegesis; charcoal sketches when there should be a 20'x80' mural. This is also due to the fact that my catalog, while quite large in some respects, leaves out some standards and staples: I have one standalone orchestral piece; I have no string quartets or quintets; I have no Pierrot-like ensemble pieces; I have no percussion-only pieces; my piano-and-instrument catalog is fairly thin; most of my chamber music has odd or non-standard instrumentations (bassoon, tenor saxophone, and bass clarinet, for instance, or trombone and violin). So, submissions to things come and go and I scramble. Sometimes I succeed in completing a work (my clarinet quintet -- didn't win the prize I submitted it for, but it's a good piece, still waiting on a performance); other times, like the aforementioned cello-piano work, I get caught up with other pieces, with life, with people, and that October 1st deadline quietly eludes me.
So, I don't know what to do. I don't know how to focus on writing just one piece at a time. Something has been lost in mental translation since the days of composition teachers hovering over my work; something has been amplified in the liberty I've received as a free-lancer; something is missing in the fact that I don't have the immediate resources (peers on a performance faculty at a music school, to wit) to run a piece by someone and get their response. I do have Facebook and all and I occasionally post my scores or send scores to acquaintances and friends -- but there's a frustration level there, as well, in that I rarely get feedback, or at least critiques beyond the topical (of course, many of my friends are busy with spouses, jobs, careers, and the like, so I can't blame them for letting a solo trombone work, for instance, fall through the cracks). I have no ideas on how to focus and I'm left with basically the notion that writing as much as possible as quickly as possible couldn't feasibly include sticking to one work at a time.
I'm dating my music, perhaps. Moving back and forth between sketches, getting somewhat familiar with them, but not profoundly so, and not committing to any singular entity. I did manage to do so with my dissertation and a few other larger works, but those were important works for deadlines or merit. I guess I used those pieces, then. But then, perhaps -- if we extend this gruesome analogy further -- I'm nothing more than a man-whore of composing. And all composers, then, probably fit into this scheme, of moving on from piece to piece after various levels of intimate understanding of each musical world. We're a lascivious, insatiable bunch.
All of us, except maybe Henri Duparc.5
0. This was supposed to be a chronicle of what works I'm attempting to create; instead, this happened. I'll keep this instead.
1. No, really. It's true. My natural demeanor is very quiet, borderline-boring, and not easily provoked. Wasn't always so, to be sure.
2. Admittedly, I started a few pieces in 2008 that I finished in 2009 or am still working on; I also dedicated a fair amount of time to updating and revising some pieces, and I also had this thing called a dissertation (and, at the time, a serious romantic relationship -- despite the discussion above, the two were not mutually inclusive) that took up a lot of my time.
3. As it stands, I have difficulty taking existing works and extracting new pieces from them. I know it would increase my exposure and performance chances, but I'm on principle opposed to taking a movement out of a work to make it stand alone. I also don't relish the idea of more work or finding errors or rehashing old blunders. I should probably change this perspective.
4. cf. Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom
5. Henri Duparc was a French composer who, along with Samuel Rousseau, Chabrier, Massenet, d'Indy, and Franck, represents the French late-Romantic and post-Romantic traditions (prior to Debussy/Ravel). Despite his lasting reputation, or maybe causative of, his output is one of the smallest and paltriest of any "established" composer. Villa-Lobos, on the other hand as we all know, wrote what seemed like a piece a week -- he himself admitted that a lot of the hundreds of works he cranked out were not very good. Frank O'Hara was a poet who, while I adore his work, could have stood to reread a lot of his poems.
Labels:
2010,
composing,
post-structuralist dodderings
18.8.10
Slowing the Phenomenon Down
I come quietly out of the still and silence of the shadows to ask the eternal question:
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
25.5.10
Oh, hello. I didn't see you sitting over there, poor neglected blogorino.
My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.
Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.
Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.
Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?
---
Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...
EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.
My mind has been connecting some academic dots for a while, and while I'm not at the point yet to fully elucidate some of my most recent internal discourse, I figured I could at least be less neglectful and give a general idea of some topics I have been mulling over. They're exciting and enticing, for certain. Understand that these are rough sketches that make perfect sense to me. I am, as they say, all about some feedback.
Semiotica-Erotica
Largely, an exploration into the past thirty to forty years of postmodern discourse and field of ideas unveils a bit of heavy-handedness when it comes to transcendental characteristics of closed or open sign-signified systems vis-a-vis Lacan and Derrida, with so much as inspecting the readings done on them by Lyotard and Baudrillard revealing a kind of fetish characteristic over one aspect of this discourse: while not specifically gendered, the deconstructionist (and post-deconstructionist) reading of linguistic symbologies in a sense sexualizes its own content. Disrobing the closed systems and denuding open systems, there has been a slow rise in the approach to deconstructionist philosophy of ritual and sustained academic pleasure in it. So much so that at this stage that Fukuyama (for one) can be completely discredited: neither are we at the end of history, nor are we at the end of semiotics. While I disagree with any eschatological reading of philosophy/history, a pretense of sophistry on the part of structuralist/early-poststructuralist hangers-on can be observed as little more than a repeated act to derive some sort of pleasure.
Liquid Fragmentation
In a less (perhaps) disturbing realm, I turn to the concept of technologically/societally-created/aided social fragmentation. Any volume by Zygmunt Bauman, and select writings of Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Habermas, will speak about, poke and prod at, and engage the concept of modernity being a breaking device, a clever tail-eating serpent that both created and was created by a weakening of the social fabric of humanity and the demise of community. This, of course, has been popularized in such works as Bowling Alone and others, and still more less-technical philosophising has been done in the popular sphere to invoke some sort of awareness and action from its readership in order to restore humanity to a world of connection and unification, less homogeneous heterogeneity and happy-unhappy individual isolationism. While Bauman et al briefly touch on these points, I have only seen any extensive theorizing on the subject in one place (Liquid Modernity) and at that only subdued: the subject I speak of here is a concept of Liquid Fragmentation. Perhaps the moniker Fluid Fragmentation would be more fitting: while sociologically this is not a radical concept, in terms of ontological readings of religious ideologies it has the potential to be galvanizing. The central framework is that societies, groups, clusters, and even individuals suffer from yet perpetually celebrate the notion of fluidity and liquidity, that an identity is a continual, breathing, near-sentient thing: while not pernicious inherently, its application has some room giving us pause: identity creation, symbol creation, and crystallization of the unified are typically things we come to celebrate once those are in place and - barring for the minute any Bagdikian or Adorno reading on mass media being the message rather than the mediums - if we legitimize and non-problematize the notion of morphological identity we allow ourselves a permanent yet constantly shifting form of fragmentation. Marriage name conventions, street addresses, jobs, hair colors, tattoos: these are all small things that point to a permanent flux rather than a permanent break and do indeed become signs for ourselves; yet, each shift becomes a form of fragmentation distancing oneself and (if I can sneak in Adorno) pseudo-individualizing us through marked isolational activities.
Cyber Ecology
While this has probably been writ about before up to this point, I have honestly not read any academic writing about it; my ignorance of such a topic clearly, obviously, does not prevent it from existing. I've just not done any research on this. (NB - this tends to be my MO: I'll think on a subject for a while, and once I've clarified it to some extent, then I start researching to see how behind I am) In 1998, I started my first webpage and got my first (several) email addresses. Where are they now? What happened to them? Who claimed them? Of course, this is analogous to who we are as fluid-identity-permanent-fragmentation humans (see previous topic), but who is cleaning up the messes we made in the early days of the dot-com? What will happen to MySpace five years from now when only "Tom" (who has not apparently logged in for months!) will be remaining? What, if anything, does this say about our predilections as humans, and, perhaps, as Americans (in this instance)? Benign neglect speaks volumes - and for the first time, perhaps we will soon have some sort of permanent graveyard to see our wastes and wanton excess that is consistently viewable from our own homes and bears our identity; landfills, junkyards... these things bear the mark of anonymity: "that could be anyone's trash - not just mine." Paradoxically, what's missing here is an individual responsibility, an existence in isolation of our consumer sins as outlined in the catechism in each one of our guidebooks to planet Earth. (I think now of a website in particular that keeps old, dead pages permanently cached - I think they've collected something in the neighborhood of 2 billion pages up to this point, and counting) What impact will this have on us - if anything! - if we see all our creations and identities laid bare before us? Will it be another long bookshelf of old romance novels or VHS tapes from an elderly, deceased family member? Will we actually pay attention to it?
---
Don't worry, I still think / write plenty about music. But analyses of Shostakovich in technical terms and brainstorms about musicological matters seem less sexy...
EDIT: So, Cyber-Ecology exists ("they" added the hyphen, not me) but isn't quite what I had in mind. Casual glances have pointed me to DARPA (shudder), information storage that's "green" (certainly, an important aspect of this in a less sociological-societal realm), and a bunch of articles about art. If I call it something else and tease out some subtleties, this could be something. Or nothing.
Labels:
philosophy,
post-structuralist dodderings
5.12.09
on struggles
It occurs to me that the general consensus of the world is that the inhabitants of this Earth enjoy the conceptualization and the actualization of the struggle. So much so, that this enjoyment of the struggle precludes (and would ultimately negate) any sort of true, total resolution of that struggle.
Were the world citizenry to spontaneously achieve a Utopian idyll overnight, would not there be a nigh-instantaneous Hegelian return to something to fill the absence, a return to a grand-mal dialectic for some/any/all arbitrary reason[s]? If the human-wrought phenomena of the world met some sort of singularity, would human physics interfere and re-demand some sort of overarching jihad in some other avenue of lived experience? While there can be no darkness without light, and vice versa, there cannot not exist the inbetween realm: dawn, dusk. Tepid. Fluid yet solid. This is the murk the human race seems to be caught in, the quagmire in which we seem all too happy to occupy. Some repetitive, circular, perpetual twilight or dawn of our ideas and ideals as gods to be worshiped, striven for, fetishized. We obviously see no limit on the number of, and scope of, our perennial (or self-created, self-designated perennial) struggles, so why stop reifying the Big War of Ideas? Why stop being a sycophantic tribe blindly dancing about the ceremonial fire? Why not be phallocentric in the sheer quantity of struggles? Bigger is better. More is more. We will always find opposition, even in the face of a singular homogeneity - by virtue of the fact that it is, indeed, a unified One that leaves no room for any sort of Other. Pluralism is unattainable so long the collective end-result ideal is a hegemony of Many, a homogeneity of Heterogeny. Any struggle met with resolution can only be resolved by struggling against the resolution, can only be met with the construction of the Differance and the reshaping and re-placing of a power structure.
Any decision made by human minds/hands immediately casts out into the world its opposite effect. This creates a vapor which crystallizes and solidifies as The Struggle. By making a decision, formulating a singularity, we immediately and (im)perceptibly create a new opposition. We create the opposition against people, ideas, the world itself. By eating meat, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of environmental damage, increased world poverty and hunger, spiritual and ethical injustices. By being vegetarian, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of economic negligence or callousness, a complex of perceived (be it real or arbitrary) moral superiority, creation of the opposition to the opposition, other forms of environmental damage not shared by meat-eating...
Struggles group together. They seem to flock together, as birds, as coordinated sounds. Each one cause, struggle, jihad, seems to boost and beget any number, perhaps infinite, of closely-related phenomena, and the chain of relations created from association of struggles to one another ends up dragging the discourse of disparate ideas - say, the relatedness of carbon cap-and-trade in Montreal to women's rights in Saudi Arabia to evangelical movements in Sumatra - into a sort of loosely-woven, yet coherent, net, a net that catches all things buried/open at the hypo/epi/hypercenter which on one hand polarizes and radicalizes the root opposition movements yet on the other hand becomes a Klein bottle net, catching all yet nothing, allowing the arguments to sluice through since the collective effect of this net is to catch only itself and the entire chain of ideological discourse of present day Earth.
Crossroads or a standstill.
Were the world citizenry to spontaneously achieve a Utopian idyll overnight, would not there be a nigh-instantaneous Hegelian return to something to fill the absence, a return to a grand-mal dialectic for some/any/all arbitrary reason[s]? If the human-wrought phenomena of the world met some sort of singularity, would human physics interfere and re-demand some sort of overarching jihad in some other avenue of lived experience? While there can be no darkness without light, and vice versa, there cannot not exist the inbetween realm: dawn, dusk. Tepid. Fluid yet solid. This is the murk the human race seems to be caught in, the quagmire in which we seem all too happy to occupy. Some repetitive, circular, perpetual twilight or dawn of our ideas and ideals as gods to be worshiped, striven for, fetishized. We obviously see no limit on the number of, and scope of, our perennial (or self-created, self-designated perennial) struggles, so why stop reifying the Big War of Ideas? Why stop being a sycophantic tribe blindly dancing about the ceremonial fire? Why not be phallocentric in the sheer quantity of struggles? Bigger is better. More is more. We will always find opposition, even in the face of a singular homogeneity - by virtue of the fact that it is, indeed, a unified One that leaves no room for any sort of Other. Pluralism is unattainable so long the collective end-result ideal is a hegemony of Many, a homogeneity of Heterogeny. Any struggle met with resolution can only be resolved by struggling against the resolution, can only be met with the construction of the Differance and the reshaping and re-placing of a power structure.
Any decision made by human minds/hands immediately casts out into the world its opposite effect. This creates a vapor which crystallizes and solidifies as The Struggle. By making a decision, formulating a singularity, we immediately and (im)perceptibly create a new opposition. We create the opposition against people, ideas, the world itself. By eating meat, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of environmental damage, increased world poverty and hunger, spiritual and ethical injustices. By being vegetarian, say, one creates the opposing turbulence of economic negligence or callousness, a complex of perceived (be it real or arbitrary) moral superiority, creation of the opposition to the opposition, other forms of environmental damage not shared by meat-eating...
Struggles group together. They seem to flock together, as birds, as coordinated sounds. Each one cause, struggle, jihad, seems to boost and beget any number, perhaps infinite, of closely-related phenomena, and the chain of relations created from association of struggles to one another ends up dragging the discourse of disparate ideas - say, the relatedness of carbon cap-and-trade in Montreal to women's rights in Saudi Arabia to evangelical movements in Sumatra - into a sort of loosely-woven, yet coherent, net, a net that catches all things buried/open at the hypo/epi/hypercenter which on one hand polarizes and radicalizes the root opposition movements yet on the other hand becomes a Klein bottle net, catching all yet nothing, allowing the arguments to sluice through since the collective effect of this net is to catch only itself and the entire chain of ideological discourse of present day Earth.
Crossroads or a standstill.
Labels:
philosophy,
politics,
post-structuralist dodderings
9.10.09
This Bear Will Hunt
Being on the Outer Banks in November or December presents a hermetic world, a sphere where memory and deep solitude are encapsulated, the spray from a grey and windblown sea acting as flakes for this microcosmic snowglobe, the cold, breaking water the Outside World beyond the thin ribbon of sand. The hand that shakes the world every so often is that thick, humid, cold southwest wind, a once-warm Gulf Stream breeze chilled by the Pamlico Sound, the salt content reduced but still piquant in the nose. There is a grit in the breeze, perhaps fine sand or crystallized salt, or just the needling of remembering pin-pricking the cheeks as the wind sweeps over and down the dunes, disappearing into the foam and gun-metal-grey clouds, the horizon at some hours an indistinct ash color. There is a loneliness, but a comfortable loneliness. There is a blustery world afoot, but softened by the safe distance from the water and a sturdy coat. Only the face is vulnerable, but the head can always be turned in the other direction to avoid direct confrontation with the elements. Peering into the junction of sky and water sets the mind into a well-controlled nuclear reaction, one thought engendering another begetting another developing another until the end-product of remembering, re-imagining, and re-romanticizing a subject arises, with the rest of the world of thought safely contained by the skull, the most important control rod of the human race.
Or, this is what happened about the eighth time I listened to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest all the way through, which came around 3 in the morning several days ago. This is a review long overdue, perhaps; my knowledge of this band is limited aside from The Yellow House, which was an offering I could have taken or left as it became something that played into the Brooklyn-cum-Montreal world of prep-school indie. Veckatimest may very well be the best album I have heard this year, musically speaking, and stands with Beck’s Sea Change and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret as one of the best “break-up albums” of the past decade. I could not bear to remove my headphones, and I did not shuttle between a few songs as I am prone to do when a new album enters my life and have heard it once through, trying to find the highlights. All twelve pieces on the album stand well together, creating a strong architectural shape – as albums ought to do but frequently do not – in terms of musical material and lyrical content and emotional curve, and while some songs are favored, I have difficulty not dropping the needle on side A and not letting the needle trace its way to the paper; I have difficulty not flipping the album and letting the needle groove again; I have difficulty not repeating this ad infinitum.
I am hard pressed to find a pop group (let’s ditch the “indie” misnomer for a minute) that has zero difficulty in integrating a fresh, “challenging” (for the uninitiated), and consistent harmonic language with timbres and textures that at once evoke and hegemonize all the band’s influences, from The Beach Boys down to The Walkmen. I do not think I can name another pop group that has no problem (and maybe implacable tolerance for) completely nixing the three-chord tonic-dominant scheme in favor of modal harmonies that move more toward Messiaen than Miles. I cannot think of another rock drummer in a band formed after 2000 that has his musicality under more control than Christopher Bear, who dares perform on the set like it is an actual collection of instruments and not a time-keeping device. In terms of form, even though verse-chorus is still popular and in use by Grizzly Bear (time-tested, ear-approved, perhaps), so much through-composed music permeates the album, and the softening of the delineation between verse and chorus, or verse and verse, or reprise, or subject, or sub-subject, or parenthetical phrase is incredibly welcome. Harmonically, the group is right at home with chords in inversion, nebulous tonal positioning, and something that escapes the world of good pop music at large: convincing voice leading and contrary motion. Who knew that the simplest of musical formulas could be employed so well? Much of this is helped by the incisive yet above-reproach gentle voice of Ed Droste (and occasionally his mirror-voice in Daniel Rossen), a mild breeze coming in off the sound that ramps up, withdraws, and occasionally exhibits an edge that, like the fine grit on the southwest wind, causes a head to turn, only to take more benign masochism.
“Southern Point” starts as a sea breeze turning directions, high tide coming a minute into the track, with a peculiarly piquant harmonic world: a vacillation in the verse between minor tonic and flat submediant dominant (that’s i-VI7 for the theory nerds; or if you’re counting, a Ger+6), and constant minor-major mode mixture doused with the “pretty” Major-7th chords in the chorus (is it a chorus, or an extension of the verse?) creates the world of late Brahms if he listened to a lot of Floyd and early Crimson. The tempestuous world between meter and its hypometric counter help propel the piece into the wayward, distant modulations, the drums acting as a marker between horizon and sky, somewhere between Samba and Jack DeJohnette.
Perhaps the most direct, non-confrontational pop song on the album is “Two Weeks,” which has had plenty of indie-station airplay and was even thrown into an iTunes promotion (which, no doubt, helped the album debut at the #8 spot on Billboard). This song, while beautifully constructed – again, Bear is in command of the entire ensemble with his subtle, well-orchestrated percussion – belies the rest of the album. While the preponderance of vocal harmonies in thirds and fourths and usage of the Lydian mode can serve as exemplars, the clarity of the form and the conventionality of the harmonic language (to an extent) may serve as a bad example to the lay audience. Nonetheless, Droste’s lyrics provide the necessary smokiness, ghostliness, and coldness to counter some of the sweetness in the convention. The text of the song, of lingering and forgetting (perhaps – Droste has remarked that the content’s interpretation can be as ambiguous as the words themselves), of sludging through some sort of relationship going nowhere, of asking the questions to which no answers will ever be satisfactory, lends a sadness, a meek anger, to the dulcet gloss:
Think of all the ways
Momentary phase
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Every time you try
A quarter, half, a mile,
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Would you always?
Maybe sometimes?
Make it easy?
Take your time…
The brilliance here is the subtext: the desperation and totality of regret. Droste’s unseen protagonist, facing the cold wind, maybe even spitting into it with the demure of a true Southern Genteel-man, can only take so much of an apparent silence, of an apparent need – and a promise not met, even halfway.
“All We Ask” starts out with a riff that could be placed on The Walkmen’s Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone without question, with a tape-saturated Starburst, but this evaporates as no distortion comes into play, and the lightly chromatic vocal lines accompanied by dominant-substitutes or dominant-add-6th and a repressed, skulking, constant, neurotic percussion part. “Leave us alone,” calls the voice; “lead us all home.” Take us out of our heads. Take away the sea. Take away the sand. Or give it all back. The journey satisfies no one: “I can’t get out / what I’m into / with you,” despite the calls harmonically and vocally to simply leave. Walk out of the cold.
“Fine for now” is the bitter pill of irony on the album. “Done askin’ for your permission / Please understand / We’re all faltering / How’d I help with that? / If it’s all or nothing / Then Let me Go / We’re all faltering / Why’d I help with that?” Rossen gives his slightly-more-crooner-ish voice to the lead character of this mini-drama, stating “There is Time / So much Time,” but for everything to go ever more downhill. The washy nature of the soundworld here: the breakers soaking everyone. No one is unscathed. Even Rossen, as his voice occasionally struggles to overcome the envelopes pushed forward by rolled cymbals and reverb-drenched Telecasters. It’s impolite, of course, to kill the protagonist, but this is what happens: the dominant never appears; tonic-center pedal points linger; 7th scale degrees get thrown around like sea gulls in a gale; fake steel drums pinprick the eardrums, a fleck of warmth in an otherwise cold tide pool; the vocalist writes himself out of the story, unaware.
“Cheerleader” is cheekier, but no less insidious in its handling of a relationship soured: Droste’s delivery is imagined as a series of dialogues with his Other and asides with an audience that doesn’t hear him (or, perhaps still his Other). The bridge is out ahead; we’ll plunge to our watery deaths, but I’ve got to keep driving, because there doesn’t seem to be a good stopping place. This isn’t Chappaquiddick. This is love. That’s the difference. “I should have made it matter.” The problematic relationship the audience has with the text, though, is the statement of making it “matter.” The narrator may be taking on the long-past regrets of the Other while belching “it does not matter” when he can, a calm vine of sour grapes trampled by ponies with their eyes on the next pasture. The lushness of the harmonic language here – perhaps the most added tones and busiest of chordal textures on the album – helps to create the conflict and give the narrator (and the intended audience) a sensation of agoraphobic claustrophobia. Helpless and halting wherever, no matter how close or far to the situation.
Rather than continue the blow-by-blow, I assure you the next several pieces are necessary listening; the subject matter doesn’t vary too much, and the same rich blend of production – warm, close vocals, intimate settings for the drums and backup vocals, with plenty of spatial differentiation and depth differentiation (in short, exceedingly well-produced) – accompanies the beautiful melancholy-without-hatred of the lyrics. I want to focus on three more songs: “Dory,” “Hold Still,” and “I Live With You” – simply because of what happens musically. (“While You Wait for the Others” needs no introduction and comes close to being “Two Weeks” redux)
“Dory” begins over a pedal point on D which bursts into a weird mix of Cole Porter and the Cocteau Twins. The favoring of arpeggiated chords in lieu of solid chords – that is, Peter Buck and not David Crosby (yet another reason I can’t get behind “freak-folk” as a label) – works especially well here (as it does throughout the album) and contributes the open, desolate space “Dory” sets up with the extended metaphor of fish swimming, diving, and dying in the freezing depths due to whatever poor choices they made. But the chorus. Oh, the chorus. D major, Bb major, F major, Ab major. After a world of ct7 chords, chromatic neighbors, and others: the final fade out – the progression over a… D pedal. As it should. Perfect circle – or a spiral, if you go the Tonnetz route and favor the ultimate construction of the harmonic language in tritones and m3s. Which is more probable, given the nebulous character of the chorus’s Bb Major. The production layering and pedal sustain, in tandem with spectral desires of the D major triad, seems to create a world somewhere between B Major and Bb Major in that second chord. This is no mere Procrustean analysis, but a thorough examination of the rhetoric: spiraling out of control of these metaphoric sea-dwelling critters, descending into their grave; the metaphor dives into the music, ending the piece with the circular motion, the mild disorientation after staring into the abyss of the horizon for too long: the shock when the horizon stares back and becomes upside down.
“Hold Still” is – and I cannot put this in better, more mellifluous, or more direct terms – simply a beautiful, effective, moody, and spare piece. The guitar line 1’20” – a Lydian mode with some unresolved dissonances that moves against a I-IV motion – is simply staggering in its effect of facilitating that plaintive desperation that comes with wanting to dive into the wreck of a cold sea but knowing all the ramifications and stripping to skivvies and catching a hypothermia-induced cold a few hours later. “I’ll take our chance / Without compromise / There isn’t anything left to try.” Washing away the sins of memory, baptism as protection against future destruction. Indiscretion only exists on paper. Regret only exists in time; memory only truly belongs to one person: he or she who wants to remember, though nothing can be gained from it. “Here we go again … The story goes on file / As if we never were there at all.”
But go listen to “While You Wait for the Others” anyway. Repeatedly. I have to mention at least the circular self-destruction of sour grapes trampled in a vineyard of “I did nothing to deserve this but fuck you I will lash back and goddammit I missed and shot myself in the foot.” And, here it has been mentioned.
“I Live With You” is gut-turning. One thing Grizzly Bear does masterfully is working the emotional fader. Certainly, well-orchestrated songs, adventurous harmonic language, and exceptional musicality help with this. Still, the achievement here is in the exquisite beauty of the ambiguity:
“You brought us this far / We’ll do what we can / Return / Don’t put me on / Return / Don’t make me beg / Return / And they’ll try / They’ll try /To keep us apart”
Such circular pleading, such unrestrained yearning with the confidence that the Once is the Now, crooned and/or belted out over irregular phrase-length structures and an echoic, if not mocking, youth choir backup texture makes anything that has come out of Montreal in the past ten years look like the dung of a hermit crab. Inconspicuous and straining for meaning. “I Live With You” is the anxiety of isolation. Not being able to leave Corolla once the ferry stops or 12 gets flooded over. The song marries together the malevolence of love with the grace of separation; the hatred of sharing with the earnestness of selfishness.
The album has convinced me, if nothing else, that this world is grossly unfair, filled with victims at every turn, filled with villains before every victim, filled with perpetrators who become the mugged. The wind knocks us all down. We get slapped with a wave yet we dive in for more at the worst possible time. We dream of silent space, a gust to refresh us, and what we get is a white-hot, self-contained apparatus of self-destruction that only we can control. Just this side of neurotic breaks do we stop ourselves and keep ourselves in our own universes, our miniverses, our macrocosms. Just this side of memory and forgetting, of love and desperate hatred, is where I found this album, where I fell in love with this album, where I began to hate myself for not loving this album more. And then I realized: while I wait for the others to make it all worthwhile, I can simply take off my jacket, get chilled to the bone, and cower under the leeward side of a dune until the weather turns.
Which might be in April or May. Until then, the speakers pump the world of brine and grey tides and a narrow love of isolation into me, and I’ll gladly take the abuse. Over and over again. “[I] could hope for some substance as long as [I’d] like / or just wait out the evening.”
Or, this is what happened about the eighth time I listened to Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest all the way through, which came around 3 in the morning several days ago. This is a review long overdue, perhaps; my knowledge of this band is limited aside from The Yellow House, which was an offering I could have taken or left as it became something that played into the Brooklyn-cum-Montreal world of prep-school indie. Veckatimest may very well be the best album I have heard this year, musically speaking, and stands with Beck’s Sea Change and Built to Spill’s Keep It Like a Secret as one of the best “break-up albums” of the past decade. I could not bear to remove my headphones, and I did not shuttle between a few songs as I am prone to do when a new album enters my life and have heard it once through, trying to find the highlights. All twelve pieces on the album stand well together, creating a strong architectural shape – as albums ought to do but frequently do not – in terms of musical material and lyrical content and emotional curve, and while some songs are favored, I have difficulty not dropping the needle on side A and not letting the needle trace its way to the paper; I have difficulty not flipping the album and letting the needle groove again; I have difficulty not repeating this ad infinitum.
I am hard pressed to find a pop group (let’s ditch the “indie” misnomer for a minute) that has zero difficulty in integrating a fresh, “challenging” (for the uninitiated), and consistent harmonic language with timbres and textures that at once evoke and hegemonize all the band’s influences, from The Beach Boys down to The Walkmen. I do not think I can name another pop group that has no problem (and maybe implacable tolerance for) completely nixing the three-chord tonic-dominant scheme in favor of modal harmonies that move more toward Messiaen than Miles. I cannot think of another rock drummer in a band formed after 2000 that has his musicality under more control than Christopher Bear, who dares perform on the set like it is an actual collection of instruments and not a time-keeping device. In terms of form, even though verse-chorus is still popular and in use by Grizzly Bear (time-tested, ear-approved, perhaps), so much through-composed music permeates the album, and the softening of the delineation between verse and chorus, or verse and verse, or reprise, or subject, or sub-subject, or parenthetical phrase is incredibly welcome. Harmonically, the group is right at home with chords in inversion, nebulous tonal positioning, and something that escapes the world of good pop music at large: convincing voice leading and contrary motion. Who knew that the simplest of musical formulas could be employed so well? Much of this is helped by the incisive yet above-reproach gentle voice of Ed Droste (and occasionally his mirror-voice in Daniel Rossen), a mild breeze coming in off the sound that ramps up, withdraws, and occasionally exhibits an edge that, like the fine grit on the southwest wind, causes a head to turn, only to take more benign masochism.
“Southern Point” starts as a sea breeze turning directions, high tide coming a minute into the track, with a peculiarly piquant harmonic world: a vacillation in the verse between minor tonic and flat submediant dominant (that’s i-VI7 for the theory nerds; or if you’re counting, a Ger+6), and constant minor-major mode mixture doused with the “pretty” Major-7th chords in the chorus (is it a chorus, or an extension of the verse?) creates the world of late Brahms if he listened to a lot of Floyd and early Crimson. The tempestuous world between meter and its hypometric counter help propel the piece into the wayward, distant modulations, the drums acting as a marker between horizon and sky, somewhere between Samba and Jack DeJohnette.
Perhaps the most direct, non-confrontational pop song on the album is “Two Weeks,” which has had plenty of indie-station airplay and was even thrown into an iTunes promotion (which, no doubt, helped the album debut at the #8 spot on Billboard). This song, while beautifully constructed – again, Bear is in command of the entire ensemble with his subtle, well-orchestrated percussion – belies the rest of the album. While the preponderance of vocal harmonies in thirds and fourths and usage of the Lydian mode can serve as exemplars, the clarity of the form and the conventionality of the harmonic language (to an extent) may serve as a bad example to the lay audience. Nonetheless, Droste’s lyrics provide the necessary smokiness, ghostliness, and coldness to counter some of the sweetness in the convention. The text of the song, of lingering and forgetting (perhaps – Droste has remarked that the content’s interpretation can be as ambiguous as the words themselves), of sludging through some sort of relationship going nowhere, of asking the questions to which no answers will ever be satisfactory, lends a sadness, a meek anger, to the dulcet gloss:
Think of all the ways
Momentary phase
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Every time you try
A quarter, half, a mile,
Just like yesterday:
I told you I would stay
Would you always?
Maybe sometimes?
Make it easy?
Take your time…
The brilliance here is the subtext: the desperation and totality of regret. Droste’s unseen protagonist, facing the cold wind, maybe even spitting into it with the demure of a true Southern Genteel-man, can only take so much of an apparent silence, of an apparent need – and a promise not met, even halfway.
“All We Ask” starts out with a riff that could be placed on The Walkmen’s Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me Is Gone without question, with a tape-saturated Starburst, but this evaporates as no distortion comes into play, and the lightly chromatic vocal lines accompanied by dominant-substitutes or dominant-add-6th and a repressed, skulking, constant, neurotic percussion part. “Leave us alone,” calls the voice; “lead us all home.” Take us out of our heads. Take away the sea. Take away the sand. Or give it all back. The journey satisfies no one: “I can’t get out / what I’m into / with you,” despite the calls harmonically and vocally to simply leave. Walk out of the cold.
“Fine for now” is the bitter pill of irony on the album. “Done askin’ for your permission / Please understand / We’re all faltering / How’d I help with that? / If it’s all or nothing / Then Let me Go / We’re all faltering / Why’d I help with that?” Rossen gives his slightly-more-crooner-ish voice to the lead character of this mini-drama, stating “There is Time / So much Time,” but for everything to go ever more downhill. The washy nature of the soundworld here: the breakers soaking everyone. No one is unscathed. Even Rossen, as his voice occasionally struggles to overcome the envelopes pushed forward by rolled cymbals and reverb-drenched Telecasters. It’s impolite, of course, to kill the protagonist, but this is what happens: the dominant never appears; tonic-center pedal points linger; 7th scale degrees get thrown around like sea gulls in a gale; fake steel drums pinprick the eardrums, a fleck of warmth in an otherwise cold tide pool; the vocalist writes himself out of the story, unaware.
“Cheerleader” is cheekier, but no less insidious in its handling of a relationship soured: Droste’s delivery is imagined as a series of dialogues with his Other and asides with an audience that doesn’t hear him (or, perhaps still his Other). The bridge is out ahead; we’ll plunge to our watery deaths, but I’ve got to keep driving, because there doesn’t seem to be a good stopping place. This isn’t Chappaquiddick. This is love. That’s the difference. “I should have made it matter.” The problematic relationship the audience has with the text, though, is the statement of making it “matter.” The narrator may be taking on the long-past regrets of the Other while belching “it does not matter” when he can, a calm vine of sour grapes trampled by ponies with their eyes on the next pasture. The lushness of the harmonic language here – perhaps the most added tones and busiest of chordal textures on the album – helps to create the conflict and give the narrator (and the intended audience) a sensation of agoraphobic claustrophobia. Helpless and halting wherever, no matter how close or far to the situation.
Rather than continue the blow-by-blow, I assure you the next several pieces are necessary listening; the subject matter doesn’t vary too much, and the same rich blend of production – warm, close vocals, intimate settings for the drums and backup vocals, with plenty of spatial differentiation and depth differentiation (in short, exceedingly well-produced) – accompanies the beautiful melancholy-without-hatred of the lyrics. I want to focus on three more songs: “Dory,” “Hold Still,” and “I Live With You” – simply because of what happens musically. (“While You Wait for the Others” needs no introduction and comes close to being “Two Weeks” redux)
“Dory” begins over a pedal point on D which bursts into a weird mix of Cole Porter and the Cocteau Twins. The favoring of arpeggiated chords in lieu of solid chords – that is, Peter Buck and not David Crosby (yet another reason I can’t get behind “freak-folk” as a label) – works especially well here (as it does throughout the album) and contributes the open, desolate space “Dory” sets up with the extended metaphor of fish swimming, diving, and dying in the freezing depths due to whatever poor choices they made. But the chorus. Oh, the chorus. D major, Bb major, F major, Ab major. After a world of ct7 chords, chromatic neighbors, and others: the final fade out – the progression over a… D pedal. As it should. Perfect circle – or a spiral, if you go the Tonnetz route and favor the ultimate construction of the harmonic language in tritones and m3s. Which is more probable, given the nebulous character of the chorus’s Bb Major. The production layering and pedal sustain, in tandem with spectral desires of the D major triad, seems to create a world somewhere between B Major and Bb Major in that second chord. This is no mere Procrustean analysis, but a thorough examination of the rhetoric: spiraling out of control of these metaphoric sea-dwelling critters, descending into their grave; the metaphor dives into the music, ending the piece with the circular motion, the mild disorientation after staring into the abyss of the horizon for too long: the shock when the horizon stares back and becomes upside down.
“Hold Still” is – and I cannot put this in better, more mellifluous, or more direct terms – simply a beautiful, effective, moody, and spare piece. The guitar line 1’20” – a Lydian mode with some unresolved dissonances that moves against a I-IV motion – is simply staggering in its effect of facilitating that plaintive desperation that comes with wanting to dive into the wreck of a cold sea but knowing all the ramifications and stripping to skivvies and catching a hypothermia-induced cold a few hours later. “I’ll take our chance / Without compromise / There isn’t anything left to try.” Washing away the sins of memory, baptism as protection against future destruction. Indiscretion only exists on paper. Regret only exists in time; memory only truly belongs to one person: he or she who wants to remember, though nothing can be gained from it. “Here we go again … The story goes on file / As if we never were there at all.”
But go listen to “While You Wait for the Others” anyway. Repeatedly. I have to mention at least the circular self-destruction of sour grapes trampled in a vineyard of “I did nothing to deserve this but fuck you I will lash back and goddammit I missed and shot myself in the foot.” And, here it has been mentioned.
“I Live With You” is gut-turning. One thing Grizzly Bear does masterfully is working the emotional fader. Certainly, well-orchestrated songs, adventurous harmonic language, and exceptional musicality help with this. Still, the achievement here is in the exquisite beauty of the ambiguity:
“You brought us this far / We’ll do what we can / Return / Don’t put me on / Return / Don’t make me beg / Return / And they’ll try / They’ll try /To keep us apart”
Such circular pleading, such unrestrained yearning with the confidence that the Once is the Now, crooned and/or belted out over irregular phrase-length structures and an echoic, if not mocking, youth choir backup texture makes anything that has come out of Montreal in the past ten years look like the dung of a hermit crab. Inconspicuous and straining for meaning. “I Live With You” is the anxiety of isolation. Not being able to leave Corolla once the ferry stops or 12 gets flooded over. The song marries together the malevolence of love with the grace of separation; the hatred of sharing with the earnestness of selfishness.
The album has convinced me, if nothing else, that this world is grossly unfair, filled with victims at every turn, filled with villains before every victim, filled with perpetrators who become the mugged. The wind knocks us all down. We get slapped with a wave yet we dive in for more at the worst possible time. We dream of silent space, a gust to refresh us, and what we get is a white-hot, self-contained apparatus of self-destruction that only we can control. Just this side of neurotic breaks do we stop ourselves and keep ourselves in our own universes, our miniverses, our macrocosms. Just this side of memory and forgetting, of love and desperate hatred, is where I found this album, where I fell in love with this album, where I began to hate myself for not loving this album more. And then I realized: while I wait for the others to make it all worthwhile, I can simply take off my jacket, get chilled to the bone, and cower under the leeward side of a dune until the weather turns.
Which might be in April or May. Until then, the speakers pump the world of brine and grey tides and a narrow love of isolation into me, and I’ll gladly take the abuse. Over and over again. “[I] could hope for some substance as long as [I’d] like / or just wait out the evening.”
Labels:
2009,
post-structuralist dodderings,
record review
14.5.09
Yeah Yeah Yeahs: It's Blitz! (Part 0 of 1)
I have a hypothetical for youse guys:
Can Karen O. please, please, please stop plagiarising Siouxsie Sioux? I finally got my hands on a copy of Yeah Yeah Yeah's It's Blitz! and, while it is imminently enjoyable and crispy-pan-fried smooth-butter bizarro-pop, everything reads and sounds as though Karen has basically taken all the naughty bits about bondage, LaPortian discussions about bodily functions run afoul, Foucaultian smatterings of punishment and madness, and Paglia-esque animal-woman conflations from Siouxsie's Juju and Kaleidoscope and smashed it together with Tori Amos at her angriest and run it through a P J Harvey irony press.
Granted, none of this detracts from YYY's efforts. In fact, there is something a bit refreshing about the dance-club-cum-Salo attitude Karen portrays through the album. It is a bit unsettling, as it is a strident departure from the sonic worlds of their first two EPs and Fever to Tell, what with all the multilayered mixing and lack of importance in the guitar for the first few tracks. For instance, "Heads Will Roll" starts out with a keyboard chord progression that could easily have been lifted from Superstition or Peepshow. Karen's vocals themselves have calmed down considerably through these six years, and her Byrne-ish tics are far more prevalent, revealed by (assumably) superior recording equipment, and her tone quality has the struggling-contralto, nigh-emphysematic word-ending quirks that Siouxsie has given us during her solo career.
Musically, the densities are almost staggering. "Soft Shock" has no fewer than four separate streams of thought between the vocoded voice, the keyboard (while playing in unison mostly with the vocoded voice in the bridges, the timbre is separate enough to become its own animal), the guitar-distorted-1, the guitar-not-distorted, drums, bass, another guitar, and at last Karen. "Dragon Queen," while a fabulous song which inexorably combines ELO, Thompson Twins, Sheena E, Speaking in Tongues-era TH, and flecks of funk, is burdened with a huge amount of activity. YYYs pull this off, of course, by keeping the layers spare, like a good Henze symphony, and not ultra-complex, like the worst Ferneyhough piece. Many of the songs do, though, become rather blocky. By this, I mean Penderecki: nothing, nothing, THEN SOUND FOREVER, then nothing. Monomorphic. Static recursively through forward motion. Monotemporal. Fixed images with idiosyncratic character for four minutes or so. I have no clue whether this is a benefit or not; ask me in a few weeks, when I'm drunk or sober or sleeping or not.
Granted, Karen's influences are less visible (audible?) to the audience here but there are so many we could choose from. GBV, New Order, TH, PJ Harvey, Patti, the list could go on. But here, she's shoehorning Siouxsie in between all of those. Let me demonstrate: GBV SIOUXSIE New Order SIOUXSIE TalkSIOUXSIEing HeaSIOUXSIEds, PoSIOUXSIElly JeaSIOUXSIEn HarSIOUXSIEveSIOUXSIEy,... one easily gets the idea. "Hysteric" is a great example of this. As is "Skeletons." In the latter, we have a symphonic bass drum, a martial drum-sticking-line, atmospheric and translucent keyboard riffs, and an ethereal voice discussing -- well, esoteric lyrics in unrhymed couplets with a gothic rendition of permanent, unrequited love over a pentatonic wash of synths. (I give you "Softly" from Superstition) In "Hysteric," we have - albeit updated - an ambivalent take on the so-called journey of amor that we have (in customary deprecating and removed way) in Siouxsie's "Ghost in You." The main differences are that Karen is singing over a chord progression that evades the dominant and sings in a Scottish rip rhythm. Hold on: Siouxsie sort of does that too.
Again: the album stands on its own merits, and I owe it a proper review without post-structuralist doddering, and it shall have one soon after I review everything else new and old that, for some reason, I have the urge to discuss or rip apart. Mainly discuss. But I reserve the right...
I do suggest the album gets a proper listen from you, too. It's rather good.
I also say "finally" a bit tongue-in-cheek since it has been out for two months. I do not get to things quickly enough, it seems, but, that happens to be how I roullez le bon-temps.
Can Karen O. please, please, please stop plagiarising Siouxsie Sioux? I finally got my hands on a copy of Yeah Yeah Yeah's It's Blitz! and, while it is imminently enjoyable and crispy-pan-fried smooth-butter bizarro-pop, everything reads and sounds as though Karen has basically taken all the naughty bits about bondage, LaPortian discussions about bodily functions run afoul, Foucaultian smatterings of punishment and madness, and Paglia-esque animal-woman conflations from Siouxsie's Juju and Kaleidoscope and smashed it together with Tori Amos at her angriest and run it through a P J Harvey irony press.
Granted, none of this detracts from YYY's efforts. In fact, there is something a bit refreshing about the dance-club-cum-Salo attitude Karen portrays through the album. It is a bit unsettling, as it is a strident departure from the sonic worlds of their first two EPs and Fever to Tell, what with all the multilayered mixing and lack of importance in the guitar for the first few tracks. For instance, "Heads Will Roll" starts out with a keyboard chord progression that could easily have been lifted from Superstition or Peepshow. Karen's vocals themselves have calmed down considerably through these six years, and her Byrne-ish tics are far more prevalent, revealed by (assumably) superior recording equipment, and her tone quality has the struggling-contralto, nigh-emphysematic word-ending quirks that Siouxsie has given us during her solo career.
Musically, the densities are almost staggering. "Soft Shock" has no fewer than four separate streams of thought between the vocoded voice, the keyboard (while playing in unison mostly with the vocoded voice in the bridges, the timbre is separate enough to become its own animal), the guitar-distorted-1, the guitar-not-distorted, drums, bass, another guitar, and at last Karen. "Dragon Queen," while a fabulous song which inexorably combines ELO, Thompson Twins, Sheena E, Speaking in Tongues-era TH, and flecks of funk, is burdened with a huge amount of activity. YYYs pull this off, of course, by keeping the layers spare, like a good Henze symphony, and not ultra-complex, like the worst Ferneyhough piece. Many of the songs do, though, become rather blocky. By this, I mean Penderecki: nothing, nothing, THEN SOUND FOREVER, then nothing. Monomorphic. Static recursively through forward motion. Monotemporal. Fixed images with idiosyncratic character for four minutes or so. I have no clue whether this is a benefit or not; ask me in a few weeks, when I'm drunk or sober or sleeping or not.
Granted, Karen's influences are less visible (audible?) to the audience here but there are so many we could choose from. GBV, New Order, TH, PJ Harvey, Patti, the list could go on. But here, she's shoehorning Siouxsie in between all of those. Let me demonstrate: GBV SIOUXSIE New Order SIOUXSIE TalkSIOUXSIEing HeaSIOUXSIEds, PoSIOUXSIElly JeaSIOUXSIEn HarSIOUXSIEveSIOUXSIEy,... one easily gets the idea. "Hysteric" is a great example of this. As is "Skeletons." In the latter, we have a symphonic bass drum, a martial drum-sticking-line, atmospheric and translucent keyboard riffs, and an ethereal voice discussing -- well, esoteric lyrics in unrhymed couplets with a gothic rendition of permanent, unrequited love over a pentatonic wash of synths. (I give you "Softly" from Superstition) In "Hysteric," we have - albeit updated - an ambivalent take on the so-called journey of amor that we have (in customary deprecating and removed way) in Siouxsie's "Ghost in You." The main differences are that Karen is singing over a chord progression that evades the dominant and sings in a Scottish rip rhythm. Hold on: Siouxsie sort of does that too.
Again: the album stands on its own merits, and I owe it a proper review without post-structuralist doddering, and it shall have one soon after I review everything else new and old that, for some reason, I have the urge to discuss or rip apart. Mainly discuss. But I reserve the right...
I do suggest the album gets a proper listen from you, too. It's rather good.
I also say "finally" a bit tongue-in-cheek since it has been out for two months. I do not get to things quickly enough, it seems, but, that happens to be how I roullez le bon-temps.
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