Category: Music

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Air Raid

A happening today at Berkeley… the monthly emergency preparedness sirens went off at noon on the first Wednesday of the month, as usual. And just as they did, a caterwaul arose, huger and more textured than the sirens, nearly but not quite drowning them out. People came out of their offices and into the courtyard, and looked up to the dorms across the street. There, atop a roof six stories above the ground, were four students with guitars and Marshall stacks, plugged in and improvising a wall of sound to interplay with the sirens. A free concert of artfully tweaked distortion and dada rock and roll improv. Should have AudBlogged it.

Music: Black Cat Orchestra :: Introit from Requiem
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Greendale

Have been listening to Neil Young’s sonic novella “Greendale” for months – a somewhat disjointed portrait of three generations living in a small town, ultimately focused on granddaughter Sun Green, who awakens to her enviro self, takes over the lobby of Powerco, welds herself to the beak of a bronze eagle and becomes a media spectacle through the oracle of her megaphone (“Hey Mr. Clean, you’re dirty now too”).

Later realized that Young had made a movie out of Greendale — the whole thing shot on a Super 8 underwater camera (“That Super 8 grain looks like my music sounds“); the footage is grainy, never quite in focus, and seems to oscillate between 12 and 20 frames per second. The music is huge, deeply rocking. The stories are completely honest and uncomplicated — no symbolism at all. If a song mentions a rooster, Neil shows you a rooster. The characters speak every word of the songs. In anyone else’s hands, this kind of literalism would be corny, but Greendale is totally truthful, like almost everything Neil Young has ever made.

Music: Cosmic Jokers :: Interplay of Forces
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Gruppo Sportivo

buddyodorFinally got bored of the default Entourage mail sounds I’ve been hearing for two years and went looking for replacements — which turned up in spades at soundsetcentral.com. Paging through the downloads, jaw suddenly dropped when I came across a Gruppo Sportivo sound set.

25 years ago I worked at a surf shop in Morro Bay, when punk and new wave were peaking, and one of our customers brought in a tape of this obscure (to Americans) Dutch new wave band. The tape was on constant loop for an entire summer, permanently burned into my brain. But the funny thing was, I never saw an album cover of theirs, never owned any of their records, and promptly forgot about them when I left the shop.

Suddenly re-obsessed with Hans Vanderburg (Vandefruit) and Gruppo Sportivo, tracked them down on Amazon; turns out a bunch of re-issues have been produced recently, import only. Not a trace at Rasputin’s or Amoeba, so ordered “Buddy Odor Is a Gas,” “10 Mistakes,” “Back to 78” (full discography). They arrived a few days ago.

It’s strange to compare one’s hermetically-sealed-in-time memory of some forgotten musical branch with current impressions. How one group can be so stupid/silly and so brilliant at the same time is a confounding paradox. But I’m having fun trying to work it out. Amy and I have been singing the “Beep Beep Love” chorus for the past few days – amazing and welcome ear worm.

Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Tokyo
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Inner Space

BBC News looks at the psychology of portable music players, the significance of the aura or bubble that surrounds one the moment the music starts, and why it’s so appealing. A key point is that headphones in part allow one to regain control of the senses – the world represents a bombardment of visual and sonic messages, and by replacing the sonic shell, you in part get to choose your sensual world, rather than moving through the one the world chooses for you.

I didn’t start wearing a music player until my late 30s, and remember the experience being very different than expected at first – it wasn’t just fun to listen to music – the iPod literally changed the way I felt in the environment. It was almost too much. The experience feels much more normal to me now.

More:

Some women use earphones to deflect unwanted attention, finding it easier to avoid responding because they look already occupied. In the same way, removing earphones when talking to someone sends a strong message about how interested one is in what is being said. It pays the speaker a compliment.

Music: Gong :: Master Builder
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Song for Spring

Is it spring yet? Sure feels like it. Camelias are blooming like crazy, Amy planting up a storm, I fertilized the lawn with Scott’s Turf Builder (amazing stuff!).

For no particular reason, in the mood to celebrate with Jimmy Webb’s glorious lyrics to “MacArthur Park” (made famous by Richard Harris, Donna Summer, Frank Sinatra, take your pick). Who today writes lyrics this good?

I recall the yellow cotton dress
Foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees
The birds, like tender babies in your hands
And the old men playing checkers by the trees

MacArthur Park is melting in the dark
All the sweet, green icing flowing down
Someone left a cake out in the rain
I don’t think that I can take it
‘Cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again
Oh, no!

I think The Polyphonic Spree should cover MacArthur Park.

Music: The Fall :: Dog Is Life/Jerusalem
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Thoughts on The Grey Album

GreyAlbum DJ Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album has been on my iPod for a week now, and I’m still feeling conflicted by it. In case you’ve missed the story, executive summary: DJ Danger Mouse has taken Jay-Z’s “The Black Album” and remixed it with samples from the Beatles “White Album.” The results are brilliant, frustrating, obnoxious, beautiful, and an insult to the legacy of the Beatles (though ironically, probably intended as a tribute). If you haven’t heard it, download mirrors are all over the place. And EMI is dispensing cease-and-desist letters like Pez.

Looking at The Grey Album from three angles:

1) As a concept and a piece of technical wizardry
2) As a challenge to copyright law
3) As a piece of artwork

1) Technically, the Grey Album is a remixological wonder. Danger Mouse is a whiz. It’s a trip to hear such familiar strains hashed and rehashed and whipped up and layered back down with this kind of slick wrist expertise. It’s like there was an explosion at the LP factory and somehow all these disparate parts came back down to earth magically hanging together — all wrong, but still somehow totally in sync. While there are long-ish excerpts from The White Album, most of the Beatles you get here are new beats created by twisting and tangling and untangling snippets from familiar songs. Listening to this stuff, half my attention is busy marvelling at Danger Mouse’s skills.

2) It’s funny how this case overlaps with the Ken Light Kerry/Fonda case that’s been front and center for me at work lately – both involve two works by different creators being remixed by a 3rd party. In Light’s case, lawyers are trying to determine whether newspapers can run the composite/collaged image copyright-free or whether royalties are due. Striking parallels to the Danger Mouse project.

Last Tuesday, thousands of web sites mirrored copies of The Gray Album in an all-day protest called Grey Tuesday, the idea being that if enough people participated in the protest, they’d all get away with it. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted comments on the legal position of Grey Tuesday participants.

Napsterization wonders what your rights are “if you own the two albums outright already, and simply want the blended version, remixed?” Great question.

At Corante, Ernie Miller wonders whether some kind of remix formula or recipe could be created to allow consumers to recreate the Dangermouse mix from the two original sources, thus sidestepping copyright issues. I respond that the suggestion is similar to the technique used to distribute the lame MP3 encoder, thus bypassing Fraunhofer’s patent. But music is not a computer program, and I am highly doubtful that sufficient notation could be devised, or that anyone could enter in the data in sufficient detail to recreate the artwork.

3) No matter how marvelous the mix or how interesting the copyright questions, you’re still left with a work of art that somehow has to stand on its own, despite leaning so completely on the work of others. Bottom line: Is it a good record? Well, I’ve been listening to it for days, so it must not be a total abomination. But for the most part, I keep listening because I’m fascinated, not because I think it’s a particularly good record. I’m not much of a rap fan to begin with, and Jay-Z’s style doesn’t do much of anything to goose my predilections. As rappers go, his delivery is bland and his lyrics mediocre. It’s not all gangsta, but there’s way too much of this kind of crap (from various tracks):

All my wimmin get tennis bracelets…
Used to deal snowflake by the O.Z….
I like big-body Benzes…
Stay away from ho’s…
I got 99 problems but the bitch ain’t one…

So you get this amazing mix experiment, all these great old Beatles riffs chopped up tossed up chunked up in cruel and unusual (and very cool) ways, all colliding bizarrely with this semi-gangsta crap. The result is as depressing as it is amazing.

Yes, many of the lyrics are better than the ones I quoted, but bottom line is that Jay-Z’s rap is not worthy of The Beatles backing music (even remixed). In fact, it creates the opposite effect: You get the feeling that one of the greatest records of all time by one of the greatest groups of all time has just had mud ladled all over it. You hear these old Beatles samples, and those lyrics start running through your head. Then Jay-Z starts up with his juvenile patter and you just feel kind of robbed. Listening, I go back and forth between digging this whole crazy messed-up adventure on one hand, and feeling like a great chapter in human creativity has been totally desecrated on the other.

My favorite lyric on the album:

“And if you can’t respect that
your whole perspective is whack,
maybe you’ll love me
when I fade to black.”

Well, maybe. I like what Danger Mouse is trying to do from an experimental POV, I like the way he’s challenging copyright, I dig the beats, I enjoy hearing the Beatles in a totally new vein, but the rap pretty much cancels out any positive net effect. Not entirely, but pretty much. All told, I guess I just feel kind of grey about it.

Music: Jay-Z + DJ Danger Mouse :: Moment of Clarity
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Let Them Sing It For You

Type in a few words — the more generic the better — could be words from songs, or from textbooks or from the newspaper, it doesn’t matter — and the whole history of pop music will come rushing back at you, one word at a time. If any of the words you entered are not in the Let Them database, you can point them to a song from which the word in question can be excavated. Freaky and wonderful.

Music: Billy Strayhorn :: Halfway to Dawn
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No Thanks

This year’s awesome box set was a gift from my brother: No Thanks – The 70s Punk Rebellion. Rhino put together 100 songs covering the period around 76 – 79 — great creative/raw music from Patti Smith, The Buzzcocks, The Mekons, The Germs, Pere Ubu, Richard Hell, X-Ray Spex, The Fall, Sham 69, etc.

Rhino did a good job keeping the catalog on the punk side of the punk / new wave tight rope (no B-52s here, though there is one Devo track). But at the same time, by stopping at the end of the 70s, the collection avoids the harsher, less musical (and less creative) spit and broken glass punk of the early 80s (Fear, Saccharine Trust, DK, etc.)

Though not every track is awesome or even “seminal,” it’s a really nice slice of a period that was a turning point in the evolution of my own musical tastes. At the time, I too was wearing a “Disco Sucks” badge on my backpack and dissing Led Zeppelin and arena rock.

The funny thing is that I believed my own tripe about disco and anthem rock. Now I’m simultaneously enjoying the incredible 2-DVD set Jimmy Paige put together covering a decade of Zep in video. Talk about “Hammer of the Gods!” The punks wrote off Zep and the like as pompous bombast — they wanted to take rock back to roots. And they did. But to dismiss Zep is to miss out on a whole other flavor of roots rock – totally elemental yet soaring, majestic. The Rhino collection is fantastic, but not one band on it can hold a candle to Zep in terms of pure passion, presence, musicality, intensity…

I’d like to apologize to my former self for years of digging punk at the expense of loving Zep.

Music: The Modern Lovers :: Pablo Picasso
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SACD Outputs Analog

Hooked up a Sony SACD player to our system the other day and popped in one of the newly remastered Bob Dylan SACDs*. Our MSB Link DAC is auto-sensing, and knows what’s plugged into it. Was amazed that as soon as the SACD started playing, the DAC’s signal detect lights went dark and the system went silent. Eh? The player is connected to the DAC via optical Toslink, but analog also goes out for other purposes. Using the player’s remote to enable the CD layer rather than SACD brought sound back, but it was clear the DAC was totally out of the picture (and the extra SACD data was being ignored).
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