Unabashed Eclecticism

A first stab at a rational aesthetics

2012-02-07T18:39:00.000-05:00

We are living during a historical moment in which more people have more access to infinitely more information than has ever been possible before. Given that fact, it seems to me that it makes little sense to do what many people seem content to do, which is: find something you like and keep getting more of the same. What we should be doing is learning, about anything and everything, all of the time. Trying new things should not be seen as the pastime of the adventurous; rather, it should be considered the norm. This has nothing to do with recklessness - you don't even have to leave your couch to experience the unfamiliar. The only things you need leave behind are your preconceptions and prejudgments.

What we ought to desire is the best of everything. And by "the best" I don't mean someone else's idea of what that is. I don't mean what is critically acclaimed or popularly beloved. I mean those things (works of art, activities, interests, people, places, whatever) that are unique; I mean those things that are extraordinary either in themselves or in the effects they have; I mean those things that are masterfully crafted or have the appearance of having been masterfully crafted.

I mean, also, those things that excel at being themselves, that have a mission or a set of goals or just a certain nature that is their own. If they have an aim, they might be successful or unsuccessful in that aim, but that's less important. The point is that they know what they are about and they go for it. To take a weirdly random example: a basket of battered, deep-fried chicken. Nobody who eats fried chicken thinks that it's health food. You can see the grease stains on whatever container the chicken is placed in. It's fried chicken! It tastes good because it's full of fat. You can decide for yourself whether you want to risk eating something so unhealthy, but there's really no way to say that fried chicken is lying to you about what it is.

On the other hand, people have often accused certain works of art and their creators of pretentiousness, with James Joyce and his novel Ulysses being prime examples. Pretentiousness is an affect that is tantamount to being dishonest about one's own nature. It is an attempt at seeming more important or interesting than one actually is. Almost inevitably, however, some people will deride as "pretentious" something that they have failed to understand (the irony is that doing so is itself the height of arrogant pretension). Regardless of how "difficult" or "tedious" a work may be, how can we possibly know that something (or someone) is being dishonest about its own nature unless we have a thorough and accurate understanding of that nature? It is not my goal here to convince anyone that Ulysses (or Joyce) is or is not pretentious, only that the label "pretentious" is not a great criterion for evaluating aesthetic value. Rather, my point is that we need to establish more fundamental criteria first, in order to decide whether something is, among other things, pretentious.

So how can we go about judging the aesthetic value of our two examples of fried chicken and Ulysses? Qualitatively, they are obviously quite different, as one can tell simply by noting the categories that each item belongs to: food and literature. You could eat a copy of Ulysses, but you would have to have an exceptionally perverse sense of taste in order to find the experience more pleasant than that of eating fried chicken. Conversely, you can't read fried chicken. There is no plot, no characters, no setting and no development. The fried chicken can't tell you anything about the experience of being Irish in early 20th century Dublin, for example. (There is a narrative of how the chicken ended up on your plate, just as there is a story about how a book ends up in your lap; however, what I want to discuss here is not the history of physical objects, but the nature of cultural objects in terms of their aesthetic value.)

We have to judge each type of object or experience on its own terms. It is not, however, simply a matter of assigning an aesthetic value to each cultural object and then deciding to go with whatever has the highest value. Aesthetics is not a quantitative science; not yet, anyway. It's also not a matter of deciding what is most pleasant or fun. Eating fried chicken is a very pleasing experience for many people, but that doesn't change the fact that it isn't a very healthy choice. This is not to say that certain works of art are bad for your health (although they could be), nor that one should choose to consume art based on whether it is somehow "good for you" like eating your vegetables (there was an article in the New York Times last year that pretended to take seriously the analogy between healthy food and "difficult" art, but I believe this analogy is flawed for a number of reasons I won't get into here). I believe there are better ways to judge the aesthetic value of an object or experience:

1. Is this allowing me to experience something new, and if so, is it unique in its ability to deliver this kind of newness to someone who has never experienced it before? (E.g., there is nothing quite like the experience of reading Ulysses, but eating one plate of fried chicken is quite similar to eating another.)

2. If this is not something new per se, is it an example of something that performs in an extraordinary way, or causes me to feel something extraordinary? (E.g., perhaps this particular fried chicken is special in some way - exotic spices or the use of some other rare ingredient.)

3. Is there a sense of quality craftsmanship in this object? Sometimes there is much to admire about something simply in how it was made, and in being a remarkable specimen of its kind. (E.g. Ulysses is a stellar example of the craft of writing. Some plates of fried chicken are cooked better than others.)

4. As discussed above, there is aesthetic value (which, by the way, we can probably admit essentially means beauty) in simply being true to one's own nature. Sometimes flaws - or even outright failure - can be part of what makes something beautiful.

I'm aware that not all of the above coheres into a straightforward essay. It may read more like a transcript of a thought process. Unfortunately I don't foresee having the time to tinker with this piece much in the near future, so I've decided to post it as is. Be that as it may, I welcome your feedback. What do you think about these criteria for evaluating an object or experience in terms of aesthetic value? Do you agree that they are valid or not? What criteria would you add? Do you think it's a mistake to even try to create a rational theory of aesthetics? Is this all complete bollocks? Let me know.

Mac Mini: The Haunting

2012-02-05T13:44:00.002-05:00

Last August, I made up a little short story on Twitter that I thought was mildly hilarious. Nobody saw it because I have about 12 followers. So I'm reposting it here even though it's going to seem odd to read a whole bunch of tweets as one long thing. You kind of have to imagine you're getting these one at a time. It also helps a whole lot if you have heard Ween's album The Pod. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this thing even 10% as much as I do:

Just put Ween's "Pod" album in my iTunes and the dock icon started jumping up and down like it was in pain.

Playing Ween's "The Pod" album. That's weird - usually iTunes doesn't stop after every song and ask if I'm sure I want to continue.

Playing Ween's "The Pod" album. The screen keeps getting darker and I have to keep turning up the brightness. Must be a new OSX bug.

The song "Pollo Asado" just ended. A dialog box came up in iTunes that just asked, "Why?" Had to click the "I'm sorry" button.

Listening to The Pod. All good. I guess iTunes got over itself. Although my Mac does seem strangely warm to the touch.

Went upstairs to get some lunch, left music playing. When I came back, my Mac was leaking. Some Macs have liquid coolant. Mine doesn't.

Just made it through "Molly." My Mac mini is now cold as ice to the touch.

These new Macs are so advanced! After playing Ween's "The Pod" album for 45 minutes, it's in a corner of the room making a cocoon.

Mac mini emerged from cocoon. Scurried under my bed - didn't get a good look. Ween album still blaring somehow. On phone now with Apple.

Had no idea the Genius Bar did house calls, but I guess they're coming over. Also, is there a computer term that sounds like "exorcism"?

For those of you who missed my live tweets earlier today, I put on Ween's album "The Pod" and my Mac mini wept & became a giant insect.

Later on, some Genius Bar peeps came by. There was a lot of chanting and consulting of scrolls. I guess it was pretty serious.

It was touch and go for a while; a few of the geniuses were partially devoured. The blood… well, let's just say the carpet will never quite be the same.

But in the end, they managed to banish the demon possessing my computer back to the parallel dimension from which it came. And recover my data!

So I guess the lesson I've learned is: always go for the extended warranty. You just never know.

Academic fails

2012-02-01T23:25:00.001-05:00

Today, I encountered two errors in rhetoric in separate academic essays, both apparently the result of poor judgment on the author's part about what their audience is likely to know. The first was in an introductory essay on the life of John Milton in the Norton Critical Edition of Paradise Lost. The author describes how Milton writes in someone's autograph book, and then somehow decides that this requires further explanation. In a parenthetical clause, the author explains to his readers that "it was fashionable in those days to collect samples of the handwriting of eminent and potentially eminent persons." Hmm. Yes, I suppose it is hard for most of us today to imagine a time in which collecting autographs of celebrities is something that people do. Wait, no it isn't. I have no idea what the author was thinking here, particularly since the essay is otherwise quite fine.

The second error is less strange and more unforgivably insulting. In the midst of an essay that purports to analyze metadata schemes, the author writes, "Among the most influential historical statements of bibliographic control objectives, are Charles A. Cutter's (1904) objectives for a library catalog, printed in the 4th edition of his Rules for a Dictionary Catalog. Emphasizing resource discovery, almost one hundred years prior to the development of the World Wide Web and digital technologies...." Okay, I understand that the author wants to emphasize that Cutter's rules are still significant despite having been written a long time ago, but he writes almost as if he doesn't believe his readers are capable of figuring out the number of years between 1904 and 1991!

What is worse is that, despite having gone out of his way to highlight this interesting historical fact, it is completely inconsequential in the context of the essay. It is merely noted as, I guess, something for library science students to feel smug and superior about. I shouldn't have been surprised, however, as I was already suspicious of this writer. A mere two pages earlier he had brought up Immanuel Kant apropos of nothing and quoted him, quite out of context, for no good reason that I have been able to ascertain. Unlike the Milton essay, whose edifying function at the beginning of a critical edition one of English literature's high-water marks is quite necessary and clear, this latter is one of those academic essays that makes me feel sorry for the author, his peers who had to review it, myself for having been assigned to read it, and really the whole system that produces such obfuscating and mostly worthless texts. How depressing that the miracle of written communication can be subverted toward the end of nothing more than helping someone gain academic tenure while contributing almost nothing to the world.

2012-01-30T20:44:00.000-05:00

Google, Amazon and Apple all want you to stick your music in a cloud. Meanwhile, as we all know, Facebook has teamed up with Spotify to hook you into a cloud with music already in it. I can't tell who's gonna win this fight, if anyone, so I'm trying everything. Here are my reviews of each puffy cloud:

1. Spotify - Unlike Amazon, Apple and Google, Spotify doesn't let you upload anything. Instead, you can play anything in their library for free (plus anything it finds on your hard drive). As the partnership with Facebook would suggest, Spotify places a strong emphasis on social listening. You can see what your friends are listening to, subscribe to their playlists and even listen to music together with Soundrop (one of several "apps" now available from within Spotify, which is itself a stand-alone application). Spotify is a lot of fun, simpler to use in many respects than the other 3 cloud apps, and is particularly suited for exploring new sounds. It's also great in that, although you do have to download the app to use it, you don't have to spend any time uploading or "matching" songs. There is also a mobile app for Android and iOS, but you'll have to pay $10 a month to use it.

2. iTunes Match - To use this, you need to have songs in an iTunes library and you can't have more than 25,000 songs (not including iTunes Store purchases). Assuming you meet those two qualifications, for $25 a year you can keep all your songs in the cloud. Since the iTunes Store likely already has a copy of most of the songs in your library, it only uploads what it needs to. This can save a whole lot of time and is one of the cooler features of iTunes Match. Obviously if you don't like iTunes and/or don't have an iOS device, this is not for you.

3. Google Music - You're limited to 20,000 songs but unlike Apple, Google actually lets you pick and choose what gets uploaded. If you have more than 20,000 songs, you can still use the service - you can either let Google choose 20,000 for you or pick them yourself. Upload speeds are good but unlike Apple, you really do have to upload every single song. Of course, since it's Google they not only support Android devices but also iOS (via HTML5). Google also supports a decent range of filetypes: not only mp3 and aac but also wma, ogg and FLAC (although some of these get transcoded to mp3 format after uploading, which is a bummer). But probably the nicest thing about Google Music is that you don't need to download a separate app to play your songs - they'll play right from your web browser on music.google.com. Actually, scratch that - the nicest thing about Google Music is that it's completely free.

4. Amazon Cloud Player - This is marketed more like a side benefit of buying Amazon Cloud storage. If you plunk down $20 (or more if you want more storage) for 20GB, you also get unlimited music uploading. Plus, like Google you can play your music from any web browser. There's also an app for Android and iPad (although not iPhone, oddly). This would probably beat Google Music's sorry ass except for two things: 1. Fewer file formats are supported (only mp3 and aac, although at least there are no transcoding shenanigans) and 2. The Uploader app is a total piece of shit. This really disappointed me - I was all set to let the uploader run for a week or so, uploading my 80,000+ songs (what, you don't have that many? I guess you must hate music) but then I noticed every time it would finish uploading a song, it would sit there for 2-3 minutes before continuing to the next one! If you do a little multiplication, that means it would take somewhere between 160,000-240,000 minutes to upload all of my songs. That's about 3-6 months. I think I'll wait for them to fix that bug.

Some thoughts on the possible end of mass-produced art and pop culture

2011-12-16T18:12:00.002-05:00

I wrote a post a few months back about why I still buy CDs (instead of buying/stealing mp3s/AAC/etc). This has very little to do with wanting to support artists (although I do want to) and much more to do with wanting the best possible value for my money. No matter what price you pay for a CD, the long-term value is much higher than that of the equivalent mp3 (or AAC, or Ogg Vorbis, etc.) files. See that earlier post for some reasons why I believe this to be the case.

Meanwhile, however, I'm more convinced than ever that music has to be free. It already is free, of course. But much of the music business is still in denial about this. The record companies are dying (or just getting swallowed up by bigger and bigger media companies) - when I worked at the Archive of Contemporary Music this fall, I was overwhelmed by the sheer number of self-produced CDs being made with absolutely no label backing. At most, a band/artist will hire a company to promote their music, but there really is no need for the service that labels provide anymore. Recording costs have gotten so cheap that if you can afford a MacBook, you can make an album. There's no reason to sign a contract that forces you into five or six figures' worth of debt that you may never be able to pay back.

I see us moving from a model of music distribution based on mass production, the inheritance of 100+ years of mechanically-reproduced media, to a service-oriented one via digital distribution. And there's no reason to limit this concept to music. It applies equally to film and other audiovisual media. We're already used to this model via services like Netflix, Spotify, and Rhapsody. Even good old cable TV is essentially a service model, albeit a more old-fashioned one.

But even Netflix et al. are not going far enough for me. What I see in our future is a lot more fragmentation. We've already gotten to the point where it's impossible to keep up on every aspect of popular culture because it's superabundant. The sheer volume of new works being produced is overwhelming. If you love film and that's your favorite passion, I bet you don't know as much about the current music scenes, and vice versa. And you can't even keep up with everything new in your favorite medium. You'll have to pick a genre or a style to focus on, and even then you might not be able to watch/hear/read everything. The only thing holding us together enough to have any kind of relatable conversation about culture right now is that we're still relying on a lot of the old-model media corporations, for the creation of new works if not for their distribution. If/when those conglomerates finally die out, we'll have nothing left but a network of independent artists promoting themselves. It'll be interesting to see what the impact of that will be on society (assuming it does happen).

We've been living with a shared popular culture for so long that we forget it really hasn't existed for very long. In fact, it's largely a 20th century phenomenon. I can envision a time where culture becomes almost entirely a local thing as it once was. Except that with the internet, the whole idea of "local" could be transformed. Local might just be whatever you and your friends happen to glom onto. Or art could just become another service like personal trainers and psychiatrists. You might hear a song or somebody might refer you and you pay the artist to write and record more songs for you. It could even be collaborative, depending on the temperament of the artist and how demanding you are.

I would imagine this might be worrying to many consumers of pop culture who are used to the way things work now. But I think a lot of visual artists and composers of classical music are already used to being commissioned or given grants. I can't see any reason why the same thing couldn't work on a smaller scale with indie musicians and their laptops.

Perhaps eventually we'll just pay artists to create something for us and we'll be free to do whatever we want with it - copy it, give it to our friends, even claim we wrote it ourselves if we want to be assholes like that. The whole concept of copyright isn't terribly relevant if the artist gets paid directly upfront for creating a work. Won't some people make careers by ripping off other artists? Yes, but that's already happened. Besides, think about the alternative (i.e. the current reality) - the copyright term is extended beyond all reason just so a huge company (*cough* Disney *cough*) can continue to profit off of a cartoon mouse that a dead guy thought up almost a hundred years ago. Does that really seem better to you?

Copyright was never intended to be abused in such a manner. Like all intellectual property laws, copyright is meant to encourage and reward innovation in our society. The idea is that if you protect the ideas of artists and inventors, they will be able to make a living from continuing to create more and more ideas. Thus both artist and society directly benefit. Well, if I have one or two good ideas that make me rich and I know that the copyright will never expire, and that my grandchildren will still be collecting royalties off of what I did, how does that encourage me to create anything else? (By the way, it also rewards my lineage just for being born. It's basically creating a new class of IP royalty.)

Of course, the reality is more complex than this. Creative people will often be creative no matter what. However, when corporations own intellectual property, therein lies a bigger problem. It's no longer a matter of rewarding an individual for his or her contribution to society or culture. It's allowing a corporation to continue to profit off of someone's creativity in perpetuity (every time the copyright term is about to expire, they just hire lobbyists to convince Congress to extend the term another 20 or 50 years). Large for-profit corporations are inherently conservative entities. Why would they take a risk on something new when they can simply keep making money off the same thing that's always worked for them? It's entirely possible (and I think inevitable) for copyright, having been stretched unduly way past its originally intended limits, to have the opposite effect it was intended to have: that is, it can impede progress, slow the flow of new ideas into common culture, stifle creativity.

Bad Special Effexor

2011-11-14T20:05:00.001-05:00

I was listening to Grizzly Bear's album Veckatimest today and kind of basking in the laid-back beauty of it, when I suddenly recalled the last time I had listened to the album. It was back in 2009, a few months after I had quit taking Effexor. In order to mitigate the unusually intense withdrawal symptoms (anyone who has ever been on Effexor can tell you about the experience of missing just a single dose - it's not fun), I had devised a clever little method of tapering my doses and had successfully gotten myself down from 225mg a day all the way to zero. This was done gradually, over the course of 7 or 8 weeks. I was very careful. Nor did I let my guard down once this process was over. I had originally been prescribed antidepressants back in 2005 for (believe it or not) depression, so naturally I was on the lookout for returning signs of depression in myself. I did not anticipate what actually happened, which was that I slowly but steadily transitioned into a state of near-constant high-level panic and dread. I lost my appetite and started to lose weight (which seemed kind of nice at first). Then I began to sleep less and less, until finally I was barely able to get any sleep at all. Every time I would close my eyes and start to doze off, I would suddenly think something like "I could die in my sleep tonight!" Immediately I would feel a jolt of adrenaline and want to jump out of bed as if awakened from a nightmare.

This thought didn't exactly come out of nowhere, but a somewhat lengthy digression is necessary in order to explain the origin and nature of my death-obsessed horror. I grew up without religion - my father had been forced to go to church throughout his childhood and despised it, so had no intention of putting his children through a similar ordeal - and apart from a mild fascination with the Bible when I was about 10 or 11, I grew up with a vague, wishy-washy idea of God as this benevolent, Santa Claus type figure. My Bible reading and a few religious friends spooked me just enough so that when I first discovered my father's Frank Zappa albums and played the song in which the satirical rocker intoned with trademark cynicism, "If we're dumb, then God is dumb - and maybe even a little ugly on the side," I immediately turned the volume down on my stereo and waited, cowering, for the lightning to strike me. Later on, after I had determined, through careful experimentation, that punishment for listening to (or reading) heretical words was not forthcoming in any kind of timely manner from God Himself, my doubts about his existence grew apace. While part of me clung to my childish notions of a supreme and loving deity, the rational part of my brain decided that religion was pretty much not worth wasting much thought over.

Since then, although I had thought about death often over the years and wondered about its essential mysteriousness, I found it hard to wrap my brain around the concept of non-existence, so I preferred to hold out hope for some sort of afterlife, although of what kind I couldn't really imagine. Fast-forward to 2009 and I found myself confronted with the reality of death in a much more intense way than I had ever considered it before. Right at the time that I was becoming more and more anxious, my father unwittingly loaned me the book that would send me over the edge of panic and fear. It was called The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self. A rather succinct and straightforwardly-written thesis on how the brain creates consciousness and the "illusion of the self" by German philosopher Thomas Metzinger. After reading the first few chapters, I was both convinced that the very notion of any kind of life after death was ludicrous (consciousness itself being a mere illusionary construct of the brain, a tenuous bundle of nerve cells) and utterly terrified of the fact that my future non-existence was more or less the only thing in the world that I could count on with utmost assurance. This book, combined with my rapidly developing state of anxiety, pretty much destroyed my fragile psyche.

In a futile attempt to escape this terror-ridden mental state, I would go on long walks around my neighborhood. One day I put the aforementioned Grizzly Bear album on my iPod. Listening to it then, the songs felt to me like a meaningless rattle of strings and drums, an absurd noise to make in the face of overwhelming, all-engulfing, terrifying, eternal nothingness. I don't mean that I actually thought any of this while listening - I mean that I *felt* it, directly - as directly as you feel the warmth of the sun on your face, and as strongly and thoroughly as you love whomever it is you love the most.

I know this will sound strange, but I think of that person who suffered as not exactly me but some other person who lived inside of me, and I feel sad for the suffering of this other me. His ordeals over the course of a few months seem to me now, while not nearly as horrible as those of countless others I've seen, heard or read about, just as pointlessly cruel.

Although I had good reasons for going off of Effexor, it was still a unilateral decision on my part. I, ultimately, have nobody to blame but myself for what happened. Still, I couldn't have known what would happen, so I don't necessarily think of it as a stupid mistake. Obviously, it was unwise to go off of a medication without a doctor's supervision. But I couldn't afford a doctor at the time; this was, in fact, the main reason I was going off the medication (Effexor is quite expensive, although I understand a generic version is available now). Furthermore, despite having seen psychiatrists and other mental health professionals for years beforehand, nobody had ever warned me that anything like what I experienced could happen to me if I went off my medication.

In the end, I think what this experience showed me is that what makes each of us recognizably ourselves can be altered (and in some cases, permanently so) to an arbitrary degree, by chemicals just as surely as by physical traumas. We are all such fragile creatures.

Why I still buy CDs

2011-11-06T10:31:00.000-05:00

Everyone knows CDs suck. They're lame, outmoded, plastic replicas with all the soullessness of digital and none of the warmth of vinyl or analog tape. And even if you did want to listen to those godless bits and bytes, once you insert the disc into your computer and rip all the tracks, that CD is reduced to a superfluous hard copy. CDs are relics of the past, destined for the landfill, soon to be forgotten as we upload all music onto our hard drives and into the cloud. Right?

Not so fast. There are still good reasons to buy CDs. In fact, I will argue that it still makes more sense to buy them instead of mp3s (assuming you care about what happens to the music you purchase/acquire over the long term).

The kind of data compression used to encode audio in mp3 format is "lossy." This means that some of the original information that was there when the music was recorded is gone forever from that mp3. According to the creators of the compression algorithm that encodes mp3 files, the missing information would've been inaudible anyway, but many people can in fact hear the difference between an uncompressed audio file and an mp3. In any case, to me it seems absurd to pay for what is, essentially, a deliberately damaged file.

The thing is, CDs are still the only means by which to acquire uncompressed digital reproductions of most music. I would settle for purchasing music in a "lossless" compression format such as FLAC or Apple Lossless; the data compression tricks used in such formats allows for full recovery of all the information in the original, uncompressed file. However, the iTunes store doesn't even give you the option of purchasing in such formats. Neither does Amazon, nor most other vendors, large or small. Occasionally I'll come across smart, savvy, independent musicians or labels that sell their music in FLAC (or even uncompressed WAV), but these are still very much the exception. So until most music vendors start selling FLAC (or Apple Lossless), I will be buying CDs.

But let's say you're perfectly happy with mp3s and the way they sound. What do you care if some harmonic overtones in a part of the spectrum you can't hear anyway are missing? Well, consider the possibility that in the near future, someone may develop a more efficient compression algorithm than mp3. Actually, this has already happened - in fact, software engineers are constantly coming up with newer and better ways of compressing both audio and video. With some of these newer lossy formats, you can get sound quality as good as or better than the mp3s you now own but that take up less disk space. Sounds great, right? If you bought mp3s, though, you're going to have to repurchase all of your music in the new format. If you'd gotten CDs (or lossless-compressed digital files), this would never be a problem, because you'd always be starting with the original audio file(s).

[Note: You might be wondering why you can't simply convert mp3s into one of these newer formats directly. This is called "transcoding" and it always leads to degradation of audio quality. It might not be obvious at first, but after you've converted from mp3 to Ogg Vorbis and then AAC, you probably won't like the results.]

What about vinyl? Don't get me wrong, it's a lovely format. Putting a record on can be a kind of ritual and can make a listening experience seem special. However, this doesn't make analog discs in any way superior to digital ones. All the disadvantages of vinyl that most people were happy to rid themselves of with the advent of the CD are still there. Polyvinyl chloride discs are still big, bulky, heavy, slow, inconvenient, prone to wear and tear, and sound inferior on all but the most expensive audiophile equipment. I know many people will swear that there is some magical "warmth" imparted by the vinyl format that makes it superior, but I believe this is a kind of delusion. If that's how you prefer to listen, be my guest. But let's please have no illusions about superiority of sound quality.

So until I see a big move toward lossless or uncompressed audio becoming much more widely available for download online, I am going to stick with the only format currently available that allows me to get as close as possible to the music as it was recorded. I am not alone in feeling this way; in fact, I wouldn't be surprised if CDs get a slight boost in sales over the next few years. It won't be a mainstream phenomenon, so the bump may be very slight indeed. I'm not saying I expect to still be buying them ten years from now (although it's not impossible), but for those of us who passionately collect music that is relatively outside the mainstream, I think CDs will stay relatively popular for the short-term future.

Giacomo Puccini, Turandot

2011-04-23T22:29:00.001-04:00

Well, I certainly wanted to enjoy Turandot, but my ability to do so was severely compromised by what are, to me, some major flaws in the libretto. As beautiful as the music is, it's hard not to notice the problems that Puccini himself died without overcoming. For starters, the whole thing is predicated on the notion of senseless murder ("Turandot the Pure /will be the bride of the man of royal blood/who shall solve the three riddles which she shall set./But if he fail in the test/he must submit his proud head to the sword!") That's a nice gimmick for a fairy tale, but it really doesn't make any sense. It's hard to imagine anyone actually being stupid enough to try this. He would have to be incredibly arrogant, and kind of an idiot as well. Enter Prince Calàf. As Act One opens, he's just been reunited with his blind father, the deposed king Timur, whom he had thought to be dead (and vice versa). Both are overjoyed to see each other (well, not literally in Timur's case because he's blind, but you take my meaning) and Calàf proclaims his eternal thanks to the servant girl Liù who was apparently responsible for leading his father to safety. A couple of minutes later, though, Calàf catches a glimpse of Princess Turandot and falls, apparently, madly in love with her, causing him to suddenly no longer care at all about the fate of his father or Liù.

And yeah, I get it, love makes you do some craaaazy things, but dude literally goes from "Oh daddy, I thought I'd never see you again! Thank you so much, Liù, for taking care of my father!" to, a minute later, "Hey Liù, if I die, take good care of pops for me, aight? I gotta go chase some royal tail. Peace!" Now, I understand that the librettists were trying to show the almost supernatural power of this sudden love spell under which Calàf has fallen under, which is why they spend half of Act One having everyone try to convince him not to pursue the princess. But then, if he's pretty much in thrall, is he really supposed to be brave? Zombies aren't brave. And if he's not in thrall, then he's really just an incredibly self-absorbed asshole. With drama, it's best for heroes to be at least somewhat sympathetic. Calàf, throughout the opera, is the opposite: his behavior is almost always reprehensible. And yet we are supposed to be on his side. This lack of a central, relatably human character ends up being the opera's fatal flaw, in my opinion at least.

In Act Two, we are introduced to Princess Turandot, who is revealed to be pretty much a psychopath who gleefully celebrates the beheading of every man who tries to win her hand. She tells us (and herself) that she's acting out of revenge for a female ancestor who was conquered by a man, but I am going to go out on a limb here and say that I don't agree that this justifies her heinous acts of gratuitous bloodshed.

This alone would be enough to ruin the opera for me. A Prince, who is either an asshole or a zombie, wasting his time and risking his life to marry a Princess whose chief pastime is cold-blooded murder? That would work for me only if the libretto's authors were aware of how crazy this is and played it as darkly comic, instead of the "love conquers all" theme that they were apparently going for.

Anyway, Act Three is where it all really falls apart for me. After having answered all three of Turandot's riddles, Calàf has, for reasons unknown to anyone but him, arbitrarily decided that he can win the Princess's heart by posing a "riddle" of his own: guess his name before sunrise and he will voluntarily put his head on the chopping block; otherwise, she has to marry him. This proclamation causes the princess to immediately order everyone under her command (which, I guess, is pretty much everyone in China) to find out what Calàf's name is before dawn, or else. Or else what? Death, that's what. Yes, the penalty for failure is death *again*. This princess LOVES MURDER.

Now, as you might expect, the princess's servants immediately go to Calàf and, in a kind of breathless desperation, plead with him, offering him pretty much anything he could possibly want if he will just tell them his name and GO AWAY. And then, when nothing they say gets through, they simply beg him to spare their lives from the cruel death that awaits them. And what is Calàf's response to all this? "Inutili preghiere! Inutili minacce!/Crollasse il mondo, voglio Turandot!" ["Useless entreaties! Vain threats!/Though the skies fall I will have Turandot!"] That's right. He doesn't even *pretend* to give a shit.

With daggers drawn, the servants insist that he relent. And just when they are about to give Calàf a well-deserved stabbing, a bunch of soldiers stomp in with none other than poor Liù and Timur. Having seen Calàf with them earlier, the servants know that they must know his name. The princess appears and the servants explain the situation. At this point Calàf does basically the only decent thing he does in the entire opera: he lies to Turandot, insisting that the two prisoners don't know him. Liù, in an incredibly selfless act of bravery that immediately makes her the opera's only true hero, says that she alone knows the prince's name.

Turandot orders the soldiers to restrain Calàf. They do their best to extract the name from Liù with the aid of torture, but she defiantly says that she'll die first. Turandot orders the soldiers to stop and asks Liù how she can be so courageous. Liù answers with a long speech declaring her hopelessly unrequited love for the prince. After her speech, she stabs herself with a soldier's dagger, martyring herself for her love.

What would you expect Calàf to do at this point? Surely not wait for everyone to leave and then start making out with Turandot (whom he calls "Principessa di morte"), but that's exactly what he does. As the New Grove Dictionary of Opera puts it:

Clearly the man who can persist in his wooing of a woman of whom he knows nothing, and whom he has every reason to dislike, immediately after a slave-girl has killed herself for his sake, is bound to forfeit our sympathy.

The princess says of her new lover, "C'era negli occhi tuoi/la superba certezza …/E t'ho odiato per quella …/E per quella t'ho amato" - ["In your eyes I saw/the proud certainty of victory …/And I hated you for it …/And for it I loved you"]. I guess this is supposed to come off as cosmic and grand, like Tristan und Isolde, but in light of what has just taken place minutes before on the stage, it sounds unbelievably crass, shallow and cold. Whatever romantic feelings have just been kindled between the two lovers seems to be based on physical attraction and a Romantic veneration of the ego reminiscent of the novels of Ayn Rand. (Seriously, doesn't Dominique give almost this exact same speech to Howard Roark at some point in The Fountainhead?) You can tell Puccini wanted Turandot to be about love as a transfiguring force, but he never quite figured out how to resolve these problems, so it comes off as being more about a young man's horny hubris and a girl who celebrates his utter lack of modesty or conscience.

I can see why people still like the opera, especially as stunning visual spectacle accompanied by some gorgeous orchestral and vocal music. I, in fact, enjoyed parts of this opera a great deal. But as a whole, it feels like an empty vessel, a failure whose parts are greater than their sum.

Jeff Beck, Blow By Blow

2011-04-23T22:27:00.000-04:00

What if I told you that the most celebrated instrumental guitar album of all time ends with a keyboard solo, on a track dominated by a string section (orchestrated by none other than George Martin), and from which the last note of guitar had faded away 3 minutes earlier? That it is an album in which song structure, melody, flow and balance all trump showcases of instrumental virtuosity, guitar-based or otherwise? And that it contains not one but two Stevie Wonder songs (one of which appears on no other album)? Does that sound like crazy talk to you?

If so, then it appears you haven't been properly introduced to Jeff Beck's 1975 masterpiece, Blow By Blow. The first album credited just to Beck (rather than the Jeff Beck Group), he obviously decided that this was to be something special, a more personal statement, perhaps. After all, you don't start working on arrangements with George Martin unless you've got it in mind to do something out of the ordinary. Martin, who ended up producing the album, is probably not the first name that comes to mind when you think of instrumental jazz-fusion, but his talents were in fact remarkably well-suited to what Beck was trying to achieve: a harmonious blend of soaring melodies, funky grooves and moments of wild improvisational abandon. They succeeded, on every level, probably beyond their own expectations.

My head almost exploded trying to figure out which song from Blow By Blow to present here. For an instrumental album showcasing Jeff Beck's guitar magic, you wouldn't think that narrative flow would figure into its construction so much, but you'd be wrong. The fact is, this damn thing is so expertly crafted that choosing one piece from it only makes me think about the pieces I'm leaving behind. One reason for this is that, as originally presented on vinyl, most of the songs on each side segued directly into one another. But this isn't like Miles Ahead where, to me at least, the songs could've gone in any order and are just made to segue as a kind of production trick. Here, the album is conceived as a unit of artistic presentation, much like the Beatles' output beginning with Revolver. (No doubt Martin has everything to do with the album's cohesive structure, not to mention the inclusion of a reggae-tinged version of "She's A Woman.") Just as Sgt. Pepper wouldn't be the same album if "A Day In The Life" was shoved in the middle somewhere, every song on Blow By Blow is placed where it is as carefully as syllables in a line of poetry.

This is still more of a feat when you learn that about half of the tracks on the album were basically fashioned out of live-in-studio jams. I reckon the key here was Beck's choice of sidemen: keyboardist Max Middleton (who worked on the Sgt. Pepper film soundtrack with Martin), Chinese-Jamaican bassist Phil Chen and Guyanese-born, Trinidadian-raised drummer Richard Bailey. These are tasteful session players who know how to lay down seriously funky grooves without stepping on each other's toes. (Chen's playing, particularly on "Constipated Duck" - a title you must love or else you lack a soul - is some of the best 70's funk bass I've heard outside of a Parliament/Funkadelic or Sly & The Family Stone record.)

So anyway, call me unoriginal but I chose the first song on the album. Entitled "You Know What I Mean," I think it's a perfect introduction to the unique charms of this album: the funky upbeatness, the breezy, carefree nature of the melodies, the conversational tone of Beck's guitar. What I hope this song also demonstrates is the album's accessibility. Blow By Blow was not a #4 Billboard chart hit by accident; i.e., it's not just for wonky guitar fanatics or jazzbos. It's something special, an instrumental album that isn't all about itself in the way too many such albums are nowadays (too many albums in general, actually, but that's another topic). To put it more simply, it is fun to listen to.

You can probably find all the songs from the album on YouTube, but then you won't experience the magic of this album's flow and great segues. Do yourself a favor and download the highest-quality version of Blow By Blow you can find. It's an album that benefits greatly from high fidelity sound reproduction.

Best of 2009 Pt. XI: Runner-ups

2009-07-17T14:44:00.009-04:00

Veckatimest
Grizzly Bear

There's something sinister about the way the drummer for Grizzly Bear plays. I'm not referring to the way he looks - I've never seen him. But there is something alternately robotic and primordial about his approach. It's distinctly not human - in fact, I'd be impressed but not surprised if drummer Christopher Bear was an actual fucking grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis in scientific terms). Hey, if they can dance and play with those little red balls, they can probably hit the drums with those paws. Okay, so that's a pretty crazy idea, but I swear it's the kind of stuff I think of when I listen to these guys. Hauntingly beautiful, like a natural vista of forest and mountain ranges, you might not realize how much you like this music until long after you first hear it.

Superficial Gossip
Ringo Shiina

In Japan, I get the feeling that even the more popular singer/songwriters feel less constrained by genre and era than they do in the U.S. and EU countries. Despite being one of the top female pop musicians/icons in her country, Ringo Shiina leaps across and between genre boundaries as often as the most experimental groups here. Shiina is so famous and renowned in her home country that, at the ripe old age of 30, she has already received an award from the Japanese goverment for her work. On this album, she moves comfortably from soul/R&B to funk to jazz to 50's musical to modern rock and electro - and she succeeds on all fronts, crafting an album so catchy and so unpredictable that I bet Mike Patton would kill to have made this. Awesome.

Carboniferous
Zu
Remember the band Morphine? Imagine if, after Mark Sandman died, they hired a new bass player and changed their sound to all-instrumental math-metal (a la Meshuggah) and made a ton of records in Italy, before signing to Ipecac and getting Mike Patton to do some guest vocals. That's pretty much how this sounds. Um, did I mention that it's awesome? Yeah, it is.

Le Mani Destre Recise Degli Ultimi Uomini
Secret Chiefs 3 (as Traditionalists)

Trey Spruance is the kind of genius I can never get enough of. He and his group of ridiulously talented musicians, the Secret Chiefs 3, are so multifaceted in the sheer number of genres they're capable of tackling that they've had to subdivide themselves into fictional "satellite bands" that specialize in particular sub-categories of music. In this case, we have one of the satellite bands, Traditionalists, making an album-length soundtrack to an imaginary Italian thriller/horror film. It's of course unbelievably amazing and well worth your time and $$$ - I just wish the film was real.

Wavering Radiant
Isis

Just putting out a new album automatically gets Isis a place on my "best of" list - all they have to do is not fuck it up, which they never do, so this one is pretty much a no-brainer for me. For those who don't know, Isis is pretty much the quintessential post-metal band, even though no one's exactly sure what post-metal is (hint: take sludge/doom metal, add keyboards - for atmosphere, not for virtuosic displays or solos - and long instrumental passages [some bands don't even have a vocalist], and you're pretty close). For those who do know the band, the question with regard to Isis is probably always going to be, "Is it as good as Oceanic?" The correct answer to that question will likewise always be: who cares? Oceanic is a great album but Isis have better things to do than satisfy fans of that album by making endless sequels to it. If you love Isis and want to hear something new from them, Wavering Radiant doesn't disappoint.

Black Clouds & Silver Linings
Dream Theater

Thank god for prog-metal. No need to worry whether or not I'm a dork for liking Dream Theater. I *know* I am. There are more chops on display on a single DT track than most bands ever use in their entire career. It's refreshing to me to hear a band that doesn't hold back - these guys know how to play the fuck out of their instruments and they're not afraid of doing so. As usual there are a lot of lengthy tracks here with lots of contrasting sections - if you don't like 20-minute-long songs, don't bother with this one - actually, don't bother with prog, period.

Octahedron
The Mars Volta

I have noticed a tendency for Cedric Bixler-Zavala to parody certain stock phrases in his lyrics as a way of saying something familiar/catchy while subverting cliche. So, for example, "Since we've been wrong" subverts the usual "since you've been gone." That's just one reason I dig The Mars Volta. Another one, of course, is composer/guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/mastermind Omar Rodriguez-Lopez's amazing musical gifts. This time around we get a bit more slow, melodic stuff, but if you're thinking this is a bid for mainstream success, how do you explain titles like "A Halo of Nembutals," and lyrics like "What a foul little temptress/your daughter's become"? And that's just one of the rare lines that doesn't sound like someone narrating their all-time worst acid trip. These guys are my favorite maniacs.

Middle Cyclone
Neko Case

I haven't heard any writer personify a tornado until Neko Case did it with the lead track on this album. "This Tornado Loves You" is one of the strangest love songs I've ever heard, but it's no less emotional for that. A lot of Neko's songs are like that - strange, yet strangely touching. All kinds of odd characters seem to inhabit the songs on this album, including birds, prison girls, and (I think) Sorrow. In "The Magpie To The Morning," besides the titular bird, there's also a mockingbird and a vulture, which "wheels and dives/Something on the thermals yanked his chain/He smelled your boring apex/Rotting on the train tracks/He laughed under his breath/Because you thought that you could outrun sorrow". On "Fever," Neko herself seems to be running from Death, whose "peculiar" songs she overhears. When he finally hears her "tiny heartbeat," he gives chase: "I heard him coming/shrapnel spitting from his wheels/His scything arms rake for my heels". Damn.

Best of 2009 Pt. X: Hold Time by M. Ward

2009-07-16T13:30:00.002-04:00

For once an album whose charms aren't difficult to explain. M. Ward writes great songs, he covers other people's great songs (Buddy Holly, Don Gibson and Billie Holiday here), he plays great guitar, his voice is charming - what's not to love? Critics say Hold Time isn't as good as his earlier albums, which makes me glad I haven't heard them. I'll have something to look forward to, and if I disagree with the critics, even better.

I guess it's cheating to make this review so much shorter than the others, but I feel like if I kept going it would be just so many words. You should listen to this album - I think it's great. If I had to pick some adjectives to describe it, I'd say it was alternately blissful and contemplative - this is largely an upbeat album, as far as I can tell. Even the slow numbers seem more thoughtful than melancholy to me - like sitting back and gazing at the stars or watching the clouds go across the sky.

I think Hold Time is one of the best albums of 2009. Listen for yourself and decide if you think I'm right.

Best of 2009 Pt. IX: Moondagger by Deastro

2009-07-15T13:16:00.009-04:00

When Deastro mastermind Randolph Chabot sings, "I'm a prophet of how things should be," he's not kidding, as far as I'm concerned. This is a fantastic album. Everything about it is close to perfect. Even the artwork for it is pretty much perfect. Chabot is an ambitious guy: his music is grandiose and majestic, like church music with a dance beat; meanwhile, his lyrics reference literature from Cormac McCarthy to medieval poetry (in the same stanza). He's young, he's talented and he's got a lot to beat his chest about.

Most of the tracks feature a traditional band with guitar, bass and drums and peppered with lots of synths. Besides sometimes sounding like disco church music, Deastro's songs remind me a bit of Deerhunter and Wolf Parade (maybe it's all that cavernous reverb), but a lot of the melodies seem more "naive" and carefree-sounding. New Order must also be mentioned, which seems like a clear reference point on "Kurgan Wave Number One" in particular. There's also a distinct Beach Boys-via-Panda Bear influence, which Chabot seems to directly acknowledge by directly quoting the vocal melody of "Bros" toward the end of one of the songs, the epically-titled "Daniel Johnston was stabbed in the heart with the MOONDAGGER by the King of Darkness and his Ghost is writing this song as a warning to all of us!"

There are two instrumentals on Moondagger and both are so well done that you realize this guy could easily get by without even bothering with lyrics. However, Chabot's lyrics are pretty great for the most part. Besides the literary references, religion (and perhaps the subversion of religion) comes up a lot: "I’m dancing for the world with a pentecostal fervor/While sonny the druggy cherokee gets his face kicked in/I’ve got a boombox blaring backward hallelujahs/I’ve got your picture in my pocket stained with rainbow watermarks." But even when he's writing a more traditional song of heartbreak, he saves himself from mediocrity via great lines like these (which to my mind recall Faust): "I’ll access the stars/I’ll read between the lines/Consort with scientists and maniacs/oh to find/A way back home a way back to your arms".

I realize that most of you aren't going to feel the way I do about this album, but I hope you'll give it a chance. The Pitchfork reviewer (I know I mention them too much) seemed almost offended that Chabot even *tried* to make an album as great as this. I hope most people aren't as arrogant and jaded as a lot of music critics seem to be - personally, I try not to lose my sense of wonder, my optimism, and most of all, my humility in the face of talent and hard work.

Maybe I feel compelled to say these things because this is the last review I'm finishing in this series. I hope you all like some of these albums half as much as I do - if not, I hope you all have music that you love just as much, or if not music, some other kind of art that fills you with joy and wonder the way the music of The Decemberists, John Zorn, Sunn 0))), Sunset Rubdown, Animal Collective, Dirty Projectors, Passion Pit, Bibio, Deastro and M. Ward has filled me with their new albums these past six months. Stay tuned as tomorrow I will present the runners up, albums that are also great but didn't quite make my own personal top 10.

Best of 2009 Pt. VIII: Ambivalence Avenue by Bibio

2009-07-13T11:46:00.003-04:00

Like a lot of the best releases on Warp (one of my favorite record companies), Ambivalence Avenue is an album that rewards careful listening, especially in headphones. So much so that I didn't quite realize what was so great about it until I donned my own pair of Sennheisers and sat down to do nothing else but listen. Just one example: Fire Ant's stuttery, spaced-out middle section's cavernous excitement can really only be appreciated on a good pair of 'phones.

On the other hand, the title track, with its entrancing 3/4 rhythm and wonderful instrumental refrain, can be appreciated on any kind of sound system. Said refrain features the kind of cheery, unpretentious melody that one hardly seems to hear anymore. It almost reminds me of old Jethro Tull or some other 60's English folk-rock.

Jealous of Roses continues this exploration of the past with what sounds like late 60's funk à la Sly Stone: funky wah-wah guitars and falsetto vocals (mountainous gobs of spring reverb on the latter). All The Flowers shifts gears again, this time into some nice acoustic fingerpicking - I'm just guessing here but I think this is a pitch-shifted guitar and not some weird instrument with a sopranino range. Anyway, the sound is bright and bell-like, which seems to be a sound Bibio (aka Stephen Wilkinson, from somewhere in West Midlands, England) enjoys and may suggest a nostalgic looking-back to childhood.

Sugarette starts off with a high-pitched bell-like synth, a looped arpeggio that seems to linger after it disappears. Soon synth bleeps appear that sound straight out of Super Mario Bros. and take over the track - perhaps a reminiscence of a childhood spent playing Nintendo games (the aforementioned Fire Ant also features a recording of children playing some type of ancient video game). S'vive has as its foundation what sounds like a sample from a wind-up musicbox, all chimes and innocence.

There is a charming sense of wide-eyed wonder that pervades pretty much every minute of Ambivalence Avenue. Although in Jealous of Roses he chides, "You speak of love as a symptom of conformity," for the most part Wilkinson seems content simply to observe, record and report, rather than cast judgment, as in my favorite lyric moment on the album (from the track Haikuesque): "When she laughs/The piano in the hall/Plays a quiet note." This song also exemplifies another interesting feature of this album: many of the songs seem to "end" before the track itself does. In this case, after the song fades out, a recording of a man repeating a short prayer ("The Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me") plays over ambient synths, ending after a minute and fading out with the sound of tolling church bells. More reminders of childhood, perhaps?

But more than the innocence, more than the fun changes of sound and playing-with of genre, it's Bibio's sense of melody that gets me. He never seems to get bogged down in mere ambience or sounds and beats. There's always a strong melodic hook at play, no matter how weird things get. Even in Dwrcan, which features some of the album's most complex layering of beats and sounds, there are melodies that create lift and move the track along. So that when the glitchy, Autechre-ish beats appear about halfway through, you're already floating along on a cushion of airy, flowing notes and chords. Eventually the beats disappear and the last minute is a slow melody for ambient strings that fades out gradually. When all is silent, you may be tempted to play the whole album again. It's a temptation to which I've given in many times these past few weeks.

Best of 2009 Pt. VII: Manners by Passion Pit

2009-07-12T12:29:00.012-04:00

Passion Pit employ the type of synth sounds the kids of my generation told ourselves we hated in the early 90s. Whether you listened to Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg's P-Funk-leavened hits, or whatever other vaguely angst-y music you were into (in my own case a curious blend of 70s rock and jazz, 80s punk and Primus), the synth-driven pop of the 1980s was decidedly lame in the flannel era (those two great early-90's bastions of taste, Beavis & Butthead, when coming across videos of "80s music," almost invariably made sounds of disgust before giving the inevitable verdict: "This sucks. Change it."). It wasn't until later in the decade that we realized we missed the sounds of our childhood and weren't in such a hurry to grow out of that stuff after all.

By now it's perhaps clichéd to reminisce over and to enjoy (with varying degrees of irony) the cheesiest of 80s music. It's been embraced everywhere, from VH-1 to YouTube to popular films (The Wedding Singer being one of the earliest examples that comes to mind; The Hangover, which features Mike Tyson listening enraptured to Phil Collins' AOR staple In The Air Tonight, is just the latest in a line of such references). We're truly living in a post-Rickroll age.

With 80s nostalgia a kind of cliché and darker angst seemingly reserved for hard rock and metal, what's a new indie rock band to do? Many go the "early R.E.M." route of mysterious lyrics and lo-fi production, wrapping the music in a kind of echoey haze. Music that seems to be about something and is vaguely earnest, but earnest about what you're not sure.

Bands like Passion Pit, usually burdened with the moniker "electro-pop," are following a different path. Using synthesizers and drum machines that either are, or are capable of replicating, the ones from 25 years ago (Yamaha's DX-7 is the most famous and most ubiquitous - with literally lots of "bells and whistles" and other bright sounds, this keyboard was used by pretty much any pop group from the mid-80s you can think to name), they're trying their best to write songs that suggest the past and its summoning of idealized childhood, while keeping things rooted in the present via modern production (both hi- and lo-fi) and, uh, mysterious lyrics. In effect, they are indie bands in retro-pop clothing. MGMT and Deastro are other examples, but on Manners, Passion Pit seems the most committed to the "good times" aesthetic. I think the Pitchfork reviewer compared listening to this album to remembering a great night out with friends, and it does have that character, even if the singer writes lyrics like, "That's a frosty way to speak/to tell me how to live next to your potpourri" and "Walls came crumbling/my thin skin trembling/with these salty wounds/my stolen gold inside the emperor's tomb."

Lyrics aside, this is not subtle music; it's more of a "wall-of-synths" experience. They go for the big and glorious choruses which, again, somehow feel like an idealized childhood where every wish is granted and magic is pretty much everywhere.

In other words, Manners is pretty much about fun and simple pleasures. And it's very consistent. All you have to do is check out the video for "The Reeling" and you'll get the vibe of the whole album. To quote Pitchfork again (because they are my betters, and one's betters must be respected and quoted often), "if you like one Passion Pit song, you'll probably like them all." I like 'em all.

Best of 2009 Pt. VI: Bitte Orca by Dirty Projectors

2009-07-12T11:26:00.007-04:00

I know, another album that's being hyped to death. I had previously written off Dirty Projectors, having only heard Rise Above. But this is way more engaging and fun to listen to, and somehow still just as bizarre. Put on your headphones so you don't miss anything or annoy your roommates and dig in, kids. "Cannibal Resource" starts the album with a head-nodding beat and the strangest harmonic progressions this side of 20th century classical music. Luckily this song also features lead singer/musical mastermind Dave Longstreth on vocals, so you'll know right away what you're in for. By contrast, the album's single, "Stillness is the Move," leaves the vocal chores entirely to Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian, the group's female singers/instrumentalists extraordinaire.

I find it hard to describe this album. It's a unique formula, comprised of Amber and Angel's harmony vocals (including some crazy hocketing toward the end of "Remade Horizon"), Dave's own peculiar vocal melodies (some people really hate his voice, but I think it's perfect for the music he creates), lots of guitars and other stringed instruments (I think I hear mandolins but it could be something more exotic) plucking strange arpeggios and riffs, all over some deep, solid grooves provided by the bass and drums. It's a wonderful world to lose yourself in. The songs typically don't feature anything like a standard chord progression, and the guitars are rarely used to just strum chords, but even when they do, the effect is never anything like a standard folk or rock song. Melodies and whole sections come and go without repeating themselves. And yet each track has at least something resembling a chorus or a catchy hook. Overall, I guess I'd say they strike the middle ground between "serious compositions" and ordinary songs.

Longstreth writes all the music for Dirty Projectors (although Amber got co-writing credit for "Stillness"), the project he began as a freshman at Yale University's School of Music. The album he made that first year of college - The Glad Fact - is astonishing and well worth listening to. In fact, most of the Dirty Projectors' back catalog is worth seeking out, although I'm still not crazy about Rise Above.

Best of 2009 Pt. V: Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective

2009-07-11T15:50:00.003-04:00

I confess: I'm really late to the party. I didn't know about Animal Collective until I read this post from Hipster Runoff. I also didn't know about Hipster Runoff until I followed a link there from another blog. Shame on me! But I have an excuse: I'm incredibly unhip. Also, the past few years have been rather odd and complicated for me, the end result being that my knowledge of what has been going on in indie music since about 2005 is practically nil. And even before that I wasn't really too savvy (I tend to be the guy who discovers a "cool new band" way later than everyone else, although Metacritic helps me out these days).

So when I first heard Merriweather Post Pavilion in January, I was flabbergasted. I didn't know what the hell was going on. Parts of it sounded like the Beach Boys, parts of it sounded like rows of effects pedals jamming with themselves. I hadn't a clue, but I had the feeling that if I listened to it enough, it might begin to make sense to me. I was right: repeated listenings made all the odd noises and samples seem more natural and many of the vocal lines started to careen around in my head at random times during the day. Before I knew it, I was hooked, and I had to hear more. So I started collecting their earlier records, and again I was shocked. They were even weirder, with crazier vocals and more acoustic instruments instead of synths and samples. Eventually I was sitting there listening to Here Comes The Indian in my headphones, paying attention to everything I heard, and it struck me that these guys were, if not geniuses, close enough for me.

I think Animal Collective have made some of the best and most interesting music of this decade. If you've never heard anything by them, I highly recommend taking the same route I did. Start with Merriweather and work your way backwards. If you're as slow as I am, be prepared to listen a few times before the beauty of this music starts to sink in.

This review feels redundant because I know this album was hyped to death and most people have already heard it and made up their minds already. But I had to write something, even though I wanted to just write "DUH" and be done with it. Ok, now I'm really done with it.

Best of 2009 Pt. IV: Dragonslayer by Sunset Rubdown

2009-07-11T11:42:00.003-04:00

Spencer Krug seems to like saving the punchline for the end. There's a part of almost every song on Dragonslayer, usually between 1 and 2 minutes before the end, where something new is revealed. In the first few songs, to get the listener to notice what's going on, the music actually stops for a second - this is where most songwriters would end. Instead, the song continues with new lyrics, sometimes a new melody, and always a slightly different take on things. It's sort of like a bridge, but it's a bridge to nowhere - we never get back to the chorus or verse. (The one seeming exception to this rule, "Nightingale/December Song" still changes the lyrics of its refrain at the end.) This, along with Krug's usual lyrical tendencies (he seems to be having a conversation with someone he knows and you don't) helps explain the beguiling difficulty of this album. These songs demand your attention, yet expecting them to make sense is probably asking too much.

The whole album seems to have an elegiac feel, as if Krug is saying goodbye to something, although it's not exactly clear what that something is. "I think maybe these days are over," he sings on the opener, "Silver Moons." If I can indulge myself in a little armchair analysis, I'll take a guess that the complexity of Krug's songs has something to do with a fear of making music that is "merely" pop. And yet his lyrics seem to me also to reveal a fear of being so obscure as to be regarded as irrelevant. In other words, I think he's grappling with a need to feel like what he's doing is very important. I think this explains not only the complexity but also the grandiosity of many of his songs: the allusions to Classical figures and themes, the march-like choruses where he sings a line and his bandmates have to repeat it. I'm not saying this to criticize him - all his tricks work, pretty much. But the last song on the album, "Dragon's Lair," seems to indicate a longing to break out of the indie world and into something bigger, longer-lasting and more meaningful: "So you can take me to the dragon’s lair/or you can take me to Rapunzel’s windowsill./Either way it is time for a bigger kind of kill." Your guess is as good as mine as to what those two alternatives represent, but like the song says, either way it must be "bigger".

Best of 2009 Pt. III: Monoliths and Dimensions by Sunn O))))

2009-07-10T17:11:00.004-04:00

When I was 12 I started playing guitar. My first instrument was a $40 electric that had no name on it. I was immediately struck by the fact that it was capable of more than simply playing notes. Lacking a proper amplifier, I found an adapter cable and plugged the guitar into my Magnavox bookshelf stereo. The sound that came out was low-volume and polite, but if I turned it up enough I'd get feedback. This was interesting.

The only guitar hero I had when I started playing was Frank Zappa, whose style was far too advanced and outlandish for me to imitate. What I discovered, when I finally did get a proper guitar amp, was that even if your technique wasn't up to par, you sure could make a lot of noise. And that noise was sometimes more fun to make than playing actual notes.

I went on to take lessons and improve my technique to near-mediocre levels, but now and again I would give in to my impulse for sonic experimentation. Usually when I would get some new toy, like a chorus or delay pedal. This was fun for me but I never thought of recording these experiments - they were just for my own immediate pleasure. Thank god there are people in the world who are more visionary than me.

Sunn O)))) makes music that starts with the premise that sound itself is pleasurable and worth listening to. More specifically, we're talking about the sound of a heavily-distorted, downtuned guitar. Since the band consists of two guitarists, drums are very often (but not always) left out of the equation. Over the years, they've experimented with adding various things to their sludgey guitars: effects, vocals, keyboards. However, Monoliths and Dimensions represents their biggest, most elaborate experiments thus far. Teaming up with Evyind Kang and a host of orchestral instruments as well as a choir, they expand their sound vertically a great deal, even as it continues to crawl and lumber along at the pace of a chained sloth on Demerol.

The first track, "Aghartha" is a bit deceptive, as it is closest to the group's past recordings. Featuring a Hungarian vocalist who croakingly intones some sort of poetry in a register usually reserved for one's death rattle, the track also includes a couple of upright basses, conch shells, Tibetan horns, violin, viola, piano, English horn, French horn, clarinet and hydrophone. These, however, are used not to form some kind of New Age aura around the guitars but to create squeakings, scrapings, snappings, buzzings and drones. In other words the mood is not lightened in any way by the inclusion of "classical" instruments - quite the opposite in fact.

The real shock comes with track 2, "Big Church," which begins not with the sound of distorted anything, but with a female choir intoning some mysterious chords. The track as a whole is very clearly divided into three parts, each part ending abruptly with the tolling of a church bell (how appropriate can you get?). The choir and the guitars interact throughout, and the whole thing works so well that after hearing it, you wonder how they can top this. And indeed, the third track seems a bit of a retreat, again featuring mainly the guitars and the Hungarian dude again (okay, okay, his name is Attila Csihar and he sang on a Mayhem album; happy?). A smaller, male choir makes a cameo appearance and some brass and synths are also used, if sparingly.

But like that old Vanessa Williams song goes, Sunn 0))) saved the best for last. Closing number "Alice," which I gather is a tribute to Alice Coltrane, sees them totally going for it and letting Eyvind Kang and his ensemble take over. The result is the brightest (go ahead and think of the obvious pun, I won't stop you) music they've ever performed. This change in tone is as unexpected as it is welcome. The track's beginning by no means assures us that this will be the case, coated as it is with evil-sounding chords and menacing echoes. But something happens over the course of this track's 16 minutes. Something I've never heard in Sunn 0)))'s music until now, and something I rarely hear happen in any music written after the early 20th century: development. Rather than remain in stasis or juxtapose contrasting material, the music is slowly transformed from one thing into another. It happens so gradually, in fact, that it's almost impossible to hear. Yet by the end, none of the original mood of darkness and forboding remains. When trumpets and horns start to sound major chords more than halfway through the track, it seems like the most natural thing in the world. Gradually the guitars disappear and harps and violins take their place. A trombone blows a gentle melody which turns into a solo as the music fades into silence. It's enough to make you weep for joy. It's an absolute triumph - this track alone would make this album worthy of "best of" status. Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler would both approve, I think.

Best of 2009 Pt. II: Alhambra Love Songs by John Zorn

2009-07-10T11:23:00.003-04:00

This is the second in a series of blurbs about my favorite albums from the first half of 2009.

Alhambra Love Songs
John Zorn

If I didn't know John Zorn's catalog better, I'd think he was being ironic. The guy who made Naked City, who appropriated punk rock and death metal within his schizophrenic, manic, avant-jazz, cut-and-paste compositions; the guy who used Mike Patton - one of the smoothest vocalists in rock music - almost entirely for his screaming and other non-melodic vocal noises; the guy who seemingly never met a genre he didn't like for at least 15 seconds - has made an album of nothing but jazz-based piano-trio compositions, an album so genteel and free from chaos or noise that it would upset no one.

In reality of course, this isn't as shocking as my silly lead-in makes it seem. There is plenty of precedent in Zorn's prior work for the kind of beautiful calm espoused in these gem-like pieces. However, I believe this is the first time he's delivered an album this thoroughly chilled-out. Like the eye in the center of a hurricane, Alhambra Love Songs is eerily calm. Not all of the songs are equally placid, but even the more uptempo numbers like "Moraga" and "Larkspur" don't feature any jarring sounds or off-putting harmonies.

My first impression of this album was that, while it was superficially appealing, there was not a lot to distinguish one track from another. Boy is that wrong. The diversity of this music is in its melodic composition, not in its instrumentation. If you think about it, that's much harder to do than simply dazzling the listener with lots of exotic "weird" instruments or effects. Over and over again, Zorn impresses with the depth and beauty of the melodies he has composed for this album. Some of the tracks touch on Latin jazz; others seem to draw on Zorn's wealth of Masada material. Each one is a self-contained world.

Considering the sheer mass of Zorn's output, it's hard to assess his work as a whole. I'm certainly not going to try. But I will say that of the several dozen Zorn albums I've heard, this one strikes me as one of the most successful and fully realized.

Best of 2009 Pt. I: The Hazards of Love by The Decemberists

2009-07-10T11:13:00.000-04:00

Partly inspired by Paste Magazine, I present to you the first in a series of blurbs about my favorite albums of the first half of 2009.

The Hazards of Love
The Decemberists

The critics seemed a bit divided on this album, but I'm obviously a big fan. What irks me is that even a lot of the reviewers who have praised it have been rather sheepish about it, almost like they're embarrassed to admit to liking it. The PopMatters reviewer called it "pretentious" and thought that having children sing on one of the tracks was an "egregious miscalculation" - he also felt that the lyrics, "though excellent throughout, do sometimes border on self-parody." I think your review borders on self-parody, douchefuck!

Pitchfork's Marc Hogan rated it 5.7 out of 10 and said reading the lyrics is "[t]oo much work, not enough payoff." Of course, nobody from Pitchfork could ever admit loving an album with lyrics so vivid and poetic. They prefer their lyrics to be pointlessly obscure, like the stuff Spencer Krug tosses off on any of his several dozen releases each year.

But the real beauty to be found here is in the music, which is arranged to perfection and has melodies that will haunt you for days and weeks after hearing them. The upright bass in "The Hazards of Love 1" is just one example of how evocative the instrumentation is on this album. When it first appears at just under a minute into the track, it plays whole notes, functioning as nothing but a low cushion of vibration on which Colin Meloy sings the song's refrain. It then asserts itself properly with a slow, understated arpeggiated phrase of its own, while the music continues to build steam into the next verse. It's one of those moments that is simultaneously satisfying on its own and yet also seems to build excitement and energy.

Moreover, the album is unified musically in ways that suggest classical forms. For example, the harmonies in the album's instrumental intro form the basis of whole songs later on. Throughout, themes and their variations appear and reappear. In other words, this album is carefully crafted - and who hates good craftsmanship? People who think they are too jaded or cynical or hip to be moved by mere musical sounds, I suppose. And also the tone-deaf: let's not forget them. Their inability to hear the beauty in melody and harmony is pitiable, and we should feel sorry for them. But they shouldn't be writing music reviews.

My approach to music appreciation

2009-06-17T18:14:00.003-04:00

My ideal approach to listening to music is to sit down and listen to it, preferably with some sort of caffeinated beverage. Classical music typically requires your conscious attention in order to get the most of it, so I try my best to just listen. When it comes to other types of music, however, I like to do other things while listening. For example, sometimes I play a video game, though nothing too intense. This helps to keep my mind from wandering while not requiring much brain power of itself, allowing me to focus on the music. Another nice activity while listening to music is driving, as again it requires attention but not much brain power, so your mind stays focused on the music and the road.

Occasionally I will try reading while listening, but this almost always fails as I will end up either ignoring the music or be unable to concentrate on the text. Writing fares a little better, because it allows me to procrastinate and listen instead of actually writing.

One technique for listening to new music, especially if it's a bit challenging, is to simply play it in the background and not pay attention to it, just let it percolate through your ears while you do other things, in order to simply let yourself get used to the sound of it. You won't always remember a lot of what you heard. But you can go back and listen again, undistracted, and be less overwhelmed with the newness of it and more able to absorb the details. That's something I do a lot.

The main thing is to listen a lot, again and again. If a given piece of music can't withstand being listened to many times, it's probably not going to stand the test of time. Of course, if that's not the goal, then who cares if it does? But my personal preference is for music that can and will be listened to well beyond its own time.

I'm not sure what the big idea is here, but I'm hoping to nudge myself toward writing some reviews of new/recent albums that I think are worth listening to over and over. I don't know if I'll succeed as I'm astonishingly gifted in the ways of procrastination. We'll see what happens.

Arts & crafts to blow your mind

2009-02-07T13:35:00.005-05:00

Those of us in the know are aware that an innocent strip of paper can without warning transform into a Möbius strip (via a piece of Scotch tape):

The Möbius strip has a number of horrifying properties. For example, if you were to glue two together by their edges, you'd get a Klein bottle (good luck with that).

One thing you can do is cut the strip in half along the middle. You will end up with one strip that is twice as long as the original strip of paper:

I know you're dying to know what happens if you were to cut this new strip in half along the middle. Naturally, you get two strips wound around each other (duh!):

This makes a good paper necklace or ribbon. More importantly, your cat will love it:

She's clearly wondering what she did to deserve this.

It's just a phase, we'll grow out of it: is postmodernism some kind of symptom of our cultural adolescence?

2009-02-04T01:06:00.007-05:00

"The post-modern attitude of hyper-self-awareness, unrelenting irony, and overbearing cynicism seems to mirror Adam and Eve’s post-lapsarian self-consciousness" -anonymous

The Fall in Genesis can be read as a story about growing up and becoming an adult. Adolescence is a time when we lose our childhood innocence and start to realize what the world is really like. Just as adolescence is (hopefully) a stage on the way toward adulthood, perhaps self-aware, irony-laden postmodernism is a stage of our culture on its way toward... well, something.

Once everyone in a society achieves a postmodern level of self-awareness, maybe the next stage is to become immune to it somehow. Think about your own perspective and how it changes as you get older: when you're 15 and your parents embarrass you in front of your friends, you feel like it's the end of the world. But then you grow up and maybe you realize things like that aren't such a big deal. As an adult you have more important stuff to worry about than how cool you look.

The media/advertising machine, operating under some form of quasi-free-market economic principles, seems to want to trap people in a kind of perpetual state of adult adolescence (more grown-up virtues being presumably rather less easily marketable). Personally, I do feel like the older I get the less I care about that stuff (and the less "stuff" I want to buy), so if my own experience is anything to go by, the advertisers/marketeers are being smart in trying to keep us from growing up.

Is it possible that maturity has something to do with not caring so much about whether people are judging you (though I doubt anyone can 100% not care, it's only human), but rather simply caring about other people?

I think artists in particular find it hard to lose that sense of feeling judged, not only because they're usually very sensitive, but also they really do get criticized (sometimes rudely) by all kinds of people. That's something that most people probably don't have to deal with - we get criticism from our bosses, yes, and from our families & friends, sure, but generally not from strangers who don't give a damn about us. Creative types have to put their work out there, which is often very personal, so they have to risk being deeply hurt by strangers every time they release one of their works into the world.

Maybe artists were the original adolescents (in the sense of being allowed, socially, to be the way teenagers are today). Celebrities (who are often artists and/or adolescents) are also like this. It might be impossible to really grow up if everyone acts as if the world actually does revolve you (and then punishes you for believing it's true).

I realize this all sounds kind of vague and also rather teleological (i.e. as if I'm suggesting our culture is living out a pre-planned destiny) but I think there's a way of thinking about this without proposing Intelligent Cultural Design.

In evolution, the results of natural selection, viewed with hindsight, can appear so mind-bogglingly complex as to require a creator (see Paley's watchmaker analogy). If you take the time to study evolutionary theory, however, you'll come to realize that in fact this is an unfounded assumption: natural selection (which is really just a function of the laws of physics) does the job perfectly.

If we allow that natural selection is the mechanism behind sociocultural as well as biological evolution, then there is no need for a grand design or master plan; but as conscious agents we are responsible for our culture and what it produces, just as we are responsible for our own bodies and what they produce. Maybe we should start thinking about meme therapy for our culture (Note: I Googled "meme therapy" and all I got was this boring blog).

The human uterus: merely an obstacle to removing other useful organs

2009-02-03T18:29:00.002-05:00

"The woman was chosen to be the first donor to undergo the procedure because a previous hysterectomy enabled doctors to operate without a uterus obstructing their efforts, he added."

I know another band whose initials are AC and their song titles are way cooler

2009-02-01T04:01:00.002-05:00

After lying in bed in the dark for an hour or so listening to Animal Collective's Campfire Songs in headphones, I think I am finally starting to get them.

Or I might just be starting to fool myself into believing that I'm not wasting my time listening to them. But I don't feel like going down that particular twisty path of logic, so screw it. Until further notice I'll be listening to AC and trying to come to grips with what they call music. I assume I'll come out the other side either a hipster, an anti-hipster or dead. Or if I'm really lucky, all three (triple whammy)!

Tea, crumpets and the living dead

2009-02-01T03:42:00.008-05:00

So like, zombies are cool, right?

I'm intrigued. I'm not sure yet whether I'd actually want to read this. P&P is one of my favorite books and, while I'm not much of a purist and I don't have any problem with the concept, it does seem just a tad gimmicky. On the other hand, I'm a curious fellow and I would like to see just how good/bad this ends up being.

The Shins' new album

2007-03-01T08:14:00.000-05:00

For those who have not yet indulged in its aural splendor, I can assure you that Wincing the Night Away is just as fine an album as its two predecessors, although the reviews upon its release were somewhat mixed. Like many great albums, it does take time to digest, revealing its character only after repeated listenings. Featuring several songs written in a more expansive style than anything Mercer has heretofore chosen to present us with, juxtaposed with tracks that could be outtakes from the first two Shins' albums, Wincing may later be viewed as somewhat of a transitional moment for the band.

The thing about those "expansive" songs is that, because of their comparative harmonic simplicity, some critics have chosen to characterize them as failed experiments, whereas I would counter that it is precisely these that make the album, not only a great CD, but also an independent entity of its two elder siblings. When you hear, for example, the snappy hip-hoppish beat for "Sea Legs," you know that you are listening to Wincing; one cannot make the same claim for the following track, "Red Rabbits," which really belongs to Oh, Inverted World's sonic universe.

"Sea Legs," incidentally, is one of the best tracks on the album, despite all the critics who have dis(mis)sed it. It is completely successful in its effect, showcasing a typically atypical Mercer melody that floats along atop its breezy accompaniment, followed by a long, melancholy outro that reminds me of classic Pink Floyd more than anything else. The song's title, perhaps referring to Mercer's adapting his talents to this more flowing, groove-based music (and/or perhaps to the listener's ears adapting to it as well), seems quite appropriate.

Those who expect nothing from Mercer but the same perfectly polished, two and a half minute rococo gems, churned out one after another, only have themselves to blame for being disappointed. Presumably these are the same types who begrudged the Beatles for everything they did after A Hard Day's Night. The rest of us can only pity their close-minded conservative stance while we eagerly await the next chapter in the continuing story of one of the decade's finest songwriters.

Lowe's Zappa Book Sucks, Part Two

2006-12-25T14:06:00.000-05:00

So I'm halfway through Kelly Fisher Lowe's book (see below for my initial reactions), and it only gets more disappointing. What is really a terrible shame is that Lowe did not do his homework in trying to decipher more of Frank's lyrics, despite the fact the lyrical content is (by default) what Lowe, as a non-musician, focuses primarily on.

It astounds me that Lowe describes the lyrics to "Pygmy Twylyte" as "absurdist" and "inscrutable" when, in fact, the slightest effort to comprehend the lyrics to this song reveals that they do in fact, make perfect sense. The "green hocker croakin' in the pygmy twylyte" is just another hapless victim of drug abuse. In this case the protagonist is particularly pathetic because he seems to be a user of both uppers and downers. "Crankin' and a-cokin" indicates that the guy is presumably snorting cocaine and/or using amphetamines, aka "crank." "Out of his deep on a four-day run/hurtin' for sleep in the Quaalude moonlight" tells you how he got to this point: he was obviously on an amphetamine kick (people who do uppers will often stay awake for days at a time) and is now "hurtin' for sleep," turning to Quaaludes (a ubiquitous drug of the 70's and a powerful sedative) in order to get some relief. However, the combination of all those drugs in his system has made him sick and he's sitting there, looking all green and sickly and shaking and scared, totally pathetic and vulnerable, a complete slave to the drugs, and just scared out of his mind, afraid that he's gonna die. He has a "crystal eye" and a "crystal kidney" -- a reference to methamphetamine which is a crystalized form of the drug. Anxiety, sleeplessness, poor skin condition and kidney damage are all problems resulting from amphetamine abuse.

The term "pygmy twylyte" is, I think, connected to the song "City of Tiny Lites," another song concerned with drug abuse. The city of tiny lites is visible after the use of downers and wine; similarly, the green hocker (incidentally, he's probably a hocker because he's been driven to sell most of his possessions to pay for his drug habit) is "smokin' in the pygmy twylyte" after doing some Quaaludes in order to end his four-day amphetamine bender. I would conjecture that Frank may have heard a story about someone on 'ludes or some other sedative who, in the trance-like state induced by the drug, imagined seeing a tiny little city, maybe in a puddle or some other reflective surface, lit up by a streetlight. This would conform with Frank's usual tendency of commemorating "true stories" or events in song form.

It is also, of course, consistent with FZ's strong anti-drug stance. For Frank, anyone who allows him or herself to become suspectible to delusions of the kind described in those songs is worthy of ridicule. The proclivity of Americans to being taken in by illusions, whether drug-induced or otherwise, was a socio-cultural trait of which Zappa strongly disapproved. To him, drugs were an escape and could only be destructive, whether indirectly, by making the user unable to face the reality of his situation or by directly wreaking havoc on his body. Zappa hated deceit and felt a lot of America's problems were caused by its people being unwilling or unable to face up to the truth, no matter how ugly.

To me, if you can't get any of this out of the song's lyrics and are willing to dismiss them as "absurd," you have no business writing a book that purports to concern itself with an analysis of Zappa's lyrics. Anyway, that's why I think Kelly Lowe's book sucks.

The Words and Music of Frank Zappa, by Kelly Fisher Lowe

2006-12-25T09:12:00.000-05:00

I am about a third of the way through Kelly Fisher Lowe's ambitious book. Unfortunately it really seems as if he is attempting to bite off more than he can chew. Maybe I misunderstood him, but he seems to promise a much more interesting and in-depth analysis than he appears capable of delivering, at least in this relatively short volume. In trying to cover so much ground (he attempts to say something about nearly every song on the 40 or so albums he's chosen to write about), he has no choice but to maintain a rather brisk pace throughout, which makes for some fairly shallow readings of Zappa's songs.

That in itself wouldn't be so bad if the book were not also as riddled with errors as any other Zappa book. This is a continual problem that seems to plague everyone who writes about Zappa and/or his music. Apparently, despite the fact that all the correct information is easily available online, it is impossible to publish a Zappa book without an enormous number of factual errors as well as typos.

Typos certainly happen in almost any published book, especially first editions, but why do so many extremely conspicuous ones seem to get by in these Zappa books? The case in point here is that in Lowe's book, the VERY FIRST PAGE has a glaring typo: he refers to a "Stratocaster and a Fender Camp" from the song Joe's Garage.

Excuse me?? Fender fucking Camp?!? Listen, if there's anybody out there writing a book on Zappa right now, please hear my plea: hire me as your proofreader, PLEASE. I promise you, by the time I am done with your manuscript, there will be no such typographical mistakes lurking within its pages.

On the other hand, is it possible mistakes like that are introduced later on, after the author is already done with his manuscript and the process of publishing has begun? I really don't know this process or how it works, so maybe there are weird things like infinite numbers of monkeys locked away in rooms retyping manuscripts for some arcane reason and this introduces these sorts of typos. I DON'T KNOW.

But what I do know is, my copy of Frank's autobiography (admittedly a trade paperback and therefore possibly not a first edition) does not have these kind of typos. In fact, although I admit I haven't gone over every page as carefully as I could, I don't recall seeing ANY typos at all in The Real Frank Zappa Book.

Anyway, moving on to more serious mistakes. There are the usual, by now expected, simple factual errors throughout the book. Disappointing as these may be for the Zappa fan, we are certainly not surprised to encounter such erroneous information in a Zappa book. However, what particularly irks me is not these sorts of errors which, as inexcusable as they are, at least can be looked up and easily corrected (for example, how hard is it to remember that the album, Does Humor Belong In Music? actually documents Zappa's touring unit in 1984, NOT 1982 -- two VERY different bands that any serious Zappa fan would be able to tell apart by ear almost instantly).

What gets me is that Lowe, admittedly not a musicologist (and presumably not a musician), nevertheless bandies about technical music terms that have very specific meanings and, not surprisingly, uses them incorrectly a number of times. He refers to the song "Mr. Green Genes" as a "half-time waltz" for example, which it is clearly not (at the bare minimum a waltz has to be in 3/4). Similarly, he asserts that "Who Needs the Peace Corps?" starts off as "a basic shuffle," which it does not. There is not a single second of shuffle rhythm in that song. It is much more akin to a march, an attribute that is accentuated on the 1988 live arrangement as heard on The Best Band You Never Heard In Your Life.

In fact, almost every time Lowe writes about the music rather than the lyrics, he either gets it wrong or writes a description so generic as to be interchangeable. For example, here is the rest of his description of "Peace Corps":

As the song develops, you find Zappa working in his usual vein of odd and varying time signatures [actually the entire song is in 4/4]. The song starts and stops and segues quite unexpectedly. It finally ends up with a marvelous light jazz outro with Zappa speaking over it.

What purpose do these kind of descriptions serve? For those of us who know the songs as well (or better than) Lowe, it doesn't advance our understanding of the music. For those who don't know the song, it certainly isn't specific enough to give one much of an idea of what it sounds like -- and the parts that are specific are either misleading or downright inaccurate.

Every book I have read on Zappa has contained musical descriptions of this sort and they are usually laughable at best. Ben Watson, whose book Lowe highly recommends in the bibliographic essay in the back, is probably more guilty than most of coming up with page after page of these ludicrous descriptive passages. They might provide the author and certain readers with some enjoyment, but their informational content is close to zero.

Maybe the thing I like the most about this book is that it makes me want to write a much better book on Zappa's music. I think I could do a lot better job than anybody else published so far. It would be nice if there were a book out there besides Frank's autobiography that wasn't totally fucked up in one way or another.

Ockerian Addenda

2006-11-25T12:36:00.000-05:00

In response to my posting on Zappa the other day, David Ocker made some interesting comments I'd like to address. (His comments are in block quotes below.)

The original title of the piece (for the first, oh, week or so) was "Blow Job". But eventually he made it a narrative about Mo and Herb charging Frank for their vacation in Pamplona. Sarcastic is exactly the right word. Don't forget the airhorn at the end.

The original title is too funny. "Blow Job" sounds like the closest thing to a generic Zappa title he ever came up with. And the sarcasm, I don't know whether it came through as such to my girlfriend -- she seemed rather baffled by the whole thing.

But if you can appreciate Zappa's sense of humor and the peculiar physicality of his music -- I don't know if this makes sense, but Zappa referred a lot to the physical processes involved in making music (e.g. the air moving around a room), to the extent that I sometimes get the feeling he did think of himself as almost like a kind of scientist. I feel like a scientific attitude informed much of the way he approached music. In any case, when I listen to Zappa's music I feel a strong sense of the physical world, of an appreciation of sounds in themselves, rather than the intellectual, abstract music of most composers in the European classical tradition.

In other words, although I'm sure there are exceptions one might think of, I feel like in general when Zappa composed, he was thinking about sound itself more so than he was thinking about things like harmony, melody and "meaning". Not that he didn't possess a lot of technical knowledge, but it was being used in ways that the people who canonized Western "music theory" would not have intended (or even have been able to conceive of).

Perhaps it isn't too much of a stretch to say that Zappa took the tools of Western music and basically used them to negate the purposes for which they had been designed. However, if this is an accurate statement, I believe it was only a means to an end: to subvert people's expectations and allow them to really LISTEN, at least for a little while. Once he had done this, they would be ready to hear the true content of his music: raw, uncensored imagination, translated into the physical world through the medium of sound.

You wrote "We still do not know why Zappa wrote music like Mo 'n Herb's Vacation." - he wrote music of all kinds because that's what he did; it was fundamental to him, like eating or breathing.

I would be foolish to argue that writing music was not fundamental to Frank Zappa's nature. However, as I am at times an exceptionally foolish person, I'll go ahead and do it right now. I think composition was fundamental to his personality -- but I think it could as easily have been something other than music that captured his interest. It was the physical immediacy of the sounds of Varese and R&B music that drew him, I believe. Had those two types of music not been there for him to absorb as a teenager, he might have turned out quite differently.

Are you wondering why this piece didn't come out sounding like Bobby Brown or Dynamo Hum. It's trite but also true to say "because he was a good composer" - he picked the beginning materials (guitar licks for sure and some people say even a quote from Varese) and he developed the ideas creatively until the piece said what he wanted it to (in the Zappa language) and until he liked the way it sounded.

I don't have much to add here, except to say that I agree, and to emphasize the last part: liking the way it sounded was crucial for him. I think Zappa had a large variety of sounds that he enjoyed and wanted to hear expounded in certain ways. So for him, the sounds inherent in the formation of "Bobby Brown" were important enough, in their own way, for him to complete its composition. He may not have enjoyed playing that song (or "Dinah-Moe Humm") dozens (hundreds?) of times, but he recognized its appeal and felt it was a small price to pay for being able to continue his career.

What I want to know is - did your girlfriend enjoy the music - or did she just wonder why he had even bothered?

I don't think she enjoyed it. I think Zappa is really baffling to her. She's a musician but she loves music that is complex in very different ways: Carlo Gesualdo, Monteverdi and J.S. Bach, for example, are three of her favorite composers. Mind you, I really enjoy that stuff too, but Zappa will always be closer to my heart, I think, because it is what I listened to when I was young and impressionable. Even when I don't listen to Zappa's music for many months at a time, I feel like it's still right there with me.

A Brief Message of Thanks

2006-11-22T12:59:00.000-05:00

When I wrote my last post, I never imagined it would be read and commented on by anyone, let alone David Ocker himself. I started this blog as an outlet for my arts-related thoughts and opinions. Only recently did I think about the idea of other people reading and appreciating what I'm doing here. As a teenager I thought of myself as a writer and a wannabe musician/composer. For the past 5 or 6 years I haven't thought of myself as anything other than a person trying to get over my personal problems and earn a living doing whatever I can stomach for eight or ten hours a day.

Anyway, my point is that I'm glad that not only am I writing again, but that, thanks to the magic of blogging, it's possible for what I write to be read by others. Hopefully I can keep this up.

In my next post, which should be following this one within the next hour or so, I want to address the comment Mr. Ocker left. As you might imagine, he supplied some interesting information and raised some good points/questions to which I'm itching to respond.

Frank Zappa: Tools & Methods of Composition

2006-11-21T09:48:00.001-05:00

I was listening with my girlfriend to a recording of Frank Zappa's orchestral piece Mo 'n Herb's Vacation when she suddenly asked a very interesting question: "Why did he write this?"

To really answer that question would require skills of a psychoanalytical nature I do not possess. However, it did get me to thinking. Just this morning I listened to a Zappa show from the autumn of 1978, when he was apparently still working on Mo 'n Herb. At that point in its evolution, Zappa referred to it simply as "Mo's Vacation" and it was performed as a trio of marimba, bass and drums.

On this particular night, "Mo's Vacation" was followed directly by "The Black Page #2" and I found the juxtaposition of these two compositions both striking and instructive. They are constructed in roughly the same manner: a polyrhythmic melody is stated and repeated, with variations, over a steady, metronomic pulse. Zappa was fascinated by complex rhythms; perhaps he felt this was unexplored territory, a place where he could stake his claim as far away as possible from "normal" rock music.

His particular interest was the generation of polyrhythm by the superimposition of an unrelated rhythm over an underlying pulse (usually explicitly stated on a drum or other percussion instrument). This is evident in much of his music, including guitar solos -- Zappa claimed it felt more natural for him to play phrases of fives and sevens (and higher, more complex ratios) than to improvise within strict subdivisions of the beat. Perusal of The Frank Zappa Guitar Book, a collection of transcriptions of guitar solos (often including drum transcriptions as well), appears to bear this out. While some of the rhythms are certainly accidental (indeed, in a few cases they are the result of overdubbing a pre-existing solo, played in a different tempo/meter, onto a studio backing track) and some of the transcriptions might be considered overly fussy, it is clear that Zappa was not a rhythmically traditional player.

As related as they might be in terms of rhythm, harmony is where these two works diverge most widely. For all its rhythmic complexity, "The Black Page" is an essentially tonal piece. It might shift around between different tonalities in unorthodox ways, but the melody is still fairly hummable. One of Zappa's gifts that, to me, still seems widely unrecognized, was his gift for melody. He had a knack for writing lines that are tricky to play and/or sing yet are capable of sticking in one's head as tenaciously as a Top 40 AM hit.

"Mo's Vacation" is another story. It exists in a completely atonal harmonic environment. This makes it tougher to absorb for ears unaccustomed to the ways in which pitch-relationships are handled in such music. I don't know the exact origins of this music. It seems likely that Frank had originally written it for orchestra and arranged it for his rock band just to see what it sounded like. He seemed to instinctually steer away from atonal music in his rock compositions, no matter how complex they might get in other ways. So this seems to have been a rare experiment.

Indeed, "Mo's Vacation" was not played again by any of Frank's bands before or after this tour. In placing it in the setlist next to "The Black Page", Frank may have been performing a kind of experiment on his audience. By carefully gauging their responses to each composition, perhaps he could confirm a pre-existing hunch that most people would tolerate polyrhythmic complexities much better in a tonal environment.

Ultimately, the composition performed that night became the first movement of Mo 'n Herb's Vacation, a kind of concerto for clarinet and orchestra, given its premiere performance and recording by the London Symphony in 1983, with Kent Nagano conducting. The contrast between the staccato, "objective" sound of the marimbas versus the expressive, sarcastic clarinet could hardly be any wider. Frank had clearly made the correct choice in terms of instrumentation. What I don't know is whether Zappa knew all along that a clarinet, or any woodwind for that matter, would be necessary in order to bring out the particular character of this melody.

We still do not know why Zappa wrote music like Mo 'n Herb's Vacation. The question is probably unanswerable as such -- why does anyone do anything, really? -- but by thinking about how he may have gone about solving particular compositional problems, we can draw some interesting conclusions, or at least make some interesting conjectures.

Death Metal Jamboree

2006-11-02T07:27:00.000-05:00

For the past week or so, all I've been listening to is metal, mostly death metal. I was driving my poor girlfriend nuts playing this stuff day in and day out. She left on Thursday to run another workshop with the Western Wind at Smith College, so I'm left to my own devices for the next 8 days. I'm hoping to get the metal itch out of my system by the time she gets back.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good place to talk about the bands I've been listening to and the impact (or lack thereof) they've had on me.

Arsis: Insanely fast melodic death metal duo from Virginia. Very intense music but worth checking out. The oddest thing is that it's all done by two guys: a drummer and a multi-instrumentalist/vocalist. I assume they would have to hire people in order to play live, but the album is quite a feat. The only problem is the intensity really never lets up so it tends to fatigue your ears, but hey, this IS death metal we're talking about here.

Carcass: One of the classic death metal bands, this English group set new standards for melodic death metal. Their debut album, like a lot of early death metal, is totally unlistenable due to the abysmal production. Their reputation is mainly staked on two albums: Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious; and Heartwork. The former is the last and best Carcass album to feature those ridiculously erudite and pun-ridden lyrics about dismembering corpses, making musical instruments out of the dead, etc. All rather tongue-in-cheek and consciously ironic, especially considering the band were all vegetarians! Heartwork, on the other hand, is a more personal statement and considered one of the first melodic death metal albums.

Cynic: Progressive metal from the late 80s. Features those ridiculous sounding synthesizer vocals you might remember hearing on old Kraftwerk albums. Except on Kraftwerk they sounded cool and German, and here they just sound silly and out of place. People praise this band, which broke up after making one album, but I don't think they live up to their legend.

Daath: I really don't understand the hype behind this band. Supposedly the head of Roadrunner Records heard their demos and was so blown away he signed them, the first death metal band he's signed in 10 years or something like that. Well, I listened to an advance copy of their Roadrunner debut, The Hinderers, and I don't get it. Apart from a couple of tracks with some techno beats there doesn't seem to be anything new or innovative here. In fact I have to say it's downright boring. Plus I hate their vocalist, who sounds more like he's clearing his throat than trying to actually growl.

Death: God bless Chuck Schuldiner, RIP! For those who don't know, Chuck was the mastermind behind Death, which never really had a stable line-up but also never made a bad album. One of the originators of the genre who never was satisfied with staying within its boundaries. Each release seemed to build upon the last one and the musicianship and songwriting kept improving up to the very end. Unfortunately cancer robbed us of any further work from Chuck, but his legacy certainly will live on. I most highly recommend the last 3 Death albums: Individual Thought Patterns, Symbolic, and The Sound of Perseverance.

Hypocrisy: Peter Tatgren deserves credit for thinking of combining death metal with Pink Floyd, certainly not something that would've occurred to me. His band Hypocrisy has so many albums it's hard to keep track of them all. For me the best of the bunch is the self-titled album, although Abducted is pretty good too. Unless you absolutely love pure death metal to the core, skip Penetralia and Osculum Obscenum, which came out before Tatgren took over on vocals and started experimenting with his songwriting.

In Flames: Apparently a very popular and influential band. This is perplexing because the songwriting is so incredibly repetitive. Just about every song is based on the exact same chord progression. I'm not usually a stickler about this sort of thing, but come on! I can't justify listening to an entire album multiple times if at least 80% of the songs are harmonically identical.

Lamb of God: I love these guys. Through four albums (five if you count the one released under their old name, Burn the Priest), they have maintained the right amount of heaviness, catchiness and originality. I highly recommend them to any fan of metal, although I doubt that would be necessary given their popularity right now.

Mastodon: I fell in love with these guys right from the get-go. A ridiculously talented metalcore-influenced band from Georgia, Mastodon is a favorite of both critics and metal fans, and for good reason: with energy and talent to spare, they rip into imaginative, hook-laden songs about such potentially nerdy topics as Moby Dick and put them across with such utter heaviness and conviction that any idea of laughing at these guys for being pretentious immediately exits your mind, never to return.

Meshuggah: This legendary quartet from Sweden resembles a team of long-haired mathematicians more than a metal band. Their intensity and precision is completely beyond belief. The release of Chaosphere, now almost 10 years old, set new standards for technical metal that have yet to be surpassed, let alone even reached, by others. They have left thousands of their fans, many of whom are musicians themselves, perplexed as to how some of their music is even humanly possible to perform. The relentless assault of their songs combined with the cold, inhuman, anti-melodic sound they have honed to perfection mean that Meshuggah is definitely not for everyone. But for those brave enough to accept their challenge, the experience can be highly worthwhile.

Obituary - Slower and more groove-based than most "traditional" death bands, they've been around since nearly the beginning of the genre so they do demand a certain measure of respect. John Tardy's vocals, while clearly death metal, are also totally unique and instantly recognizable. In fact, Obituary as a whole is one of the most easily recognizable bands in a genre that is overstuffed with bands who tend to sound disappointingly similar.

An Obituary riff can be recognized usually within about 2-3 seconds. Steadfastly avoiding implying a tonal center, the typical riff will sound "seasick," alternating between moving up and down the scale. It will also have a marked tendency to go up a major (or minor) third and then down (or up) a half-step. There will also be fifths (both natural and flatted). Leaps of intervals wider than a fifth are fairly rare. Rhythmically, the quarter and half note (crotchet and minim) are used much more than in most death metal riffs. There are slow sections consisting almost entirely of crotchets and minims in some songs. A typical pattern is four sixteenth notes (semiquavers) followed by a quarter note. Sometimes this is augmented to four quavers followed by a minim. Naturally, this basic pattern is varied and plenty of Obituary riffs are not of this rhythmic type. There are the more genre-typical double-time riffs consisting entirely (or almost entirely) of palm-muted 32nd notes, but these are used more for contrast and relief than to beat the listener over the head.

If all this sounds obscure and technical, the end results are quite direct, uncomplicated without being monotonous (for the most part) and so uniquely theirs that in my opinion they should have a patent on this formula!

The classic Obituary albums are considered to be Cause of Death and The End Complete, although I would place World Demise right alongside these two. Their debut album, Slowly We Rot, is worth a listen too although the production is fairly bad and the guitars are much too muffled.

Opeth: Ok, these guys are good. Really good. Basically Opeth are a melodic death/prog metal band with the ability to write satisfying 10-15 minute songs while somehow managing to sound as unpretentious as possible. They even made an entire album with no metal riffing whatsoever -- and a damn fine album it is -- just to prove that their use of the genre wasn't a crutch but a deliberate choice. If you're a prog-metal fan, think of Opeth as everything Dream Theater reached for but could never grasp -- in a word: tasteful.

Quo Vadis - These guys are from Canada and are extremely talented. They deserve to be a lot more well-known. The songs mostly fit into "melodic death metal," which means growly vocals and fast riffs within a framework of mostly traditional harmonic progressions. As opposed to traditional death metal which is much more atonal. There are some progressive elements such as the use of odd meters and some orchestral instruments here and there.

Someone Please Kill The Killers

2006-11-01T23:10:00.000-05:00

The Killers are my new favorite band to hate. Not that it's too difficult. They make it so easy. From their boring, over-hyped albums full of mediocre synth-ridden pop-punk, to their pathetic faux-Gothic teenie-bopper rebellious image, to their idiotic frontman, Brandon Flowers, who says he thinks his band's new album is as good as Achtung Baby or OK Computer, they've really got it all, as far as the lameness factor goes.

And yet somehow, perhaps simply to infuriate people like me, they are popular. They can sell out Madison Square Garden. How can a band whose every song, down to each individual guitar riff and vocal melody, sounds so utterly derivative, possibly attain such a high level of success? Is this how it felt to be a black rhythm and blues musician in the 50's and 60's hearing countless bands and players ripping off your very soul?

Call me old-fashioned, but I liked these songs better when The Cure wrote and sang them twenty years ago.

F For Fake, Orson Welles

2005-09-13T13:10:00.000-04:00

Neither a straightforward documentary or a fictional story, F For Fake is a unique kind of film essay, a meditation on the concept of fakery and forgery in art. It incorporates a great deal of footage from an uncompleted documentary about Elmyr de Hory, who made his living forging paintings. To this footage Welles adds his own narration and splices and dices his way through a fascinating tour de force of masterful editing.

The film asks the question: if no one can tell the difference between an original painting and a forgery, then what exactly IS the difference? If we can't ever know for sure what is real and what is fake, does it, ultimately, matter? Welles suggests several possible answers to this conundrum, without telling us what we ought to think. He subverts the viewer's expectation of a linear story by doubling back and revisiting the same events from different angles. He confronts us with the artifice of film itself — there are many shots of stacks of film reels and of Welles in the editing room piecing together the same footage of which the film is comprised. We are thus continually reminded that what we are watching is another kind of fake: an artificially-constructed reality. Almost miraculously, the film still manages to have a clear beginning, middle and end.

F For Fake is not only fascinating but extremely entertaining, mainly because the film's main character is Orson Welles. He narrates throughout and also appears on-camera in various guises, making mischief and wandering around in a magician's outfit and generally seeming to have a great time hamming it up and being serious and funny at the same time. A large part of the beauty and fascination of F For Fake comes from listening to Welles explain the convoluted story behind the film's origin.

This is mandatory viewing for Orson Welles fans, and highly recommended for anyone with a sense of humor and a love for adventurous filmmaking.

The Simulacra, Philip K. Dick

2005-09-10T10:30:00.000-04:00

I confess: I've been reading science fiction novels all summer. But it isn't my fault: I was assigned to read Octavia Butler's Mind of My Mind in my penultimate undergraduate class at Pace this summer, and it all went downhill from there. Next thing I knew I was ordering out-of-print Isaac Asimov books for a dollar a piece at abebooks.com and unashamedly riding the subway while engrossed in paperbacks with titles like Foundation and Earth and Patternmaster. Yes, it was quite a descent into genre fiction from my lofty perch amongst David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami novels and .... oh let's face it, I've been reading more graphic novels than anything else for the past year. That and geeky nonfiction books by guys like Richard Dawkins and Antonio Damasio. I've been a very naughty English major, I admit.

And I would've gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for The Simulacra. This is the book that finally made me say uncle. The next book I read will be a bona fide Literary Classic, because Philip Dick has finally made me understand the limits of genre fiction. Dick was possibly unique among sci-fi writers of his generation, in that he fully embraced all the conventions of his genre—spaceships, aliens, advanced technology, parallel universes, and all manner of other weird things—but did not accept its limits. While most other sci-fi authors were content with writing neat little stories about how fancy gadgets would help humankind explore and conquer the galaxy, Dick wrote exclusively about dystopian future societies, viewing technology as the rope with which humanity would hang itself. Much more of a realist and more cynical than most of his peers, Dick's characters both conform to and utterly confound the clichés of sci-fi heroism. What makes them so wonderfully sympathetic is that they are almost always deeply flawed—even (sometimes especially) the central protagonist, presuming there is one.

Unfortunately that is where The Simulacra falls down. There is no central character in the novel and so, as the plot unfolds, it becomes increasingly difficult to decide whom to root for. This was seemingly Dick's intent, but he ends up leaving things in such a chaotic, ambiguous mess that by the time one reaches the end, no one seems particularly worth caring about. Perhaps the real problem is that there are so many characters that none of them really takes precedence over the others, either in terms of the amount of narrative devoted to them or the degree of sympathy with which Dick portrays them. To his credit, he avoids painting in black and white: while no one is truly evil, no one is particularly good either, and nearly everyone is simply concerned with the business of reacting to and trying to stay one step ahead of everyone else. In other words, this is a novel populated with selfish, neurotic schemers in a bleak world all but devoid of genuine caring about others.

In itself that does not invalidate the novel, but the story's lack of cohesion and unresolved situations don't build much of a case for its defense. When I say that there are limits to genre fiction and that Dick did not accept them, I am paying him a compliment: at his best, Dick transcended his chosen genre and elevated science fiction to literary, high-art status. Unfortunately, in writing this novel Dick fell prey to the perils of writing science fiction. He cleverly concocted a bunch of bizarre, fantastical situations, technologies and characters, but failed to imbue them with any real meaning or moment. Thus not only do we not know whom to care about, neither do we have any idea what the real point of anything that happened was. Perhaps that again was Dick's intent, but it's hard to understand what anyone else is supposed to get out of it. Ultimately the novel is frustratingly unsatisfying, lacking any real dramatic arc or climax—a dry hump of a narrative.

To try and summarize the plot would probably be an exercise in futility, but to give you the gist of things: the story takes place in a future America called the USEA in which the President is an android (simulacrum) called "der Alte," built by a huge, monolithic cartel called Karp und Sohn. A new der Alte is built every four years and "elected" by the people. The part of der Alte's wife Nicole is played by an actress. Meanwhile a secret, unelected Council actually runs everything and the people are kept distracted by the spectacle of der Alte and Nicole on their television screens. These are the secrets that separate the two segments of the society, the rulers and the general populace, called the Geheimnisträger ("secret bearers") and Befehlträger ("followers"), respectively. In the course of the novel, we follow "Nicole" and a host of other characters ranging from Richard Kongrosian, a paranoid, telekinetically-gifted Russian pianist, to Bertold Goltz, leader of a populist cult called the Sons of Job and ostensibly Nicole's nemesis.

Inexplicably, the novel ends with the implication that humanity is about to destroy itself and a new race of Neanderthaloid people (created accidentally through radiation damage during World War III) are ready and willing to take its place. Mind you, the first 200 pages of this 214-page novel give absolutely no inkling of anything relating to this theme whatsoever. Most of the novel is preoccupied with the internal and external struggles of the various characters and Dick's attempts to connect them, which are extremely artificial and make the author's role seem like that of a bio-engineer splicing genes together at random to see what happens. Perhaps the experiment was a success; I have a feeling only Dick knew for certain.

There is also a strangely persistent thread of paranoia relating to neo-Nazism which is of course never explained fully or resolved in any way. One is left uncertain as to what precisely Dick's point was: is the USEA a fascist government or are the "Sons of Job" led by Bertold Goltz the real neo-Nazis? And what in the world is the point of bringing real-life Nazi Hermann Goering into the story using time travel only to have him do absolutely nothing other than express horror at his own impending demise (revealed using the same time travel technology)? It simply doesn't make any sense.

With all that said, there are some redeeming qualities to The Simulacra. Dick's portrayal of his characters' mental flaws is, as always, one of the most ingratiating qualities of the book. His characters are always so beautifully flawed that we laugh at them and with them simultaneously, and try to pretend that we don't see ourselves in them. The book's tone, a mixture of paranoid dread and urgency with detached ironic observation, is also classic Dick. These elements are what makes the novel's failure such a particular disappointment. I have read several Philip K. Dick books but I've never been so dissatisfied after reading any of them. I can't recommend this book to general readers or new Dick fans, but if you're a hardcore fan and you're quite determined to read this, it will probably satisfy your craving for more Dick.

Personally, I'm off Dick for now. Yes, Dick has left a bad taste in my mouth. Okay okay, I'll stop with the Dick jokes. I'm just saying, don't waste your time with this one. Get a hold of one of his better novels, like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Divine Invasion or Martian Time-Slip; even VALIS, although some people hate that book—I happen to love it, but I can understand and sympathize with those who don't. Just be warned that none of his novels will turn out the way you expect. Of that I can absolutely assure you.

Sadhappy: Outerspaces

2005-09-08T14:07:00.000-04:00

Sadhappy are not so much a band as a concept. Dating back to the late 80's, the band was originally a collaboration between Paul Hinklin and Evan Schiller, on bass and drums, respectively. Sadly (or happily), I can't tell you what Sadhappy sounded like back then, since I've only heard their latest CD, Outerspaces.

Happily (or sadly), I love this album and I'm going to tell you why. First of all, it features three incredibly talented musicians: Evan Schiller (drums and samplers), Michael Manring (basses) and Mike Keneally (guitars and keyboards). Secondly, it has some of the best track titles of any instrumental album not produced by Frank Zappa, including "Aerocar Vs. The Sweet Tines," "Nightmare At Guitar Center," "Wide Steaming River of Molasses," and my personal favorite, "Aunt Myrtle Ties One On At The Starlight Lounge." Thirdly, it is sonically and stylistically diverse enough that if you put the CD on, about 10-15 minutes later your friends will ask, "Is this still the same CD?" Fourthly, and apropos the previous points, it is FUN to listen to, something that is by no means guaranteed with instrumental music these days. Like Dweezil Zappa's recent Automatic, this is an album that displays formidable musicianship without taking itself too seriously or disappearing up its own ass. I recommend it for anyone who likes experimental, improvisatory music that isn't bogged down with heavy concepts or excessive wankery. And of course, it's mandatory for fans of Keneally, Manring and/or Sadhappy.

A very short guide to the eras of classical music

2005-09-07T16:19:00.000-04:00

Medieval: Anything written in the Middle Ages, until around 1450. This is the one with all the monks chanting. Melodies are simple and writing is mainly sacred music for voice. Modern tonality had yet to be invented so the scales used in the melodies sound really "ancient." Since this era is so long and featured many transitional periods, it's hard to come up with a list of composers who typified the period.

Renaissance: By the 15th century, music theory was advancing and the forms were getting more complex. Polyphony (more than one melody being played at the same time) comes to prominence and the laws of harmony are relaxed a bit to accomodate the needs of the new music. Composers in this period include William Byrd, Giovanni Palestrina, Jacob Obrecht and many others.

Baroque: Dating from the 17th to midway through the 18th centuries, this is the stuff with the harpsichords. The Baroque sense of melody was quite different from our own: repetition was minimal and Baroque composers wrote long, ornate, endlessly flowing melodies. This was also the period in which opera was invented (in Italy, of course). Important composers of this era include Purcell, Buxtehude, Telemann, Handel, J.S. Bach, Monteverdi, Scarlatti and Vivaldi.

Classical: Though classical is a catch-all term for all "concert" music, the Classical era in European music is considered to last from the mid-18th to the early 19th centuries (1740-1820 is often used for the timespan). This is the era in which our modern sense of melody and form were invented, chiefly by C.P.E. Bach (J.S. Bach's #1 son) and Haydn, who are considered the founders of the Classical movement. Basically this involved increasing the dramatic potential of the music through the use of various rhetorical devices, such as repetition and contrast, to create tension and resolution (thus giving the music a dramatic arc). In the Classical style, these techniques became the modus operandi by which composers generated and sustained a listener's interest. Composers of note include Haydn, C.P.E. Bach, J.C. Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven.

Romantic: From mid-19th century into the early 20th century, composers generally followed Beethoven's lead in taking the Classical forms and expanding, loosening and personalizing them as they saw fit. Even as the methods of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven became institutionalized in music schools, composers of this era usually felt compelled to come up with more and more idiomatic and personal means of expressing greater depths of emotion. The result was a looser, more chromatic sense of harmony and a general move toward larger orchestral forces and forms.

A sense of nationalism as well as increased reliance on extra-musical literary and pictorial references also characterize the Romantic period. This is the era in which composers wrote vast symphonic poems, gigantic operas and virtuosic sonatas and concerti. Since this period is so diversified with so many composers from different nations with vastly different styles, it is somewhat difficult to characterize the "Romantic sound." Wagner and Brahms were two equally Romantic composers, but they could hardly be more different from each other, and in fact they were de facto leaders of rival schools of musical thought. The list of great composers from this era is imposingly large: Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Wagner, Bruckner, Mendelssohn, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Liszt, Dvorak and Berlioz, just to name a few.

20th Century (pre-World War II): All bets are off as the available musical resources increase at a rapidly escalating rate. Composers take advantage of this bounty to come up with some of the most astonishly complex and diverse music yet written, in styles ranging from old-fashioned (neo-Romantic and neo-Baroque) to new and experimental (atonal, polytonal, serial, polyrhythmic). Important composers are too numerous to count but include Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartok, Verdi, Mahler, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Varese, Ives, Holst and many, many more.

20th Century (post-WWII): The rise to prominence of several forms of popular music outside of the classical tradition (notably jazz and rock n roll among many others) creates a problem for composers who choose to continue writing "traditional" music. Some choose to ignore the outside world and continue the developments of those before them: Pierre Boulez, among others, develops serial music and others follow suit. Other composers take advantage of new advances in technology in various ways, composing pieces for magnetic tape and using samples of "found sounds" and manipulating them in various ways (the technique is called musique concrete and is first used by Edgard Varese and Pierre Henry, later taken up by Karlheinz Stockhausen and many others). Still others follow more idiosyncratic paths: John Cage experiments with "prepared" piano as well as compositions mediated through the operation of chance, making explicit the heretofore unacknowledged random ineffability of musical performance; Krystof Penderecki and others write music utilizing micro-intervals to create new levels of dissonance; Steve Reich, Terry Riley and Philip Glass explore various aspects of minimalism in music; Frank Zappa uses the example of Varese's "blocks of sound" combined with his own love of rhythm & blues to create a savvy, satirical, heavily-ironicized music combining elements of rock, jazz, pop and 20th century classical. Other composers before and since WWII include: Harry Partch, Conlon Nancarrow, Olivier Messiaen, George Crumb, Gyorgi Ligeti, Arvo Part, and myriad others.

For much more detail on all of these eras, Wikipedia is your friend.

Bach: English Suites No. 2 & 3 and Scarlatti: 4 Sonatas; Ivo Pogorelich, piano; DG1986

2005-09-07T09:54:00.000-04:00

It's probably foolish of me to recommend a recording of Bach's English Suites when it's the only recording I've listened to the whole way through, but I'm going to do it anyway, for a few reasons. One is that it's a cheap album that you can buy on iTunes and it comes with some bonus Scarlatti sonatas; another is that it's really, really good.

The recording in question is by Ivo Pogorelich, a Croatian pianist known mainly for his Chopin. It's a testament to his interpretive breadth that he is also able to play Bach and Scarlatti so convincingly. I think I remember reading an interview with Horowitz or some other old pianist saying that the best way to approach Bach on the piano is to pretend you're playing a harpsichord -- which is to say that the main problem with Bach on a modern piano is you've got to make it sound like it isn't a modern piano. It would be easy to succumb to the temptation to let the notes sustain and bleed all over each other into an Impressionistic mess. With Bach the most important consideration is clarity, since Baroque harmony is the result of the interweaving of separate melodic lines. When Bach was writing these pieces the pianoforte was a new instrument that sounded more like a clavichord than anything we'd recognize as a piano today. The dynamic range was much more limited, the strings weren't doubled, and the sustain pedal may not have even existed yet.

All that being said, it is very possible to play Bach on a modern instrument, provided you have an understanding of how to approach the music. Pogorelich clearly does and for that reason I wholeheartedly recommend this recording to anyone interested in exploring the music of J.S. Bach. This is a recording on Deutsche Grammophon from 1986 (presumably digital) and the sound is crisp without brittleness. I'm not sure where this was recorded but the ambience sounds quite natural and not overpowering or bone-dry, making it a pleasure to listen to and not fatiguing to the ears, even on headphones.

another tiny prayer to Father Time

2005-09-06T13:01:00.000-04:00

Plans is the new album from Death Cab For Cutie. It's not being given the credit I think it deserves, presumably because it is the major-label debut of an established indie emo-pop group. No one is really bashing it (except people who obviously shouldn't be reviewing such material in the first place) but no one's quite singing its praises either. More or less the reaction across the board is a resigned "meh" of approval. This kind of apathy is disheartening but not unsurprising from professional critics who have to come up with something interesting to say in order to earn their living. As an alternative to world-weary criticism, I'm opening up my wordhole and exposing my earnest and embarrassingly naive opinions on music et al. I have an absolute commitment to better living through art and music and I stubbornly refuse to become jaded. That's about as close as you'll get to a manifesto out of me.

Some have compared Plans to X & Y, in an attempt to write it off as another fluffily soothing bit of background music with a crooning vocalist who writes esteem-boosting lyrics for his sensitive, primarily female audience. There might be some truth to that, but I think it's too facile. For one thing, while you won't catch me knocking Coldplay here, and I was very pleasantly surprised by their new album, Ben Gibbard makes Chris[t] Martin look like Robert Frost.

The poet analogy is deliberate, because some reviewers have been less than kind to some of Ben's writing on this album. But let's face it: in a world where critics quote Ashlee Simpson lyrics as though they were worth pondering over, at least he's trying to sing something memorable. And if he does err on the side of preciousness at times (e.g. the title of this post, which I have to admit I actually like), the lyrics are never less than solid and the imagery and subject matter is complemented nicely by the somber, polished arrangements. Speaking of which, an aside: I'm not one of those people who thinks great songwriting has to be accompanied by sonic murk -- perhaps because I listen to so much classical music. Yes, I'm a nerd. Yes, I'm one of those people who listens to Steely Dan and sings along with the guitar solos. And I realize that by admitting as much I've negated the value of my opinions for a good percentage of people out there. But don't say that you weren't warned!

To return to the subject at hand, Ben comes up with a few zingers throughout Plans. "What Sarah Said" conjures up a scene with which most of us are familiar, sitting in the hospital waiting room "that reeked of piss and 409," setting up a one-liner that made me smile: "And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground as the TV entertained itself." And in "Marching Bands of Manhattan" he picks up a familiar image (also used on the previous album, Transatlanticism):

Sorrow drips into your heart through a pinhole
Just like a faucet that leaks and there is comfort in the sound...

Comforting sounds are prevalent in Plans. Throughout, Ben Gibbard sounds comfortable enough with his own voice that he could pull off the old cliche and make the phonebook sound meaningful if he sang it. Since the sonic world in which that voice resides consists mainly of acoustic instruments, with lots of piano and organ along with the guitars, you may find as I do that this album sounds more like home than your actual home.

On the other hand, "Different Names For the Same Thing" has a deceptively old-fashioned piano/vocal intro, after which the song is rearranged and reharmonized to sound more like a Postal Service track -- lyrically the song is practically a haiku in its brevity, but musically the sense is of starting a lonely journey and arriving somewhere quite different, in a mood of elation, as though a battle has been fought and won, somewhere offstage.

I often think that the type of music we like reflects who we are as people. Your enjoyment of Death Cab For Cutie, and indeed the whole emo genre, probably is a good indicator of your level of introversion. If you're quiet and shy and spend a lot of time alone like I do, you'll probably find it easy to like this album. If your idea of a good time is club-hopping or you work in sales, Plans should be reserved for post-hangover recovery time only.

I'd appreciate feedback on this, my first review. FYI, I had to pee almost the entire time I was writing this. And I'm at work. So I have no idea if what I'm writing makes any sense, really.