I...

got nothing. Music bloggy wise.

Let's attempt to at least do something technical to expand my learning. Yes, let's attempt embedation of a video.

Dinner is served...

Happy New Year

It was a New Year's tradition in our house to play ABBA's "Happy New Year", from 1980, just after midnight.



For a few years I also liked to put on radio station WWV, broadcasting on internationally allocated standard carrier frequencies of 2.5, 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz in the shortwave band.

The way out

Writing exercise

Rules:
1 keep your hand moving
2 lose control
3 be specific
4 don’t think
5 don’t worry about spelling, punctuation, or grammar

Write for 15 minutes starting with "i see"

Result (unedited)
I see a way out, but it’s on the ground and I’m on a merry go round. It’s a matter of perspective, what’s moving and what’s not. There’s a way of fixing my eyes and moving my body that makes me sense that there’s stability somewhere. Cross products shove me in unexpected directions but if I can just hold onto the bar and move my neck, I can find perspective. I see that the way out involves jumping, but the ground so close is the ground that’s moving the fastest. If I were strong enough, I could jump way out to the sandbox, but I am no longer batman. If only the bars were over the TOP of the merry go round, I could just jump up and catch one and let my legs swing out all the energy I’ve built up on this ride until I was hanging still and peacefully. But then I’d be hanging from a bar and I’d have a different kind of problem, with the spinning world below like a welcoming hot tub of familiar challenges. It’s not really a way out, but more of a bar vacation. The way out has to involve jumping, or just waiting for friction to grind the world to a halt, but I hate waiting. Rhythm has to play a part here in the way out. I can choose five or six points and focus on them long enough to judge whether they’d be a good place to land and let my physical intuition do enormous calculations of projectile motion that I’d never be able to write down. There?…. There?….. there? ….. there? ….. there?….. there?. No, not there. Not there. Not there. Ok there. The way out also involves some pretty careful timing. Now? Now? Now? Now? Now? No, not yet. I now watch my landing place every 10 seconds for 3 seconds and try to study it. It seems to move and change. I use the studying of the landing place as an excuse for not jumping. But soon I will jump. Next time. Now? Ooooh, I missed it. OK NOW. Ouch. Ow o wow ow. What have I broken? Why am I still spinning? Where is everybody? Will I get used to this? Maybe I should plant something or build something. I’m still spinning. Where is the rhythm of stillness? What is there to guide the next move without the fight against the spinning? Anywhere I put my hands and my knees and my elbows and my feet they stay.

Right way / Wrong way: Songs about Bob

This year I heard what has to be one of the best Bob songs ever, and it nearly washed away the memory of one of the worst songs I’ve ever heard—about Bob or anyone else.

Right way

Bob - Drive-By Truckers

Let’s start with the good Bob song, from the Drive-By Truckers’ universally awesome Brighter than Creation’s Dark.  “Bob” sounds like a like a Don Williams classic until you realize the song is subverting country music’s “Simple Man” and rambler tropes by revealing its guileless hero as not-quite-all-there loner who never married and still lives with his mom. Not because he’s gay, you understand. But because he’s a misanthrope who’s just self-aware enough to wonder whether he and sad bastards like him aren’t being incrementally eliminated by cheap cable internet connections and the liberal media. It’s a two-minute microtragedy, and it’s a REALLY GOOD SONG.

Wrong way

Losing My Way - Justin Timberlake

If you want to hear a character study that’s absolutely, hilariously awful, I urge you to check out Justin Timberlake’s “Losing My Way.” I was a huge fan of Timberlake’s Futuresex/Lovesounds, but its worst song (by many, many miles) is this cautionary tale about how drugs can tear apart your life. Here are song’s two verses:

Hi my name is Bob and I work at my job
I make forty-something dollars a day
I used to be the man in my hometown
Until I started to lose my way
It all goes back to when I dropped out at school
Having fun, I was living the life
But now I got a problem with that little white rock
See I can't put down the pipe

Now you gotta understand I was a family man
I would have done anything for my own
But I couldn't get a grip on my new found itch
So I ended up all alone
I remember where I was when I got my first buzz
See I thought I was living the life
And the craziest thing is I'll probably never know
the color of my  daughter's eyes

I think Justin Timberlake may have violated the first rule of writing, which is write what you know. Love him or hate him, JT is a ridiculously talented musician who was raised in relative wealth and trained as a performer from a very young age. If that’s not bad enough, dude is an amazingly good athlete who’s become a near-scratch golfer in his spare time. My point is this: Timberlake has not wasted one moment of his life in the kind of pointless, soul-crushing squalor faced by the average crack addict. And that’s why “Losing My Way” is a particularly good example why people who don’t do drugs should never, ever urge other people not to do drugs. Like Nancy Reagan before him, such advice is likely to have the opposite effect.

Justin probably should have left the song off the album, instead he tried to salvage it by including it on the album’s weaker half and adding a rote bridge before finishing off with a gospel choir. As I said, I really like Justin Timberlake. But this is very good evidence that I shouldn’t.

Another Three

I don't have much this week, but here are three videos which you may or may not enjoy.

Week 113: Johnny Cash y El Gran Combo

A friend sent me this saying it was not only good for christmas, but required watching. I agree.



And here's El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, a national institution, singing a song called, No Hay Cama Pa Tanta Gente (not enough beds for so many people). It's a song about a Christmas party. Send them down, cuase they're dangerous upstairs goes one of the call and response choruses.



Have a feliz Navidad!

Natural Selection

Three pairs of hands outstretched for Clara; she's only 350 days old still she must make a choice.

Slice of carrot,

Slice of carrot, chunk of cheese,

Slice of carrot, chunk of cheese, piece of bread.

Slice of carrot, chunk of cheese, piece of bread. List,

Slice of carrot, chunk of cheese, piece of bread. List, value,

Slice of carrot, chunk of cheese, piece of bread. List, value, select.

We are always making lists. It's not a cultural thing, though I voted, did you?

Immigrants have a stronger sense of "Bestest" than the restest of us. Santa's making a list, even checking it twice.

It's a matter of survival.

The media likes to make lists; not to demonstrate the wisdom of their editorial boards but because they know that lists attract debate which attracts readership which attracts advertisers which attracts revenue which keeps them in the swim.

So without further revenue, debate this...

My Top Ten List of Music for the Year Music to My Ears 2008, going up but not really in any particular order...

10. Farts (my own mainly, physical affect also welcome)

10.5 The constant ringing in my years. Tells me I'm alive.

09. A good ukelele, better than a crappy ukele. I have a short list but A is miles above B. Bad ukele did not make list.

09.5 The sounds of the forest. Though I am lost, they tell me I am alive.

08. My sole remaining grandmother's voice. Old school New York - just like Mama Biden, "God Love Him"'s abound.

08.5 Onions sizzling in olive oil. If I am hungry I am alive.

07. www.SadHorns.com is pretty good.

07.5 My feet in motion, running along the lake shore. What good is alive if I cannot run?

06. The little quivering sound baby Clara made, ten seconds after surfacing. I hear all babies make this one.

06.5 The coffee maker in the morning. What good is alive without mornings? Without coffee?

05. A successful drum take.

05.5 The shovel in the snow. Death is all around but not inside my gloves.

04. Mail dropping into the mud room from the door slot (IF, contains a good Netflix DVD, a paycheck, a New Yorker, a letter, or a package for Clara. These days --after many years of drought-- it almost always does contain one of the above. Btw what happened to all those NAP mailings we used to do, let's get back to it okay?)

04.5 The shovel in the earth. Good things come to those who wait.

03. Dungen

03.5 A thick Chicago accent to help me form my own.

02. churchbus on a roll - though it's been a while

02.5 My own Texas drawl when I choose to use it.

01. Clara (ullus sanus)

01.5 Clara (ullus sanus)

Houston Photo Section

Houston December 22, 2008

New Napcast

This is just a funny collection of songs that I thought I'd try and put a theme to, with pictures and other songs that matched the mood. The reggae ones were the first inspiration and the best songs, but I thought I'd find others to add to it to extend the theme. They are chosen purely on title.

Don't think this theme extends into my life. It doesn't compare except, mostly, in humorous thoughts.

Merry Christmas!

Listen by clicking the player below, or signing up to the podcast via this RSS link:
http://nap.podomatic.com/rss2.xml

No Guru, No Method, No Top Ten List

I've always found top ten lists, or top anything lists for that matter, a bit suspect. For one thing, the title seems to presume a wider purview (the year in music, for example) than could possibly be surveyed by one individual, or even one organization. Even for the music you do hear in one year, it's impossible to give everything a fair shake. A high percentage of the stuff I end up liking, I don't necessarily start out liking. It takes several listens to even start an investigation. I guarantee that courtesy isn't extended to every contender. Then there's the eternal matter of taste. And the final absurdity is the specific numerical ranking, that #4 is definitively worse than #3.

Having said all that, these lists do sometimes have a function for this reader, to see what I've missed, what I should maybe give a second and third chance. So if anyone feels so inclined, feel free to comment with your lists of whatever sort. Meanwhile, here are this year's supposed top viral videos. I had thought there were more...

musical interfaces and how to make almost anything

inventing invention

aww, i was looking forward all week to writing this blog post about all the final projects from two awesome classes at the media lab: musical interfaces and how to make almost anything. then i realized that i probably shouldn't post photos of peoples' ideas without asking them, so i will just encourage you to explore the links. in particular, if you go to the websites of the people in the class, you'll see some cool stuff. but, that doesn't really have much to do with music, although it gave me some ideas for my big project.

there doesn't seem to be a public website for the musical interfaces group, so i will have to just say that it was cool, for now. sorry.

oh, i do have something for you...my contribution to this video was to select an appropriate song. i think i chose well. this is yet another class, "design for fabrication," and the video was put together by my friend seth hunter. bonus points if you know the track.

Far, Far Away

I'm at my sister-in-law's wedding this weekend, so I don't have much to say, or time in which to say it. But I note that on the way up here, I heard Wilco's "Far, Far Away" on a brand new mix CD I received (one of those swap parties). I've heard it many times, but it sounded better for some reason.

I've been a Wilco fan for as long as there's been Wilco, and there's not a single record I don't like. That said, I've always felt like the songs on Being There were somewhat unfinished. It's got beautiful, effortless melodies and some inspired playing. And it covers a lot of ground. But even when it came out, many of the songs felt like sketches to me, especially the lyrics.

Hearing "Far, Far Away" last night forced me to reconsider. At least that one song. What used to sound unfinished now contains perfect restraint, creating space for those elegant cowboy chords and steel guitar. It's just a really good song. And I love the lyrics. It's not genius or anything, but it seems to say what needs to be said.

Deep in my heart
I know it's right

Z

I think I have discovered the source of all that is bad in music. Actually, I hesitate to call it music. Let's just call it what it is: Crap. In the past few years, I've watched in horror at the increasing popularity of crap and wondered where all this crap keeps coming from. I've had this personal theory that there is a single source, some kind of wellspring of this blight which threatens to destroy music as we know it. It will breed and eventually squeeze out the good, like a cancer. But like cancer, it's possible to stop it if you catch it early. With that in mind, it's time to start the chemo on Southern California's Suburban Noize Records.

The first, obvious clue here is the way they spell "noise." Unless you are Quiet Riot or Slade, you just don't get to spell it with a "z." I think there may be a law somewhere saying something to this effect. These people flout this law, apparently thinking it's more important to seem rebellious, in a well-established, non-threatening way.

Next, let's look at Wicked Wisdom:



Yes, that's Will Smith's wife fronting a metal band.

Then there is Big B:



Or Daddy X:



Or, most importantly, Brokencyde:



Can you feel the rebellion? If you manage to sit through these videos, I think you will come to the same conclusion that I have about the crap origin. And now that we've identified the source of the rot, we must now busy ourselves with cleaning it up. Or, I guess, do nothing. That's what I'm doing about it.

***********

Somewhat related to last week's post, here is The Economist's take on the evolutionary origins of music.

dUngEn

Week 112: A Pointless Manifesto

or

The Means vs. The End: An Exaggeration: A Pointless Manifesto: A Prediction: A Pure Waste of Time: Ignore The Results

There is a certain segment of the population that is all about results. Scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, many others. For them beauty and poetry are incidental.

They will hang themselves by their results.

There are some that might aim for a beautiful solution to a given problem, but ultimately it’s the solution that interests them.

They will also hang themselves by their results.

There are also artists, poets, and musicians who are concerned with results. And not just results like getting work, success or money, though these are also very sought after results. The very worse of them are concerned with the worst results of all: a clear and definable statement, an understandable image, a purpose, a message, a result.

Their results will hang them from the highest branches of their own lofty aspirations.

Because results are incidental to creation.

The result then is that musicians, in particular, will hang for the longest eternity, from the very highest branches with the thickest ropes.

The result of their concerns with results.

Because music should be free from any aim.

Because music is the most pointless of endeavors and should remain so.

Because musicians who attempt to contaminate music’s bright illustrious pointlessness with a purpose will lead the world into the chaos and darkness from which it is already almost too late to turn back.

Because music is our last hope.

Our world is walking up the gallows to hang from its results and it is musicians who are the hangmen.

The only way out of this purpose-obsessed existence is to ignore all cause and effect. And so we must declare and end to results. And so we must declare an end to purpose. And so we must create a music that is never over.

And now it’s dorky day again.

Purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purpose purposev purpose purpose purpose

I mean dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky dorky 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This Week On Wednesday On the NAP - Special Wednesday Edition EXTRA Typing! Happy Holidays From Mr. Lost His Way

Last week, I lay down some pretty basic drum tracks in the Sunken Monastery. Once I was happy with the quality of the performance, I lay down a bass track. But then every other time I'd listen back, the thing seemed to have no rhythm what so ever. Then it got cold, very cold. So I went back down to the Monastery and started beating on the drums to get some indoor exercise. I soon realized I could play that drum part better so bass track be damned, I did another take. Then I noticed the kick drum track was humming and traced it back to the Joe Meek compressor so I had to redo again. Ran the kick too hot. Recorded again. Now I think I got something but need to step away, clear my brain.

So it's taken a week to maybe get a drum part down. At this rate, I hope I finish a piece by 2010.

BTW, my snare sounds like a possum in a wheelbarrow, what the hell can I do to it? I think I'm mic'ing it alright. It sounds shitty in the room too so I don't think it's the mic's.

Kick drum could probably be a little dead-er and I think I know how to fix that. It's also noisy and oddly creaky in its metal parts. I need a good mic too. I'm watching Sennheiser mic's on eBay, just waiting for a good deal.

Around the House

I bought one of these. It has been a blast to play. Ukele is very easy to pick up for a guitarist since the standard tuning is the same as the top four guitar strings, except it's tuned up (d becomes g) and the fourth string is thinner and an octave high.

Originally I bought a much less expensive uke but it proved un-tune-able. This Lanikai sounds amazing. I'm going to record with it soon. Thinking about a children's album (surprised?).

Chicago Photo Section

The Hideout, Chicago - December 14th, 2008

Around Town

Metal is one of the most popular rock genres of all time but I had no idea the metal cuisine was equally loved until I tried to get in at Kuma's Corner. Kuma's is a nondescript Chicago corner bar by outward appearance, terrific hamburger joint set to a metal soundtrack on the inside. However getting a seat is difficult. I finally got a chance to try the place this month - I ordered to go.

I got the Slayer which is a huge burger topped with chili, andouille sausage and a bunch of other stuff. Tricia had the Mastodon which is their BBQ offering. Both were awesome.

This weekend Kuma's is hosting a Doom Fest at the Double Door. Looks like a good one, gonna try to make it Saturday night.

Can't go Sunday because I'll be on my way to H-town. I've never been more ready to get down there too. It's Clara's first Christmas for one thing. It's also been the coldest December I can remember and getting colder; supposed to get down to -4 by Monday. They tell me it's cold in Houston too, but they don't know cold.

point to delinquency

I have just uploaded my post from last Sunday, which risks being buried before ever being visible, so scroll down to find my post. I'm sorry for the delay - Sunday night I was stranded on the New Jersey turnpike in my fire truck.

Lack of Failure = Success

This content of this post makes me feel sappy and girly, just how I like my movies - but not my books, oddly. Back to the sap, if I could complete this current day and time post and story with victorian outfits, that would be even better. Sadly, the events of last night were not three hundred years ago, or even a hundred and fifty, which would have done in a pinch.

And you know what? I'm going to wrap it up in a lovely bow with a solid beginning, middle and happy ending.

Why not? I've wasted a good half of my work day on non-work things, communication breakdown is happening all around as per usual, and I'm faced with another night of all work.

Back to the happy...

Yesterday my boy got a severe ear infection from out of nowhere. He hadn't been sick or had a fever. As soon as I get to work, I have to turn around and go get him. There was an hour drive I could have done without. Also, before leaving I got to attend a meeting where everybody received their 'corporate gift' (repeated like 20 times, so weird) except me. I know I will soon receive my 'corporate gift' so I'm not upset about the delay. (Again, so weird. How about 'our gift to you?' huh?)

I pick up the boy, manage to get he and his brother in to see the doctor and Abe has an 8 degree ear infection. Apparently it's bad but I don't know the scale. Luckily the little one is without sickness.

Abe mostly acts just fine but every once in awhile has a bout of cranky behavior. We go through about 5 of those as I'm trying to work from home and finally it comes to a head when I tell him to go to bed without his hot chocolate. He starts throwing a tantrum. A tantrum! I actually give him a spanking, which is for me, like how I used to smoke, I didn't even inhale so wasn't actually doing it for a good three years. Needless to say it's like the tap a baby bird would give a tree. It's still new to me and I may drop it, but anyway...

This sends him into wails and I look forward to another miserable 30 minutes as I try to get him to brush his teeth and into bed so I can then go work for 3 hours.

I give him a hug and ask that he gives me one. He does. A little hope rises. I talk to him soothingly that I need him to calm down and that we can have some great times tomorrow if he can just exhibit some better behavior that's more positive and normal voice. He actually acquiesces. Then his cry changes and he gives me a hug with his arms and his legs.

We brush teeth, and by the end he's back to happy Abe. I am so thankful for the bounceback. None of this holding on to anger or the memory of "I've been done wrong." Just, happy Abe.

I tell him how it's great that he's so happy and he said that when he was crying his mind changed and he thought about if I died and he missed and really loved me. He was very happy and looking to a great morning of hot chocolate, chocolates from the Christmas calendar and getting to ride the bus to school.

Then I go help Artie out who is struggling with Moses who just will not relax. I take over and tell he needs to get his act together or he's going to thinking chair. He stops immediately and closes his eyes. After I sing a song, I try to leave doing the slinking movement of moving very slowly out of the bed so he won't notice.

He notices. I tell him I'm going to go to work. He says, Mommy go? I said yes. He asks, "In the van?" I say no. I tell him I'm going to work downstairs. He says, "In mommy daddy bed?" No, downstairs. He says, oh, and rolls over and goes to sleep.

Unprecedented.

I couldn't believe the success of these two things. What made me most happy is that I feel an actual connection with my older boy. He's finally getting this death thing, that we have to enjoy each other right now. More importantly, I can actually do this mother thing. It is possible to have it work, and not just be endless tasks of just trying.

I don't know if anybody gets this, but even if you don't have kids, it's just the feeling of finally connecting to someone intellectually and spiritually and know that they will always be there for you, in whatever capacity they can be. The connection, the success of that connection, the lack of failure - totally awesome.

What's In A Name

Sometimes people introduce me to other people as a "musician". It always makes me feel a little weird, considering the paucity of my output and the infrequent rate at which I play shows, which can easily be measured in terms of SPD (shows per decade). I like to say that I'm a theoretical musician... theoretically, I make music.

I (can) do a number of different things, but what I'm best known for (by 5 or 6 people) is playing a Farfisa organ through a laptop. You can listen to some here. One thing I'm trying to figure out is what to call it. Initially I just used my own name, but a couple years ago, a friend arranged for me to play at a noise/experimental series. In an attempt to conform to my perceived norms of said series, I tried to make the music noisier, by use of this thing called a distortion pedal. You can listen to the results here. It doesn't really sound that radically different from the previous output, but in anticipation of a radical change, I had thought I'd better come up with a noisier name. And so I utilitized a previous idea, the rejected-in-favor-of-"Ultra Hummus" name, "Lordosis".

But being that it didn't turn out to be a radical break, I feel like I mislabeled the music and wasted the name. I would hereby like to retain all rights to the Lordosis (tm) name in perpetuity, but I want to save it for a noisier future. Meanwhile, this stuff still needs a name. I really wanted to use "Melody Laughter", after the freeform thing the Velvet Underground sometimes did. Unfortunately, there's already a Japanese band by that name that no one has probably ever heard of. Okay, hmmm. I was just going to link to the band's website, which I think was melodylaughter.com, but now it turns up an error. Maybe the name is free for me now! I wonder if there's any way to find out definitively? At any rate, I had then considered using something like "Melody Laughter UK", which could cause a certain amount of humorous confusion. More recently, I thought maybe "Conortronics" (inspired by Frippertronics) might be good.

Additionally, I feel like this music might possibly be acceptable in the venues of multiple -brows, which raises the question of whether to use my own name in one situation and an invented name in others, or whether to enforce consistency. Of course, as I mentioned, this is all mostly theoretical, but lemme know if you have any brilliant ideas.

32 Flavors and then some

Every Friday at 4pm is tea at the MIT Media Lab. Hosting rotates around different research groups. This week Necsys, the network admin folks, hosted, and apparently they have a reputation to hold up. Their entire space was decorated with lights and centerpieces. One guy made homemade chocolate milk, which he was hand serving to teagoers. There were cheeses, dips, breads, crackers, cookies, veggies, and oh so many different types of chocolate. At this tea I was invited by Barry Vercoe to a concert at Harvard later that evening. Knowing Barry, it was bound to be interesting, so we met up at 6 and drove to Harvard Square.

Following a fine Indian meal, we walked through Harvard Yard to the John Knowles Pain Concert Hall. The Harvard university Studio for Electroacoustic Music was presenting "H Y D R A - THE SOUND SPACE EXPERIENCE." The smallish concert hall was pimped with 32 speakers, arranged in sets of 8 concentric circles around the central section of the hall. The performers (Hans Tutschku and his students of Music 167) sat at a large yamaha mixing console in the middle of the audience. The stage was empty and the performers were largely invisible unless one happened to be sitting right behind them, which we were, of course.

From the program:

"The Hydra loudspeaker orchestra is a sound projection system designed for the performance of electroacoustic music with or without the participation of instrumentalists. A loudspeaker orchestra consists of loudspeakers distributed throughout a performance space used for the spatial diffusion of an electroacoustic work. Hydra is comprised of 32 loudspeakers placed all around the concert hall, distributed both horizontally and vertically, in order to prvide a wide range of sound planes and perspectives. Two control interfaces with 32 faders create the possibility to control in real time the individual loudspeakers, or groups of them, which are especially configured for each work performed. Harvard's electroacoustic music resources are concentrated in the Harvard University Studio for Electroacoustic Composition (HUSEAC) located in Paine Hall, at the Harvard university Music Department. The HUSEAC facilities are open to graduate composition students and those enrolled in electroacoustic music seminars."

The first half of the concert consisted of 9 pieces by students. The undergrad students had composed their pieces in stereo but were then diffusing them into the 32 channel system in real time. The grad students had composed for 32 channels. The reason Barry was particularly interested in attending, aside from knowing Hans, was that one of his students was performing. Anna Huang, whose desk I'm occupying while she spends the year at Harvard, performed her piece. It's still a bit up in the air whether she'll come back to MIT in the spring. If she does, I may be out of a desk at the highly space-constrained Lab. This is interesting because I may also be out of my loft apartment, as my landlords are trying to sell it in April. April is also when the second half of my NASA funding gets applied. I could easily be out of a job, a desk, and a place to live come April. But I digress into the uncertainties of life.

Back to the concert...I wish I could describe the difference in sound between this setup and, say, a surround set up in a movie theater. You'd think it might be similar since the rooms are the same and movie foley and soundtracks are designed to give a feeling of being inside the sound. But it was totally different. It was like being inside a giant 3-D HD sound hologram or something. All of the compositions were using non-pitched sound samples, and after two and a half hours of this, my musical brain was dying to hear the more traditional elements of music (pitch, harmonic progression, rhythm) on this system. It wasn't to be, though.

The second half of the concert was a 43 minute piece by Iannis Xenakis called la Legende d'Eer. The original piece was written for 8 channels and looped on a 32 channel speaker system in an installation space in Paris that people walked through. Hans Tutschku created a mix to simulate for this seated audience the experience of walking through the original space. It was painful at first, but then mesmerizing. The 43 minutes went by much faster than I thought it would.

The benefit of going to a concert like this with Barry is that he knows EVERYONE, so everything comes with bonus backstories. Xenakis was a friend of his, as is Hans. I wish I had more for you guys, but all I have are these kind of lame iPhone pictures of the hall.

Mogwai is rocking me with their action

It’s been a while since I really tore into some Mogwai. Like a lot of people, I enjoyed Young Team. But other than that record and My Father My King, I’ve not been a superfan.

That said, “The Sun Smells Too Loud”, off their new record The Hawk is Howling is hitting all my pleasure centers. I wouldn’t have even heard it but for its inclusion in Matador’s free fall sampler, Intended Play. Now I can’t stop playing the damn thing. Perhaps you will have a similar response: here’s a fan-made video that uses visual dance loops to accurately convey the song’s booty-swaying potential (I’ve seen this semi-stock video footage before, but where?).

I just downloaded the rest of the record this morning, so I haven’t had a chance to dig into it, but I do recommend downloading that Matador sampler. It’s got lots of great tracks, including unreleased awesomeness from A.C. Newman and Condo Fucks (a.k.a., Yo La Tengo).

ZZZZ

I haven't listened to much music this week. That is, I haven't listened to much music outside of the near constant "beep, beep, beep" of trucks backing up, as the city tears up the streets in my neighborhood. I guess they are lowering the grade, but I have no idea why they are doing that. They are here very early and they leave after dark. It sounds like they are making a lot of progress, but then I look out the window and I just see bunches of them standing around and not much has changed since the last time I looked. That's not to say that aren't making any progress, just that the pace seems glacial. And all the beeping and crashing and sometimes the physical shaking is distracting.

At night there are trains. And there is always the freeway. I sometimes wish that I could stop hearing it. I know that would be worse, but sometimes I just want to sleep. But I can't. Not with all the noise and activity going on out there. So I spend a lot of time just lying here thinking about the nature of all this sound.

Sound doesn't really exist, does it? What we think of as sound is just the way our brains are wired to respond to compression waves. That's a pretty useful thing for us to notice, because perceiving these little differences in air pressure probably saved us from the maws of quite a few lions. And as a bonus, since our brains were all based on the same blueprint we all perceive these pressure differences similarly--instead of say, some of us perceiving them as sound and some of us perceiving them as color--so we can exploit this sense for our own purposes. We make our own waves and then even impose an aesthetic them. We like some of them, but dislike others. Some of them inexplicably inspire a sense of foreboding in humans. Where does that come from?

The next logical step here is to wonder if there are other physical phenomena for which we don't have receptors. What if we had well developed receptors tuned to the level of moisture in the air? Wouldn't we also impose an aesthetic on that? It seems like we would then have a kind of television based on this sense which would let us all have a similarly artificially manipulated humidity experience. What a strange world that would be.

I sure wish I could sleep.