On a whim
I searched Spotify
for music by Robert Fripp
but found none.
Instead
there was a recording of him speaking to a crowd
about various musical things.
And it was good.
“Music never goes away” he said,
“It’s always available,
but we are not always
available to music.”
And when pushed
to say where music comes from,
to say something about its source,
he just said, resoundingly:
“Music comes from love.”
“The creation of a style often begins with a negative achievement.”
- Tracy Kidder and Richard Todd, Good Prose
If you are a fan of musical minimalisms, atmospheric indie rock, and electronic beats, there was a lot to like about the xx’s poised and elegantly understated performance at Hammerstein Ballroom last week. The young Mercury Prize-winning trio from the UK is Romy Madley Croft on electric guitar and vocals, Oliver Sim on bass and vocals, and Jamie Smith on electronic percussion and keyboards. Theirs is a stripped-down, austere and moody sound that relies on just a few echo-y guitar chord progressions, a handful of sliding bass notes and spartan beats to conjure deep feeling. Against this musical backdrop is Croft’s and Sim’s deeply affecting singing–a singing that is only possible with close mic’ing and serious amplification. Many xx songs feature Croft and Sim taking turns singing the lines of the songs which has the effect of making the song sound like voicing shared secret stories between them that we are listening in on. In concert, the quiet singing sounds powerful and intimate and the minimalist musical textures richly transparent.
While Croft and Sim sing and play at the front of the stage, it is percussionist/programmer Smith standing behind them who is most interesting to watch. (I plead guilty here to a percussion bias.) Smith had an array of electronic drum pads and sample/sequencer machines set up at three different stations across the stage. On most songs you could see him doing something I have only recently thought about as a bona fide kind of musical activity: electronic finger drumming. Standing in front of a hardware controller, Smith used his index fingers to slam out sampled kicks, snare drums, hi hats, hand claps, and other percussive shards in real time. On one song he even played steel pan–though I couldn’t see an actual pan. (And does this matter if Smith used real pan mallets and the sound was real enough?) The pleasure of watching Smith was that you could see him truly controlling the percussion parts–playing little fills, leaving silent spaces at the end of phrases, and, most importantly, keeping his own perceptibly imperfect time that didn’t ever sound quantized (save for a few pre-sequenced patterns he would trigger here and there while busy with something else). Thus, even in those moments where a song had a four-on-the-floor kick drum part you could hear Smith’s small imperfections. Smith also had a single crash cymbal set up at one station center stage. On one song, the percussionist’s right hand held a stick to play a ride pattern on the cymbal while his left hand index finger drummed away kick and snare patterns on tiny rubber pads. What a striking contrast between the acoustic and the electronic! But thanks to Hammerstein Ballroom’s powerful amplification, it all gelled together. If Smith’s finger drumming skills weren’t enough, he also played keyboards here and there. Hats off to his heavy musical lifting.
With the xx, less really is more. The band can extract drama and maintain musical interest from the most seemingly threadbare of materials, and their songs rarely follow popular music’s verse-chorus-bridge conventions. The xx will repeat parts and stay in a place for a while, letting intensity build by other means. It turns out that those threadbare materials–cycling around the notes of a minor triad, say–are anything but. And while I sometimes found myself wanting a little more –a few more strange chords, or maybe some denser rhythmic stuff–the xx make music their way, and theirs is as much about all the things they choose not to do.
***
“Angels”, the opening song on the xx’s recent album Coexist, is effective for reasons both musical and sonic. Musically, there are just four sound sources: Croft’s voice, electric guitar, electric bass, and drum programming. By the standards of multi-layered contemporary pop, it’s a simple instrumentation, but the music fits together in a powerful way. Each part itself is simple too: the guitar plays a 2-note riff that moves around, plus a few chords; the bass slides over a few notes, first in the upper range, then in the lower; the drum programming eschews pretending to be a conventional kit and alternates between sparse scattershot snare drum rolls and concert bass drum hits; and Croft’s voice rarely gets beyond whispering a melody within the tight confines of the first five notes of a minor scale.
“Angels” is also sonically striking. Each instrument inhabits a distinct space in the mix. The guitar is deeply reverbed to sound distant–distant as if off in a far corner of a cathedral; the bass is in a drier and closer proximity to sound like its amplifier is but a few feet from the mic; the drum programming is surreal: the concert bass drum so huge that it momentarily obliterates the other instruments each time it’s sounded, while the snare drum swims in a long tail reverb yet still sounds closer to us than the guitar; finally, the Croft’s voice has a super close-up and dry sound, as if Croft is whisper-singing with a hoodie on and her mouth an inch from the mic. On the one hand, “Angels” sounds like a realistic recording: like four musicians located at varying locations around a single microphone. On the other hand, the song also presents an impossible listening perspective that places the listener at the center of each sound. “Angels” is a simple song, but its arrangement and its recording give it reams of deep resonance.
At home my wife and I watch a prodigious amount of English Premiere League soccer–that’s real football to the rest of the non-North American world. In earlier posts on this blog I have written about watching soccer and golf for their ambient sound potentials–the roar of the soccer fans, or the hushed-reverent tones of the golf commentators. But last week it occurred to me that what is truly interesting about soccer is its rhythm. I say this as a former avid player, a present avid viewer, and as an all around rhythm enthusiast.
Soccer creates rhythm in a number of ways. First, it’s a game of constant motion. Sure the ball may occasionally go out-of-bounds and someone will take a throw-in or a team will have a free kick, but for the most part the ball and the players keep moving for two 45-minute halves (which also means zero commercials). Contrast this with American football or baseball where the action happens in fits and starts. The constant motion of soccer–the motion of the rolling ball and the running players–creates a mostly seamless flowing rhythm.
Soccer is also a game of constant syncopation–that is to say, accentuation in unusual places. First, the ball’s motion is one of ever-changing velocities, tempos and angles–rolling on the ground, flying through the air, bouncing off players’ feet and bodies, spinning, and skidding. Not for an instant does the ball stay motionless and its trajectories are always shifting, always new. Similarly, the players keep moving into geometries that form, quickly vanish, and then re-form again, endlessly. At any given moment anywhere on the pitch you see players moving as if in different rhythmic meters, organizing themselves into a complex polyrhythmic dance around the moving ball, their body movements like accents within the collective rhythmic tapestry.
In addition to constant motion and syncopation, soccer offers space. Despite 22 players roaming the pitch, there’s always more empty green space than occupied space. This empty space is analogous to the space between notes in music: a static background against which we focus our attention on the moving players and the moving ball.
***
But to flip the script for a moment: if soccer has a rhythmic dimension, does music making have game-like attributes? Consider a group of improvising musicians. Their improv takes place within some kind of musical behavioral frame that determines what, stylistically speaking, is fair play and what doesn’t really work. The musical actions of the musicians are analogous to the movements of soccer players on the pitch–collaborating with one another in real-time to achieve a goal. The actions of the musicians are also deeply and singularly focused on making a collective sound. That sound is analogous to the ever-moving soccer ball that is chased around the pitch. Indeed, it’s as if in both improvisational music making and soccer playing it’s the music/ball that leads everyone on their shared adventure of concentration, action, and dynamic interplay. Yet this analogy is not perfect. The goal of soccer is competitive: to score goals! While in music making–which, by the way, can be super competitive as well–the most satisfying moments are often those that don’t need to go anywhere at all. There’s no one keeping score either–just an assemblage of good feeling.
I recently saw a striking cube-based structure by Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) at the MoMa. When you stand in front of it and take it in, the work works on multiple perceptual levels. Here are few things that I noticed:
one large (about 5 by 5 foot) and shallow three-dimensional square;
twenty-five smaller (1 by 1 foot) three-dimensional cubes;
moving from any corner towards the center: five nested cubes, each larger than the previous one (1 by 1, 2 by 2, 3 by 3, 4 by 4, 5 by 5);
and a twenty-five square foot wall space divided by a superimposed grid.
There’s nothing hidden here: you can see not only the metal structure, but also right through it too–to the spaces inside the cubes (on whatever scale you see the cubes on) right onto the cube shadows on the wall itself. As art, it’s not trying to represent anything but itself. It is what it is: solid yet transparent.
LeWitt’s work also reminds me of structures I see (and hear) a lot in electronic music circles, specifically the grid matrix used on drum machines, sequencers, and samplers–instruments which, by the way, are increasingly one and the same piece of hardware. Consider the classic Akai MPC drum machine/sampler
or the more Novation Launch
or the Monome
or Native Instruments’ Maschine
or Ableton’s Push
We can move in other directions too. LeWitt’s cube structure also reminds me of beloved (musical) games from my childhood, including Mego Corporation’s Fabulous Fred (1980)
and Parker Brothers’ Merlin (1978).
LeWitt, widely regarded as the founder of both minimal and conceptual art, began making what he called his open and modular “structures” in the 1960s and the cube form was the basis of much of this work. Thinking analogically about LeWitt’s modular cube piece as I look at it, it feels like an early sign of the repetitive and grid structures of minimal and electronic dance musics (not to mention the grid structures of electronic music controllers). No, there probably isn’t a chain of direct influence here–though LeWitt was an influence on some minimalist composers, some of whom may in turn have influenced various electronic dance musicians. But maybe the significance of the modular cube as art idea lies in its calm anticipation and representation of the digital world many artists inhabit today.
When I first saw Mumford and Sons on Saturday Night Live recently I wasn’t sure what to make of them–which is my fault not theirs. They seem like a throwback to an acoustic bluegrass-folk-rock sound. No synthesizers, sequencers or drum machines, just acoustic guitar and bass, piano/organ, banjo and dobro, a horn section, sing-song group vocals, and a lead singer/guitarist, Marcus Mumford who doubles as a drummer by playing a steady kick drum while standing up and fronting the band. The music is raucous and raw, harmonious and celebratory, but I wasn’t listening too closely–in part because I was staring at the TV wondering if Mumford’s shin muscles might be getting sore from playing that kick drum!
Mumford and Sons originated in the West London folk scene around 2007. Their recent album, Babel, was the fastest-selling album of the year here in the United States and in the UK. A few weeks ago, songs from Babel occupied four of the top ten most streamed songs on the music service Spotify. The music–which critics have called ”pop songs couched in the language of the rustic troubadour” and “blockbuster bluegrass”–has clearly struck a chord with a lot of listeners. I spent a few days trying to overdose on Mumford and Sons in a listening experiment much like the one I carried out with country music here. The point of the experiment was just to figure out how everything works and to hear what kind of effect the music has on me.*
One of the band’s most streamed songs is “I Will Wait”, track three on Babel. The song is uptempo with a 4/4 thumping groove and tightly structured as a series of verses as choruses. The verse is a I-IV-V progression over 8 measures. Nothing special here, music-wise, but it sets the song’s reassuring tone. The music soon opens up with the pre-chorus section, which is a vi-v(6)-I-IV-iii-V progression repeated twice. There are twice as many chords in this section as there are in the verse and chorus in about the same number of measures. The phrase “And I’ll kneel down” gets the first three chords as support, lending the section a sense of motion–maybe a musical representation of literally kneeling down?–and a movement towards that last V chord which will lead dramatically back to the I chord that begins the chorus. The chorus is a I-iii-V progression. That second chord is minor and adds a little melancholy to the chorus’s otherwise boisterous feel. The iii chord hits just as Mumford sings “you” at the end of the line “I will wait for you.” Simple but poignant, and the words gain power as they’re repeated.
Much of Mumford and Sons’ music alternates between whisper intimate verses and rousing, bellowing-in-a-pub choruses. “I Will Wait” makes good use of these shifting dynamics to build and release tension. There’s an urgency and intense emotionality to the song which is transmitted through the steady streams of 16-note guitar/banjo strumming and plucking that supports Mumford’s gruff singing. The music sounds old-fashioned–built as it mostly is out of this strumming, plucking, and the rousing vocal harmonies. Rhythm parts don’t come from drumming as much as from the group’s collective thrum. Mumford make use of careful arrangements too. Sometimes the instruments drop out, strumming limited to the downbeat so the vocals can shine a capella-style. The music sounds live–as if we’re all down at the pub singing and sharing our stories with one another, pouring our hearts out over beers.
There are even tiny tempo variations that reinforce Mumford’s authentically live sound. If you have Babel, listen very closely from 2:06 to 2:15. At the end of the second repetition of the chorus–right around 2:11-2:13–the tempo drags ever so slightly for a brief moment. I first noticed this a few weeks ago and couldn’t put my finger on the problem. It’s so subtle as to be almost unnoticeable, but if you tap your foot along from the first time around the chorus you might catch it. You can’t quantize this kind of thing because the whole band is playing together. And maybe it’s not something you’d want to “fix” anyway. After all, it’s little quirks like this (what the ethnomusicologist Charles Keil once called “participatory discrepancies”) that let us know that the music was recorded live. I listened to the song again as I was editing this blog post and snapped to attention at 2:13 while not aware that I was even paying attention to the time.
***
So why is Mumford so popular now?
Maybe they’re popular because their live-sounding recordings set them apart from so much contemporary electronic pop. Ok, so I’m comparing apples and oranges here. But to continue the food metaphor: one of the most delicious things about this music is how different it is from most technologically-thick pop. Mumford feels live and sounds acoustic. This is a big deal in the context of the pop charts but not to Mumford’s members. Bassist Ted Dwayne is even an acoustic music purist:
“Electronic music or a DJ playing CDs doesn’t excite me. Acoustic instruments are really raw and have a much bigger energy. That is something I can understand.”
Some critics say that the authenticity of Mumford’s live and acoustic folk sound is simply context-related–that it sounds the way it does in part because so much other popular music feels synthetic rather than acoustic, groovy but not folky. As critic David Smyth observes, the band’s music “certainly feels authentic within the context of the charts, which are full of auto-tuned vocals and super-produced R&B songs.”
Finally, listening to Mumford has me thinking about musical style and how style usually changes quite gradually. It’s for this reason that the sound of the pop charts is quite homogenous–different songs by different artists (is “artist” even the appropriate word in this era of think-tank songwriting?) each having a similar feel and texture. Because of this, the sound of contemporary pop will seem like a static thing for a long while. As if in a game of Copy Or Perish, everyone uses similar sounds, similar beats, similar lyrical gestures to keep up with one another until…Someone comes along and does things differently. Maybe Mumford’s success will prompt a stylistic tipping point, or maybe not. Maybe they’re just a one-off–too much “rustic troubadour” to copy. Besides, one thing to remember about musical style is that homogeneity often coexists with fractionalization: there is a niche for every style that can make a case for itself. And in this regard at least, Mumford and Sons succeeds.
***
* Also: listening experiments help me address musical information overload. From my perspective, we have three choices:
1. Listen to a bit of everything. I do this all the time. It’s exciting but glosses over the details.
2. Listen to nothing. If nothing else, this is a good way to cleanse the ear palette.
3. Listen to one thing over and over for a while. This allows me to notice and obsess over details and also hear the music as a model of a social world. Listening to a music over and over helps me hear the world through the feeling of this one style, this one group, this one song.
In a recent online interview excerpted in The Guardian, musician and Portishead member Geoff Barrow discusses the idea of singing with a “fake” voice. Leading the pack in Barrow’s view is the late Amy Winehouse, a white singer who sang, some people say disparagingly, like a black jazz or soul singer from an earlier era–or like someone doing an imitation of such a singer. (There is an excellent article on this topic by Daphne Brooks in The Nation.) Barrow just doesn’t buy Winehouse’s voice, saying that “her actual voice was fake. She had a real life with a fake voice”–a singer who “had become just a comic character of herself and how she sang.”
You can decide for yourself. Here is Winehouse singing her song “You Know I’m No Good”:
Out of curiosity, I read up on Winehouse on Wikipedia. I found a quote from the jazz singer Tony Bennett, who maintained that Winehouse’s voice was the real deal–not fake at all, but steeped in the jazz tradition: ”she was the only singer that really sang what I call the ‘right way’ because she was a great jazz-pop singer. . . She was really a great jazz singer. A true jazz singer.”
In contrast to Winehouse, Barrow mentions a few other female singers—including PJ Harvey, Barrow’s Portishead bandmate Beth Gibbons, and Bjork–who “change their voices while remaining themselves.” Presumably what Barrow means by this is that each of these singers assume a singing voice which, while not their speaking voice per se (after all, whose singing voice is?) is nevertheless somehow true to who they are. But how can a listener make this determination?
I have always liked Bjork’s voice, mainly because it’s so unique–a flexible tool that can sing those unusual Bjorkian melodies. And come to think of it, Bjork’s singing voice is just like her speaking voice but louder and more melodic, arising organically out of the same Icelandic source. Bjork sings in a way that sounds like a heightened spoken voice–as if she’s singing-explaining some very cool things to curious elementary school kids and getting carried away. Her voice seems to be true to who she is.
Here is Bjork singing her song “Moon” (which, by the way, features some devastatingly good overdubbed background vocals):
As for that best-selling singer of recent years, the Englishwoman Adele, Barrow adds: “Strangely enough I think Adele sings in her own voice, I think it’s her trying to be a big voice and that’s her.” But again, how does Barrow come by his insight? How can a listener know Adele is “trying” to be a big voice? Maybe she just has a powerful, big voice.
Here is Adele singing her huge hit “Someone Like You.” One thing I noticed about it compared to the Bjork and Winehouse songs is how massive Adele’s recorded vocal sound is. This is due to her big voice but also to a pristine recording that really booms:
***
These are all interesting notions: What does Barrow mean by singing with a “fake voice”? How do we know when a singer’s or instrumentalist’s artistry is fake or authentically the real McCoy? And what does it mean to change one’s singing voice while remaining oneself?
First, being “fake” in musical terms usually means making use of a style or idiom or timbre that isn’t “natural” to you, isn’t authentically yours. In the case of Winehouse, her detractors feel that she wholesale appropriated her vocal sound rather than…Rather than what? Developed it in isolation, free of stylistic influence? You can see the can of worms this opens up: How do we hear the difference between someone authentically inhabiting a sound as opposed to just fakingly co-opting it in a tourist-y kind of way? Maybe with singers, their voices either ring true or not, although a lot of singing–from pop to opera–sounds affected anyway. With instrumentalists, judging authenticity is even more problematic because instrumentalists can to some degree hide behind their instrument’s sound. All this to say that it’s hard to ever really know how genuinely artists lay claim to a sound and come by their knowledge of its stylistic conventions.
Second, whether we’re talking about singers or instrumentalists, we judge fakeness or authenticity by listening and trusting our guts, and I suppose, our eyes: Does this sound make sense coming from this person? By this measure, Winehouse’s slurred slinkiness, Bjork’s wandering wide-eyed rapture, and Adele’s bellowing all ring true. Each singer inhabits her own kind of authenticity.
Finally, as for changing one’s singing voice while remaining oneself, I’m not sure I understand what this means. Why does it matter whether or not one remains oneself as one sings or plays an instrument? Hasn’t making music always been a kind of theater anyway, a way for performers to try on different hats?
“Seeing is believing, but hearing is hearsay” — Julian Henriques, Sonic Bodies (2011)
Like a lot of people, I’m a fan of Instamatic, a smartphone photo app, because it makes me feel like a skilled photographer. The app is essentially photo editing software that allows you to quickly–really quickly, with the tap of a virtual button, actually–apply a range of filters to your photo to make it look sharper and just plain cooler. Cooler because the filters make your photo look old, moody, vintage, over-saturated, analog old-school, or as Leonard Koren might describe the worn aesthetic–wabi-sabi (you can read more about this Japanese concept here). Instamatic is also a social app, allowing you to share pics with other Instamatic users. So I imagine there are billions of Instamatic photos floating out in the ether, capturing and constructing cool wherever we users happen to point our camera-phones. It feels that easy to use: point, shoot, add filter. Here is one of my pics:
You get the idea.
Thinking about it, it strikes me that Instamatic encourages people to think photographically–to be on their toes, ready for cool sights to capture and render. This is a good thing in that the app pushes us to be visual ethnographers, documenting the passing, strange, and wonderful of our everyday lives. When we take pictures, we see the world differently for a few moments. We think about how we can “frame” what we observe around us, and how we can compress the seen into a visual document for posterity or for our friends. A lot is captured in a photo too. Consider the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words” which refers to the idea that a complex idea can be conveyed through a single image. If this isn’t literally true, then pictures at least provide the illusion of capturing ideas because in pictures we notice so many details, contrasts, and relationships.
But here are my questions: How many words is a sound worth? And if there were an Instagram-like app for capturing, filtering, and sharing sound (calling all app developers out there!), would have it have the same emotional resonance as Instagram?
***
I decided to experiment with taking a field recording I made on my iPhone and running it through some effects processing to try to create some different aural moods. The recording is of a man playing the accordian on a subway platform at Grand Central Station in New York City. After listening to him for a while, I donated some money and he turned to face me so I could take a photo. I liked the music he was playing, and liked it even more as I fiddled around with adding effects to it.
Here is my original field recording:
Here is the clip with delay added so that it sounds like the instrument is bouncing off walls, all dubby and mysterious:
Here is the clip with static added so that it sounds somewhat like an old recording:
Here is the clip with chorusing and flanging added:
Here is the clip with distortion added:
Here is the clip with reverb added so that it sounds like it’s in a cave or large cathedral:
Here is the clip with a glitch-y effect added:
You get the idea. (My favorite, by the way, is the clip with delay added.)
Now one question is whether or not the application of these audio effects affects the mood of the original recording. The answer, I think, is yes, but exactly how the effects alter the mood is somewhat hard to describe. A second and even more fundamental question: Do the audio clips convey as much as the photo of the accordian player conveys? I think so, though the things they tell us are of a different order. Given that I have included a photo of the musician above, we can directly compare the different kinds of information the visual and aural media bring to our awareness. Looking at his photo, you might notice how he’s dressed (casually in jeans, and with a baseball cap), the expression on his face as he plays (pretty neutral, though he was smiling for my picture), or even the heft of his instrument–it almost looks like it’s a struggle just to get those accordian bellows to wheeze into life. My photo captures these bits of information, but it leaves other things out. By contrast, the audio recording isn’t static like the photo is. Instead, it captures the accordian player’s performance over time (about a minute and half of time, in fact). This allows us to experience the non-musical ambient sounds of the subway too–for example, the sounds of other people, and the sounds of spare change landing in the musician’s open instrument case. Without anything to see, we can only focus on the audible information, but we’re granted the luxury of letting that information reveal itself over a duration. Finally, what’s most striking to me when comparing the photograph of the accordian player with a recording of his music is that the music seems more melancholy and expressive than its maker actually looks. The music seems to tell a story that we might miss if we were only looking.
sympathetic resonance –a harmonic phenomenon wherein a formerly passive string or vibratory body responds to external vibrations to which it has a harmonic likeness (Wikipedia).
In his article “The Talk That Does Not Do Nothing” in the July/August 2012 issue of The Believer (The Music Issue), Peter Coviello writes about fighting with a friend over the merits of Steely Dan’s music. Their rambling discussions take place over the course of twenty years, and one of the issues they argue over is whether or not there is a recurring character portrayed in Steely Dan’s lyrics. As it turns out, there may well be such a character and Coviello expertly parses the textual connections among different songs to make his case. Along the way he also renders the experience of his Steely Dan discussions to show what being a devoted music fan is all about.
One of the ways fans express their fandom is by talking about the stuff they love with their friends, explaining and arguing over its virtues, what makes it work so well (or not so well), what makes it important to them, and so on. In the second half of his article, Coviello shifts into deep analytical mode and provides us with an excellent overview of the nature and purpose of criticism in general:
“I’d like to say, then, that what you’re doing when you’re fighting about slight, useless, beautiful things you love, is, in effect, criticism–if we can torque the idea of the critical enterprise hard enough so that it takes seriously the joyousness, the inflooding sense of richness and abundance, by which we are sometimes possessed both in the presence of an object and also in and through the talking with others about the object and its captivations. (…) Criticism might also be understood as the making of a language–and with it the making of a special, precious kind of sociality, fractious and lovestruck–whose roots are in ardor and captivation, something kindled by those moments of exhilaration that songs so commonly produce. (…) Talking [is] the mode of joy’s enlargement, its enactment” (10).
There are a number of exciting points here. I especially like the idea of criticism as a special kind of talking about that which captivates us in something, as a “precious kind of sociality” that frees us to create a unique language for our talking/writing, and also the idea of criticism as a way to enlarge the joy we have already experienced through say, music, art, or in a book. Taken together, these ideas on the functions of criticism reinforce a notion that I’ve had for a while: the critic–amateur or professional, it doesn’t really matter–as someone who puts into words the texture of his/her co-resonance with whatever it is that seems worth writing about. To use a sound analogy: we’re vibrating in sympathy with a tone that has already sounded and now we want to extend that resonance, amplify it, and let it keep ringing through ourselves and hopefully out towards others too.
As I have said elsewhere, practically speaking this blog is more for me than for you, sure, and tries to ask questions about musical things as I encounter them. And by things I mean: musical sounds, instruments, artists, aesthetics, technologies, codes and systems of signification, compositional techniques and performance practices, and so on.
But metaphorically speaking, this blog is like a tuning fork, trying to get its forms and contents in tune with one another–to get them in sympathetic vibration, so to speak. It’s not that the topics presented aren’t of vital interest, because they are–at least to me. But what’s equally at stake is how well-proportioned the posts are in relation to the material about which they speak. This is a pursuit and a discipline that I find fascinating because, depending on what I’m talking about, it’s possible to say too little or too much, miss the right tone, harp on insignificant details while missing the main point, come across as haughty or too neutral, and on and on. Sometimes the subject matter benefits from the inclusion of photos, animation, or video clips in the post, yet at some point there’s always a prose description that’s a compression and distillation of what it all seems to mean to me, right here and right now.
And saying what something means
in just the right way
can make all the difference.
While waiting for some take out food I dashed into the clothing store Urban Outfitters to have a look around. Founded in Philadelphia in 1970, Urban Outfitters specializes in hipster aesthetics–specifically, making clothes that look vintage and of an older era. Originally a single store in lower Manhattan, the company now has retail outlets in 38 states as well as in Europe, bringing the out-of-date-and-therefore-cool look to the suburban masses everywhere. As I walked around I passed racks of t-shirts that were replicas of ones from the 1970s and 80s depicting cartoon images of boomboxes and turntables, Mr. T, the Star Wars and Atari logos, and so on. This is the kind of clothing which, if you grew up in the 70s or 80s like I did, you might have actually worn. Even if you didn’t, the iconography of these brands and personalities still resonates deeply (I have fond memories of the audio and video game technology in particular). This resonance triggers a nostalgia (nostalgia is Urban Outfitter’s fashion currency) for the past and you find yourself thinking: “That time was pretty cool wasn’t it?” Of course, back in the day, the stuff wasn’t vintage, it was just youth fashion or leading edge technology. This all reminds me of my fashionable sister exhorting me in the 1980s to explore the real vintage/second-hand clothing stores to search for real old stuff–like plaid shorts. (Which I did find and I did wear. Thanks MEB–but that’s for another forum!)
***
Urban Outfitters also sells vintage-style technology. By the front door of the store I spotted the Lomokino 35mm movie camera, a new machine designed to look and function like the 35mm cameras of old. Who, you ask, would use this when we have cell phones that ably do the job? I don’t know, but here it is:
I also saw the Music Hall USB-1, a turntable with a USB wire to connect to your computer. What would I do with such a machine? For one thing, if I were a vinyl collector I could dub those vinyl sounds off the vinyl and into a hard drive. So maybe this old-new technology could be useful:
Finally, I saw a small and carefully chosen selection of recent-ish recordings re-released on vinyl. Even in our digital era it’s not unusual for musicians to release limited vinyl editions of their work. DJs like vinyl for its supposed superior sound quality, and some non-electronic musicians who release music on vinyl think the format is cool because that’s how all recorded music once existed (which is a kind of vinyl/analog fetishism if you ask me). And why does Urban Outfitters sell vinyl? Maybe because, like the Atari t-shirts downstairs, vinyl signifies the past.
One album that I recognized on the rack because I listened to it a few years ago was Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago (2007) (see lower right hand corner in photo).
Iver (Justin Vernon) is an indie folk-rock musician who famously recorded For Emma by himself in a Wisconsin country cabin over the course of a three-month retreat (he was recovering from a relationship plus a bout of mononucleosis) using very low tech (vintage, really) means: an acoustic guitar, some drums, an amp and a mic, and an old computer. Here’s Iver: “I had a very light set-up, a basic small recording set-up: a Shure SM57 and an old Silvertone guitar. I had my brother drop off his old drums… some other small things–things I would make or find lying around.”
Iver’s overdubbed vocals are imperfect, ragged and rustic, his foot stomping percussion gritty and ad hoc, and his guitars noticeably out of tune. The sound conjures a timeless, worn, and definitely vintage aesthetic. Here is Iver’s song “Skinny Love”":
