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Freestyle: Musical Cliches (?)
Go by feel. Follow your bliss. Express yourself. Make it catchy. Practice, make it right, rehearse. Build your fan base. Mix up styles, fusionize. Make it relevant, contemporary. Keep evolving. Do your own thing. Hear it in its historical context. Cater to your fans. Self-deprecate. Continue reading
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Lessons From Dilla 1: High End Is Optional
Having high-end frequencies is optional: Do you need hi hats and cymbals? Does the kick need to be crisp or can it be muffled? Continue reading
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Resonant Thoughts: Ulf Olson’s “Listening For The Secret” (2017)
“There is…an interesting dialectic of tradition and Avant-Garde at the heart of the Grateful Dead’s music, a dialectic that might be generated by the larger dislocations taking place on a worldwide scale, but enacted within a community, forming around a group of musicians, that would gradually grow until it would become a national, and to… Continue reading
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Long Tail Listening
In music, we pay a lot of attention to the onset of sounds—the point at which the sound begins its audible life. The onset of a sound is its attack point where the stick hits the drum, the bow grabs the string, the finger presses the key, and so on. From a sound’s attack we… Continue reading
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Brett’s Sound Picks: Chad Lawsen’s “St. John Passion (Johannespassion), Bvw 245 (Bc D2)”
(This austere piano versioning of Bach reminds us that either we’re not reaching high enough or have momentarily forgot beauty’s reach.) (Follow Brett’s Sound Picks 2018 on Spotify.) Continue reading
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Disconnected Music
Envision a music that’s truly free— without a WIFI connection or social media access a device left to its own, off the grid of Sharing and Liking and intertextual Thumbs Up, attuned to relations and shapes within not without, listening through its silence. Continue reading
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Fluid Metrical Feels, Delay Effects, And Rhythm In Nils Frahm’s “A Place” and “#2”
Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending quality time with Nils Frahm’s latest recording, All Melody. The album alternates between intimate solo piano work that is perhaps Frahm’s signature quietudes sound, and more expansive (and long) pieces built upon rolling electronic keyboard arpeggios swirling in delay-effected, rhythm deluges. Not that we need to categorize… Continue reading
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Musical Depth
depth the distance from the surface to the bottom of something; the apparent existence of three dimensions in a two-dimensional representation; complexity or profundity of thought As I wrote here a few years ago, music is a depth experience par excellence, that seems to have built into its design an endless capacity to conjure virtual… Continue reading
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