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justforbooks · 2 years ago

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Ryuichi Sakamoto was not a man cut out to be a pop star. As a teenager, he liked the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, but his abiding passion was New York’s underground avant garde art scene – Joseph Beuys, Fluxus, Andy Warhol – and its accompanying experimental music: he was fond of pointing out to interviewers that he was born the year that John Cage composed 4’33. At university, he studied the work of modern composers Boulez, Stockhausen and Ligeti; he had a particular interest in the challenging electronic compositions of Iannis Xenakis. The first album to bear Sakamoto’s name, 1975’s Disappointment/Hateruma, was a collaboration with percussionist Toshiyuki Tsuchitori that consisted entirely of free improv. If he was going to have a role in the Japanese pop world at all, it was in the background, using his keyboard skills and interest in the fast-developing world of synthesizers to find employment as a session musician.

But a pop star was exactly what Sakamoto became, at least for a time. A 1978 session for singer Haruomi Hosono led to the suggestion that they should form a band with drummer Yukihiro Takahashi. Yellow Magic Orchestra went on to become both the biggest band in Japan – inspiring a degree of paparazzi attention and screaming fervour among fans that Sakamoto seems to have loathed every minute of – and the first Japanese artists to find more than novelty or cult status in the west.

Yellow Magic Orchestra were successful, but they were groundbreaking too. The convenient shorthand was that they were the Japanese Kraftwerk, although in truth, YMO didn’t really sound like Kraftwerk at all. Alongside the synthesizers, they used guitars, bass and acoustic drums. They were more straightforwardly aligned to disco: their debut album even featured an electronic version of the deathless “ooah ooah” whoop from the Michael Zager Band’s Let’s All Chant. You could detect the influence of jazz fusion and, later, the UK’s ongoing ska revival. Like Throbbing Gristle, they appeared fascinated by the kitschy 1950s exotica of Martin Denny and Arthur Lyman, which had featured traditional Japanese instruments and quasi-“oriental” melodies; Yellow Magic Orchestra’s biggest international hit was a version of Denny’s 1959 track Firecracker.

Equally, you could see why the Kraftwerk comparison stuck. Both bands shared an obsession with technology – Yellow Magic Orchestra were pioneering in their use of sequencers and samplers and they introduced the world to the sound of the Roland TR-808 drum machine – and a belief that being cutting-edge experimentalists didn’t preclude them from writing fantastic pop songs. The Sakamoto-penned Behind the Mask, from 1979’s Solid State Survivor, was covered by Michael Jackson, ostensibly for inclusion on Thriller, although it was dropped from the final tracklisting; it was eventually turned into a UK hit by, of all people, Eric Clapton.

Both YMO and Kraftwerk were interested in the detournement of Anglo-American pop: just as Kraftwerk borrowed from the Beach Boys on Autobahn, so YMO covered the Beatles’ Day Tripper and Archie Bell and the Drells’ Tighten Up, the latter in cartoonish Japanese accents. They also shared a dry sense of humour, which in Yellow Magic Orchestra’s case usually fixated on western prejudices and fears about east Asians. On the cover of Solid State Survivor, they dressed in red Mao suits, enjoying a drink with an effigy of the late dictator. While the US fretted about an influx of Japanese cars and technology damaging their economy, 1980’s X∞Multiplies featured a series of sketches, one featuring a sinister Japanese businessman signing a contract, another featuring an American who realises his Japanese host can’t understand English and lets rip with a torrent of racist abuse: “The Japanese are pigs, yellow monkeys, they have small cocks and short legs.” As a moral panic erupted over the deleterious and addictive effect of the Taito Corporation’s Space Invaders games, Yellow Magic Orchestra’s records literally sounded like arcade games: their eponymous debut album was packed with interludes featuring their bleeping noises and tinny Game Over death marches.

And, like Kraftwerk, Yellow Magic Orchestra proved vastly influential – or rather, it took the rest of the world a little while to catch up: there was something telling about the fact that Solid State Survivor wasn’t released in the UK until 1982, at the height of the synth-pop wave that YMO had presaged. By then, their music had found its way into the collections of DJs and producers in New York’s burgeoning hip-hop scene – they were apparently astonished when the audience on Soul Train began breakdancing when they performed Computer Games – although it was a track from one of the solo albums Sakamoto had begun releasing concurrent with his career in YMO that had the biggest long-term impact. Riot in Lagos, from 1980’s B-2 Unit, had been recorded in London with reggae producer Dennis Bovell, and was apparently inspired by the Afrobeat of Fela Kuti. It remains an astonishingly timeless and effervescent piece of electronica: if you didn’t know it and were told it was released last month, rather than 42 years ago, you’d believe it. Abstract but funky, it cast a considerable shadow over dance music: it was big club hit on release, helped shape the sound of electro and turned the head of hip-hop producers including Kurtis Mantronik. Drum n’ bass producers Foul Play sampled it, and you can hear its influence in the music of 90s electronic luminaries Aphex Twin and Autechre.

Yellow Magic Orchestra split in 1983. If Sakamoto had left it at that and returned to modern classical music, he would already have earned himself a place among the era’s greatest pop innovators. But with the release of Nagisa Ōshima’s film Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence, in which he also starred, he began a career as a soundtrack composer that clearly suited his temperament far better than the Beatlemania-like scenes Yellow Magic Orchestra had provoked at home. It would lead him to work with Bernardo Bertolucci, Pedro Almodóvar, Brian De Palma and Oliver Stone, among others, and be showered with awards, including an Oscar and a Golden Globe.

But the vocal version of Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence’s haunting main theme, retitled Forbidden Colours, also cemented a partnership with former Japan vocalist David Sylvian that had begun with the 1982 single Bamboo Houses/Bamboo Music. Along with Can’s Holger Czukay and experimental trumpeter Jon Hassell, he became part of Sylvian’s repertory company for a series of extraordinary albums that attempted to reimagine 80s pop in a more expansive, exploratory and pensive way.

They seemed to reflect Sakamoto’s own position within pop after Yellow Magic Orchestra. Sakamoto’s solo albums largely contained music that existed at one remove from whatever else was happening, in a space where he could follow his own path. On 1989’s Beauty and 1991’s Heartbeat, it sometimes seemed as if he was constructing his own brand of the exotica that had entranced YMO, blending eastern, western and African influences together, assembling eclectic and improbable guest lists that, on Beauty alone, included Youssou N’Dour, Robbie Robertson, Robert Wyatt, Brian Wilson and Prince protege Jill Jones.

It wasn’t as if Ryuichi Sakamoto needed to be at the centre of pop culture in person: thanks to sampling, the centre of pop culture was never that far from his music. In recent years, it’s been borrowed by the Weeknd, Justice, Burial, the Beastie Boys, Jennifer Lopez, Brandy and Freddie Gibbs.

In the late 70s, the other members of Yellow Magic Orchestra had called him the Professor, a jokey nickname that contrasted Sakamoto’s intellectual bearing with his unwanted role as the group’s main heart-throb. It was a title Sakamoto seemed to grow into more and more in his later years: recording minimalist albums with German artist Alva Noto, providing ambient scores for art installations, releasing live orchestral and solo piano recordings of his compositions. There are clips of Yellow Magic Orchestra in the 2017 documentary Coda, which showed Sakamoto returning to work following a diagnosis of throat cancer, but it’s still hard to square the young pop star who stares imperiously down from his apartment wall in a portrait by Andy Warhol with the man in his late 60s, learnedly discussing classical organ chorales, the purity of the sounds he recorded during a trip to the North Pole and whether a piano going out of tune represented “matter struggling to return to a natural state”.

The album Coda depicted him working on, async, was released in 2017. It combined Bach-inspired piano pieces with monumental drones, distorted synthesisers and ambient field recordings. The artists who lined up to remix its tracks came from the leftfield cutting-edge of electronic music: if you wanted evidence of how widespread Ryuichi Sakamoto’s influence was, the fact that his work was clearly an inspiration for the likes of Arca and Oneohtrix Point Never and had been sampled by Jennifer Lopez on a US No 1 single seems a reasonable place to start. Contemplating his mortality in 2017, Sakamoto said he wanted to make “music I won’t be ashamed to leave behind – meaningful work”. By any metric, he already had.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Ryuichi Sakamoto #in memoriam

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singeratlarge · 7 months ago

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Isaac Albéniz, Per "Howlin' Pelle" Almqvist (The Hives), Mel B, Annette Bening, Johnny Cash’s 1976 single “One Piece at a Time,” Kato Cephus, G.K. Chesterton, Roy Crewdson (Freddie & the Dreamers), Karla DeVito, Danny Elfman, The Everly Brothers 1960 single “Cathy’s Clown,” Noel Gallagher (good to have met you), Mel Gaynor (Simple Minds), Haydn’s 1753 opera “The Limping Devil,” Valy Hedjasi, Bob Hope, LaToya Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Ted Levine, Sylvester Magee, Karl Münchinger, David Palmer (ABC), Adrian Paul, Mike Porcaro, Freddie Redd, Sylvia Robinson, Francis Rossi (Status Quo), Schoenberg’s 1956 “Modern Psalm,” Carl Story, Stravinsky’s riotous 1913 ballet “The Rite of Spring,” Mitch Taylor, Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech (1851), The Waitresses 1982 single “I Know What Boys Like,” Randall Woodfin, bassist "The Senator" Eugene Wright, Iannis Xenakis, and one of my heroes, the late, great keyboardist, singer-songwriter, co-founder of Procol Harum and sidearm to Eric Clapton and George Harrison: Gary Brooker. His solo albums + Procol Harum albums have been with me since they were new, and I’ve covered a few of their songs (I love doing “Whiskey Train”). In my orbit, The Davy Jones Band did a share-bill with Procol Harum, and everyone raved about PH’s set. Gary’s 1982 album LEAD ME TO THE WATER partially inspired my first album DOOR IN THE WATER. Here’s a recently-made and marvelous cover of PH’s signature hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” performed by my pals down at the studio, Chris von Sneidern & Friends: https://sircvs.bandcamp.com/track/a-whiter-shade-of-pale

Meanwhile, heavenly HB to GB and thank you for your years of trail-blazing musical excellence.

#garybrooker #procolharum #chrisvonsneidern #prairieprince #tapevaultstudio #sanfrancisco #birthday #pale #classicrock #britishrock #ericclapton #georgeharrison #davyjones #monkees #johnnyjblair #whitershadeofpale #doorinthewater

#johnny j blair #singer songwriter #music #pop rock #san francisco #Gary Brooker #birthday #Chris von Sneidern #Prairie Prince #Tape Vault Studio #pale #classic rock #British Rock #Eric Clapton #George Harrison #Davy Jones #Monkees

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filamentzine · 9 months ago

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George Kokkinaris

Α piece of music that needs to be played loud

Albert Ayler - Ghosts

A piece of music that moves you forward

Xenakis – Nomos Alpha

A piece of music that gets stuck in your head

Anthony Braxton - 23c

A piece of music that makes you want to dance

J.S. Bach - Goldberg Varations

A piece of music that makes you feel badass

Cachao - Descarga

A piece of music that you remember from your childhood

Blind Guardian – Mirror Mirror

A piece of music that reminds you your hometown

Manos Hadjidakis - Ilissos

The piece of music you’ve listened to the most

John Coltrane - Acsesion

I play double bass, compose and improvise in order to get to know people and cultures of societies. Through my collaborations with composers, improvising with musicians, collaborating with visual artists, poets, dancers, I create performances of musical and sound representations in order to contribute to the approach of unknown or hidden roles to the human perception functions of music. My music is inspired by traditions and cultures, which hundreds of years ago to the present day perceive music as an integration of human activity and expression. My performances is based on the physicalization and humanization of music through voice and movement, while combining them with new technologies. I apply new techniques to the double bass while believing in the holistic nature of music performances with speech, dance and image. I interpret and study the classical orchestral repertoire as well as works by 20th-21st century composers from different cultures and backgrounds. I travel for concerts and collaborations abroad and also organize seminars on improvisation, Creative Music. I am part of the editorial team of the magazine “NewMusic.gr” in order to create community and develop the music scene in Greece.

www.aktapha.com

www.newmusic.gr

www.kokkinaris.com

#filament zine #george kokkinaris

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spaceintruderdetector · 10 months ago

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Viewed from certain perspectives, lannis Xenakis is not only a singular figure in twentieth-century music history, he is probably the most revolutionary, for he was not only a composer of grandiose works of a “strangeness in the proportion” ,!4] which is how Francis Bacon defined beauty. But like Arnold Schoenberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and John Cage, he was also the author of theoretical music writings of the highest order. He was an independent architect for many years and worked for Le Corbusier from 1947 to 1959. He created an extensive architectural oeuvre, also manifested in many texts on architecture. In addition, Xenakis was a mathematician, inventor, and engineer. G.W. Leibniz defined music in 1712 as “an unconscious exercise in arithmetic in which the mind does not know it is counting,”!2] and there is probably no other composer as close to this understanding of music as Xenakis.!3

From Xenakis' UPIC to Graphic Notation Today : ZKM Karlsruhe : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

#iannis xenakis #modern music #music theory

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gregorsamsa-ra · 2 years ago

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patti smith, matthias grunewald, sylvia plath, john singer, toni morrison, frida kahlo, gina pane,, oscar wilde, el greco, george struikelblok, tracey emin, mark rothko, julia margaret cameron, jung boc su, ron athey, andrea mantegna, seamus heaney, nico, gustav mahler, paula rego, diane arbus, arvo part, bob flanagan, leonard cohen, ahn chang hong, francisco goya, nina simone, ulay, susan sontag, marina abramovic, edith piaf, edvard munch, louise bourgeois, beth gibbons, ian curtis, raimund hoghe, antony hegarty, maria callas, samuel barber, gunter bruce, francis bacon, arthur rimbaud, kae tempest, mike parr, david nebreda, pier paolo pasolini, sam fender, nick cave, ana mendieta, christian boltanski, leon golub, fabio mauri, david olusoga, kiki smith, maya angelou, hieronymus bosch, bobby baker, janis joplin, nan goldin, andrei tarkovsky, bob dylan, abel ascona, nancy spero, billie holiday, robert capa, sarah lucas, friedrich nietzsche, sonia boyce, steve mcqueen, fabrizio de andre', alda merini, letizia battaglia, nick drake, charles bukowski, iannis xenakis, rogier vander weyden, janine antonii, arvo parks, tracy chapman, jean genet, valie export, linda mary montano, william blake, john cooper clarke, hannah wilke, lou reed, tracey moffat, doris salcedo, rebecca horn, giacomo leopardi, santiago sierra, teresa margolles, regina jose' galindo, suzanne lacy

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usmaradiomagazine · 2 years ago

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“𝑺𝒆𝒎𝒑𝒓𝒆 𝒑𝒊ù 𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒔𝒐 𝒄𝒉𝒆 𝒑𝒆𝒓 𝒄𝒓𝒆𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒏 𝒎𝒐𝒅𝒐 𝒆𝒇𝒇𝒊𝒄𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒃𝒊𝒔𝒐𝒈𝒏𝒂 𝒄𝒐𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒂𝒓𝒆 𝒊𝒍 𝒅𝒆𝒍𝒊𝒓𝒊𝒐 𝒆 𝒐𝒓𝒈𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒛𝒛𝒂𝒓𝒍𝒐" 𝐋𝐀 𝐌𝐔𝐒𝐈𝐂𝐀 𝐂𝐎𝐌𝐄 𝐏𝐑𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐂𝐀 𝐃𝐄𝐋𝐋'𝐈𝐌𝐏𝐎𝐒𝐒𝐈𝐁𝐈𝐋𝐄 - Monografie oltre ai generi𝗣𝗶𝗲𝗿𝗿𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗲𝘇: 𝗹'𝗶𝗻𝗾𝘂𝗶𝗲𝘁𝗼 𝗲 𝗶𝗹 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗼𝗿𝗲 🎧 𝐀𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐓𝐀 𝐈𝐋 𝐏𝐎𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐓

Nelle precedenti puntate del programma, abbiamo più volte narrato del grande movimento d’avanguardia musicale europeo, concentratosi in particolare a Darmstadt, durante agli anni ’50 del secolo scorso, il punto di partenza in azione e reazione di tutto quello che andrà a seguire nel Novecento. Lo abbiamo visto attraverso le monografie su Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen e in dialettica opposta o complementare anche John Cage e Giacinto Scelsi. Come un'ideale chiusura del cerchio, andiamo oggi alla scoperta di uno dei più carismatici, per certi tratti autoritari e sicuramente influenti personaggi di quegli anni, il compositore e direttore d’orchestra francese Pierre Boulez.

In gioventù Boulez si ritirò dagli studi matematici per intraprendere quelli musicali anche se i primi influenzeranno particolarmente il suo approccio alla composizione. Con il trasferimento a Parigi avviò una vera e propria rivoluzione musicale insieme a Stockhausen appunto e al belga Henri Pousseur, accentuata dall’incontro con il giovane John Cage durante gli anni Sessanta. Proprio nella capitale francese fondò nel 1970 l’IRCAM, l’istituto per l’esplorazione e lo sviluppo della musica moderna.

Compositore innovativo e aperto alla sperimentazione di quegli anni, Pierre Boulez fu anche un’eccezionale direttore d’orchestra, a capo dell’orchestra di Cleveland, la sinfonica della BBC e la Filarmonica di New York in cui contribuì alla diffusione del repertorio di Debussy, Mahler e Stravinsky.

Michele Selva ci porta a conoscere una figura imprescindibile della cosiddetta classica contemporanea, nonché uno dei precursori ella musica elettronica e delle su infinite possibilità.

Un programma a cura di Michele Selva Regia di Alessandro Renzi Illustrazione tratta da un’immagine di Artcurial

🎧 𝐀𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐋𝐓𝐀 𝐈𝐋 𝐏𝐎𝐃𝐂𝐀𝐒𝐓 🎶 𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐏𝐑𝐈 𝐈𝐋 𝐂𝐀𝐍𝐀𝐋𝐄 - La Musica come Pratica dell'Impossibile

#boulez #pierreboulez #usmaradio #ritratti

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grahamstoney · 4 years ago

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Musique Concrète and Other Experimental And Electronic Music

New Post has been published on https://grahamstoney.com/music/musique-concrete-and-other-experimental-and-electronic-music

Musique Concrète and Other Experimental And Electronic Music

In the subject Creative Music Technology at university last semester, I was asked to listen to a collection of experimental and electronic music to stimulate my creative imagination, and to write what I liked and didn’t like about it. Here’s my rather cynical take on the genre.

Musique Concrète

Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry – Symphonie pour un Homme Seul

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This piece reminded me of Strauss’s Symphonia Domestica; only less musical. I’m a Homme Seul (single man) and my life doesn’t sound anything like this. In his book La musique concrète, Schaeffer described the work as “an opera for blind people…”. Haven’t they suffered enough?

Edgard Varèse – Poème Électronique

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The audio equivalent of Luis Bunuel & Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou.

Does to my ears what the asbestos coating on the walls of the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair for which it was commissioned, would do to my lungs.

György Ligeti – Artikulation

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George Lucas must owe Ligeti millions in royalties for R2D2’s sound effects. Initially I thought I was joking when I first wrote that, but I’ve since discovered that he was actually trying to create a sort of phonetic speech in electronic music, which pretty much fits R2D2’s dialogue. Plus, the title is German for “articulation”. That should have been a giveaway.

I thought this piece might make more sense to me if I played it backwards, so I dropped it into Logic Pro X and reversed it. I couldn’t tell the difference. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I listened to it in the original quadraphonic. I’ll just end noting that Ligeti abandoned electronic music after composing this piece.

Iannis Xenakis – Concret PH

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2 minutes and 44 seconds of breaking glass to my ears. I think I’d rather listen to Kraftwerk.

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Kontakte

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It’s long. It’s too long. I think this is how Jacob Collier learned to play piano in his mother’s womb; but look at him now. The title is German for “Contacts”, which I think Stockhausen interpreted as “Just hit the things.” Maybe it sounds better in the original quadraphonic.

Stockhausen was evidently a pioneer of the extended dance remix, as the work exists in several versions: “Nr. 12”, “Nr. 12½” and “Nr. 12⅔”

Bernard Parmegiani – Accidents / harmoniques

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Parmegiani had studied mime before turning his hand to electro-acoustic composition, and in this piece it really shows. From the album De Natura Sonorum (the nature of sound). I felt like there were Martians in my head listening to this. Surely he’s just playing a joke on us.

Pauline Oliveiros – Bye Bye Butterfly

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Bids farewell to the institutionalized oppression of the female sex while also providing inspiration for the sound of the Theramin. Gave my new monitor speakers a good workout; I hope the neighbours enjoyed it too.

Tape Loops

Steve Reich – It’s Gonna Rain

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I’ve got this pervasive feeling that it’s going to rain. I’m not sure why. I liked the way the meteorological message panned left and right. More like It’s Gonna Have An Acid Trip.

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Halleluiah Part II is over. I’m not sure how I lasted the full 18 minutes.

Terry Riley – Mescalin Mix

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Parts of this sounded to me like an industrial version of native Australian bush sounds. I felt like I was on a camping trip in the 23rd century.

Brian Eno – 1/1

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From his album Music For Airports/Ambient 1, which apparently coined the term Ambient Music. Brian Eno has a lot to answer for. However, this track put me in a relaxing state, ready to fall asleep on the plane; so I liked it.

Sampling

Luc Ferrari – Ronda, Spain, June 2001

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After being jolted awake by the sound of a loud sliding door opening to greet the day, I was drawn into this by the sweet sound of a French woman’s voice. I imagined she was Ferrari’s lover, speaking to him in bed after awakening on a warm Spanish summer Sunday morning. I wanted to know what she was saying, but my French isn’t good enough. In my mind’s eye, they head to a busy market together to buy some croissants for breakfast, where we hear a man’s voice repeating “numero quatro”, which I assumed is Spanish for “number 4”. As the voices fade, the sound becomes more musical and we return to the soft sound of Ronda speaking to her beloved back in their villa together. I quite liked it.

My interpretation, however, is not what the composer had in mind. According to him, the point of Les Anecdotiques (The Anecdotals) is to dispense with the story altogether. My busy market was, in fact, the sound of Spanish tourists in a museum. While he describes the woman’s words as “Spontaneous and intimate”, in this context they are simply words in a foreign language with no narrative purpose. Just another one of Pierre Schaeffer and Michel Chion’s sound objects, if you will. My narrative interpretation of what was intended as an explicitly anecdotal work is testament to the human brain’s tendency to make meaning out of nothing. It turns out Rhonda is a village in Spain, not a woman.

Still, I enjoyed my little fantasy, thank you Luc.

John Oswald – Manifold

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Wow, this was short. I didn’t even have time to eat breakfast while listening to it. It was only about as long as the Spotify ads, but certainly more fun. I recognised a couple of songs, like U2’s With or Without You and Sinead O’Connor’s Nothing Compares To You. Artists who use samples liberally often sample obscure works, sometimes affording them attention they would otherwise have missed; but in this work Oswald went mainstream. It sounded to me like the soundtrack to a sample-abusing hip-hop artist from the 1990’s being beaten up in a boxing ring by all the artists who reckoned he’d ripped off their work.

Tod Dockstader – Water Music: Part III

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I quite liked this piece. The cuteness of the sounds and the stereo effects bouncing between the left and right channels really drew me in. I’ve recently got myself some decent monitor speakers for my home studio and this piece really worked on them. Pretty amazing for something released in 1963.

Dockstader started out in the 1940’s, prior to the invention of magnetic tape, editing his steel wire recordings with a lit cigarette. That makes me realise how much I take the piece-of-crap Logic Pro X File Editor for granted. Listening to this, I found myself wanting to know what was going to happen next, like I was watching a soap opera on TV; only with no actual story.

Synthesis

Karlheinz Stockhausen – Studie I

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I found this quite disorienting to listen to. I guess it was revolutionary in 1953 but I reckon now you could whip it up in Ableton in about 5 minutes using the Random MIDI Effect and some automation.

Eliane Radigue – Jetsun Mila (Pt.1) / Birth and Youth (Excerpt)

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I liked how the pulsing ambient drone sound in this grew over time; it drew me in and had me wondering what was going to happen next. Unfortunately the answer was: not much. Gradually a rhythmic element with some high pulsing tones which grew over time came in. It was a bit like listening to a very slow EDM dance track from underwater in a diesel-powered submarine going at full throttle for 12 minutes.

Laurie Spiegel – Appalachian Grove: I

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I liked the pulsing stereo effects in this piece and the way the tonal characteristics of the sound varied while the pitch changed. It’s much more melodic than the other tracks we’ve listened to and that made it more enjoyable to my ears. It got a bit harsh in the middle though. This piece puts the musique in musique concrète.

Morton Subotnick – Silver Apples of the Moon – Part A

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Perhaps the sound designer for Star Wars had this in mind when creating the sound effects for R2D2. I kind of lost the flow of the conversation without the witty English-accented retorts from C3PO though. Morton Sobotnick is described as The Mad Scientist in one interview, and I think if I listen to this too often I’ll end up fitting one of the DSM-5 diagnostic categories I’m learning about over in PSYC1002.

Suzanne Ciani – Concert at Phil Niblock’s Loft

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This piece had some funky sounds that I liked. The start reminded me a bit of Kraftwerk but without the rhythm and melody; although it did get more melodic later. I’d probably give it a Distinction for its use of technology given it was made in 1975, but only a Credit for musicality.

Barry Schraeder – Lost Atlantis: Introduction

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At first, I thought this sounded a lot like a modern ad for KFC; then I realised I was hearing a Spotify ad.

I liked the ambient sounds in this piece and the way it surged in and out with its “mysterious tone colors”. It slowly builds to a crescendo until we get the drop that EDM lovers crave, and then built more quickly to the ultimate drop at the end. I kept wondering what was going to happen next; I’d still rather listen to Fleetwood Mac, Supertramp or Queen though.

Contemporary Examples

Amon Tobin – Foley Room

DJ & producer. Retain percussive quality through sounds. Horsefish & Esther’s. Create beauty and delicate textures from sounds. Pitched percussive material. Fast loops. New textures. Funky beats. Check out the Foley Room Documentary.

Aphex Twin – 1ST 44

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Acid house DJ in rave scene. Intelligent Dance Music. More complex sampling, polyrhythms, rhythmic patterns. From Collapsed album. Polyrhythms sounded funky. Lots of variation.

Holly Herndon – Chorus

Intersection of humanity and technology. Recorded web browsing. Stereo ping-pong effects. Here’s a talk she gave about her creative process.

Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith – Riparian

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This was my favourite out of these three, largely because it sounds the most musical to my ears. I liked the pulsing beat in this track. I can hear a bass line for instance, melodies played on the synth and lyrics, although I can’t tell what they are saying. I also like the way the soundscape swirls around when listened to with headphones. It feels ambient, immersive and musical all at the same time. I get the sense that she’s using the electronics at her disposal in service of the music rather than the other way around. There’s even a great video about how she uses modular synthesis.

Graham Stoney – Foster le Concrète

“How hard can it be?”, I asked myself. And since I had an assignment to do, I wrote my own musique concrète track based on the drum rhythm from one of my favourite songs, Coming of Age by Foster The People. I even made a breakdown video showing how I did it; because that’s what the assignment required.

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Conclusion

I didn’t take too easily to some of the more experimental musique concrète pieces we studied at the beginning of this semester. The weekly listening tasks felt harsh to my untrained ears and I would think mean things like:

“Didn’t the Geneva Convention ban cruel and unusual punishment?”

Perhaps these tracks will never be my preferred go-to pieces for chilling out on a Friday night, but when I look back at some of my cynicism-laced early comments in these discussion threads, I cringe. I just didn’t appreciate the historical significance of these pieces and how they might have influenced later electronic music that I do enjoy, like Kraftwerk say.

Then in Angharad Davis’s Music Colloquium Series talk on George Antheil’s Ballet Mécanique, when she played a snippet of the work I heard sounds reminiscent of musique concrète. Sure enough, they were roughly contemporaneous, and Antheil had been living in Paris at the time musique concrète was just getting started. You never know when something you study in one arena will pop up elsewhere.

Another thing I’ve learned in this subject is about taking creative risks and learning to follow my gut instincts without worrying whether a concept will work, or other people will like it. This has been an opportunity for me to explore that. My Formative Skills Assignment piece Foster le Concrète was in part a reaction to my frustration at the lack of discernible rhythm in some of the early pieces we studied. However, I really didn’t know whether the concept was going to work, and that was a little anxiety-inducing; especially given that I was doing it for an assignment which would be graded. I was quite touched to hear other students say they liked the end result, and I feel more confident about following my gut instincts in future and seeing what I end up.

Finally, I’ve been really inspired by the creativity of the other students in this subject. It’s been a weird experience studying online this year without ever meeting them in person, but I’ve really enjoyed hearing the creative works everyone came up with. They’re all so distinctive and amazingly different, it’s incredible; yet they were all products of the same brief. I can’t wait to hear everyone’s works on the radio, TV, movies, video games, Spotify, or whatever audio technology is around when we all graduate: live streaming direct to our neurons perhaps?

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henrythejealousmonk · 6 years ago

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Why not love for its own sake?

The fear of misinterpretation haunts all of my actions. I’ll use fear as a means of being afraid. I’ll think about other’s reception of my love, for that alone is enough. I will stand victorious with my chest matted with blood to be dominate in that moment, and I will love the ensuing downward slide to obscurity.

I’ll cry and whimper when I learn you don’t love me like I love you. That you’ve received my love as a perversion of what I meant. In bringing all my feelings to the surface, I cast a shadow over the essence of my actions. I have made a terrible mistake and I have no choice but to passionately accept it. I cannot, like an ascetic, move on from what I deeply feel is the meaning of my life.

G_ddamn this fucking d___lish tragedy. I cannot express the loss I feel to the ones I love. At least not in the plain language that I want to use. THEY LIE! Don’t keep it hid, they say. Am nothing but a Grendelian monstrosity in their eyes. Sense of self completely desensitized. What is this? Passion fading. Heartless pity for the life thought.

Memories rendered.

Nostalgia triggered.

Internal language for its own sake. Now the external, likewise. Have been in tempestuous disintegration. MY G_D, IT’S FULL OF LOVE! I feel every moment as if I had been there to experience it. And with every moment it becomes me. And I am me again, and again. Am back to fear. “I love you, that’s all that matters.”

#fourth of july #pynchon #chomsky #john gardner #jupiter #iannis xenakis #rick roderick

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militarytrash · 7 years ago

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god i finally finished organizing my pinterest boards a little better. here’s some for the characters

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elmartillosinmetre · 7 years ago

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VANGUARDIAS DE LOS 60. LOS SONIDOS DE LA GEOMETRÍA ENTRE LIGETI Y SCELSI

Esta mañana, en el Curso de Siglo XX del Aula de Mayores he hablado de modelos matemáticos aplicados a la música y de texturas, he hablado mucho de texturas.

Algo había en el ambiente sobre la cuestión de la textura, porque en 1960 se publicó Free Jazz de Ornette Coleman y el mundo del jazz se vio profundamente conmovido. Después llegaron músicos como John Coltrane y trazaron la vía fundamental por la que iba a discurrir el universo del jazz durante más de una década.

Como gran epígono del expresionismo alemán, traje a Bernd Alois Zimmermann.

Y por supuesto su obra maestra, Die Soldaten, en la producción clásica de Harry Kupfer para la Ópera de Stuttgart.

Luego centré mi atención entres grandes compositores que, en efecto, centraron buena parte de sus preocupaciones en cuestiones relacionadas con el timbre, la indeterminación y la textura, empezando por Xenakis.

Siguiendo por Ligeti, del que destaqué también su flanco teatral, tan fluxus tan happening.

Y por supuesto su Grand Macabre, en la producción de La fura.

Finalmente, me acerqué al singular Giacinto Scelsi y toda su leyenda esotérica a cuestas, pero también su exploración de la naturaleza esférica del sonido.

Me ayudó este DVD del Festival Musica Viva de Múnich.

#ornette coleman #john coltrane #bern alois zimmermann #harry kupfer #iannis xenakis #györgy ligeti #giacinto scelsi #música #music #aula de mayores aires creativos

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singeratlarge · 2 years ago

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Isaac Albéniz, Per "Howlin' Pelle" Almqvist (The Hives), Mel B, Annette Bening, Johnny Cash’s 1976 single “One Piece at a Time,” Kato Cephus, G.K. Chesterton, Roy Crewdson (Freddie & the Dreamers), Karla DeVito, Danny Elfman, The Everly Brothers 1960 single “Cathy’s Clown,” Noel Gallagher (good to have met you), Mel Gaynor (Simple Minds), Haydn’s 1753 opera “The Limping Devil,” Valy Hedjasi, Bob Hope, LaToya Jackson, John F. Kennedy, Ted Levine, Sylvester Magee, Karl Münchinger, David Palmer (ABC), Adrian Paul, Mike Porcaro, Freddie Redd, Sylvia Robinson, Francis Rossi (Status Quo), Schoenberg’s 1956 “Modern Psalm,” Carl Story, Stravinsky’s riotous 1913 ballet “The Rite of Spring,” Mitch Taylor, Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman?” speech (1851), The Waitresses 1982 single “I Know What Boys Like,” Randall Woodfin, bassist "The Senator" Eugene Wright, Iannis Xenakis, and one of my heroes, the great keyboardist, singer-songwriter, co-founder of Procol Harum and sidearm to Eric Clapton and George Harrison: Gary Brooker. His solo albums + Procol Harum albums have been with me since they were new, and I’ve covered a few of their songs (I love doing “Whiskey Train”). Elsewhere in my orbit, The Davy Jones Band did a share-bill with Procol Harum, and everyone raved about their set. Gary’s 1982 album LEAD ME TO THE WATER partially inspired my first album DOOR IN THE WATER. Here’s a recently-made and marvelous cover of PH’s signature hit, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” performed by my pals down at the studio, Chris von Sneidern & Friends:

#garybrooker #procolharum #chrisvonsneidern #prairieprince #tapevaultstudio #sanfrancisco #birthday #pale #classicrock #britishrock

#johnny j blair #singer songwriter #music #pop rock #Gary Brooker #Procol Harum #Chris von Sneidern #Prairie Prince #Tape Vault Studio #San Francisco #birthday #pale #classic rock #british rock #Bandcamp

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paaulamartel · 7 years ago

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ARQUITECTURA Y MÚSICA.

La arquitectura y la música son dos artes que caminan de la mano , las dos construyen y crean espacios , estructuras , geometría , texturas o colores . A lo largo de la historia esta relación ha ido evolucionando, mezclándose la una con la otra hasta llegar al punto en que una obra musical puede ser el inicio de la inspiración arquitectónica o un espacio la inspiración de la música . La historia nos ofrece infinidad de ejemplos sobre cómo la música y la arquitectura se asemejan, como por ejemplo:

Preludio para cello no 1 de J.S. Bach y la plaza de San Pedro del Vaticano de Bernini:

Bach caracteriza sus obras por los usos del bajo continuo que permanece durante la obra o con la reiteración variada de un segmento o sección, el uso de las curvas y la sensación pendular , la complejidad intelectual y conceptual de ambas artes, la construcción vertical, la técnica y el ritmo . Se asemeja el recorrido tonal y la vuelta al tono principal de la pieza con la forma circular de la planta de la plaza , comparando la característica rítmica del preludio con la gran columnata del "abrazo de San Pedro " que crean la misma sensación de hipnosis y te encaminan en un recorrido que acaba en la basílica o , en el caso de Bach en el primer motivo del preludio.

Ambas representaciones artísticas tienen origen en un patrón que se va desarrollando a lo largo de la pieza .

https://youtu.be/S6yuR8efotI

L.V.Beethoven:

Compositor entre el clasicismo y el romanticismo, aseguraba que “La Arquitectura es una música de piedras y la música una arquitectura de sonidos”.

La música de Beethoven es un reflejo de un alma frustrada y atormentada por la enfermedad que acabó con su etapa de gran música orquestal que hablaba de la lucha contra tempestades y pasiones y concluyó con los cuartetos de cuerda que representaban su alma vencida, acabada y rendida ante su trágico destino.

https://youtu.be/B7pQytF2nak

John Cage y Mies Van Der Rohe:

La arquitectura de Mies Van Der Rohe se caracteriza por la sencillez de los elementos estructurales y por la ausencia total de elementos ornamentales y este concepto de abstracción que defiende Mies lo llevará a cabo John Cage con la famosa obra "el 4´33´´ " donde el protagonista es el público porque los tres movimientos que componen esta obra son el silencio absoluto y la obra es realmente la reacción que la gente tiene ante esta provocación .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTEFKFiXSx4

Pabellón de Barcelona - Mies Van Der Rohe

Iannis Xenakis:

Xenakis, ingeniero y músico, es un gran ejemplo de la mezcla de la arquitectura y la música. Trabajaba como ingeniero en el taller de Le Corbusier y en los cálculos que hacía para las obras de Le Corbusier aplicaba los mismos procesos compositivos y estéticos que en sus creaciones musicales. Una de sus obras , Metástasis, la basó en el conocido Modulor definido por tres intervalos diseñados a través de tres secciones compuestas por la sección áurea .

https://youtu.be/SZazYFchLRI

El Modulor inspiró la nueva gama de medidas armónicas que indicaban una nueva forma musical, lo que favoreció la creación de la corriente musical contemporánea: La música estocástica. Esta nueva corriente estaba basada en la música matemática , regida por leyes universales que aplicando la combinación adecuada y la ley científica correcta daría lugar a la composición perfecta de la obra hasta el punto de usar matrices para componer obras. Aquí se originó una nueva forma de percibir y concebir la música y se estableció un nuevo sistema de notación musical.

http://www.arquls.cl/2013/04/musica-arquitectura-o-viceversa/

http://www.filomusica.com/filo71/xenakis.html

https://www.plataformaarquitectura.cl/cl/tag/musica

#arquitectura #architecture #musica #music #le corbusier #xenakis #beethoven #John cage #bach #bernini #mies van der rohe #GRUPV07

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priceofliberty · 7 years ago

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Accidentally stumbled upon this gem while researching exponential growth trends with limitations:

Why do Communist countries become frozen in time? It turns out there's a good reason, and it can be proven mathematically.

The branch of mathematics is called Complexity Theory. This branch was developed for computers to answer the questions about how long it will take a computer to solve certain types of problems. For example, suppose it takes a certain computer program one hour to process 1,000 data values. How long will it take the program to process 2,000 data values or 3,000 data values?

It depends on what the computer program does with the data. It some cases it will take 2 hours or 3 hours, respectively, but in other cases it will take 4 hours or 9 hours, respectively. Complexity Theory sorts all that out.

Malthus' argument, described in the last section, was essentially a Complexity Theory argument.

Now, if we apply the same concepts to governing the population of a Communist state, we see why Communism has to fail.

In order to provide a worker's paradise, Communism requires that every financial transaction be price-controlled, so that no entrepreneur can make an unfair profit. The state determines how much any store manager can charge for a product, so that poor people are not taken advantage.

As a practical matter, that means that each time a new service is offered, or a new kind of product is developed, or is manufactured in a new way, or is distributed in a new way, or is sold with different kinds of customizations, some bureaucrat has to make a decision on how much may be charged for that product or service.

Now, how many how many government bureaucrats does it take to do all this? That's the problem. Let's do a little computation.

The population of the country grows exponentially with time, so let's assume that the population is P = A ept (A times e to the power p times t) as a function of time t. The number of products and services grows at least proportionately to the number of people, so let's make a conservative estimate that the number of products and services uses the formula P = B ept. Assuming that each transaction involves two people, the number of transactions will be T [[**Error** Macro 'C' is illegal **]] faster rate than the population grows. In order to enforce the economic controls, a fixed percentage (at least 1%) of these transactions will have to be monitored. So, as the population grows, it requires a greater and greater proportion of the population to enforce the economic controls, and so Communism falls apart.

That's why Communist countries like North Korea, East Germany and Cuba were stuck in the 50s. They had to freeze the introduction of new products, because their bureaucrats could never keep up with the economic controls on an exponentially growing product set.

That's why, once the population becomes large enough, larger than a few million people, a free market is the only form of economic management that's mathematically possible.

Using similar Complexity Theory arguments, it's possible show mathematically why feudal government had to give way to monarchies, and why monarchies had to give way to republics. (We already discussed this in conjunction with the French Revolution in chapter 8, p. [westeurope#178].) The argument is similar in all cases: As the population grows, the number of transactions between people grows much faster, and so the only forms of government that work are those that do not require the government to monitor individual transactions.

#socialism #communism #economics #generational dynamics #John J. Xenakis

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