Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

Just some thoughts about creativity.

What is creativity? Everything in this world can be seen as innovations, combinations of something else. I have been thinking about something that can not be traced, that is, something that comes from nowhere and that kind of thing is what I regard as original. However, everything seems to be product of revolutions. In fact, I think when people want to create something completely different, firstly they have to have an idea of what they want to achieve. Then they have to figure out the process of how they can achieve that. The process, however, actually consists of things they know. Like Douglas said how he plays music. People have to express ideas with some kind of language. And for me, everything ever exists comes from the human nature. The variety of food comes from hunger. In the process of fulfilling the need, people  discovered things with different tastes. That’s the language for food. People then try to combine different kind of raw materials and seasonings to create something “new”. But is that creativity? Isn’t it simply combinations? The same with music. Even when people using different kind of things to create sound, they get the sound from nature rather than “creating” something doesn’t exist. Then people experiment with different objects to find out what they sound like. Then to innovate the sound to get what they want. If creativity means something that is completely new, I don’t think there is any creativity. What people do is to build stairs using what they already have in hand to a place they want to go.  

If we just look at music, I think every listener tries to find their favorite kind of music.  However, not all people find everything satisfying. That makes them to seek new kind of music. For me, I’m somewhat between indie and emo. The motivation for me to listen is to find something that I really love. Although there are parts of songs which I like a lot , there’s not a single musician or band I find satisfying all my needs so far. So maybe I will make something myself. But since there are so many musicians in the world and we human share 99.9% of our genes. It’s still possible for a majority of people to find their “favorite” music which they can stick to. So they are not the ones to blame. They are just doing what is right for them. It’s the same that people just don’t understand why we are always not satisfied with what we already have. Fortunately, although we are the minority, we are always here. There are always people trying to innovate or to “create” new stuff to listen to. This makes perfect sense. The world will be worse if there’s just too many variable and even worse if the world is not moving anymore. We need surprises but too many surprises will just make surprises ordinary. So for me, the world is perfect. : P    

I don’t know if this makes any sense. I was so occupied with thinking and just couldn’t make a sound in class so I have to say this.~ 

I want to talk about clear sky this time.

For me, the piece is roughly three parts. The first part is from the beginning to the point where the chaotic percussion ends. The third part is from where the strong piano notes that seem to clear the whole scene. And the second part is in between. This is really a “rough” partition but it is actually because the second part seems to be a big cloud to me.  The piece starts with the “theme”, and then the percussion shatter sthe whole theme(repetedly) into pieces (after the percussion, the sound is just like people scattering glass everywhere). The ending part sounds like the big cloud of sound is clearing up and the piece has nearly found itself successfully. The second part, which is supposed to be a searching process, seems to be unrelated. There are a lot of cool spots in it, especially the spot David picked out. I don’t know whether the composer is intended to do that but the whole second part is like finding light in a cloudy sky. However, the more I listen, the clearer I feel towards the piece. So I think I give the piece another listen.

Another thing is about the sound. It has long been a question to me that what is the role(or no role at all) do those human sound(like the sound of player blowing the instruments) and sometime the ambient noise have in music. If there is a place where “pure” sounds can be created, will composers use that place? I think this is different from the sound Alex Ross talked about in his article. Even recordings have those inevitable sounds made by players. And sometimes those sound can get ugly. If there is ”pure” sound like the sound of a clarinet without the sound of the player breathing, would it be any better? I do believe that some pieces and some instruments should have the original sound. Like the scratching of the guitar strings and the sound of players’ finger hits the keys in Continuum, those sounds are cool. However, in a piece like  clear sky, which for me it would be better if the saxphone sound would be more smooth, in contrast to those other instruments, and if the silence would actually be absolute silence(I think there’s some background noise in the piece). The contrast itself might be beautiful.

Anyway, I think I still need more listening to get a clearer picture of the piece. So that’s for now.

This is my “Holy Jesus I need to write about this” post. Holy Jesus I need to write about this.

Justice is a duo from France. They like to make you dance. Their latest single, “Stress”, is a six minute piece first released a few months ago, along with its highly controversial video that was banned in several countries for its graphic/realistic depictions of youth gang violence. Justice made a more danceable remix of its own song, which I just discovered last week. I thought I’d blog about it, due to its intrepid amounts of awesome.

Where do I begin? This song uses strings samples heavily, giving it a sound similar to”Night on Bald Mountain”. It’s hard for me to tell if the strings are actually recorded or synthesized/sampled, which shouldn’t matter because the production values are through the roof, regardless. The piece also samples multiple siren and alarm sounds. Justice is addicted to “slap” style bass riffs, giving their songs a signature funk sound, as is the case in the “Stress” auto remix (their bass lines are always originally recorded). Overall, this remix is a mix of epic club banger and cinematic montage piece, and I love it.

Here’s the remix link:

Justice – Stress (Auto Remix)

I won’t put the cool spots here because that would ruin the surprise. Watch the video!

AFTER you check that out, also take a look at the original “Stress” video. It’s a must-see.

Justice – Stress

Okay, I’m done. Enjoy the Justice!

Nothing from Nothing reminded me a lot of the Morton Feldman music that we listened to a while back.  I didn’t like this as much as Feldman’s music when I listened to it the first time.  I had trouble enjoying the piece’s silences as much as I do in Feldman’s works, and the music overall got repetitive.  All in all, I had trouble concentrating on Nothing for 20 minutes.  Then I discovered the iTunes visualizer.
With something to stare at, my mind no longer wandered.  The screechy flute sounds became brilliant showers of light, not unlike the enticing glare of burning magnesium. The vibraphone produced swirling streams of confetti.  The percussion beats that started about half way appeared as small hairs of light that disappeared almost instantly. Each time the piece faded to nothing, it held me in anticipation of the next burst of color.

I had never heard Girl Talk until I came to Oberlin. I had heard of them, yes, but I sort of figured that anything heavily referenced on the Oberlin 2012 facebook group was well worth avoiding.

I was wrong.

The first time I heard Girl Talk, it was early September and one of the worst days of my life. I had spent the morning going back and forth from the old media check-out room, to the art department, to the new media check-out room, to the cage, to ginko gallery, to the photo co-op,  back to the art building, and so on ad nausem and side cramps. All this walking culminated on the bench outside my photography professor’s office, holding the knowledge that manual cameras are so completely obsolete that noone on campus owned any, much less was willing to rent one to a lowly, novice of a freshman, and the shiny new iPod I had just received for class in my other hand. I put my headphones on, and after being a bit frightened at what came up when I put it on shuffle, searched through it for anything that sounded vaguely familiar.

I sat outside my photography professor’s office for a half an hour, bouncing up and down, dancing and singing a bit, and basically, having a ball. I didn’t even mind that he didn’t show up. Anyone passing by must have thought I was insane. I was grinning wildly and bopping along, and occasionally cracking up laughing and exclaiming things like “Really? Really?!” to no one in particular.

The first time I made someone else listen to Girl Talk was a couple of weeks after that. We were on a study break, and I was jamming out in the corner, actually still doing homework. “So show me this weird music you’ve been listening to,” my friend demanded, raised eyebrows, hand out, not about to take no for an answer.

“Um, okay,” I said, and quickly changed the track to something a little more listener-friendly.

My friend nearly snorted water through his nose. “Did they just sample Paul McCartney? Really?” He couldn’t stop grinning. I didn’t get my ipod back for a while.

Since then Girl Talk has been all over. I joined a couple friends on an impromptu to Lake Eerie late one Saturday night, and we rolled all the windows down, blared Girl Talk, and sung into the wind. I’ve heard it in co-op kitchens on particularly bad crews and on the radio. The thing is, Girl Talk has almost spoiled me. I can’t listen to Paranoid Android without thinking about how much better Girl Talk made it. Who in the world would have thought that ABC by the Jackson Five would be so much improved by giving it a back beat and blending it with Bohemian Rhapsody? The originals are sometimes (especially in the case of Avril Lavigne) not as good as what they’ve been made into. Rapping over Come On Eileen and God Only Knows, if not one of the best ideas ever, is at least one of the most amusing ideas ever. Every part of every Girl Talk song is a “cool spot.”

I think one of the reasons I am constantly so amazed by everything they produce is that I spent a good deal of my summer writing found poetry; taking the words of my classmates and famous writers and strangers and twisting and rearranging them to create something completely new. I discovered this accidentally, just listening to a classmate in my writing workshop read his work aloud and trying to type fast enough to catch all the phrases and words and images I found really intriguing. I ended up with a block of text that read a lot like poetry. I started experimenting with rearranging the words and ideas of the “feedback poems,” as my class started to call them, and I believe that some of the best things I wrote during those three weeks I did not actually write. My friends wrote all of the words and phrases, and all I did was rearrange, adding a couple of words here and there where necessary. I spent a long time torturing myself over who “wrote” the poetry I ended up with, and now I know exactly what was going on. I sampled.

The idea of musically legitimizing stealing with the word “sampling” is fantastic. I am a fan. Everything comes from somewhere; some a little more directly than others. That’s not a problem in and of itself. Artists learn by copying and drawing what the masters have created, and then branch off that knowledge to create something new. A sketch of a statue is still a beautiful new piece of art, and someone may be more enthralled with that than the original marble. Directly using others’ material without credit and plagiarizing is a different story. Giving credit where it is due (which I am sure Girl Talk has done in what have to be the longest liner notes ever) and then making something new is not only acceptable; I would encourage it. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Most things have been done before, and we can just branch off them to create something “new.” Reuse, and recycle.

Beyond that, it is incredibly hard sometimes to rip things apart and put them back together in a way equally as aesthetically pleasing as the original. Girl Talk always hits it perfectly, and I am always impressed.

Hey guys, long time no post, I know. I’ve been sick and then lost my password, and eh, I hate excuses. Let’s get on with this. I’ll do the assigned blog now, and then stayed tuned later on today for Natalia’s Make Up Posts!

This piece is so amazingly disjointed and yet works together so fluidly. I have tons of different impressions scratched down on my paper: “forests, birds, haunted house, glowing,” etc. One of the main impressions I got from the piece was the idea of birdcalls, because of the way the piece is structured. It is rare for an instrument to continue playing for very long, so the snippets reminded me of bursts of birdsong. I heard an owl-like sound at 7:48 and 7:58, and when the tapping began (at 10:15) it reminded of a woodpecker. The thing that I think makes this whole piece work is the fact that the two instruments are not really playing with each other. They’re layering over each other. They never play for exactly the same interval; one always comes in earlier, leaves later, or bounces in and out of the music. The flute and the vibraphone are on different planes. At the beginning this was played up even more, with the instruments almost taking turns, in order to highlight the scarcity of sound, and all the silence sprinkled through the piece. At about 8:46 I realized that the sound was becoming more compacted, and there were a lot fewer intervals of silence. Occasionally I even forgot that there were only two instruments because of the diverse sounds they created. However, these sounds could only play two at a time because of the limited numner of instruments, which also added to the layering sound. To my ears, there were five nine building blocks of this song: silence, flute trilling, vibraphone trilling, flute shrieking, vibraphone clanking, the two different kinds of tapping, the ominious hum, and the glowing hum.  These sounds affected the tone of the piece a lot. At the beginning, when it was mostly silence, humming vibraphone, and softly trilling flute, the piece felt a lot calmer than later on, when the vibraphone began tapping out beats and the flute began to shriek. The end worked very well, because it calmed down a lot and thus reminded me of the beginning, but at the same time had a different sound clearly derived from the music’s progression.

Basically, I really liked this.

Well, I really want to figure out something about the title of the piece. It’s really interesting and confusing. But I don’t know how to understand this title. So I’ll just leave it.. Maybe someday I’ll get an answer.

The piece is really(REALLY) interesting. At first there seems to be a theme which the flute just goes up and down(both the pitch and the sound intensity) and at the same time, the vibraphone does the same thing but with the same note. However, the sound doesn’t just stay that way, with every few repetitions, it gets something new in it. But the most unpredictable thing is the first silent moment. When I heard this, I thought there would be something going on soon. And at around 6:33, the second silent moment comes and the piece goes out of the original track. The piece accelerates and the sound mass begins to grow into a more colourful one. What I want to talk about is the part starting at 12:00 when the flute appears as a percussion instrument. It’s like the starting of a fight. The flute wants the vibraphone to follow it to be a percussion, however, firstly, both of them started as a negotiation. Vibraphone rejects the idea by doing what it did before. Don’t want to act rude, the flute answers politely with real notes. The negotiation just goes on. However, the vibraphone is apperantly not the strong side and always gives in. The flute uses more and more percussion notes and begins to scream at the vibraphone occasionally. At last , the vibraphone couldn’t stand it anymore, and after the flute screamed again in a unbearable way, the vibraphone obeyed.

This is a little funny but this is what comes to my mind as I listened to the piece for the second time with the score. But even in this, the cool spot for me is the part during which the flute and the vibraphone played alternatively. And both of them hint each other to go in by using some gestures. The sound played by the flute and the vibraphone were so different that I sense them as in different places but watching each other. There is the tacit understanding going on and it just feels great.

The piece is just interesting and I would definetely come back to this.

First off, I apologize for being late on this blog. I should have organized my time better to get in on time. My fault.

Anyways, I wasn’t really sure what to write about for my blog this week. I thought about Du Yun and the similarites between her and Ligeti, but that’s not what’s really taking over my musical mind lately.

I want to talk about the music from Darius Goes West, the documentary shown in West lecture hall this past Tuesday night. Darius Goes West, in brief, is about Darius Weems, a teenager from Athens, Georgia who is wheelchair-bound due to his life-long bout with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, and his cross-country journey to get his wheelchair customized on the MTV show “Pimp My Ride”.

Darius grew up in public housing in Athens, Georgia, a city that already has high poverty and unemployment rates. His older brother, Mario, died at the age of 19 from the same disease right before his high school graduation. Darius’s life is obviously one filled with tribulations, and since the age of 15, he has expressed his emotions and chronicled his cross-country journey through raps.

From a very superficial standpoint, the beats Darius raps on are very simple and repetitive, but that’s not what you listen to; because of the 1-dimensionality of the beats he uses, the listener’s focus shifts exclusively to Darius’s lyrics, with each subsequent line grabbing your attention. Darius raps about his home, his background, his travels, and his life with DMD, and does so with a wonderful touch of youthful creativity and cleverness that really make it a joy to listen to.

Darius is 19 now, and visited Oberlin Tuesday night with the crew from the documentary as they continue their tour of the US for a year-long fundraiser for DMD research.  I met him after the screening and told him about my own exploits in hip hop, and he showed interest in exchanging tracks in hopes of possibly putting an album together, since most of his time is dedicated to the screening tour this year. While this is still all up in the air, I’m really excited about what this could develop into, and I wanted to share it with the class.

It’s really beautiful how hip hop can bring people together like this. While I am from Georgia myself, I would have never met another lyricist like Darius were it not for this ground-up musical medium we have in common.

Alright. Rolling stone just came out with the 100 greatest singers ever.

Bob Dylan was number seven,  beating people like Robert Plant, Freddie Mercury, Bono(fair), Steve Perry, James Brown, Stevie Wonder.

Fine Bob Dylan was the man and all. Yeah, yeah he was an inspiration. Yeah he was the omnipotent folk god for millions of people. But he wasn’t that fucking fantastic at singing. I mean yes. Great musicians deserve praise, but not in every single category of musicianship. (unless they do deserve it). Say what you will about his voice, make any argument that makes sense. But I still wont believe that there are no less then six people better at singing then him.

Screw you Rolling Stone magazine. Screw you.

Ever heard of Luciano Pavoratti?

I’m moving back in time to Alice’s piece, “I Was a Lover” by TV on the Radio. I’m an avid fan of TV on the Radio and in my opinion, this is one of their best works. The piece is so powerful, using evocative and complex language enhanced by the pounding, almost dragging beat. The lyrics are full of conflict and resonate deep within the listener. Many interpret them as the deterioration of a relationship, but they are clearly portraying a political message from the band in a poetic, beautifully haunting way. The music reminds me of a melancholy blues singer in the bowels of Chicago’s clubs, lamenting the woes of today’s society, while the horn loop in the background is like crying of a dying elephant–not very elegant, but it’s something powerful, heavy, and full of grief. This song continues to capture my ears and I haven’t been able to stop listening to it.