Sonic Revelations, Sonic Revolutions

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.

Pretty much every week since I’ve come to Oberlin has been filled with good music. This week was no different.

On the weekend I listened to DW 2 by Lang while doing my laundry, and subsequently freaked out. The way he utilizes repetition and instrumentation is something awesome; I heard funk, I heard jazz, and I heard classical, all coming from this piece’s pieces of repeated phrases and seemingly random sequences of riffs. I felt like I do when I take samples from a song and loop them infinitely in Acid Pro, the program I’m most used to. But the way Lang moves and progresses past little snippets of a violin here and a cello here and vocals there is really something to behold. I’m really into what this guy does. It’s like DJing with pen and paper and an orchestra; it’s really something else.

Also: “First you put on your shirrrrrrrrt”

Sweet Honey in the Rock also played Sunday, to a pretty packed Finney Chapel. I was really glad to see this group perform, seeing as they’ve been writing and performing since the 70s. It was really a site to behold, with the backdrop of the very recent election of Barack Obama livening up the mood and bringing so much contemporary meaning to the songs they sang. The signer, the traditional African instruments, and the audience participation really made the performance special, adding to the raw talent behind the world-famous a capella group. It was a great start to the week.

Finally, Eighth Blackbird was amazing! I only caught the second half of the show, but I must say, Steve Reich’s “Double Sextet” was incredible. After seeing how the pianists, violinists, cellists and company interacted with each other’s vibrations throughout the piece was really inspiring, and made me want to write pieces in a similar fashion, that go beyond the plane of standard composition, and implement elements of improvisation, performer interaction, and algorithmic sequences.

Altogether, this week was really inspiring for me musically. I can’t wait to get some spare time to work on my own music…