I was online looking for that hidden link between Timbaland and Pharrell. Did you know that they knew each other since middle school? Their parents knew each other, their grandparents knew each other, they wuz tite.

Anyways, what caught my eye was this:
On the ABC show "Nightline" Pharrell said, "I could always visualize what I was hearing" and "It was always like weird colors," suggesting he may have synesthesia.

Maybe that's why I like his production so much, it's oddly visual. In fact, I think that's why I like what I like at all - good music, to me, is inseparable from a strong image. I don't think I'm like other synesthesiacs though. I don't see color, I see shapes and textures. If it's a real instrument, I see the instrument. If it's an abstract noise, it's a waveform, clearly defined in a three-dimensional space. Voices tend to fall in the latter category, which is why it's so easy for me to tune out lyrics.

MP3: Joanna Newsom - Three Little Babes

How often do you smile every time you hear a song?

Her voice tears into my head with the brittleness of a siren. And I enjoy it.

Joanna belongs to the group of singers you either love or hate, and as with most singers of that ilk, I love her. There is a rawness of sound there, a very visceral sonic characteristic that reaches out with it's tendrils and pushes itself into the folds of your brain. I've heard her voice in this song likened to a wailing cat or a diseased woman, and it's hard for me to disagree. Is that truly a negative thing though? I'd argue that it's a sensation so compelling, so ugly, that it cuts through all the bullshit, that forces you to listen to it... well, I think that's something quite beautiful and rare.

Dabrye
1 MP3: Bloop
2 MP3: Game Over

8bit melodies rocking amidst unsure hip hop

MP3: Broadcast - Lunch Hour Pops

Broadcast is now officially the top of my Last FM list. They have toppled the mighty Aphex Twin, who's influence loomed so large in my mind that first listening to him was a formative experience that set the stage for how I listen to music. So, what makes Broadcast so good?

At times, such as this, it is simple, beguiling pop. Trish Keenan's cool, unaffected delivery has such a distance to it that it seems to just to hover somewhere between the horizon and sky. And when her voice sings such pretty melodies, it dances around the harp like some child's plaything gone wild. It's a very romantic view of music, complete with high pitched electronic flourishes and a merry-go-round melody.

MP3: Johann Sebastian Bach (Yo-Yo Ma) - Suite No.1, S. 1007 in G Major - I. Prelude

I asked my coworker if he could identify a classical song and he smirked, "I know classical songs, but I don't know any classical song names... they're all like 'Suite in C B A' and 'Concerto in A Minor Plus Plus'". Funny... but it also got me thinking. Isn't this what Autechre also does with their song titles? Garbagemx36, 6Ie.cr, VI Scose Poise - it's a way of avoiding labels. Nondescript, faceless, an indication that it's the music that matters, stupid. It's nice to know that a common attitude is shared throughout the history of abstract instrumental music.

Sufjan Stevens 9/16 - Paramount Theater, Austin

I like Sufjan Stevens. It's pleasant music, full of nice harmony and pop. A guy with a guitar and sickly-sweet double tracked vocals, what's not to like? It's the type of music you could play for a girl at random from the street and she'd probably love it and love you for it.

But I don't love his music by any stretch. The words "sugary" and "overproduced" come to mind. It's like the trap that some of Elliott Smith's music falls into - layers and layers of harmony actually begin to detract from the sincerity of the music. Grandeur is great to aim for, but there are different, and more affecting, ways to reach elation other than typical choral arrangements and movie soundtrack orchestration. It doesn't quite reach cheesy, but it smells all too familiar.

This is the mindset I went into the show with, but I was open to having my opinion changed. The live show is, afterall, a gateway to a religious experience. Bands that are merely good on record become powerful and god-like on stage. An explosive sound can blow your mind into sensual ecstasy. Hopefully, my image of him as indie-pop lite would gain something of a bit more substance.

Sufjan's band then all walked out with butterfly wings. My opinion was not changed. The show was good though, I enjoyed it overall. The stage was full - there was a horn section, back up singers, and the standard guitar/bass/drums. They played head-nodders and attractive melodies, appealing stuff through and through. There were songs I didn't recognize, but at the same time, there was also nothing that surprised me. During climaxes, the theater hummed thick with harmonic layers, but musically, it was like eating vanilla creme cookies for an hour. Pleasant, at worst. Or, at best, whichever you prefer.

Near the beginning of the show Sufjan stated that he would play songs that aimed at "transcendence". I suppose I just have a differing view of how to accomplish that.

It's funny whenever I tell someone I don't listen to lyrics. They just kind of nod their head, accepting the fact as if I just told them that I clip my toenails on Tuesdays. It's a matter of choice, they would think to themselves, it's not as if he can't really hear the lyrics. But I can't.

My co-worker was getting pissed off because he was pointing out lyrics that he wanted me to hear. He kept rewinding and rewinding to the phrase, and asking me about the 'little girl'. I just thought he was a pedophile. "LITTLE GIRL, LITTLE GIRL!! " he would scream hysterically, "IT'S RIGHT THERE!!" Eventually I made him sing it for me, because I had no idea what he was talking about. In a short magical phrase, the song I had been listening to for 5 years suddenly became a pederass's anthem. ...He says little girl??!

It's often I think the music I listen to isn't well known (sometimes it very much is though). It always makes me happy to find a fellow soul who likes what I do, especially the stuff that I would consider obscure. I'm gonna list some albums that I have yet to find others who enjoy them as much as I do (that I haven't introduced the albums to in the first place).

snd - Tender Love
Asa-Chang & Junray - Jun Ray Song Chang
Manitoba - Up In Flames
Keith Fullerton Whitman - Playthroughs
Vashti Bunyan - Just Another Diamond Day
Triple R - Friends
Susumu Yokota - Grinning Cat

ok, I know of others who enjoy these, but mainly because I introduced the music to them. I guess I feel like these are more like private discoveries than anything else, as if I had turned the corner while on a walk and happened onto a secret garden I could spend the rest of my life in.

As I'm looking over the list I notice these themes: minimalism, odd juxtapositions of sounds, and prettiness. And I know with snd, Asa-Chung & Junray, and Susumu Yokota, I could very easily imagine myself creating this type of music. Shit, you know what I just realized? Those themes are very Buddhist-centric. Perhaps not as far Zen as John Cage's ideals are, but they lean towards that. An affirmative reflection of life. Positive heady analysis of the world around you. That is my goal, that is what drives me. It's an introvert's position to believe that the act of reflection in itself is good, and I tend to apply that to art. The most profound art makes you reconsider, reevaluate, and reexamine.

Here's a counter-intuitive nugget from John Cage :

"If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on. Eventually one discovers that it's not boring at all but very interesting."

While I don't think it's always correct, there's something to that.

John Cage represents an extremism. He fights to let sound be sound, thus his fight is also against any sort of artist intervention or created symbolism. It's a bit paradoxical isn't it? Even if he were to set a tape recorder in a forest and then play it back to an audience, it would still represent a conscious artistic choice.

His extreme stance when it comes to music making is perhaps why I've heard people say, "Read and love Cage, but listen to his music only out of curiosity".

It makes me wonder how John Cage would see the modern electronic music I listen to - it's a genre not as restrictive as other genres, indeed, it's the most free. From the organic-electronic fusions of early Amon Tobin to the hyper synthetic glitches of Oval, the genre follows Cage's sound first worship. BUT, the genre is also about highly personal expressions, an extension of the ego Cage might say. Sound first, but manipulated to the creator's desires. It might be instructive to look at how Cage views Varese, a composer who manipulated interesting sounds to his own end. Varese is important as a predecessor, Cage goes on, but he remains distinctly a figure of the past because "rather than dealing with sounds as sounds, he deals with them as Varese." Cage might view the same way someone such as Aphex Twin, who's intensely weird abstractions are an extension of his personality, even while pushing sound to the forefront.

Another "Silence" Excerpt

There are people who say, "If music's that easy to write, I could do it." Of course they could, but they don't. I find [Morton] Feldman's own statement more affirmative. We were driving back from some place in New England where a concert had been given. He is a large man and falls asleep easily. Out of a sound sleep, he awoke to say, "Now that things are so simple, there's so much to do." And then he went back to sleep.

One thing that has always pissed me off is when someone says, "Even I could do that." But they don't. And that's the point. Art is not about technical ability - and that goes over the layman's head. The layman calls the artist pretentious, but the true pretension lies in the layman. Should artists restrict themselves to what the layman thinks is art, or should everyone just let art be?

'Silence' by John Cage

"As the unchallenged father figure of American experimental music, Mr. Cage wields an influence that extends far beyond sound alone....Indeed, the entire American avant-garde would be unthinkable without Mr. Cage's music, writings, and genially patriarchical personality."

From what I understand, this nigga did more than anyone else to free sound to be -just- sound. I'm not that far into the book yet, but even already his ideas impress me in their profundity.

It is the sheer pleasure of hearing sound that is at the crux of all his ideas. To Cage, experimental music is merely a method to release sound to be sound. Chance operations, improvisation, and undefined variables all function in the same way - to produce a new and unique listening experience every time. Part of his framework that allows for this is the division of composition, performance, and listening into seperate and distinct activities, so much so that he laughs, "What do they have to do with each other at all?" What happens then is unrestricted freedom in creativity: a composer may make a piece last 639 years, or have a pianist play nothing for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. Cage calls it "meaningless play", but the focus is clearly on the act of creation. It's a new product of sound every performance, but most importantly, it's also unique for the composer. He's definitely an artist's artist.

In the activity of listening, Cage contends that there is always something to hear, you just have to open your ears. Using an anecdote relating his experience in a room designed to be completely silent, Cage theorizes that there isn't really silence at all. As he sat in this room that was desigend to be silent, he heard two tones, one low and one high. He was informed that the low was his circulation system and that the high was his nervous system. "Try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." It's a bit philosophical I think - it's really about changing your definition of what constitutes sound, or maybe even more broadly, about being receptive to the world around you.

How I think his Zen buddhism figures into that:
Zen makes use of koans, anecdotes that are paradoxical or seemingly nonsensical, but are stepping stones to enlightment. They shut you up and make you go 'Whuh?'. A moment of perplexion follows, and rational thought ceases. Then, your mind is free. Cage's compositional methods function similar to koans. They slap you upside the head and make you go 'Whuh?'. But then you listen. Then, you are in a state of 'be here now'. You begin to hear sounds unencumbered by your notion of what music is or should be. You just hear. It's really a kind of a beautiful and life-affirming approach: take in the world as it is, rather than what you think it is.

Here's a story that he tells that I like. It may be predictable, but it illustrates his thoughts on sound perfectly:

Several men, three as a matter of fact, were out walking one day, and as they were walking along and talking one of them noticed another man standing on a hill ahead of them. He turned to his friends and said, "Why do you think that man is standing up there on that hill?" One said, "He must be up there because it's cooler there and he's enjoying the breeze." He turned to another and repeeated the question, "Why do you think that man's standing up there on that hill?" The second said, "Since the hill is elevated above the rest of the land, he must be up there in order to see something in the distance." And the third said, "He must have lost his friend and that is why he is standing there alone on that hill." After some time walking along, the men came up on the hill and the one who had been standing there was still there: standing there. They asked him to say which one was right concerning his reason for standing where he was standing.

"What reasons do you have for my standing here?" he asked. "We have three," they answered. "First, you are standing up here because it's cooler here and you are enjoying the breeze. Second, since the hill is elevated above the rest of the land, you are up here in order to see something in the distance. Third, you have lost your friend and that is why you are standing here alone on this hill. We have walked this way; we never meant to climb this hill; now we want an answer: Which one of us is right?"

The man answered."I just stand."

WHAT DID I DO??? I just uninstalled Warcraft 3 and Counter-Strike. Man, I feel ... less dirty.

AGENDA

1) Do things you are afraid of.
2) Dance!

Brave New World

Good, but flawed. It worked for me all the way up to the end, where the believability starts spiralling away into the clouds. The hero whips his own back in religious fervor to punish himself for lusting after a woman. His whip til he bleeds, and he curses himself for even thinking about her. It is outrageous, for the simple fact that you just can't relate. His earlier doe-eyed astonishment of a world of extreme brings initially you into his character. When he asks why things are the way they are, we ask with him. When he criticizes some of their ways, he merely speaks for us. When he cries for his dying mother, we feel his rage and sorrow. Then he starts RAPING HIS OWN BACK!!!! It just comes out of nowhere. But, Aldous Huxley admits as much, saying that to bring it to such an absurd end was amusing to him at the time. Well fuck that.

Other thoughts

- Huxley knows what being truly alone feels like. There are alot of outsider type heroes in popular culture, but Huxley deftly expresses the pure despair of being alone. There is at once both anger and yearning, to intentionally rebel and to still feel somehow you have to fit in somewhere. You search and you search, and you may find some like-minded individuals, but you still feel alone. It becomes a spiritual journey, and you feel forever in darkness. Eventually and maybe suddenly, it reaches a point of pure terror, when you realize that nobody in the fucking universe can help you. You are stuck there in the darkness, and it's fresh and immediate and alarming. Then you realize: it's just you.

The main hero feels this despair. When he is introduced as person stuck between two cultures I was immediately hooked. The book then became something more than just a sci-fi exploration of a future technological path. Y'know, maybe it became rather an exploration of outsider status to identity. Too bad it went off the goofy side.

- This man's vocabulary is fucking amazing. I'm studying for the GRE and it's like Huxley was given an assignment to write a book with every single GRE word in there. No wonder they assign it in highschools.

- Huxley also admits another fault: instead of having to choose between a cold, clinical modern world and the brutal, violent reservation, Huxley would've included a third option that fit somewhere inbetween those two. He considers the book in it's current state philosophically incomplete, and I agree. It bothered me for a bit, because what the book as written is saying if you aren't living your emotions and desires to their complete end, you aren't living as an adult. The people of the book's modern world are genetically programmed and environmentally conditioned to be 24/7 satiated so that no strong desires arise. That state of being is related as being a child, or maybe immature. It's funny, the whole time they're talking shit about being content, I'm wondering if Huxley has an anti-Buddhist agenda. Anyways, he sets up that world as the diametric opposite of the reservation life, and clearly it's the reservation life that he champions. The reservation life with disease, mob violence, substance abuse, and an extreme in-group mentality. The reservation life that causes the hero so much misery and self-conflict that he starts whipping himself. And you read on and on til the end and you wonder why, with all these evils, is it being championed. And you read the foreword and you find that it's for no good reason, other than it's amusing. Sorry, I'd agree with Huxley himself, I'd change it. I felt too much for this guy for him to descend into some half-assed cartoon.

markmaking in drawing is a good analogy for sound in music. some use both as a means to an end, and some use both as an end in theirselves. i think you can get fucking gloriously lost in just sound with the aid of repetition. melody and structure are present, but they fall to the wayside. the same with markmaking: in figure drawing i saw pieces by other students where the figure was discernible, but it wasn't really the point. charred up, fucked up, fat and thin lines criss-crossed subject matter into oblivion, we're not dealing with representation anymore. get lost in the details, get lost in the moment.

inductive logic seems to be the cause of most of humanity's misunderstandings. ex: if A of group 2 is bad, then all of group 2 is bad.

happens with music all the time. it's easy to stereotype music, because labels give a convenient organizational method. ex: if Aceyalone is hip-hop and you hate hip-hop, you must hate Aceyalone. the end result is you're missing out on a fuckload of good music. it's necessary to generalize, but to generalize negatively in a broad absolute way means you miss out on life.

i hate conversations where you go "my experience is x," then as soon as you stop and maybe a little bit before they go "my experience is y which is only tangently related but i'll say it anyways because i have nothing to add and only heard words coming out of your mouth and not any actual ideas conveyed and i might as well be listening to a frog croaking because really i just want to talk about myself and avoid conversational dead space because then i have to actually think about what you're saying". happens all the time, especially with super-social people and even more when i was younger.

sometimes it's nice hearing someone just spill about themselves though, it's sorta confessional and voyeuristic to experience it and tells you another aspect of their personality besides the actual content of the conversation. also easy to tune out because they dont expect any real response.

i think it happens alot with good friends because you don't really need that 'connecting with' follow-up questioning portion, you already know you're connected and usually you understand where the other person is coming from. it's like saying 'oh, i understand' is implicitly said because you're already close. you don't have to ask what they mean, or the context, because you already know.

another exception to the rule is when you're drunk. god damn can you go on and on about the stupidest bullshit when you're drunk.

i guess i'm on a run of attacking commonly used words. slut is one i've been meaning to write on for a while. i don't have anything exciting to say that hasn't been said before - it's a double-standard, sexist word, socially constructed idea, yadda yadda yadda. despite it's disgusting meaning to some, it's disgusting to ME to hear it used the way it oftenly is. WHY is there a negative stigma attached to someone enjoying themselves? that's really what it comes down to.

admittedly that negative stigma can be very intense. i think it takes a bit of logic, to realize someone else is dictating what you should enjoy, and a lot of self-confidence, to stand up to the pressure of conformity, to be free of negative stigma.

i wasn't supposed to like rap. i wasn't supposed to like rock. i wasn't supposed to like idm. i'm still not even supposed to like girly shit or pop. growing up and being very impressionable, i often succumbed to these pressures. as someone who was very into alternative rock, i was ashamed for even thinking rap was listenable. even now, i love listening to mainstream hiphop, but i get disapproval from friends who are supposedly above that. and on the other side of the coin, as an asian who's supposed to like techno and rap, i felt inadequately asian for listening to rock. and as a 'normal person', why the fuck would i want to listen to weird atonal shit with no vocals? as a guy, there are times even now when i feel less 'manly' for listening to ultra-effeminate music. that is one strong ass stigma to fight.

in the end though, one of the greatest epiphanies in my life was when i stopped letting what i was supposed to like affect what i genuinely liked. i'll form my own criteria for what's good. others think who you are should guide what you like. i think what i like guides who i am.

thumpd
it never ceases to amaze me the thing thats we choose to remember, the things that we respond to, the things we are stimulated by. what's the process of 'hey, i think this is interesting'? the things that impact me, i have this huge urge to take a step back and consider 'why?'. many times it's conditioning, but equally many times i have just no fucking idea. just no fucking idea. we all are saturated with so much media in our daily lives, why do the things that do pop out from the deluge pop out in the first place? i guess what i'm trying to do with this blog is articulate the why's that i do find. i see it as a challenge. often in writing you'll see 'this is something that words can not describe'. that's just laziness.

(not to say that reading text about something is the same as experiencing it. of course not. but to say 'this is something that words can not describe', is to say 'i cant find the words to describe this". it's evading fault.)

a common liberal standpoint
is "don't legislate morality". it is always pointed at conservative lawmakers. my teacher even said this in class about gay marriage laws. but... when the fuck is legislation NOT morally-defined? it's ridiculous to think that liberal lawmakers are completely unbiased and not guided by a sense of what's right and what's wrong. it's more like saying hey, "don't legislate YOUR morality. mine's ok though". just plain hypocritical.

relating it to music...
"dont legislate morality" is like saying "dance music sucks". music has different functions, and when people say things like "dance music sucks" they are invalidating the type of music. their music can serve a function for themselves, but if music that serves a different function for others, then it sucks. like "dont legislate morality", it's speaks of more than just personal preference. it's saying what i listen to is more legitimate than what you listen to, or in the case of 'legislating morality', what i legislate is more legitimate than what you legislate.

sitting here at my house with a decent 3 speaker set up, a thought just occured to me. the way i listen to music now at my apartment is a 2 speaker boombox system that sits way up high above my head. i still love music as ever, but the images that go through my head now are pretty different than what it was when i was living at home.

the way i used to visualize music was very layered, the bass sounds occupying the lower ground and mid and treble sounds occupying higher ground. very much affected by the 3 speaker setup with the sub on the floor. the funny thing is, this is the way i visualized music for a long ass time, to the point to where i often thought, 'how the hell else could you visualize music, it just makes sense!!'. bass sounds below other sounds. how more common sense can you get. but now, with this other setup, i dont visualize the sounds in music containing such distinctiveness in layering. there's depth, but not to the level it was before. like one of those magic eye illusions depths.

i think i prefer this 3 speaker setup, even though i'm 100 percent sure the 2 speaker boombox has higher fidelity.