A Musical Interlude

Sorry for not posting anything recently (aside from trying to get answers from Tom). So to tide you over, here’s some music:

Siouxsie and the Banshees improve on an Iggy Pop song, The Passenger:
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nAON-MwUPY&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Tom Shear (d/b/a Assemblage 23) doing his thing in Anthem. I, for one, love the way the various voices come in and out throughout the song.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpuu0-7_R5Q&fs=1&hl=en_US]

Music Nerd Joke

I’m going to tag all my Cocteau Twins MP3s and, in the TLAN frame, set the language code to zxx.

Ego Likeness: Save Your Serpent

Just heard this on the Metropolis Records podcast, and thought I’d pass it on: Ego Likeness’s song Save Your Serpent (direct MP3 download).

The lyrics, in particular, jumped out at me:

We are of reptiles
We are of stardust
We are of mercury
and these things are our kin
We are of dignity
We are of mercy
We are of cruelty
and this is not our sin

Build no temple
Just remember
what you came from, who you are
And you’re owed nothing
Just feel lucky
to leave a trace of who you are

Tones on Tail – Rain

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gs4MJIcjx8&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

Tones on Tail was a side project started by Daniel Ash of Bauhaus. Their discography is short enough to fit on a double-CD album, but it’s one of my favorites.

I love the way that Rain takes it sweet time building up. It’s a song that refuses to be rushed. It take over four minutes of this 8-minute song before the first word is sung. The Cure only lasted 3:52 in The Kiss, but there, it felt like an extended solo at the beginning of the song, whereas here, it’s more as if the band is setting the mood for the song proper that is yet to come.

I’ve never been one for pictures painted with music, but in the opening part of Rain, I can see the clouds moving in, the first drops starting to fall at 0:58, a lull, and then the keyboard line starts raining in earnest around 3:37. And so, by the time the song actually gets going, you’re ready to settle in for a rainy afternoon indoors.

And when the song ends on a 20-second sustained chord, well, that’s all right, because by then you’re not expecting anything to happen quickly. Note, too, that as each note is released in turn, it dies out with a glissando down that mirrors the glissando up at 0:28. Perhaps that’s the clouds parting and the sun coming out.

All in all, I have no idea what the song is about, but it’s a nice bit of mood music. And I have no earthly idea what Slender Fungus is about either, so I guess that’s okay.

Sing Like You Mean It

What with it being late December and all, I’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music lately. And one thing I’ve decided is that I really need to separate my collection into “Christmas music (straight)” and “Christmas music (ironic)”. It hurts my brain when I put the MP3 player on shuffle and it goes from Bing Crosby’s Silver Bells to William Hung’s version.

Another thing is that I need to purge my collection of such schmalzy glurge as Christmas at the Dentist’s and Stuck in an Elevator for Christmas.

Which brings me to my main point: that playing or singing like you mean it counts for a lot. I just listened to Etta Jones’s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. I can’t think of a single objective criterion (tempo, syncopation, inflection, etc.) by which it should be excluded from An Uncool Square’s Treasury of Easy-Listening Christmas Favorites, but I like it. There’s something I can’t define, but basically she sings like she means it, like it gives her joy to be singing this song, rather than singing like “hey, it’s a gig.” (And yes, I hear a lot of the same thing in gospel music, which is why it goes on my list of genres that I respect, even if I don’t enjoy the music itself.)

Mannheim Steamroller could easily have been a novelty act: A Synthpop Christmas. But I think there’s a joy that comes through in his playing, a feeling that he actually likes those songs, and wanted to do them justice in his own style. Ditto Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra, though Dean Martin could get a bit too schmalzy for me.

Of course, singing like you mean it isn’t everything. Wing is quite earnest, as is William Hung. But that doesn’t mean I want to listen to more of them than I absolutely have to.

I completely understand people who hate shopping in December because all the malls are playing the same twelve goddamned songs for a solid month. I too put on my iPod to drown out the Extruded Music Product. But if you look, you can find performances of those same twelve songs (and a lot more) that actually sound good. To a large extent, I think it’s simply because the musicians have genuine love for the material.

(PS: for the people who are tired of hearing the same twelve songs over and over, every year I make it a point to listen to Navidades Radioactivas, a Spanish punk Christmas compilation. It’s definitely… different.)

The Sun Is A Miasma

They Might Be Giants’ new album Here Comes Science is all sorts of awesome. One of the things I like is the inclusion of both Why Does The Sun Shine? and a new song, Why Does the Sun Really Shine?.

The first one, a cover of Tom Glazer and Dottie Evans’s song, begins:

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

The second, on the other hand, tells us:

The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
The sun’s not simply made out of gas
No, no, no

The sun is a quagmire
It’s not made of fire
Forget what you’ve been told in the past

Why Does the Sun Shine? is a catchy tune, with a sciency theme that deserves to be included on the album. It’s also nice that They decided to record an updated version of the song.

But more importantly, aside from telling kids what plasma is, Why Does the Sun Really Shine? says that science isn’t static. New things get discovered, old ideas get discarded. And the fact that the old song is on the album is similar to the way that science doesn’t purge old ideas: there’s no heresy police whose job it is to raid libraries and rip out the pages of books and journals that talk about Lamarckism or phlogiston.

Rather, old ideas in science are like that 8 Gb drive I still have in my closet for some reason: yes, I used to use it: at the time, it was the best thing I had available. Then something better came along, and I stopped using it. And once I get over any residual sentimental attachment, I’ll eventually toss it.

(Well, there’s also the fact that since Why Does the Sun Really Shine? also says to “Forget that song”. So “that song” had to be included on the album to let people know what to forget.)

Wednesday List

Some bands that were obviously named before Google became the one and only way to find anything anywhere:

  • ABC
  • AC/DC
  • The Band
  • Foreigner
  • Genesis
  • Guess Who
  • James
  • LeƦther Strip (yes, that’s L, E, A-E ligature)
  • M
  • Prince
  • (The Artist Formerly Known as Prince)
  • Secret Service
  • Squeeze
  • The The
  • Type O Negative
  • U2
  • Wham
  • Yes
  • Bands named after places: Boston, Chicago, Kansas, Nazareth, etc.
  • Bands named after common items: Heart, Hole, Journey, Madness, Ministry, Nirvana, Opposition, Orgy, Pig, Queen, Rush, Starship, Wire, etc.

I considered

  • Mr. Mister
  • The Smiths
  • The Who

but if you put those names in quotes, Google can find them.

Bonus list: album titles that Google can’t find:

  • by KMFDM
  • ? by Nena
  • Promises by Opposition
Further Thoughts on Musical Evo-Devo

I keep thinking off and on about writing a program to apply evo-devo to musical composition (part 2 ). There are tons of problems to solve, of course, but I may have made some progress.

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Calculating My Tastes

One thing you can do in iTunes is to give songs a rating from 1 to 5 stars. It also has an option to play highly-rated songs more often during shuffle play, but frankly, I can’t be bothered to go through my collection rating songs by hand. And besides, the metadata that iTunes stores for each song includes things like the number of times it was played, the last time it was played, the number of times it was skipped, the last time it was skipped, and the time when it was added to the library. It seems that from this, it should be possible to figure out what I like and what I don’t like. Specifically, it should be possible to write an AppleScript script that goes through the library and computes ratings.

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Software Enzymes for Musical Composition

When
I last wrote about using evo-devo to compose music,
I had gotten stuck on the problem of implementation. In particular, I couldn’t figure out how to write a seed organism that would develop into a simple composition that I could then use to evolve other tunes. I also wasn’t sure how to get the various genes to actually work together, not at a level at which I could start coding.

After some thought, it occurred to me that enzymes and proteins act sort of like functions in software: they bind to molecules (take arguments), which they can then modify, and sometimes release another molecule into the surrounding medium (return a value). So I just needed to come up with the software equivalent of an enzyme.

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