The world we have lost

Came across an interesting article on Jim O'Rourke today:

Mr. O’Rourke’s production style is precise and dry; he creates a sound picture in which tiny sonic details matter. But where his Drag City records are concerned, everything matters: the pacing, the length, the sound, the cover images. For this reason he won’t allow “The Visitor,” or any of his albums, to be sold as downloads, on iTunes or anywhere else. He’s taking a stand against the sound quality of MP3s; he’s also taking a stand in favor of artists being able to control the medium and reception of their work.

“You can no longer use context as part of your work,” he said, glumly, “because it doesn’t matter what you do, somebody’s going to change the context of it. The confusion of creativity, making something, with this Internet idea of democratization ...” he trailed off, disgusted. “It sounds like old-man stuff, but I think it’s disastrous for the possibilities of any art form.”

Like me, O'Rourke is 40. I suppose, when you're that "old," and faced with the sort of industry-wide upheaval that the music business is currently going through, you're entitled to a certain degree of curmudgeonliness. And while I generally try to resist that sort of thing, for the purposes of this post I'm going to broadly agree with O'Rourke's assessment of where music is at, because it gives me a convenient excuse to express a few thoughts I've been mulling over anyway.

First: the obvious. To the extent that jazz's viability as a music of the future is in jeopardy, that situation has a lot to do with various threats to the existence of a strong and extensive fan community.

But what is a fan? Consider: a true fan does much more than simply "like" a certain artist or genre. True fanhood is, essentially, an irrational enterprise.

For instance: I have written before about the importance of context for a fan's love of a given work. I may be fascinated by the biographies of my favorite musicians, because they provide an engaging frame -- but the music itself is no different whether I know the relevant background or not. The fact that I seem to enjoy a given tune more once I have obtained said information strikes me as somewhat odd.

But if you really want to talk about irrationality, think about the extent to which fanhood has traditionally involved elaborate rituals of fetishization. While true music fans love music, and love stories about music, we also love to fetishize the objects that convey music.

(Right? I'm assuming that you too have lovingly caressed a well-worn LP jacket.)

So the fact that we are developing a purely digital, artifact-less musical culture is maybe a little concerning. Cuz, you know: how do you fetishize an mp3?



And what happens to fanhood when you no longer have an art object to fetishize? Do you stop caring about the art itself? I wonder. While people still do buy physical media, I suspect that in general our relationship with recordings (i.e., qua recordings) has become much more ethereal, and much more casual (I know, I know). Who really worries about losing, misplacing, or wearing out a recording anymore? In my own case, I transfer most of the digital music I download onto disc, but I rarely buy jewel cases in which to protectively house them. I also gave up on CD wallets. Generally I just let the damned things accumulate in piles on my desk, or else just stack 'em back on the spindle they came from. Once they have been "consumed" for a given period of time, the MP3s, in turn, get backed up onto numerous hard-drives, which I hardly ever consult because there is so much new music to get to.

One could argue that the whole history of recording technology thus far has been driven by the search for devices and media that make the experience of music durable, reliable, and convenient. At their most fragile, brittle, and finite, older forms of music media (the 78, say, or even the cassette, which was always getting "eaten" at the wrong time (in my experience, anyway)) seemed to invite a greater degree of fetishization. We knew they wouldn't last forever, we knew they might be hard to replace, we knew they actually required some effort to obtain -- so of course we treated them with greater reverence.

Now that everything is so much easier, more durable and convenient, is that reverence harder to come by?

[photo credits: puroticorico, carlcollins]

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Speaking of "fetishizing": the Industrial Jazz Group is having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour! You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Oh yeah, and we also have a remix contest.

Return of the son of last week's comment thread

Not to get too incestuous on this blog, but I sorta did promise to return to a certain discussion from last week. You know, the one that cropped up in this post, but simultaneously seemed to cry out for its own space.

Quick summary: it's basically a version of the old "recorded music vs. live music" debate. Mr. G and Steve smartly posited the superiority of the latter, while I attempted to argue for the value of both. (Apologies if I am misrepresenting.)

In an effort to get right back into that moment, and to cut off this damned preamble before it goes too far, can we just pretend that what follows is a natural extension of the previous comment thread?

Mr. G: I think it behooves us as musicians to remind folk how canned music is to music as canned peaches are to peaches, and they should re-gain the ears to hear that, and thus demand live music.

Durkin: Again, I'm a big fan of live music, and I agree we need to find ways to increase its presence in the world. But canned music is not to music as canned peaches are to peaches. "Canned music" (if we must call it that) is to music as apples are to oranges.

If, when listening to recorded music, your main question is, "How much does this sound like live music?" then of course you are in for disappointment. It's the wrong question to ask. The authenticity battle is a battle that engineers can never win (and so sound system ads that tout verisimilitude are disingenuous).

Which, by the way, is not to say that live music has a more convincing prior claim on authenticity. What seat do you have to be sitting in to get the "real" symphony? Which concert hall? Which orchestra and conductor does it have to be? What edition of the score should be used? What state of mind do you have to be in? What time of day does it have to be?

It's no disrespect to live music to wonder these things. But that's the problem with the "live" vs. "recorded" debate: we harbor all kinds of anxieties about "technology" (defined pretty narrowly), and so recorded music is regularly scrutinized to see if it passes the "real thing" test, and found wanting because it doesn't. Live music, we assume, is just "music" -- pure, unmediated, undifferentiated, and never filtered by the acoustic idiosyncrasies of the context in which it is heard, or even by the physical and/or psychological biases of its listeners! (Huh?)

Mr. G: As musicians we need to remember that Mintons was Monk, it was a place, it was the place and it was made special by the presence of the living Monk. Place the best Japanese Import LP in a glass case, it just ain't the same. The place is where the living music happened.

Durkin: Sure. But my childhood bedroom, where I spent long hours listening to music on headphones, deep into the night, was also a place. The music I discovered there sure felt alive to me. That's a testament to the records that were involved (many of which I wouldn't really understand until later) -- because with most of them the possibility of ever experiencing their content as actual "living music" had long past.

Mr. G: if music was simply wiggly air, then sound systems would work. What you and I hear, as musicians, is different than what the average person hears because you and I colour what we hear with prior experience. In other words, we imagine most of what we hear on records because we know what it really sounds like. Thus I can listen to old cylinder and victrola recordings and get really excited about the composition and musicianship, whereas everyone I have ever lived near (save a few, musicians all of them) will say "Turn Off That Noise!"

Durkin: Yes, as musicians we fill in a lot of the details when we listen to recordings (though see above reference to records I loved but didn't understand when I first heard them). However, many recordings have a beautiful sound unto themselves. Cylinder recordings are a pretty extreme counterexample, of course, but, for instance, I adore the creepy sound of the original 1928 version of "The Mooche" ("squashed" and "noisy" though it is by modern standards). In fact, I don't think I have ever heard a version I like better. In such cases (and there are many of them) the recorded sound is, for all intents and purposes, a compositional gesture.



More broadly, the recording studio, and recording technology in general -- as the "techno kids" you rightly admire know full well -- is just another instrument. It's a machine that produces sound, just like a trumpet, or an accordion, or a kazoo...

Mr. G: If it is all just filtered sound, everyone should be used to it, like how they all see circles where the eyes nearly always see ellipses, it needn't be a learned thing. Everyone has heard sound filtered through doors, through hats, through distorter muffs of all sorts, yet you play a soundsystem in a subway, you get sneers, you play a guitar, you get smiles. You play a brassband record out your shop window, you get nada, but the Hypnotic Brass plays a street corner and people (who cannot see them) swerve from blocks away to investigate the marvelous 'sound'.

Durkin: This seems to me to be a pretty broad generalization. I have personal experience with friends playing guitars in subways, only to be met with rolling eyes, and then to be escorted out a few minutes later by cops who certainly weren't smiling. And anyone who has been to a discotheque, or a rave, or any other environment that is driven by DJs and sound systems (and the cultures that surround them), knows that whatever "sneering" happens in those contexts is typically unrelated the source of the music.

Both recorded and live music are filtered, inevitably. And so they will remain -- at least until we figure out a way to beam songs directly into each other's brains.

[Photo credit: Eva101]

The funmaker

Since I took my very first piano lesson in a Wurlitzer store in the 70s, it seems poetic that I managed to score a (gratis!) Wurlitzer Funmaker Custom Series 545 Organ yesterday.

You know, the one with the Leslie speakers! And the foot pedals! And it's in near mint condition!



Talk about luck: I had no real plan for getting this hefty beast home, and was unexpectedly assisted by the kindness of not one but two strangers in the process of getting it into and then back out of my Volvo station wagon.



A big shout-out to my awesome and beautiful wife for allowing my to drag this damned thing into our dining room. (She may or may not have seen it as a kind of "fee" for the chickens that are on their way to our house at this very moment.)



I can't be sure, but I suspect that this may be the very instrument used in soundtracks to many of the sci-fi and horror B-movies I seem to be addicted to these days.

And the kid likes it too!

Part v. whole

The always-astute Seth Godin hits upon one of the issues facing those of us who work in genres (like jazz composition) that depend upon the development of an idea, as much as the quality of that idea:

The web has become a giant highlights reel... [...] We can skim really fast now. [...] As consumers of information, though, I wonder if the best parts are really the best parts. [...] the parts you miss are there for a reason.

Real change is rarely caused by the good parts. Real change and impact and joy come from the foundation and the transitions and the little messages that sneak in when you least expect them. The highlights of the baseball game are highlights largely because the rest of the game got you ready for them.

Oh, the irony! Did you notice how I highlighted key quotes from a post about the dangers of highlighting?

But it's true, and he's right. One of the, oh, I dunno, 5 million reasons I adore Frank Zappa is that he understood there was a certain aesthetic value in, well, momentary boredom, and that sometimes you have to let dumb shit happen on tape for a little bit in order to make the beautiful sections of an album really stand out.

The web, for all its potential as a tool for focusing our attention on the specifics of something (I guess "cropping" would be the main metaphor here), is also a deep hit of short-term gratification (cue Louis CK noting how quickly impatience can morph into ingratitude).

To put all that another way: for independent musicians, it's great how sites like CD Baby and eMusic offer browsing customers an opportunity to hear 2 minute clips before actually purchasing an album. But honestly -- how would you go about selecting a representative 2 minute clip from Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Or Coltrane's "My Favorite Things"?

Everything old is new again (part 2) / Friday Muxtape no. 3

When I'm not composing or touring or bandleading, I love watching technology obsolesce and re-emerge. Our gadgets rarely disappear entirely: through processes of fascination and fetishization, the trappings of dead or dying technologies are usually rescued and put to new (albeit sometimes entirely superficial and / or merely psychologically satisfying) uses.

Kevin Kelly is right: we love our machines.

Exhibit A:

Get a rotary dial on your iPhone.

I actually don't understand the appeal of this -- I used to get my fingers stuck in rotary dials all the time, and I always thought they were a royal pain in the ass... though I kind of liked the way they sounded during the dialing process.

Exhibit B:

The "Grungelizer" plug-in for Cubase.



It makes things sound... old.

(I'm not even going to say anything about the digital simulacra of fully functioning "dials," because that is pretty much standard with any audio recording software or plug-in.)

Exhibit C:

"Below the fold." Check it out: strictly speaking, there is no "fold" on a computer screen. This is a term from another dying technology: printing.

Exhibit D:

Muxtape.

I have tons and tons of cassette tapes stowed away in boxes in the basement. Why don't I just chuck 'em? I don't know.

Here's what I do understand: when riffing on the cultural idea of "the mix," it's only natural that Muxtape would define itself visually by referring back to the first commercially-available medium for the practice of making mixes.



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It's interesting when a new technology cuts down on the work involved in making art. In the face of this sort of thing, there's a risk that the stuff that already exists, which was created without the benefit of that technology, may come to seem more "obsolete" or "quaint" than it actually is. Someone outside the history of a given practice -- audio editing, say -- can mistakenly focus on how "easy" it is, now.

What is an artist born at the wrong time to do? Sometimes it's just a matter of figuring out ways to put new technologies to even newer uses -- uses other than the ones which they were specifically designed for. Note that the phonograph itself was originally conceived (by Edison, anyway) as a dictation machine, not as a device for disseminating recorded music (how's that for ironic: what became one of the greatest emblems of leisure was originally intended for use in a fucking office).

So what about computers: the context for most creativity in the twenty-first century (so far)? Sometimes I think that the light-show you can get from an iTunes or Windows Media Player "visualizer", for instance, would be seen as "art" if it weren't so easily available. Maybe that's what makes the following video, by Dennis Liu, so damned fascinating: it takes the mundane processes of the personal computer -- processes which would have been amazing twenty years ago, but which now seem hackneyed (to me, anyway) -- and uses them to entirely different (and new) aesthetic purposes (and very effectively, I might add):



Cool.

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And now today's mix:

1. Masaro Sato: "The Plan to Incinerate the H-Man." From a movie I've never seen but would like to.

2.. Lavender Diamond: "Rise in the Springtime." The excessive sweetness of this band (what else would you expect, with a lead singer named "Becky"?) is much more endearing live. Anyway, it was a hot day today, so I thought of this tune.

3. Deep Zen Pill With Brother Bam Shock: "Power." John Oswald. Plunderphonics. A double-album of mashups par excellence -- done without the aid of digital technology, as I recall. This one poaches from Zeppelin and a preacher.

4. Colin Stetson: "Groundswell." A lot with a little.

5. Them: "Friday's Child." Van Morrison was in a band called Them -- before he was the Van Morrison.

6. Chico Hamilton: "In a Mellotone." You east coasters will hate this, I know.

7. Barbara Lynn: "Heartbreaking Years." Old school that never really got its due. Tight horns, eh?

8. Carla Bley and Paul Haines: "Why." Linda Ronstadt on vocals. Remember when pop singers actually wanted to expand their horizons?

9. Harry Nilsson: "Turn On Your Radio." The opening guitar bit gets me every time.

10. The Sylvers: "Love Over Mind." My wife laughs at me for liking this band. You can too. Circa the disco era, or something.

11. Tinhorn Justice: "White Crow (Mike Rowe)." One of the many nice things about leading a band as big as the IJG is that you get to meet a lot of great players. I'm gonna be featuring the projects of IJG members in this and future muxtapes (instead of always just featuring IJG tracks) -- just so you get a sense of the sort of talent I'm fortunate enough to be able to share the stage with whenever we go out on tour. This week: trombonist Ian Carroll's [not "Carr" -- that's what I get for writing this post in the wee hours of the morning - ed.] band Tin Horn Justice, with Cory Beers on drums and percussion, Tony Digennaro on guitar, James Berry on electric accordion, and Ian on electric trombone. Recorded live at CalArts, recently.

12. Kenyon Hopkins / Creed Taylor: "No Smoking." There's so much going on in this little play -- a satire of the sexual norms of the mid-twentieth century, a commentary on scientific hubris, a quirky example of easy listening music. It's that perfect combination of weird and mainstream that actually used to be possible -- the sort of thing that would never slip through the cracks at a serious label today. From an album called Panic: Son of Shock.

Another 2.0 note

So, yeah, I recently joined Twitter. As if my life isn't already cluttered with too much web-stuff.

Here's my Twitter page.

I'm not totally sold on the value of this site yet, but I will say it's entertaining. Who knows, perhaps Twitter will bring back the aphorism? (It's a dying art form, you know.)

In grad school, I used to ask my students to avoid using fancy language to say something that could be said simply. You know -- don't say "in my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that" when you can just say "I think."

So in some ways I get Twitter, and I appreciate the challenge it offers (say something useful in 140 characters or less) -- even if only as an exercise. Nuanced discussions are impossible (or at least inconvenient) in this context, but that's okay, because I suspect they can start there. (And I think Twitter's often-cited proclivity for generating gibberish could also be useful -- perhaps as a way of publicly clearing out the "brain roof chatter" and trying to get to something more pithy.)

According to some, Twitter could become the go-to site for fast news (assuming you're following relevant sources, of course). Here's how that facet of it played out with yesterday's earthquake in China.

How to wear earbuds

Found this helpful illustration (c/o thedodgyguy) over at a forum addressing one of the primary challenges of new listening technology: how to keep earbuds from falling out.