You are currently browsing Evan's articles.
I’m tired of it! It is in no way ‘dead.’ That must be noted. I despise that kind of language. It’s lazy. It makes people fret and frown unnecessarily. The album is not dead, I’m simply tired of it.
One of my concerns with the album focuses on how it groups content together amorphously. The numbering of the tracks is something that album fanatics talk about with rather obscure and imprecise language. Track 8 on an album can have incredible meaning to certain people. For others, track 3 is the most exciting moment because it defines the tone for all of the music that follows (that taking into account the fact that tracks 1 and 2 are introductory singles, which is not the case for all albums). In the end, the study of track ordering is a science best left foggy. Artists (and mastering engineers) order their content in a way that best serves the “flow” of the album.
The problem with this “flow” logic is that first listens then tend to, well, fail. With classical works, you have a program that tells you the names of the movements. You look at a Beethoven symphony. It has four movements. The title of each movement expresses the tone of what you will hear. You stop paying attention for a few minutes, but when you come back to the moment at hand, you still know that you’re in the slow movement. You can come back. When I experience an album for the first time I never know where I am. All I have is the moment and rare do I get the feeling that that moment extends much farther than the end of the song. Only once you have listened to the whole album can you go back and begin to piece together the track order logic. After a couple of listens (usually breaking up the album into smaller listening) can a full listen-through be satisfying. The experience of the album as a whole is thus problematic, because the experiential narrative must be learned before it can be appreciated.
I believe this “flow” logic comes from the process that many artists follow in creating an album. In my experience, we would write some songs, record them, and then we would decide the order of the album by listening. I could make the argument that this is a wonderfully pure form of decision-making. Anti-intellectual, etc. There were always songs, though, that no matter where we placed them on the album, didn’t fit. The pitch-content transition between songs was awkward, the emotional landscape shifted too quickly, or the two songs on a very superficial level sounded too alike, thus diminishing the impact of both songs. We worked on each song separately and heard each develop into, hopefully, something uniquely magnificent. Cliche, right, but we the artists would sit down and craft each puzzle piece before putting the full picture together. Problematic!
For us it was fun to try and contextualize each song. Each song already had meaning to us, and now we could extend their meanings further by putting them into a larger context. My issue with this is that as a consumer, I think of the album first, the songs second. The best songs on a sub-par album suffer under the weight of the whole. I can’t get them out of the album, even if I go as far as purchasing a song separately on iTunes or Amazon. That amazing song is a piece of something, contributes to something larger than itself, thus I am always left feeling slightly unfulfilled if digested solely separated.
[I'm cutting myself off here. Already covered too many topics in too few words. Think of this as an introduction, then. 'Two' will be more succinct, hopefully]
The folks over at Pitchfork have put up a DVD of Panda Bear and various artists who opened for him on his miniature 2007 tour for Person Pitch. I was living in Philadelphia at the time, so I got the chance to see one of the shows. Watching the video brought up a slew of points that I’d love to get across in a series of posts. The first of these is the most simple and will probably make me sound older and crotchetier than my twenty-three years.
The concert was too loud.
Panda Bear faithfully executed the tracks from Person Pitch as well as early versions of some of the tracks that would later appear on Animal Collective’s most-recent, Merriweather Post Pavillion. I was slightly disappointed that experiencing most of these tracks live meant a similar experience to listening to the record. I wasn’t expecting anything more than that, but one still feels let-down leaving a show having heard songs reproduced with button presses and no showy show.
The acoustics were a bit rough in the First Unitarian Church, with a bright, harsh reverb that blurred out any of the subtleties of the music. Panda Bear’s voice was EQed horribly, if at all. Everything he sang sounded quite muddy. And the volume of the show was an onslaught. There were no dynamics. A more relaxed song came across just as powerfully as one of Panda Bear’s more ebullient tracks. My ears got tired fast and so did my brain. When the music has no dynamics you get bored. It strips away a layer of emotional impact. The lack of dynamics could have been attributed to Panda Bear himself and a lack of ability to manipulate his hardware to breathe in a musical way, but even if this was the case, there was no need to have the show be as loud as it was. My fiancee and I were in the back row, center – right in front of the mixing board – so you’d think we’d have the perfect mix. Not so. I put my fingers in my ears, and it was only then that the show sounded good. The harshness of the room was filtered out and I could actually make out the music much clearer.
In summary, it was fun to go out and go to a show. I like Panda Bear and am always interested to see what he writes. The show, though, was bad. It was boring for lack of dynamics and exhausting because I had to keep my fingers in my ears the whole time. Why does it have to be common practice these days to bring earplugs to concerts? It just seems ridiculous. Some music begs to be loud to a point where you feel the sound vibrating you bones, but Panda Bear’s music did not resonate with me at such a volume.
Any thoughts on this?
A while back I read Frank Zappa’s autobiography. Not my favorite read (I was especially disappointed that the final chapters were dedicated to social/political rants rather than a look into how he felt about his ’90s work), but I remember being struck by a particular sentiment. He purportedly never listened to his own recordings. Once he was done with a record, he was done with it. Considering how prolific he was throughout his career, this may have been a protective mechanism against doubt and regret. When you’re pumping out material at the pace he worked, I’m sure there were plenty of compromises and dialed-in fixes for recording or compositional issues that came with each recording.
I could never work that way. It’s too late for me! I’ve always worked slowly. The Dionysiac Revelry record took us a good part of three years to finish. Some of the demos for that record were written a year or more before that 3 year period even began. And since we have the totally rad technological advances in music these days, I was able to listen to “Being Here…” for the entirety of the recording journey. It would be safe to assume then, that I’d be done with the record once it was completed. Three+ years of hearing the music develop into its “final” form. Not so! I occasionally go back and listen. I do it for a couple reasons:
I’ll clear the air and profess this right off the bat: listening back is incredibly ego-building. I BUILT THIS THING. HOORAY! Sure you recognize the mistakes and the horrible sections, but when you nailed a song it’s always interesting to test it. Did we nail that section? Was it as tight as I remember it? My taste has evolved. how primitive was the writing? It can be incredibly refreshing to listen back to the old material and recreate the compositional process and compare it to how you now work. I tend to notice that I completely glossed over certain compositional or engineering choices in my older material. With so many software instruments, so any musical styles, so many damn options these days, seeing how I inadvertently limited myself due to a lack of knowledge is incredibly refreshing.
There’s so much more to listening back than just considering the craft. It has personal implications as well. Music locks a PLACE. When you listen back to that Mariah Carey record that helped you through a painful breakup, nostalgia kicks in. The emotions come back, and the memory of where you were when you experienced that record is reconstructed. The car you aimlessly drove around in and cried while listening to Mariah Carey becomes real again for the moment of listening back. I think its the way that emotional landscapes are mapped onto a recording that let you recreate that space.
So when I listen back to my old Wounded Soldier recording I remember the room! The room! That summer! Those moments of watching movies, but stopping them halfway because I got the itch! Putting together a recording seems to map even more emotions than simply listening to a final product (ala my Mariah Carey example)
Of course, the recording world of Frank Zappa didn’t allow for extreme overdubbing. They would go into the studio, smash out a recording, then move on. Good musicianship and a different mentality towards recording might have contributed to this. So maybe even if Zappa listened back to his old recordings he may not have found such a personalized nostalgia. He wrote so much music, maybe he never got that close to any of it. A crying shame!
What thinks you Ariskany Recordists? Emotional mapping? Waves of nostalgia? Specifically relating to the space in which the recording took place? I’m curious.
Gilgamesh’s “Destroy All PT Cruisers” has officially entered my Running/PhysicalExercise Playlist. This is no mere feat of Insider PR-ing. I feel that fellow Ariskany Records mate Gilgamesh has crafted a song worthy of the emotional state needed for X-treme activity.
Running is a horrible activity. I have grown to love it, now having outgrown my self-starving adolescent period I finally eat enough calories each day to get me through some good ol’ fashioned exercise. But back in the day I needed some serious tunes to get me though a punishing workout. I put together countless mixes only to realize that a small handful of songs from my collection could handle the task. In high school they were few:
Grateful Dead – Hard to Handle (From The Phil Zone, back when PigPen was singing)
Rolling Stones – Rocks Off (From Exile on Main St.)
? – There were a couple others, but these two stand out.
These songs could get my blood pumping – that combined with my endorphins made for a serious runner’s high. I would then usually run way too fast and tire myself out early, but damn if it didn’t feel good.
What songs didn’t work? “White Light/White Heat” comes to mind. Man, what a pumping and breathing and chugging track by the Velvet Underground, and yet when that song came on my energy dropped and I felt my body all over. The tempo drops just enough and maybe Mo’s drumming just wasn’t tight enough. I wouldn’t have that brilliant track any other way, but it lacked the tenacity to be a part of a running mix.
So why does “PT Cruisers” work? Maybe it’s the triple drum machine attack. Maybe the incessant guitar line. (As a side note, I got to hear this maybe two years before Gilgamesh finally unleashed it and had the drum and guitar track stuck in my brain… FOR TWO YEARS). I love how a couple minutes in, that third drum machine finally jumps into focus in the left speaker and begins the back and forth motion every two bars. When that left drum machine plays you feel every 8th note. But it drops out after two bars! In the vacuum the two other drum machines click away, but now we’re only feeling the first beat of every bar. This back and forth occurs for the rest of the song. It’s fast enough, “PT Cruisers.” Also Gilgamesh delivers lyrics with a wonderful biting, yet absurd tone. Perfect for shouting along with the run.
I must be off to class. But here’s my short list for running:
This Heat – Health and Efficiency
Lightning Bolt – Two Towers
Gilgamesh – Destroy All PT Cruisers
(they’re long songs, and I never run that long anywayssssszzzzz)
My little booth! Check out those Quadratic Residue Diffusers! Whoa!
-Evan
Evan: Some thoughts!
So yes. I wrote this piece for a contest. How perfect. I’ve been pushing, in my mind, a return to compositional freedom. That is, to write something that I think sounds good, without a care for what my doubting brain has to say. Since entering the shapeless world of post college graduation, I entered that scary space of existential-dilemma-ishness in regards to recording. Why was I writing? Who was it for? Was I truly in need of new sounds? I wasn’t necessarily in a good place in general, so it makes sense that it would affect my ability to record.
But now. I am finishing up audio engineering school, and I’ve found that excitement again. We’re in the process of creating a space on the internet where we all can share our music. Where we can take as much care as we feel in presenting our work. This is all exciting to me, and I know helped me in writing this piece. Sure, if I made a good recording, maybe I’d win a sweet piece of gear; but at least I’d have finished a piece. Alright, enough emotional baggage!
I had three weeks to complete the whole thing, and knowing that I would need at least four days for mixing and editing, I had a little over two weeks to write and record SOMETHING. (The stipulation of the contest was that I had to use the Apogee Duet (see video below) in some creative and interesting way and submit whatever I came up with). I had written a canon back in my college days and decided to use that as my starting point. The early process of creating and then sifting through musical ideas can be hard when working with a deadline, so I was happy to have the canon to start out with.
Composing was a similar process to Napping Study. Recording singing ideas in the morning, then editing them later that night. I really enjoyed this process, as I was working every morning, and I only had an hour to setup, record, then put everything away before class started.
Scenes from the iso booth
The equipment was nice, too. Used a Neumann TLM103. Mmm. Nice microphone. It’s going to be sad to leave the school here and return to my SM57. Ah well.
When it came to mixing, what I was the most concerned with was levels. Since I exclusively used punch recording and each section had its own SPECIAL AND INTERESTING arrangement, my biggest challenging was making the listening experience smooth. Later on I’ll post some of my recordings from 2007-08 where I did not do such a smooth job. Thankfully the school had some really nice monitors, and I was able to mix Beach Canon in several different rooms. I ended up with a mix that although still has some irregularities and EQ issues, I was happy with. And apparently Apogee was too!
I’ve never had my music give me something in return, so this has been an incredibly encouraging experience.
This is in no way a complete post, but I’ll leave it at this for now. If you have questions about the piece, please comment! If you have ideas for what I could have done better compositionally, engineering-wise, or mixing-wise please let me know! Discussion is always cool. Again, here’s the link!
LATER.
I’ll do better next time!
Evan: I finished a new song! This came about all because of a contest to win an Apogee Duet at the school I’m attending. We simply had to use it in some way and post our production on the school’s website. Thusly I took the opportunity to write a new song!
I worked pretty steadily for the past three weeks on this thing, so I don’t really have much to say about it at this point. I need some time away from it. Critiques?
