So we’ve disappeared, again.

I’ve been riding the train for almost 4 hours a day for the last three months. Damn I need to get a netbook! I thought about writing things in a notebook, but I really don’t have time to transcribe thoughts on the weekends. Simply too busy!

I’m getting married in a week and a half. My internship in the City has finished, so I no longer ride the train for quite as long. I’ve found that my brain has decided to take a vacation. No intellectual thoughts have occurred. Thought about music has ceased. Especially since every waking moment is spent thinking about what I should be doing to help to prepare for what will be a stupendous and amazing day. Getting married is such a time sink!

My fiancée and I have been working diligently on music playlists. Dinner and post dancing music we’ve worried less about. The dancing playlist has been quite a task, though. I dislike dancing. It’s mostly dull, and wherever I’ve ever been dancing, there’s never any music played that I actually enjoy. Putting together this playlist meant that I (we, I mean) got to pick out music that I love… to dance to….

Impressions: Animal Collectice – Merriweather Post Pavilion/In the Flowers

From Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009)

Some great melodies, but lacking execution when it comes to the arrangement, recording quality, and form.

“In The Flowers” begins with a flood of highly compressed (data compression) noise, followed by arpeggios from an effect-laden acoustic guitar. The sound is dense and is particularly packed in the high-midrange. There is no space. Nothing sounds natural. Avey Tare’s voice sings a sing-songy tonal melody. This is fine. It repeats itself. The tempo is a lilting 3/4. Because the sound is so muddy in the high-mids, I can’t relax and enjoy this moment for what it is.

The middle portion of the song underlines this point: “In the Flowers” has one wonderful trick up its sleeve, and that is the shift from 3/4 to 2/4 when the thomping bass drum fades in. That moment is exhilarating, has a jubilant arrangement, and always makes me smile, but it lasts for a scant 16 or so measures, before the coda of the middle section begins, signaling a return to the 3/4 arrangement.

“In the Flowers” relies too much on its rhythmic shift. I love songs like this, where a move to a different rhythm or tempo feels organic and propels the song in a direction you didn’t think it would move! Sadly, “In the Flowers” doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere until that rhythmic shift. Not to say that it occupies that rarefied place of STILLNESS that some composers or groups manifest (Morton Feldman comes to mind), but that the experience feels so unpolished, so tossed off, that I feel like the band is merely vamping for a time until we’re lulled into a state of desire. I want to revel in the time before and after the middle section, but there is too much clutter: extraneous noises, dense and bright reverb, backwards reverb on Avey Tare’s vocals. It’s sonically frustrating (sadly much like the rest of the record).

I’ve created an understanding of what I think was trying to be accomplished, but the actual experience sadly falls short of that each and every time I listen.

For some context: I’ve loved Animal Collective ever since “Here Comes the Indian.” So I certainly had expectations, even hopes for this record! Maybe I’ll come back to it in a year and find the record as a whole less abrasive, but right now I am completely baffled at the media’s fixation on this being The Best Album of The Year So Far. It came out in January! Of course it’s better than most stuff that came out already.

To reiterate: some very good songs. But I can’t help but compare this record to Here Comes the Indian, to Sung Tongs, to Campfire Songs (my favorite!), and this one feels so less crafted, so tossed off comparatively.

I did listen to it about 15-20 times, though. There’s something about being well-versed in a band or composer’s language that allows you to willingly subject yourself to a piece of theirs that you don’t particularly like. When I’m not listening to the record, I find myself wanting to like it. Every time someone off-handedly mentions the amazingness of the record, I have the urge to go back and listen, to try and see if I missed something. I’ve since learned.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is not my favorite record, but it’s good!

Tired of the Album: 2

A Subset Column on CDs:

Am I the only one who hates Bonus Material? An album gets rereleased, remastered, etc. and the label/artists decide to give us Bonus Material. I understand the marketing behind such a thing: make the fans who already own the album buy it again.

This is perfectly understandable when tacked onto a film. There are menus. The bonus material, deleted scenes, etc. must be selected in order to be accessed. But with CDs, there is no choice. One must stop the CD in order to NOT experience the bonus tracks. Obnoxious. If there could’ve been some way to disengage the bonus material, to be able to simply listen to the record without another batch of lesser material beginning, I would have been happy, but instead the label/artist compromise the purity of the product.

Recordings provide no visual. There is nothing for us to hold onto, nothing that occupies space with a recording. We found with album artwork and the jewel-case, though, that music was somewhat successfully captured. Ornate housings of an experience-intangible. I’ve since sold all of my compact discs, but I do fondly remember sifting through my collection, finding that favored case, and marveling at the power it held. The relationship that the disc had to the Album was direct.

When the Bonus Material was added the power of the packaging weakened. The CD was now just a carrier of data, holding not just the album, but this other stuff, too. And not only that, but the two could not be disconnected. When the final song finished playing, YOU HAD TO PRESS STOP. This (not always) intricately crafted artistic experience was diminished due to its proximity to material not intended to be a part.

My need for the compact disc and packaging to be that wonderfully direct link to the experience of the album went so far as to disallow CD singles to appear in my collection. The idea that the same packaging was used to deliver just two songs ruined the illusion. I even had trouble holding onto EPs because of this!!

Nevertheless, I am finally free of such problems. Betty Davis’ self-titled album is now called “Betty Davis”. The bonus material released with that album “Betty Davis (Bonus Material)”. Thanks audio software applications!

Manifesto No.1

First things first: we are not a record label.

Impressions and Update: Briefly!

Times are tight here at Records. Time is tight, moreso. Cary is incredibly busy right now, and I’m currently spending a good deal of time interning at an audio mastering facility in NYC. What’s nice about this situation for me is that I get over 3 hours of train riding for my commute, which means that I get a TON of time to listen to music.

When I was living in Arizona my big time for listening was my 20 minute bikeride to and from school. This was adequate, but involved terrible headphones and, because of the nature of my activity, I was not in a place to listen to music with dynamics or anything without a sense of vibrancy and motion.

BUT NOW! When I’m terribly exhausted from my day in New York, I can sit on the train, stare out into the fleeting daylight (or my own reflection due to the night), and listen to more, well, contenplative stuff. Like Scott Walker! And Henri Dutilleux! Hooray!

Scott Walker – The Drift (2006) is excellent. Exhausting. A lot of textural work in the arrangements. I found myself desiring something with a bit more motion. The compositions feel like set pieces for the words. Almost as if he wrote the words, set the words to a melody, then simply decorated the sonic space behind the melody. This technique works wonderfully and creates some amazing moments, but I honestly wish the record had more variety. Then again, I’ve only given the record a handful of listens (only once all the way through) and maybe there is more subtlety than I’ve picked up on. I may write more on this soon.

Henri Dutilleux – Tout Un Monde Lointain is also excellent. It’s a Cello Concerto from 1970. I love Dutilleux. I love his melodies. Perfectly pleasing, yet wonderfully angular. I’ve been moving backwards through this piece. 5 movements, each one about 4 or 5 minutes long, so not a very exhausting piece. But I started listening backwards. And I love it. I’ve made it to the 3rd Movement (Houles). Delicious. Sadly not much more comes to mind. Still a good deal of details to catch with this one. So might write more about this soon, too!

Otherwise, updates will be minor in the coming weeks. Sad! But they will exist. We will persist! This Records is forever.

Terrifying Heights – Demo

Download it! – Here
Finally, Cary and I have collaborated on a song together. Cary wrote the initial chord changes with a sparse accompaniment. I then slammed the MIDI files into Logic, spiced them up with some Virtual Instruments, then played around with the arrangement.

I am in love with the bass line. It plods. I want to make that line plod as much as possible. I want to bob my head with slow deliberate motions; the line should sometimes slip just behind the tempo, like the song wants to get even slower (but it doesn’t). I am at a loss as to how to accentuate that thought with the arrangement. Do we even need to accentuate it? Is it present enough?

Due to the nature of one-man recording I am always fighting against the urge to simply throw on another layer. The first 50 seconds feels full enough to me. I tried to record a melody there, but there was no room and it shifted the trajectory of those 50 seconds. Should there be more there?

The rest of the song has a smattering of ideas, all lined up in a row. I need to work on my development of ideas, rather than simply moving through them.

I’ll leave you with that.

Terrifying Heights – Demo

Important Artist Statement

I find it easy to point out what is wrong in something. Even in the things I love – I sometimes slip into simply pointing to the experience of the thing: “it is small, that is bad – why would one want a thing like that to be small? It should be larger.” This comes so clearly from a state of desire. I want a thing that is similar, but larger. There is no bad in such a case. In past I’ve too quickly made critical remarks about a thing in such a state of desire. It feels childish now. If I can’t find the good in something from now on, I’m going to chalk it up to desire. I’ve been surprised too many times in past by things I, in a more distant past, disdained with the whole of my body. I will henceforth do my best to portray my dislike for something as a dissatisfaction. (This also allows for the belief that those that create a thing were hopefully in a state of mind of enjoying that which they created).

This is about music, though, this Records. Not just things. It feels fresher to listen again without Bad. Way better.

Company Update: April 6th – News

Tired of the Album: One

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]

Concerts: Too loud?

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?