WRONG NOTES: a blog of ear reverence
Wrong Notes collects posts on music, art, culture and fun stuff. Also included: news about the Ear Reverends.
On music appreciation
If you love music, you play music.
The more you love music, the more you want to actively make it heard—heard by yourself and by potentially others and everyone.
A quick aside: let us briefly note that this is the essence of any "music business"—give people a way to participate in making music they love, that is so great / convenient / novel / special / sharable / fun / etc., that they will pay for the opportunity. . .
So, we push the play button or hire a musician to play a party or are musicians ourselves. Even most passively (we enter a room where someone else has put on music, or we walk past a musician on the street, etc.), when we notice and respond to the sound, we become co-creators of the music. If we like it, our ears perk up, and we may clap along, nod our heads to the rhythm, dance, sing our favorite phrase, or get others to hear it as well—we are playing a part in the music too.
As a musician, when I hear music I love, I not only want to play it on the stereo or join with it in concert, but I also want to play music on musical instruments. Sometimes that means playing the same music I've heard—for example, hearing a song and then learning to play it on guitar. But, more typically, I want to create new music, influenced by what I've heard.
So, given all of this, I always have a question about how much to talk or write about the music I love. I always want other people to know that music too, but talking and writing about music, in words, feels so inadequate compared with what I want to say in music. I generally find it pretty frustrating to talk or write about music.
But, I think I am going to write about the music I love a bit more here on Wrong Notes, because I see a need to get the word out. I wish I were productive musically in a way that I could quickly and fully say what I want about other's music through my own music. My ideal would be to be like Jimi Hendrix performing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" on June 4th, 1967—only three days after the Beatles' album came out.
(Here's a video of Hendrix playing the song a bit later that year, in December '67:)
Some more thoughts on writing about music
What I hope to write will not be music criticism, but will be music appreciation.
I sometimes enjoy music criticism, but I basically find its goals to be, very frequently, largely un-musical! In the larger scheme of things, that's OK in that music criticism can be great writing and one can enjoy it as such. But, at its musical-worst, music criticism is writing that convinces you to not play music. At its worst, it suggests that thinking and talking and writing about music are more important and/or better than playing music.
And, I don't have any interest in producing music criticism in that sense.
As an example of writing about music I find encouraging, I can point to Tom Moon's 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. You can enjoy his writing as writing, but Tom's writing constantly makes me want to stop reading and start playing!
So, as I write more about music, I'll point back to here as my footnote about why I'm not reviewing or critiquing the music I am writing about. For me, the goal of the writing is music appreciation—play music now!
Phone recordings robots
Ever notice how many ways people communicate with each other through voice recordings? For example, phone greetings, voicemail, etc.?
Beyond all of the voice greetings and messages recorded by actual human people, I also hear a lot of messages recorded by robots / voice synthesizers.
I am generally interested in all of these as part of the sound of our time. Something we hear a lot. And, I can't help but wonder how much of it, if any, will be captured in art that future peoples might use to better understand us.
I also can't help myself, when I have to recorded something like a phone greeting, from wanting to use it as a creative opening—if not something strictly musical, at least something akin to a musical performance—or maybe something like performance art.
And, a bit of a tangent: oh, I so much wish I had a copy of this one voice greeting I recorded in the mid-1990s . . .
I recorded a message for my at-the-time office phone. It was an early digital phone / PBX system (Rolm, I recall) that allowed you to re-record just the tail end of your message. In other words, you didn't have to re-record the whole thing—I think the idea was that people would flub their phone numbers or sign-offs at the end, and this feature helped you correct just that bit. Maybe it was so you could have a changing ending that was easy to change?
That feature allowed me to essentially cut and paste together a message out of fragments of my speech, such that my somewhat normally spoken sentences became reset with unusual timing / transitions between words. Many aspect of the rhythm and cadence of the speech were altered, and the final "piece," by the time it was done, left you with an eerie / haunting feeling—even though what I said would look perfectly normal and acceptable were it just written out on paper .
Argh. It's almost pointless to describe it like this (I can't believe I even tried)—you had to hear it.
At the time, I had to delete and change my message, or I was going to get fired. It was like "delete it NOW, or else." So many people at the office—even people I hardly ever talked to, went out of their way to tell me how pissed off they were about that message—so I relented and changed the message. Of course, many of my friends—even people I hardly ever talked to, went out of their way to tell me how much they had loved it.
Had I thought about it more at the time, I would have at least saved a copy for myself, for later (like, now!). But, anyway, that's a whole other story. And, maybe it's even better as a legend than something we could re-examine now.
Now, back to today's (shorter!) story—with sound!:
Today, I got a robot to record a new greeting for my mobile phone. And, I thought it'd be fun to post it here (since so few people call my mobile anyway), so at least a few more people might hear it.
Enjoy!
An image for the new music I am creating right now.
· · · good things come to those who click · · ·
Exicited is a start
Sometimes when you experience something a lot, you stop noticing the "event" of it—it's more like a constant.
Music has been like a constant in my life, but I sometimes have to ask "why" about it, given the gap between what I feel about music and (the lack of) what I actually do on some days.
But, I noticed something the other day—that I hadn't really noticed before: I wake up every morning completely excited about music.
I can't figure out what more to say about it without sounding totally corny. But, literally, every morning, I wake up excited about music.
For me, at least, it sort-of explains some things, just recognizing that "event" and its frequency.
And, it doesn't answer any "why" for me, but it maybe gives me less reason to even ask. Or, if I ask:
Q: Why?
A: Because it's there.
I am excited aboard, about, above, across, after, along, alongside, amid, amidst, among, amongst, around, as, aside, astride, at, athwart, atop, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, circa, concerning, during, following, for, from, given, in, inside, into, like, near, next, of, off, on, onto, over, pace, past, per, plus, regarding, round, save, since, through, throughout, till, times, to, toward, towards, under, underneath, upon, via, with, within, according to, ahead of, as regards, as per, because of, close to, due to, in to, inside of, near to, next to, on to, owing to, prior to, pursuant to, subsequent to, that of, as far as, by means of, in accordance with, in case of, in front of, on account of, on behalf of, on top of, with regard to, with respect to, anent, behither, betwixt, cum, ere, fornenst, fornent, pro, qua, re, vis-á-vis music.
Wrong answer, right place, it’s time
Welcome Mike Gordon fans. . . and anyone else sent here for being wrong.
So, if you're here because you've gotten an answer wrong at Mike Gordon's Andelmans' Yardsale, and you're reading this (I can picture your mouse ascending to that great back button in the sky), hello, sit down, stay awhile—had I'd known you were going to be here I would have made some tea, but I hope this will do.
Click through to a few pages and check out some of the Ear Reverends' music: Entaruption, Plastic Toys, Wing Drops, Riddle. There's more—feel free to snag any mp3s you find—they're just lying around all over the site and looking for good homes.
Thanks kindly Mike!
Coachella Metal Bounce (2009).
· · · good things come to those who click · · ·
The web page is the new shiny disc
I started writing this as an email to Lucas Gonze.
This is an extended comment where I elaborate on why Lucas's new Wax MP3 Player is exciting to me—how it seems to match-up with something I've been thinking about and working on (e.g., for Err or Man in the recent past, and for new stuff for the future). It seemed like a good topic to post about here on Wrong Notes:
As I've started developing HereJam, I've been thinking about the new role of the record label, in relationship to releases: the new release is (going to be) all about how the music appears on / across the web.
The files and discs are almost irrelevant—definitely secondary. They do need to exist, but, really, once they are published, anyone can get them anywhere. But, the player / interface is primary, because it's actually about that "content" that is the music—about getting into that music.
So, I see the record label as having the role of providing musicians with new web players—i.e., the new formula is:
musician's new music + record label's new player = a new release
This kind of relationship between the label and the artist is easily non-exclusive (though it can work as exclusive one, as well): one new kind of "remix" will be in the multiple different web players created for the same music. The players can be made of all kinds of things that complement the music: visual art, photographs, videos, interactive games, factual information, lyrics, fiction, poetry, nonsense, etc.
Put another way: the player itself is the new format for music. And, rather than it being a single / fixed format, it is instead of the web (e.g., like a website—it is a web page or website). Each player can be distinctive in design, but all players will have at least a few common, idiomatic, elements that make it similar to other players. They marry idioms of the web with idioms of the music player—both provide nearly unlimited opportunities for design—for being turned into products.
You'll know it's a music player when you see it (e.g., maybe it has something to click to make it play), but the player format can be totally free to be any kind of web page(s), which can have original and distinctive shapes, structures, semantics, contexts, interactions, looks, feels, etc. The web page is the new shiny disc.
So, I think Lucas is really on to that!
The whole and the piece
I started noticing a pattern when I was a kid, where I'd keep making things bigger — more multifaceted, typically.
So one question, with the Ear Reverends' music, has been about the size of works. Is this thing I am working on a song, an album — more? less? Is it, as music, just what one will hear? What about other aspects of its experience, perceptual and conceptual?
Part of what I've been doing lately is evaluating the relationship between planning and doing. In particular, between talking about plans and doing them.
This blog has always been a question, in terms of what is said and what is presented, in relationship to the music. And, same with the website—the web is a part of this music, as an interface to it.
I am working on some things. Maybe they will be bigger things, and take more time. Maybe taking a lot more time.
So, Wrong Notes may be slow for a while.
nearby posts:
Wrong Feeds
Wrong Pasts
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- September 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- June 2006
- April 2006
- October 2005
- September 2005
- December 2004
- October 2004
- September 2004
- August 2004
- July 2004
- June 2004
- May 2004
- April 2004
- March 2004
- February 2004
