On the Nature of Noise

Composer & musician Raz Mesinai (a.k.a. Badawi, & formerly of Sub Dub) reflects on the dodgy dichotomies of "soul" vs. noise (e.g.: organic vs. synthetic, or analogue vs. digital recording & music-making) in a recent post on his "Harmonia Prohibitorum" blog. Fascinating stuff, and -- given my own preferences and listening interests -- it touches on a lot of things I've thought about myself over the years. Here's some excerpts...

Later when I got off the plane...I thought about how, despite my own opinions as an electronic musician, this belief that computer based music loses the "soul" of a sound raised a lot of questions.

[...] From what we can tell by looking back in history and seeing where we are today, music was used as a way to communicate as well as to tell myths, and helped the people listening to the stories to experience the myth's more intensely (that's all I strive to do, tell a ghost story while beating the drum, whether it be a real one or a laptop).

Taking a step back in time, it reminded me of my own issues with computer based music software versus analogue hardware. Despite my prejudices I'm almost entirely digital for the portability and the wide spectrum of possibilities that comes with it but one thing that keeps me yearning for analogue is the noise of it. My main problem with digital music applications is the silence that is there to start with. If you record nothing at all onto analogue tape and play it back there's still something there. I always needed some noise to begin the working process with, a tone or some hiss seeping through the faders of a beat up old Alan and Heath and then take it from there.

However now digital music applications are becoming more of a tool for creating noise, sometimes at the most micro of levels. What we're hearing now in music is that the sounds have become more and more complex. You can tell by listening to underground electronic music these days which is incorporating a higher bandwidth of hi frequencies and sub bass as well as contemporary notated music which had been leaning further to incorporating prepared instruments, electronic sounds and extended techniques. Both genres overall just incorporating a wider spectrum of noise, harmonics, overtones, beating tones etc.

What is happening is people are yearning for more noise and it's becoming more and more acceptable to hear it, so we are actually improving our ears by being able to hear sound in a different way. Who knows, maybe the more these sounds become filled with other noises and are incorporated into contemporary pop music, that within a hundred years our ears will be so open that we'll be able to hear a bird singing from a mile away, or a fox in the woods in the Catskills while we're sitting in a coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Read the full text here.

Related: Mesinai talks about his work (video).

Odd Symmetries and Offroad Excursions

So my friend T-Roy recently flipped me a link to the collection of the Dallas Morning News series of Pulitzer-winning photos from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Pretty heavy stuff, without a doubt.

That sort of put me in mind for finally collecting the list of links below, of various interesting items I've stumbled into in recent months. Images that deal with architecture in some way or another -- and also deal with destruction, desolation, abandonment, and with odd man-made or natural configurations. And with, I suppose, the way history and human events run their course.

First up, some relics from the other side of the Cold War era...

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Photographer Jan Kempenaers has traveled the former Yugoslavia and taken some pictures of monuments that date back to the Tito/communist years -- monuments that all very Modernist in style, sporting all sorts of odd contours and angular extrusions. I'm slightly reminded of Matthew Collings's "geometry of fear" descript for certain sculpture of Abstract-Expressionist vintage.

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Similarly, Frederic Chaubin has captured some images of some vintage Modernist architecture from locations that once fell behind the Iron Curtain.

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In case you haven't encountered these before, this is a pic from the interior of some backlands Russian fortress. At some point, the Soviet military had commandeered it for testing weapons -- specifically some high-grade napalm variant. Supposedly, the stalactites you see hanging from the ceiling are the result of the bricks melting during the tests. (Brickcicles, if you like.) There more pics of this and scores of other intriguing photographs at this Russian photoblog that I stumbled across a while back.

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FYI: There's a Flickr photo pool devoted to The Unconscious Art of Demolition.

There's also a torn posters Flickr pool. I'm assuming that whoever started it is familiar with the "decollage" works of Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella.

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The Demolition Flickr pool was, I suspect, named in hommage to "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal" -- a satirical film/faux-documentary that cam out about 5 years ago. 

Yeah...the patchy buffs on the wall, all odd and blobby and meandering and never quite matching the color of the ground. Masking, ghosting, inverted palimpsests...whatever. As if Rothko and Ad Reinhardt had become public muralists, etc. etc. Anyone seen this one before? I showed to one of my classes of art students some years ago; and I think most of them were confused by it.

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Clay Ketter has taken a series of photographs of foundation slabs from the stretches of the Mississippi Gulf Coast decimated by Hurricane Katrina.

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This, reputedly, is a photo that shows the extent of deforestation in a portion of Bolivia. You can see it and plenty more like it from this collection of images taken by the Landsat-7 telescope

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Also, photographer and modern nomad Tod Seelie (a.k.a. Sucka Pants) recently posted a number of entries documenting his participation in an nautical excursion through the waterways of Europe and beyond -- caravanning along with a gaggle of aquatic gypsies on a flotilla of "junk rafts." Lots of incredible photos. I envy the life this guy leads. Check the June and July posts on his blog to follow their travels.

Get Your Ticket and Climb Aboard

Amusing that, a mere week after the cultural and media tsunami prompted by the death of MJ, I stumble across this piece on the blog for the U.K. music magazine The Wire. It seems that -- so many years after the fact -- the ‘70s dance program Soul Train presents a revelation for overseas viewers. Of particular interest are the comments of contributor Derek Walmsley, when he explains:

“This sort of audience participation is really unfamiliar to British (and especially English) types. People clap the beat out precisely, and cheer the breakdown in a Kurtis Blow track without prompting. No fourth wall between audience and performer. The camera doesn't cut away from the dancers or edit the footage in ridiculous ways, it lingers on them. Uptight Englanders look away now.

The kind of seriousness with which the main man introduces the segment -- 'We now turn our attention to the soul train' -- give it a life of its own. That kind of autonomous zone was kind of unheard of on UK TV, where the biggest televisual pop medium was Top Of The Pops, where you had watcher and performer with little in between.”

Quaintly amusing, especially the bits about “without prompting” and there being “no fourth wall.”

And I never would’ve guessed that it was such a distinctly American thing; the sort of thing that may, even to this day, seem phenomenal or exotic because it had no equivalent elsewhere. From these shores, the show has always had something of an iconic status in the pop-culture realm.

To me, Soul Train was an integral part of growing up in the 1970s, as much a part of the cultural landscape as anything else. I casually watched it on nearly a weekly basis, mainly because it happened to be on TV at about midday on a Saturday, landing on the schedule somewhere between the cartoons that aired in the mornings and the bouts of wrestling and roller derby in the afternoons.*

It might be pointed out, however, that this was in the Deep South -- in the “Heart of Dixie,” no less -- in something of a different era. For some reason that was too obvious be warrant explanation, I wasn't (to say the least) supposed to be interested in such a thing. Members of my family and a good many of my white peers and schoolmates would make comments, the common response being asked why I'd want to watch a bunch of “[insert racial epithet here]” dressed up in “ridiculous outfits” dancing around to “that noise.” Far from making me to want to watch the show more by way of some reflexive contrarian/transgressive impulse, these responses (like a number of other things at the time) only made me start wondering about people and why they held certain attitudes about such stuff. As far as I could see, Soul Train (like American Bandstand) just looked like a bunch of (admittedly quite stylish) people getting together and having a good time. So just where was the harm in that, exactly?**

So...it was the South, it was scarcely a decade after the Civil Rights Movement, I was among the first generation of kids to attend classes in desegregated public schools, and I was a white kid. So I guess I was supposed to be watching Hee Haw instead. Shrug. ***

Anyway, go over there to see the selection of vintage Soul Train clips. There's some good ones there -- Al Green, Barry White and plenty of others, as well as a good early one of the line getting down to to Fred Wesley & the JBs that's worth it for the fashion peeps alone.

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* About this time, there were two half-hour animated musical shows on Saturday morning TV -- one for the Jackson 5, another one for the Osmond Brothers. They might even have run opposite each other on different networks, I can’t recall. But it was hardly a rivalry between the two in terms of popularity. The Jackson 5 were far more popular, and -- as we’ve been so often reminded these past couple of weeks -- their appeal did indeed cross the boundaries of race, age, & what-have-you. Whereas the Osmond Brothers were little more than your typical "boy band," because I can’t recall anyone other than the girls in my 2nd and 3rd grade classes ever liking the Osmonds.

** I'll concede that I may have already been brainwashed by Sesame Street by this time.

*** Naturally, these last few paragraphs are very subjective, me speaking from personal experience of some three-and-a-half decades hence. If there's anything I've noticed in my trips back down South in recent years, it's that attitudes vary from place to place, from city to city. And that the city I grew up in and the area thereabouts seem to be worse in this respect than a lot of others -- that the attitudes and interactions across the "racial divide" are (running in both directions) more overtly strained, hateful and toxic than in a number of other places. Given the histories of the cities I'm thinking about, I guess this should come as no surprise. And if anything, it's recently convinced me that my hometown was even more of an armpit than I ever previously thought.

Rip That, and Start Again...

Arriving some years after the fact, RIP: A Remix Manifesto -- a Girl Talk -centric documnetary on the joys of mash-up/bastard pop/bootleg/plunderphonic culture...


Interested parties can view all 13 chapters of the thing via the page over at the opensourcecinema.com page.

Somewhat relatedly, I recently watched this.

Verdict? Long-winded, meandering, at least an hour longer than it needed to be, in need of major editing. It's as if the filmmakers wanted to make two docos -- one about Kraftwerk specifically, and another one about krautrock in general. And since they didn't have the means to release both, they put them together in a single package. I wasn't expecting very much in the first place, but somehow it managed to come in well under the rewarding mark.

Insert Inscrutable Series of Non-Sequiturs Here

The Empty Bottle has posted it's billing for this year's "Adventures In Modern Music Festival," sponsored by The Wire magazine. Given all the "new economy" biz, no surprise that the billing is considerably less wowing than that of previous years. Still, the headliners for the first two evenings are enough to prompt hell-yeahs in these quarters...

WEDN 09/09/09
CAROLINER (as in "Rainbow Hernia Milkqueen," etc.)
Chris Corsano
Thrones
Haptic

THUR 09/10/09
ANDY MOOR + DJ /rupture
Hanne Hukkelberg
Lucky Dragons
Sharon Van Etten

FRDY 09/11/09
YACHT
Menace Ruine
Burning Star Core
Ju Suk Reete Meat & Oblivia

SATR 09/12/09
A HAWK & A HANDSAW
OvO
Ty Segall
Mountains

SUND 09/13/09
PHANTOM ORCHARD featuring Ikue Mori & Zeena Parkins
Blank Dogs
Subarachnoid Space
Woods

I think I've got a few Caroliner records around here somewheres, and it's been a while. Time to excavate...

Outside the Gates of Eden

Above: "The Cross Garden," property of Bill Rice, Elmore County, AL.

I'm currently trying to round up info on "outsider" artists (and just general "primitive" off-road weird Americana) around the Midwest, for the sake of making future roadtrips & excursions. Unlike with the South, I'm finding that info on such stuff is a little harder to come by -- at least as far as the whole "folk artist" thing is concerned. Maybe, for whatever reasons, they're just not so common in these parts? Somehow I doubt that.

I've located a few in Wisconsin, there's a few in Michigan that I need to dig up more about. Nada for Illinois, so far. If you have any recommendations for things I might've missed, holler.

:: Sun City Girls - "Only in America, Inc. / Man Without a Harmonica"

photo sources: 1, 2, 3, 4

Ghost Dance

I'm not so sure with the 'electro' zag these guys have taken recently, but I do love how the bass at the beginning goes ka-chunk, ka-chunk, ka-chunk like a nail gun. And this is still a really fun tune to clap and dance along with in a live setting. Nice, crisp photography on the clip, too.

As Big as Nature Itself

I first encountered the work of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky back in 2001, via his rather staggering "Ship Breaking" series of landscapes.

The thrust of Burtynsky is primarily ecological. He travels the world, visiting locations around the globe where industrial and urban development have altered (or poisoned) the landscape on a massive scale. Over the years, this has taken him from the Bangladeshi ship-dismantled yards of Chittagong, to the oil fields of California, to sites of environmental destruction caused by China's "economic miracle," and to the unbelievably sprawling quarries of western Australia. Given the scale of the subject matter, the works need to be seen in a large format for the effect to be fully comprehended.

The recent documentary Manufactured Landscapes focused on Burtynsky and his work. It's currently circulating on DVD. Here's an interview with the photographer that offers a glimpse into how he works....


More here and here.

Additionally, it seems that Filastine -- in the course of his extensive globe-trotting -- recently visited the shipyards of Chittagong, apparently making soem field recordings that he used as raw sonic materiele on his last album...

"In 'Stereofonic Streetscape Blowout' from Dirty Bomb you can hear the sound from those two fotos of the tower being ripped from the top of the ship. There is only a short usable bit of recording because I lost my senses and yelled something like 'holy fucking shit' over most of it.

After about an hour onsite I was expelled by some security thugs. They didn’t want people documenting the shipbreaking yards because it’s a notorious environmental and labor disaster. For me it also illustrates a larger theme -- about how we make, transport, and discard things, about relative values and hidden costs, about the grand works of man and their undoings."

Read his full comments and see his photos from the excursion over at his blog.

Some Rare, Archival Blat

Funny how these sorts of things just turn up from time to time...

Over at the VOA's "African Music Treasures" series, there's a number of mp3s posted of some early Fela material -- some of it previously released, some not. The tracks come from session that Fela Ransome-Kuti & his Koola Lubitos cut for the VOA in 1965. They've also posted the audio of a 1967 interview that the Voice of America's bureau in Lagos.

Check 'em out here.

And the WFMU blog recently posted an odd moment of musical history. Purportedly, it's the tapes from an event (circa 1957) that involved composer Edgard Varèse conducting a jazz workshop session that included such noted musicians as Art Farmer, Charles Mingus, Teo Macero, and others. Naturally, it veers toward high musical abstraction,and the audio quality's pretty lacking, the origins of the tapes might be a little suspect. But you can check them over there.

The Wu Note Series

Sometimes inspiration comes from a negative source -- from a restless dissatisfaction with the status quo, more often than not.

Such was the case with designer and Wu-Tang fan Logan Walters, who thought that much of the Wu's sleeve art left a lot to be desired. So he set about redesigned them, album by album, in a classic style that harkens back to the eye-grabbing, elegantly hard-edged vintage style that marked the in-house aesthetic from various jazz labels circa the 1950s-1960s. He intends the project to cap out at twenty-one revisions.

Classy, if not classic in execution. Check the Flickr pool of the work here, and Walter's website here.

And regardless of what one thinks (or doesn't think) about the Wu's cover art, admittedly it could easily be a lot worse.