The dB's

Tin Pan Alley: Now and Now

More music and New York (but what better city for music).  Lost City has a post on Tin Pan Alley up.  Tin Pan Alley was a street in midtown Manhattan where, in the bleak days before recorded music, sheet music was written and sold by the million.  You used to walk down the street and have people in every window to plug you with a reason to buy their hit song.  Now, in the bleak 00s where ringtones are sometimes more popular than albums, it's a Nextel store away from erasing every trace of its past.  If you have any interest in remembering the place where Irving Berlin's 'God Bless America' and 'Take Me Out to the Ballgame' first hit, click here.  

New York in the 80s and Crackpot Ideas in Urban Homesteading

Ah bless the St. Marks Bookstore where I recently stumbled on a picture book called New York Noise. I'd heard two New York Noise albums and reading without words is a pleasant way to waste time on my way home from work. By way of background: NYN, the albums, are a collection of New Wave/No Wave/whatever you call it tunes from the last American music of note to have a time (76-85), place (downtown New York), and feeling that extended to all the surrounding arts. Disagree? Name me three bands from Seattle? Name me one play inspired by the backwards-looking NY garage-bands of the early-2000s? Find me a garage in NYC!

New York Noise, the book, sketches an interesting line between the scene's different players in brilliant black-and-white photos. Did these people know they would be famous? Was there this feeling that everything they did was important? How did they all play in each others' bands? Why are these pictures so professional? Some of the NYN players, without order:

• The Talking Heads, then band
• Steve Buscemi, now actor
  
• Eric Bogosian, playwright, monologist, actor
• Paul Zaloom, then puppeteerish monologist, now Beakman
• Madonna, singer not the religious figure, perhaps also a figure of another kind, only tangentially related.
  
• John Cage, musician we've previously mentioned
  
• Keith Harring, artist
  
• Micheal Stipe, lead singer of REM
• Liquid Liquid
• Willem Dafoe, performing with Richard Foreman's Wooster Group. See Foreman's new play.
• David Byrne, always brilliant, see him here with Richard Thompson
• Robert Longo, artist and filmmaker, forgive him Johnny Mneumonic, his prints and art is much more interesting
• Kim Gordon
  
• Richard Prince, artist, remember his advertising photos
• Laurie Anderson
  
• Jim Jarmusch, a truly talented filmmaker, one with faith in his audience's attention
• John Lurie, musician/actor/now exhibited painter, once star of Fishing with John
  
• Cindy Sherman, photographer
• Richard Hell, proto-punk, poet(?)
  
• and on...
  

It's a lot of names. It's also not that many people. Reading the book, I was under the impression that everybody in the East Village, the Lower East Side, and the crummier parts of SoHo was actually making something so infectious is the idea. It's really just 30 odd people (both meanings) yet it feels like a world.

This world is precisely why I, and I presume many others, came to New York. What is it like when the stars align and music, art, writing, theater, living all overlap in a specific time and place? I don't know. New York (2008) is not that place. Perhaps, they say, it's because living is too expensive to 'work' for money one day a week and work for yourself the rest. Perhaps, I've also heard, it's because even the service industry has gotten so professionalized that you need a degree to work tables. I disagree completely.

There are scenes of 30 that are making waves, just not with the same overall cultural impact. Why? Maybe there are too many scenes of 30; maybe they're not spread across as many disciplines as No Wave was; maybe, as with the abundance of channels, there is an abundance of scenes all fighting for your attention (I saw a concert the other week that was very Lifetime...I'll spare you); maybe we'll hear about them in 20 years time and misremember ourselves being there; maybe we were...

I think the real issue is simple: we are so easily and constantly entertained that we don't and forget how to make our own entertainment. Or, when we do, the ratio is off. I was going to say I have a tremendous respect for those who post videos on YouTube or play at open mics, but I think respect is the wrong word. Thousands of people post videos on YouTube that are not really respect-able. But making your own fun is important, it entertains your friends, get good friends, invest it with intelligence, and it can entertain the World.

I meant to include this all as background bias for my urban homesteading plan. I believe it would be a good idea if the government gave people 5 years to turn an abandoned building (Baltimore has 14,000 of them, eg.) into a home they would could own. I still believe that if you allow people with a genuine desire to build something, and if you give them ownership, new, crime-freer neighborhoods will grow out of a desire to make something permanent. I just no longer believe a new Homestead Act will create another urban artists community like in NY in the 80s (for the reasons listed above, the scene was remembered falsely, NY has little abandoned housing). Still, reinvigorating a city like Baltimore from within could, it might be argued, serve a greater good than O Superman. I know I've gotten here naively and pettily, but surely that's worth the eminent domain squabbles, disenfranchising the slumlord, and the stack of paperwork.

Seeing Sound

An introduction by way of an explanation:  One of my resolutions this year is to make me some good music.  This might not be a particularly challenging resolution were I Keith Richards but, as is, I am fundamentally not Keith Richards.  I missed the sixties, I missed the seventies, and I do not play any instruments.  Of the three, the latter -- and this is important -- does not worry me in the slightest.

Many of the best artists of the past sixty years have not been particularly musically talented, whatever that means to you.  Without debating the finer points of Milli-Vanilli-ism or singing Ashlee Simpson's praises, I'm thinking about Jonathan Richman, Brian Eno, the Clash, Autechre, Belle & Sebastian, the Cars, the Jesus and Mary Chain, the Magnetic Fields, Pulp, Suicide, the Talking Heads, and the Velvet Underground amongst thousands.  At one stage in their professional careers, the eclectic above had all been (contentedly) amateurish musicians.

Blessedly, music is not about instruments.  There are some highly proficient Progressive Rockers still touring the English countryside, singing about dwarves, playing 13th chords while dressed like (creepy) children's entertainers in jumpsuits and caterpillar masks.  These people don't get me too interested, whereas the preceding 'amateurs' shone on with nothing but their intelligence, energy, taste, and patience.

Music is personal (disagree with me here) and so here's a personal manifesto.  I believe I can make music because...

1. I believe I am moderately tasteful. 
   
2. I am patient enough to wade up the learning curve, the music store jargon, the software, the hardware, the endless knob twiddlings, all in the hopes of coming up with ...
   
3. Moderately tasteful sounds to stick on top or next to the last one tasteful sound.

Is this it?  Well yes.  

Onwards to seeing sounds. 

But first an apology: I try not to equivocate.  Most of my most meaningless literary theory classes revolved around deliberately reinterpreting words ("See the band playing in the background? Perhaps they're a visual symbol for the wedding-band Carrie so desperately wants and Charlotte does not.  Maybe if the friends banded together...").  

That said, I'm aware that I use the verb to 'see' in a couple different ways but I think the connection between seeing (understanding) and seeing (visualizing) is a little richer than the above example.  Forgive me. 

Seeing sounds on the instruments:   That sounds easy.  But sounds, I've discovered, is hard.  Most of the stuff I got my guitar to do when I first held it was awful (this awful).  I needed to get to a basic understanding of pretty sounds.  

I see with pictures.  Not being a synaesthete by birth, sounds are quite distinct from sight in my mind.  I need a metaphor to make sense of the millions of frequencies that even the worst musician has at his or her disposal. 

Both the guitar fretboard and the piano keyboard visual metaphors (and mechanical inputs) for sound -- preferably melodic sound -- creation.  If tuned conventionally, they limit the potential sounds to the twelve notes that make an octave (do you see how words are getting useless here?).  

The piano is the simpler of the two: one key to one sound, plop your hands up to the right and the sounds increase in pitch.  I can't think of how to explain pitch with words, but consider the fun part of Come on Eileen and know that even the matinee actor gets that he should fake his hands right when the notes get higher.  

The guitar is more confusing as numerous 'keys' play the same note.  You can move your hands down the neck or across it to raise the pitch.  The fretboard is a matrix.  I prefer the guitar's honest complexity.  Unlike the piano's black-and-white keys, it doesn't have me prejudiced against flats and sharps (they're called accidentals; if I'm playing they certainly are).  The piano is also heavier and less likely to get you a girlfriend. 

There are other instruments -- I love the violin as an accent, the horns in Higher and Higher by Jackie Wilson -- and despite unfamiliarity, I'm sure they've got both their peccadilloes and twelve notes tuned to the same frequencies as the twelve on the piano or guitar.  It's what you do with those twelve notes that makes all the difference and it's here that seeing things becomes important.  

One note is one frequency and three or more notes is a chord.  Chords tend to have some grounding in melody and melody, while mathematical as all things, is best kept sacred and ill-understood.  Learning chords is a pain in the ass because the person who first tuned the guitar and first built the piano obviously never used them.  You could avoid chords (with computers this is easier) and just stack tones of single noted instruments on top of each other like a brass band.  For fear of retribution, I won't say anything negative about brass bands (loved them in Tusk), but they're a little impractical in a vegetarian café.  

I have lumped it and am learning the chords.  One could do this with notation, but I'm doing this with little pictures that basically tell me where to put my hands (from an un-condescending book called Fretboard Logic SE).  The modern system of musical notation is mostly instrument independent and some very impressive eight-year-olds can read single notes, chords, and notes as they move forwards in time with great ease.  I am not a very impressive eight-year-old (was I ever?) and so I must make do with tablature, a guitar specific system which tells me where to press down on the guitar's neck and which looks a lot less professional.  

Generative music aside, there is some debate as to whether a music is legitimate if it can't have its sounds recorded in note form.  There is a real push for turntable transcription and there are some compelling models that tell the turntabulist (ugh) where to scratch, fade, and bring up the Phil Collins song in the bass.  This seems academic, but I'll take that as a cue to mention John Cage.  Cage is perhaps best known for his piece 4'33" -- 4 minutes and 33 seconds of silence.  This must be legitimate because there is sheet music for it, because Cage went to college, and because you can download it from the iTunes Music Store(!).  Much of his other stuff is un-listen-able, but I make the pitstop because it's worth noting that Cage actually drew some beautiful images and notation for his work and stands as a good example of using bogus externalities to see something that just isn't there.  

Seeing Sound in Time: Pitfalls and learning curves addressed, I still think that seeing sound is useful if one is going to think in sound -- especially if one is interested in making songs longer than a note.  Most means of recording music -- tape, record, CD -- have the sound information laid out chronologically (there are no great musical palindromes) and it is in songs and recording that Time begins to crop up.  4'33" might even be an argument that this is the most important value in music. 

I am recording our songs with Apple's Logic Express 8.  Logic is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) apparently and the basic visual metaphor is the same as the other front runners and Apple's free program, Garageband.  

Logic is well-titled.  A little time spent in the program will let even the clueless (me) understand how songs are structured, the different components that go into making a song, and the logic or thinking behind things.  

Logic lets you record sound in two ways.  When you record real sound, perhaps with a microphone, you see your sounds scrunched up as waves.  When you record your sound with your MIDI keyboard, you aren't seeing any sound per se;  what you see are the notes played, how hard and how long they were hit, all lit up in bright colors like player piano roll on its side.  Logic's built-in synthesizers make the sounds simultaneously with the 'roll' of information.  

There are other DAWs.  One that I've had recommended to me by a drummer is Ableton Live.  Live is another way of conceiving (creating) music visually as a series of small sound loops (eg. add some bottom, baseline, then drums, lead, etc).  Here's their ad which (unfortunately) only gives an example of a narrow and annoying spectrum of musical genres.  But -- hey -- German muzicians.   

The language used to describe these things is jargony and bulky.  The visual metaphors are actually quite simple (a lot of the stuff looks like retro synthesizers) and, if they were designed by designers (Tufte!) instead of engineers, they would be simpler still.  

We've just finished our first song and now we're mastering it.  This involves spending some time at the equalizer which, this being the end of my music-making knowledge, might make a nice transition to the next section.

Seeing Sound Elsewhere:  I remember the equalizer on my father's stereo as a child and how you could see each kick of the bass drum.  A more grown-up version of the EQ -- well, teenagerish -- is the mp3 visualizer.  Click here if you can forgive the sound.  These are post hoc and the only real reason they exist (given that the truly stoned are just as entertained by lava lights, lights) is because one is listening to music on a thing with a screen that needs to be doing something.  

I do remember the Museum of Science's Pink Floyd Laser Light Show.  Perhaps that's evidence to suggest that I wasn't really there.  I do not remember Andy Warhol's Exploding Plastic Inevitable but I wish I could have experienced the Velvet Underground under the melting lights.  

I also remember a large neon light and sound thing at the San Francisco airport.  Here's a better take in the Detroit metro of all places.  And here, beautiful in every aspect except sound, another at the V&A Museum.  Why do these installations use ambient electronic music?  Perhaps robot music appeals to the engineer, or perhaps there's a cleaner amount of data (no fuzzy recordings, no words to detract) that can be transferred from sound program to light program.  This is also the reason why the most effective 3D movies are 3D animated -- they're already got the depth-value written -- the 3rd D.

I have yet to remember Guitar Hero as I can't get my hand on it.  This game, like its counterparts RockBand and Dance Dance Revolution, has bars of sound trickle down from the top of the screen to the bottom when you're supposed to strum your guitar.  It's not really music, but I think it has some of the fun of playing with someone else.  

A game that does make music is Elektroplankton.  The video below should give you a sense of one of the easiest to understand modes Electroplankton has for composing.  This trailer should give you a sense of more of the modes, and this song is kind of pretty.  I've not played/played the game, but I am impressed with some of the stuff I've heard and that the game has found musicians and they have found an audience.   

Some of the different modes are very similar to a step computer or drum machine.  Below is a video of a basic drum machine to show you just how easily percussion (and the kind of music you hear blasted out of Nissans by men with waxed eyebrows) is to make. 

As the internet snakes around, Electroplankton has lead me to a nearly forgotten visual/musical language called Pure Data.  Pure Data (nice name) is actually more of an instrument that can create sound and sights simultaneously.  It all seems too complex though.

In summation, Michel Gondry's video for the Chemical Brother's song Star Guitar.  This is how I would like the visual world and music to work together. 

Soukous

More music nonsense from this larger piece and interest in music.  This is Sina Makosa by the band Les Wanyika.  It's soukous: bright, thin guitar sounds, usually from the thin strings of a Fender Stratocaster.  I think it's beautiful, perhaps the one of the sounds of happiness.    

If Les W have your interest piqued, try visiting bennloxo.com for a much more knowledgeable source on African music. If you want to make some of this stuff for yourself, see if you can keep up with this chap below:

Wild Heart

Stevie Nicks is not always my kind of music, but this candid moment backstage is (wow!) beautiful.