Here are a few highlights from this week:
Sounds of the Dawn: A YouTube channel that posts New Age cassettes from the 80s and 90s. This week was Will Vukin’s Fireflow from 1989. It's fun if you like your flutes and synth pads a particular vintage. I’m listening while writing this, and honestly, it’s perfect ambient music. In addition to its successes in inspiring your ascension to meet late 20th-century Mother Gaia or whatever, it also has a creature comfort in the not-so-subtle tape noise, a refuge for those of us raised in the cassette era. By that metric, I could probably listen to the jarring flute music of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung on cassette and get the same embryonic effect. But this feels even more like I’m aboard a slice of Magic Cheese floating across the scrolling sky of Super Nintendo’s Alladin. Credit to Phil Geraldi for mentioning this in an interview promoting his AM/FM USA release - something also worth checking out if you are in the mood for a mental road trip across a distorted America.
Cat Pianos, Sound-Houses, and Other Imaginary Musical Instruments: “Deirdre Loughridge and Thomas Patteson, curators of the Museum of Imaginary Musical Instruments, explore the wonderful history of made-up musical contraptions, including a piano comprised of yelping cats and Francis Bacon's 17th-century vision of experimental sound manipulation.” Essay from 2015. Fictophones are instruments that were designed, but for practical reasons or the constraints of physics did not come into being. In other words, these are sounds that you can only imagine in your mind. Francis Bacon’s “Sound Houses,” Athanasius Kircher’s Phonurgia nova, The Horror Instruments of the collectively imagined Cat Piano or Jules Verne’s Children’s Organ are just a few of the imaginary soundscapes discussed. Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s War Horror Spring Machine, which replicates the sounds of death, destruction, and agony to dissuade war-hungry kings, is especially poignant as an even larger humanitarian crisis looms in Rafah and the Palestinian death toll approaches 28,000. The most fascinating element of these instruments is that they sound different to each of us based on our experiences. Perhaps take a moment this week to imagine your own instrument.
The Secret World of Sound with David Attenborough: An in-depth exploration of eight distinct animal species that discusses the unique sounds made by each. The series utilized vibrometers (a tool that uses Doppler shifts to measure changes in amplitude and frequency) and finger-tip-sized microphones to record the animals from a distance—presented in Dolby 360 Atmos Sound if you’ve got that kind of set-up (if you do, please invite me over for the premiere on Sunday, February 25th). I went to an AES event at the Comcast Building in Philadelphia not too long ago and got to hear Elton John’s Rocket Man in Atmos. It was pretty breathtaking, though noticeably exclusionary. I realize that you can listen to “Atmos” on your AirPods, and it is cool but also an entirely different experience.
If you know anything about most nature shows, such as Planet Earth, what you hear on the soundtrack is not really the noises of animals- and I am not referencing the chase music as the Gazelle narrowly escapes the lion’s jaws. Most of the sound you hear is designed by foley artists later in the studio. The massive sound of an Elephant’s hoof hitting the soil is more likely the sound of a human throwing mud at a wall or some shit. The truth is that elephants are relatively silent walkers due to the padding on their feet. But Nature Shows are selling the spectacle as much (or more so? Yes, more so) than environmentalism, and due to the toxic legacy of PT Barnum, elephants are stars in that regard and must sound as huge as they look. Beyond selling the power of nature to TV viewers, there is also the nightmare logistics of bringing sound recording equipment into the field. For anyone who has ever watched the behind-the-scenes footage for these types of shows, you know that getting video footage while going unnoticed is hard enough. Maybe a show like this, combined with the utilization of practical technology, can spark an interest in realism, though. Also, it's worth checking out The mini-mini series The Art of Foley if you want a comical look at sound design in films.
THTHNG: Desolation Unknown: This is an homage to John Carpenter’s The Thing by Fluorescent Grey and director Kelly Porter. It is a movie and soundtrack created using AI stable diffusion technology. The soundtrack was composed using a dataset derived from the original Ennio Morricone soundtrack. (Longish Note: this was always a curiosity in the Carpenter cannon as he didn’t do the score himself. This is only true in part. The main theme belongs exclusively to Morricone, But, and I only learned this last week, Morricone composed the theme + 20 minutes or so of other music without seeing a second of the film. It is still unclear to me whether any of that additional 20 minutes ended up in the theatrical release. Carpenter and Alan Howarth had to go into the studio later to record more music to fill out the emotional elements being played out on screen. John Carpenter, not being a typical Hollywood ego, though, still credits the entire musical soundtrack to Morricone. I am bringing light to this project because The Thing is one of my favorite films, and also - projects like this engage the listener in the ongoing debate over AI in the arts as well as its labor and societal implications. That debate requires a much longer dedicated post than I care to indulge now.
I have already expressed some negative opinions on AI without actually taking in too much of the artwork itself. That’s not fair to intelligence of any kind - human or artificial. And at this point, it is collaborative. AI has yet to release an album without the knowledge or input of its designers (right?).
The Thing is the perfect subject to engage this discussion, though. It is shifting in form, trying to figure out where and what it is, and is feared without being truly understood. It takes the forms of our culture and tries its hardest to fit in. Sometimes, the creature accomplishes this goal; sometimes, it scurries off as a disembodied head spider. Can you see Child's breath?
Also! The February playlist has grown even more with added tracks from J Mascis, The Funkees, Brion Gysin, Ariel Kalma, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Meth Math, Fred Firth, Tangent, Itasca, and Depeche Mode (among many others). Listen Here.
and RIP to the great Damo Sazuki.
Yes, please. Smooth and dreamy with syncopated synths, ethereal background vocalizations and subtle healing vibrato. English and Spanish are swapped out over the course of the record reflecting the artist's Ecuadorian roots and South Florida upbringing. Esta es esa mierda curativa.
10/10 Smiles.
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