Coming Soon…

We’re working on a ‘real’ website, to be released by the end of the Fall. Stay tuned for more updates.

What is art, music?

Art in its most primitive state is a simple imitation of nature. But it quickly becomes imitation of nature in the wider sense of this idea, that is, not merely imitation of outer but also of inner nature. In other words, art does not then represent merely the objects or the occasions that make impressions, but above all these impressions themselves, ultimately without reference to their What, When, and How. Inference of the original, external object is here perhaps of only secondary importance due to its lack of immediacy. In its most advanced state, art is exclusively concerned with the representation of inner nature. Here its aim is just the imitation of impressions, which have now combined, through association with one another and with other sense impressions, to form new complexes and new motives, new stimulil. At this state, inference of the external stimulus is almost certain to be inadequate. At all stages the imitation of the model, of the impression, or of the complex of impressions is only relatively faithful. This is true, on the one hand, because of the limits of out abilities; on the other, because, whether we are conscious of it or not, the material [the medium] in which the imitation is presented differs from the material or materials of the stimulus, so that, for example, visual or tactile sensations might be represented in the material of auditory sensations.
–Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, p. 18

Wow. If there’s one thing that never fails to satisfy me in the extreme, it’s the succinct, concise technical writing of an expert. To read someone summarize an activity into which I endlessly pour myself is as mystifying as it is illuminating.

Update: Open Source Collaborative Approach

My brief stay in New Jersey today turned out to be an impromptu band meeting. Hanging out with the guys in Teaneck and Hackensack, drinking lots of coffee, we came upon more than a few good ideas. In discussing our musical plans and how and with whom we want to make music, it’s become clear that we’re looking to apply the same kinds of principles and work method expounded by the open source movement to our music making. In short, we want to be an open source band. I want to purchase some server space so I can throw up a community forum for us to post our ideas to. This way we can pick and choose how we want to collaborate on a case by case basis. With server space a song can be posted in its working form, as a file formatted for the program that was used to mix and record it. This and the continued style development of this blog are our top priorities for the next two weeks.

In retrospect: June 2007

Last summer I had some ambitious plans. I was convinced that my band was going to take off, we were going to record some quirky, beautiful songs that people could dance to. We were going to take all our cues from Zazen Boys. Mark and I listened to them religiously back in those days. We even learned to play a few of their songs, namely “HIMITSU GIRL’S TOP SECRET” and “This is NORANEKO.” Sadly, plans alone guarantee little. My ambitions were not shared and I was being naive anyway. You can’t make people be in a band, or in your vision of a band, especially if their your friends. Maybe if you can force money-making-music out of them, that works, but even then, they can’t be your friends. After a year of inactivity and reminiscence, this has come to make good sense. So I will only collaborate now if there’s shared enthusiasm about the idea of making music, about the process by which we make music, and about the direction that the music is going in.

Still, we had a lot of fun, I think that we came up with some decently interesting, cool-sounding stuff for a couple of highschoolers with high ambitions and no expectations. I’m posting the stuff we last worked on when the steam ran out.

Pandas are Totally Cool
Untitled #1
Untitled #2
Sunday

These were recorded in GarageBand which I hope I will never have to rely on again, since I got ProTools 7.4 a little less than a month ago. (A post on that program is in the works.) I somewhat doubt it, but some of these might be rerecorded for an what will someday be a record. “Pandas are Totally Cool” is actually fine musically, it just needs to be remastered. Unfortunately the computer that I had all the GarageBand files we made was just one of many casualties of a lightning bolt that hit the apartment building behind my house in Hackensack, NJ. Remastering will be tricky, but I’m sure there’s a way.

Live: RZA

While I wouldn’t say that my expectations were particularly high for RZA’s July 5 show at Webster Hall, even someone with no idea of the greatness of the Wu would be pretty disappointed. Admittedly, I haven’t been to many hip hop concerts. There was Pharoahe Monch and the Teriyaki Boyz back in September, which was supposed to be headlined by MF Doom. I think he was planning on carrying out an elaborate hoax, sending in a look-a-like who would wear his mask and make a poor attempt at lip syncing with his raps. As far as I can tell the concert promoters wouldn’t let Bizarro Doom up on stage and Rakim showed up instead, albeit four or so hours after the show began, although I was too tipsy to really care by that point. Other than that I haven’t seen much hip hop performed live, although Saul Williams’ performance at my school this past year might qualify.

Accepting that I might not know what I’m talking about, RZA’s show was real weak. It opened with a performance by Stone Mecca who were the main culprits. The LA based group plays R&B and soul style music live which should be reason for encouragement enough. Sadly they failed to deliver. Other than performing a powerful sounding live rendition of Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Got Your Money,” they had a pretty bad sound up on stage. Granted technical difficulties were partly to blame. One of the amps was producing feedback for the first few songs of their set and it took some time for one of the Webster Hall techie guys to finally fix it. All the same the voice they used on their keyboards had a corny, Sam Ash-keyboard-section flavor and it always prevented the other instruments from blending together to form anything effectively emotive.

None of these flaws are unforgivable of course. The vocals and lyrics, however, were. I don’t think anyone in the audience was really feeling it. Their back up singers were mediocre and far too often one of them would decide to come to the fore and sing-talk to the audience about ‘our love,’ or something just as embarassingly assuming and personal. Of course the audience was made up mostly of the cargo shorts wearing high school stoner dude-bro sect with a handful of macho guidos thrown in for variety. Their response was always “WU!!! WU!!! WU-TANG CLAN!!!” which all the performers that night readily co-opted. It was as though simply invoking the audience to remember that one of the performers there that night was affiliated with the Wu was enough to deceive them into accepting it as Wu-Tang Clan material even though it was something else entirely. This continued on throughout Stone Mecca’s set, until, finally, a DJ came up and played an amazing set. One of the few exciting moments that night came when he mixed mixed the vocals from Nique La Police (scene taken from the excellent La Haine) into one of the most intense loops I’ve ever heard.

The DJ did his thing and I forgave the opening act for being the opening act. My excitement began to mount as I waited for RZA’s set. The turntablism I was then enjoying got me all excited for bad-ass samples and beats to make your body move. When he cleared off I was taken aback–Stone Mecca was coming back onto the stage, plus one member: RZA himself.

I stood in denial through the first couple of songs. Finally it dawned on me that this would be the show. RZA’s not much of a rapper. In fact, I always found his raps on Wu tracks to be comically bad, but endearingly so. He does what most producers-turned-poor-MC’s do, taking on a highly stylized delivery that gives them the artistic license to bend and fumble any two words together so that they rhyme. Kanye West is notorious for doing this. I always loved his tendency towards verbosity, a rare thing in mainstream rap. Any ‘r’ sound gets turned into an ‘ah’ or an ‘eh’ or even an ‘uh,’ so that he raps “puhpendikulah to da squeh, we stand bold like fleh, escape from yo dragon leah, in patikulah,” making sure to throw in wordy bits like “cerebral cortex” and “right ventricle.”  I like that. He’s doing something different, I think.

And I can’t help but think that that’s what he was trying to do that night, but I wasn’t feeling it. It was some faux-soul balladry that he was definitely not able to deliver the goods on. I mean, producers can try to rap, and it’s cool, you cut them a little slack, but singing? That’s completely different territory. After almost half a dozen tunes that all carried the same motivational theme, my friend and I gave up and retreated.

I don’t know what to think in retropect. Was that a hip hop concert? Or was RZA staking out new territory, if unsuccessfully? I’d like to know what the two hundred or so mall rat psuedo thugs from Jersey thought… I’m going to reserve any judgments on RZA and co. until I can see them live and together (minus the great, late, ODB, RIP). Of course, Ghostface alone would be a fine substitute. I know he wouldn’t let me down.

Sunday Morning…

brings the dawn in…

Woke up rested and ready to implement some major structural change to this blog. It’s fallen into inactivity, just as our ‘band’ seems to exist in name only. But Mark and I are making, playing, and listening to music still and somehow a reduction of the band to two creative elements seems wise. This is the internet era. Collaboration is the name of the game. Mark and I have been sending song rough drafts to each other of late. I’m going to start compiling all our recent aural excursions and post them up here as soon as I finished reorganizing this thing.

My first priority has been to establish a clear, specific objective for the blog. Primary objective: to document the artistic exploits of the band Heat Death of the Universe through regular postings of audio and text (and hopefully, eventually video). Secondary objective: provide a forum for the Zeitgeist of this band, from psuedo-philosophical musings and rants about contemporary social topics to sharing media content and reviews. I hope that our general interests will be reflected here, keeping everyone abreast of the latest web humor memes, new trends in IT, bad ass cult cinema, addictive blogs, intriguing art happenings, remarkable free software, note-worthy political events, and beautiful tunes. Maybe a book will get mentioned at some point or another.

I’m hoping the next entry won’t comically follow three months from now. This last line will make me look a complete ass.

Updates

After a semester and a half of college, the idea of starting this effort up again appeals to me greatly. I read today the Yale Style Guide which provides all this useful information on how to design and manage a website. From now on I’m not going to rely on the efforts of others to sustain projects I care about. That stated, I hope I can get the people I collaborate with musically involved once again.

On a similar note, I look forward to putting some new media up here. I’ve been writing but not recording music. As soon as I get the audio input on this laptop figured out, you’ll all get to hear what this stuff sounds like.

Until soon. If this “Under construction” status lasts long at all, you can bet that it’ll last a whole lot longer.

BOADRUMS 77

The Boredoms as a super band of 77 drummers plus eYe? Today, on 7.7.07, the Japanese holiday of Tanabata? (That’s big in their culture, sort of like the Chinese New Year) Seventy-seven minutes of drumming climaxing with the sun setting? on a beautiful water part in Brooklyn? Christ god, drummers from Lightning Bolt, Oneida, Hella, Man Man, Psychic Ills, Black Dice, Holy Fuck, Gang Gang Dance, Prefuse 73? And let us not forget Andrew W.K. Honestly, this has to be up there with losing your virginity, getting married, having your first child, when you die, in terms of importance.

Sounds like I’ve never heard before, slamming, pulsing, so enormous, it was as though I could hear the Earth’s heart beat. eYe stood in the middle and conducted, would raise his hand and the intensity with which the 77 drummers tapped their cymbals would crescendo to a furious high and then follow his falling hand signal back to the a flatter, quieter “shhhhh,” and I swear it sounded more like waves crashing up against a beach than anything I’ve ever heard before. They slammed away at those toms, those snares, those bass drums, would move from weird jazzy, bossa nova drums in strange time signatures to tribal-techno sounding dance beats. As the drummers went through their motions, eYe would mess about with electronics and other contraptions, including seven guitar necks that were suspended in the air in the configuration of a piano keyboard, each with a different chord, he would hit these guitar necks with a drum stick and control, rather modulate the sustained drone of the necks, changing the timbre, the amplitude, the frequency, the everything of the sound wave. It was just too amazing. We also saw a faux-Mr. Mendelsohn there with a mohawk. I’ll post pictures of all this later when WordPress stops being such an asshole and some videos are up on YouTube.

LISTEN TO THIS

So last Friday night when gettign back home from a party we had the pleasure of listening to this jewel on WFMU:

3

New Material Rough Draft

Mark and I worked out what sounds like a song that will be going on the EP. It’s unmixed and sounds terribly languid since we haven’t any drums backing it up, but that will be corrected shortly. Also need that mixer posted about before, which will make mixing far more easy.

Random: does anyone realize how completely bad ass Mastodon is? I mean, Dayum.

Anyway, here’s what we jammed up. Should sound much better once we’ve the band together, can elaborate on structure, get some vocals.