Owner: Singing Pi, Collapsing Time, The Xenophile Wildstyle, and Other Song Stories URL:http://mog.com/Shinjuku_Zulu Join Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:47:43 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Stories behind & around the songs, with streaming posts, including "Speed Tribes & Slow Is the New Fast", "Repainting Mona Lisa & Scarborough Fair", "I (Large Hear) Music & Mrs. Major Tom", "Badminton &am Site statistics:Click here
Past Lives Part 3... and <i> Howdydaomaori </i> 2007-10-01 10:00:51 This track is from the downtempo side of the “Sonorous Sussurrus” CD by K.I.A. (on iTunes HERE and also at eMusic, CD Baby, etc… Have a listen while you read…
Cont’d from Part 2
...In fact, she realized, all these decades along and many completed books later, that all the stories she’d written had been given to her— once she’d learned her letters, she’d simply transcribed the words she’d always been hearing in her head. (The process of writing had always mystified her; it was more like she was reading not writing—like she was holding a candle under a page to reveal the words already written in invisible ink…)
* *
So the above and previous Part 1 and Part 2 were told to me matter-of-factly, sitting on a shag rug in the dimly-lit basement of a suburban home. (I’ve obviously amped the story so it sounds better, but the melody is the same.) I asked the lady sitting on the floor across fro Read more:Lives
Past Lives Part 2... and <i> Coal Coal Black (Instrumental Edit </i> 2007-09-29 18:17:47 Hmm. There’ll have to be a Part 3 to the below post, which’ll have the backstory. Listen to the song while reading, as a soundtrack. It’s from the Instrumental
Edits CD of Various Chimeras by Shinjuku Zulu, at iTunes Here
...and she began to share those stories— neighbors visiting from a nearby homestead heard her read to the children and asked for a story. (She wrote one for them about a fish who wanted to climb mountains.) Other neighbors began to ask, too. (They got ones about words behaving like birds, and a man with four elbows, and…)
More—there was a request to read to the ladies’ social group at the new church. (Their story: a land where clothes were plucked fresh from the bush like a rose, and thrown away when old…) Then the schoolteacher asked for a story for her students. (A porpoise who swam to Italy to see if the fountains there were superior to the one on his head….)
Soon people from the town began r Read more:Lives
, Black
Past Lives Pt.1... and One Come We (Instrumental Edit) 2007-09-28 20:36:16 As it’s a little long, the post will be split in to two parts, with some interesting and illuminating background to the story coming in Part 2…
Listen to the track as you read the post. The song is from Shinjuku Zulu’s “Various Chimeras Instrumental
s” CD at iTunes HERE
Hands with more cracks than a riverbed in a drought, shoulders muscled like a man’s, brown hair sunbleached light from long days outside… all mostly from doing the laundry: lugging buckets, making soap, scrubbing clothes and then squeezing and twisting and slapping out the excess water. Laundry: on a farm with a husband, three children and a house made from the prairie itself (dirt floor, sod roof, wood and mud walls), there was always the drudgery of laundry, laundry, laundry.
And yet, and yet… when hanging clothes to dry: a momentary chance to create. She’d arrange the laundry in fancy—not beautiful, not pretty, she knew—patterns of c Read more:Lives
Wikimusic and... <i>Happiness Like Motion </i> 2007-09-09 10:40:00 Who owns the past? History belongs to the victors, if you believe the old the saying. Any conquering Emperor—and by Emperor I meant country, religion, corporation, etc.—wants only their version recorded, only the good shit put down on that stone/papyrus/book/website. Don’t mention the genocides/torture/devastation, planned or accidental, just the peace/spirtual salvation/progress since then… as in “Chemicals? Sold to? Nazis? Wha? Look, over there, don’t you love this new wing we built for the University?” (Check out Dave Emory’s radio show for a tsunami of info on all kinds of hidden history )
Which is why a wiki-world is so wonderful. The only way to get a fair and balanced perspective is to have multiple perspectives—5 blind men & elephant—and wikipedia not only allows this because it’s being written and re-written by the masses on a minute-by minute-basis, but because it also keeps all previous versions onli Read more:Motion
Samuel Jackson... and <i> Segue </i> 2007-08-31 06:45:36 The movie Resurrecting the Champ starring SamuelJackson
, Josh Hartnett, Alan Alda, Terri Hatcher, etc. features the Shinjuku Zulu song Segue, from the first Shinjuku Zulu CD, at iTunes HERE , in it’s soundtrack.
The movie (opening this weekend) is getting good reviews, especially Jackson’s performance…
“Segue” features an African chant by the Arctic Zulu Ensemble over breakbeats, and about midway through, the song morphs into a 4/4 afroelctrotechno-soaring-chorus thingy. In fact, that’s almost what the Globe & Mail had to say about the track, in its review of the CD: “In Segue, a chain of syncopated gasps and a soaring African chorus changes a brooding bass line into the root of something earthy, sunny and intimate.”
A couple other tracks from that first Shinjuku Zulu CD also have African chants on them: Cyclone , Yedayed and Brando
Brian Eno said in a Wired interview some time ago that computers need
The Xenophile Wildstyle... and <i>Shanghai Masai </i> 2007-08-21 09:07:26 Hybrids, synthesis, mash-ups, grafting, genetic modification, fusion, collage, chimeras—they are all words to describe the same function: bring one or two (or more) seemingly disparate elements together to create something new. It’s a great (lazy?) way to come up with something unpredictable.
On my releases I’ve been doing gen mods mostly with the music (hear, at this earlier mog post, the song Dirty Liar” which mixes hip hop, blues, and banjos, or on this very early post Da Riddim Griffin , which mixes Japanese cheerleaders, disco, 1920s cabaret, electro, and squaredance,) but in the case of the track “Shanghai
Masai” it was more about doing it lyrically, an experiment in throwing together words that rhyme but have different cultural or temporal references, and seeing what kind of imagery and meanings would pop up.
So phrases like “shanghai masai” or “tokyo gringo” or the linguistically tricky-slash-silly “capoe
Exo-stomachs... and <b> Freedom </b> 2007-08-19 22:38:50 For the last year, give or take a few months, a good friend has been carrying around, in a bag, her stomach. She would eat normally, the food would move through her and at some point (I didn’t ask where), get diverted through a tube and then into the bag, which she wore under her clothes. This bag has a little pump (grinder?), which helped her body process the food. She would have to empty the bag not too long after she ate, and a couple other times throughout the day.
I mean, think about it’s one of those modern medicine = amazing things. You’re carrying around a major organ outside your body! Maybe we’re not too far from the brain-in-a-jar future of those Star Trek/Futurama imaginings. (Hell, we finally have video phones. And private space-travel is close…)
So back to my friend… she has had four or five major operations, and has often been very tired this last year. Her activities have been severly curtailed—she had to stop working (s Read more:Freedom
O.B.E... and <i>Chimera Hey Ya </i> (Part Two) 2007-08-09 15:02:09 Those multicolored raindrops actually hit my skin ; that voice from the disembodied head resonated in my ears; the lace-light arcing tunnels blurred as I moved through them at great speed; and that heavy sensation of gravity (pulling me down in darkness into transition with the others) was as real as what you feel when your airplane suddenly drops due to turbulence. The descriptions in Part One of this post just can’t convey how real the experiences in those dreams were.
I had a little epiphany in a giant bookstore. So I’m in Chapters a few years ago, and I pick up a slim volume about yogic practices. It explains the history and the how-to process of out-of-body-experiences (o.b.e). As I’m scanning it—wishing there was a Mystical Experiences for Dummies quick guide—I come across the fact that there are apparently two ways to exit the body, the death canal and the birth canal. Apparently the death canal passage is a one-time thing; your soul uses it onl Read more:Chimera
, Part Two
Ayahuasca... and Yedayed 2007-08-04 03:11:15 Ayahuasca is a psychotropic drug used in South America by shamans in religious ceremonies to induce transpersonal experiences.
Some of the experiences sound wonderful (plants speaking directly to you, instant healing), some perhaps a little frightening (vomiting black snakes, and um, bug people)... but all are ultimately transformative. (Listen to this News For the Soul archived radio show on the topic; it’s about a third of the page down, dated Feb. 15th, HERE )
In a recent book “Power and Somethingsomething” by Somebody Somebody (sorry I can’t remember) the author asks a shaman about the ayahuasca process, and in particular why he seems to speak and sing strange words during the experience. He answers that he uses metaphors and oblique words—for instance instead of using the word “ground” he’ll say “where the peanuts fall”—because when he uses direct words, he crashes directly in to what he is trying to d
O.B.E.... and <i>Rainbowbeau </i> (Part I) 2007-07-19 23:23:58 I used to wet the bed. My pea-sized bladder was so full I’d awaken and quickly throw off the covers and clamber quickly out of bed. I’d feel the thick threads of the rug on my bare feet, and the little shock of static as I opened my bedroom door. In the moonlight, I’d pull up the porcelain toilet seat (cool on my fingers), and pee, the stream hitting the water loudly in the dead-silent house, parents and brother asleep in rooms down the hall. Finished, I’d start to fall asleep as I shuffled back to my room, but manage to get in bed and pull over my covers—hearing little pops of static from the blanket—before blackness.
And immediately awaken to wet sheets. It was always a mystery to me, because I knew I’d just gotten up to use the bathroom.
Sleep is a strange thing. I used to be so good at it; now I seem forever awake. I barely have time to achieve R.E.M. now, whereas before I would always wake up dazed with wonder at the beauty and comf
Dog Technology... and <i> Shinjuku Zulu </i> 2007-07-02 23:07:18 When European explorers encountered the Inuit, apparently northern Canada’s indigenous peoples were fascinated not so much by the explorer’s/exploiter’s guns, but by their dog technology. The Europeans had trained their animals to perform all sorts of functions and understand commands like point, fetch, and so on, in ways that the Inuit hadn’t considered, or considered possible. (Dogs can do….that? )
When the idigenous peoples of Central or South America encountered the first ship from Spain , they had a hard time seeing it, because apparently massive, wind-powered ocean-crossing ships were so far outside the realm of their experience didn’t have the ability, or the neural-connections, to comprehend them. (According, anyway, to the writer who proposed this idea, whose name escapes me at the moment.)
And here’s the reverse: electric light bulbs existed in ancient Egypt, depictions of which are carved in stone images in Dendera . But moder Read more:Technology
Badminton... and <i>We Do Supersonic </i> 2007-06-19 16:36:15 Faster is officially the new fast, (despite my earlier shout-out for slow ). How do I know this? Because now even badminton is an extreme speed sport.
I was recently contacted with a request to license We Do Supersonic for the inaugural Speedminton tournament in New Orleans. (They approached me because they’d heard of the use of that same song in a Fast Yoga competition.)
Speedminton, for those who don’t know, is badminton on four-times-fast-forward. Here’s how they breaknecked the game: the birdie is rubberized and it no longer has the same velocity-losing drag shape; there’s no net in the game; the racquets are shaped differently; and instead of gatorade you gulp ice espresso.
But don’t bother with Speedminton because it’s already evolved; now there’s Blackminton, which is the same as it’s predecessor but is played in the dark with black lights, glowing body paint and booming music. And you don’t use a racquet,
Stopping... and <i>Sleep</i> 2007-06-12 17:04:50 “Did you hear about those people who got killed at the bus stop?” someone at the table next to me had just asked me. The man was pointing with a tobaco-stained finger to the newspaper on his table. The lead story was about how a bus had gone out of control in the snow and had run over a father and his son.
“You know, I hit a deer once.” He slowly lifted his cup and took a sip of his Dunkin Donuts coffee, and continued. “With my truck, on the highway. It was raining, nightime, all of a sudden there it was in front of me, couldn’t stop.” He set down his cup and clapped his papery hands together hard as he could, imitating the smacking sound of the accident. “It didn’t even bleed, like you’d a thought.” He reached in his pocket, took out a wrinkled pack of smokes, laid it on the table. “She was a real beauty, too. I felt her heart stop.” He took out a cigarette, placed it next to the pack.
“I̵ Read more:Sleep
Collapsing time... and <i> Hummingbird </i> 2007-06-03 13:44:50 I was in an old building with large windows, right next to Naka-Meguro train station. It was a typical Toyko summer, super humid, and the windows were open to try and create a breeze (there was no air-con).
A bird flew in and settled on a desk before looking around. When it noticed its salaryman surroundings (shady, but sllim-food-pickings), it decided to leave. It immediately crashed into a closed window, then looped out and tried again, and then again, smacking into more and more invisible walls. As it grew crazier in its flight it drew more attention, and people were trying to open all the windows they could. They were also getting brooms and shaking newspapers and waving their arms to try and direct the little bird out. Nothing worked.
Eventually, after an especially loud thump on the window, it fell to the floor. (It remained on its feet, like an aging professional boxer near career’s end.)
The bird, a sparrow, was near me at this point, so I slowly shifted, ca Read more:Hummingbird
Eyeah!... and <i> Allelujah </i> 2007-05-29 06:24:11 For me, chants in music are the equivalent of abstract art; you rorschach yourself into a meaning and vibe. The vocal provides the human link, but the lack of lyrics allows you to bring your own experience or state of mind to the work (think audible ink blot.) The same track could resonate as being haunting/relaxing, sad/uplifting, or ancient/futuristic, etc., depending upon your mood, the time of day you listen to it, how much caffeine (or other substances) you have ingested, your location, whatever.
Of course I’m a big fan of words, and appreciate great lyricists like Sufjan Stevens—Casimir Pulaski Day is such a great song—and of course the obvious writers like Dylan, Cohen, and so on, but with a song with lyrics you’re somewhat stuck in one emotion or human experience—a meter maid, anarchy, uh, being under umbrellas, or riding in cars. (In case you’re from mars, attributions are as follows: the Beatles, Sex Pistols, Rihanna, and any number
Speed Tribes... and <i>Slow Is the New Fast </i> 2007-05-23 08:31:51 In Japan, there is a certain subculture who sci-fi their motorbikes and they ride them very loud and very, very fast. They are called the Bosozoku, which roughly translates into The Speed
Tribes.
But we in the west are the true speed tribes. In our tricked-out gogo gadget lives, not only is faster better, faster is the only option. Too much is not enough, and even faster is still too slow. (Ever felt impatient waiting less than half-a-second for a web page to load? You know what I mean.)
The other day I watched an elderly woman with a cane walk down a short hallway. It was like watching a special-effect sequence in a movie; everyone around her was a blur of movement, too fast to capture-focus; she stood out because she was so slow. It took her a few minutes to walk maybe 20 feet. She was smiling the whole way, lost in her thoughts, clearly enjoying herself. Watching her was calming, like watching a zen garden; I began to feel a different sense of time. (Well, for a little whil
Fourth Dimensional Shadows... and <i>Rise Up</i> 2007-05-22 20:46:35 I recently read somewhere that singing might have predated talking in the evolution of human vocal communication. My first thought was not that humans eventually developed a more sophisticated means to interact like talking, but that we de-volved into a clunkier (but quicker) means of getting ideas across. (But perhaps that’s a good thing; if I think of, say, George Bush singing a speech, it would probably sound like a combination of the cheesiest country-music-yodel mixed with a grandiose German opera ulullaton, a bit of male-cheerleader rah-rah-rahs, a Christian dirge, with more-than-a-smidge of Sanjaya (that kid with the hair from American Idol) pop cheese. So at least George talks his speeches. (Well, attempts to, anyway.)
Another metaphor for the singing-to-talking devolution is the transition from analog (smooth curve) to digital (stepped curve, where you lose out on some information and complete sound). Or maybe the diffusion (or downshifting) of singing into somethin Read more:Shadows
Repainting Mona Lisa... and <i>Scarborough Fair (A True Dub of Mine) </i> 2007-05-14 10:41:35 I wouldn’t want to re-paint the Mona Lisa, or say something more interesting like Nude Descending A Staircase . They are fine as they are, and are perceived as even “finer” the longer history frames them. Why fuck with that?
But actually, it’s not even that—it’s more: why recreate when you can generate? I make music from the perspective of a visual artist—and the thought of painting another person’s work is just, well, strange. To try to paint a copy would only end up showing the new version’s flaws (“he didn’t get the smile right”), and interpreting would only descend into parody, like painting “The Homer Lisa”, or even worse, something I call philisophimilophical (faux thoughtful,) like painting Kate Moss smiling as she faints from hunger, calling it “The Bony Lisa”, and explaining it in the artist’s statement as “a comment on the space between beauty and ugly consumer soc
Synchronicity...and <i> Tombouctou, Adieu! </i> 2007-05-01 08:24:07 So “Various Chimeras” (by Shinjuku Zulu) was finished; it had taken nearly three years to complete. Mixing and mastering was all done, and it was about to go to the CD manufacturing stage… when I came across some wax cylinders.
I don’t sample—I like to write songs that sound as if they’ve been sampled, and I’m particularily interested (at the moment) in mixing differing eras. I like the idea that in a sample-style song you are experiencing two or more different times simultaneously. (Kinda like a cubist painting, where you are looking at the front at the same time as you are looking at the profile of the subject.) I also like that in songs with samples you (aurally) inhabit different phyiscal spaces at the same time in the song, each with their own fingerprint sonics— say the plantation field and New York nightclub of Moby’s Natural Blues , or the hip hop, basement turntablism mixed with the battlefield echo of taps in the tra
La la la, Woo-hoo, Hey heys... and <i> Make Me Shake </i> 2007-04-22 00:19:07 And sometimes, sometimes, you just want to write a La La La song —with absolutely nothing to do with mathematics, fine art, dna, haikus or brain entrainment (see previous posts at left,) just… sex.
For the track Make Me Shake
from the Various Chimeras CD by Shinjuku Zulu, I wanted to write a song using only La La’s in the chorus, Do Re Mi’s in the verses, and as few as other words as possible. (But it still had to make lyrical sense.) As in “‘Do re’ me, on the floor/ La ti ‘oh’ me, at the door/get it up, go go low/ here comes an x-rated show/make me shiver, make me shake/ ‘Do Re’ me till I sing:/ La La, La La La, La La….”
I don’t know if it’s the Nelly Furtado Phenomena or the Fergie Effect, (as the song itself says, “Badness is good stuff”) but the Make Me Shake track is currently one of the most popular ones from that CD.
Larissa Gomes, who also appears on all the Shinjuk
Remixable Art... and Rashomon (Part II) 2007-04-16 15:11:38 I began making visual art long before I started making music. I’d been working on collages for awhile, but various ideas hadn’t crystalized until I had a chance encounter in Tokyo with Keith Haring. He was there for the opening of the Pop Shop. I really liked his work, which I’d first seen on the cover of Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock . I loved graffiti art—words as picture, the public/anonymous aspect of it, the tribal references, and of course the whole hip hop/breakdance scene with which it was associated, all appealed to me—and I understood that Harring’s success was due to the fact that his work was so instantly recognizable. As my medium was information (collage,) there was no ‘gestalt’ recognition of my style (as you had to read all the individual elements to ‘get’ the piece,) and I realized at that moment, (as I watched him tag his trademark barking dog onto someone’s jacket) how important it was to create a
Frequency Following Response... and <i>Uneunoia</i> 2007-04-10 08:53:26 Frequency FollowingResponse
(FFR) or brain entrainment is a phenomena where the brain locks on to an external signal and begins to mirror it, or follow it, which produces a change in the brain’s chemistry, which translates into altered behavior. ( Jose Delgado was studying this in the 60s, at Yale, where he found that a modulated radio frequency could alter mood.)
The dark side of this phenomena is where a device like HAARP and its pulsed radio frequency energy could be used, among more nefarious things, to stroke the ionosphere and broadcast frequencies onto a crowd to induce fear, a flight response, lethargy, even anger or other less coherent states. (Want that anti-war mob to disperse from in front of the White House? Dial it up.) Check out this video , at the 0:55 and 1hr 21 minute mark. It’s by Nick Begich , who wrote Angels Don’t Play This HAARP ; also refer to his radio show Changing the Way We See the World.)
The positive side of this entrainment Read more:Frequency
Remixable Art...and <i>Downquark</i> (Part I) 2007-04-09 19:05:22 Pointillism is the late 1800s compositional technique of using tiny dots (“points”) of paint, rather than blending, to create colors in a work of art. From a distance, you see the colors of the paintings as solids—the colors “blend” in your eye—but as you get much closer you see the individual component dots. (TV uses this method as well.) It developed from the Impressionist style of using unblended brush strokes of color placed side-by-side. One of the most famous Pointillist paintings is Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
My own visual art is like Pointillism in the sense that my paintings are composed/constructed from multiple individual units whose aggregate froms a larger image. Works often use 50 to 100 panels (each panel being 12” x 18”,) with the idea being that the paintings can be remixed—that is, like music the original image can be deconstructed and rearranged into something comp
Sound Art... and <i>Large Slow River</i> 2007-04-09 07:34:28 Addendum to the below Micro-poems post: my one and only own foray into spoken-word-over-music realm is the song “Large Slow River
” from the “Sonorous Susurrus” CD by K.I.A., where I use (an officially approved) sample of the sound artwork “A Large Slow River” by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. More on it in a moment.
Spoken word is so tricky—it often comes off as pretentious/artsy/faux-poetic, boring, or worse, in some cases, funny. Good funny is bad; it’s like a joke, and once you get it, why hear it again? (Never understood why people buy comedy albums, however brilliant, for this reason.) Bad funny is bad, because… well, that’s self-explanatory.
There are so many examples of bad spoke-word-over-music, from the William Shatner stuff (bad funny) to the tracks on the “Dead City Radio” CD by William Burroughs to “Fire Coming Out Of the Monkey’s Head” by Gorillaz, and I think even Leo Read more:Sound
Acapellas... and <i>Sweetness Likes the Reverb </i> 2007-04-09 07:31:41 I was in Istanbul, it was twilight, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard…
Even though I make ‘electronic’ music, or at least make music with electronic devices, and love love love cool production (shoutouts to Timbaland and William Orbit and The Neptunes and Flood and Mad Professor and…) there is, of course, no better thing than to hear an unaccompanied human voice in a song. (Unless it’s mine, that is; I have a terrible voice, which is why I’ve worked with a multitude of vocalists, from rappers and toasters to opera, blues, soul, choral, pop and folk singers.) And I always include an acapella or two on my releases…
So back to Istanbul… sitting on a rooftop, overlooking the Bosporus, moments away from the Blue Mosque, sun setting, and the first call to prayer starts, and then a few moments later, another one from a mosque slightly further away, in a different voice, and then another one, still further away, anot Read more:Sweetness
Micro-poems, John Lily... and <i>Dubmarine</i> 2007-04-09 07:30:34 I’ve always been a fan of e.e. cummings, because his poetry is so song-like; you can hear the music in this quote from his poem “somewhere i have never traveled”:
(i do not know what it is about you that closesand opens; only something in me understandsthe voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
Generally, I’m not a big fan of spoken-word, or poetry with music… except for Laurie Anderson’s work, because she’s so good at it. Of course as in the song “O Superman, but for me especially in the song “John Lilly”, where in a micro-poem, she manages to compress more meaning and emotion than there is in many a novel. Here’s the lyrics, but go listen to the song:
John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins, said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale who was swimming around and around in his tank.
And the whale kept asking him questions t
Banjos and electronica... and <i>Dirty Liar</i> 2007-04-09 07:26:02 Banjos (or is that Banjoes? Dan Quayle, I feel your pain) and pop music are great, especially in electronica. Yes, you heard me, electronica.
So below are some are some fantastic banjo tracks, (that’s not an oxymoron) arranged in order from more tradtional to more radical genres, from singer/songwriter (Sufjan Stevens) to Old Tyme/Bluegrass/Country (O Brother) to dance/electronic (The Grid) to folk/electronic (Four Tet) to country/electronic (K.I.A.) to ambient electronic (Air) and finally, rap/dance/blues/electronic (Shinjuku Zulu).
Sufjan Stevens, All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands
Soggy Bottom Boys, I Am a Man of Constant Sorrow
Air, Alpha Beta Gaga
K.I.A., Box the Gnat
Four Tet, She Moves She
The Grid, Swamp Thing
Shinjuku Zulu, Dirty Liar
Long Songs...and <i>Coal Coal Black</i> 2007-04-09 07:24:20 I understand short attention spans and all that, but I do like the idea of slow being the new fast. Or rather, long being the new short.
There’s a company that provides a service to radio stations of cropping down songs to just the ‘best’ parts, i.e. the hooks, and will chop out, say, that unecessary third chorus, or that outro, or that bridge, so that all songs fit into a two-minute format, on the theory that people really only want the good parts anyway and don’t have time for more. (In fact record companies have also sliced up songs into ring-tone portions; you pay more for the chorus than you do for the verse.)
I’m not a big fan of nostalgia (hate it, in fact) but when the odd mood strikes me I’ll go on iTunes and listen to thirty-second clips of old favorites. Of course you don’t get the full emotional arc of the song or have time to get into the groove… but in my head I already know the song so that’s enough for me, so Read more:Black
Singing Pi... and <i>Massive Ballerina </i> 2007-04-09 07:22:57 So I made the mistake of mentioning the idea for a song to Sinead O’Connor, and Kate Bush ended up stealing it.
Really.
Well, maybe. A few years ago (when I was writing for the music mag, see other posts below) I was interviewing Sinead O’Connor, and we were talking about how songs originate, and I mentioned that I’d had a dream where a person was singing the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard… the song was perfect, it was mysterious, and it was endless.
It was the number pi.
But in the dream the song didn’t feel dry, abstract or mathematical; it was very emotional and meaningful and passionate… and you weren’t even really able to hear the numbers, it was more a connection to the energy conveyed through the syllables of the words of the numbers… sort of like how Elizabeth Fraser chooses her words for the beauty of how they sound (including taking words from foreign dictionaries) not for any literal meaning (i.e. “ Read more:Singing
, Ballerina
Music Is My Hot Hot Sex, Music Is My Radar...and <i>Music Is My DNA</i> 2007-04-09 07:21:33 I was dreaming, and I heard a very beautiful sound, familiar, like it had always been in the background, but strange, like I’d never heard it before.
As I concentrated on it, more distinct parts became audible. It was, in fact, a song—and it was coming from my body. Specifically, my DNA . Each strand was vibrating, like a harp or violin or guitar string, and emitting its own melodic sound, and the combination of the melodies created a song…
At that moment in the dream someone passed by, and I heard the song specific to her resonating DNA . Next to her was a man, and he had his own song… and a child near them, who had his own song… in the dream I then had an aural birds-eye-perspective… I heard all the songs from all the people in the plaza, and how together, they formed a much larger and more complex song. It was symphonic, not cacophonic.
Sometime later, in the real world, I read about string-theory, which is where, to quote the Wikipedia Read more:Music
, Radar
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