file: 17 anticipation [1999].mp4
composition: anticipation (failed 2013 remaster of 1999 cd demo)
status: downloaded youtube video
Tuesday, December 24, 2013
jessica amber murray
....and, now, to attempt to have a few drinks without smoking any cigarettes. considering the temperature outside (along with my absolute aversion to indoor smoking), i think i'm likely to do well. we'll see.
regarding the smoking thing...
the packs have been almost entirely cut out. i've bought probably around ten packs, total, since the beginning of september. what i've been doing instead is falling back to these single cigars that can be picked up at the corner store for around $1 whenever i'm about to crack. it's a little more costly on the face of it, but it's a good shot of nicotine so it works for a while. one of the problems quitters will run into is that when they crack once they want another one almost right away; the cigars seem to mitigate that. more importantly, it has broken me of a lot of routines, like smoking after meals. to me, that's the harder part. i know nicotine is a physical addiction (meaning that coming off of it will produce physical effects, like drowsiness) but i don't really feel hooked on that level. it's more about breaking routine...
...and not drinking. i've always been a social drinker, so no people has meant no drinking. i mean, i spend most of my time reading, and i'd rather be sober for that. i prefer marijuana as a creative aid. what i'm about to do is uncharacteristic.
so, i can't claim i'm nicotine-free. but i *have* broken the routine, to the point where i can honestly state that i'm not a habitual smoker anymore.
which is all i really wanted to accomplish in the first place. i don't mind being a social smoker that specifically smokes around alcohol and marijuana. what i no longer wanted to be was a solo smoker. on that point, mission accomplished.
(meaning i'm not going to get too mad at myself if i buy a pack on christmas, just like i didn't get too mad when i bought a pack a few weeks ago when it was over 10 degrees, just as an excuse to hang out outside for the day. stuff like that is enjoying the drug, not being a slave to it.)
mom
Wow! That's Great!...Wish, I could have that much self-control!
jessica amber murray
i don't think it's a question of self-control so much as it's a question of doing what one wants. i kind of strongly believe that smokers smoke because they want to, not because they're zombies. the physical withdrawals are coercive, no doubt, but it comes down to wanting or not wanting to quit.
mom
Addiction Stinks!....And in the end it WILL TAKE CONTROL!.....DENIAL is an addicts BEST FRIEND.
jessica amber murray
well, sure. but the semantics break down when you speak of control. what i'm really doing is giving myself permission to indulge, not controlling myself from indulging.
i guess i have a level of broad consistency in my concept of "self-control" that goes into a lot of areas and that my perspective regarding drugs is more of a consequence of how i see things more broadly. consider governments and this idea that their laws dissuade anti-social behaviour, the idea that laws act as disincentives to control people's desires. this is an idea that is, i think, very wrong. sure, on the one hand, you have the logic of poverty that often triumphs over the laws of social order. circumstances where property crimes exist are often circumstances where it's logical for an impoverished person to steal something or otherwise break property laws. governments can produce laws to catch people when they do this, but the laws don't actually succeed in preventing property crime. they merely succeed in criminalizing poverty. rather, eliminating that sort of crime requires a lot of social work to both eliminate the conditions that lead to it as logical and to create a populace that sees it as morally wrong. once you get to that ideal point, preventing crime is less of a process of people controlling themselves from committing crimes and more of a process of people choosing not to behave in a way that is anti-social. that's the ideal.
the way we treat addiction is sort of a cop-out. i mean, i'm not denying that addicts need to admit their addictions. i agree that acknowledgement is the first step. but actually working through it is a process of transcending the desire, not repressing it.
i think it's possible to use drugs without abusing them.
with alcoholism (and for random readers, that's not something i feel i have a problem with), the way to get beyond it is not to have the "self-control" to avoid it but to develop a desire to be sober.
(and i think i'm being a little bit buddhist, but it's something i connect to accidentally and intuitively rather than consciously)
in a moral sense, i find buddhism more rational than western religion. in the west, we've fallen into a sort of false dichotomy between "master morality" and "slave morality". the irony is that the dude that developed that false dichotomy is also the dude that transferred a lot of eastern ideas into the western sphere. he completely missed the obvious synthesis that was sitting right in front of him.
you need to be careful studying buddhism in the west, though, because most of the literature is misinterpreted hippie nonsense. there's a danger of turning into a new age weirdo.
for example, avoid anything that tries to connect buddhism with science.
i kind of like the idea that "only lost people require religion". which is to say that walking into a church or a temple or a synagogue isn't likely to find you people that understand how to behave morally on an intuitive level, but people that are struggling with it. people that "get it" find the whole thing boring and trivial.
not to put myself above it or anything. not declaring myself perfect. but there's a lot of truth to it. and if one can separate the social help from the control and brainwashing [which is difficult, especially for people in fragile states], i'll accept it could have some value.
what i'd rather see, though, is a resurgence of secular social institutions that strip out the brainwashing. i think there's a really open space here for socialist thinkers to walk into and am not really sure why they haven't, given that it connects quite well to the idea that "the social revolution must come first".
....and, now, to attempt to have a few drinks without smoking any cigarettes. considering the temperature outside (along with my absolute aversion to indoor smoking), i think i'm likely to do well. we'll see.
regarding the smoking thing...
the packs have been almost entirely cut out. i've bought probably around ten packs, total, since the beginning of september. what i've been doing instead is falling back to these single cigars that can be picked up at the corner store for around $1 whenever i'm about to crack. it's a little more costly on the face of it, but it's a good shot of nicotine so it works for a while. one of the problems quitters will run into is that when they crack once they want another one almost right away; the cigars seem to mitigate that. more importantly, it has broken me of a lot of routines, like smoking after meals. to me, that's the harder part. i know nicotine is a physical addiction (meaning that coming off of it will produce physical effects, like drowsiness) but i don't really feel hooked on that level. it's more about breaking routine...
...and not drinking. i've always been a social drinker, so no people has meant no drinking. i mean, i spend most of my time reading, and i'd rather be sober for that. i prefer marijuana as a creative aid. what i'm about to do is uncharacteristic.
so, i can't claim i'm nicotine-free. but i *have* broken the routine, to the point where i can honestly state that i'm not a habitual smoker anymore.
which is all i really wanted to accomplish in the first place. i don't mind being a social smoker that specifically smokes around alcohol and marijuana. what i no longer wanted to be was a solo smoker. on that point, mission accomplished.
(meaning i'm not going to get too mad at myself if i buy a pack on christmas, just like i didn't get too mad when i bought a pack a few weeks ago when it was over 10 degrees, just as an excuse to hang out outside for the day. stuff like that is enjoying the drug, not being a slave to it.)
mom
Wow! That's Great!...Wish, I could have that much self-control!
jessica amber murray
i don't think it's a question of self-control so much as it's a question of doing what one wants. i kind of strongly believe that smokers smoke because they want to, not because they're zombies. the physical withdrawals are coercive, no doubt, but it comes down to wanting or not wanting to quit.
mom
Addiction Stinks!....And in the end it WILL TAKE CONTROL!.....DENIAL is an addicts BEST FRIEND.
jessica amber murray
well, sure. but the semantics break down when you speak of control. what i'm really doing is giving myself permission to indulge, not controlling myself from indulging.
i guess i have a level of broad consistency in my concept of "self-control" that goes into a lot of areas and that my perspective regarding drugs is more of a consequence of how i see things more broadly. consider governments and this idea that their laws dissuade anti-social behaviour, the idea that laws act as disincentives to control people's desires. this is an idea that is, i think, very wrong. sure, on the one hand, you have the logic of poverty that often triumphs over the laws of social order. circumstances where property crimes exist are often circumstances where it's logical for an impoverished person to steal something or otherwise break property laws. governments can produce laws to catch people when they do this, but the laws don't actually succeed in preventing property crime. they merely succeed in criminalizing poverty. rather, eliminating that sort of crime requires a lot of social work to both eliminate the conditions that lead to it as logical and to create a populace that sees it as morally wrong. once you get to that ideal point, preventing crime is less of a process of people controlling themselves from committing crimes and more of a process of people choosing not to behave in a way that is anti-social. that's the ideal.
the way we treat addiction is sort of a cop-out. i mean, i'm not denying that addicts need to admit their addictions. i agree that acknowledgement is the first step. but actually working through it is a process of transcending the desire, not repressing it.
i think it's possible to use drugs without abusing them.
with alcoholism (and for random readers, that's not something i feel i have a problem with), the way to get beyond it is not to have the "self-control" to avoid it but to develop a desire to be sober.
(and i think i'm being a little bit buddhist, but it's something i connect to accidentally and intuitively rather than consciously)
in a moral sense, i find buddhism more rational than western religion. in the west, we've fallen into a sort of false dichotomy between "master morality" and "slave morality". the irony is that the dude that developed that false dichotomy is also the dude that transferred a lot of eastern ideas into the western sphere. he completely missed the obvious synthesis that was sitting right in front of him.
you need to be careful studying buddhism in the west, though, because most of the literature is misinterpreted hippie nonsense. there's a danger of turning into a new age weirdo.
for example, avoid anything that tries to connect buddhism with science.
i kind of like the idea that "only lost people require religion". which is to say that walking into a church or a temple or a synagogue isn't likely to find you people that understand how to behave morally on an intuitive level, but people that are struggling with it. people that "get it" find the whole thing boring and trivial.
not to put myself above it or anything. not declaring myself perfect. but there's a lot of truth to it. and if one can separate the social help from the control and brainwashing [which is difficult, especially for people in fragile states], i'll accept it could have some value.
what i'd rather see, though, is a resurgence of secular social institutions that strip out the brainwashing. i think there's a really open space here for socialist thinkers to walk into and am not really sure why they haven't, given that it connects quite well to the idea that "the social revolution must come first".
Monday, December 23, 2013
roach situation
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: the initial landlord
hi.
i just want to say things are going well here. and merry christmas.
there's actually not what i'd call a "roach problem" in the unit itself. i've seen a few here and there, exclusively where there are cracks in the wall. that is to say that i don't think there are roaches in the unit, but it is certainly the case that sometimes roaches wander into the unit from elsewhere in the building. i saw one the other day near the dead heater in the kitchen, and hadn't seen one before that since about october - when i had seen a few near the hole for the pipe in the closet. when i covered up the pipe, they went away. so, i've filled the cracks around the dead heater up with a pile of old hole-ridden socks i had hanging around for rags and expect that will keep them out of there. it seemed like the roach i saw in the kitchen was actually looking for water, not food. it was attracted to the sink. i'm very careful to ensure all the food in the unit is in the fridge - even like bread and stuff.
i do, however, feel a responsibility to point out that there are roaches in the building. my perspective regarding that is that there are bugs everywhere; i'm content to simply patch up holes when i see them and keep them out that way. but, as a tenant, i think i have a responsibility to inform you that they do seem to have a nest in the building somewhere.
j
To: the initial landlord
hi.
i just want to say things are going well here. and merry christmas.
there's actually not what i'd call a "roach problem" in the unit itself. i've seen a few here and there, exclusively where there are cracks in the wall. that is to say that i don't think there are roaches in the unit, but it is certainly the case that sometimes roaches wander into the unit from elsewhere in the building. i saw one the other day near the dead heater in the kitchen, and hadn't seen one before that since about october - when i had seen a few near the hole for the pipe in the closet. when i covered up the pipe, they went away. so, i've filled the cracks around the dead heater up with a pile of old hole-ridden socks i had hanging around for rags and expect that will keep them out of there. it seemed like the roach i saw in the kitchen was actually looking for water, not food. it was attracted to the sink. i'm very careful to ensure all the food in the unit is in the fridge - even like bread and stuff.
i do, however, feel a responsibility to point out that there are roaches in the building. my perspective regarding that is that there are bugs everywhere; i'm content to simply patch up holes when i see them and keep them out that way. but, as a tenant, i think i have a responsibility to inform you that they do seem to have a nest in the building somewhere.
j
mom
Hi J....How are you? I am fine(fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional)...lol. Oh Well....Hate this time of the year! For Sure! Anyways....Did you ever activate that XP? Just wondering? I have a friend that I was going to give it to, if you haven't, of course...Although...I am hearing from a few different people that when it is a home edition...One can have multiple activations of it?? Not sure? You would prolly know for sure...
jessica amber murray
the purpose of activation is to ensure that the purchased product key is used on one, and only one, computer. i'm not currently using it, and don't really see how i could use it, to be honest. i'm running pirated versions...
mom
So, it would be safe to give it to my friend then? But, if you feel that you want it, I will not give it to him.
jessica amber murray
no, go ahead.
mom
K...Thanks!...It will be his Christmas gift then. Just a friend. Not a boyfriend...Very nice older fellow...He just hates his windows 8, and was wanting a copy of XP.
But, You didn't answer me about how you are!?....This time of the year kinda sucks a bit(more than a bit!)...I am living in the bottom of a brown bottle right now...I know....Pathetic!....I have a few left and then am going to go through a bit(more than a bit) of horrible with-drawl...And then will be going to my friends place(his name is Paul)(He is the one I want to give my XP to,(but only if you are sure you don't want it) to cook up the Traditional Christmas Dinner...Nanny&Leo are coming too...Will be soooooo nice to see her(not so sure about Leo though)..LOL... Do you have any plans for that Annoying Day?
jessica amber murray
i actually haven't been to a christmas dinner in a few years, now. for me, it's just wednesday. if anything, i'm irked that the recycle doesn't come until friday, because i couldn't get it all out last pickup.
i'll probably have a sandwich and listen to music.
mom
That sounds quite peaceful to me.... I kinda wish I could just do the same...I have spent more than a few Christmas Days the same...And rather enjoyed it that way. I am a little stressed about my Christmas Day this year. Just hate that feeling!
jessica amber murray
i just have no patience for religious holidays or hallmark holidays. it's merely a wednesday.
mom
I hear you for sure!...Feeling quite the same!.....The only thing I am looking forward to is the yummy turkey dinner(as I am going to be the one cooking it!..And, I do make a yummy dinner for sure!)...What, I am finding that I am feeling a bit stressful about, is that...They are ALL depending on ME to get my old(fairly undependable ass) over there to prepare it!...LOL...What if, I decide to change my mind!(I won't, of course)...Just hate the feeling of it all.
Hi J....How are you? I am fine(fucked up, insecure, neurotic, emotional)...lol. Oh Well....Hate this time of the year! For Sure! Anyways....Did you ever activate that XP? Just wondering? I have a friend that I was going to give it to, if you haven't, of course...Although...I am hearing from a few different people that when it is a home edition...One can have multiple activations of it?? Not sure? You would prolly know for sure...
jessica amber murray
the purpose of activation is to ensure that the purchased product key is used on one, and only one, computer. i'm not currently using it, and don't really see how i could use it, to be honest. i'm running pirated versions...
mom
So, it would be safe to give it to my friend then? But, if you feel that you want it, I will not give it to him.
jessica amber murray
no, go ahead.
mom
K...Thanks!...It will be his Christmas gift then. Just a friend. Not a boyfriend...Very nice older fellow...He just hates his windows 8, and was wanting a copy of XP.
But, You didn't answer me about how you are!?....This time of the year kinda sucks a bit(more than a bit!)...I am living in the bottom of a brown bottle right now...I know....Pathetic!....I have a few left and then am going to go through a bit(more than a bit) of horrible with-drawl...And then will be going to my friends place(his name is Paul)(He is the one I want to give my XP to,(but only if you are sure you don't want it) to cook up the Traditional Christmas Dinner...Nanny&Leo are coming too...Will be soooooo nice to see her(not so sure about Leo though)..LOL... Do you have any plans for that Annoying Day?
jessica amber murray
i actually haven't been to a christmas dinner in a few years, now. for me, it's just wednesday. if anything, i'm irked that the recycle doesn't come until friday, because i couldn't get it all out last pickup.
i'll probably have a sandwich and listen to music.
mom
That sounds quite peaceful to me.... I kinda wish I could just do the same...I have spent more than a few Christmas Days the same...And rather enjoyed it that way. I am a little stressed about my Christmas Day this year. Just hate that feeling!
jessica amber murray
i just have no patience for religious holidays or hallmark holidays. it's merely a wednesday.
mom
I hear you for sure!...Feeling quite the same!.....The only thing I am looking forward to is the yummy turkey dinner(as I am going to be the one cooking it!..And, I do make a yummy dinner for sure!)...What, I am finding that I am feeling a bit stressful about, is that...They are ALL depending on ME to get my old(fairly undependable ass) over there to prepare it!...LOL...What if, I decide to change my mind!(I won't, of course)...Just hate the feeling of it all.
on the question of john mclaughlin's underacknowledged importance in the development of guitar rock
deathtokoalas
only the levee breaks would stand up in court. except it wasn't plagiarism 'cause it was a cover.
page is definitely guilty of ripping off mclaughlin and clapton and beck. and plant was definitely trying very hard to do the aretha thing. there's no need to make things up.
gonzocurt
Yeah, and Clapton, The Stones and Beck "ripped off" B.B.King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, etc. Or was it they just loved that stuff so much they had to play it? And it influenced their musical language just like you pick up accents etc. In most cases, they worked their own creative process on it and honed it into something the young whites of the time loved.
deathtokoalas
well, it's sort of exaggerated, really. my point was that page wasn't really a guy that copied black artists, he was a guy that copied white artists that were heavily influenced by black artists. the synthesis had already been established by the time page came along...he built his sound on top of a fusion that had already happened....
but, to the extent that those other players were copying? there's a far stronger "cultural appropriation" accusation leveled at the rnb sound of the stones, the early beatles, etc than there is at the heavy blues of cream, yardbirds, zeppelin or sabbath. they operated in the same (lack of) theoretical space, sure. but cream didn't steal any more from robert johnson than jimi hendrix did. they were both working with extrapolations of a pre-existing sound, but they were also both entirely unique. delta blues simply doesn't have a psychedelic quality or a baroque quality, or any influence from eastern music.
MICHAEL HAMILTON BERRY
mclaughlin ? Page was on recordings long Before he was even heard of....what do you have to offer about music history ?
taking some one Else's song and presenting it as your own is dishonest and is actually theft of intellectual copy write. It is Illegal and morally wrong .
I like Led Zep but I think this is a rotten thing they have done over and over again.
The other poor bastards are probably broke and dead with nothing to show for a life in music. nothing to pass on to us and their descendants.
THATS why if is a ROTTEN thing to do !
deathtokoalas
i hate led zeppelin, but it's not because of the plagiarism (that doesn't truly exist), it's because robert plant is just not enjoyable to listen to. it's really a shame that page decided to work with such an annoying vocalist.
mclaughlin was even page's biggest influence, at least in the sense of who we understand jimmy page as today. mclaughlin actually gave jimmy page guitar lessons in the mid-60s. he's the architect of the sound.
page started off doing session work for country musicians, while mclaughlin was playing for graham bond. graham bond's rhythm section was made up of ginger baker and jack bruce, who would later form cream with eric clapton. this is where the fusion sound developed; mclaughlin did some early jazz recordings with bruce & baker....
when baker & bruce formed cream, clapton was very much their replacement for mclaughlin.
davis wanted hendrix to work with him, initially. hendrix couldn't commit. so, he picked mclaughlin. not page. not clapton...
page first intersected with mclaughlin when they were doing (uncredited) session work for the rolling stones. mclaughlin was the primary session guy, page was the second. there are apparently mid 60s stones tracks where mclaughlin is playing lead and page is playing rhythm.
i'm not adding anything to music history, i'm merely teaching it to somebody who doesn't know it.
only the levee breaks would stand up in court. except it wasn't plagiarism 'cause it was a cover.
page is definitely guilty of ripping off mclaughlin and clapton and beck. and plant was definitely trying very hard to do the aretha thing. there's no need to make things up.
gonzocurt
Yeah, and Clapton, The Stones and Beck "ripped off" B.B.King, Freddie King, Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Robert Johnson, etc. Or was it they just loved that stuff so much they had to play it? And it influenced their musical language just like you pick up accents etc. In most cases, they worked their own creative process on it and honed it into something the young whites of the time loved.
deathtokoalas
well, it's sort of exaggerated, really. my point was that page wasn't really a guy that copied black artists, he was a guy that copied white artists that were heavily influenced by black artists. the synthesis had already been established by the time page came along...he built his sound on top of a fusion that had already happened....
but, to the extent that those other players were copying? there's a far stronger "cultural appropriation" accusation leveled at the rnb sound of the stones, the early beatles, etc than there is at the heavy blues of cream, yardbirds, zeppelin or sabbath. they operated in the same (lack of) theoretical space, sure. but cream didn't steal any more from robert johnson than jimi hendrix did. they were both working with extrapolations of a pre-existing sound, but they were also both entirely unique. delta blues simply doesn't have a psychedelic quality or a baroque quality, or any influence from eastern music.
MICHAEL HAMILTON BERRY
mclaughlin ? Page was on recordings long Before he was even heard of....what do you have to offer about music history ?
taking some one Else's song and presenting it as your own is dishonest and is actually theft of intellectual copy write. It is Illegal and morally wrong .
I like Led Zep but I think this is a rotten thing they have done over and over again.
The other poor bastards are probably broke and dead with nothing to show for a life in music. nothing to pass on to us and their descendants.
THATS why if is a ROTTEN thing to do !
deathtokoalas
i hate led zeppelin, but it's not because of the plagiarism (that doesn't truly exist), it's because robert plant is just not enjoyable to listen to. it's really a shame that page decided to work with such an annoying vocalist.
mclaughlin was even page's biggest influence, at least in the sense of who we understand jimmy page as today. mclaughlin actually gave jimmy page guitar lessons in the mid-60s. he's the architect of the sound.
page started off doing session work for country musicians, while mclaughlin was playing for graham bond. graham bond's rhythm section was made up of ginger baker and jack bruce, who would later form cream with eric clapton. this is where the fusion sound developed; mclaughlin did some early jazz recordings with bruce & baker....
when baker & bruce formed cream, clapton was very much their replacement for mclaughlin.
davis wanted hendrix to work with him, initially. hendrix couldn't commit. so, he picked mclaughlin. not page. not clapton...
page first intersected with mclaughlin when they were doing (uncredited) session work for the rolling stones. mclaughlin was the primary session guy, page was the second. there are apparently mid 60s stones tracks where mclaughlin is playing lead and page is playing rhythm.
i'm not adding anything to music history, i'm merely teaching it to somebody who doesn't know it.
Sunday, December 22, 2013
heavy dream...
i wish people would be a little less coercive in enforcing conformist concepts that reject being square. being square is a personality trait, but it's also often a reaction to events. the quality of being square exists at the core of a square person's individuality.
square people exist.
so, instead of enforcing norms through insults and coercion, why don't we just accept that people have different value systems?
i'm consequently reclaiming the term.
i wish people would be a little less coercive in enforcing conformist concepts that reject being square. being square is a personality trait, but it's also often a reaction to events. the quality of being square exists at the core of a square person's individuality.
square people exist.
so, instead of enforcing norms through insults and coercion, why don't we just accept that people have different value systems?
i'm consequently reclaiming the term.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
publishing first remaster & re-release of inri (inri015)
so, this is completely, totally done now, no going back to it. i boosted the bass in a few places and actually reverted back to the cd rip for a few of the sound collages. i think it sounds pretty good, actually, for the most part.
there's one specific track, the 8th, on the second demo that is causing me headaches. the mix is just so saturated and muddy that i'm constantly getting information overload listening to it. i'm having a hard time building reference points. i want this done with by the end of the day, so i can move on, so soon.
====
it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but i've finally got this cleaned up to a final state.
....and now that it is mastered decently and has had a handful of bad decisions removed, i have to say it holds up fairly well. when comparing it to other late 90s electro-rock hybrids, it carves out a really unique space in it's exploration of more abstract electronics. i'm not content to recycle depeche mode or new order yet again; i want to mix in elements of glitch, throw in sound collages and even get a little proggy sometimes. really, i wish there were more people working in this removed a space, both then and now. it's really rather refreshingly creative.
the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". while some of the songs are more compelling than others, the more consistently interesting material is actually the experiments.
where it drags is in the vocals, but only to an extent. the eighth track is indefensibly bad; incoherent to the point that i don't even remember what it was about, if it was about anything at all. the rest of it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 17 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being useless at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 8th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
====
my first cd demo represents a dramatic shift in sound that, at the time, was meant to be permanent but that ended up being merely a step in a long journey. on one hand, the shift in sound reflected my changing tastes away from alternative rock and towards industrial music. on another level, it was a return to my childhood roots in 80s synthpop. i was also expanding my tastes into glitch, noise and what could be called "musique concrete".
the shift to using drum machines was dominant in the new sound, as was the reality that i had a synthesizer available to me starting in the beginning of 1998. another major factor was the use of a pc. however, my main songwriting tool remained the guitar and these are still mostly guitar-driven pieces.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the follow-up demo, inriched) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are still some points of embarrassment, but it's really only the 8th track that is causing me any serious grief. my singing style has changed quite a bit though - most of the lyrics here are in a spoken word style, rather than sung. it's partially the result of insecurities with my voice, but it's mostly due to the shift to something electronic. i found the dead pan vocal delivery more appropriate. it's something that stuck with me though until relatively recently.
some of this material was written as far back as 1994, but was only sequenced in the second half of 1997 and recorded in the first half of 1998. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed simpsons samples). this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, vocals, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production
released june 20, 1998
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
there's one specific track, the 8th, on the second demo that is causing me headaches. the mix is just so saturated and muddy that i'm constantly getting information overload listening to it. i'm having a hard time building reference points. i want this done with by the end of the day, so i can move on, so soon.
====
it took a little longer than i wanted it to, but i've finally got this cleaned up to a final state.
....and now that it is mastered decently and has had a handful of bad decisions removed, i have to say it holds up fairly well. when comparing it to other late 90s electro-rock hybrids, it carves out a really unique space in it's exploration of more abstract electronics. i'm not content to recycle depeche mode or new order yet again; i want to mix in elements of glitch, throw in sound collages and even get a little proggy sometimes. really, i wish there were more people working in this removed a space, both then and now. it's really rather refreshingly creative.
the record/demo bounces back and forth between "songs" and "experiments". while some of the songs are more compelling than others, the more consistently interesting material is actually the experiments.
where it drags is in the vocals, but only to an extent. the eighth track is indefensibly bad; incoherent to the point that i don't even remember what it was about, if it was about anything at all. the rest of it is valid, even when it's trite, because it's real. that is to say that it sounds like i'm 17 and less than well-adjusted. if it could be better than it is, it would lack the authenticity of being a demo produced by a troubled teenager. i might not articulate my feelings of being useless at a very high level of thought or with much compelling poetry, but i'm certainly feeling them and that feeling certainly gets across in my unique and goofy sort of way. likewise, when i go into juvenile shock rock i am actually convincingly juvenile and convincingly shocking (unless i'm trying to be ridiculous, in which case i pull that off just as well).
that means you have to listen to it from a certain distance because a big part of what you're listening to is the spectacle of a demented child being demented, but when you do that it comes off as some of the most idiosyncratic leftfield synth pop i'm aware of. you've never heard anything quite like this.
so, if i could remove the 8th track without killing the flow of the disc, i would. beyond that, the edits that i've made have left me comfortable with throwing this out there as it is - under the existing caveats.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
====
my first cd demo represents a dramatic shift in sound that, at the time, was meant to be permanent but that ended up being merely a step in a long journey. on one hand, the shift in sound reflected my changing tastes away from alternative rock and towards industrial music. on another level, it was a return to my childhood roots in 80s synthpop. i was also expanding my tastes into glitch, noise and what could be called "musique concrete".
the shift to using drum machines was dominant in the new sound, as was the reality that i had a synthesizer available to me starting in the beginning of 1998. another major factor was the use of a pc. however, my main songwriting tool remained the guitar and these are still mostly guitar-driven pieces.
the guitar work is one of the things that separates the sound from a typical industrial aesthetic. i've never been a fan of heavy metal and largely shied away from creating that kind of thing. yet, i found myself connecting more with psychedelic guitar at this point than punk rock. industrial psych generally implies something like trance, but it need not to. industrial hendrix? well, maybe it ends up sounding more like synth pop, which has historical roots in psychedelic music and progressive rock. the point is that the music does manage to carve out a unique space between industrial music and synth pop that i don't know of any clear comparisons to. people have suggested mid-period swans, the legendary pink dots and nine inch nails - only the last of which was a significant influence, and none of which are really that close. a better comparison, although still not a significant influence at this time, would be joy division - who would become a significant influence after this phase. my actual influences at the time would have been more like brian eno (through his 70s and 90s work with david bowie, as well as his work with u2), early prog (genesis/floyd/crimson), peter gabriel, the beatles, radiohead, the smashing pumpkins, REM, sonic youth, the tea party and a bit of contemporary electronic music (prodigy, nin, coil, foetus, autechre, nitzer ebb, ministry, econoline crush, gravity kills, stabbing westward, skinny puppy and side projects). the sense of humour is coming from frank zappa and matt groening, if they are not actually the same person. i wasn't listening to much tears for fears, i don't think, but you can hear them lurking underneath everything.
some of these songs are reworked versions of tracks i had recorded previously. in almost all cases, i consider the versions here (and on the follow-up demo, inriched) to be the authoritative versions of these tracks.
the demo is consciously constructed to alternate between "conventional songs" and "experimental pieces", although both definitions are stretched. it generally takes the form of connecting passages. it's meant to give the record the feel of a cohesive work rather than a collection of songs.
lyrically, i'm still a teenager, but i'm starting to grow into myself a little more. there are still some points of embarrassment, but it's really only the 8th track that is causing me any serious grief. my singing style has changed quite a bit though - most of the lyrics here are in a spoken word style, rather than sung. it's partially the result of insecurities with my voice, but it's mostly due to the shift to something electronic. i found the dead pan vocal delivery more appropriate. it's something that stuck with me though until relatively recently.
some of this material was written as far back as 1994, but was only sequenced in the second half of 1997 and recorded in the first half of 1998. unfortunately, i decided that the songs sounded better in mp3 and consequently compressed everything before burning. i understand now that i was hobbling together a crude mastering process, but it means (unfortunately) that the closest thing i have to the finished tracks are low quality mp3s and a cd-r. these tracks were taken off of a cd-r and run through digital post-production in dec, 2013 in a process that also included minimal editing (mostly the removal of badly placed simpsons samples). this is my first official record; as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, synthesizers, drum programming, sequencing, sampling, vocals, cool edit synthesis, windows 95 sound recorder, found sounds, strategies, soundraider, hammerhead, sound design, metronome, digital wave editing, production
released june 20, 1998
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
Friday, December 20, 2013
how you know you're doing the noise thing right: every frequency isolates as static. instruments? what are those?
i should have known this was going to take longer than i wanted and that it was going to be painful. the core of these two initial cd demos of mine, inri and inriched, is actually pretty impressive once certain things are taken into consideration. objectively. it stands up well when compared to the other electronica/rock hybrids of the period. i'm a better guitarist than most of those bands had and i go more into contemporary electronic strains - sample art, happy hardcore, glitch - whereas they were all just ripping on depeche mode. it's a more complete and a more informed synthesis. there are certain syncretic approaches that i don't think anybody has yet to really follow up on...
unfortunately, and i really wish i hadn't, but i absolutely managed to really successfully ruin them, in ways i can't entirely reverse. but there's a lot of things i can do.....and i'm nearly done doing them.
random samples are mostly gone. i've swapped out a few vocal parts for instrumental versions. a lot of effort has been put into boosting mids (often guitar distortion) and fattening basses. what's left is what it is, and usually works in the way it was meant to.
they're both nearly salvaged at this point. i mean, i'm a 16-18 year old kid and that implies certain things (and a lack of certain things). compensating for that and being lenient with myself to the point of understanding the immaturity as actually being a part of the art, there's only one really painful track on each. that's a failure rate that's really entirely manageable. it's a lot more than i would have said about these demos before i started with this.
so, it's painful, but i'm happy i'm doing it. i'm happier that it's nearly done. a few more hours. i'll post a few updates when i get there.
i should have known this was going to take longer than i wanted and that it was going to be painful. the core of these two initial cd demos of mine, inri and inriched, is actually pretty impressive once certain things are taken into consideration. objectively. it stands up well when compared to the other electronica/rock hybrids of the period. i'm a better guitarist than most of those bands had and i go more into contemporary electronic strains - sample art, happy hardcore, glitch - whereas they were all just ripping on depeche mode. it's a more complete and a more informed synthesis. there are certain syncretic approaches that i don't think anybody has yet to really follow up on...
unfortunately, and i really wish i hadn't, but i absolutely managed to really successfully ruin them, in ways i can't entirely reverse. but there's a lot of things i can do.....and i'm nearly done doing them.
random samples are mostly gone. i've swapped out a few vocal parts for instrumental versions. a lot of effort has been put into boosting mids (often guitar distortion) and fattening basses. what's left is what it is, and usually works in the way it was meant to.
they're both nearly salvaged at this point. i mean, i'm a 16-18 year old kid and that implies certain things (and a lack of certain things). compensating for that and being lenient with myself to the point of understanding the immaturity as actually being a part of the art, there's only one really painful track on each. that's a failure rate that's really entirely manageable. it's a lot more than i would have said about these demos before i started with this.
so, it's painful, but i'm happy i'm doing it. i'm happier that it's nearly done. a few more hours. i'll post a few updates when i get there.
on the middle class nature of socal punk
happyhooliedaze
Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....
Punk is punk and has nothing to do w/electonic or hiphop.
deathtokoalas
i'd say punk has a lot to do with hip-hop, politically. further, this is a type of punk that was popular in california; rave/industrial was a type of punk that was popular in england.
happyhooliedaze
real punk is rebellious and libertarian,NOT political .Rave has NOTHING to to w/punk.Ravers are a bunch of drugged up rich kids that listen to talentless.pre-programmed garbage. Don`t talk about u don`t know as its obvious,ur "standin` on the outside,lookin` in".
deathtokoalas
the reality is that most punk, especially socal punk, was also put together by upper middle class kids. bad religion were centered around rich mommy's basement. they wrote most of their lyrics as a criticism of wealthy white culture from a first person perspective. great band, don't get me wrong, but bringing class politics into punk rock has always been perilous. joe strummer was actually an aristocrat.
rave is derived directly from industrial, which was an offshoot of punk. this is a question of historical fact. it's not a matter for debate.
ron paul is not a libertarian.
the major thing libertarians don't understand is that markets are inherently coercive. they base their ideas around concepts of freedom from the responsibility to contribute, rather than freedom to choose how to contribute responsibly. the end result is a freedom to exploit, rather than a freedom from exploitation.
Paul Boisvert
First off, all of your facts are correct and I'm sure others can agree on that. Also I completely agree with your opinion of Libertarian ethics. With that said, the subliminal opinion within your comment displays a vast amount of Class Envy. I think that your opinion of this band's writing material and your own personal beliefs make no sense because the lyrics to these songs can give you the proper information to fuel your conflagrations against the Upper-Middle/Upper Class. Also, your general thesis on discontent for Class Politics involved in Punk Rock music into a rant on Class Politics was completely hypocritical. I'm truly not trying to throw any hate in your direction because I can admit to suffering from Class Envy as well, of course those of us who have been truly affected by this recession have many of the same beliefs in that specific area. Good luck to you!
deathtokoalas
i was responding to a previous comment, which was a response to a previous comment of mine. the privacy settings that have come with these new youtube/google+ rules have created the problem of not being to reply to replies on your own comments. i think the context would clear things up.
but "class envy" is sort of a weird concept from a leftist perspective, where the aim is to abolish class. i think all leftists have something that is sort of like class envy, but that that isn't a very astute way to articulate it.
i mean, "class envy" is sort of the same concept as "distributive justice". i don't want to completely discard it as nonsense. it's just that, envy is an almost comical way to describe the process of recognizing the injustice of inequality.
Marios Laskaris
Who told you their parents were rich? They were shopping clothes from Walmart from what I know. I am not saying they were starving, but they were not rich either. Writing generic stuff without having done your research is unacceptable and far more off putting than middle class 17 year olds writing songs about what they think is wrong with the world!
deathtokoalas
i don't know or care where brett & friends shopped before they became very wealthy from epitaph records, but if you had done that basic "research" yourself, you'd realize that this entire genre is the reaction of upper middle class suburban white kids - and that, yes, bad religion is a band that mostly operated out of upper-middle class garages.
to be clear: these were guys that lived with their parents well beyond any socially normal cut-off point. they fit any conventional definition of the word "loser". self-releasing records isn't cheap, and they partially offset the cost of that by not taking responsibility for paying for living expenses like rent. if you share the mindset, you realize why climbing up social hierarchies isn't important to some people. but, socal punk as a reaction to suburbanite living (and this is a distinct thing from other kinds of punk) couldn't have happened otherwise. that's exactly what this is.
which is fine. i'm not really criticizing them for this, i'm just correcting somebody's flawed perception of punk having this kind of ghetto hip-hop romanticism. that's not true. the prominent, influential bands were mostly rich kids, which reflects our social reality. it would be a remarkable triumph of capitalism if kids could actually climb out of the projects with socially relevant art projects!
the reality is that it's how most of the audience connects with it. i grew up in a project, but by the time i was in my mid-teens i was living in a white, upper middle class reality. there were a lot of things i didn't like about that. socal punk bands like the offspring, the dead kennedys, bad religion and others helped me make sense of this upside-down reality i was living in and work my way through it's contradictions. upper middle class white kids are humans too; they need ways to cope with reality like everybody else. they may see some problems with the composition of the current system (even as it privileges them). more importantly, they may very well reject it on it's axiomatic basis. it's those upper middle class white kids that this was written by and for.
in a sense, understanding bad religion (and socal punk in general) is very simple: teach a generation of kids a moral code when they're growing up, then tell them to go out and break it in order to be "successful" and finally watch them react in confusion and horror when faced with such daunting contradictions worked into the basic process of survival. this whole cycle of events - from the moral teaching, to the opportunities revolving around being "successful" to the freedom to rebel - is a reflection of the privilege that socal punk was birthed within.
so, rather than reject the idea of these bands coming from wealth, you'd be better off to look into it a little further. it's kind of a vitally important aspect of actually understanding what this is/was all about.
Marios Laskaris
Upper middle class can be punk too. As Graffin says and I totally agree, a girl from an affluent religious family who consistently shows up to church on Sunday with her green mohawk and "Fuck Jesus" shirt is punk. But so is a biology professor who claims that Charles Darwin's ideas were wrong and has his own. Going against the grain is punk.
And what you're asking for/your idea of the "proper punk band" is impossible. You're asking for a bunch of 17 year olds that have no money to somehow aquire guitars and drums and convince Atlantic records (since epitaph would not exist in your "punk world") to release their album! Not possible! Most punk bands had to "create record labels", because no one would release a punk album from an unknown band back in 1975-1980. And if epitaph was not created, offspring, pennywise and NOFX and so many other punk bands probably wouldn't exist now and I definately wouldn't have been able to listen to them/discover them over here in Greece. So thank f**k for that! You need to think about reality too and not just theory!
I'll help you get an idea of their world back then. Sure they were not living in the streets like bums, but they were not living an untroubled life either:
''In 1976 I moved with my mom and brother to the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. Like millions of other victims of divorce in the 1970s I had to deal with the fact that my father was now living far away (in Racine, Wisconsin) and I would not get to see him as much as most other kids see theirs. This pain was compounded by the bewildering alienation I felt as a Wisconsin boy at Junior High School in the Los Angeles unified school district. I had entered a landscape unlike anything I experienced in my 11 years of life. I had dark brown fluffy, wavy hair, unfeatherable, impossible to mold into the cool rock-and-roll hairdos of the 1970s that were so popular. I wore velour kids shirts from K-Mart, and corduroys and because they were less expensive than jeans and we didn't have a lot of money. I had cheap shoes, usually also from K-Mart or Payless, always worn out, with goofy logos that emulated the real popular brands that all the other kids wore. I could see fellow 7th graders come to class with squinty eyes and euphoric smiles reeking of pot smoke. If you went along with the flow, unquestioning and complacent, you were accepted and rewarded with social status. If you questioned the norm, or went against the grain in any way, you were in for a rocky ride down the social ladder.
I came to be friends with a particular class of people who were labeled geeks, nerds, kooks, dorks, wimps, and pussies (or "wussies" if you combine these last two). We hung out together and did creative things after school...''
deathtokoalas
as pointed out in a previous comment, i was responding to a previous comment about prominent punk musicians and class. i've never presented an ideal of a punk band, or criticized anybody for the class they were born into. i was merely rejecting the idea that punk (and especially socal punk) had any kind of inherently "lower" class politics, for the sole reason that it just simply isn't true.
lukmruk
"ron paul is not a libertarian." oh sure he is randroid
deathtokoalas
right-wing libertarians tend to reject rand and objectivism. it isn't very good with ideas like the nap. and paul is racist, homophobic and sexist - ideas that tend to be weak in libertarian circles. libertarians tend to be in favour of gay marriage, to the extent that they acknowledge marriage at all. not paul. libertarians tend to be pro-choice on abortion. not paul. and libertarians tend to be "colour blind", they don't write up racist newsletters to try and control a white supremacist voting demographic.
paul, like rand, is just a peculiar type of american conservative. there's no value in analyzing him more deeply than that.
miaumiaucatmagician
you're making very good comments all the way
mattlaureys
here are some words from greg himself from "no direction" :
"a righteous student came and asked me to reflect
he judged my lifestyle was politically incorrect
I don't believe in self important folks who preach
no Bad Religion song can make your life complete"
Alfredo Rodriguez
The reality is, you have no clue. You weren't there when they wrote this, and fuck your political agenda. Fuck Joe Strummer, he wasn't even in a punk band. Sorry, but I can't even think of his useless bands name right now. Dance music, isn't punk rock, go rock the cashbah on the dance floor.
deathtokoalas
i don't really enjoy the clash, either, but there are a lot of other early punk bands (like the buzzcocks) that double very well as dance music. again, i don't know where people are going by disconnecting punk from dancing. what's the motive for that kind of revisionism? hardcore was something else, but it was as much of a reaction against punk as it was an evolution of it.
i also don't know why there's so much hostility to rave culture. ignoring the historical connections, just the similarities in outlook should be enough to see a set of political allies. they're both dead now, but rave was arguably more successful than punk in building a viable counter-culture. i guess there were punks that hated hippies, too, but they must have been no less close-minded.
randomusername987
I agreed with the first part, but how the hell was all the rest relevant?
deathtokoalas
i think it follows from the conversation. i mean, can you be more specific?
randomusername987
Well i was referring to the original post. What does ron paul etc have to do with Suffer?
mattlaureys
what are you even ranting on about ? that guy was making solid points and you start going on a rant talking about things that are completely insignificant. the reasons people disconnect genres from eachother is because they are diff genres and completely diff music duh. you're just ranting and linking everything to punk. and you say "they're both dead now" punk is very much alive tons of punk bands still making music and rave is also , still plenty of raves going on. you like to bash on punk don't you ?
Alfredo Rodriguez
I guess Bad Brains was also a rich band of white kids from the "burbs" as well. All these bands come from blue collar working families. Greg and Brett's parents are educators. Teachers don't make much money. Fuck Ron Paul fucking racist piece of shit!
deathtokoalas
the last time i checked, bad brains weren't skate punk from southern california. further, it's rather insensitive for you to suggest that teachers don't make a lot of money. relative to who? doctors? it's a certain sort of cluelessness that would argue that teachers are not comfortably in the middle class.
as mentioned repeatedly, that has nothing to do with what i was talking about. i really couldn't imagine dropping a bad religion record off at a mcdonalds and expecting the employees to connect to it. the songs do not discuss issues that are of relevance to the most desperate members of the working class. rather, they discuss topics that are of concern to the middle class children of teachers.
Sam steinhauer
Average yearly salary for a public school teacher in the US is about $50,000. However, Greg's parents were Professors which is most certainly an upper middle class job. Still don't get why this should change my opinion of the band.
deathtokoalas
i at no point suggested it should....
Thursday, December 19, 2013
thoughts regarding a repressed memory
it's amazing how repressed memories can just throw themselves back at you. i remember this clearly, now. which is remarkable, because i couldn't have been older than 2.
i'm sitting in a high chair, eating chocolate cake. which means it was probably my birthday. i've long deciphered the language that these humans around me are using. i'm struck by their deep corruption, and ultimately frightened by them. i understand that my safety in their presence is never certain.
somebody, perhaps my mother, tells me that once i learn to talk i'll be more like them. i can't remember the language, i can only remember the reaction, which was horror.
it was probably something parents or grandparents reflexively say on early birthdays. getting big. be talking soon.
my decision not to speak as a child, which lasted for several years, was a fully conscious attempt to keep myself pure from what had been identified as the source of human corruption: language.
...and i can now also remember myself walking around the hospital in circles, kicking a toy around the waiting room, and weighing the pros and cons of keeping my innocence by maintaining my silence, which i would, of course, eventually break.
for whatever reason, i've never told anybody this.
apparently, what the doctors determined is that i was disinterested in human interaction - not autistic, but simply highly introverted.
there was more to it than that.
and i'm not sure i've changed much.
existential dread is usually measured in terms of "teenage angst", but i wonder if anybody's studied it in toddlers.
i was saying "g-houst", with a soft g like j, but i interpreted gh the same way as ch or sh - always soft and never hard.
(i hadn't yet seen words like 'chromatic')
the day-to-day pronunciation of "ghost", as in "ghostbuster", struck me as a populist fallacy. i was certain that true poltergeist experts in the actual field would pronounce it correctly, correctly meaning in a way that conformed to my understanding of phonetic rules - gh must be just like sh and ch.
what was actually driving my insistence was a fallacy of precedence. i seem to have believed that words existed inherently in written form first and were only later taken up in speech. as such, they are defined by the rules of phonetics first and foremost and then corrupted by human speakers who impose populist fallacies upon them. i know now that it's actually the other way around, that written language is designed to capture the sounds of human speaking and that when humans change how they speak, written language changes as well.
i do, however, have specific and clear memories of what i'm saying.
i probably arrived at that fallacy of precedence (which is actually some kind of platonism, funnily enough) through experience. i mean, it's not like i had it formally postulated, but it seems to be the not-thought-through assumption i was working with because it's how i approached it: i was reading before i was talking.
the concept of the unwashed masses being too ignorant to pronounce 'ghost' correctly, gh clearly being just like sh or ch, must have also been an example of the fallacy of generalizing the specific.
so, i do fully admit to relying too much on deduction and not enough on experience and coming to some faulty conclusions as a result of that. in my defense, i'll state that i learned the value of scientific thinking very early - PRECISELY due to making deductive errors very young.
again, though, i specifically remember wrestling with the idea of whether i should talk or not and going through a long period of not talking due to rejecting it.
but, yeah, that's what i was thinking: ghostbusters was just watered down pop-sci for the masses, whomever put it together screwed up the pronunciation, and real ghostbusters that had advanced degrees in the topic would know how to pronounce it properly because they would understand that gh must be just like sh and ch (which i had never seen in a hard usage).
just to put it more in context, a word like 'zucchini' would have deeply bothered me as well. i would have argued until i was blue that it should be pronounced 'zook-cheen-ee", and then proceeded to phonetically deconstruct the word in a perfectly reasonably demonstration of that fact. i would have used phonetic rules that i only vaguely remember today, like the first i making the second long and the double cs making the u long. it would have actually been pretty complicated and impressive - and completely correct, in the sense of a formally logical deduction from first principles. i would have then accused anybody that maintained the popular, fallacious pronunciation as being functionally illiterate.
in other words, i would have not just expected there to be an underlying theory of pronunciation, i would have thought myself well-versed in it's rules, and then expected people to follow those rules. i would get very upset when people denied those rules and denounce them as pretenders and anarchists. my universe was very ordered through strict rules of structural logic.
of course, in time, i learned this isn't true. it was a valuable learning process.
ultimately, i wanted the world to be easily analyzable: i wanted everything around me to be understood through logical deduction. that way, i could say "this is why things are like this". the why, and the knowing why, and the knowing how to know why, was very important to me.
suggestions that the universe was different than this, that there were exceptions that could not be understood deductively, bothered me very deeply and would put me into temper tantrums.
the way to convince me, btw, would have been to argue with me on a phonetic basis, rather than simply tell me what is true and what isn't on an authoritarian level. and i think that's what eventually ended up happening. somebody explained to me that i had the 'gh' sound wrong, phonetically, that it's not soft before a vowel as one would expect by analogy through ch, and i went from there.
in fact, i remember that this person was my grandmother.
i'm sitting in a high chair, eating chocolate cake. which means it was probably my birthday. i've long deciphered the language that these humans around me are using. i'm struck by their deep corruption, and ultimately frightened by them. i understand that my safety in their presence is never certain.
somebody, perhaps my mother, tells me that once i learn to talk i'll be more like them. i can't remember the language, i can only remember the reaction, which was horror.
it was probably something parents or grandparents reflexively say on early birthdays. getting big. be talking soon.
my decision not to speak as a child, which lasted for several years, was a fully conscious attempt to keep myself pure from what had been identified as the source of human corruption: language.
...and i can now also remember myself walking around the hospital in circles, kicking a toy around the waiting room, and weighing the pros and cons of keeping my innocence by maintaining my silence, which i would, of course, eventually break.
for whatever reason, i've never told anybody this.
apparently, what the doctors determined is that i was disinterested in human interaction - not autistic, but simply highly introverted.
there was more to it than that.
and i'm not sure i've changed much.
existential dread is usually measured in terms of "teenage angst", but i wonder if anybody's studied it in toddlers.
i was saying "g-houst", with a soft g like j, but i interpreted gh the same way as ch or sh - always soft and never hard.
(i hadn't yet seen words like 'chromatic')
the day-to-day pronunciation of "ghost", as in "ghostbuster", struck me as a populist fallacy. i was certain that true poltergeist experts in the actual field would pronounce it correctly, correctly meaning in a way that conformed to my understanding of phonetic rules - gh must be just like sh and ch.
what was actually driving my insistence was a fallacy of precedence. i seem to have believed that words existed inherently in written form first and were only later taken up in speech. as such, they are defined by the rules of phonetics first and foremost and then corrupted by human speakers who impose populist fallacies upon them. i know now that it's actually the other way around, that written language is designed to capture the sounds of human speaking and that when humans change how they speak, written language changes as well.
i do, however, have specific and clear memories of what i'm saying.
i probably arrived at that fallacy of precedence (which is actually some kind of platonism, funnily enough) through experience. i mean, it's not like i had it formally postulated, but it seems to be the not-thought-through assumption i was working with because it's how i approached it: i was reading before i was talking.
the concept of the unwashed masses being too ignorant to pronounce 'ghost' correctly, gh clearly being just like sh or ch, must have also been an example of the fallacy of generalizing the specific.
so, i do fully admit to relying too much on deduction and not enough on experience and coming to some faulty conclusions as a result of that. in my defense, i'll state that i learned the value of scientific thinking very early - PRECISELY due to making deductive errors very young.
again, though, i specifically remember wrestling with the idea of whether i should talk or not and going through a long period of not talking due to rejecting it.
but, yeah, that's what i was thinking: ghostbusters was just watered down pop-sci for the masses, whomever put it together screwed up the pronunciation, and real ghostbusters that had advanced degrees in the topic would know how to pronounce it properly because they would understand that gh must be just like sh and ch (which i had never seen in a hard usage).
just to put it more in context, a word like 'zucchini' would have deeply bothered me as well. i would have argued until i was blue that it should be pronounced 'zook-cheen-ee", and then proceeded to phonetically deconstruct the word in a perfectly reasonably demonstration of that fact. i would have used phonetic rules that i only vaguely remember today, like the first i making the second long and the double cs making the u long. it would have actually been pretty complicated and impressive - and completely correct, in the sense of a formally logical deduction from first principles. i would have then accused anybody that maintained the popular, fallacious pronunciation as being functionally illiterate.
in other words, i would have not just expected there to be an underlying theory of pronunciation, i would have thought myself well-versed in it's rules, and then expected people to follow those rules. i would get very upset when people denied those rules and denounce them as pretenders and anarchists. my universe was very ordered through strict rules of structural logic.
of course, in time, i learned this isn't true. it was a valuable learning process.
ultimately, i wanted the world to be easily analyzable: i wanted everything around me to be understood through logical deduction. that way, i could say "this is why things are like this". the why, and the knowing why, and the knowing how to know why, was very important to me.
suggestions that the universe was different than this, that there were exceptions that could not be understood deductively, bothered me very deeply and would put me into temper tantrums.
the way to convince me, btw, would have been to argue with me on a phonetic basis, rather than simply tell me what is true and what isn't on an authoritarian level. and i think that's what eventually ended up happening. somebody explained to me that i had the 'gh' sound wrong, phonetically, that it's not soft before a vowel as one would expect by analogy through ch, and i went from there.
in fact, i remember that this person was my grandmother.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
some people are asking about software.
in the 80s and early 90s, there were three (well, more than three, but three competitive) types of computers on the market: your typical macs and intel machines, along with something called an atari. due to issues that exist in reality (such as price), the atari machines became standard amongst diy electronic musicians in the late 80s and early 90s. the computers used by bands like autechre, ministry, skinny puppy, kmfdm, etc for sample editing and sequencing were mostly ataris, using software written for atari.
probably the most well known software atari daw was cubase, which enjoyed a run as a popular windows/mac daw in the 90s before being dismantled by, i think, yamaha, in the 00s. the vst interface was not developed until 1996, but it was built on top of previous technology.
all that to say that there were probably "plugins" used on the album, but you'd need an atari emulator to actually use them.
another piece of relevant history: one of autechre's contemporaries, rdj, aka the aphex twin, almost single-handedly popularized software synthesizers. if you'd like to hear some early vst plugs, the aphex twin is a better place to look than autechre.
if you really want to capture the spirit of this type of 90s techno, though, you'd better learn to program in C. a lot of these artists programmed their own software. for a (not so) gentle introduction to this approach to music, i'd try a program called MAX.
young people that are interested in seeing some old (but very modern) computer software running in real-time (it's an early version of pro tools) can also consult the 'gave up' video by nin, 1992: watch?v=yVpw1SwJRBI.
in the 80s and early 90s, there were three (well, more than three, but three competitive) types of computers on the market: your typical macs and intel machines, along with something called an atari. due to issues that exist in reality (such as price), the atari machines became standard amongst diy electronic musicians in the late 80s and early 90s. the computers used by bands like autechre, ministry, skinny puppy, kmfdm, etc for sample editing and sequencing were mostly ataris, using software written for atari.
probably the most well known software atari daw was cubase, which enjoyed a run as a popular windows/mac daw in the 90s before being dismantled by, i think, yamaha, in the 00s. the vst interface was not developed until 1996, but it was built on top of previous technology.
all that to say that there were probably "plugins" used on the album, but you'd need an atari emulator to actually use them.
another piece of relevant history: one of autechre's contemporaries, rdj, aka the aphex twin, almost single-handedly popularized software synthesizers. if you'd like to hear some early vst plugs, the aphex twin is a better place to look than autechre.
if you really want to capture the spirit of this type of 90s techno, though, you'd better learn to program in C. a lot of these artists programmed their own software. for a (not so) gentle introduction to this approach to music, i'd try a program called MAX.
young people that are interested in seeing some old (but very modern) computer software running in real-time (it's an early version of pro tools) can also consult the 'gave up' video by nin, 1992: watch?v=yVpw1SwJRBI.
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Monday, December 16, 2013
welcome to oblivion, alright
i wrote a lengthy sort of psycho-analysis of trent reznor when this came out that has largely been rendered inaccurate by the new nin disc.
i think i'm developing a theme out of 2013: creative artists going back over some of the ground they developed around the same time as trends have developed around the sound they created once upon a time, but in a way that is more like connecting with roots than following trends. this is either reznor's attempt to sound like fever ray [although it never falls into a space that is nearly as poppy as fever ray] or it's pretty hate machine v 2.0, !now with ableton!.
i don't care about any of that.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trent reznor and atticus ross mimicking trent reznor. that's also secondary, except to point out that the disc crosses the line to self parody. it's like...you've used that fucking sample in about 20 songs now, trent....maybe you should stop doing that now....
this could have been something, but it's too consciously structured as a marketable product. listening to it with a little space from it, and with better headphones, is still leaving me with the same basic reaction: this record is painfully constrained by a set of artificial boundaries that are far too limiting to capture the potential that the songs hint at, and it's enraging because what they hint at is an extrapolation of trip-hop into a level of abstraction that the genre never actually accomplished.
so, it'd be great to hear this remixed by some off the wall younger electronic musicians (doldrums, born gold, lingouf) but, nowadays, reznor is more likely to go after pitchfork picks than hang around the fringes looking for new shit. i'd expect remixes from mgmt and lopatin, if he were to bother. it's easy to forget that this is the guy that distributed warp records in north america, or that this band is named after a coil record. fwiw, it sounds more like cabaret voltaire remixing a collaboration between peter gabriel and kate bush.
i could go on; i'll stop. it's just frustrating....as has been the expectation for far too long...
i think i'm developing a theme out of 2013: creative artists going back over some of the ground they developed around the same time as trends have developed around the sound they created once upon a time, but in a way that is more like connecting with roots than following trends. this is either reznor's attempt to sound like fever ray [although it never falls into a space that is nearly as poppy as fever ray] or it's pretty hate machine v 2.0, !now with ableton!.
i don't care about any of that.
it's becoming increasingly difficult to tell the difference between trent reznor and atticus ross mimicking trent reznor. that's also secondary, except to point out that the disc crosses the line to self parody. it's like...you've used that fucking sample in about 20 songs now, trent....maybe you should stop doing that now....
this could have been something, but it's too consciously structured as a marketable product. listening to it with a little space from it, and with better headphones, is still leaving me with the same basic reaction: this record is painfully constrained by a set of artificial boundaries that are far too limiting to capture the potential that the songs hint at, and it's enraging because what they hint at is an extrapolation of trip-hop into a level of abstraction that the genre never actually accomplished.
so, it'd be great to hear this remixed by some off the wall younger electronic musicians (doldrums, born gold, lingouf) but, nowadays, reznor is more likely to go after pitchfork picks than hang around the fringes looking for new shit. i'd expect remixes from mgmt and lopatin, if he were to bother. it's easy to forget that this is the guy that distributed warp records in north america, or that this band is named after a coil record. fwiw, it sounds more like cabaret voltaire remixing a collaboration between peter gabriel and kate bush.
i could go on; i'll stop. it's just frustrating....as has been the expectation for far too long...
art cannot produce change; rather, it is a product of change that is occurring. marxists have never understood this properly. plato, on the other hand, understood it perfectly.
it follows that art is an end, and not a means. when we see movements of creative art, we know something has already changed and it is too late for reactionary forces to reverse it. it's celebratory; gloating, even.
but, it also represents the phase where the movement becomes decadent. every art-based counterculture movement has been co-opted. artists inherently seek to go beyond struggle and merely exist. so, it's not just a failed tactic but we can understand why it's a failed tactic. let's learn from this, not repeat the same mistakes again.
http://jacobinmag.com/2013/12/art-in-the-age-of-fatalism/
it follows that art is an end, and not a means. when we see movements of creative art, we know something has already changed and it is too late for reactionary forces to reverse it. it's celebratory; gloating, even.
but, it also represents the phase where the movement becomes decadent. every art-based counterculture movement has been co-opted. artists inherently seek to go beyond struggle and merely exist. so, it's not just a failed tactic but we can understand why it's a failed tactic. let's learn from this, not repeat the same mistakes again.
http://jacobinmag.com/2013/12/art-in-the-age-of-fatalism/
Friday, December 13, 2013
prematurely republishing inri (inri015)
so, post-production on this is complete, along with some minor changes - removal of awkward samples, basically.
i consider this a listenable release. the lyrics are not always great (although there's a few i like that i'll pull out for inricycled B), but they either express valid viewpoints as i was experiencing them or they pull of the shock rock thing well enough to be effective. less than half of this will be recycled, but i would only really like to actually strike out track 8.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
i consider this a listenable release. the lyrics are not always great (although there's a few i like that i'll pull out for inricycled B), but they either express valid viewpoints as i was experiencing them or they pull of the shock rock thing well enough to be effective. less than half of this will be recycled, but i would only really like to actually strike out track 8.
https://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-lp
Thursday, December 12, 2013
spent hours doing post-production, can't tell the difference between result and initial wave files.
grargh. let me try this again...
i'll never forgive myself for deleting all the source files for this ancient stuff. something as simple as boosting the guitars turns into a math problem about fundamental frequencies and harmonic overtones. ugh...
not to mention those samples. to be 17 again would be to understand what the fuck i was thinking.
the mastering process on this stuff consisted of compressing the wave files to mp3. the fraunhofer method, i suppose. hey, that *is* a type of compression and it was a valid best approach when mastering software was out of the reach of warez on home pcs.
btw, my take on warez is that if intellectual property is to exist at all then it should be very minimal in scope. ten years, tops. i don't tend to go after the newest releases, but i think previous cycle software should be treated as freeware.
anyways, this is long overdue to be run through some stereo imaging and harmonic exciters. but there's just a handful of places where the mix has come out fucked...
so, i'm running over the source material with parametric eqs trying to get just the right frequencies out. almost done. and it's almost painful, really.
^ only a perfectionist, huh? lol.
grargh. let me try this again...
i'll never forgive myself for deleting all the source files for this ancient stuff. something as simple as boosting the guitars turns into a math problem about fundamental frequencies and harmonic overtones. ugh...
not to mention those samples. to be 17 again would be to understand what the fuck i was thinking.
the mastering process on this stuff consisted of compressing the wave files to mp3. the fraunhofer method, i suppose. hey, that *is* a type of compression and it was a valid best approach when mastering software was out of the reach of warez on home pcs.
btw, my take on warez is that if intellectual property is to exist at all then it should be very minimal in scope. ten years, tops. i don't tend to go after the newest releases, but i think previous cycle software should be treated as freeware.
anyways, this is long overdue to be run through some stereo imaging and harmonic exciters. but there's just a handful of places where the mix has come out fucked...
so, i'm running over the source material with parametric eqs trying to get just the right frequencies out. almost done. and it's almost painful, really.
^ only a perfectionist, huh? lol.
Wednesday, December 11, 2013
publishing inricycled a (inri002)
so, i just spent the last several months flooding everybody's feed with music that i wrote in the 90s as a teenager, criticizing both it and myself and more or less suggesting that you don't bother listening to what i'm spamming you with.
this inri material has been a problem for me for years because quite a bit of it is some of the music i've written that's closest to me (consider i was around 15 when i wrote most of it), but quite a bit of it is also absolutely terrible and unoriginal garbage and it's all intertwined with itself.
i've gone over it a few times and pulled out sections for listenable consumption. it's the only really workable approach. I had never done that for the cassette demos, though.
i wanted everything available for analysis in it's rawest form, that's why i uploaded. but, that's not the material i'd ever send anybody to go listen to. i'm actually really happy that this is finally put together because it gives me a document of myself in early high school (the tenth grade) that i can actually send people towards.
so, no, you probably don't want to listen to the other 90s stuff i was posting. the awful lyrics, the rip-offs, the sometimes terrible playing and other characteristics make those demos of historical value only.
this compilation i've just pulled out, though, is void of all of that and is really quite listenable. if you like noisy grunge/punk/doom/hardcore with a prog/fusion/jazz/blues flair (and can handle the odd ambient or psychedelic pop embellishment) then you might get some enjoyment out of it. i was a pretty talented little guitarist...
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inricycled-a
===
i've released a dozen different things with the title "inricycled", making it more of a concept than a release. it's not just the material i'm recycling, now, it's the idea of recycling material.
i hope this is the final iteration. the difference, here, is that i'm trying to isolate segments of songs that people interested in my more recent compositions would find interesting. these fragments aren't entirely void of lyrics, but they're very minimal. they're also quite short.
i've retitled most of the tracks to get a feel of what the music sounds like and/or what i was thinking as i was writing it.
the material in this volume is taken from the following cassette demos:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-1 (1996)
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-2 (1997)
this is the best possible absolute starting point for my musical material.
sequenced and mildly modified in dec, 2013. as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, drums, vocals, keyboards, tapes, found sounds, metronomes, digital wave editing, production.
released july 1, 1997
this inri material has been a problem for me for years because quite a bit of it is some of the music i've written that's closest to me (consider i was around 15 when i wrote most of it), but quite a bit of it is also absolutely terrible and unoriginal garbage and it's all intertwined with itself.
i've gone over it a few times and pulled out sections for listenable consumption. it's the only really workable approach. I had never done that for the cassette demos, though.
i wanted everything available for analysis in it's rawest form, that's why i uploaded. but, that's not the material i'd ever send anybody to go listen to. i'm actually really happy that this is finally put together because it gives me a document of myself in early high school (the tenth grade) that i can actually send people towards.
so, no, you probably don't want to listen to the other 90s stuff i was posting. the awful lyrics, the rip-offs, the sometimes terrible playing and other characteristics make those demos of historical value only.
this compilation i've just pulled out, though, is void of all of that and is really quite listenable. if you like noisy grunge/punk/doom/hardcore with a prog/fusion/jazz/blues flair (and can handle the odd ambient or psychedelic pop embellishment) then you might get some enjoyment out of it. i was a pretty talented little guitarist...
http://jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inricycled-a
===
i've released a dozen different things with the title "inricycled", making it more of a concept than a release. it's not just the material i'm recycling, now, it's the idea of recycling material.
i hope this is the final iteration. the difference, here, is that i'm trying to isolate segments of songs that people interested in my more recent compositions would find interesting. these fragments aren't entirely void of lyrics, but they're very minimal. they're also quite short.
i've retitled most of the tracks to get a feel of what the music sounds like and/or what i was thinking as i was writing it.
the material in this volume is taken from the following cassette demos:
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-1 (1996)
jasonparent.bandcamp.com/album/inri-cassette-demo-2 (1997)
this is the best possible absolute starting point for my musical material.
sequenced and mildly modified in dec, 2013. as always, please use headphones.
credits:
j - guitars, effects, bass, drums, vocals, keyboards, tapes, found sounds, metronomes, digital wave editing, production.
released july 1, 1997
Sunday, December 8, 2013
i've wanted to do some projects with this sort of thing for a while, but i was thinking more along the lines of generating them in matlab.
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2013/baryonic-acoustic-oscillations
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2013/baryonic-acoustic-oscillations
Saturday, December 7, 2013
ok, so step one is to relisten to things closely. a lot of what i just uploaded was raw, and i may reupload. i won’t repost. i should be back to reposting deny everything material within about a week.
my goal was to be done remastering by jan 1. that was a full month with no headphones, so i'm going to need to work a little faster through it.
i have a rough outline of things. i'll be constructing several new releases to hold outtakes and alternate mixes. so there's a LOT coming...
...and then there's going to be a lot of new material coming, as i complete roughly 5 projects quite quickly.
my goal was to be done remastering by jan 1. that was a full month with no headphones, so i'm going to need to work a little faster through it.
i have a rough outline of things. i'll be constructing several new releases to hold outtakes and alternate mixes. so there's a LOT coming...
...and then there's going to be a lot of new material coming, as i complete roughly 5 projects quite quickly.
Friday, December 6, 2013
RE: Yes, All new homeowners can pick up their first recycling Red & Blue Boxes free at the Environmental Services Centre
From: Jessica Murray <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
To: city.windsor.on.ca
i picked some up at home hardware the other day....
thanks anyways.
j
To: city.windsor.on.ca
i picked some up at home hardware the other day....
thanks anyways.
j
ollie
I like going through my media chronologically, in all aspects. I started with wwi. After immersing myself in WWI media, docs, literature, art, etc for about a month, the joy of those early 20s jazz recording sprang to life and didn't seem trite in the slightest. I've actually been doing this for a couple of years now and I'm in the early 90s now. Its a fun experiment that I'd highly recommend.
I want someone to invent an app so people can build historical/chronological playlists with friends. It would be cool if people could have a best of 1990 cross media playlist to crowdsource
... or a best of 1782
jessica amber murray
i was building chronological playlists on youtube for a while, but have kind of let it sit since i moved here. 60s - 00s. plus one for "serialism" which i took a broad definition of to include any kind of abstract jazz. and i suppose i'm building something like that on my web page, slowly, although it's cross-linked to literature and other things as well. i think it's a neat idea, too. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIx9xafrMCgYqDYIp4SK6tA/videos?view=1
ollie
I have this book, its a historical atlas of world history. I think it forms an excellent template for how people should interact with their media. Sort of like a google earth with a timeline that media could be tagged to by date.
I'm meeting with someone in the next month to develop the idea. If you have any input I'd be interested to hear about it.
I want it to be a crowdsourced documentary organiser that can serve as a tool for historical schooling.
jessica amber murray
i think that sounds like a lot of programming! i've played around with geographical lists to organize bands in scenes (montreal post-rock, or seattle grunge, or whatever) and can see the appeal to approaching music this way, at least up until about 2000 when the internet sort of abolished the local music scene by opening up the spread of ideas. the kind of isolation that created the washington/oregon punk scene probably isn't going to happen again. what we've seen more recently are scenes jumping up around hashtags. a good example of that is "chillwave". it's interesting, but is it anachronistic? and, if so, if the focus is *history*, does that matter? i was actually thinking of building something like this for my programming project. i ran it by a bunch of people and they all questioned whether there was any kind of demand for it. my answer was always "well, i'd use it.". but after thinking about it, i sort of think they're right. i mean, i like the idea - i'd use the site. but it's hard to see why people would move from spotify (although i should point out that spotify didn't exist at the time, and my idea may have been interpreted as an alternate model for spotify that took in aspects of discogs, which also didn't exist, and timeline, which also didn't exist....) or last.fm for that reason, or why the media companies would license it. i've been slowly building up a timeline on facebook, though. just my own records. just a hobby. but i do hope that, one day, it's a large resource. having something like that opened up and crowd-sourced would definitely be interesting. but, again, why would people use it instead of wikipedia, besides the gui? so, i guess my input is it's a cool idea that's going to require a lot of work and will probably have a hard time sustaining itself. but i'd use it. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jessicas-Music-Collection/505092896244390?ref=hl
ollie
I don't know a thing about programming, but the first step from my basic perspective is meta-tagging fields for detailed date information, so your date tag for Sgt. Pepper says June 1, 1967 instead of 1967.
As for local scenes being relevant or not, think of how this could be applied as an event promotion/ local media collection tool.
jessica amber murray
you'd probably end up storing it all in xml files with those tags and then putting a searchable interface over top of it for usability. the user would be able to construct a timeline of desired events by genre, individual, whatever so that timelines of 'john lennon, 1960-1980' or 'punk rock, 1976-1996' could be constructed.
ollie
Bring in the geographic tag and it becomes a historical media atlas. With a calendrical interface, people can contextualise their media historically.
Computer, what was happening in October 1962?
its already on wikipedia, just not the direct link to the media
First James Bond movie, first Beach Boys album, first Beatles single, Cuban Missile Crisis.
jessica amber murray
yeah. it's a neat idea. i wish you had asked me this five years ago, though, when i was in the right head space. right now, i'm personally more interested in building a personalized timeline that focuses on my own writing, reviews, interpretations, etc than opening it up to crowdsourcing and objective analysis. but i do think the latter would be interesting to see exist.
ollie
That's where it becomes a promotional tool.
A database for event footage so that people can familiarise themselves with a local art scene.
I'm looking forward to developing it. Know a couple of teachers who think it will be a good teaching tool for history.
I'll keep you updated.
jessica amber murray
i'll just point out that if you compare it to something like discogs or librarything, something that bogs those sites down is the user content. wildly inaccurate or borderline reviews by people that don't really know what they're talking about. i guess that's more something to worry about down the line. but i think the major usability challenge on the timeline is likely to be clutter. maybe another example to look at is the phenomena of the soundcloud comment.
ollie
I see it working more like facebook, where you add users based on the quality of their content. For instance, there would be some interest in having an Idle No More or an Oxford History department newsfeed for tagged media.
I like going through my media chronologically, in all aspects. I started with wwi. After immersing myself in WWI media, docs, literature, art, etc for about a month, the joy of those early 20s jazz recording sprang to life and didn't seem trite in the slightest. I've actually been doing this for a couple of years now and I'm in the early 90s now. Its a fun experiment that I'd highly recommend.
I want someone to invent an app so people can build historical/chronological playlists with friends. It would be cool if people could have a best of 1990 cross media playlist to crowdsource
... or a best of 1782
jessica amber murray
i was building chronological playlists on youtube for a while, but have kind of let it sit since i moved here. 60s - 00s. plus one for "serialism" which i took a broad definition of to include any kind of abstract jazz. and i suppose i'm building something like that on my web page, slowly, although it's cross-linked to literature and other things as well. i think it's a neat idea, too. http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIx9xafrMCgYqDYIp4SK6tA/videos?view=1
ollie
I have this book, its a historical atlas of world history. I think it forms an excellent template for how people should interact with their media. Sort of like a google earth with a timeline that media could be tagged to by date.
I'm meeting with someone in the next month to develop the idea. If you have any input I'd be interested to hear about it.
I want it to be a crowdsourced documentary organiser that can serve as a tool for historical schooling.
jessica amber murray
i think that sounds like a lot of programming! i've played around with geographical lists to organize bands in scenes (montreal post-rock, or seattle grunge, or whatever) and can see the appeal to approaching music this way, at least up until about 2000 when the internet sort of abolished the local music scene by opening up the spread of ideas. the kind of isolation that created the washington/oregon punk scene probably isn't going to happen again. what we've seen more recently are scenes jumping up around hashtags. a good example of that is "chillwave". it's interesting, but is it anachronistic? and, if so, if the focus is *history*, does that matter? i was actually thinking of building something like this for my programming project. i ran it by a bunch of people and they all questioned whether there was any kind of demand for it. my answer was always "well, i'd use it.". but after thinking about it, i sort of think they're right. i mean, i like the idea - i'd use the site. but it's hard to see why people would move from spotify (although i should point out that spotify didn't exist at the time, and my idea may have been interpreted as an alternate model for spotify that took in aspects of discogs, which also didn't exist, and timeline, which also didn't exist....) or last.fm for that reason, or why the media companies would license it. i've been slowly building up a timeline on facebook, though. just my own records. just a hobby. but i do hope that, one day, it's a large resource. having something like that opened up and crowd-sourced would definitely be interesting. but, again, why would people use it instead of wikipedia, besides the gui? so, i guess my input is it's a cool idea that's going to require a lot of work and will probably have a hard time sustaining itself. but i'd use it. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Jessicas-Music-Collection/505092896244390?ref=hl
ollie
I don't know a thing about programming, but the first step from my basic perspective is meta-tagging fields for detailed date information, so your date tag for Sgt. Pepper says June 1, 1967 instead of 1967.
As for local scenes being relevant or not, think of how this could be applied as an event promotion/ local media collection tool.
jessica amber murray
you'd probably end up storing it all in xml files with those tags and then putting a searchable interface over top of it for usability. the user would be able to construct a timeline of desired events by genre, individual, whatever so that timelines of 'john lennon, 1960-1980' or 'punk rock, 1976-1996' could be constructed.
ollie
Bring in the geographic tag and it becomes a historical media atlas. With a calendrical interface, people can contextualise their media historically.
Computer, what was happening in October 1962?
its already on wikipedia, just not the direct link to the media
First James Bond movie, first Beach Boys album, first Beatles single, Cuban Missile Crisis.
jessica amber murray
yeah. it's a neat idea. i wish you had asked me this five years ago, though, when i was in the right head space. right now, i'm personally more interested in building a personalized timeline that focuses on my own writing, reviews, interpretations, etc than opening it up to crowdsourcing and objective analysis. but i do think the latter would be interesting to see exist.
ollie
That's where it becomes a promotional tool.
A database for event footage so that people can familiarise themselves with a local art scene.
I'm looking forward to developing it. Know a couple of teachers who think it will be a good teaching tool for history.
I'll keep you updated.
jessica amber murray
i'll just point out that if you compare it to something like discogs or librarything, something that bogs those sites down is the user content. wildly inaccurate or borderline reviews by people that don't really know what they're talking about. i guess that's more something to worry about down the line. but i think the major usability challenge on the timeline is likely to be clutter. maybe another example to look at is the phenomena of the soundcloud comment.
ollie
I see it working more like facebook, where you add users based on the quality of their content. For instance, there would be some interest in having an Idle No More or an Oxford History department newsfeed for tagged media.
on the inevitability of metalcore fans all eventually dying of catastrophic, stress-related heart attacks
all tension, no release.
studies will show that metalcore fans will have higher rates of stress related illnesses.
(deleted)
well, they will, once the audience reaches heart attack age. which is probably not that far into the future.
well, if anybody does the studies, anyways. there's a research idea, at the least.
(deleted)
hardcore is a type of music that developed in the late 70s and early 80s, mostly out of the punk movement. early hardcore bands included the likes of bad brains, the dead kennedys and black flag. it had some influence on thrash metal bands like slayer, which is what this sounds a lot more like, and a mild, roundabout influence on progressive metal bands like dream theatre, which provide the missing piece in the equation. yet, it lacks the political messaging that defines hardcore as a genre. i'm willing to concede that this isn't as bad as the modern "metalcore" that derives itself thematically from bands like limp bizkit, but it has essentially nothing in common with hardcore as a genre. labeling it as such is really highly disingenuous; thematically and conceptually this is metal, and not punk.
i stand by my hypothesis, however, and think you're providing more evidence for it than you realize.
(deleted)
i'm actually a middle aged schizophrenic weirdo with a masters degree and a good sense of misanthropic humour, but that's a nice try.
(deleted)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20013543
(deleted)
i'll still take beethoven over rossini, though, because it has that release. this doesn't. listening to this is like bottling your emotions up until you explode....
...and arguments otherwise are basically labeling that explosion as stress relief.
(deleted)
i think release could refer equally well to an idea from music theory and a reduction of volume and/or intensity. what you're getting at is the opposite of release. it's not my fault, it's just what the word means. but i sort of explained that already, too - what you're doing is creating high amounts of tension, watching it explode and then calling it release, when what that is is either tension (relative to the first meaning) or implosion (relative to the second).
i also have to admit i don't hear a lot of chaos in this. it's very ordered.
(deleted)
yet, none of these words express relative concepts. you're consequently spouting pretentious nonsense.
what you mean to say is that the record makes full use of the spectrum, which i can mildly agree with, and also that you enjoy the adrenaline rush and subsequent burnout.
the price of this disc is going to increase dramatically if heroin users find out it produces endorphins....
(deleted)
converge is a type of progressive metal. i've used the term thrash in this thread and would continue to. they don't draw much influence from hardcore (which preceded them by a good ten years) and never did.
certainly, converge and dillinger are more similar to each other than either are to black flag or bad brains or minor threat or....
studies will show that metalcore fans will have higher rates of stress related illnesses.
(deleted)
well, they will, once the audience reaches heart attack age. which is probably not that far into the future.
well, if anybody does the studies, anyways. there's a research idea, at the least.
(deleted)
hardcore is a type of music that developed in the late 70s and early 80s, mostly out of the punk movement. early hardcore bands included the likes of bad brains, the dead kennedys and black flag. it had some influence on thrash metal bands like slayer, which is what this sounds a lot more like, and a mild, roundabout influence on progressive metal bands like dream theatre, which provide the missing piece in the equation. yet, it lacks the political messaging that defines hardcore as a genre. i'm willing to concede that this isn't as bad as the modern "metalcore" that derives itself thematically from bands like limp bizkit, but it has essentially nothing in common with hardcore as a genre. labeling it as such is really highly disingenuous; thematically and conceptually this is metal, and not punk.
i stand by my hypothesis, however, and think you're providing more evidence for it than you realize.
(deleted)
i'm actually a middle aged schizophrenic weirdo with a masters degree and a good sense of misanthropic humour, but that's a nice try.
(deleted)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20013543
(deleted)
i'll still take beethoven over rossini, though, because it has that release. this doesn't. listening to this is like bottling your emotions up until you explode....
...and arguments otherwise are basically labeling that explosion as stress relief.
(deleted)
i think release could refer equally well to an idea from music theory and a reduction of volume and/or intensity. what you're getting at is the opposite of release. it's not my fault, it's just what the word means. but i sort of explained that already, too - what you're doing is creating high amounts of tension, watching it explode and then calling it release, when what that is is either tension (relative to the first meaning) or implosion (relative to the second).
i also have to admit i don't hear a lot of chaos in this. it's very ordered.
(deleted)
yet, none of these words express relative concepts. you're consequently spouting pretentious nonsense.
what you mean to say is that the record makes full use of the spectrum, which i can mildly agree with, and also that you enjoy the adrenaline rush and subsequent burnout.
the price of this disc is going to increase dramatically if heroin users find out it produces endorphins....
(deleted)
converge is a type of progressive metal. i've used the term thrash in this thread and would continue to. they don't draw much influence from hardcore (which preceded them by a good ten years) and never did.
certainly, converge and dillinger are more similar to each other than either are to black flag or bad brains or minor threat or....
Yes, All new homeowners can pick up their first recycling Red & Blue Boxes free at the Environmental Services Centre
From: the city of windsor
To: "death.to.koalas@gmail.com" <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
Hi Jessica.
I just wanted to let you know that you can come down to pick up your new boxes. We are located at 3540 North Service Road East (corner of EC Row & Central Ave.)
We are open from 8:00 am to 4:00pm. I will just have you write down your name and address and then you can collect your boxes.
Thanks,
Public Works / Environmental Services
To: "death.to.koalas@gmail.com" <death.to.koalas@gmail.com>
Hi Jessica.
I just wanted to let you know that you can come down to pick up your new boxes. We are located at 3540 North Service Road East (corner of EC Row & Central Ave.)
We are open from 8:00 am to 4:00pm. I will just have you write down your name and address and then you can collect your boxes.
Thanks,
Public Works / Environmental Services
regarding the legacy of christian tonality in western popular music, and subsequent challenges to it
tomhulcelover
how are you gonna say the beatles ripped off of journey? haha didn't that beatles song come out before?
deathtokoalas
that's right. these are all rip-offs of let it be.
most shocking statement of the century, said nobody: all pop music is ripped off from the beatles.
...although the dude that pointed out that it's just a basic mathematically correct chord progression is also right, even though it just obscures the reality that pop music has been stuck in tonal stasis since the 1700s. people in mozart's time frame wouldn't have insulted you for your lack of originality if you had played something with a mathematically correct structure, they would have accused you of channeling satan and destroying music if you deviated from a proper chord progression.
the mathematics of tonality underlie the primary reason that creativity and popularity go together so seldomly and are often defined more by atmospheric changes rather than tonal shifts. if you want people to react well to your music, you need to conform to the mathematics underlying harmony. it's consequently us, the consumers, that drive a lack of originality in popular media.
that's all this is really pointing out.
tomhulcelover
umm ok
deathtokoalas
the channeling of satan part is historically completely accurate. chopin is one example. and beethoven was regularly accused of trying to destroy music (and, in fact, was.). let alone, you know, ozzy.
the intervals and shifts that we interpret as acceptable are precisely the intervals and shifts that the church declared to be acceptable. that's not a coincidence.
tomhulcelover
dude, im sorry but i dont really care
deathtokoalas
seems like you do to me. whatever.
Tom Alma
Bear in mind that Waltzing Matilda was around a long time before The Beatles...
deathtokoalas
sure. and celtic folk, as we know it, came from renaissance lute music. most of the songs in the list, though, are let it be, including the journey tune. i was more drawing attention to the background that it all has in sanctioned christian tonality (itself derived from pythagorean number mysticism).
babalooey100
Cool I thought the Pythagoreans only played triangles .
deathtokoalas
except that pythagoras (who was head of a philosophical school that fused number theory and music theory into a kind of buddhist mysticism) stole his theorem about parallelism (which is actually wrong in the geometry we live in) from chaldean sages while he was stumbling through babylonia searching for wisdom, and they themselves probably ripped it off from the egyptians, who probably stole it from atlantis and/or aliens, at which point our history currently begins and we can't go back any further.
Jimmy Greer
Uhhhh, dumbass....the reason Mozart and them could be more creative is because they've got about 60 more instruments to use than your average rock n roll band.
deathtokoalas
yeah, that makes perfect sense, you illiterate nincompoop.
in terms of creativity, the beatles blow mozart out of the water, and it's precisely because they're on the other side of the abolition of a set of rules that mozart was expected to follow. nobody talks about mozart's creativity - because he was not a creative artist. rather, people hold him up as the finest example of a dullard who followed the set of proper conventions, as they were pushed down from the hierarchy above.
if you're going to bother, try and keep up. but i'd rather you just shut the fuck up.
Aussie Dave
Mozart was amazing
deathtokoalas
you could create a computer algorithm, call it "mozart" and lose nothing of value from the original. i suppose there will always be those that praise form over function, but creative is not the correct way to describe his music.
Matthew Joseph Harrington
Too many notes for you?
deathtokoalas
you don't even realize that you have no idea what you're talking about....
i mean, i'd like to produce a witty come back, but it just doesn't make any sense. it's, like, not even wrong.
BryanPiekarski
You're crazy. "All pop music is ripped off from The Beatles." Unless this statement was satirical, in which case, I retract my comment.
deathtokoalas
i don't even think it's controversial.
BryanPiekarski
The Beatles definitely did have a lasting impact on popular music, their music spawned a lot of copycat bands trying to copy their sound and success throughout the 60s, but The Beatles were pretty much gone by the 70s. Besides, The Beatles were no where near as influential to even rock n' roll as the likes of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.
deathtokoalas
i don't see any use in arguing with hipster revisionists about something that is not considered controversial by anybody with the slightest bit of understanding on the topic.
you probably don't realize that the beatles actually changed the rules of music theory when it comes to harmony, which is what the video is about. there was music before and after the beatles. there are very few artists that can make that sort of claim. you can talk about bach, beethoven, debussy....and the beatles are next in line. there hasn't really been a shift away from this yet, but there have been a few near misses (kurt cobain's concept of harmony was radically different, but he didn't have enough of an effect on what followed to cause a shift. reznorian tonality has been recently seeping into pop music (see the most recent avril lavigne song for an example) but it is repackaged impressionism.).
i mean, you don't even seem to realize that buddy holly and chuck berry existed about ten years before the beatles did anything worth listening to, or pushed through the changes that i'm talking about. 50s, 60s...same thing, right?
BryanPiekarski
I don't understand your last paragraph. You seem to agree with me but you're also berating me?
deathtokoalas
chuck berry and buddy holly belong to the era that existed before the beatles. they were both influential on the beatles, chuck berry moreso, but trying to compare their influence is basically a category error. it's like comparing michael jackson to kanye west.
in terms of direct influence, it's a joke to suggest either one of them even come close to the influence the beatles left. in terms of their influence on music, they are only important in terms of the artists they influenced, which would also include the rolling stones and the who and pink floyd and many others. and, if you want to play the game of stringing things backwards, you have to string it back further than the 50s, and you have to consequently conclude that neither one of them deserves more than a footnote in history - neither did much more than market traditional folk and blues arrangements that were written well before they were born.
the beatles transcended all of that, and in the process changed the very fabric of what pop music actually is.
BryanPiekarski
is 1957 to 1964 really a huge cap in time? "neither deserves more than a footnote in history" lol. What did The Beatles really change? Their impact doesn't seem to resonate today as it did throughout the 1960s.
deathtokoalas
you think that because you don't understand the changes they made.
the britpop movement aside, every time you hear a string section in a pop song ballad, that's the beatles. and, as i've mentioned they're responsible for a shift in tonality. shifting tonality is gigantic. there's only a handful of artists that can state that, and i listed them already.
you admittedly have to stretch a little to pull metal out of helter skelter, or techno out of tommorrow never knows, but the blunt reality is that these were the beginnings of those genres. and, they of course hold a central place in psychedelic and progressive music; you can hear their influence still across that spectrum, from tame impala to radiohead to the mars volta.
but, in terms of chord progressions, the key is that shift in tonality that they pushed, with the help of george martin.
speaking of michael jackson and the beatles, most people don't know that michael spent a good deal of his childhood living with paul mccartney. it's known they collaborated a bit, but paul did a lot of ghost writing and michael mostly relied on his producers so the extent of his involvement in michael's work is a bit of an open question, in my mind.
the influence of those five dudes is really just immeasurable.
...and as for lennon's work in the 70s, it's worth noting that he wrote what is probably david bowie's biggest hit (fame), amongst other things.
how are you gonna say the beatles ripped off of journey? haha didn't that beatles song come out before?
deathtokoalas
that's right. these are all rip-offs of let it be.
most shocking statement of the century, said nobody: all pop music is ripped off from the beatles.
...although the dude that pointed out that it's just a basic mathematically correct chord progression is also right, even though it just obscures the reality that pop music has been stuck in tonal stasis since the 1700s. people in mozart's time frame wouldn't have insulted you for your lack of originality if you had played something with a mathematically correct structure, they would have accused you of channeling satan and destroying music if you deviated from a proper chord progression.
the mathematics of tonality underlie the primary reason that creativity and popularity go together so seldomly and are often defined more by atmospheric changes rather than tonal shifts. if you want people to react well to your music, you need to conform to the mathematics underlying harmony. it's consequently us, the consumers, that drive a lack of originality in popular media.
that's all this is really pointing out.
tomhulcelover
umm ok
deathtokoalas
the channeling of satan part is historically completely accurate. chopin is one example. and beethoven was regularly accused of trying to destroy music (and, in fact, was.). let alone, you know, ozzy.
the intervals and shifts that we interpret as acceptable are precisely the intervals and shifts that the church declared to be acceptable. that's not a coincidence.
tomhulcelover
dude, im sorry but i dont really care
deathtokoalas
seems like you do to me. whatever.
Tom Alma
Bear in mind that Waltzing Matilda was around a long time before The Beatles...
deathtokoalas
sure. and celtic folk, as we know it, came from renaissance lute music. most of the songs in the list, though, are let it be, including the journey tune. i was more drawing attention to the background that it all has in sanctioned christian tonality (itself derived from pythagorean number mysticism).
babalooey100
Cool I thought the Pythagoreans only played triangles .
deathtokoalas
except that pythagoras (who was head of a philosophical school that fused number theory and music theory into a kind of buddhist mysticism) stole his theorem about parallelism (which is actually wrong in the geometry we live in) from chaldean sages while he was stumbling through babylonia searching for wisdom, and they themselves probably ripped it off from the egyptians, who probably stole it from atlantis and/or aliens, at which point our history currently begins and we can't go back any further.
Jimmy Greer
Uhhhh, dumbass....the reason Mozart and them could be more creative is because they've got about 60 more instruments to use than your average rock n roll band.
deathtokoalas
yeah, that makes perfect sense, you illiterate nincompoop.
in terms of creativity, the beatles blow mozart out of the water, and it's precisely because they're on the other side of the abolition of a set of rules that mozart was expected to follow. nobody talks about mozart's creativity - because he was not a creative artist. rather, people hold him up as the finest example of a dullard who followed the set of proper conventions, as they were pushed down from the hierarchy above.
if you're going to bother, try and keep up. but i'd rather you just shut the fuck up.
Aussie Dave
Mozart was amazing
deathtokoalas
you could create a computer algorithm, call it "mozart" and lose nothing of value from the original. i suppose there will always be those that praise form over function, but creative is not the correct way to describe his music.
Matthew Joseph Harrington
Too many notes for you?
deathtokoalas
you don't even realize that you have no idea what you're talking about....
i mean, i'd like to produce a witty come back, but it just doesn't make any sense. it's, like, not even wrong.
BryanPiekarski
You're crazy. "All pop music is ripped off from The Beatles." Unless this statement was satirical, in which case, I retract my comment.
deathtokoalas
i don't even think it's controversial.
BryanPiekarski
The Beatles definitely did have a lasting impact on popular music, their music spawned a lot of copycat bands trying to copy their sound and success throughout the 60s, but The Beatles were pretty much gone by the 70s. Besides, The Beatles were no where near as influential to even rock n' roll as the likes of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.
deathtokoalas
i don't see any use in arguing with hipster revisionists about something that is not considered controversial by anybody with the slightest bit of understanding on the topic.
you probably don't realize that the beatles actually changed the rules of music theory when it comes to harmony, which is what the video is about. there was music before and after the beatles. there are very few artists that can make that sort of claim. you can talk about bach, beethoven, debussy....and the beatles are next in line. there hasn't really been a shift away from this yet, but there have been a few near misses (kurt cobain's concept of harmony was radically different, but he didn't have enough of an effect on what followed to cause a shift. reznorian tonality has been recently seeping into pop music (see the most recent avril lavigne song for an example) but it is repackaged impressionism.).
i mean, you don't even seem to realize that buddy holly and chuck berry existed about ten years before the beatles did anything worth listening to, or pushed through the changes that i'm talking about. 50s, 60s...same thing, right?
BryanPiekarski
I don't understand your last paragraph. You seem to agree with me but you're also berating me?
deathtokoalas
chuck berry and buddy holly belong to the era that existed before the beatles. they were both influential on the beatles, chuck berry moreso, but trying to compare their influence is basically a category error. it's like comparing michael jackson to kanye west.
in terms of direct influence, it's a joke to suggest either one of them even come close to the influence the beatles left. in terms of their influence on music, they are only important in terms of the artists they influenced, which would also include the rolling stones and the who and pink floyd and many others. and, if you want to play the game of stringing things backwards, you have to string it back further than the 50s, and you have to consequently conclude that neither one of them deserves more than a footnote in history - neither did much more than market traditional folk and blues arrangements that were written well before they were born.
the beatles transcended all of that, and in the process changed the very fabric of what pop music actually is.
BryanPiekarski
is 1957 to 1964 really a huge cap in time? "neither deserves more than a footnote in history" lol. What did The Beatles really change? Their impact doesn't seem to resonate today as it did throughout the 1960s.
deathtokoalas
you think that because you don't understand the changes they made.
the britpop movement aside, every time you hear a string section in a pop song ballad, that's the beatles. and, as i've mentioned they're responsible for a shift in tonality. shifting tonality is gigantic. there's only a handful of artists that can state that, and i listed them already.
you admittedly have to stretch a little to pull metal out of helter skelter, or techno out of tommorrow never knows, but the blunt reality is that these were the beginnings of those genres. and, they of course hold a central place in psychedelic and progressive music; you can hear their influence still across that spectrum, from tame impala to radiohead to the mars volta.
but, in terms of chord progressions, the key is that shift in tonality that they pushed, with the help of george martin.
speaking of michael jackson and the beatles, most people don't know that michael spent a good deal of his childhood living with paul mccartney. it's known they collaborated a bit, but paul did a lot of ghost writing and michael mostly relied on his producers so the extent of his involvement in michael's work is a bit of an open question, in my mind.
the influence of those five dudes is really just immeasurable.
...and as for lennon's work in the 70s, it's worth noting that he wrote what is probably david bowie's biggest hit (fame), amongst other things.
Thursday, December 5, 2013
on the question of cultural appropriation in the nutcracker suite
has there been a discussion around cultural appropriation and the nutcracker suite? is it even really christmas music?
dunno. but this arrangement for classical guitar is a personal favourite.
in all truth, the spanish dance sounds like german music. i'll give tchaikovsky free reign with the russian dance. the arabic dance should probably be called the chechen dance or something; it might not sound like something from the heart of the arab world, but russia has a very large muslim population with it's own culture and you can sort of hear a synthesis between russian and muslim ideas in a way that kind of makes sense, if you only assume that the composer had no real understanding of anything south of the caucasus mountains. and, likewise, tchaikovsky's concept of "chinese" probably relates more to mongolian settlement in central russia than to anything legitimately sinic. russian/mongolian as a hybrid culture is also a pretty real thing.
but, i'm missing the point. i don't want to comment on the actual ballet other than to concede any points about trivialization as entirely valid.
the thing is that the composer was probably mostly working with scales, modes and tonalities. we can debate the value of doing so, but starting off on a specific note is said - within western music theory - to have an ethnic character. so, there is a "spanish mode" and an "arabic mode". and there is a real correlation there. that's probably the extent to which tchaikovsky made any attempt to sound genuine.
that's how davis got the name of this jam. it's not spanish in any way, it's just phrygian.
dunno. but this arrangement for classical guitar is a personal favourite.
in all truth, the spanish dance sounds like german music. i'll give tchaikovsky free reign with the russian dance. the arabic dance should probably be called the chechen dance or something; it might not sound like something from the heart of the arab world, but russia has a very large muslim population with it's own culture and you can sort of hear a synthesis between russian and muslim ideas in a way that kind of makes sense, if you only assume that the composer had no real understanding of anything south of the caucasus mountains. and, likewise, tchaikovsky's concept of "chinese" probably relates more to mongolian settlement in central russia than to anything legitimately sinic. russian/mongolian as a hybrid culture is also a pretty real thing.
but, i'm missing the point. i don't want to comment on the actual ballet other than to concede any points about trivialization as entirely valid.
the thing is that the composer was probably mostly working with scales, modes and tonalities. we can debate the value of doing so, but starting off on a specific note is said - within western music theory - to have an ethnic character. so, there is a "spanish mode" and an "arabic mode". and there is a real correlation there. that's probably the extent to which tchaikovsky made any attempt to sound genuine.
that's how davis got the name of this jam. it's not spanish in any way, it's just phrygian.
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