Entries tagged with "brian+eno"
Wednesday 19 November 2008
Minimal means and meanings
Salon 21 is a wide-ranging series of informal talks by composers and musicians put on by new music org Soundstreams. Last night we heard an appreciation of the music of Arvo Pärt by composer, conductor and Laurier professor Glenn Buhr. Buhr’s enthusiasm made for an engaging introduction to the music, providing lots for a musicology geek like me to enjoy without getting too technical.
One particular aspect that interested me was Pärt’s use of process, following simple, deterministic procedures to generate stirring music from extremely limited material. It’s similar in some senses to Steve Reich‘s phase pieces, or Brian Eno‘s loop-based ambient works, but there are big differences.
Reich’s phase music uses short loops, whether that’s physical loops of recording tape, percussion or piano figures that are simply repeat throughout the piece. These fall in and out of phase with each other, shifting from unison to a subtle echo to cacophony to tightly interlocking patterns, and finally come back into phase again, bringing the piece back to where it began.
Eno’s ambient pieces, such as Music For Airports, were inspired by Reich’s work, but use loops of uneven length that will practically never repeat. Eno’s self-stated goal was to create pieces that were effectively infinite, something he was able to explore further once computer music technology allowed it—he coined the term “generative music” to describe it. It comes as no surprise, really, that Eno’s designing the chimes to be sounded by the 10,000-year Clock of the Long Now.
But where Reich’s pieces are cyclic and Eno’s aspire to being infinite, Arvo Pärt’s music is more fatalistic. We heard a recording of his Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, which uses as its basic material a descending A-minor scale, with violins moving fastest and lower strings progressively more slowly, but all moving toward the tonic—their ultimate destination. The whole piece is relentless in its finality, moving inexorably downward until at last the high strings linger on their notes, waiting for the basses to catch up, and the long final chords boil with a kind of dread—fitting for a meditation on death.
The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir close out their North American tour with a stop in Toronto tomorrow night, but sadly, I won’t be there. My consolation: we’ll be in the studio mixing the new Flickershow CD!
Wednesday 24 October 2007
Wanted: self-similar audio waveform generation
I’ve been listening to a podcast from last year featuring Will Wright and Brian Eno, talking about generative art, and it gave me an interesting idea.
There have been a lot of attempts at so-called “fractal music” (here’s a bunch of links to several such projects), but all the ones I’ve heard just take a chunk of data from, say, the Mandelbrot set, and map it to one musical scale or another. It’s hard to really hear any self-similarity happening.
Which seems a lost opportunity. Think about it: sound waveforms themselves have fractal properties, because phenomena like vibration, resonance and oscillation happen on all physical scales. Speed up a thumping rhythm far enough and eventually it turns into a tone. And any waveform can theoretically be expressed as a mix of sine waves of different pitches. Fractal generation software lets you zoom in and out to see different fractals in near-infinite detail. What if we could do the same by speeding up or slowing down a piece of audio?
A big challenge, of course, would the problem of resolution. Whether you’re working with analog or digital audio, as you slow it down you’ll eventually start to lose detail in the high frequencies, until it all goes muddy. It’s akin to blowing up a photograph, until all you can see is the grain, or a bunch of great big pixels - or conversely, shrinking it until you run out of photograph. You could always pack in more data to describe a chunk of sound, but you’d end up with a gigantic file, and you’d always hit a wall somewhere. For best results the sound from our hypothetical audio-fractal would have to be computed on the fly.
Not a new idea, but as far as I know no one’s done it yet. There’s an entry for something called “All-Music-Set Player” at Halfbakery (a “communal database of original, fictitious inventions”) which is pretty close to the mark. I’m not interested in generating all music, just creating interesting sounds to explore.
Controls: speed, perhaps other parameters like density or default shape. It’d be interesting to work in some sort of “scrub” control too.
Issues: what language to write such a thing in? How do you describe the waveform? (some sort of generative grammar that sums wavelets?) How do you set up such a generator so that you can calculate a value for a sample at an arbitrary point on the time axis? Is it even possible? The fact that I can’t find any examples of fractal audio generators makes me wonder if the obstacle is simply one of processing power…
(The podcast that sparked all this, by the way, is from a seminar series put on by the Long Now Foundation: Ogg | MP3 | text summary I’m afraid of Spore. I think it might eat me.)
Wednesday 10 May 2006
The remix site for My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts is up. (Unfortunately, while the Flash interface is very pretty, it took a lot of poking before it accepted my registration. I don’t even know what I did to make it work.)
I notice as well that under “Listen”, when you select “Filter”, you can view all the remixes positioned on various axes - due no doubt to Eno’s fascination with “axis” thinking (there’s a mini-essay about it in his book A Year With Swollen Appendices). Neat to be able to view them arranged by those various criteria… and maybe even more interesting, to see where there aren’t any remixes yet. That ability prompts questions like “Why hasn’t anyone done a mix that’s busy but slow?” or “Can you have a piece of music that’s menacing but sweet?”
So now I’ve got the complete tracks from “A Secret Life” and “Help Me Somebody”, on a quest to find out the answers. It’s neat to hear them all like this… like getting to peek into the studio during the making of the album.
Here we go!
Friday 24 March 2006
Reissue of Byrne and Eno’s My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts
Wow, has it really been 25 years? The previously unreleased tracks sound pretty cool. Apparently they’re going to put up a remix site soon, too. And dig the studio photos and the ‘video’ for “Mea Culpa” full of snippets from chem/physics films.
At the dawn of my university radio days (yeowch, even that was 12 years ago now), “Help Me Somebody” was the first piece of music I ever played on the air.
Bush Of Ghosts just grooves in such peculiar ways… hardly any drum kit, but tons of other percussion put through all sorts of electronic wringers, and none of it quantized. Y’know, I love drum kit, but this has me interested again in doing something different. I always loved that Wall Of Voodoo had Joe Nanini and his pots and pans rather than a “drummer”. And one of the greatest things about Nortec Collective (especially Bostich) is the fabulous percussion…
Hmm.
Saturday 1 October 2005
Eno’s first disc of songs in over a decade. It does share the gentle atmosphere of its near-namesake of thirty years ago, Another Green World, but all the tracks actually do have vocals.
Eno has remarked that lyrics may be the ‘last really hard problem’ in music, as technology makes it easier to produce slick-sounding recordings. And honestly, I don’t find most of his lyrics that interesting. As with a lot of Eno’s work since about the tail end of his “rock” era, they’re generally vague and unevocative, with titles that all seem to involve “up” or “down” or “under” or “over” or “between”, and the songs themselves are along similar lines.
And musically? There’s a uniformly soft, introspective mood throughout, even to the point where the songs can blur together a bit, but it’s pleasant enough. There’s a sort of undersea feel to “Going Unconscious” that’s quite lovely, with the same eerie sense of wonder that Boards Of Canada are so good at. What goes around comes around…
“This” opens the album on a bouncy note, and were it not for the final verse (something about “this revolver / this fire / I’ll hold it up higher, higher” really bugs me, for some reason) it’d be near perfect. I keep expecting it to turn into “Paranoimia” by the Art of Noise, though… seems like a mashup waiting to happen.
“How Many Worlds” has a folk-song naivete that develops into something quite stirring thanks to a lovely string arrangement that seamlessly blends the real (frequent Eno collaborator Nell Catchpole) and the synthetic. Eno’s fascination with vocal processing continues, too: he sings in a fragile, machine-assisted falsetto on “And Then So Clear”, and the modulated voice-over on “Passing Over” has been understandably likened to a Dalek.
The creeping dread of “Passing Over” is one of the few jarring moments on the album. But the most powerful and hardest hitting track is the closer, “Bone Bomb”. Its catchy, sweetly chiming accompaniment belies the chilling words, recited by Aylie Cooke: “my body / so thin / so tired / beaten for years / ploughshare to bomb”. By a strange coincidence, Camper Van Beethoven’s latest album also closes with the song of a suicide bomber, but its platitudes about faith and the Lord fall flat. By contrast, the soft, resigned interior monologue of “Bone Bomb” hits like a punch to the gut. “Everything stolen except my bones / now I am only bone / I waited for peace / and here is my peace.”
So Eno can certainly write evocative words… maybe it’s just verse that’s the problem. Bring on more spoken stuff!
Thursday 9 June 2005
Finally watched Velvet Goldmine last night. It’s basically a revue - there’s a thin plot about a reporter looking into the extravagant life of a vanished glam rocker reminiscent of David Bowie (complete with “Ziggy Stardust” stage persona)... but it’s mostly an excuse to do an extended music video with fey, pretty boys in glitter and makeup doing lots of posing and snogging and Oscar-Wilde-quoting amidst all the rocking out.
It goes on a bit long, perhaps, but there’s plenty to recommend it if you’re a music geek and/or like watching pretty boys snogging. It’s full of references, and the soundtrack is almost all period stuff. No Bowie - that’d make the parallels too obvious, I suppose - but plenty of stuff like early Brian Eno and early Roxy Music, both in original form and covered pretty ably by the cast with help from Thom Yorke, Shudder To Think and others. Most of those musical details went over my SO’s head, but the eye candy made up for it. :D
Tuesday 5 April 2005
Got to talking about seminal experiences with a friend - among other things, how my musical tastes in high school and beyond were shaped by Mondo 2000 magazine. *blush* (Among other things, it was there that I discovered Camper Van Beethoven, Negativland and Brian Eno.)
There was also this odd little TVO series that was just clip after clip from weird experimental films. I used to sit a tape recorder next to the TV speaker to record the music (or sound effects, or whatever). One had a clip from Koyaanisqatsi, and the music blew my mind - the tinny sound made it sound like it was on a gramophone. And thus it was that the first album I ever bought 1000 Airplanes On The Roof by Philip Glass, followed by several more… much to my mother’s annoyance. ^.^
Sunday 8 August 2004
There is a sort of ‘tyranny of originality’ in this society.
The way I see it, there’s no dishonor in doing something that’s been done before. The great early epics and myths came about through telling and retelling, and evolved over time - probably becoming more resonant with their audiences all the while. Vernacular building ‘architecture’ works because its patterns contain the accumulated wisdom of generations.
Culture doesn’t grow through everyone holing up in bunkers and doing everything they can to avoid repeating themselves, or anyone else. It grows by people building on one another’s work, taking existing ideas and using them to new ends.
(All the same, I run into these kinds of internal objections a lot, for example, when I do music - crap, I don’t want it to sound too much like (whatever). One of the ways I’m getting around it is through things like the Song-A-Day? project - challenging myself to work fast, so as to shut up a lot of those internal censors.)
J wrote a while back about ‘genius’ and how elevating someone (van Gogh was his example) to the level of genius subtly forbids everyone else from participating. “Oh, you can’t be an artist! You’re not a genius like him!” ...bollocks, and too widespread an attitude altogether.
In contrast, Brian Eno came up with the idea of “scenius”:
“I was fed up with the old art-history idea of genius - the notion that gifted individuals turn up out of nowhere and light the way for all the rest of us dummies to follow. I became (and still am) more and more convinced that the important changes in cultural history were actually the product of very large numbers of people and circumstances conspiring to make something new. I call this ‘scenius’ - it means ‘the intelligence and intuition of a whole cultural scene’. It is the communal form of the concept of genius.”
— from a letter to Dave Stewart, in A Year With Swollen Appendices
(The term ‘tyranny of originality’ is used sometimes in business to refer to what’s called the “Not Invented Here” syndrome.)
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