Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Space Rock Opera Rigel 9: A Rare Recording from 1985

in Literature, Music, Sci Fi | January 26th, 2018

In her remembrance of recently departed sci-fi great Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood describes “an absurd vision” she drew from Le Guin’s fantasy novel A Wizard of Earthsea: “There was Ursula, moving calmly down a hill of whispering sand under the unchanging stars; and there was me, distraught and running after her and calling ‘No! Come Back! We need you here and now!’” Atwood longs for Le Guin’s responses to the crises of the present, the old hierarchies of power and privilege reasserting their cruel dominance over men, women, children, and an already overburdened environment.

The problem of power and its abuses is one Le Guin returned to over and over in her work. “As an anarchist,” writes Atwood,” she would have wanted a self-governing society, with gender and racial equality.” As a keen anthropological observer of human behavior, she saw how and why technologically-advanced, yet psychologically reactionary societies stray from these ideals, destabilizing the ecological balance they depend on to survive and thrive. Le Guin fought back in her way. She was a prolific builder of poetic new worlds. Through them, we will always have her wisdom, and in a few rare instances, we have her music.

No, Le Guin didn’t compose, but she did write librettos for three different collaborative projects. Above, we have her “most noteworthy melodic undertaking,” according to Locus magazine’s Jeff Berkwits, Rigel 9, a space opera with music by avant-garde composer David Bedford, recorded and released in 1985. (It’s also streamable on Spotify. Listen below or here.) Rigel 9 “tells a pretty classic space story,” Cara Giaimo writes at Atlas Obscura. “Three astronauts, named Anders, Kapper, and Lee, are sent to explore a strange world. After Anders goes off to collect plant samples and is kidnapped by extraterrestrials, Kapper and Lee argue over whether to rescue him or save themselves.”

Amidst this drama of tiny red aliens, a double sun, air that smells of cinnamon and yellow and orange trees, we learn a few unsettling facts about what has happened back on Earth. “The Earth has no more forests,” sings Anders, “no wilderness, no still places.” Evoking a Sartrean horror on a planetary scale, he gives us an image of “only human faces, only human voices…. The Earth has no more silence.” The resources we need to replenish not only air and water, but also weary minds have disappeared. These revelations set up Anders’ seduction by the lushness and quiet of Rigel 9, and the gorgeous soprano voices of its inhabitants.

Bedford’s music is transporting, with “Bowie-esque synth sweeps” and saxophones, thrilling choral movements, and a pounding rhythm section that puts one in mind of Queen. Scottish New Wave duo Strawberry Switchblade make an appearance, as the lead voices of an alien funeral procession (top). The dialogue and spoken performances can be a bit corny, but the space rock opera has never been suited for subtlety, and Le Guin and Bedford purposefully created the drama as a radio play of sorts. “We had talked about the composition as ‘opera for ear,” she explained, “That is, a ‘radio opera… We liked the idea of being able to imagine the scenery, and then putting that scenery into the words and the music.”

That same year, Le Guin released another musical effort, teaming with musician Todd Barton for a cassette-only production called Music and Poetry of Kesh, released together with her novel Always Coming Home. And ten years later, she worked with classical composer Elinor Armer on Uses of Music in Uttermost Parts. This eight-movement work features Le Guin herself, narrating a text about “a fantastical realm,” Berkwits writes, “the Uttermost Archipelago in the fifth quarter of Island Earth—where sound literally sustains life.” Just above, hear one movement, “The Seasons of Oling,” a further reminder that Le Guin, who never shrank from the violence of our world, could always imagine enthralling alternatives.

via Atlas Obscura

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Watch Animated Scores to Music by Radiohead, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Photek & Other Electronic/Post-Punk/Avant-Garde Musicians

in Animation, Music | January 25th, 2018

A few weeks ago, we told you about Stephen Malinowski and the Music Animation Machine, a popular and pretty expansive YouTube channel that features scrolling, color-coordinated animated “scores” for classical works from Debussy to Bach and Stravinsky.

But what if there was a version of this, somewhere somehow, for electronic music?

Ask the question of the Internet, dear reader, and the gods will provide. For just over a year motion graphics designer Johannes Lampert has been working in a similar style to interpret the work of electronic, post-punk, and modern composers like Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt in which every sound is represented by a different animated symbol.

In the above video, Lampert takes on Talking Heads’ multilayered, Fela Kuti-inspired “The Great Curve” from Remain in Light. The video gives us jagged lines for Tina Weymouth’s bass, a steady border of dots for Chris Frantz’ propulsive drum tracks, and several gaps into which the three vocal lines of the song—David Byrne’s lead, and Nona Hendryx and the band’s multitracked call-and-response backing vocals—drop and pulse. Add to that an unbroken jagged line that replicates Adrian Belew’s searing and soaring solo.

Currently there are 12 tracks available on Anatomy of a Track’s Youtube channel, with a posting record that suggests Johannes Lampert is working on one every two months.

Lampert experiments with the layout and graphics of his animations, making their design complement the music. Hence “The Great Curve” looking like African textiles, Gil-Scott Heron’s “New York Is Killing Me” aping the New York Subway map, and Photek’s “The Rain” as a puddle filled with pulsing raindrops.

Maybe the most complex video so far is for Radiohead’s “Bloom,” which is just as chaotic as the band’s tumbling drum machine. But it does uncover how steady the bass is in this track while all around the other instruments are shimmering and ethereal. And for just a good time, Justice’s “Phantom” is turned into a dynamic light show that looks like a night drive down a Japanese expressway.

I would put it to you that modern electronic artists think about their music much like these animations. I mean, what are music editing programs like ProTools or Logic Pro but horizontal scrolls of dots and sound waves?

No doubt Lampert has more tricks up his sleeve and more tracks to animate. Stay tuned.

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Artificial Intelligence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Difference Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

in Music, Technology | January 24th, 2018

This week, the artificial intelligence community Botnik published a 2018 Coachella Lineup poster composed entirely of performer names generated by neural networks. It does get one wondering what the music of “Lil Hack,” “House of the Gavins,” or “Paper Cop” might sound like — or, given the direction of technology these days, how long it will take before another neural network can actually compose it. But why use AI to create yet another millennial-minded Coachella act, you might ask, when it could create another Johann Sebastian Bach?

“One form of music that Bach excelled in was a type of polyphonic hymn known as a chorale cantata,” says the MIT Technology Review. “The composer starts with a well-known tune which is sung by the soprano and then composes three harmonies sung by the alto, tenor, and bass voices.” Such compositions “have attracted computer scientists because the process of producing them is step-like and algorithmic. But doing this well is also hard because of the delicate interplay between harmony and melody.” Hence the fascination of the question of whether a computer could ever compose a truly Bach-like chorale.

The video at the top of the post offers a listening experience that points toward an answer. The minute-long piece you hear, and whose score you see, comes not from Bach himself, nor from any human Bach imitator, but from a neural network called DeepBach, a system developed by Gaetan Hadjeres and Francois Pachet at the Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Paris.

Like any such deep learning system, the more existing material it has to “learn” from, the more convincing a product it can produce on its own: just as Botnik’s network could learn from all the band names featured on Coachella posters since 1999, DeepBach could learn from the more than 300 short chorale compositions the real Bach wrote in his lifetime.

“About half the time,” says the MIT Technology Review, “these compositions fool human experts into thinking they were actually written by Bach.” But of course, this sort of artificial intelligence has a greater and more diverse potential than tricking its listeners, as other experiments at Sony CSL-Paris suggest: the AI-composed “Beatles” song “Daddy’s Car,” for instance, or the “Flow Machine” that re-interprets Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the style of the Beatles, Take 6, and even electronic lounge music. But we won’t know the technology has matured until the day we find ourselves booking tickets for artificial intelligence-composed music festivals.

via MIT Technology Review

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 6 ) |

A YouTube Channel Completely Devoted to Medieval Sacred Music: Hear Gregorian Chant, Byzantine Chant & More

in Music, Religion | January 22nd, 2018

The artists of medieval Europe, at least according to the impression we get in history class, gave far less consideration to the world around them than the world above. Historians argue about how much that general attitude hindered the improvement of the human lot during those ten centuries or so, but even we denizens of the 21st century can feel that the imaginations of the Middle Ages did tap into something resonant — and in the domain of music quite literally resonant, since the sacred songs of that time still create a properly otherworldly sonic atmosphere when they echo through cathedrals.

If you don’t happen to live near a cathedral, you can experience something of that atmosphere through your headphones anywhere you happen to be with Callixtus, a channel on the not normally sacred space of Youtube. “Perhaps named in honor of either Pope Callistus or Xanothopoulos Callistus, Patriarch of Constantinople,” writes Catholic web site Aleteia’s Daniel Esparza, it offers “an impressive collection of sacred music, mostly medieval, including choral works belonging to both Western Christianity and the Eastern tradition.”

Callixtus’ playlist includes such enduring “hits” of these traditions as the Gregorian chant “Invitatorium: Deum Verum,” the Byzantine chant “Δεύτε λαοί” (“Come Ye Peoples”), and the multi-part Medieval Chant of the Templars.

How did this still-haunting style of music come about? According to former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who laid out these ideas in a popular TED Talk, it evolved alongside the houses of worship themselves, the architecture shaping the music and the music shaping the architecture: “In a gothic cathedral, this kind of music is perfect,” says Byrne. “It doesn’t change key, the notes are long, there’s almost no rhythm whatsoever, and the room flatters the music. It actually improves it.” So familiarize yourself with all this sacred music through Callixtus, but as soon as you get the chance, hie thee to a gothic cathedral: no matter your religious sensibilities, it will certainly enrich your aesthetic ones.

via Aleteia and @dark_shark

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Western Music Moves in Three and Even Four (!) Dimensional Spaces: How the Pioneering Research of Princeton Theorist Dmitri Tymoczko Helps Us Visualize Music in Radical, New Ways

in Math, Music, Physics, Science | January 18th, 2018

Every musician has some basic sense of how math and music relate conceptually through geometry, in the circular and triadic shapes formed by clusters of notes when grouped together in chords and scales. The connections date back to the work of Pythagoras, and composers who explore and exploit those connections happen upon profound, sometimes mystical, insights. For example, the two-dimensional geometry of music finds near-religious expression in the compositional strategies of John Coltrane, who left behind diagrams of his chromatic modulation that theorists still puzzle over and find inspiring. It will be interesting to see what imaginative composers do with a theory that extends the geometry of music into three—and even four (!)—dimensions.

Pioneering Princeton University music theorist and composer Dmitri Tymoczko has made discoveries that allow us to visualize music in entirely new ways. He began with the insight that two-note chords on the piano could form a Möbius strip, as Princeton Alumni Weekly reported in 2011, a two-dimensional surface extended into three-dimensional space. (See one such Möbius strip diagram above.) “Music is not just something that can be heard, he realized. It has a shape.”

He soon saw that he could transform more complex chords the same way. Three-note chords occupy a twisted three-dimensional space, and four-note chords live in a corresponding but impossible-to-visualize four-dimensional space. In fact, it worked for any number of notes — each chord inhabited a multidimensional space that twisted back on itself in unusual ways — a non-Euclidean space that does not adhere to the classical rules of geometry.

Tymoczko discovered that musical geometry (as Coltrane—and Einstein—had earlier intuited) has a close relationship to physics, when a physicist friend told him the multidimensional spaces he was exploring were called “orbifolds,” which had found some application “in arcane areas of string theory.” These discoveries have “physicalized” music, providing a way to “convert melodies and harmonies into movements in higher dimensional spaces.”

This work has caused “quite a buzz in Anglo-American music-theory circles,” says Princeton music historian Scott Burnham. As Tymoczko puts it in his short report “The Geometry of Musical Chords,” the “orbifold” theory seems to answer a question that occupied music theorists for centuries: “how is it that Western music can satisfy harmonic and contrapuntal constraints at once?” On his website, he outlines his theory of “macroharmonic consistency,” the compositional constraints that make music sound “good.” He also introduces a software application, ChordGeometries 1.1, that creates complex visualizations of musical “orbifolds” like that you see above of Chopin supposedly moving through four-dimensions.

The theorist first published his work in a 2006 issue of Science, then followed up two years later with a paper co-written with Clifton Callendar and Ian Quinn called “Generalized Voice-Leading Spaces” (read a three-page summary here). Finally, he turned his work into a book, A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice, which explores the geometric connections between classical and modernist composition, jazz, and rock. Those connections have never been solely conceptual for Tymoczko. A longtime fan of Coltrane, as well as Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and Stravinsky, he has put his theory into practice in a number of strangely moving compositions of his own, such as The Agony of Modern Music (hear movement one above) and Strawberry Field Theory (movement one below). His compositional work is as novel-sounding as his theoretical work is brilliant: his two Science publications were the first on music theory in the magazine’s 129-year history. It’s well worth paying close attention to where his work, and that of those inspired by it, goes next.

via Princeton Alumni Weekly/@dark_shark

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Dolores O’Riordan’s Beautifully-Pained Vocals in the Unplugged Version of The Cranberries’ 1994 Hit “Zombie”

in Music | January 16th, 2018

Yesterday, amidst the many tributes and inevitable dissention over the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., a sad piece of news seemed to get buried: the death of Cranberries singer Dolores O’Riordan, at the far-too-young age of 46. The Irish vocalist not only “defined the sound of The Cranberries,” as her NPR obituary notes, she defined the sound of the 90s. Anyone who remembers the decade remembers spending a substantial part of it with Cranberries’ hits “Linger,” “Dreams,” and “Zombie” looping in their heads.

Just 18 when she auditioned for them in 1989, O’Riordan took the band from what might have been rather formulaic mopey, jangly dreampop and gave it “a smoky hue in full cry” as well as “a sweet, delicate tone that evoked centuries of Gaelic folk tradition.”

Like another recent, tragic loss from the Gen X heyday—Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell—she fully embodied passionate intensity with a voice that was an arresting force. Whether you were a fan or not, you simply had to pay attention.

Listen, for example, to the band’s 1994 protest song “Zombie,” which memorializes two boys killed the previous year in an IRA bombing. It’s a track that “sounds wildly anomalous,” writes Rob Harvilla at The Ringer, “given the other songs that made her famous.” While the “plodding rumble” and “crushing distortion” evoke any number of angsty quiet-loud anthems of the time, O’Riordan’s “was the last voice you expected to hear howling over it.” The contrast is haunting, yet the song works just as well without fuzzed-out guitars and thunderous drums, as in the orchestral MTV Unplugged version above.

The “Zombie” video offers a classic collection of 90s stylistic quirks, from Derek Jarman-inspired setpieces to the use of black and white and earnest political messaging. For us old folks, it’s an almost pure hit of nostalgia, and for the young, a nearly perfect specimen of the decade’s rock aesthetics, which included a refreshing number of famous female solo artists and frontwomen just as likely as the men to dominate rock radio and television. Indeed, it seems like the 90s may have produced more prominent female-fronted bands than any other decade before or since. Or maybe I just remember it that way. In any case, central to that memory is Dolores O’Riordan’s “stadium-size hit about deadly violence in Northern Ireland,” and its beautifully pained laments and pointedly unsubtle yelps and wails—a stunning expression of mourning that reverberates still some 25 years later as we mourn its singer’s untimely passing.

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Vinyl Collection and His Strange Literary Worlds

in Books, Literature, Music | January 12th, 2018

Haruki Murakami readers, or even those of us who’ve just read about his novels, know to expect certain things from his books: cats, ears, wells, strange parallel realities, and above all music. And not just any music, but highly deliberate selections from the Western classical, pop, and jazz canons, all no doubt pulled straight from the shelves of the writer’s vast personal record library. That personal library may well have grown a few records vaster today, given that it’s Murakami’s 69th birthday. To mark the occasion, we’ve rounded up a few hit playlists of music from the Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and 1Q84 author’s work as well as his life.

At the top of the post we have a Youtube playlist of songs from the artists featured in Murakami’s non-fiction Portrait in Jazz books, still, like most of his essayistic writing, untranslated into English. We originally highlighted it in a post on his formidable love of that most American of all musical traditions, which got him running a jazz bar in Tokyo years before he became a novelist. Just above, you’ll find a 96-song Spotify playlist of the songs featured in his novels, featuring jazz recordings by the likes of Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, and Thelonious Monk, the classical compositions of Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, and Haydn, and pop numbers from the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, Hall and Oates, and Michael Jackson.

Finally, you can close out this musical Murakami birthday with the Spotify playlist above of music from his own vinyl collection — though at 3,350 songs in total, it will probably extend the celebration beyond a day. Even that listening experience surely represents only a fraction of what Murakami keeps on his shelves, all of it offering potential material for his next inexplicably gripping story. And though the English-speaking world still awaits its translation of Murakami’s latest novel Killing Commendatore, which came out in Japan last year, you can hear the music it name-checks in the Youtube playlist below. Something about the mix — Richard Strauss, Sheryl Crow, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Duran Duran — suggests we’re in for another Murakamian reading experience indeed:

A 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Record Collection

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Read Online Haruki Murakami’s New Essay on How a Baseball Game Launched His Writing Career

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

in Literature, Music, Religion | January 11th, 2018

When the term “witch hunt” gets thrown around in cases of powerful men accused of harassment and abuse, historians everywhere bang their heads against their desks. The history of persecuting witches—as every schoolboy and girl knows from the famous Salem Trials—involves accusations moving decidedly in the other direction.

But we’re very familiar with men supposedly selling out to Satan, dealing—or just dueling—with the devil. They weren’t called witches for doing so, or burned at the stake. They were blues pioneers, virtuoso fiddlers, and guitar gods. From the devilishly dashing Niccolò Paganini, to Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, to Jimmy Page’s black magic, to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia,” to the omnipresence of Satan in metal…. The devil “seems to have quite the interest in music,” notes the Polyphonic video above.

Before musicians came to terms with the dark lord, power-hungry scholars used demonology to summon Luciferian emissaries like Mephistopheles. The legend of Faust dates back to the late 16th century and a historical alchemist named Johann Georg Faust, who inspired many dramatic works, like Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, Johann Goethe’s Faust, Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus, Mikhail Bugakov’s The Master and Margarita, and F.W. Murnau’s 1926 silent film.

The Faust legend may be the sturdiest of such stories, but it is not by any means the origin of the idea. Medieval Catholic saints feared the devil’s enticements constantly. Medieval occultists often saw things differently. If we can trace the notion of women consorting with the devil to the Biblical Eve in the Garden, we find male analogues in the New Testament—Christ’s temptations in the desert, Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, the possessed vagrant who sends his demons into a herd of pigs. But we might even say that God made the first deal with the devil, in the opening wager of the book of Job.

In most examples—Charlie Daniels’ triumphal folk tale aside—the deal usually goes down badly for the mortal party involved, as it did for Robert Johnson when the devil came for his due, and convened the morbidly fascinating 27 Club. Goethe imposes a redemptive happy ending onto Faust that seems to wildly overcompensate for the typical fate of souls in hell’s pawn shop. Kierkegaard took the idea seriously as a cultural myth, and wrote in Either/Or that “every notable historical era will have its own Faust.”

Modern-day Fausts in the popular genre of the day, the conspiracy theory, are famous entertainers, as you can see in the unintentionally humorous supercut above from a YouTube channel called “EndTimeChristian.” As it happens in these kinds of narratives, the cultural trope gets taken far too literally as a real event. The Faust legend shows us that making deals with the devil has been a literary device for hundreds of years, passing into popular culture, then the blues—a genre haunted by hell hounds and infernal crossroads—and its progeny in rock and roll and hip hop.

Those who talk of selling their souls might really believe it, but they inherited the language from centuries of Western cultural and religious tradition. Selling one’s soul is a common metaphor for living a carnal life, or getting into bed with shady characters for worldly success. But it’s also a playful notion. (A misunderstood aspect of so much metal is its comic Satanic overkill.) Johnson himself turned the story of selling his soul into an iconic boast, in “Crossroads” and “Me and the Devil Blues.” “Hello Satan,” he says in the latter tune, “I believe it’s time to go.”

Chilling in hindsight, the line is the bluesman’s grimly casual acknowledgment of how life on the edge would catch up to him. But it was worth it, he also suggests, to become a legend in his own time. In the short, animated video above from Music Matters, Johnson meets the horned one, a slick operator in a suit: “Suddenly, no one could touch him.” Often when we talk these days about people selling their souls, they might eventually end up singing, but they don’t make beautiful music. In any case, the moral of almost every version of the story is perfectly clear: no matter how good the deal seems, the devil never fails to collect on a debt.

Watch Häxan, the Classic Cinematic Study of Witchcraft Narrated by William S. Burroughs (1922)

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 4 ) |

Hear Ursula K. Le Guin’s Space Rock Opera Rigel 9: A Rare Recording from 1985

Watch Animated Scores to Music by Radiohead, Talking Heads, LCD Soundsystem, Photek & Other Electronic/Post-Punk/Avant-Garde Musicians

Artificial Intelligence Writes a Piece in the Style of Bach: Can You Tell the Difference Between JS Bach and AI Bach?

A YouTube Channel Completely Devoted to Medieval Sacred Music: Hear Gregorian Chant, Byzantine Chant & More

Western Music Moves in Three and Even Four (!) Dimensional Spaces: How the Pioneering Research of Princeton Theorist Dmitri Tymoczko Helps Us Visualize Music in Radical, New Ways

Hear Dolores O’Riordan’s Beautifully-Pained Vocals in the Unplugged Version of The Cranberries’ 1994 Hit “Zombie”

Stream Big Playlists of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Vinyl Collection and His Strange Literary Worlds

A Brief History of Making Deals with the Devil: Niccolò Paganini, Robert Johnson, Jimmy Page & More

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