aural-morphology-blog

[aural-morphology-blog]

Blue

If you’re an aware jazz listener, even this picture might cause you a little outrage. Here’s the scoop: in 2014, “bebop terrorists” MOPDtK recorded, note for note, Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” and put it to record. Some cried plagiarism. Jimmy Cobb himself thought it was interesting if somewhat perplexing. I only discovered it recently, but something about this bugged me enough to attempt a dissection of it. Usually if people are getting mad at art there’s something interesting to be got from it. The funny thing about this record is that there’s not really any law against doing something like this - the compositions are not being claimed as MOPDtK’s intellectual property, and the line between this and an album full of cock rock cover songs is wispy at best. And people are angry, nevertheless. Why is that?

Myself, I don't think any jazz listener has to be outraged by this record, although I'm glad that some apparently are - if that makes any sense. Given the rest of their body of work, MOPDtK are very evidently not hacks and seem to have crafted this album with a specific purpose in mind. What first sprang to mind for me regarding this record was that with Blue, MOPDtK were calling attention to the essential weirdness of recording a session of improvised music. Consider first that if the mics hadn't been on hand, there would be no evidence that humanity had ever conceived of Kind of Blue. It would have only existed for as long as Davis and co. were actually playing and then disappeared; they could play things like it, but they'd never play that exact performance again. Now, however, Kind of Blue occupying the place it does in the meta-narrative of jazz, rather than conceiving of it as a snapshot in time that just happened to take place during one of the best performances in jazz history, we think of the record itself as inseparable from the actual performance. The things that Miles and his band did remain as a shade on the vinyl and tape and CDs, their echoes there, long after even the death of the musicians. All we can imagine any more is the recording itself. Thanks to the act of mechanical reproduction, the transience of the performance, which was embedded in audible space for the duration of the players actually playing, has been eroded as the performance transitions to a strange preserved version that exists even when no one is listening. At the culmination of this erosion, even if we technically "know" that it's just a recording, we instinctively think of the record and not the performance, like how when we see a photograph of a person long dead, we think more and more of the photograph and are less and less able to contemplate the person whose likeness is reproduced by it. A comparison might be the persistent (possibly apocryphal) tale that some Native Americans were very distrustful of cameras when they were first introduced to them, as they believed they would steal a person's soul. In a way, that viewpoint isn't wrong; as the memories of that person fade after their death, their being is reduced to a likeness in a photograph, and even if what they accomplished in life remains, it becomes attached to the photograph, trailing after it, and the likeness in the photograph takes the place of the actual person in people's minds. So the fact that MOPDtK can provoke outrage simply by taking advantage of one particular mechanically reproduced performance - by making a human reproduction of a mechanical reproduction of human music - calls attention to how much people have forgotten the fleeting nature of the music. It is really weird for people to be able to record, note for note, the same performance that was performed ONCE and once only, more than fifty years ago, passing in and out of the instruments of the musicians and the ears of those listening. I am glad that people are outraged by this because I am glad we still have the capacity to recognize this, on some basic level. If it's weird for people to be able to do that, it's weird for the recording to exist in the first place! The approach is very dadaist: people can't be wheedled into seeing the weirdness of reproducing works of art in this manner, so MOPDtK shock the audience into seeing it instead by doing something so baldfaced. The strange effects of mechanical reproduction and how they act on the essential nature of music aren't something you have to pass judgement on, anyway; recorded music isn't going anywhere, and it isn't necessarily a bad thing that reproducing it in this fashion changes it in this way, so I don't think reading into Blue as an attack on recorded jazz is necessary. Mostly what Blue does for me is make me love Kind of Blue even more, and I think it should make any jazz fan feel the same, because it should cause them to remember that it is absolutely a chance in millions that such an incredible group played such incredible music at that exact moment, causing it to be recorded so that so many people can hear it. It's unbelievable that everything should have come together so completely at just the time when recording engineers happened to be on hand, so that so many people got the chance to hear it. It makes you think of the recording of jazz sessions as casting out a net in an ocean of performances, hoping to snare things people will never forget - which certainly reinforces my belief that jazz (and all improvised music) is one of a kind among all art: elusive, transient, beautiful, to be regarded with awe.

[aural-morphology-blog]

Tumblr fooled me. Seems the “keep reading” links actually don’t appear on this page when the post is formatted as a video. To view the rest of the posts older than this one, you’ll have to click the permalink to them.

[aural-morphology-blog]

The Inferno is not just "a book about hell"; this album isn't just black metal written about the same. These texts are explorations of the so-called human soul - what it's capable of, what is inevitable about it, and in degradation, whether any distinction between the mind and body and the "soul" even is possible. In the case of this album, its Alighierian tension and resulting panic can be understood as arising from a single conclusion: given the power of the mind, sin (whether Gnostic or Christian or otherwise Abrahamic) is basically necessary and unavoidable.

The narrator of the album exhorts God to "judge me just as a cadaver", a body; Ignatius of Loyola first spoke these words, framing humans as, ideally, blind bodies being guided by God through life. With the Deathspell Omega reading, this view becomes perverse - Ignatius is actually admitting that only the body, which acts simply on orders, is free from sin, and that the mind is doomed regardless of what it thinks. The demiurge, imperfect, is possessed of free will - the divine body is not, and is free from sin, not because it chooses to be, but because it can't help but be any other way. To this end, to posit the existence of the divine presupposes not only the existence but the necessity of sin: even if we choose to move toward the divine, we are still making a choice, and are thus imperfect and subject to damnation. In order to be saved, we must first fall. The contradiction is insane, laughable madness, of the sort frequently found in radically dualist Gnosticism and the branches of Christianity influenced by it.

How does this reading apply to Deathspell Omega's music? Fas is characterized by heavy dissonance, specifically chromaticism, in great swathes and washes, not entirely atonal and moving between agonized tonal harmony and frantic and sharp atonality, a lost soul being torn mind from body, searching this way and that for some solution. Dissonance has long been associated with hell and damnation, and for Fas to employ it so effectively and heavily is no coincidence. The conclusion reached by the narrator at the closing of the album is that the search for salvation is a chore for the lost, and that the only true fulfillment is to accept the obscene and relish in the fall - and so become the demiurge itself. If "the obscene" and the sinful is to be thought of as dissonance, one can find a parallel in Henry Cowell's views on noise, published in 1929 of all years:

"Since the 'disease' of noise permeates all music, the only hopeful course is to consider that the noise-germ, like the bacteria of cheese, is a good microbe, which may provide previously hidden delights to the listener, instead of producing musical oblivion."

Replace "good" with "inevitable" and this could act as a (far less spiritual) summary for the entire thesis of Fas. This dialectic and deranged tension is that which lies at the heart of most truly great music, no matter its nature: spiritual, philosophical, emotional, or even physical (there being an actual physiological basis for the "discomfort" engendered by dissonance). Deathspell Omega, here, manage to cover all of this ground, at once invert and embrace traditional black metal aesthetic by finding a new way to revel in the fires of hell, and provide, in retrospect, a jumping-off point for a whole school of metal composition dealing with dissonance and atmosphere, all in one exhausting effort - this is an achievement to seriously laud.

[aural-morphology-blog]

First, this is raw, and that beat is an absolute monster.

Second. At times Meek Mill's mentality linking hustling, money, and artistry, and how the three contradict or support each other, kind of reminds me of assertions made (aggressively) by Jim Goad and (more conservatively) by Clement Greenberg, among others: since probably about the Renaissance, the only class that can afford, without major risk, to make so-called "pure" art is the elite.

In the narrative of American capitalists, slinging bricks is supposedly for the lower class and/or outlaws, and thus contradicts artistry, which they believe should be solely the domain of people who just concentrate on "the ideas" rather than the art's marketability, but without hustling, people like Meek can't make enough money to make the art they want. As a hustler, Meek's disgust for critics and rappers who think that artistry is somehow "above" real life, and that it doesn't matter if they diss him because there won't be consequences, extends to physically threatening them. He's cynical enough to understand that the system which allows him to be so wealthy and flaunt his Rolls etc. also makes it pretty much necessary that to get rich you either have to do illegal stuff or be born lucky, and as a result he doesn't have time for those who have pretensions of belonging to a class that can afford to extricate artistry from the hustling that allowed them to get there.

I suppose one could consider trap rap postmodern, in that it is art about acquiring the means to make art. There is something very transgressive - which is unfortunately seen as backwards by a lot of people! - about trap rappers inverting the capitalist myth that art should have nothing to do with grimy and realistic things like selling drugs, trying not to die, and getting money.

Third. I think Meek is probably a very shrewd dude. The last line about the Rolex - comparing the thrill of touching an iconic symbol of wealth to the tyranny of drug addiction - encapsulates the general duality and tension of the whole song, and thus the message of trap in general, and is a really beautiful and sad comparison. This kind of fading or “greying” of the ostentatious nature most commonly expressed by rappers coming up from the ghetto was approached by hip-hop albums like Reasonable Doubt in the boom bap era, and then done really unsubtly (and insincerely) by a million pop rappers in the mid-2000s. Instead, Meek pairs every dream with a nightmare, every image of wealth with one of ducking would-be assassins, and they all speak for themselves.

This kind of juxtaposition subtly transforms our listening, so that we can be nodding our head and appreciating Meek’s lyricism in the way that we might get pumped up by Big Pun’s “Beware” or other classic tracks, while simultaneously being struck by the eerie and desolate nature of the ghetto and the system it - and Meek Mill - sprung from.

[aural-morphology-blog]

What are you on about?

I have a short answer to this question, or one like it, in a page up top, but it isn’t completely satisfying, because I was trying to be pithy and mysterious all at once, like a Buddha’s Hand citron. The bottom line is: I am curious about sound, and about music in particular. I was raised with it, I live with it, and I will die with it. From infinity to infinity there was energy, and if there was a medium to give it voice, there would have been sound too, whether or not anyone heard it. On our planet, the medium is the stuff we breathe. Visual art is merely a projection, which the eye captures in two dimensions, but music is the excitations of space itself. It exists in the very air, in every direction at once. It is associated - to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s words - with “centers everywhere and boundaries nowhere.” Sound is absolutely unique to our senses, and there is a lot about it to keep me interested.

Music, then, is an art form we can’t do without. You hear of people not caring much for visual art, of people not caring for literature; rarely do you hear of people not caring much for music. This all stems from its ubiquity. If representation is contamination, music is arguably the “purest” art: paintings, drawings, stories throughout history have all at some time attempted to mimic things occurring in the natural world, but representational music is a relatively new phenomenon, starting with the encroachment of the industrial age and the enormous and scary transformation of auditory space that accompanied it. It’s perfectly acceptable and even instinctual to, upon hearing the sentence “I painted a painting today,” reply “What of?” Upon hearing “I wrote music today,” there is no such equivalent. Representation in visual art is presupposed; there isn’t even a syntactic structure that would allow someone to say that they wrote music of something.

This is because music lives in instants in time, not as a projection onto something. If you get nothing else out of reading this blog, if you dismiss it as the hysterical mashings of someone who couldn’t hack it in academia, I would love for you to sink your teeth into this idea: prior to being able to notationally represent and/or record music, music only existed in the time during which it was being created. Only the memories of those who heard music being performed provided any evidence that it had ever existed. The only art predating mechanical reproduction which is so transient as music is theatre, and, being entangled with literature, the history of theatre is a little loopy, as are many of its practitioners (and I say that as lovingly as possible), so we will not complicate things. I will say that even theatre, though, originated as a way of telling a story, of reducing to a model something which was too complex to understand otherwise. Music doesn’t have such an easy explanation. And that is why it fascinates me.

Black Boned Angel, who as of yet defy explanation.

So with difficulty I return to the question. I am undertaking these writings because, because music stands alone. Because it is old and complex. Because we take it for granted as much as we take the air for granted. There are a million ways to think about music, a million directions to push in. I want to explore those directions. I want to discuss the ways composers do what they do: interpret, express, declare, transform, represent. The more examples, the better.

If you’re still not satisfied, I want to talk about semiotics, intertextuality in music, modes of listening, acoustic space culture a la McLuhan, generative processes, recording and reproduction, and noise, among others, often using specific pieces to illustrate my points, but come on, I came to tumblr so I wouldn’t have to write as pleases the publishers, can’t you let me say it with a little more florid poetry?

In keeping with the informal presentation of these posts I may attempt humour here and there, which may be confusing. I will try to separate the serious and the comical adequately. If you laugh, hooray. If you find yourself just embarrassed for me, breeze through it.

[aural-morphology-blog]

Hello!

First post; more to come. For my audience of none.