kevins-hortatory-hub - Tumblr blog

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jesse pikmin and waltimar white

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Every january goth couples are fucking hard to try and have a halloween baby they're gonna name ophelia or some shit

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ive just found out i can do this on Traktor and spent the last 25 minutes doing it on a loop and absolutely crying laughing

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USA. New York City. 1995. Pandora’s Box, Mistress Brigitte between clients . susan meiselas

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cover page

i organized this page via tags - just pages that keep similar pieces of content together. so when i link a general category, it will be to the tag page, which will have the several relevant posts. quick inventory:

cover page (you are here!)

adapted/revised project 2 (can be found here)

project 3 (can be found here) (just the documents are here)

some writing artifacts (can be found here)

you can also just look at the sum of all of these things, in the reverse order i posted them, which will all be on the page that i linked as my submission if you scroll enough.

we find ourselves on tumblr because this is probably my primary social media platform, and i'm quite acclimated to its usage. i also just knew of it being able to host audio, embed images, etc. i could also create this page without having to register anything or think too hard. naturally, as we are in the online realm, i use my online voice.

an obvious theme across this content is music making, and particularly trying to pull apart and make cases as to where it is that the appeal of music lives. i also hope to exhibit general wonder and awe with respect to the richnesses of communication in music - you can notice two ends of a spectrum here, between the review of joanna newsom's incredibly verbose music and the intractable sound of liz fraser's voice.

the material from project 2 is revised to make better use of a rich text editing format. specifically, on tumblr, there is the ability to place inline images (quite easily, even) that i would hope make the review feel more sectional and digestible rather than a stack of text. it also felt particularly appropriate, as i usually post music reviews to my tumblr page (my other one) and i suppose i had forgotten to do that for this review - i think the blog-post feeling of tumblr is the most suitable for my review writing style, compared to the published feeling offered by rateyourmusic.

the material from project 3 is hosted here, and i would say a simple yet fundamental reason for that is that it's so annoying to host an audio file almost anywhere, and with tumblr i can just give you a link that has an mp3 file with no problems. additionally, the post that contains the audio file is able to have a labeling of the song and artist titles, as well as a cover photo. i thought it was an interesting paradigm. it sort of legitimized the thing for me - up until that moment of "publishing" it, it had felt like a near-scrap project. i also just enjoy the way that the block quote looks on tumblr, which was good for the phonetic transcription.

moreover, the fact of a song-plus-music-video just feels like a classic thing to be included in a portfolio. maybe some day down the line i'll have a proper website that has music and/or visual media embedded in it.

my work this semester fits in a long-stretching narrative as to my ability to complete artistic works. the only thing that was fully and truly unlike anything i had done before was the singing-outside-and-videoing-myself aspect of the project 3 video, but multiple times i impressed myself at the fact of a timely completion of a project (which is a rich thing to say for project 3 and this porfolio, sure, but i also feel that i shot pretty high as far as the ambition of it). we discuss the ability for different genre forms to interact with the rhetorical strength for an audience, but something critical here is that the formal existence and presentation of my projects sold them to me, myself as something valuable and worth completing. things like that fact of publishing the cocteau twins cover and giving it a name and title will be useful for me to think about in the future as i attempt to get more similar projects out into the world.

similarly, i'll keep thinking about the formality or informality, as well as design nuances, with regards to other creative projects, with respect to taking inventory of a rich communication that exists in my head and trying to express the shape of it in a familiar way.

thank you for reading !

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milk-eyed mender review (extra subheaders)

i think it would be absolutely great to have these songs exist in a playlist (for the most part they are strong vibe-producers and have nice beginning and ending moments) but good luck putting them anywhere

i promise that she is a better harp player than I would ever expect to be, even in 2004, and her voice is perfectly inimitable, again in the sense that i would never be able to imitate it. like usually i can imitate women's voices and sound somewhat convincing to my own biased ears, but i can't do that with joanna. otherwise i would describe the songwriting as mostly functional – it's really enjoyable to listen to in a pop sort of way, but if you're hoping for jazz chords and key changes i don't think you'll really find many bones to chew on.

yea baby!

you are out walking in the spring or the fall, either listening to the album with headphones or via pushing joanna newsom and her harp in a wheelbarrow while she is performing the music. you can use the sidewalk, though you should ambitiously move onto the grass once you see somebody else walking in the opposite direction. joanna newsom is not capable of contracting the disease, but there is no reason that you should be unmasked. vinyl is probably also fine, i have not yet been able to try it.

you shouldn't worry too much about having a particularly correct and comprehensive understanding of what is being said in these songs. don't bother with things like genius lyrics either – i imagine it's possible that some of the lyric transcriptions are explicitly wrong since i'm unaware of an official publication of the lyrics (for instance, they write "sending the first scouts over" for the first line of anecdotes off of the 2015 album, whereas it is -obviously- "sending the first cats over") ("/ back from the place beyond the darn"), and the annotations are often misguided (joanna newsom voice). i think much of what she has to say is pretty apparent, and in any case i have found it fun to try to paint the picture of her words in my head as i listen to the songs more and more. this all being said, you should take my interpretations of the songs as truth because i am very good at understanding lyrics

it is fun to hear joanna newsom sing words. for this album in particular, she took her human essence and ground it into dust which is mixed in so deeply to the music that you will keep coughing and sneezing violently while you listen to it

this is the album of mrs. newsom's with the compositional style that is best suited for me. the later albums supposedly have the arrangement and language that demonstrate her divine ancestry and whatnot – i think those albums are great. the milk-eyed mender reads to me as a profoundly earthly document – not by virtue of perfectly describing the world, but rather by working hard in an attempt to place its characteristics. you should think of this album as folk-appropriating pop music – she makes statements like "you take no jam on your bread", but i'm sure that when she gets fast food she's not going to tell them to schmear the top bun of her burger or whatever. her stylistic choices seem to me to be an attempt at making fundamental statements that are also unmarred by a weighty colloquial understanding of terms – ideas like "shall we go outside, shall we break some bread" and "bury this bone to gnaw on it later" offer a simple visceral interpretation, which form the building blocks of the narratives. i imagine that to be the purpose served by a lot of Folksy language on the album – inflammatory writ is worded like an angry anonymous essay posted on the doors of a small town church in the 19th century, and it uses analogies of bugs and bread and candles because that's all she can count on the other citizens to be familiar with. but surely and inescapably the song is written by a modern musician trying to warn a modern audience against artistic stagnation (or whatever). at that, i think the album also forms a beautiful little monument to instinctual songwriting. necessarily, she spent time crafting a voice that is somewhat artificial (in live performances you can see her mouth contorting to produce it) and a lot of the word choices could not ever come from someone's default mindset unless they spent a lot of time reviewing encyclopedias and whatnot to prepare for it. and yet a lot of qualities of the music point to a composition process emerging from the gut and the heart. i would single out peach plum pear for its sincerity and balladry – lines like "and the gathering floozies /afford to be choosy" are probably born from a desire to rhyme the word "floozy", but the desire cleanly coexists with the most poetic and faithful wordsmithing effort. i think the song is an unmatched gorgeousness of language, where a desire to evocatively tell a story is seasoned gently with efforts to form a distinctive singing voice and impressive vocabulary. i would say the album succeeds (and professes) to contain the real concepts aimed at by its words. even failing that, the pure vibe-journey is enough to make for an entertaining listen.

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here is my lyrics card that i prepared for usage in the performance of the carolyn's fingers cover. you can see it in the video, i was balancing it on a tree branch. it shows some early thoughts i had about what the words would be, and it sort of forced me to engage with them before i had thought very hard about it (it is not easy to perform this song from memory, i had to write something down so that i would have a place to start). i think that the fact of my writing this made it feel necessary for me to produce a proper phonetic transcription, and to think about the lyrics as potentially korean words.

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"lyrics"

in this case, an attempt at parsing this song for lyrics is made discursively. i believe that it is kind of impossible to actually come up with lyrics for the song, but i will be trying to do so while primarily providing a discussion as to what might be going on with the language in the song.

first of all, i reckon that it is in fact “language” which is heard in the vocal aspects of this song; liz fraser and her bandmates maintain that they generally wrote down and refined the things which were put into the music, and though it’s possible that this song would have been improvised to some extent, i think it is surely communicative, in that it is comprised of someone expressing a slew of thoughts and emotions through an advanced and specific set of sounds and tones.

towards the beginning of the song (pt sections 1, 2, 3) there is a frequent usage of an “est” or “ets” sound, and in several of these cases it is sung in a way that contains a large portion of melodic material. i understand this singer to often swap adjacent consonant sounds, so these words might be “jets”, “chest” or “chats”. their positioning in the music makes it seem like these words are particularly important or exciting, which may motivate “jets” or “chats” in particular.

the segment i transcribed as “ha dji magna” is interesting in that the “dji” pronunciation sounds sort of alveolar (?), resembling the ipa token “dʑ” which is more common in spoken korean and chinese language. that phrase resembles a korean word 하지만, which might be translated similarly to the english word “however”. i think of korean phonetics as well for that term “ma-ha-hets” just because the vowel sound is close to the 애 vowel and does not transcribe to english naturally (nor does much of the song), however there is also not a natural way of transcribing the trailing “ts” sound in korean phonetics.

reflecting further on the idea of swapped (or replaced) consonants, the line transcribed as “tsa food si throu” in section 4 might be understood as a playful way of saying “the food is thrown”.

in general, there is a clear element of playfulness and elation in the basic nature of a lot of the vocalizations of the song, such as “ha ha ha”, “he he he”, “ta ta ta” sounds appearing often (though they may be harboring more sophisticated communications in an abstract sense). i would suspect that more uncertain emotional content may exist in the song, however it seems that it would be intended in a bittersweet or juxtapositive framing.

while i would struggle to find familiar words in it, i would highlight the final phrases “oom not ti” as having a phenomenal and rich emotional character, resembling a longing onward gaze.

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carolyn’s fingers - phonetic transcription

1. miness ey ha ha ha hem

ya ha ha ha-a bulag

jay ha ha hets est to hest ud ma-ha-hets

2. su vou-huci he a hem

je-ha-ha-hets

yee hee fro ha dji magna habna me

3. jed fa ne ha haha hess a hess ud ma-ha-hets

jed fa dya ha hehe su su do ma ha ha

4. les pop lo mou ha ho

tsa food si throu a ho

bee spas wa hehe in boo li ho ma-ha-ha

5. bree-he-he-he... oo swah ood a noo ma-ha-ha

bree-he-he-he... oo swah ood a noo ma-ha-ha

6. seem lough ha ha ha home

ya susie ta ta ta

bree-he-he ... had moo shep twid mounge

bree-he-he... had moo shep twid mounge

7. oom not ti, llama hey [repeats until finish]

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some notes i took in the production of the carolyn’s fingers cover (syncing up the different musical components was harder than i thought it would be)

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a screenshot of differing lyrical interpretations among google results - part of the process for the artifact analysis of project 3