Swans, the most skilled group of sound gods to ever rock the face of the Earth, and my favorite band, display one of their many grains in their song, Helpless Child. It is an emotionally engaging epic from their 1996 2 disc album, Soundtracks for the Blind, an impressive collection of live recordings and collaborations. Soundtracks for the Blind is my favorite Swans album, and Helpless Child is my favorite song on the album. I find myself discovering new sounds in the atmosphere of this song almost every time I listen to it. When you have 16 minutes, turn off all the lights, and listen to Helpless Child with the highest quality sound system to which you have access (I must emphasize the importance of this). Also, the louder you listen to this song, the better it is; all of Swans’ music is created to be listened to very loudly. Listen closely to how Michael Gira’s voice is complemented by the surreal instrumentals. I urge you to keep listening once the lyrical portion of the song is over: the meat of the song is in the instrumental layering.
Monthly Archives: September 2015
My Grain
I Of The Storm – Of Monsters and Men – Beneath The Skin
To me, the grain is all about being able to feel the passion of the artist(s) and having there be substance in a song. I feel that finding ‘the grain’ in music is very important and is a wonderful experience. Although everyone has different opinions about what the grain is to them, this song is just one of the many examples of songs that I feel have the grain.
Of Monsters And Men is one of my very favorite bands and have been listening to them since they released their first album a few years ago. This song, ‘I Of The Storm’ is off of their second and latest album and is definitely one of my favorites. Although the majority of their songs, to me, feature the grain, this one definitely stands out to me a lot. This song starts off calm but then dips into a dramatic feel in the chorus that builds you up and then slowly brings you back down. When listening to this song, I feel the highs and lows from the singers voices and the instruments playing. If you like this song, I would also highly recommend listening to these other songs by them: From Finner, Yellow Light, Lakehouse, Crystals, Empire and We Sink. I also recommend listening to this song as loud as you can to get the full effect (:
The Grain (Thoughts from Class)
Hey Guys!
Today’s discussion made me think a lot about this band from my small home state Rhode Island called Brown Bird. A few people mentioned artists who did some of their best work while in the hospital near the end of their lives, and how the grain is often stronger in those people. This song is from Brown Bird’s most recent (and final) album, and I think that it exemplifies the quality of the grain being strengthened under stress. It seems to me that people who are dealing with things in their lives such as severe sickness are able to pour all they have left into their art.
For some background on the band, Brown Bird is made up of a couple who have been playing together since around 2003. A few years ago, David Lamb was diagnosed with Leukemia, and as a last project he and his partner recorded this last album “Axis Mundi.” The album was released after his death. In my opinion, the music is already emotional without knowing their background, but the knowledge of the situation under which the album was recorded makes it easier to hear the grain.
Anyway, here’s their song “Tortured Boy.” I hope you like the grain.
Pop music today
If anyone is familiar with Bo Burnham I’m sure you know where I’m going with this! He is a comedian from Mass that explains pop music perfectly. When we were talking about pop music today in class I couldn’t help but think of this video.
Your Brain on Music
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Neuroscientist Daniel Levitin discusses how our brains interpret music:
Andrew Bird
Hey everyone.
I found something cool and interesting kind of relating to our class so I thought I would post something on the blog.
A composer named Andrew Bird is a musician that specializes in playing string instruments. His latest album Echolocations: Canyons focuses around natural forming acoustic spaces. He wrote an entire album based on the way sound moves through canyons. I found it interesting that this artist chose a location and thought about how the sound moved in relation to the environment before starting to actually compose music. He let his environment kind of due it for him. Below is a quote from Bird explaining a little about this process. Also attached is a quick “trailer” to him album as well as a song from it. I hope you check it out it’s dope.
“Ever since I was a child I would test different spaces with my voice or whistle or violin. Whatever sound you make it’s like a giant limb that can reach beyond your fingers and grope the corners of the room. Now when I’m on tour playing a different theater every night we “tune” the room hunting down the bass traps and the standing waves to give the listener the most even and wide spectrum sound. There are certain frequencies that resonate while others are lifeless. Sometimes the room refuses to yield and I have to consider playing different songs that will work in that room. It’s a challenge but I enjoy the moments when I must yield to the environment. So I thought it would be interesting to take all this outside where the reflections off the landscape are triggering countless inferences and steering the conversation.”
Trailer:
The Canyon Wants To Hear C Sharp:
Edison’s Talking Dolls
In “The Sounds Around Us,” by Lawrence English, we learned about Ludwig Koch’s recording of a Common Sharma using a wax cylinder recorder. English describes this as the first “field recording” and says that it is significant in that it represents a transformation of how sound was perceived and remembered.
Perhaps surprisingly, the first recordings made and distributed for the purposes of home entertainment were not recordings of music. Instead they were recordings of the voices of little girls reciting nursery rhymes and prayers. These recordings were then inserted into talking dolls and sold as toys. The toy was a flop and quickly disappeared from the market. The few dolls that remain in existence have been mute for some time, as their owners were reluctant to damage the wax cylinders that allowed the dolls to speak by playing them. Researchers recently developed a means for contemporary listeners to hear these voices.
When you listen, you will probably not be surprised that the toy was not successful. However, the dolls are notable in that they were the first instance in which sound recording was envisioned as a way to capture musical performances and to repeat them for entertainment purposes. In doing so, the music recording industry transformed the way in which music was experienced and created.
Read more about the talking dolls and listen to their voices in a New York Times article from May 2015.
Hearing vibrations
In “Introduction: Hearing Vibrations,” Shelley Trower examines the development of scholarly, scientific, and popular writings about sound as vibration. She is particularly interested in how attempts to detect, analyze and control sound as vibration lead to new developments in a variety of scientific fields, including psychology, neurology, physiology, as well as practices that used vibration as a means of establishing the objective basis of their ideas such as spiritualism. For Trower, these writings about vibration opened up new modes of understanding the relationship between mind and body, between internal thoughts, feelings and emotions on the one hand, and external materialities including bodies and objects on the other.
The following videos exemplify some of Trower’s points. The top two are referred to in the text. The bottom two are an example of how vibration exists between and through objects, and always has the potential to be transformed into sound. Continue reading