Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga’s music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:
Lady Gaga’s 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We’ll look at the occult meaning of the video “Telephone”.
This might be the last great music video. Beyonce picks up Gaga from jail in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill! But Christ, the product placement. This thing has more brands in it than Logorama.
An interesting article about how composer and programmer David Cope found a unique solution for making computer-composed classical music sound as though it was composed by humans: he wrote algorithms that based new works on previously created works.
Finally, Cope’s program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach’s spirit — and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he’d begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.
Gosh it’s going to get interesting when machines can do some real fundamental “human” things 10,000x faster and better than humans can.
I don’t know what took me so long, but I finally tracked down the soundtracks for both Moon and Sunshine…hiding in plain sight on iTunes. They are both great in their entirety. If you just want a taste, at least get Welcome to Lunar Industries from Moon and Sunshine (Adagio in D Minor) from Sunshine.
Update: Forgot to add that the Sunshine soundtrack is only available through iTunes and the Moon soundtrack is available in the US as an expensive import (and not on Amazon’s mp3 site or anything like that) so your best bet is iTunes there as well.
What I am worried about and don’t want to fall into, is dependence on too many screens to play a set. It’s bad enough having one computer screen. After all, it’s all about the performance and the people. I want to be looking at the crowd and them looking at me, interacting with one another. If we start getting dependant on screens it is going to ruin the art of performance.
The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.
Just out. Haven’t listened yet (downloading now) but if the last three are any indication, this is gonna be a great Monday for listenin’. Sample tracks:
5. Lil Wayne (feat. Babyface) vs Royksopp - Comfortable Up Here
15. Michael Jackson vs Ratatat - Billie “Wildcat” Jean
19. R. Kelly (feat. Keri Hilson) vs Sally Shapiro - Number One Christmas
31. Ghostface Killah vs Beirut - Save Me Concubine
Ever since this video blew my mind when I first watched it, I’ve wondered how it was made. Turns out Gondry tested the concept out on a sidewalk with oranges, shoes, videotapes, and drinking glasses. Alas, the making of doesn’t cover the three months of post production required by the finished product, although the video isn’t completely digital as you might expect:
The video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France. They shot the train ride 10 different times during the day to get different light gradients.
What I love about the approach is that it’s showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It’s entertaining, but it’s also an exercise in demystification — which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.
Maybe you’re tired of un-pop-music-like things being run through Auto-Tune, but I’m not quite there yet. This Auto-Tuned Carl Sagan mix is very nearly sublime.
In 2001, Tim Hawkinson created Uberorgan for the gallery at MassMOCA.
Several bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horn tuned to a different note in the octave, make up a walk-in self-playing organ. A 200 foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encodes a musical score of old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties. This score is deciphered by the organ’s brain - a bank of light sensitive switches - and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into non-repeating variations of the score.
Part sculpture, part giant musical instrument, Hawkinson’s installation was a loose interpretation of the human body’s organ systems. Uberorgan conducted itself for five minutes every hour, on the hour. The exhibition traveled from MassMOCA to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it graced the museum’s entrance hall during the exhibit of Hawkinson’s work called Zoopsia, a name that means “visual hallucinations of animals.”
You can hear a minute long sample of the Uberorgan on the Getty Center website. To me it sounds like a duet between a three-year-old jamming out on a bass saxophone and an elephant in a good mood.
Update: Tim Hawkinson and the Uberorgan are featured the Art:21 episode,”Time.” Seeing and hearing the piece, even on the small screen, is impressive, and Hawkinson explains how he came about creating such a voluminous, volume-driven work of art. (thx, cliff)
In the past couple of weeks i’ve been getting a band together for fun to play the eraser stuff live and the new songs etc.. to see if it could work! here’s a photo.. its me, joey waronker, mauro refosco, flea and nigel godrich.
We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.
This conversation with Greenwood is part of a new series by Sasha Frere-Jones’ on the sound quality of recorded music.
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