Artist talks about (mostly) music.
Audio notes on my recent album Frontiers, my "Chicago" album. Additional information on some of the tracks, as well as sheet music, can be viewed on Studio Notes.
1966 was a year of rapid acceleration of technology, which had a profound and lasting effect on culture. I still think the 1960s are unparalleled in how fast the world changed, and affects my work to this day. The Music video: Every Building On the Sunset Strip
Computers can be instruments, but differ in many ways in how playing instruments is largely an embodied experience.
...or do they own us? Ideas may be meant to be shared, and are not proprietary. Is it “all mine” or “all ours”? My prediction is that everyone will choose to do everything themselves, and where skills are lacking, software will fill in the gap. Ideas will be both proprietary and shared in the sense that even a quarter note or an eighth notes can have rights associated with it. But it will destry matural heirarchies that have allowed music to evolve in the way that it has. The film Get Back is a window into how ideas get negotiated. Perhaps the best collaborations are mostly about negotiation.
Like the Difference Mode in Photoshop, we can apply the metaphor to neural nets.
At what point do we know a project has reached its creative potential? Continuing on with something that is generative may be preventing new ideas to be developed.
Every new medium extends the options and possibilities for audio and video production. The Metaverse will probably enhance spatiality in music--or at least we'll be thinking more about it.
Listen on Bandcamp: https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/track/route-285-new-mexico
Background on this Cindy Sherman photo (still).
Even though this is exclusively a streaming album, I do spend a lot of time sequencing the tracks as if they would be pressed to vinyl. The album is geographically ordered moving south and east from California, through New Mexico (with a trip to the Moon) then into Texas, then Mississippi, then skipping to NYC, then overseas. If pressed on vinyl, Side 2 would begin in Switzerland, then into Kashmir, and ending in Vietnam. Titles, places, and the photographers. The titles are the search that you would do to find the photograph, so essentially it's an "Easter Egg" album. For example "Still 21" will locate that photo immediately. Side 1: 01. Every Building On the Sunset Strip/Havenhurst [Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles] 02. Bronson Tropics [Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles] 03. Nipomo [Dorothea Lange, Nipomo CA] 04. Route 285 New Mexico [Robert Frank, Gallup NM] 05. Moonrise in Hernandez [Ansel Adams, Hernandez NM] 06. Mare Tranquilitatis [Buzz Aldrin, The Moon] 07. Standard Amarillo [Ed Ruscha, Amarillo TX] 08. Red Room Mississippi [William Eggleston, Greenwood MS] 09. Still 21 [Cindy Sherman, Manhattan, NYC] Side 2: 01. Boden Sea 1993 [Hiroshi Sugimoto, Uttwil, Switzerland] 02. Boden Sea 1993 (EDM Mix) 03. Brassai 1934 [Brassai, Paris] 04. Madame Bijou [Brassai, Paris] 05. Srinagar 1948 [Henri Cartier-Bresson, Kashmir] 06. Saigon Street 1963 [Malcolm Browne, Saigon] 07. Brassai 1934 (Jazz Mix) 08. Madame Bijou (EDM Mix) 09. Havenhurst (Reprise)
The things we've always valued in culture ripple through the generations. They're like gravitational waves which affect us in subtle ways.
While a song can have atmosphere, atmosphere can't have too much "song" in it. Classical music is "atmospheric" in some sense, but has a through-composed structure. Even though ambient music doesn't have structure, spatiotemporality creates form over time in context of all the songs on an ambient album, or in an ambient playlist.
On Bandcamp: https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/track/red-room-mississippi Videos: Mashup of the original Vintage Smoking video. https://youtu.be/OIxTLBLlINI Original "Vintage Smoking": https://youtu.be/aEIUfeJGcWQ Guitar Video: https://youtu.be/VeLD64N7ob8
Notes recorded March 25, 2021.
Various forces are nudging us in one way or another, including yourself. So should we proceed through our lives with wu wei (trying not to try), or trying until we know that the nudges are moving us in the "proper" direction?
De-skilled art is sometimes more cunning.
In multi-disciplinary art sometimes the work involves mostly resolving the concept to the point where it can actually be worked on. This is unlike Dada, in that you don't just rely on the readymade to obviate the need for some degree of craft. (Originally recorded in March 2021)
This is somewhat related to what Umberto Eco was covering in his book The Infinity of Lists. A culture prefers enclosed, stable forms when it is sure of its own identity, while when faced with a jumbled series of ill-defined phenomena, it starts making lists. (Originally recorded June 2021)
The book referenced is actually published by Prestel Publishing: Tweedy, Spencer, and Azerrad, Lawrence. Mirror Sound: The People and Processes Behind Self-Recorded Music. Germany, Prestel Publishing, 2020. (Originally recorded 3/2021)
"Creativity" and "innovation" are long-time buzz words. But "curiosity" is now added to the mix. You have to be curious and be willing to experiment before innovation can occur. (Originally recorded 5/19/2021)
"Musicist' is a word I coined in the 90s to describe a musician that enjoyed music for both its intrinsic and extrinsic qualities, and was essentially a DIY artist. A Musicist is like a Physicist or an Artist. You could extrapolate it in the other direction with "Artician", and interestingly, "Physician".
What we might want ideally is to have the ability to make music manually, without the crutch of electronics, and now AI. The corollary in terms of running is the footwear industry. In music, focusing on the gear can shift attention away from the art form into a kind of materialism or even a kind of 'fashion'.
Blog post: https://leebarrymusic.blogspot.com/2021/07/does-music-have-anything-to-do-with.html
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/2429
I'm a big fan of aeropainting, a style which was used over several decades and had its roots in early fascism, but became successful for purely aesthetic reasons. https://www.google.com/search?q=aeropainting&client=firefox-b-1-d&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiw8reHu-jxAhUyAZ0JHQpqA3EQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1536&bih=739
Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, by Frank Wilczek https://www.google.com/books/edition/Fundamentals/WQfhDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 "Our ancestors inhabited a distinct sensory universe. It is difficult to imagine a world without eyeglasses, mirrors, magnifying lenses, microscopes and telescopes, artificial lighting and flashlights, clocks and watches, smoke alarms, thermometers, barometers, and a host of other devices that enrich our perception in many directions. Yet that was the world in which humans lived over most of our history."
Contests are a good way to take the pulse of new genres, and a way to allow the general public to view or listen to what creative people are doing in their studios. What I realized is that these AI initiatives are more like the art studios of the Old Masters where there are teams of artisans. The band metaphor applies as well, but typically there are hierarchies. (Sorry about the AC coming on. It is summer) https://www.aisongcontest.com/blog/ai-song-contest-music-videos
In 2045 how will 'good' be defined, and will there be a thread back to the songwriters at the end of the 20th century?
'Shorts' are certainly not a new idea, but a good one in terms of reminding us of the things we really like and can be played again and again like a favorite single in the 1960s.
Do we ever really know what motivates us day-to-day in creative projects? What's 'free will' do we think we're using? (The book referenced is Sincerity: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and the Curious Notion that We All Have Something to Say (no Matter how Dull) https://www.google.com/books/edition/Sincerity_How_a_moral_ideal_born_five_hu/dZh3DB7jj5wC?hl=en&gbpv=0
A real place is where the body, mind, and spirit can be joined with others. An imagined place does almost the same thing, and may in fact be joined with all other imagined places. (Audio is extracted from a video recorded earlier)
If music is architecture, the decoration on the exterior is what's now holding it up. Sound itself is the structure.
I never like looking at one thing--especially art on screens.
Thoughts on two somewhat connected books: The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Free_World/rrziDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0 The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous: https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_World/xB2ZDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
Imagination is a powerful tool, a sixth sense, a weapon. We must be careful how we use it, in life as on stage or screen https://aeon.co/essays/imagination-is-the-sixth-sense-be-careful-how-you-use-it In our current climate of partisan paranoia, we've all ramped up imaginative demonisation of the other. This leaves us vulnerable to dark imaginings. The Chinese American philosophical geographer Yi-Fu Tuan states it plainly in his book Landscapes of Fear (2013): ‘If we had less imagination, we would feel more secure.' Yes, there are real threats and enemies out there, but not as many as our active imagination produces. Alas, we can't stop fantasticating if it's the root of human cognition, and we wouldn't want to give it up if we could. But can we turn that awesome power of imagination toward humanising ourselves and others? Disaster movies It's what it's like to live in the world Subconscious movies It's what it's like to live in the frame
Bridge metaphors are always useful in the creative process, and in songwriting, literally useful.
In Analogia, technology historian George Dyson presents a startling look back at the analog age and life before the digital revolution—and an unsettling vision of what comes next.
If you work in more than one discipline, you'll have to problem-solve in all of them.
My thoughts on this book. https://www.google.com/books/edition/They_Are_Already_Here/lvUPzgEACAAJ?hl=en "People I've interviewed have called UFOs various versions of the ultimate problem to solve. Many of them don't believe UFOs, a term that just means something in the sky that the viewer can't understand and we're forged in alien furnaces, but they do believe these sites are something. Maybe there's something in our heads. Maybe there's a secret military craft. Misinterpreted planets, blimps, wavering stars, atmospheric phenomena. Swamp gas. Our collective ignorance all of the above organized into sky lights. But whatever they are or are not, people undoubtedly see these things that they can explain, talk about them, write about them, wonder about them. Sometimes people sing about them. Plenty have wrote lyrics about UFOs such as Ella Fitzgerald, two little men in a flying saucer."
As a continuation of the "Containers of Music" idea, I'm revisiting recorded music's intimate connection with cinema, and how it encodes memory.
If we think about improvisation as a type of control, we can increase or decrease improvisation as if it were a knob or slider. If we define a range of possibilities, these can be assigned to values, 0-100, for example. Turning up the volume of the improvisation means it's looser, turning it down makes it more scored/orchestrated. What we want ideally is arounf 45-55%
More re: Boulez: "The way we conceive of the world of sound has long tended towards standardization of all its phenomena, at whatever level of pertinence they operate. The exclusion of all scales other than major and minor modes, and the establishment of equal temperament, was motivated by the most stringent standardization, allowing only a limited number of relationships within a given set of functions. Our instrumental world has tended towards purity of sound, according to one or another timbre, reducible to an abstract idea that can't be easily embodied in a previously established pitch hierarchy."
(Sorry for the clicks--the vinyl was scratched...) "Responsibility is taken through general rules for driving one note, or group of notes, from another. When we introduced aleatoric elements and then pure chance into our dealings with sound, so that material was no longer chosen but rather provided externally, we forgot this fundamental fact of musical language, that each element depends on every other one. The derivation of one motive or interval from another, or of the vertical dimension from the horizontal, our processes that seem to be indispensable if coherence is to be achieved, if language is to be necessary." Music Lessons: The Collège de France Lectures https://www.google.com/books/edition/Music_Lessons/CssHwwEACAAJ?hl=en
“Railway time” arrived in America too, splitting the country into four distinct time zones and causing protests to flare nationwide. The Boston Evening Transcript demanded, “Let us keep our own noon,” and The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette wrote, “Let the people of Cincinnati stick to the truth as it is written by the sun, moon and stars.” https://www.noemamag.com/the-tyranny-of-time/
Emotion is sometime a mechanical operation in music (Apollonian as opposed to Dionysian). The James song is "Born of Frustration"
A run-down of the series. All are released on Bandcamp: https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/
The reason I wanted to set music to this photo (and subsequent painting) is perhaps with the same wonder and fascination of the original artist. This style of architecture (the dingbat, each with a unique signature) is decidedly Southern California: modern, streamlined, care-free, "breezy", and leisurely. ("Beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine--all along the way...") At the beginning of the piece is one of David Lynch's daily weather reports, as a kind of DJ leader. It's interesting that when I was doing the airy synth parts, the weather was exactly like the weather in L.A. per Lynch's weather report. Bandcamp: https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/album/music-for-places-v-music-for-photographs
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