I wrote a piece about Beach House producer Chris Coady, a friend of mine who also recorded Islands’ 2009 record Vapours (as well as YYY, TVOTR, Jana Hunter and lots of other awesome musicians along the NY/Baltimore axis), for Interview’s music blahblahg. Here it is.
Hooray for Merrill! My bandmate Lindsay showed me a video of her 4AD session the other day, too. Rawk!
tUnE-yArDs
“Top Chef”
Yes, Merrill Garbus is the type of person who will write a song about rooting for the winner of Top Chef and perform it in someone’s backyard. She’s awesome like that. AND IT’S A REALLY GOOD SONG!
In light of a recent road trip, soundtracked by Another Green World, I’m adding this to the perpetual wish list. This, along with that Farfisa organ.
Let’s give thanks that the Phillies are wrapping up another World Series victory, and that after said victory, we can all get back to watching NBA basketball.
Rejoice! ‘Tis the season of Ron Artest’s rage, insanity, and unabashedly bad rapping.
But who knew Ron was such a politicized feminist? Here’s the video for “Afghan Women.” Oh, Ron. You’re the people’s MVP!
For yuks I read some Richard Hell tonight on “Rock Lyrics as Poetry” and his “Punk Beginnings.” What for, you ask? Tell ‘em, Hell:
“Comparing poetry and rock lyrics isn’t exactly like comparing apples and oranges, you could say it’s like comparing apples and apple pastry. They have something fundamental in common, but that doesn’t mean it makes much sense to try to compare them.
“But I’m going to try to just because it’s fun to “think,” and I regard myself as being pretty good at thinking. But thinking is a kind of game. Works are more interesting than thoughts.”
I enjoyed reading these articles this weekend:
* “Letting Her Finish” [heh!] — Idolator on Taylor Swift & the history of the country-to-pop crossover:
“… [T]hink of this week’s charts as the culmination of a two-decade pendulum swing. For the first time since probably “Islands in the Stream,” the most-played song on American radio is a country tune—sung by America’s new sweetheart, who, usurping rappers aside, just put her first MTV Video Music Award on the mantle.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates on MF Doom— “The Mask of Doom” (The New Yorker, September 21, 2009, p. 52):
“Dumile is uninterested in hooks, displays a flagrant disregard for linear storytelling, and insists on cutting songs that time out before the three-minute mark.”
* This Recording on WHY? & the vegan wonder known as Yoni Wolf
I don’t have perfect pitch in the strict sense. I do have what’s called relative pitch, however: given a starting note, I can identify any other note relative to it thereafter. Given that formal definition, though, relative pitch would seem to be a particular skill that can called up when tested. But actually, it’s not really the kind of ability that I would describe as a skill. I grew up playing music fairly rigorously, so there is undoubtedly some aspect of training or practice that accounts for it, but I started at such an early age that it’s hard to know whether I owe my relative attunement to nature or nurture, or both.
In any case, relative pitch is more like the tint of my audial-sensory experience; it’s not just something I store away until I’m at a piano, testing my ear against a random note. It’s more of an integrated influence than a discretely applied skill. And really, how often do we isolate a single note, anyway? Sure, given a pitch, I can identify others. But in the long term, I can pretty much always, almost without fail, sing a song in the exact right key—even if I haven’t heard it in ages. It’s a little like color memory: you might picture, for example, your first ‘red’ tricycle right now. (Perhaps a perfect-pitch version of this analogy would be like always recalling the ideal red, or the most primary red, no matter what chromatic context or actually existing object it may or may not belong to.)
I get a private thrill out of testing this ability by recalling a song I haven’t heard in forever and then looking it up on the YooToob to make sure I’ve still got it. It goes to show, too, that relative pitch isn’t so immediate and transient as the single-note-to-note test that accounts for its formal definition. It’s a perceptual phenomenon that can function on a very long-term scale: tonality imprints itself. In that way, my audial experience is pretty much all relational. Maybe for everyone it is, to some degree: for people with relative pitch, exaggeratedly or more explicitly so, and for people with perfectly pitch, absolutely so.
According to a friend—a friend who knows and respects my deep, deep appreciation of Mariah Carey—Memoirs of an Imperfect Angel has too many ballads.
I don’t like the idea of not liking a Mariah record. “Obsessed,” however, has grown on me.
Yes, yay indeed. But WTF is going on in this cover photo?! I’m not talking about those hearts &c.—that’s the work of therichgirlsareweeping. I’m talking about that crouching-camper face he’s got on there. Looks like somebody forgot to bring the TP roll!
Yay, there’s a new Morrissey record due out November 3.
xoxo, c. hotpoint. (Obvs. the album art doesn’t actually have all those hearts and stuff on it.)
Screaming Females, “Boyfriend” [via exquisiteboredom]
This is just what I was in the mood for tonight.
Christian Joy is the untouchable genius of a designer behind Karen O’s legendary costumes. She also designed Nick’s Vapours cape. Eat yer metaphysical heart out, Warhol!
When it comes to recording equipment, there’s a whole new lexicon to learn—cryptic and bureaucratic-sounding machine monikers like “1031As” and “the Neve 8068.” I’ve decided to start giving the equipment secret nicknames to help me remember it all. It’s not clear to me why studio gear almost universally goes by its technical labels. I am amazed by people who converse in its nomenclature.
It also all looks alike, more or less, with a color gradient ranging from black to gray to silver. Its only colorful features are knobs and wires, strictly perfunctory aesthetics for distinguishing between otherwise identical-looking connection cables. It all kind of looks like what I imagine the inside of an analog television to be.
![[Young] Nick Cave. Swoon.
[via
almostepistles
metalshell]](http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kqzdlxp9CP1qzgdvqo1_500.jpg)
