as i’m sitting here watching silent hill speed runs, i have to wonder what roger ebert could have possibly been thinking when he began his one man crusade against the notion of video games as art. the post was made almost 4 months ago and after 4000+ comments, who knows how many blog responses, and a concession, this is both late and redundant. but it’s an idea that popped in my head and this is a blog so you are powerless to stop me.

we are, as always, unable to agree on a consistent definition of art. it seems that art is some vague notion, and nobody really knows what it is, except that we know it when we see it. so i must fall back on the only definition of art that has ever made sense to me: art is the document of human experience. life interpreted and represented through our eyes. ebert argues that the nature of games (in the most general sense) precludes them from being art: you cannot “win” at the mona lisa. this is a distortion of the argument, and a misunderstanding of video games as a medium. video games are an interpretation and representation of games. a field or a dead shark aren’t art either, taken by themselves.

but back to silent hill. this is a game that i would never in my life try to play. i remember being too scared to enter the shadow temple in zelda when i was younger (who am i kidding i am still scared). but for some reason i’m drawn to silent hill. i have the soundtrack and i’ve read the plot summaries and i watch other people play it. yeah, i just got done arguing how video games are art in the most fundamental way, and aren’t required to be measured in terms of emotional response, or social relevance, or anything. but there’s something about this game, even just watching it, you experience something. that should be worth something, right?

Cadence Weapon – Grim Fandango

i must’ve seen harry potter and the half blood prince four or five times in our hotel in italy. i don’t know why, but between the world cup and harry potter there was just nothing on tv. each time it was on i managed to catch the scene where dumbledore has to drink the Unhappiness Water in order to obtain the Magical Hidden Prize. dumbledore breaks down, and harry has to force it down his throat, with dumbledore crying and begging for it to end.

in all my fuckedupitude, making music has become this agonizing process of existentialism and self-doubt. it always ends the same. i know that no song, no piece of art, nothing ever created in the world ever – nobody ever gets it right, right away. it’s only once i’ve spent hours banging my head against the wall that i’m able to force myself, kicking and screaming, to just write it, just write the damn thing, write anything. and the floodgates open. and i look at the finished product and i wonder about that crazy person from the week before. who let him into my office?

i’ve been given a prescription for a medication whose possible side effects include anxiety, depression, and feelings of worthlessness. well, how much worse could it get, really?

Wild Nothing – Live In Dreams

the opening notes of hunted by a freak just hit me, like that moment of recognition when you’re standing in the audience and the familiarity of a song washes over you and you can’t stop smiling. mogwai have a gift with melody that is, at the same time, not melody. vocals that are barely discernible as such ebb in and out over the steady backbeat and constant guitar. there’s something happening between the vocals, guitar, and bass that i can’t put my finger on, it must be something to do with overtones or harmonics (i should have paid more attention in physics). it’s like looking at something through wet glass, morphed, always changing.

Mogwai – Hunted by a Freak

]]> http://www.thisetc.com/2010/07/mogwai-hunted-by-a-freak/feed/ 0 http://www.thisetc.com/2010/07/blockhead-music-by-cavelight/ http://www.thisetc.com/2010/07/blockhead-music-by-cavelight/#comments Tue, 13 Jul 2010 15:26:30 +0000 alex http://www.thisetc.com/?p=782

this album has been sitting in my amazon shopping cart for like, 6 years now. just one of those things. you scrape together enough quarters to buy a shiny new music-disk, and you see that $16.99 price tag and it’s like, ohh man, 16.99 huh…maybe next time buddy.

from what i understand, blockhead takes a sort of Endtroducing approach to beat-making: that is, each beat is made entirely with a record player and a sampler, with minimal alteration of the samples themselves. the samples are layered one over the other, more or less untouched. sounds removed from their original context are thrust together to become something new. when he succeeds it is profound, like finding something you thought you had lost.

unfortunately some samples were just not meant to be stacked on top of one another. the reluctance toward any sort of adjustments inevitably result in some awkward rhythmic or harmonic clashes. the beats sound like the way they were made: you can see the seams. blockhead’s tendency to use saxaphone and harmonica licks for melody can be a double-edged sword at times: they are grating if they are too specific, but forgettable if they are not specific enough.

in the interview i linked, blockhead says that he isn’t interested in learning to use new equipment. while i think there is something to the idea of becoming proficient with a single instrument, there seems to be something in his process that limits any sort of development. a blockhead beat from 10 years ago sounds an awful lot like a blockhead beat from a week ago. when i talk to people about blockhead, the conversation always seems to lean towards once-you’ve-heard-one-you’ve-heard-them-all. i’m not sure if this means anything. there is certainly a different mood between music by cavelight and, say, uncle tony’s coloring book. but somehow it isn’t enough.

i guess it sounds like i’m beating up on blockhead pretty hard. i’m not saying this album is bad, it’s actually one of my favourite of his solo albums. maybe i’m thinking too much as a producer rather than a listener. but if the problems with a piece of music draw me out of the listening experience, i think it is alright to address technical issues.

all that said, listen to this song. you won’t give a shit about anything i just said.

Blockhead – Sunday Seance

pretty much anybody who asks me what my favourite album of all time is has to sit through me rambling on about this album and how one day, when hip-hop is a legitimate field of study, it’ll be required reading. so yeah, i sort of like this album. of course, i realize that it is sort of a ridiculous thing to say about an album, but i think there is something to it. the cold vein is a groundbreaking record, an album that simultaneously acknowledges convention and transcends it.

thematically, the cold vein is not exactly subtle. the pigeon/phoenix metaphor is simply a variation on the rags-to-riches themes that have defined hip-hop culture for decades. vast aire is especially occupied with the notion of the phoenix, which for him is about the ascent of the soul rather than socio-economic status. cannibal ox aren’t interested in a new pair of shoes.

vordul mega rhymes in snapshots,  each line dense with fragmented imagery and metaphor. when i hear him rap i imagine that i am looking at black and white pictures of buildings through one of those little viewfinders. the relentless staccato of vordul mega’s delivery can be overwhelming and impenetrable, yet it isn’t difficult to see how that might have been intended.

in contrast, vast aire’s rhymes are given room to breathe. he is the more showy of the two. whereas vordul mega’s verses are almost universally bleak, vast aire injects comedy  and does not shy away from personal confession. vast aire defies the traditionally accepted concept of the emcee. he raps with words cut out of magazines, a delivery that sounds like the hip-hop equivalent of a collage. he is not above the typical emcee braggadocio, and yet each verse is laced with self-deprecation and irony. he lacks the raw metrical precision of his partner, yet never comes across lazy (cough mf doom). the f word, which is essentially a solo feature, turns the typically dreaded requisite “girl song” into one of the most genuine love songs i’ve ever heard. just ask my grade 12 english teacher about the analysis i handed in for a poetry assignment (i did poorly).

el-p’s production is a work unto itself – the instrumental only release is one of the few among hip-hop albums where i’ve felt it was justified. the beats fuse traditional breaks and jazz samples with synthetic flourishes, conveying the cold oppression of the streets in a way that hip-hop had never quite managed before – or since. the line between organic and synthetic is blurred. the f word hums and whirrs like a mechanical jazz trio. notice how the synth fuses with the lead guitar in the opening notes of pigeon. jaco pastorius’ rich bass sound is transformed into something otherworldly, hovering. i bought this album immediately after hearing that beat.

Cannibal Ox – Pigeon

if there’s one thing i’ve taken away from the experience it’s that i can’t convincingly pull off a one-man band. i think i have valid ideas – this much has remained intact – and i wouldn’t pursue music if i didn’t think so. but i don’t know if anything i create is really capable of standing up on its own. maybe more valuable as part of a whole. earlier today i told somebody, “i’ve decided that what i really want to do is to join Grizzly Bear.” i can only imagine how stupid that must have sounded. they say: you want to be in a band? be in one. you want to collaborate with people? find them. well okay i guess i will just do that then.

so the problem remains: i’m not good enough to be alone, and i’m not good enough to present myself in a way that would interest other people in working with me. but i endeavor still.

stumbling

i was at grooves the other day, flipping through the rock section when i came across this album. i noticed it sort of out the corner of my eye. sometime around when i was 14-15 i’d made a huge wishlist on amazon.ca of cd’s i wanted to get, and this was one of them. basically i bought this out of principal.

if i remember correctly, i’d heard a Black Heart Procession track on Little Radio (back when they used to just play music (actually i think they have started playing music again, gonna have to check it out…)). there are also some really cool Sigur Rós Ágætis Byrjun b-sides, among other neat things.

it was sort of a gamble really. you’d think my music taste would have progressed over the past 5 years. i don’t know if the fact that i enjoyed this album is a sign of me being a really forward-thinking 15 year old, or a lazy 20 year old. most of the artists on here trigger some sort of nostalgia. Sigur Rós is the most obvious, i listened to Ágætis Byrjun and () so much in those days that i pretty much got sick of them. the tracks that are on here, though (Bíum Bíum Bambaló and Dánarfregnir Og Jaroarfarir), i enjoyed. that is reassuring i guess.

the lead singer of Arab Strap collaborated with Mogwai on one of my favourite tracks from Young Team, and their tracks on this album are very postrocky. MOGWAIESQUE.

the black heart procession track is still my favourite, though. when i listened to exit out it reminded me a lot of The Album Leaf, and when i looked them up it said that the guy who does the album leaf is also in this band! so that’s a fun little connection. the album leaf was also very important to me during my 15yearoldhood.

anyway, it was a positive consumer experience overall. i’ve decided to go through that old list of albums on amazon.ca and see if there’s any other neat stuff i never got around to listening to…

The Black Heart Procession – Exit Out

i first heard the 8 mile soundtrack when i was 12 years old. this was back when i was just becoming aware of music, a time i think of as the Great Awakening. my parents would not buy or be party to any purchase of music that they considered “rude”. as a result, my cousin and i developed a sort of rum-running situation where he would buy the albums for me, concealing the parental advisory label by reversing the album covers. i can’t remember exactly what it was like for me to listen to these albums back then, except that devious feeling of having the eminem show playing in my walkman with my parents no more than 10 feet away. listening to the album again for the first time in years, i understand it on an entirely different level. maybe because this time around i feel like i can relate to where eminem is coming from.

please don’t let me be bitchin holdin no regular job

it’s definitely a fear of mine that i should end up just anybody. a recent episode of community dealt with the idea of people who are “special”, and concluded that this was not actually the case. logically, i accept this. there is nothing that i am capable of that any other person might not be as well. but i want to be a part of something, to contribute something that is recognizably mine. the scenario where i’m just regular, ordinary, data – my mind rejects it.

you can do anything you put your mind to, man

the message of 8 mile isn’t a particularly radical one – it’s basically a bedtime story. ‘lose yourself’ is distilled in its final line, an almost afterthought that seems to barely make it in before the fade. by the time ‘lose yourself’ won an oscar it had become a sort of cliché in itself (endless jokes about “mom’s spaghetti”). it’s been long enough now that i can separate the song from the noise, and for some reason this line in particular struck me. maybe i’m just a sucker.

you don’t see me in the hood, it’s cuz i’m doin this, man

a line that probably seemed like a throwaway when i first heard them, a bunch of words that sounded cool when obie trice said them. it’s relevant to me now at a time when i’m convinced the most important thing is that i am interested in what i do, and that i invest myself in it.

thinking about this has made me realize the importance of circumstance. one album taken in two distinct periods of my life can have meanings entirely independent of each other. in this new context, 8 mile was a letter to eminem’s younger self when he was most desperate, and i don’t think i’ve ever found him more utterly convincing.

Eminem – 8 Mile

if sarcasm is saying what you don’t mean, then irony might be defined as not saying what you do mean.

dramatic irony is often defined as a situation in fiction wherein the audience has knowledge that a character(s) does not. for example, a character might say, “today is a great day, nothing will go wrong today,” while the audience might know of a velociraptor off-screen that is about to eat them. while it is true that in this situation the audience is aware of a velociraptor that the character in question is not, it is better to think of irony as i defined it in the first paragraph: that the author is not saying what they do mean. to convey the scene’s full meaning, the line might literally be rendered, “today is a great day, nothing will go wrong today (except that i am about to be eaten by a velociraptor).”

in a recent episode of 30 rock, liz lemon noted the irony of a situation in which she was locked in a closet by her gay nephew who she had recently outed. she then asked, “is that irony?” to which he replied, “not really.” the common interpretation of irony is as an unfortunate coincidence (see: that one alanis morisette song). however it’s easy to see how this comes about as these sorts of situations in fiction are often ironic because the author intends to convey meaning through unfortunate coincidence. perhaps if liz had been outing her gay nephew while she was locked in the closet, while simultaneously concealing or being oblivious to her own homosexuality, it might have been a more concrete example of irony.

there might also be a sense in which the title of this post is ironic, though it creates conflict. it is possible, or even likely, that when reading a blog post titled “the definition of irony”, one might expect a story about an ironic personal anecdote, rather than a meditation on the literal definition of irony. in this case, i said exactly what i meant, which was contrary to what was expected – reverse irony?

there is also the sense in which this entire post has been an ironic f u bro to henry whom i told i would be writing more stream of consciousness posts and that this sort of bullshit is the result

Norah Jones – Young Blood

i saw norah jones play this song live on the colbert report and it was pretty immediate. it’s almost like norah jones + kaki king + iron & wine?? instant success. probably the fastest a song has ever made it to my loved list on last.fm. it’s just subtle and beautiful and it makes me feel warm.

Norah Jones – Young Blood

Grizzly Bear – Veckatimest

trying to keep up with new music, i end up overlooking things. my first impression of yellow house was that grizzly bear were just a sleepier animal collective. seeing them live in june changed that pretty quick. veckatimest reminds me of when i first got into radiohead, where each song would just run my life for about a week. this song just happens to be the one running around my brain for now.

Grizzly Bear – Ready, Able

Lone

my discovery of lone (and the “wonky” movement in general) is just one example of how effective last.fm’s excellent recommendation tool is. they know me so well. i don’t know what else to say. i love it and ain’t nothin that could come between us.

Lone – Sea Spray

Signalrunners – Meet Me In Montauk

ok so technically this song came out towards the end of 2008, but whatever. apart from being the catalyst for my whole trance/progressive house phase of 2009, this song has surprisingly strong sense memory associated with it. signalrunners have definitely abused the success of this song, as their most recent work following it – their remix of oliver smith’s ‘restless’, and andrew bayer’s collaboration with boom jinx – sound structurally as though they were built from the same project template. and while both of those songs still manage to be great, none of them surpass the original.

Signalrunners – Meet Me In Montauk

i feel like i am forgetting something