kottke.org posts about music
I loved every little bit of this letter that producer Steve Albini sent to Nirvana before the recording of In Utero, the band’s final studio album. In it, Albini clearly and succinctly lays out his philosophy about recording music and has specific suggestions for working with Nirvana. But the last few paragraphs, about his payment, are awesome. I’ve reproduced the selection here in full:
#5: Dough. I explained this to Kurt but I thought I’d better reiterate it here. I do not want and will not take a royalty on any record I record. No points. Period. I think paying a royalty to a producer or engineer is ethically indefensible. The band write the songs. The band play the music. It’s the band’s fans who buy the records. The band is responsible for whether it’s a great record or a horrible record. Royalties belong to the band.
I would like to be paid like a plumber: I do the job and you pay me what it’s worth. The record company will expect me to ask for a point or a point and a half. If we assume three million sales, that works out to 400,000 dollars or so. There’s no fucking way I would ever take that much money. I wouldn’t be able to sleep.
I have to be comfortable with the amount of money you pay me, but it’s your money, and I insist you be comfortable with it as well. Kurt suggested paying me a chunk which I would consider full payment, and then if you really thought I deserved more, paying me another chunk after you’d had a chance to live with the album for a while. That would be fine, but probably more organizational trouble than it’s worth.
Whatever. I trust you guys to be fair to me and I know you must be familiar with what a regular industry goon would want. I will let you make the final decision about what I’m going to be paid. How much you choose to pay me will not effect my enthusiasm for the record.
Some people in my position would expect an increase in business after being associated with your band. I, however, already have more work that I can handle, and frankly, the kind of people such superficialities will attract are not people I want to work with. Please don’t consider that an issue.
(via @akuban)
The Other F Word is a 2011 documentary about how punk rockers and other countercultural figures made the transition from anti-authoritarianism to parenthood. Features members from Devo, NOFX, Black Flag, Rancid, and also pro skater Tony Hawk. Here’s the trailer:
To be sure, watching foul-mouthed, colorfully inked musicians attempt to fit themselves into Ward Cleaver’s smoking jacket provides for some consistently hilarious situational comedy, but the film’s deeper delving into a whole generation of artists clumsily making amends for their own absentee parents could strike a resonant note with anyone (punk or not) who’s stumbled headfirst into family life.
Available to rent/buy on iTunes and on Amazon.
(via @claytoncubitt)
Here’s a medley of isolated vocals from the Beatles’ Abbey Road:
Many more isolated vocal tracks are available on this subreddit. Here are the instructions for making your own isolated vocal tracks with Audacity, the same open source audio processing app that Tim used to make his slow jams. (thx, tim)
A couple of weeks ago, a slowed-down version of Dolly Parton’s classic ballad “Jolene” went viral. A lot of people who heard it loved it, a few people didn’t, but everyone seemed to agree that it was like listening to either an entirely new song or the same song again for the first time.
One of the things that’s eerie about this is that if you listen closely, everything is just a little bit out of tune. There’s conflicting information about exactly how much the track has been slowed. Some people have said that it’s simulating a 45 RPM record played at 33 1/3, which is certainly the most common way people who lived with record players heard popular songs at slower speeds. But that would actually be quite a bit slower and lower than this.
The other figure I’ve seen (forgive me for not citing everything, I’m typing as fast as I can) is “Jolene” has been slowed by 17 percent, which sounds about right and would explain why all the notes seem just a little bit sharp. Here’s the formula for slowing or speeding up a recording to shift the pitch but generally stay in tune:
(2 ^ (semitones change/12) - 1) *100 = Percent Change
So — as one does when procrastinating from remunerative work — I made an Excel spreadsheet.
If you want to drop two semitones, you shift the speed down by 12.2462 percent; drop three, you shift by 18.9207 percent, which significantly changes the track. To imitate a 45 RPM record played at 33 1/3, that’s about 25.926, but very few records still sound like something a person actually made at this speed. All of these slowdowns are interesting, even the ones that don’t work.
You can do all of them in the free/open-source audio processing app Audacity; it’s very fast and very easy. (If you want to get freaky, you can also use Audacity to change pitch without changing tempo, or vice versa, or to start out slow and go fast, and all manner of lesser and greater perversity.)
But after messing with Audacity for longer than was strictly necessary, I can tell you that some songs and transformations work out better than others, and they tend to be those that share a lot of the same characteristics as Jolene:
- A mix of quick and slow instrumentation, so there’s a lot of information density. It almost has to be fractal; the more you slow it down, the more minute structures you find. The original song itself can actually be slow or fast; many fast songs really don’t work, and quite a few slow ones do.
- High-pitched, typically (but not always) female vocals, so the song sounds like a person singing and not a voice-distorted growling dude from To Catch A Predator.
- The song needs to be fairly popular, so you can listen to the slow version and keep the regular-speed version in mind. This kind of continual allusion just makes it a richer experience.
And so, here are some of the results:
I described this Prince track as sounding like the slowest, sultriest, funkiest Sylvester song you’ve ever heard.
Mazzy Star surprised me. I always thought Hope Sandoval’s vocals were gorgeous but a little warbly, which gave them character, but that’s almost entirely a production effect. When you slow it down, you can really hear how clean and sustained her notes are.
My Bloody Valentine is the best example of that fractal quality. You can slow it down almost indefinitely and it still sounds like My Bloody Valentine. At this rate, though, it really just turns Bilinda Butcher’s vocals into Kevin Shields’.
There’s more at my Soundcloud page, including The Breeders’ “Cannonball,” “House of Jealous Lovers,” Hot Chip’s “Over and Over,” Grizzly Bear’s “Two Weeks” (which I actually sped up), and more. (Finally, if slowing a track down and posting it online somehow breaks copyright, let me know and I’ll take them down.)
Update: Andy Baio tips me to a second remix of “Jolene” that slows down the track, but corrects the pitch. Sounds great.
Update 2: Here’s Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T.” slowed from 127 BPM to 110 BPM, leaving the pitch as-is.
On Soundcloud, TheMusicalOdyssey put together an hour-long mix of old blues, folk, and jazz tunes that are full of references to sex, drugs, and crime. The track listing is available on the SC page.
Lucille Bogan & Walter Roland’s rendition of Shave Em Dry from 1935 is as nasty as anything 2 Live Crew put out. The lyrics are at the bottom of this page; this is the only verse printable in a family publication:
I will turn back my mattress and let you oil my springs,
I want you to grind me daddy till the bells do ring,
Ooh daddy, want you to shave ‘em dry.,
Oh pray God daddy, shave ‘em baby, won’t you try?
(via hero squad)
In July, Jay Z rapped Picasso Baby at Pace Gallery in NYC for six hours. The fruits of that labor have been condensed by director Mark Romanek into a 10-minute music video that premiered on HBO last night. Here’s the film:
The idea of performance art came to mind. I was aware of Marina Abramovic’s Artist is Present, even though I was in London shooting ‘Never Let Me Go’ and didn’t get to go. And the idea that Jay-Z regularly performs to 60,000 people at a time, I thought, ‘What about performing at one person at a time?’ He absolutely loved it. He interrupted me and said, ‘Hold on! I’ve got chills. That idea is perfect.’ He thinks, like me, that the music video has had its era. I also wanted to make sure we had Marina’s blessing. So she attended the event and took part in the event. She couldn’t have been more happy or enthusiastic about us using her concept and pushing it forward.
Also, somehow, I have never heard Jay Z talk before. That’s his voice?
A study by researchers in Sweden indicates that the heartbeats of singers in a choir quickly synchronize.
Using pulse monitors attached to the singers’ ears, the researchers measured the changes in the choir members’ heart rates as they navigated the intricate harmonies of a Swedish hymn. When the choir began to sing, their heart rates slowed down.
“When you sing the phrases, it is a form of guided breathing,” says musicologist Bjorn Vickhoff of the Sahlgrenska Academy who led the project. “You exhale on the phrases and breathe in between the phrases. When you exhale, the heart slows down.”
But what really struck him was that it took almost no time at all for the singers’ heart rates to become synchronized. The readout from the pulse monitors starts as a jumble of jagged lines, but quickly becomes a series of uniform peaks. The heart rates fall into a shared rhythm guided by the song’s tempo.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
Here’s a watercolor drawing by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of his ear compared to an ordinary ear1:
“Mozart Ear” has become a medical catch-all term for deformed ears (for instance). Deformed or not2, the ear clearly didn’t have any negative effect on his musical ear. (via @DavidGrann)
[1] The note accompanying the drawing at Harvard’s Houghton Library reads:
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 1756-1791. Mein Ohr [und] ein gewöhnliches Ohr [My ear and an ordinary ear] : drawing, [n.p., n.d.] Water-color drawing; [n.p, n.d] 1 drawing : watercolor on paper
The “mein” is crossed out and “Mozart” is written in its place in another hand. With this is Fr. Jelinck’s A.D.s., Salzburg, 1879 Sept. 19, certifying that this is by Mozart.
↩
[2] It’s stated elsewhere that the ear is actually that of Mozart’s son, which would be slightly more plausible than Mozart drawing his own ear. ↩
I still can’t get enough of their latest Mixtape and here comes another one. The Hood Internet has done a 54-minute mix for Frank & Oak. You can listen to it below, on Soundcloud, or download by liking Frank & Oak on Facebook.
I’m 27 minutes in and so far so good.
This is the best thing in the world right now. An adorable 9-year-old kid who plays the drums and his equally adorable 6-year-old sister who sings take the stage on the show America’s Got Talent to perform. The judges coo at their kidness and cuteness. And then:
Give it until 1:40 at least…I promise it pays off. I haven’t laughed this hard in weeks. (via ★interesting)
From the beginning, all I’ve ever cared about is things being great. I never cared about when they were done. Because I also feel like I want the music to last forever. And once you release it, you can’t go back and fix it, so you really have to get it right. And that takes time.
A chat with Rick Rubin. You may not know the name, but you definitely know the music (and you’ll probably never forget the beard).
Thoughtful piece from Cord Jefferson on Kanye West’s retrograde attitude towards women (and particularly white women) on his recent album, Yeezus.
Kanye West has never advocated raping anyone. His persistent fixation on conquering white women — the lure of white women, injuring white men via their women, etc. — is troublingly retrograde for a multimillionaire who some consider to be the harbinger of a neo-Black Power movement. It ultimately gives lie to the fact that Kanye sees himself as “a god,” as he claims on Yeezus, or, as he told Jon Caramanica in that winding New York Times interview, that he is “so credible and so influential and so relevant.” I’ve yet to see a black man who is truly confident in his human worth and his power spend time crowing about ejaculating onto white chicks. What’s more, what does it yield West in the end? As Kiese Laymon asked the other day: “Do you think the white men who run these corporations you’re critiquing really give a fuck about you dissing, fucking, fisting, choking white women?”
I listened to Yeezus a handful of times when it first came out (and loved it, especially the production and beats) but had to stop because of just this issue. There is undoubtably something critical to be said about race and sex in America, but West’s hamfisted lyrics definitely aren’t it.
DJ BC took the Beastie Boys and mashed them up with The Beatles.
He did more than 40 songs…get them all here. (via ★glass)
Are those your drums? The Late Show host likes drums so much that when musical guests finish up their sets on the show, Letterman often asks the drummer about them.
(via @hodgman)
This is great…Daft Punk’s Get Lucky as it would have sounded in every decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
This is what singles should be from now on…you get the original song, a 30s jazz version of the song, a 1800s classical version, an 80s new wave version, and so on.
Jon Caramanica talks with Kanye West about his work, his past, his impending child, and all sorts of other things in the NY Times. I started pulling interesting quotes but stopped when I realized that I was copy/pasting like 96% of the article. So, you only get two:
I sat down with a clothing guy that I won’t mention, but hopefully if he reads this article, he knows it’s him and knows that out of respect, I didn’t mention his name: this guy, he questioned me before I left his office:, “If you’ve done this, this, and this, why haven’t you gone further in fashion?” And I say, “I’m learning.” But ultimately, this guy that was talking to me doesn’t make Christmas presents, meaning that nobody was asking for his [stuff] as a Christmas present. If you don’t make Christmas presents, meaning making something that’s so emotionally connected to people, don’t talk to me.
And I don’t want to ruin the amazing last few paragraphs, but I just had to include this:
I think what Kanye West is going to mean is something similar to what Steve Jobs means. I am undoubtedly, you know, Steve of Internet, downtown, fashion, culture. Period. By a long jump. I honestly feel that because Steve has passed, you know, it’s like when Biggie passed and Jay-Z was allowed to become Jay-Z.
When Commander Chris Hadfield covered David Bowie’s Space Oddity on board the International Space Station:
how were the intellectual property rights handled?
The song “Space Oddity” is under copyright protection in most countries, and the rights to it belong to Mr Bowie. But compulsory-licensing rights in many nations mean that any composition that has been released to the public (free or commercially) as an audio recording may be recorded again and sold by others for a statutorily defined fee, although it must be substantively the same music and lyrics as the original. But with the ISS circling the globe, which jurisdiction was Commander Hadfield in when he recorded the song and video? Moreover, compulsory-licensing rights for covers of existing songs do not include permission for broadcast or video distribution. Commander Hadfield’s song was loaded onto YouTube, which delivers video on demand to users in many countries around the world. The first time the video was streamed in each country constituted publication in that country, and with it the potential for copyright infringement under local laws. Commander Hadfield could have made matters even more complicated by broadcasting live as he sang to an assembled audience of fellow astronauts for an onboard public performance while floating from segment to segment of the ISS.
We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part. (via waxy)
And why should Boards of Canada have all the fun? Sigur Ros has a new album coming out as well, to be released the week after on June 18. Two singles from Kveikur are already out:
And the album can be pre-ordered on iTunes, at Amazon, or direct from the band.
Oh hello new Boards of Canada single. Nice to see you.
Sounds goooood. The entire album will be out on 6/11 in North American (6/10 in the UK) and is available for pre-order on iTunes and at Amazon.
I enjoyed and agree with much of Sasha Frere-Jones’ take on Daft Punk’s recent album, Random Access Memories.
Daft Punk’s fourth studio album, “Random Access Memories,” is an attempt to make the kind of disco record that they sampled so heavily for “Discovery.” As such, it serves as a tribute to those who came before them and as a direct rebuke to much of what they’ve spawned. Only intermittently electronic in nature, and depending largely on live musicians, it is extremely ambitious, and as variable in quality as any popular album you will hear this year. Noodly jazz fusion instrumentals? Absolutely. Soggy poetry and kid choirs? Yes, please. Cliches that a B-list teen-pop writer would discard? Bring it on. The duo has become so good at making records that I replay parts of “Random Access Memories” repeatedly while simultaneously thinking it is some of the worst music I’ve ever heard. Daft Punk engages the sound and the surface of music so lovingly that all seventy-five loony minutes of “Random Access Memories” feel fantastic, even when you are hearing music you might never seek out. This record raises a radical question: Does good music need to be good?
PepsiCo is dropping Lil Wayne as a Mountain Dew spokesman because of “vulgar lyrics” referring to Emmett Till after the Till family put pressure on the beverage giant. What lyrics? Because of its ridiculous policy against including bad words in such an august publication, the NY Times doesn’t even say what the lyrics are! Which makes the entire article worthless from a journalistic perspective. The lyrics are the entire story…without them, it’s just a bunch of press release bullshit. FYI, because we are all adults here (and your kids already know the lyrics), here are the lyrics in question courtesy of Rap Genius:
Pop a lot of pain pills
Bout to put rims on my skateboard wheels
Beat that pussy up like Emmett Till
Yeah….
Two cell phones ringin’ at the same time
That’s your ho, callin’ from two different phones
Tell that bitch “leave me the fuck alone!”
See, you fuck her wrong, and I fuck her long
I got a love-hate relationship with Molly
I’d rather pop an ollie, and my dick is a trolly
Boy, I’ll bury you like Halle
How can people even discuss the artistic merit and/or offensiveness of the lyrics if you can’t print them? The Times should either simply publish whatever it is they are talking about or not run the story at all. (via @bdeskin, who has been giving the Times shit about their profanity policy on Twitter)
You know the drill: it’s a new mixtape from The Hood Internet:
Downloads, tour details, and more info on their site.
Update: I made a playlist on Rdio of the songs The Hood Internet used in Mixtape Volume Seven…sifting through their sources is a great way to discover new and previously overlooked music.
There are maybe 3-4 songs I couldn’t find on Rdio…they are either unreleased or mixes from Soundcloud. Enjoy.
Update: And here’s the same playlist for Spotify. (via @Afterschool)
What the heck is going on? New recent albums after long hiatuses from Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk, and Boards of Canada and now Neutral Milk Hotel is reuniting for a tour? Jesus H Musical Christmas.
After a weirdly abrupt ARG, it has been revealed that the new Boards of Canada album will be called Tomorrow’s Harvest and will be out on June 11 (the 10th in the UK). Pre-order at iTunes.
Rumors surfaced last year of a new Boards of Canada record. The other day, someone walked into a record shop and bought a Boards of Canada record that contained a single track of a few seconds of music and someone reciting a six-digit number:
So maybe we’re getting a new BoC album soon? Please? (via @crazymonk)
This is supposedly a leaked version of the song Get Lucky from Daft Punk’s forthcoming album, but from what I can tell, this is just an extended version of the song cobbled together from this minute-long commercial that ran during SNL this weekend. Not that that’s a bad thing…I’ve had it on repeat for the last 30 minutes.
The duo have, however, given their first interview about the album to Rolling Stone. (via kyleread)
Update: Hmm, getting some reports that this is the actual radio edit of Get Lucky…and it does have some Pharrell lyrics that weren’t in the promos and commercials. And if not, we’re getting closer!
(via @djrange)
Update: Ha! Probably still fake. But it’s the best fake so I’ll take it for now. Would probably take DP, Pharrell, and Rodgers themselves to top this one. (via @Robbie)
Update: Guess that last one actually was the genuine article, which is now available on iTunes, on Spotify, on Rdio, and at Amazon.
What if each member of the Bluth family made an album? The album covers might look something like these.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
Oh hello, what’s this? M83 did the soundtrack to Oblivion, the new sci-fi movie where Tom Cruise plays Wall-E? That will do quite nicely. Here it is on iTunes, Amazon, or Rdio.
I don’t read music so it’s difficult for me to say how useful this is, but the folks behind Hummingbird claim their new system of music notation is “easier to learn, faster to read, and simpler for even the trickiest music”.
Roll over, Beethoven. (via @veen)
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