| Author |
Message |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - 4:36 pm: | |
Considering music as a manifestation of its carrier technology, the three minute single being a product of the capacity of a seven inch single, I started thinking about how we could expand the time dimension of contemporary music.
The DVD is now a cheap and convenient storage medium and the mp3 is a useful compression technology, and both will work in most modern computers. If we assume that a reasonable quality mp3, 44khz 128kbps, runs at somewhere near 1MB per minute, and a common DVD holds 4.7GB, a quick approximation suggests that we could comfortably fit 78 hours of music onto the DVD. (If anyone feels like attempting a better approximation, please feel free to do the math!)
To give an idea of how much this is: a complete recording of Wagner's Ring is something like 15 hours long. We could fit it onto our notional disk six times with space for a couple of 70s double gatefold epics.
More on the ramifications of this to follow... |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 22, 2008 - 4:48 pm: | |
Now what are the possibilities for this space:
* We could use all three days and six hours of it for a single piece. The medium might suggest expansive minimalism, but with (a lot) more effort and a good deal of time on our hands we might pepper it with Richard Dadd-like detail and miniaturisation.
* We could include an album of a comfortable length, let us say under an hour, along with every alternative take, mix and commentaries from the mixing process, radio diaries from the musician's arguments and so forth.
* We could have a single track of moderate length, anywhere between one minute and one hour, with a bewildering number of alternate edits. This could be intended for random play so that with countless slight variants on a single piece we would never be sure on any listening how the track would end, what the lyrics will be this time, or whether it was a song or an instrumental.
In the case of this third option: how long would it take us to become accustomed to the variability? Would we start to detect hints that would allow us to feel which version we were encountering? Similarly with the three day long single track: would we start to notice aspects of the landscape that became familiar reference points? It would require effort and concentration, such as is required for the reading of a novel, but it might expand the listening experience, and the possibilities for recording. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 11:37 am: | |
Interesting stuff. How about one track, placed several times on a DVD with different spaces of silence between the placings, so you never quite know when it's going to come on again? It could start with a very loud bang. This might cause a mental unease similar to water torture.
Or a three-day long track consisting only of one short note every day, the rest silence. Could you be arsed? |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 11:44 am: | |
Current thinking after last night's experiments: timestretching Beatles songs from three minutes something up to an hour each. I actually used a Belle and Sebastian track for this experiment. When the bass came in it sounded rather doomy.
Other ideas: complete speech synth reading of the King James Bible running across the background of the whole album. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 12:02 pm: | |
>Water torture ...
I was going to say, sample sounds of water droplets fall into a puddle, then stretch them - but I found this, and got distracted:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqYBncyKpM
"What are birds? We just don't know." |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 12:20 pm: | |
Uncharacteristically, I'm tending away from torturing the audience with this. You're with them for the long haul, like a novel, the recording experience itself could become difficult if it's a malign creation.
That sounded hippy didn't it?
Anyway: my calculations from yesterday assumed a stereo recording. If we used mono we could double the length: six and a half days. With a little judicious use of lower resolution recording for some spoken word regions I think we might be able to extend it to a week.
A week!
What we're talking about here is producing 24 hour mono radio programming for a week. What could you do with that? (You could fuck off and call it Resonance FM!) You could have hourly "news" updates with programmes the length of a good sized album between them - day and night. A short beginners language course, a set of seminars on a period of ancient history. You could pepper in smattering of comedy series, fake adverts, a small city of audio materials.
The seven day period could be divided up thematically in other ways unevenly across its border: spring, summer, autumn, winter; nine months of pregnancy, ages of man - backwards, forwards and interleaved.
An album you could really live inside. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 12:37 pm: | |
BTW: re: birds. They did a short programme on the subject. It's an extra on the DVD. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 12:55 pm: | |
>>an album you could really live inside.
Well, how about simply recording everything that happens to you for a week? There might be libraries where one could borrow someone else's life for a week and use it to soundtrack your own. Imagine the coincidences that might occur! *thinks* on second thoughts, you might end up with the soundtrack to someone's morning ablutions while you were eating your breakfast... |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 1:46 pm: | |
Should it remain unmediated? The complete week would make a nice example of expanded field recording but how about with a commentary? The weirdness of multitrack time would start to tell on the narrator. And on the commentary of the commentary... |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 1:59 pm: | |
Uncage the Cage: set it going, and everything will turn into it! |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 2:06 pm: | |
The new 4'33. Four years, thirty three days. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 2:21 pm: | |
>>should it remain unmediated?
Perhaps the person doing the recording should be obliged to voice their thoughts, uncensored, whenever they become aware of them. Could get you into trouble in meetings though. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 2:25 pm: | |
If they carried a recorder about the size of a mobile phone they could probably carry on ongoing monologue comparatively unnoticed. And as long as they stayed out of my library, of course. |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 4:00 pm: | |
But hey, why not sign to some of these nice people, and let them handle the whole deal?
http://tinyurl.com/39twph |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 4:21 pm: | |
Thank the Lord for laptop studios! |
martin
Username: martin
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 - 4:52 pm: | |
At least now we'll know if we've walked into a Mafia toilet ...
And the reported incident with Dylan is so outrageous you can't help wondering if the guy was just talking down a dead phone line to impress Napier-Bell. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - 9:34 am: | |
You can live inside a three minute single too.
I like to think of it as like a bicycle wheel that sprays water out the back when it rains.
As we approach the week-single - does it become a weak signal? Making it a year, does that make it nearer infinity if in anycase a moment can be divided infinitely? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - 11:26 am: | |
What I imagine is, how each moment through the spokes of the wheel - spokes that speed makes invisible - speechless but spoken - appears a different world, a different circle through the same circle held in place by the invisible force of the speech of metal; a new slice of world in ever continuing change vanishes once more like a rope of sand, the arc of water spraying colour like a liquid peacock's tail, the peacock screaming with the application of the brakes. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - 3:11 pm: | |
I agree that you can live inside the three minute single, in fact that's part of it's selling point, but is it a crystallised world or is it a goldfish bowl?
I guess what I'm advocating is an epic yet domestic format. A format which is huge in scale yet intimate as the week is long. Somewhere between soap opera and Tarkovsky. I'm not sure expansion has to be a pompous or pretentious endeavour. Bohemian Rhapsody is not the only way to skin this particular cat.
Having said this: I prefer the slim modern novel to the Victorian doorstop. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - 3:20 pm: | |
To use another metaphor, do you mean iotar that in some instances it's as with a very long train. It takes a age to get it started, clanking down the line between first and last whatsit, it moves very slowly at the outset, but then gradually it picks up speed, and once going goes ... fast, so that midweek you are in that moving train existence, cannon-balling along, unstoppable. Unlike with say, that quick to start is quick to stop, and has far less momentum. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Tuesday, January 29, 2008 - 4:14 pm: | |
I'd imagine that would be the case. You'd be learning the vocabulary of the medium and the grammar of longer rhythmic units. Although I might be over-egging that slightly. As I suggested before: the techniques of pacing that have been developed for radio and the longer human-span units of days. And weeks would be in there representing... well, they'd represent themselves.
The soap opera or extended novel series is probably also a case in point here. The beginning of the series, where we are learning a lot of extrapolative detail about people, places and their relations slow down the narrative at first, while later when the story has built up its own momentum a few words, a colour, or an allusion to a symbol or sound can carry great structural weight.
Returning to the three minute single: to an extent we are playing with the same thing here. Only through understanding of certain tropes and generic niceties can we make anything out of the form. Narrative is often fragmentary and sometimes laden with slang, slogans and quotations from other pop songs.
But this could be said to be the case for any genre I guess. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 11:30 am: | |
This is an interesting compositional point. Something that I do unconsciously more or less or maybe automatically is a better word, or instinctively, is think on the same topic on and off for what can be periods of many years. It surprises me sometimes how I have been developing a theme just as if the sequence of thought was unbroken, whereas in reality there were huge breaks, discontinuities and so on. In fact this is my method of working, by default, one which I have begun to adopt with writing poems too. Working in spite of discontinuity or using discontinuity and trusting that somehow over time my brain will still manage to make sense. |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 11:54 am: | |
It is in fact essential. I have to keep reminding myself when I am working (on a philosophical topic) NOT to be linear. To let something stand discontinuously until whatever other parts are needed eventually appear. If I operate as a kind of slave to my linear mind I eventually just give up and throw it all away. Very destructive. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 12:13 pm: | |
You hear a new word and then you hear it everywhere.
Time is a great compositional tool. Sometimes I think that I'd like to pursue this or that particular structural or generic aim and without consciously working towards it you find that a few weeks or months later you are working in exactly this way. It's a good and a bad thing: it means that you are slightly out of sync with yrself. You are making stuff that represents where you were weeks and months ago rather than where you are now.
Maybe this is just some misguided illusion concerning the reality of the present. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 12:18 pm: | |
Or perhaps the me who has been working on the project and the me which says that it has done something are just separate departments. But yes, discontinuities all along the line. It will not cohere but the incoherence makes some sort of pattern of which one can say "I am here" and "I am here" and "I am here". |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 2:15 pm: | |
What does Klee say of visual art: You look for a compositional balance or a *resolution of infinity*, one or the other - something like that. For me it is generally the last.
I look forward to hearing your new work io! |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Wednesday, January 30, 2008 - 3:41 pm: | |
Well, the new album is only about 78 minutes long - as an album that's quite long but in terms of expanded listening it's quite minor. And yes, there are a couple of three minute tracks on there too!
Actually the other day Al was suggesting that we should meet up with you for an amble around some galleries or something. Are you still at the mindspace.screaming.net address? |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 9:04 am: | |
The new Big Block 454 album is a proper pop album, around 40 minutes long with the 'singles' placed in appropriate places and 'quiet' songs at the end of each 'side'. Quite an effort to select the tracks - we had twice as many. Funny though - it seems very short. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 10:22 am: | |
It's definitely good if you have too much material to choose from. Amongst other things I have a spare eighteen minute track knocking about which would have completely overwhelmed the flow of the album so I'll have to put it somewhere else. Shame because it's actually quite a tight eighteen minutes and to my ears would make a nice little single.
But then again, my idea of an ideal single is Sandoz in the Rain.
Another time-related matter: my partner in Raagnagrok, Mark P, has observed that during recorded jam sessions I tend to play with an idea for five minutes and then change. Apparently it's pretty consistent. Presumably this is some measure of my attention span for the electric sitar. |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 12:53 pm: | |
Do you do alaps, jods and jhalas, and suchlike? |
mjp
Username: mjp
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 1:00 pm: | |
Io I am at that address so give it a try.
Favourite listening at the moment is Iggy Pop. I love his last two albums. I still haven't listened to the new Stooges The Weirdness but will have it soon. Albums like Skull Ring could be called minor, compared to Avenue B, for example, but they are great fun. Iggy makes me laugh. I think he is several steps ahead of almost everyone, energy wise, art wise. To my surprise. I cannot understand Cope's suggestion that Iggy is artistically dead, a description that I find baffling. Could he be jelous? |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 1:02 pm: | |
When we started we were more concerned with carelessly apeing Indian classical music but we're as likely to borrow from blues, sephardic music or whatever these days. But there is usually something resembling an alap which serves the purpose of getting our volume levels together and that will then develop rhythmically into something more chugging which a charitable observer could call a jhala.
Not yr original question: although I would rather like to do jodhpurs. At least for one gig. But have never found any in Oxfam. Found a gold turban that was used for one gig last year. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 1:03 pm: | |
Odd that you shd mention Iggy:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/46232797@N00/2232732420/ |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 1:04 pm: | |
Or maybe this one, since it works:
http://tinyurl.com/2tlnu2 |
alex
Username: alex
Registered: 10-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 3:04 pm: | |
Most gigs, I start with a kedgeree, before moving into a bungalow. |
iotar
Username: iotar
Registered: 6-2006
| | Posted on Thursday, January 31, 2008 - 3:10 pm: | |
A kedgereedoo, Bungalow Bill? |