Pink Air

All you need is Live

At the risk of blaspheming the father, the son and the holy ghosts, I was disappointed by the "new" Beatles album, Love. Maybe it's not surprising given that it was built primarily as a Cirque du Soleil backing track rather than a self-standing album, but the mixes are so conservative that, with a few lovely and promising exceptions (like "Sun King" played backward fading into the intro of "Something") there's nothing revelatory or insightful about it, which is what a great remix should be. Love just feels less interesting than it ought to given the interestingness of the elements the Martins had to work with. It's as if they were asked to dj rather than produce. (Admittedly a vanishingly fine line these days.)

But maybe the richness of the elements was actually part of the problem. So many Beatles songs, even individual parts from songs, are so familiar and interesting that you can't help hearing echoes of the original version, and all those echoes mixed together may make a mess in the mind of the listener. At a certain point, interesting + interesting ≠ more interesting, but confusion. (Kind of like what happened to the show Lost.)

But why not try it yourself and see? A demo version of Live, the best music-mixing-mashing-making software in the world, is available here for free. You can spend months digging into its creative possibilities, but you can also start making interesting mixes of your own pretty quickly. Of course, Live won't make you a great composer/producer/arranger/musician like Sirs George, Paul et al., but it can help you to become a more creative dj. And we're all dj's now.

Don't be a hater

"Here is what is wrong with the British pop industry.  You've had people writing songs who don't give a shit about the people that buy them and you've allowed that to happen.  You should all be hung, drawn and quartered."

This friendly advice courtesy of everybody and nobody's favorite music production team, Stock Aitken & Waterman. Read the 1987 Smash Hits interview and substitute "advertising" for "pop music". Oooh, creepy!

Lyrical errors

Over the past few years I've been collecting interesting misspellings in memos and e-mails. Some of them are so common ("We need to flush out this idea") that the assumed meaning may have changed. What do you do differently when you think that you're flushing an idea rather than fleshing it out?
Whatever their effect on communication, some of them are quite beautiful and would make great song titles. So here's "In Summery", the first track from my upcoming (2010, let's say) album, "Mellow Dramatic".

Terra Semicognita

If you're looking for something that you've never seen before, how do you know when you've found it? I'm wondering because a few days ago I came across the music of Matthew Herbert for the first time and as soon I heard it, I recognized it as something I'd been looking for.
If this had happened in proper cause and effect order, I might first have thought, "I'm looking for something halfway between They Might Be Giants and Aphex Twin." Then I could have queried something like Pandora or Amazon to find the overlap between fans of each. Though I've never had much luck with those kinds of systems. Usually you get a lot of soundalikes of your seed music when what you want is a non-linear result. Something you didn't know you were looking for.
This sort of thing happens fast and slow at the same time. The recognition itself is immediate. In the first few seconds of listening, I could feel my face forming the "interesting" expression, a furrowed brow with a broad, unconscious smile underneath. This is the face I look for when showing advertising. It's the best immediate indicator of positive interest that I know, more valid and reliable than what people will tell you afterwards. It's not one of Ekman's basic facial expressions, but it should be.
What's slow is the subterranean buildup of information, pushing you towards the moment of recognition. Once I knew Herbert's name, I found that I'd mentally bookmarked references to him for some time, but never remembered his name or did any further investigation  "Oh, he's the guy who sampled all the food in his house. Oh, he's the guy who wrote that musical Dogme thing." With no folder to live in, these bits were in my mind, but invisible.
Really interesting things often feel half-remembered, like a dream or deja-vu. There's a certain amount of pleasant frustration that drives us to find out more, even as we're never fully satisfied that we've grasped it. As if there's a very important personal secret up ahead that's always just out of sight.