Stereoblag

New album published: 3 7 4 11 2 5

2011-08-25T17:18:00.003-03:00

My newest album is already available for free listening and download on Jamendo: 3 7 4 11 2 5 features six tracks, all entirely instrumental, with a radically more electronic and abstract sound than my previous releases. The title of the album is a numeric pattern used to determine most -- but not all! -- of the rhythmic aspects of the music in different scales, from within each individual measure, to the album as a whole. All of the melodies, harmonies, instrument choices and everything else were NOT generated algorithmically, however.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 11: v

2011-08-14T23:19:00.002-03:00

This was one of the easiest songs to conceive -- and I mean easy in a good, self-assuring way, not in a dismissive way, if you know what I mean. Basically, this song was begging to be written; firstly because, since it would be the closer of the suite, I wanted it to be VERY different, upbeat and sparkling; and secondly because it matched exactly the mood I wanted for it. It was a win-win situation, and I can't think of any better piece to fit in here.

Yet, it's the simplest song in the set - a boogie-woogie, nothing more, nothing less. Of course, me being me, I just have to twist it somehow; and the best way to do that was to use unexpected chords -- in this case, modulating from C major to C-sharp major, and so on and on, culminating in a crescendo over a diminished chord, and back to the main key. It didn't need to be anything else. It's one of my favourite tunes in here, for being so effective.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 10: t

2011-08-14T23:12:00.002-03:00

This short piece came to my head in one lucky, inspired moment. I don't know exactly what prompted me, but I was seeking for a slow, solemn theme that transmitted a stately, not exactly sad, but poignant feel. Not that there's any special significance to this track, but I wanted it to have a different feel from the others. I guess I was thinking of using the sustain pedal for an enhanced effect, and when this sequence of notes hit my head, I scribbled them down on a notebook, with the working title of "Pedal".

Writing it was very easy a fast -- the song pretty much wrote itself from start to end. It uses a pretty predictable trick halfway through, which is to switch to what would be the relative major key, but in the minor key. In practical terms, the song starts in G minor, which has B-flat as its relative major key, but the song switches to B-flat minor instead. Yet, the tail end suggests a major key, and I like the effect of the trailing notes, which creates a hazy, ambiguous tonality.

Just not I realised that G minor and B-flat minor are exactly the two keys used in the song The Wedding, by the Legendary Pink Dots, which is also a piano led track which I truly, really love -- but I don't think I knew that particular song back then! A minor coincidence, I believe...

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 9: s

2011-08-09T10:46:00.003-03:00

I have to admit, I was scraping the bottom of the barrel for this one tune. I was out of ideas! All the other tunes just came to me one way or another: either the idea hit me on the right moment, or I remembered I had something that fit; but for this one, neither occurred. So I sort of "cheated": I started listening to old songs from the "project" mentioned in the "c" and "i" posts, trying to see if I could salvage something, but without much hope. Then, suddenly, this incredible bass riff hit me in the face: I had completely forgotten it, and not only it was brilliant and perfect for this spot, but I was delighted to write a "reggae" for the cycle. All I had to do was to start writing.

The beauty here is that I didn't have to change any melodic content at all from its original incarnation. The left hand melody was left intact, chord changes and all, and all I had to do was write the right hand staccatos, and make a crescendo lasting for the whole composition. I was amazed at how good it turned out. This was the very last piece I wrote for the cycle, and after it, I just started recording. A very happy ending indeed.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 8: l

2011-08-09T10:32:00.002-03:00

Among the eight compositions, this is the oldest one. The interesting fact is that it has been published before, on an album that I have pulled off because of its extremely subpar quality. It had eight tracks, and one of them was called "Water", and it contained a quite pretty piano melody that I had come across about 11 years ago. Of course, back then, I simply didn't know moderation, and the song carried on and on to nine minutes.

The only thing that truly saddened me about removing that album from the Internet is that the pretty melody would go to waste... but only until this project came to happen. It was the perfect opportunity to showcase the melody in its glorious simplicity. I didn't change anything substantial, so it's essentially the same as it was 10 years ago. Of course, this version is only one minute and a half long, and features solo piano, but it sounds a lot better now. I have always been quite proud of it, and I was happy that it fit so well in the project. It's a calm, peaceful song without being too cheesy.

To me, the stretch of "i", "j" and "l" is the true crowning achievement of this work for me.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 7: j

2011-08-07T22:21:00.003-03:00

One of the things that worried me is that this song is just too beautiful, and it terrified me that it would overshadow "i". Honestly, I'm not sure if it does -- I have no doubts that "i" is superior, but this one makes quite a competition.

It's an old composition, but not so old. In fact, all I had was a left hand figure in A major and in E minor, which is used in the beginning of the piece, and that was all. I found it so good, though, that I wrote it as a MIDI file and kept it filed with the title "Moon", because that is what it reminded me of. I'm not sure of when I wrote this, but I'm fairly sure it predates Big Robot, Little Robot. I never forgot about it, and when this project came by, I was delighted to bring back that little piece for it.

Like I said before, I had originally envisioned "d" for the place of "j", but I always felt that it didn't quite fit. I wanted a piece that evoked a profoundly fertile and imaginative mind and a gentle, tender feeling with a tinge of playfulness. I initially thought of a happy, jumpy melody with unpredictable chord changes and large intervals, but it wasn't working. Then I listened to that little piece I had written, and it all just came to me. It was just a matter of expanding those figures to other chords and making those dreamy, vague notes on the right hand. The closing chords were just a happy finding and matched my vision miraculously. I always had a penchant, for whatever reason, towards the G chord with that suspended augmented fourth; it works in other chords as well, but in G, it seems to have a very peculiar beauty. And for whatever reason, it translates exactly what I wanted to express in this piece.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 6: i

2011-08-07T22:13:00.002-03:00

This piece is an interesting case: the person represented in it, in spite of being part of the larger group of people represented by the album, is a special case for me. Therefore I wanted to give it a piece that was at the same level as the others, but that was particularly precious at a personal level. Therefore, I reached for this old composition that, for whatever reason, struck a chord in me and never left my memory.

It belonged to the same project from "c", but it was never actually included in it. I had a sudden moment of inspiration and wrote the song all at once, and I noticed that it truly stood out from the other songs. Originally, this was arranged for synthesizers and a few woodwinds, and it was a challenge to adapt it for piano, because I wasn't sure on which octave each line should be. I didn't want the notes to overlap, but I wanted them to be at the right range. I was afraid to make the right hand melody too high pitched, but it was pretty effective. I have to say I'm very proud of this song, and utterly surprised that I was able to salvage such an old composition with so little changes. Basically the only thing that is new is the arpeggios in the finale with that sudden change in dynamics. To me, the song does have a tinge of sadness, but the most important quality is that of deepness and introspection, of something huge, profound and profoundly beautiful. It gives me the feeling of climbing a hill and, at the top, finding an immensely beautiful landscape. Yeah, it's THAT personal.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 5: g

2011-08-07T21:52:00.003-03:00

This is a recent composition, but it was not written for this cycle. For about an year, I've been fiddling with ideas for entirely electronic and abstract albums, and one of them involved making a suite of several very short pieces, or sketches. One day, I caught myself with that descending melody, which sounded pretty endearing to me. I wrote it down, with the intention to make it as a simple synthesizer tune. When I started writing the cycle, though, I remembered I had this tune and noticed it fit in well. It was all a matter for adapting it to piano.

The right hand melody was written for the cycle, though, as well as the whole middle portion. I had the urge to make the melody filled with very large intervals, and the result sounded pretty nice to me. It's the kind of tune that, to me, is just as simple as it should be, and as effective as it could be. I can't think of a single note to change... though there aren't many at all...

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 4: d

2011-08-05T13:20:00.003-03:00

This sounds an awful lot like Scary, from Big Robot, Little Robot, but I couldn't help it: THIS was the sound that I wanted. Oddly enough, when I first thought of this tune, I intended it to be the "j" track, but I realised it didn't sit right. Then, I realised that this tune was absolutely perfect for "d", and there you have it.

In terms of feel and mood, though, it's very far from Scary, which was goofy, slapstick and almost self-deprecating. This one, however, is merely a jumpy and neat little song intended to make the listener smile, at least a little bit. The "dark" second piece was mostly a facetious way to add some tension to the song, and hopefully the resolution from that hanging diminished chord into the sparkly coda in C major should show that it's not a menacing moment at all. This is, legimately, a happy tune.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 3: c

2011-08-05T13:13:00.005-03:00

This piece is based on a very old composition. In fact, it's rooted on a project that I started a long time before, and which is one of the most obscure things I ever did. I don't think you can find the original project on the Internet anymore, and that's good, because it's not that worth listening.

That project was a song cycle set to a collaborative story made on a Simpsons fanworks forum. That obscure enough to you? Well...

Anyway, the left hand melody that starts the composition was the opening theme of the first track on the original cycle, and it popped up a few times later as well. It used to represent frustration and deception, but it actually has a pretty mellow and sweet feel. All the chord changes and the right hand melodies are new material, written specifically for Eleven Gifts. It was one of those cases in which I decided a theme was too good not to be explored further, and I have to say that I've done here, in a minute and a half, what I couldn't do in 10 minutes back in 2004 or so, when the original piece was written. It's not meant to be a sad song. It's not happy, either, but it has a merely contemplative and calming effect for me. I like it quite a bit.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 2: a

2011-08-04T11:47:00.003-03:00

Back in 2007, when I wrote Big Robot, Little Robot, I felt I could tackle the challenge to write a full, three movement piano sonata. The first movement would be the the first track from that album, Scary, and the two remaining movements would be entirely new. This never came to fruition, but I did write the main theme for the third movement. It remained shelved for years, until I came up with the Eleven Gifts project.

The theme never left my head, so recovering it was quite easy, and it was also easy to find the person to attribute it to. The waltzing, partly-joyful-partly-whimsical feel was exactly what I wanted. The already written material actually ends at the full-tone descending scale -- everything from that point on was newly written. It was actually sort of improvised: I intended to keep the waltzing rhythm, but add those tonality shifts and crazy dissonances that I used in Scary. The result satisfied me: it sounds dense, fast, slapstick, and when an actual melody seems to settle in, it's quickly broken and discarded. That's the main idea.

This was one of the easiest song-person matches, in fact -- not only because I already had the theme, but because it was a perfect match. I like it quite a lot, and I guess the fact that the theme ended up here means that the "sonata" idea was never going to work anyway.

Eleven Gifts in depth, part 1: J

2011-08-04T11:28:00.003-03:00

I don't know if I have made myself clear enough in the places where I have published Eleven Gifts, but in case you didn't notice, each piece in this cycle is dedicated to a person. The lower case pieces are in alphabetical order, but this one sticks out for a particular reason.

This piece wasn't the first one to be conceived, though. Far from it: some of these pieces are actually reworkings of songs I've written from 5 to 10 years ago, while many are new compositions. This is an entirely new composition, and the idea struck me quite quickly.

I was afraid that the sound of it was too "menacing" or terrifying to associate to the person it represents. The idea isn't to be menacing at all: my intention was to represent a very strong presence and a forwards motion, a very moving and powerful force. The very fast one-note ostinato on the left hand was a pretty obvious choice, and I'm a bit sad that I couldn't find a piano sample that made it sound as good as I wanted, but it still delivers. The odd rhythm and staccato chords are intended to grab your attention and keep you focused on it, but the ending unveils a tender and heartwarming feel that leaves your spirit positive and lifted. That's pretty much exactly what this person is all about.

The rhythm was one of those things that hit me all at once, and I had to keep replaying it in my head so I wouldn't forget it. It was too good to let it pass. Once I got to write it down, it was all a matter to find the right chords, which wasn't too hard. The softer middle portion was written entirely on-the-spot, and the finale just grew out of it. It was surprisingly easy to write this track, which was extremely satisfying: it was expecting quite a challenge from it. But that's art: the challenges sometimes are exactly where you didn't expect any.

So much to do, so much to do...

2011-07-25T11:12:00.003-03:00

I've got plenty of parallel personal projects going on, and sometimes I even fail to keep track of them. But I like this: it's better to have lots of stuff to do, than to have NOTHING to do!

I've currently got an album on the works. I spent several months staggering around on a project, and things got especially tangled up when college got in the way. Fortunately I managed to write Eleven Gifts very quickly, and that made me very satisfied. Finally I decided to put that project on hold, and started working on another, completely different project, and it's coming along nicely and it sounds... well, interesting. It's very abstract, electronic and far removed from the likes of Highways. It's also very mixed and rhythmic, and I'm hoping to complete it in the next two months, maybe, now that college is finally over, and over for good.

Stuff that happened since the last time I posted here

2011-02-14T16:11:00.004-02:00

Yes, it's been a long time, I know.

Basically, three things are worth mentioning here:

1. Highways has been released, and like every other album I've made, is available for free download. I am pretty satisfied with the results, and I can safely say that, finally, I made justice to those old, old songs.
2. I've also released another album, called Eleven Gifts. It's not properly an "album", but a cycle of eleven very simple, very short pieces for solo piano. It was made in just three days in December, and the piece has a personal significance, but it's not that important. Some of those pieces are VERY old ideas that were finally worked into something complete and satisfactory.
3. I have reopened my album reviews's website! This is an old project of mine that I used to have, but it went offline due to a misfortune and I never had the opportunity to put it back online... until now! The reviews shall be added slowly and gradually, and there are very few so far. But it will grow -- I intend to put back all my old reviews, properly re-edited and rewritten as needed. It'll be fun! I'll stop putting review stuff here: all my new opinions will be published there. So check it out!

"Highways" -- progress!

2010-05-25T10:35:00.002-03:00

I found I'm having a quite satisfactory progress with my current project. As I've stated in the past, I am working on a new album, which is actually the "definitive" issue of a little collection of blobs of sound I once used to call an "album" named Musics for Highways (sic), back from 2002 or something like that. I'm happy with how it's coming along; right now I'm in the stage of tinkering and recording the instruments, without much worry about mixing. For people who never heard the old songs, it'll be quite a shock to compare these songs with my previous albums.

Maybe by the middle of the year I'll have it done, or at least pretty much done. And I've already got a project on the queue. Things look great.

Last time I talked about this project, I was anxiously waiting for Autechre's Oversteps. Guess what? The album's excellent.

The problem with randomness in computer games

2010-03-15T14:00:00.004-03:00

As a fairly avid Flash game player, sometimes I come to think that the random() function is one of the great curses the programming languages has thrown on the gaming world.

See, Flash games are very often not done by professionals. So, among the many games you'll play, you'll come across a lot of games with clunky controls, bad design decisions, stupid gameplay and so on and on. Honestly, I think bad graphics and bad music are entirely forgivable, because the amount of HORRIBLE designing and development I've seen compensates for all the bad art out there. And many of my gripes seem to converge towards one thing: many designers don't understand how randomness works.

I should say: I'm talking as a PLAYER, not as an actual game developer. Even though I am a professional programmer and a student of Computer Science, the only time I've come to write a full-fledged computer game was for a college assignment. I often have ideas for games, but with the time, the skill and the tools I have, they're basically impossible to make. However, I understand the basic concepts reasonably well, and that's enough to see that some people should take a few lessons before they go out making games.

Get this: randomness is dangerous. In fact, it's so dangerous that pseudo-randomness is STILL dangerous enough (remember that computers are incapable of generating truly random numbers -- it at best APPROXIMATES such thing). Sometimes, games rely entirely on it in order to make things happen. However, depending on the nature of the game, this can make almost unplayable. For example, if a game drops power-ups that play a very important role on the player's performance, randomness can ruin things: one match can be extremely easy, since the player gets many useful power-ups, while the next one becomes damn near impossible, since they just never come. Or, for example, if the arrival of enemies is exaggeratedly randomised, they can make the game inexpicably hard, or even lead the player into situations where death is unavoidable. I've once played a game called Balance Balls 2, a game where the player must keep a red ball balanced on a moving platform, while other balls (some with power up/downs) fall onto it. The player can tilt the platform left that right, to get rid of the enemy balls, but the strength is limited, so once one of the sides become too heavy, the platform inevitably falls. Can you see the problem there? Yes: there are times when an absurd number of balls fall EXACTLY on the same spot, leading into an unavoidable death.

So what's the matter with that? Simple: it removes the challenge. A game like that becomes a simple matter of trial and error, of waiting for THE right opportunity to succeed. The player realises it's not his ability that determines the outcome of the game, but pure chance. So, why bother trying?

On the other hand, I'm not saying that randomness SHOULD NOT be used. Randomness is usually desired, or even necessary, to make the game work. But it seems many developers work with the idea that if the game is not COMPLETELY random and chance-based, it becomes "too easy", because predictability spoils the game.

Besides, does predictability spoil the game? Not necessarily. Again, it all depends on the nature of the game. For example, if the game uses dice, or a similar artefact to decide certain outcomes, then the dice NEED to be as random as possible, to avoid giving someone an unfair advantage. But in solo games, or in games of skill, the player NEEDS to have some sort of solid ground. Randomness doesn't need to be extinguished: it needs to be CONTROLLED. The challenge is in determining how controlled it must be, but there needs to be rules for how much the game can vary. When the game catches the player by surprise, it must be a reasonable surprise. It WON'T KILL the game if you downplay randomness a little bit; in fact, chances are that it will improve it.

Plans for the (near?) future

2010-02-25T11:13:00.005-03:00

I thought I'd need a long break from music after the particularly draining task of finishing Of How a World Is Built, but I can't help it: when the creative drive grabs you, there's no way to stop it (without driving yourself crazy, that is).

Thing is, there were actually two projects in my queue as I finished that album. To one side, there was a totally abstract and electronic project I wanted to start, based on ideas I had been collecting while working on the album. It would sort of mash-up the styles of electronic music that I have been listening, while crossing it over with other stuff, such as my fascination with TV and radio vignettes. At the other side, though, was the extremely tempting idea to remake, from scratch, one of my older albums.

Right now, I'm about halfway into the latter project. I'm honestly surprised: I see a lot of potential in this work, and I'm eager to get it done. Basically, I took the songs from Musics for Highways, which consisted originally of MIDI songs recorded straight from the Windows General MIDI FM synthesizer, and rebuilt them entirely using the technologies and software I've employed on my two previous albums. I am not treating this as a "remake", as a "new edition" of the album: I'm treating this as the "actual make", as if the previous recording was a mere early draft, a prototype, a rough sketch. What I like about those songs are the naïvety, the lack of pretension, the directness of ideas, and how well they matched the concept of highways and roadtrips. Maybe, just maybe, I'll get one or two tracks recorded soon and published for a preview. For now, just wait anxiously for the release of Oversteps, by Autechre.

Commercial music

2010-02-21T18:08:00.002-03:00

I have a couple of "side interests" that wax and wane in my life, with indeterminate frequency. They range from "pretty ordinary" to "somewhat exotic", from the things that could be mentioned in a friendly chat, to things that would be seen as pretty bizarre, even if there's nothing wrong with them. One such interests is in adverts. It's a somewhat contradictory interest, though: I have never studied advertising, I watch almost no TV at all, read few magazines and almost never listen to the radio. My interest, however, stems mostly from childhood memories, when the TV and the radio were much more present in my life. Once in a while I start hunting for old adverts and jingles that spark a wisp of nostalgia in me, and quickly my interest broadens towards advertising in general.

Recently, I reached a pretty radical paradigm shift, compared to the thoughts I had as a teenager. I have no shame in recognising advertising as an art, though I admit that's a dangerous statement. Dangerous because it's bound to be interpreted in a multitude of ways. Many people think advertising is the beating heart of the consumerist capitalism, that promotes poverty and the destruction of the planet and so on and on. Others think that it's downright sacrilegious to think of an advert, something designed to SELL, as a work of art. Both are empty arguments. The former, because I don't necessarily become a proponent of the evils of capitalism by cherishing one of its elements (and people who think so should start looking beyond the surface of things); and the latter deserves some more discussion.

Let's imagine an advertising jingle, since the main focus of this blog is music. A jingle is commissioned by a company in order to make money, in this case, by selling a product. Some people feel disgusted by that. I say: do you know all those works by so called "classical" composers, which today are performed by expensive orchestras, played in concert halls and recorded by fancy record labels with big names? Those works were also commissioned by rich and noble people, and their goal was also to make money. The only difference, here, is that those composers were not selling anything other than their own talent. But you see, the fact that those works were made for money does not mean that those works can't be works of art. Money and art are not mutually exclusive, unlike many people think. The more "romantic" music enthusiasts think that music must be made exclusively with passion and inspiration, and money should be left aside. That's NOT how the business works; and when I mean "business", I mean, yes, all those artists that are heard and loved for decades, NOT just the media fads.

Also, a jingle is not a product put out in a matter of seconds. Writing a good jingle takes a great deal of talent, of sensitivity, of vision and great skills. Think about it: a regular song can use 3 or 4 minutes and repeated listens to sink into your mind. A jingle has half a minute to do much more than that! A jingle needs to grab you right from the very first seconds, and keep the message in your mind for the rest of the day at least. Sounds easy?

Of course there are many low quality jingles and adverts, that try to get by solely on repetition and exaggeration. But there are adverts that leave a strong impression for years afterwards. There are things that I remember clearly and cherish even after 15 years! Does that mean I am a brainless sheep, follower of mass media? Or does it mean that there are incredibly intelligent, talented people working in that medium? I'm just stating facts here, but there are renowned artists that have worked in adverts. Speaking of Brazil alone, film-maker Fernando Meirelles, director of City of God (one of my favourite films), The Constant Gardener and Blindness, has directed TV adverts. Musicians and famous and respected as Antônio Carlos Jobim and João Gilberto have composed and performed jingles.

You'll say that they have "sold out". Sold out for what? Meirelles's feature films also give him money; Jobim and Gilberto's songs also gave them money. Besides, they were not openly and blandly selling off their image for a product; they were merely being professional artists. We may notice a difference there: it may be extremely annoying when a famous celebrity accepts to sell his image, but what's the matter if the artist truly puts his heart and soul into his work, even if it's just to sell something? In that vein, I remind you that Tom Waits, of all people, has done voiceover work for an advert; in fact, an advert for Purina dog chow (which you can watch HERE). Oh, Waits fans will want to kill me for that one, but I say, what's the matter? Waits does a brilliant job, in an entirely professional way. If he has decided to never do that kind of stuff again, it's for his own principles; doesn't mean the WHOLE act is rotten. Need more examples? What about Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart offering their music and voice for Luden's Cough Drops? Watch HERE. Amazing work!

Notice, though, that I'm not saying that all artists should be forced to accept their songs used in commercials, or anything; this is a business that requires respect. If someone doesn't want his work or image associated with advertisement (like Tom Waits), he has to be respected. What I am defending, though, is the vision of advertisement as a form of art. And, as with every form of art, you gotta learn to appreciate it.

Of How a World is Built: Officially released

2010-02-01T15:45:00.002-02:00

The album is now finished and released. As usual, it's available for free download, both on its official page and on its Jamendo page. Download right now!

The place of emotion in music

2009-12-30T16:29:00.005-02:00

I've been willing to talking about this for a long time, but it always seemed like a foreboding task. It's not a complex argument, but it's difficult to deliver it the right way.

The topic of "Emotion" in music always baffled me, somehow. It might seem strange, since emotions are extremely intuitive, and everyone knows what they are. That's exactly the problem: everyone seems apt to talk about emotion in music, because they know emotions so well. But talking about emotions in PEOPLE is different from talking about emotions in music. "Emotions in people" are clear and intuitive because emotions are IN the people, they come from within them. Emotions are not IN music. Music has no emotions, they don't express emotions -- it's the ARTIST that uses music to express their emotion, if he wishes to. This line of reasoning may sound clear and obvious, but many, many people don't follow it.

Go out and see how many people talk about how "emotional" a particular song is. Go and read the opinions of who think someone's playing or singing is "emotional". I ask myself: how is a listener able to objectively detect that? That would imply that music can deliver distinct, unambiguous emotions by itself. So, that means we only need to find the correct combination of musical and sonic properties to deliver one specific emotion. That way, we effectively transform music into a language, free of ambiguity and obscurity. And... there are problems. Firstly, art doesn't have to be a form of one-way communication: it's not a lecture, not a lesson, it's not the artist telling the audience how it's supposed to react. Music, as well as any form of art, can be interpreted differently by different people, and in my opinion, THAT is what should be encouraged. The audience should fill in the gaps with their own perception, turning art into an almost interactive experience; yes, interactive, since the art "changes" as the audience changes their perception. So, making music an unambiguous language is an obstacle for that. Secondly, different cultures around the world have adopted different musical systems, which means that one musical piece would NOT be interpreted the same across those different cultures, even if the artist truly, really wanted that. So the "language" of music is a social construction; it is restrictive, alienated people outside that culture and diminishes the possibilities of innovation and originality. In short, it sucks.

Unfortunately, that's how music has been progressing since... well, forever. Certain combinations of chords and melodies are perceived as "emotional", and quickly they become clichés; tired, annoying, ineffective clichés. Is THAT what we want from music? Now you see why 20th century classical music sounds so "crazy"?

Oh, no, but I'm getting it wrong, right? Emotion in music does not come from certain notes or chords: it comes from the energy, the spontaneity, the "feeling" of the artist. Oh, well. Again, I could question how "energy" and "spontaneity" could be unambiguously detected by the listener, but actually I wouldn't have a very strong point. However, recorded music nowadays is NOT AT ALL what most people think it is. Any piece of music you hear nowadays most likely has been a product of painstaking, tiresome, cold and calculated studio work. Dozens of takes are recorded, lots of effects are applied, even complete takes are edited all the way to Hell and back, things are chopped, spliced together, and so on and on, to the point where there is hardly anything "spontaneous" going on. With that, it's hard to tell if an artist is truly "expressing" himself, because the bigger worry is with making the whole thing sound RIGHT. So, we have no way of telling whether one particular part of the performance is pure human emotion or pure fakery. The only way you can tell is by intuition. Either you know the artist well enough to recognise his habits and know what they mean, or you're most likely guessing.

And yet, even with all that effort going into making the recording sound "right", we enjoy those recordings. To us, it doesn't matter how many dozen edits there are, or how many dozen takes were recorded, or which instruments are playing in each track. Music, even almost completely drained of "spontaneity", is still enjoyable. How come?

The truth, as I see it, is: emotion is not in the music. Emotion comes from within YOURSELF. The music merely provokes you, and it's YOU who concocts those emotions. That's why music works differently in different people, to the point where certain pieces of music can cause wildly different effects and provoke radically different emotions in different people. And that, my friends, is one of the things I like THE MOST about music.

So, the next time you're talking about how "emotional" a song is, don't be surprised if I dismiss your opinion entirely -- it tells more about YOU, as a listener, than about the music, which is what I'm more concerned about.

Of How a World is Built: PROGRESS!

2009-12-05T23:15:00.002-02:00

In spite of the worry and bother brought forth by the closing of the semester (which was lot less dire than in previous semesters, I'll admit), the album has been coming across nicely. Most of the instruments have been recorded, and only the last track has several tracks yet to be recorded or written -- but I'm in a pretty good pace, and I'm quite satisfied with the palette of sounds I've assembled. So, in short, hooray!

Notice: recording all parts is not the entire job. There's a lot of mixing and tweaking job to be done, and a bit of "post-processing" and addition of effects which will be made in a later stage. I've still yet to hear these tracks in close detail, to determine whether they sound good enough, and I'll leave that for after the last track is entirely recorded. But yeah, the parts remaining are relatively few. I dare say I'm about 85% finished with the album, and if everything goes fine, by early next year, I'll have it out.

One problem? I'm still undecided on the visual artwork. I have a few ideas running in my head, and I don't know in which one I should invest. This is for later, it's true, but I feel like being so into the album should help me to choose. Maybe I should focus exclusively on the music instead.

Anyway, I already have plenty of plans of things to do after this album. But I won't get ahead of myself: I really, really want to make the best job I can do with this record, and make it as good as I can, in terms of sound. The material here truly demands a lot of attention to detail, and I don't want to rush things.

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 9)

2009-10-22T21:08:00.011-02:00

First off, I'm cheating: I started playing the album BEFORE I came here to post. Why? I didn't really plan to post, but I decided to DO something and make my first post after, what? two months. TWO months. Anyway, the album:

Shinola, vol. 1

This is an "assorted bits" album put together by the band, apparently supposed to be the first in a series which currently contains only one instalment. Another "hilarious" joke from the band? I'd guess not: they're probably amassing more material for a second volume. This album comprises left over tracks from several sessions, a few new tracks and altered versions of songs released on other alternate releases. I don't want to go in details here because, honestly, it doesn't matter. What matters is the music. And in terms of music, this is probably their most inconsistent to date. "Duh, it's an odds and ends album!", you say. Well, but these are odds and ends with wildly varying quality, I say. QUALITY, see?

So, anyway, I've only heard the first track so far. Tastes Good on th' Bun, as far as I can tell, is a Pure Guava outtake. Surely sounds like it, and, well, for it to have been left off from an album like that, you can guess what it sounds like: meandering, pointless, and trying to pass itself off solely on its "quirkiness" and whacky sense of "humour". GOODNESS, does this overstay its welcome. Alright, NOW we're going fully real time. Off we go with...

... Boys Club, a parody on overly "gay" pop tunes. Yeah, you could guess that. Okay, the sound they're getting is really convincing and funny, with an EXTREMELY "slick" production, squeaky backing vocals, a groovy chord progression and a fun vocals impression by Gene Ween. Again, it probably goes on for about 20 iterations of the chorus too many. Am I noticing a trend there? Oh, well, it's not a bad effort at all. Now, I Fell in Love Today, a... blues send-up? Very slow and plodding, an insistent guitar line, and with a "soulful" vocal delivery. Yeah, so the joke is a lot more subtle here, but we're still trudging on "obvious pastiche" territory -- which already sets the standards lower than those on the three previous albums. Okay, so Quebec had two obvious parodies at the start, but then it turned the table completely around with Transdermal Celebration (man, what an AMAZING song, that! Can I stop this album and put that song on instead?... no?). Oh, I like the effect on the guitar solo here! It's a shame that we only get so little of those clever guitar effects on songs like these! Ok, guys, I already heard you can do a pretty good imitation of this stuff, now can we PLEASE go on? Which sessions did this get culled off? This is not a new one, is it?... oh, Wikipedia says it is. Crap! You'd better set the standards higher now!

Hm, now it's Big Fat Fuck... ok, I asked for too much. This was released before on an Internet "release" called Craters of the Sac, and that version was seven minutes long. WHAT?? Ok, so this track is at least actually amusing in a way: it doesn't try to be anything other than gross, and not only in terms of lyrics. The whole song sounds slowed down, especially the vocals. Sort of goes back to The Pod, but with actual humour. Yeah, it's gross, repetitive, moronic humour, but it's at least imaginative. Wouldn't want to hear this for seven minutes, though, please, no. And it stops, and we're off into Gabrielle, a Thin Lizzy parody as far as I read. And it's great! It's catchy, tuneful, energetic, and they get a really good sound going with a neat vocal impression and a hooky chorus! Finally, it's getting really good! I like the lyrics, too: it doesn't go out of its way to shove the "joke" in your mouth, and it works even better because of that. "Nobody's perfect, baby, and I'll always love you anyway"? Darn yes! Simple and effective. Great guitar solo, too. Fun playing around with the tremolo effect, too! Yeah, I just like it that much, and I don't even need to say this is the best track here so far.

And now, we go into Did You See Me?, and from the first seconds I can already tell this is going to be something else entirely: slow, strummed acoustic guitar playing those cliché "mysterious" chords, probably pulled from 70's Rush albums. The bass comes in -- ok, they're going for a Pink Floyd vibe, it seems, and so far they're nailing it to a tee. Haha, from the FIRST note I can already tell Dean has got his David Gilmour mode 100% engaged. I'm loving it!

... guys, please, I have already heard this album several times before. I'm only speaking like this for literary effect.

Okay, this just IS Pink Floyd: the string-y keyboards are on, the heavy guitar is doing its thing and the drums are heavier. And the whole song is heavier now! Wow, we're pretty much back in the 70's in less than two minutes. So far, no vocals, and this thing RULES! Ok, it's quiet now, and the vocals are in. Encoded, muttery vocals, and with a weird, bubbly effect going on underneath, like something out of an early Residents album. I like the vocal melody. Ok, this is the best song so far. Well, now we're into Genesis territory. Maybe not Genesis, but they're doing something hilarious, which Mark Prindle calls "Medieval rock" break which is a 100% apt label. Funny as hell! DOO-DOO-DOO! DOO-DOO-DOO! Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo, DOO! Great stuff. Now with the acoustic guitar coda. Awesome. Apparently this came from the The Mollusk sessions, and it's up to par. It is outtake-ish, but perfectly up to par.

How High Can You Fly?, and we're still on the 70's, with a hum-along guitar melody, and a VERY tremolo heavy vocal singing the song title over and over. The guitar melody sounds like something they wrote for White Pepper, but ended up replacing with the far superior Flutes of Chi. The spoken voice is also great. This is moronic humour, but it's inventive, and far better than the first four tracks. I like it. Transitions are in, and from the first seconds I can tell it's a parody on "adult contemporary", and they do an amazing job at nailing the airy, reverb-laden sound and cheesy keyboards. Great stuff! Colour me impressed, guys! This is really good stuff! And even the song itself is quite catchy. Great guitar work, as usual. And now, it's Israel, probably the most bizarre piece in here. But this is the GOOD kind of bizarre: not the thing supposed to shock and awe you, but the thing to leave you genuinely puzzled. On surface, it's a parody of soft, cheesy jazz music, with a melody played on saxophone and sounds of sirens, applause and the guys impersonating preachers. And there are backmasked speeches! Okay, hold on...

No, they're just fragments of the normal speeches played backwards. Yeah, I never checked it before, and only did now for documentary purposes! The synthesized "doo doo" sound is extra funny! I like this track. Its oddness is sort of captivating. The voices repeating "Israel Israel Israel" at the end is weirdly hypnotic. Now, it's The Rift, which opens up with "sci-fi" sound effects and gives way to a strangely groovy drum pattern. It's very slow and "spacey", and the vocal melody is sort of catchy. The lyrics are silly. Oh, shut up, already. This crap is almost 6 minutes long. Is it part of the point to leave me so uninterested? Okay, I can see you have your "ooooh, yep!" in place. And the guitar effects and the sci-fi noises. That's okay. Now just go away already. Good, it's going away. Finally. Now let's move on.

And we're into Monique, the Freak. Right away, it's great: a Prince parody, with a solid groove, a sticky guitar riff, those clean guitar strums and, ick, those vocals are so spot on. So spot on it's sick. And a vocoder on the chorus. Of course! Perfect. It's already fun as hell. The lyrics are so moronic and so spot on, it's hard not to get along with it. Ah, and I LOVE the backing vocals! Brilliant stuff. The whole thing just gels together and works wonders. And again, that Vocoder. Brilliant. Yeah, but NOW is the great part, the instrumental break with that awesome guitar riff. And the guitar solo. Yeah, the guitar solo! Great sound, great playing! This would go on for 10 minutes on Craters of the Sac, and it could as well go on here! Ah, and the backing vocals on the break! Also great stuff. Really, this is great from start to finish, alright. You know? I can almost say this track is too short, even at nearly 6 minutes, and even with that great guitar work near the end. But they kept the best for last! At least best in terms of humour, because Someday might be one of the very, very best comedy pieces in their whole catalogue. And I say comedy in a GOOD way: good musical comedy is not easy to make, and this is fantastic. The imitation of cheesy, starry-eyed, Disney-esque romantic ballads is spot on for the first half, but then it's BRUTALLY deconstructed after that: atrocious "chorus", dumb lyrics, a deeply intoned voice speaking back the chorus lyrics, and the whole thing is off! Amazing. And given that twist alone, the absolute stupidness of the whole song comes to life, bringing along with it pretty much every other song in the genre. Even the "orchestration" near the end becomes brilliantly, pathetically hilarious. And, EVEN still, the song is beautifully written. It's definitely not a joke for the sake of the joke: it's well constructed humour.

Anyway, that's an amazingly strong ending for the album, with two fantastic tracks back to back. I still hold Did You See Me? as an easy favourite, and everywhere else, well... it's a mess, you can see. Though the low points are almost all at the beginning of the album. Don't know if that's good or bad... Either way, this album is a necessity for Ween fans, while casual fans need only to fish out the best tracks in here and dump the rest, I guess... Feel free to disagree. I'm here to be disagreed with!... sort of.

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 8)

2009-08-23T17:54:00.005-03:00

I feel like I should apologise for the long delay between last post and this, but you know what? Screw it. There's nobody to apologise to, since nobody reads this, and I have my own good reasons to not have posted since then. It certainly hasn't got to do with me being bored with this or not wanting to do this review. Though I have to admit I'm not as excited as I was at the beginning. Yet, strangely enough, I do intend to start another series once I'm done with Ween. Though I was thinking of doing something different... Well, who knows. Let's focus on Ween for now. Today's record is Quebec. It's the third great Ween record in a row, and it seems to follow a more "serious" trend. Some tracks are blatantly parodic and humorous, some tracks are subtly parodic and humorous, and other tracks give me no reason whatsoever to believe they're either of those two things. The band is still all over the place with band homages and style pastiches, the songwriting is still brilliant and the performances convincing, most tracks are wicked good, and, hey, I seem to pick up a vibe of honesty from a few songs here. Maybe it's just wishful thinking: the last two albums were so endearing and good that I WANTED to get a glance at the real faces of the two guys. What would be the problem? They are not a novelty outfit after all. I'm all for making music for fun and enjoyment, but nothing should hold you back from pouring a bit of REAL blood and sweat over your songs.

But once again, let's go in depth. I'll hit play now and get writing.

They open up with It's Gonna Be a Long Night, a very direct and obvious Motörhead parody. They've done that before with Stroker Ace, but I think the parody is even more straight and clear this time around. The strained screaming on one note is very reminiscent of Ace of Spades, and the gruff, fat guitar sound is purely Motörheadesque. GREAT song, and great album opener. Of course, its greatness is a bit compromised by it being TOO similar to Motörhead songs and having little of Ween's own unique style on it. I don't know, it's a brilliant song and I'm enjoying it a lot, but it's sort of like a way to wake you up before the REAL show. It's a short tune and it's just ending now. Awesome. Zoloft is on now, and I think this is the first time Ween goes bossa nova. Notice: this is AWFULLY fake bossa nova, with a dull, electronic drum beat, airy pad chords, and the whole song is concocted for purely humorous effect. DON'T think that João Gilberto and Antônio Carlos Jobim are recognised as a geniuses for making music like this, guys! To be honest, I think this is a weak song. It's not terribly catchy, it's not terribly well crafted, and singing about antidepressants is nothing new, is it? Now, those backing vocals in the end, that freaks me out. Why? BECAUSE IT SOUNDS LIKE SIGUR RÓS. Really, the first time I heard that, I was going WTF -- these guys listened to Ágætis Byrjun or what? Man.

Transdermal Celebration is on now. I'm absolutely mad about this song. It's so good it's sick; amazing work here, guys. Everything is insanely catchy, from the vocal melodies all the way through the great guitar licks and embellishments. The wacky sci-fi tale told with over-the-top words and terms is great stuff too. They even made a video for this song that pretty much TELLS, visually, what they're singing here. I love it; if I had to make a super-ultra-condensed compilation of awesomeness with the best Ween songs, this would be one of my first picks -- along with every track from The Mollusk, of course. That guitar riff and bookends the song is beautiful as hell, by the way. Now, it's Among His Tribe, one of the big question marks in this album: a quiet, folksy, hushed song, with lyrics without a single hint of irony or mockery. I don't see what they could possibly be making fun of here, though some of those electronic sounds seem not to belong there at all. Faced with this song, I have no choice other than to take it for what it seems to be, and it is a very pretty song. Nice song, though sometimes I barely notice it at all.

Side B opens with So Many People in the Neighborhoor, one of those songs that can lure people into thinking of Ween as an actual novelty act. Silly sounds, non-existant melody and repetitive, inane lyrics. I don't enjoy it much, to be honest, but the chaotic "instrumental" breaks are pretty impressive and fun, with how they weave distorted, buzzing sounds and distorted, undecipherable vocals. I don't know what else to say about it -- it's ending and I sort of like it. Tried and True, now that one is far more impressive, drawing influence from acoustic, slightly country-influenced pop. That descending guitar line is pure brilliance, and the lyrics and singing and over-the-top and pompous enough to be non-serious but without being obnoxious. Though I have to be frank, I can't stand the use of the word "smell" for comedic purposes. Other than that, I like this song a whole lot, especially the guitar work. That sitar imitation is used for very good effect. Now, Happy Colored Marbles goes back to the semi-novelty camp, this time with a "toy organ" and marimbas, silly vocals and "out there" lyrics. At least the song is really catchy, and the slow tempo and unsettling sounds are creepy at JUST the right amount. The explosive, climactic ending is awesome! Great concoction of sounds, and a great effect caused by the sound of "real" instruments breaking out of the fake, electronic "toy" sound. That moment alone makes the song worth it. To close the side, it's Hey There Fancypants, a very straightly-played ragtime. I can't stand the kind of song they're imitating here. Really, just hearing the lyrics makes me want to die -- I HATE this kind of stuff, and even though I appreciate how well written and performed this song here, I don't like the song at all. Of course I don't put the blame on Ween -- I'm not that stupid. Still, eh. If I could cut out one track from the album, I wouldn't hesitate before choosing.

Anyway, we move to side C with Captain. This time, we're all the way back to 70's "art rock", slow, very echoey, desolate, plaintive and repetitive. It builds very slowly, laying element over element; first the guitar line, then the repeated vocals, the chimes, then the lead guitar, and so on. As tempted as I am to compare this to Pink Floyd, it's not similar to Pink Floyd at all -- I'm not sure what band it is similar to. But yeah, I'm familiar with the kind of vibe they're trying to create, and it's a very good effort. Those slowed down vocals are too jarring, but I like the lead guitar, and the song isn't trying too hard to show it is a pastiche. The balance of elements is just right, and the strings at the end are a VERY nice touch. And now it's Chocolate Town, a bit of country pop or whatever the hell you call this. VERY, VERY nice song, catchy, tuneful and poppy. The lyrics are obviously silly, but the vocal efforts by Gene almost make them resonant. Either way, great song, and now we come up to I Don't Want It, a... love ballad. Played ABSOLUTELY straight. Well, perhaps a bit TOO straight, since they lay down most romantic ballad clichés and nail then down perfectly. But know what? This song is GORGEOUS. If it was written by any other band, it'd probably be my favourite ballad ever. But since this is Ween, I can't shrug off the fact that they're probably doing it just for fun. But HOW can this be "fun"? It's sad and gut-wrenching! No sense of "parody" can twist the inherent beauty of this song, not even ending almost every line with a little "ah", as in "I'd lie in your arms if I could-ah". And that guitar solo in the end is the band's crowning achievement of beauty. I love it dearly. And it's immediately followed by The Fucked Jam. This is probably the band's most idiotic instrumental ever, but then again, Ween KNOWS how to make "idiotic" become a compliment. It consists of a dull drone of electronic drums and a buzzing bass drone, and on top of that they put a layer of SOMETHING... I don't know what it is, it's SOMETHING. It seems like some random, senseless vocal blabbering encoded into a buzzy, annoying synth drone. The very quick inflections of that synth surely do sound like vocal noises. And that's all that goes on for three minutes. Actually, not quite: they add those false endings here and there, exactly to make you unsure whether the song has ended or not. And since this closes side C, the effect is vastly improved. It's a funny song, but perhaps a bit TOO novelty.

Then, we get Alcan Road. What's the matter with this song? It's five minutes long, and I can barely hear anything at all. It's got wind sounds, slow droning bass notes, some other echoey effects and a "mysterious" guitar line. Really, I have no idea to say here. It IS a pretty beautiful song, but I don't quite know what to make of it. Weird. Anyway, let's go on to The Argus, which has a sort of British fantasy prog-folk vibe already from the beginning. "Yesterday we lost our lives, tomorrow we were born". Yep. It's very calm and pleasant and jangly in the beginning, and the melody is actually very catchy. Once again this falls into the category of "obviously, but not obnoxiously humorous". I love that instrumental break: it's SO 70's British fantasy rock! The mood shift afterwards is also really neat, all full of fairground flutes or calliopes or whatever those are called, and the ending is also very beautiful. This song is a nice example of how well Ween can mix clever, subtle humour with actual, honest beauty. But now, we get to the closing song, If You Could Save Yourself (You'd Save Us All), which now goes to glammy, bombastic hard rock ballads, complete with verses sung over a very hushed and quiet background. I could never be sure of how much of this song is actually serious and how much it isn't, because as much as it's clearly a parody of a very well known style, there's a tinge of honesty here. Or maybe it's just personal bias of mine? Either way, I REALLY like this song. I guess that particular line in the last stanza is the only thing that hints at obvious humour, but otherwise this song actually is quite gut-wrenching. The vocal delivery is amazing, and the songwriting is honestly impressive. I love this song, and the bombast and heavyhanded delivery is actually completely understandable and justified for a band that is known for being so self-aware and humourous. It's so good, I actually wish to hear more like this from them!

Either way, that was Quebec, another excellent Ween album. As for the next ones to be reviewed, do not expect so much praise. But THAT is for later.

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 7)

2009-07-18T18:25:00.003-03:00

White Pepper

The Mollusk is amazing. And this one is... well, not better, but virtually as good as it. It should be noted, though, that I can see a clear difference between these two albums; not really in terms of musical quality, which is as high as ever, but in terms of humour. The Mollusk was quite openly mischievous and playful in its essence, and it bounced along from song to song keeping an air of lightness all along. White Pepper, oddly enough, is more ambivalent. At times the songs sound quite serious, to the point where I sometimes can't tell whether they're being earnest or just pretending so in order to play a prank on me. This time around the genres are more spread apart, and they put A LOT of effort (as well as budget) in order to sound just like those actual genres sound. Sometimes the humour is dead on obvious, but when it isn't, it seems sort of unsure. In fact, the first song seems to address that quite directly. So, let's get the walkthrough started.

Exactly Where I'm At opens with straight 4/4 drum beats, and soon enough we get encoded vocals and an organ-like drone. First thing: the melody is dead catchy, and the singing isn't exaggerated or obnoxious, even though the lyrics are kind of silly. Also, I LOVE this little guitar riff. And, soon enough, the whole band kicks in. I'm all staged / It's all an act / I'm really scared that I may fall back in the abstract? Are they, like, being honest and saying their "comedy" act may end up preventing them from being earnest and serious when they want to?... hmm, either this is a VERY elaborate prank, or they're trying to reach out the their audience somewhat. I honestly think it's not a prank, even more because the music is so beautiful and layered and elaborate, and this isn't at all a "parody" of anything: it's a wonderfully crafted and arranged rock song with great guitar solos and sounds. I love this song. The coda goes on and on, and it could just go on forever and I wouldn't mind. The ending falls back with the encoded drum beats, some guitar picking and theremin-like noises. And we're off into Flutes of Chi: wow, beautiful! Great little meandering melody, and this time around, it's easy to tell they're reaching back into the "psychedelic" era with sitar-like sounds, starry-eyed lyrics and a bendy and contemplative vocal melody. And it's amazing. I actually like how this song is a lighthearted and funny commentary on hippie tunes, and yet it's perfectly enjoyable as a hippie tune in its own right (though 'three times thine inequity' may be a dead give away, but who wants to keep picking apart Ween lyrics?). We have a pair of solos, one sort of George Harrison-like and dum-dum-dum-dummm, and the second more meandering and loose. Love that. Great vocals by Gene, and again, that great main theme—the kind of stuff that gets stuck to your head for days on end.

It's over now, and after a lengthy final guitar note, we kick into Even If You Don't, and it's an obvious Paul McCartney parody, with beats borrowed from Your Mother Should Know and Getting Better (*ting!* *ting!* *ting!* *ting!*). The melody is wicked! Absurdly catchy and sing-along, and it's nicely coupled with vicious and desperate lyrics. You know, actually I get all irked when bands borrow this ding! ding! ding! beat, but Ween sort of nailed down the way to make it work both as an acceptable pop cliché AND as a parody. Parody? It's more like a homage, or something, I don't know. Look at the album title: White Pepper. Beatle-y much? Awesome guitar solo, too. I sort of like the verses more than the chorus in this song, in fact, but heck—it's all good. And it ends greatly, we're into the HILARIOUS Jimmy Buffet parody Bananas and Blow. Ween are doing with Buffet here more or less what the Mutantes were doing with Sergio Mendes decades before, and it's great: the atmosphere, melody, instrumentation and Dean's vocals are all dead spot on, yet the lyrics—with a full on pseudo-Castillano style—talk about being stranded with only bananas and cocaine for sustainment. Some reviews suggest this ain't exactly a "fan favourite", but heck, I easily elect this as one of the cleverest, most intelligent pieces in Ween's catalogue—AND, of course, it's catchy as hell. The conviction with which Dean opens the chorus with "bananas and blow!" already makes the whole thing worthwhile. And, oh yeah, that mean Spanish guitar solo (I dunno if it's an actual Spanish guitar, but it's meant to sound like one). And now we're into? A Motörhead parody! And, heck, Stroker Ace is SPOT ON YET AGAIN. The one note singing, the riffage, mad screaming in the chorus—plain awesome, and again the lyrics are obviously silly and over-the-top. The two amazing things are: the song is plain awesome, AND it comes hot off the heels of a Jimmy Buffet parody tune and it fits perfectly. Maybe it's just a personal bias of mine in favour of the album, because it's a completely broken flow, but it works. And now? It's an instrumental called Ice Castles. Now THIS may sound utterly strange to you, but the trick is not that obscure: it's a joke on the Mellotron, the famous keyboard loved by Prog rock bands. The song has a mood of 70's Prog mystique, very slow and waltzy, but the sounds are fluctuate up and down in pitch wildly, pretty much like a Mellotron that's been worn out a little TOO severely. The melody is actually quite pretty, but if it weren't for that "skit", this track would probably be quite a blank. But, yeah, it's just a comedy skit. Whether that's good or bad is up to you. We close off side A and move on to the flip side with...

... Back to Basom, and we're, yet again, into completely different territory. This time, this is full on into "soft rock" ballads, with melty singing, wailing David Gilmour-esque slide guitars, Strawberry Fields Forever Mellotrons going "DOO-doo-DOO-doo", synthesizer flourishes and a very, very, very beautiful melody. Yet, this is meant as parody. You know? The song works on its own and it's actually quite gorgeous and dreamy, but the lyrics try to pull you in the other way, going "NO, this is a JOKE! See the lyrics? Let to locate the last trace of waste / I picked it up and it was smiling?" Sorry, folks, I don't know why I should laugh at this. This humour is kind of self-defeating, you know? You're making fun of yourself because you're a good musician and can do great, varied music? (and yeah, I can praise their "diversity" here because they're doing GREAT songs, not merely pastiches) I don't know, I love the song but I can't take this as comedy. Bananas and Blow? It's hilarious. This? It's not. I don't know, I may be rambling and the song is already ending, but I just love it as great music. Love those sounds! Great use of synthesizers and effects. And we're off to The Grobe, a parody on alt-rock, grunge, or whatever the cool kids call this: the guitar is distorted beyond recognition, the rhythm is slow and the riff is low-pitched and catchy. The vocals seem to run through a rotating speaker ("leslie") and the lyrics are catchy beyond imagination. Yet, once again, the music is awesome. Is this a parody on self-aware and "philosophic" rock? Maybe. Once again, the music and humour seem to be in entirely different planes of existence. The humour at least seems to have a point here, and, I dunno, but it doesn't seem to be so self-defeating here as it were on the last track. Maybe it's because I'm already used to ignoring it in favour of the music. But I don't really ignore it: I think the lyrics are clever in their silliness—and, like I said, have a point. But the music? It's great, catchy, and kicks massively. And we get into Pandy Fackler, a Steely Dan parody. That is, I hear it called a Steely Dan parody everywhere, but it doesn't quite sound like it to me; it's too fast, too jazzy and lacks the harmony vocals. But, well, it isn't too far from Steely Dan, and the lyrics aren't too absurd or too senseless to defeat the music, and I love the sound they concoct here. But then again, coming up with this sound is pure studio trickery, there's no "magic" involved. One George Starostin used this song as an example that Ween COULD be a Steely Dan-like duo if they wanted to. They could? With THIS absurdly banal and ridiculous instrumental theme? I'm sorry, Mr. Starostin, but you don't pull off jazz-pop merely going up and down the scales. This works as an imitation and nothing else! The electric piano solo is brilliant beyond thought, though! Great freak-outs and uses of effects. And, well, the instrumental theme is kinda catchy, but absolutely childish. Not that that's BAD, you know...

And now comes Stay Forever, a romantic "country-rock" ballad sort of thing. Is THIS a parody, folks? How can I POSSIBLE take this as a parody? It's gorgeous, dreamy and sweet, and it warms my heard like nothing else can: "When I'm away, I wanna put my arms around you / And I wanna know, do you feel the same way? / 'Cause if you do, I wanna stay forever with you". THIS is the real deal. Why can't I imagine Ween are being honest and earnest in this song? If this IS a parody, then it's an awful one. Yeah, it sounds a lot like romantic ballads you could hear on the radio on the 70's or something, but that's not funny on itself. It's a brilliant song and one of my favourites on the album, in fact. Wonderful melody, and great vocals by Gene. Maybe this is what they were referring with "falling back in the abstract"? Who knows. Now we get into Falling Out, once again sort of country-rock but faster, and far more bitter. Now this song has a better tinge of humour, but it's a lighthearted, inviting touch of humour. And the song is hella catchy too. Great song, toe-tappingly catchy and fun. And, to close the album, the gentle ballad She's Your Baby. It's the same thing again: there's nothing here that makes me take it as humour, and to be fair, I just think I shouldn't. I love the song, and the romantic and dreamy mood absolutely carries me away. Great melody, really nice arrangements and the usual great vocal and guitar performance by the folks, and also a great little guitar solo to close off the song and the album.

The complaints about self-defeating humour DO NOT detract from the fact that this album is brilliant, though. Yet, it is part of the reason why I find it inferior to The Mollusk. But, to be blunt, the real reason why is that The Mollusk is fantastic beyond comparison, and nothing else Ween did can even dream of being next to it. White Pepper, though, comes very close. Don't miss it.

Annotated Discography: Ween (parts 5 and 6)

2009-07-12T15:32:00.009-03:00

12 Golden Country Greats

Unless I'm terribly mistaken, I've listened to this record exactly ONCE so far, so I'm extremely "fresh" on it, and this review will be every bit as "real time" as it can be. Two things I can say: as far as I can recall from the first listen, this is far better than Chocolate and Cheese (which shouldn't be too surprising), and being so surprisingly short (barely 33 minutes long), I think I'll be able to review TWO albums in a row. This also means you guys will figure out why I am so eager on making this "annotated discography" thing.

Well, first things first: it's a country record, coming from a band that enjoyed the pleasure of hopping from one genre to the other (without me caring at all). Also, everyone who talks about this record has the moral duty of saying there ARE NOT twelve songs here, and the title refers to the guest musicians invited for the sessions. However there WERE twelve songs written for the album, but two of them got cut from the album. So, what do we get from a country album written and recorded by Ween? Read on.

It starts with I'm Holding You, and it's a country ballad that already sets off the sound with slide guitar and all that follows. It's surprisingly mellow and beautiful, though it's obvious the "I'm holding something more precious than fine ore, baby, I'm holding you" isn't meant to be actually romantic (though it's funny more in an endearing than outright outrageous way). What can I say? It's a genuinely beautiful, well written and performed song. I guess it's meant to get us scratching our heads, as in, is this WEEN? Yep, it is. And I say, as much as there definitely is comedic value in the song, I'm far better off enjoying the song itself. Anything wrong with that? Okay, not we get Japanese Cowboy, and it's a more upbeat boppy country tune. Don't know much of what to say here, and the only thing that strikes me is that the vocal melody is amazingly similar to the melody of Vangelis's theme for Chariots of Fire. It's most certainly unintentional, but it's still a quite pitiful similarity. Not that it makes the song bad, or anything. It's an enjoyable song. Maybe I have nothing to say because I know shit about country music, so there. Piss Up a Rope is on now, and this is more with that rock-ish 4/4 beat instead of the 2/4 march of the previous song. Okay, we're back with the crude words and Ween-ish humour—LOTS of it. It's funny, though, for the way they use those strategic breaks with lyrics like "On your knees, you big booty bitch, start suckin'", and the solo is really crazy. My foot is tapping, so that's a good sign. Now we get I Don't Want to Leave You on the Farm, a fast but more mellow tune, cute and also enjoyable. The lyrics are more of that quirky, stereotypically-country romanticism. "I'll keep truckin' and keepin' myself stoned". Yeah, that. The last song on side B is Pretty Girl, probably the most upbeat song here so far, quite intoxicating and with some serious fiddle playing. The lyrics are hilariously and exaggeratedly stereotypical: "There's a scum-suckin' lip pucking fat ol' truck drivin' man on town / There's a boot lickin' hiney ticklin' dude around". Neat. I love that fiddle. You know, I know shit about country and I don't really hate country music in general (maybe that's because I don't live in the USA?), and this album makes me feel like listening to more of that music. I guess Ween takes bonus points for that. Again, great fiddle. Side B is over.

We move to Powder Blue, a more bluesy affair. Bluesy? I don't know how to describe these songs, really. It's got the rhythm of Piss Up a Rope. The ascending riff is nifty, but the melody and lyrics are awfully repetitive and monotonous. I like the backing vocals, though (credited to the Jordanaires). Now Gene is "introducing" the musicians. Great soloing! Oh, and he "introduced" Muhammad Ali, and the song was cut off (yeah, it was a mess up with an unauthorized sample. Sucks, doesn't it?). Mister Richard Smoker, more upbeat than before, and with funny "doodley ba-boo!" vocals and great soloing. "You smoke big dick"? Yeah, it's Ween alright. Wow, they just modulated the song up a tone FOUR times in a row in the coda. Were they aiming for a Guinness record or something? Hehe, great trick. Help Me Scrape the Mucus Off My Brain; yeah, more of those cliché Ween terms and running gags. The song itself, though, is good. But the stuff is starting to get awfully repetitive, you know? I guess THIS is the problem with country music; when it begins to repeat itself, it REALLY repeats itself. And even having merely 10 songs and 30 minutes of music, the album still suffers. But I won't complain about that yet, ok? Maybe the next two songs will present something new and invigorating. The solos in this song were, once again, great, though. Now it's You Were the Fool, another ballad; the beat is quite unusual, though. Hey, I did right in persevering: this IS different! And quite beautiful, too. I enjoy the beat, the melody and the mood all around. Great stuff. Yeah, I'm not writing much right now and just enjoying the song. Now we get some distorted guitar and feedback? Cool! This is also a quite long fade-out ending, too, and would be an excellent ending to the album. There's still one more song, though. Fluffy is... yeah, another ballad. Wait, a ballad? Well, there is just a mellow acoustic guitar and Dean moaning some pretty weirdly silly lyrics about a dog. Ok, it's quite bizarre, i.e. a very apt way to end a Ween album. Heh, this is awesome; only Ween can make an "emotional" song about a dog sound so genuinely silly; because songs about dogs ARE silly. Go ahead, call me insensitive. Great, now the album is over. Guess what? It's quite great; and again, if I had got myself acquainted to Ween following the chronological order of their albums, I'd be dangerously afraid that they would have to devote themselves to country music in order to make great albums—after, you know, the complete train wreck of Chocolate and Cheese. But no, we keep trudging ahead and reach:

The Mollusk

And THIS is why I started this whole thing. Ok, be ready guys, because I'll be raving madly in this review. I listened to this thing dozens and dozens of times and it only gets better. Basically, we're back to the more "diverse" side of Ween, but not exaggeratedly diverse; once in a while they bounce into something unpredictable, but overall they have a more down-to-earth theme. Many reviewers will talk about its maritime and oceanic sound. I think that's bullshit. Yeah, they mention the beach, the ocean and ships once in a while, but that doesn't make a "concept"! Besides, the sound is way too layered for me to stamp a label on it. Yeah, that's right: LAYERED. This doesn't merely sound like an album made on a big budget: you can clearly sense the effort they put in here. And this time around, as much as there are jokes and humour here, they don't overshadow the musical content. You can laugh at some bits, but I think it's a much, much better deal to listen to the music instead. So, follow me now.

Man, this will be a hard review.

I'm Dancing in the Show Tonight is a send-up of show tunes, starting off with a boppy electric piano and bizarrely processed vocals. What effects are these? Wow. The sound is entirely synthesized, but it's very, very convincing, and the melody is clever as hell. THIS is the big deal: intricate, careful and entertaining arrangement, with a great mix of weirdness and true technical accuracy. These guys surely learned their business! And we're straight into the title track, and right off the bat, it's gorgeous. The signature flute-y sound sets the tone, and they follow it up nicely with a "dialogue" between two voices, each one trying to sound more pompous than the other. "Bring forth the mollusk cast unto me"? YEAH, man, THIS is the unique kind of Ween humour I've come to love. "Does it speaketh of the trinity?" Keep going, guys! What more could I ask? Gorgeous, catchy music coupled with lighthearted mock-prog-rock lyrics! And a great synthesizer solo using a "trumpet" sound often used by Rick Wright. It might even be the same synth; but it's something of a cross between the "synth trumpet" of Wright with that of Vangelis. And I missed the "voiceover" bit. Great stuff. More great soloing. Awesome instrumentation. All that. Yeah, I'm caught in it already.

Polka Dot Tail is a far stranger thing, with a waltzy, pounding rhythm with lyrics that are silly without pushing it too hard. Fun mix of "folk" with whatever they're mixing here. I like these lyrics: they're absurd but somehow evocative. And the melody is great, also counting on buzzing and squealing synths and some psychedelic guitar soloing. And the way Dean (I suppose) calls "Billy..." before the solo totally owns me. And the synth freak out before the last solo is purely brilliant. I don't know what happened to these guys, but they became true masters of the business. I love this thing; and as soon as it's over, we're dumped into the insanely fast and fuzzed-out I'll Be Your Jonny on the Spot, which is sort of "electro-country" or something like that, with almost moaned, monotonous vocals. I'm not crazy about this song on its own, but it's position here is necessary, a great way to pump up the energy. I love the solo, though. It ends suddenly and we're left with the "contemplative", dreamy, phased-out ballad of Mutilated Lips. The sound in this song DRIVES ME NUTS! The acoustic guitars, groovy percussion, well-timed licks and the heavily processed vocals are a true work of art. The lyrics might be a little over-the-top with their absurdity. Yeah, of course they're trying to get over-the-top (it's a parody, after all), but that in itself achieves little. I love the "Find me the skull of Haile Selassie, I" bit, still. And, again, it's the music that matters, and it's amazing. I love the sound of the guitar in the solo; it matches the song perfectly. I'd love to hear Mike Oldfield playing that solo, heh heh. I love this song, simply. And next comes... The Blarney Stone, which is an Irish "drinking song", with AMAZINGLY convincing throaty vocals. The lyrics are extremely clever, and they went to real extents to recreate the drunken mood of an Irish pub, yelling in the backing, bagpipes (it sounds like an accordeon, though) and glass noises all around. This is awesome, really. Plain awesome. I just wonder why they rhymed "eye" with "eye" in the chorus. Intentional? Who cares, the song is still awesome. Was it Dean who sang this? Dude must have got his throat aching for weeks after that.

And it leads into what? A soft-rock ballad, It's Gonna Be (Alright) (I love that awkwardly parenthesized title). Once again, the sound is amazing, even if it's meant as a straight, no-nonsense parody of soft-rock, it's still beautiful and well crafted. Wonderful melody, too, and the lyrics never make it clear that they're meant to be a parody. Maybe they aren't?... nah. As much as I thought Joppa Road was a brilliant satire, this is so much better, it's unfair to compare. Maybe I'm reading too much in the song: perhaps it's not a satire, a mockery, and more of a harmless imitation. Either way, though, it's nothing short of brilliant. The Golden Eel comes next, with its nearly indescribable sound; distorted and sparse, almost reminding us of those stupid jokes like Candi—except there's a MELODY going on, and a good one. And the chorus comes in and bursts things up completely, with a heavy rhythm and keeping up flawlessly with the humorously pompous lyrics. That solo is GROOVY, too, sounding as if it was recorded on a faulty tape unit, and then launching into an awesome, heavier instrumental take on the chorus. Awesome way to close side A.

Side B starts with Cold Blows the Wind, and it's the only song that doesn't live up to the standards. I know that it keeps up with the "pompous" lyrical thematic of the album, but placed smackdab in the middle of the album, it's almost as monotonous and dull as Buenas Tardes Amigo. Ok, that was nasty; let's not compare anything to that atrocity: the sound here is far more profound, crafted and thought-out, and it's shorter too. The synth sounds are cool, too, but already by this point, I already stopped caring about the singing and the lyrics. But, wow, they do an awesome imitation of a Mellotron near the middle of the song. Is that an actual Mellotron? If it is, great! If it isn't, wow, great job in recreating the sound of it. A Mellotron makes anything better, especially a song like this. The sound is already far more interesting than in the beginning of the song, so my attention is already caught. Right, it's over, and we're into Pink Eye (On My Leg). Surprisingly, it's an instrumental—we haven't had much from Ween, have we? The H.I.V. Song was sort of one, but this is ridiculously better, with an actually clever and catchy melody and a very interesting and amusing combination of sounds, and it's much more than a stupid skit. The dog barking sounds are awesome, too! Ah, I really like this one; it's always great to have a melody like this in an album. Hehe, another awesome sample; it sounds like a man groaning, or something. Brilliant. And we're off into another "electro-country" song, Waving My Dick in the Wind. Great tune! Catchy as all hell, and the fast rhythm really does it justice. For some reason, I feel it would work more if it were a bit shorter. But, oh, whatever: we're into Buckingham Green, and it starts off as a stately, solemn prog rock number of sorts, with vocals caught somewhere between Gabriel-led Genesis and early King Crimson. The vocals give space to an acoustic guitar solo, but the sound is still eerily quiet and haunting. Awesome solo. And more Mellotron sounds? This time it sounds like the "choir" patch. Man, these guys REALLY know what they're doing. And off we go with a heavy, stomping instrumental part with distorted guitar and everything else. Very, very prog rock. And now it leads into another quiet part, but even more solemn and serious, with synthesized "marcato" strings and tympani. Awesome. Awesome song. And we're off into Ocean Man. Wow! Poppy, bouncy and boppy, and with an awesome strummed mandolin! Catchy as hell! And it caused these reactions in less than 10 seconds! I love this song, though it sounds like a tune they'd put in an automobile advert. It's awesome either way, with lovely guitars and a catchy as hell melody sung with a funny, somewhat slowed-down (I guess) voice. The lyrics are great, too, pompous and inane as only Ween could do it. And we reach the last track, She Wanted to Leave, a stunningly gorgeous ballad with a hollow, echoey sound and a guitar sound that seems to embody all the sadness in the world. Really! If the vocals and lyrics weren't so openly parodic (it's a story of unrequited love in a pirate ship, or something??), it'd be one of the saddest songs in my entire catalogue. In fact, if these exact same lyrics were sung in a serious way, it'd STILL be one of the saddest songs in my catalogue: the melody is gorgeous and the arrangement is fantastic. Yeah, it's titled She Wanted to Leave (reprise), but the reprise is of the first track, played in a VERY slow and sad instrumental arrangement. Wow, if I didn't know Ween very well, I'd honestly take this as a very depressing outro for the album. But, well, it's just a lighthearted little joke.

Honestly, this album is amazing, and Ween's existence would be entirely justified even if they stopped making music after it. But no: this is the first album in a streak of three great albums. The Mollusk, though, is to me their best album ever, and one I'm not ashamed to put in the highest ranks of my favourite albums of the 90's. I like it THAT much, and that's why I'm not bitter the band even after listening to Chocolate and Cheese. Spinal Meningitis? I forgive them. Honestly, Mr. Freeman? Mr. Melchiondo? DON'T fuck you. You guys are awesome. Thank you for this album.

As a post-scriptum, I have to say: this was my first Ween album (if I recall correctly—maybe it was GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, but right now I don't recall), and my feelings weren't THAT positive on first listens. It took me quite a while until I started to unveil those layers of cleverness and beauty, and create such a strong link with the album's mood shifts and deep sounds; but once that happened, the whole album worked like a charm. Give it a thorough, careful listen, without haste. It should give you an idea: I've harshly criticised the "mushy" stretches of The Pod, and I've stated distaste for the "diversity" of Chocolate and Cheese, yet THIS album totally enraptured me for not falling in either of those pits. Give it a try.

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 4)

2009-07-11T20:43:00.005-03:00

Chocolate and Cheese

What a great day to review a bad album!... well, not really. Today would be a great day for SOMETHING, and certainly not to review a bad album—but that's what I gotta do, right?... actually, not really. I'm doing this because I want to. But don't question me on that, right? You can question me on the assessment of this album... oh, man, why do I have to do this? Couldn't I review a GOOD album, like Albedo 0.39 by Vangelis instead? I could, but that would break the flow. Matter of fact, screw Chocolate and Cheese: I'll review the Vangelis record, which in fact is a strong contender to my favourite album ever (except Amarok by Mike Oldfield really holds that spot).

Look, let's get this done quickly.

Take Me Away is a swingy rocker, with slightly processed vocals and jangly guitars. WOW, the production is far better than last time around. It now sounds like they're actually on a major label. And the song is snappy and upbeat. They're parodying something here, but I can't be sure what it is. Dean (I guess) has sung the same verse three times in a row. And now we get a fuzzy guitar solo. This is a pretty great way to kick off the album; it's a fun, though completely nondescript song. You know, it's neither very catchy, nor sufficiently funny to stand on its own, but it doesn't annoy me. Great ending, though! And now it's Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down). Actually, it isn't: I set Amarok to stop playback before that song, and I won't listen to it. I know, I'm supposed to walk through the whole album and review it in real time, but I refuse to listen to this track. Aside from being not at all good, it's painfully unfunny and preposterously stupid—it doesn't sound at all like the cool, smart guys who did Push th' Little Daisies and Right to the Ways and the Rules of the World! I know what "dark humour" is, I can more or less define it: it's a joke regarding death, sickness, or overall something very disturbing. That's not what this song is: it takes a child with a fatal illness and passes that AS THE JOKE. That's not dark humour, and it's not even humour at all. It's not even creepy, or interesting, or thought-provoking or anything at all: it's just trying to thrive in shock value and shock value alone. That doesn't cut it. And, of course, such an offensively idiotic song features a kid dying of meningitis. I don't wish either of them any kind of bad, but if they had lost a child to a disease like that, I doubt they'd ever write that song. It's not a matter of taboo: it's basic common sense. Honestly? Mr. Freeman? Mr. Melchiondo? Fuck you. BUT, let's get on with this album and skip straight to Freedom of '76, a quite faithful imitation of soul. I guess the only remarkable thing about this song is how precisely they emulate the sound. But so what? I think I stated this before, but the fact that an artist can perform different styles doesn't mean he's amazing and impressive: it means he's DECENTLY COMPETENT. It's the least I can expect from a good musician. Gene's singing is quite brilliant, but who listens to Ween for the singing? And should I care about the lyrics? Oh, what the hell. I Can't Put My Finger on It. Yeah, neither can I. It brings back some of the humour of the previous albums, with a cheap drum machine sound, fuzzed-out guitars and processed vocals, a stomping rhythm and weirdly blurted lyrics. Good track? No. Well, the "quiet" interludes in the middle add an interesting aspect to it just for being so completely out-of-place and out-of-context, and I guess that's the point. And, oh, there's an "Indian" instrument (synthesized) playing at the end. Side B kicks off with A Tear for Eddie, and it's at least a relief for being completely instrumental. Supposedly, it's a homage to Eddie Hazel, from Funkadelic. It's a pretty faithful imitation of the style (Funkadelic was one of their big influences), with that deep phasing effect, and if this is a genuine homage (which is unclear, of course), it's a good one. The distorted solo at the end is good. Roses Are Free is a piece of faux-psychedelic pop with a boppy, heavily electronic sound, randomly meaningless lyrics, and a cleverly written chorus. I don't know what to say, really: it's not a bad tune, and the lyrics are not at all bad, but what is to be found interesting here? They did the "fuzzy-psychedelic" sound much, much, MUCH better on Marble Tulip Juicy Tree, which was invigorating, fun and dynamic; this one just drags and marches along lazily. The instrumental break adds some energy, but the rest is just the same on and on and on.

Now comes in the best song in the album BY FAR: Baby Bitch somehow recreates very nicely that 60's acoustic ballad schtick with Lennon-esque voice and singing, and the combination of laid back and "thoughtful" melody with completely crude and nasty lyrics has never been as good as here. I guess. The "baby, baby, baby bitchhhhh" chorus is brilliant, and the melody is catchy! I hope it's NOT an actual attack at an ex-girlfriend. They namedrop Birthday Boy from GodWeenSatan: The Oneness, sort of like Bob Dylan namedropped Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands on Sara. Hehe, great. Mister, Would You Please Help My Pony came in and, ergh: more of that "hahaha look how funny it is to be creepy" shit. At least the melody is kind of catchy, which can't be said about Spinal Meningitis, which barely had any melody at all. Look, I just won't say anything because I have nothing good to say about this song. I'll just prepare the next paragraph for when side C starts off with...

Drifter in the Dark, a pretty spot-on imitation of "Barbershop" tunes. It's spot-on and... ... ... um... ... yeah, spot-on. Look, I KNOW we don't find many albums out there that skip from rock 'n' roll to psychedelic pop to 60's folk to soul to barbershop quartet, and maybe that's because NOBODY CARES. I could be listening to, I dunno, The Cure right now. You know Faith? It's 40 minutes of the same thing, but it's GREAT. It's AWESOME. It's the same mood, the same sound, but THAT DOESN'T MATTER. Okay, now it's Voodoo Lady, a very, very, very awful piece of crap with an "ethnic" percussion beat (synthesized, of course) with tuneless singing and idiotic lyrics; yeah, I get the "boogie-oogie-oogie-oogie-oogie-oogie-oogie-oogie" is MEANT to be idiotic, but that alone doesn't make it good, does it? Erk, I hate this song; so completely dull and un-groovy! Oh, there come the fuzzy distorted guitars rising up and up and up and making noise all around. Yeah, the noise is cool, but unfortunately it's just a pale, pale ghost of a shadow of what the Mutantes were doing in Bat Macumba; it's so bad it doesn't even work as a joke. It's over now, and now it's Joppa Road, a quite funny and convincing parody of soft rock. The melody is obnoxiously repetitive, but this time it WORKS, because the jangly acoustic guitar and the "one-octave-apart" vocals are very, very spot-on. Yeah, Drifter in the Dark was also "spot-on", but at least this time it's a very relevant parody. Who cares about barbershop quartets, really? Now, this kind of sleazeball soft rock really deserves a comedic treatment, and it gets on. But yeah, it could be way shorter and the effect would have been far better. Now it's Candi. Sparse drum machine sounds bouncing left and right, a bit of bass guitar, a bit of guitar, a bit of muttering and NOTHING GOOD going on at all. Except for some of the noise, which is faintly entertaining. But the noise effects here are just trying to support the "joke"; what joke? I don't know. If this were one minute long, it would be okay, but it's actually four times longer than that. Eww. I almost wish I were listening to The Pod right now. Actually, I do wish. Man, WHY didn't they put the noise more on the centre of the song and get rid of the vocals? Damn. I dunno. I don't want to know.

Side D starts with Buenas Tardes Amigo, a song that gets all the critics wild with praise. It's a "spaghetti western" epic, seven minutes long, with solemn guitar strumming and Gene (maybe) singing slowly with a faint Mexican accent. It's awfully long, but it builds up as time goes on. It has a powerful solo and a "twist" at the end. I hate it. And it's followed up by the "amazing" H.I.V. Song. Do I need to say anything? No, it's NOT funny; this kind of "idiotic" and "offensive" humour needs EFFORT to work, and there's no effort here. What Deaner Was Talking About came in to wash the shit away, and yeah, it's a neat song. Not impressive or brilliant, but Gene's vocal delivery is good and the imitation of "heavenly" pop is very well done and all, but doesn't really achieve much more than what Pork Roll Eggs and Cheese achieved. But I won't complain. Now it's Don't Shit Where You Eat, a laid back acoustic tune. Okay, now it's over. Finally. And I complained about The Pod. Silly me! I didn't get their albums chronologically, but if I were doing that, I'd NEVER have guessed that they'd come up with such a wretched album.

Let's recapitulate: the good songs here are Take Me Away (sort of), A Tear for Eddie, Baby Bitch, Joppa Road and What Deaner Was Talking About. I'm not even sure about that list: some of those are only good when compared to the rest, because overall, they're just passable. Also maybe Roses Are Free and Don't Shit Where You Eat are not bad, but I don't care about them. The rest is either pure garbage or mindless fluff, and Spinal Meningitis (Got Me Down) holds the honour of being the single most horrible song Ween ever put on a record (well, not including those cassette releases, but I never heard them and I don't think I really want to). Maybe it's the only Ween song I'd call "horrible"—I wouldn't call any of the other tracks here "awful". Either way, those "good" songs I singled out aren't even good to the point of me wanting to fish them out of the album for my enjoyment. Maybe Baby Bitch, but that's it. The rest can go to hell; including that album cover. What an ugly thing! Yeah, that's right: I'm not "offended" by it. It's just plain ugly, aesthetically unpleasant, and—of course—moronic, and NOT in the usual Ween way.

But stick around, guys. We're warming up.

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 3)

2009-07-04T22:19:00.005-03:00

Pure Guava

Hooray! Finally the time comes for me to take a look at Ween's third offering. Actually, is ISN'T Ween's third offering if we consider all those cassette tapes made in the 80's, but, you know, let's not get into that discussion. This album, either way, is a landmark: it's Ween's first album on a major label. Elektra signed these guys, based on whatever criteria they came up with, and so Ween had a much larger budget and a pretty wide range of new possibilities to try. The result was... an album made on a 4 track recorder. Yeah, just like The Pod; the difference being that the sound is pushed way, way far into the "clean" side of it, and the songs, on average, seem to be far more entertaining. This is still a really huge polariser, though. Like The Pod, yeah; but better get into the actual walkthrough instead of try to explain it here, right?

Off we go!
And it's Little Birdy, which helps set the tone for the whole album. You got a lazy drum machine snapping away a mid tempo poppy ballad thing, a guitar that's weirdly caught between a fuzzy distortion and a clean strummy sound. Difficult to describe, like much in this album. It also seems to fluctuate very, very wildly up and down, as if they've got a very unreliable tape recorder. And the vocals? Very zoned-out kind of trippy, muttering rant, about a little birdy. Very, very, VERY The Pod-ish. Ok, now Gene Ween is ranting in a very nasal, whiny monotone. I think the thing that makes this stand out from the average Pod-mush is the bizarre mix of fuzz and cleanness in the sound. Also, the lyrics aren't trying too hard to freak you out -- it's the kind of stuff that some people would sing with all seriousness in the world, somewhere in the 60's; but it's vastly exaggerated here. And now we're into Tender Situation. Alarm bells go off; slow, sparse drum machine pattern, very sparse guitar picking, whispered vocals (yeah, as in, you gotta STICK your ears to the speakers to make out the words), and they're saying "taste the waste, man, taste the waste". Yeah, I know I'm supposed to take this song as a gag, but it goes on and on and on. Right, now we bump into a very amusing synthesizer "solo"; ok, glad to know they're up to SOMETHING here, not just the whispery whispers -- but the song still goes on and on. Now-- WOW, what is this? It's The Stallion, part 3, but it's unlike ANYTHING in the previous two parts. Man, barely 20 seconds into the song you can tell it's going to be AMAZING. And it IS. Somehow, they came up with a mix of drum machines and clean guitar picking (with a heavy flanging effect) that's plainly gorgeous, and the vocals are helium-powered (Gene or Dean? Can't tell), and it's doing a VERY convincing imitation of 70's prog rock pomposity. It's amazing, truly. And it ends with "Hey dude, he's the Stallion!" muttered in a hilarious, idiotic moron voice. Great guitar solo, too. Okay, I'm hooked.

Big Jilm. Slowed down vocals muttering some garbage, and every line ends with an exclaimed "Big Jilm!". It's not too slow, and the guitars are strummy and sort of bluesy. It's funny, in a way, and it doesn't get to the point of being too repetitive and annoying. It knows when to shut up, fortunately. Push th' Little Daisies is on now. I LOVE THIS TRACK. Gene's delivery is laugh-out-loud hilarious, and combines obnoxiousness and catchiness in a completely irresistible and spontaneous manner. Awesome rhythm and guitar work! Love it, just love it; this track tramples about 90% of the songs in the two previous albums. It was Ween's "big hit", too, featured on Beavis and Butthead. Shame people didn't get the joke and thought Ween was the stupidest pile of shit goin' on. But, then again, are we gonna expect anything from the MTV audiences? Heh. This helped give Ween their image as a "novelty band", though, sadly. I STILL love the song, though. The Goin' Gets Tough from the Getgo is on now. Is this a sort of parody on hip hop, or rap, or something like that? Funky rhythm patterns, spoken lyrics. By the way, the lyrics are really funny -- the mixture between inane cursing and "serious" life messages is SPOT ON, and the constant exchanges between the two come just in the right time to highlight how absurd the thing really is. I'm already halfway convinced THIS is the album The Pod should have been all along.

Reggaejunkiejew -- what? What kind of title is that? Wait until you listen to it: it kicks off with a totally crazy rhythm on a drum machine. The vocals have a "telephone" filter applied to them. They're violently cursing and insulting some wosshisface Rastafari figure or something. Might probably be a comment on marijuana smoking kids who think rastafarianism is "cool", or maybe Ween are just being dicks. Who knows, this song still has some of the best uses of "fuck you" in a song. Check it out! And the synth solo? Freaky. As far as I can guess, each of them is playing a very rudimentary, toy-like synth. Unbelievable sound here; I'm already impressed by this album. Now we get into I Play It Off Legit. The music so far is sparse, again, with some loud percussion sounds and vibraphone-like sounds, and moaned words. The guys really have a field day rhyming "shit" with "legit". I think I can just get into the song alright after the amazing stuff I heard on this track. But, yeah, if this song were on The Pod, it would merely help to bog the experience down even further. In this context, this imitation of a completely stoned, fuck-the-world atmosphere sounds quite convincing. Now, Pumpin' 4 the Man? Wow! Lightning fast, sort of a country mockery -- the drum machine just speeds along, and the vocals follow suit! I can barely review it! All I know it's very entertaining; great vocals there. It's one minute and a half long, of course; blink and you'll miss it. But DON'T miss it. And now, it's a ballad. Sure enough, Sarah has helium vocals and spaced out guitar strumming, so don't get it confused with a "genuine" song. It's not particularly impressive, though; Ween has done better as far as parodies of "romantic" songs go. But it's not bad at all. Springtheme kicks in. Okay, it's not really that good -- fairly catchy, but not impressive. Slow, "spaced-out" faux-psychedelic mood with helium vocals and nifty bass playing; and off we go with Flies on My Dick. Lovely title. Ohh, no, there comes that SLOW, SLOW rhythm. It's The Pod all over again. Yep, this is EXACTLY like The Pod, slowed down drums and muttered vocals and all. The guitar solo is quite entertaining, though. I don't care about this song, though, either way, and it goes on for way too long. I Saw Gener Cryin' in His Sleep is funny, though, with a silly, idiotic "country" mood and weird effects with microphones. It sounds like they're playing feedback, so they audibly mess up the trick on the very first chorus and Gene (?) yells out "We fucked it up again!" in the background. Catchy, funny, short track. Nice. And Touch My Tooter is slow, fuzzed all the way to oblivion and with screamed, out of tune vocals. A parody on "grunge", perhaps? It's entertaining; as much as it goes into the "murky" territory of the previous album, at least it moves, you know?

Mourning Glory (sic) already starts off foreboding enough, with a sound VERY saturated in the low end and echoed vocals, feedback bursts, barely intelligible words. It's just almost impossible to tell what's going on, but I can tell it's purposefully messed up and "badly" recorded -- they just love messing around with the tape, without regards to how it's gonna sound. This isn't really the kind of stuff I enjoy from these guys, but this is SO messed up and random, I can't help but stop and listen closely. Really, there is NO regard for how the final result will sound like; they're just sabotaging the tape, the guitars (?) screech and feedback, and... eh. I don't know. I don't even care about the lyrics, and I wonder if I should. And that was FIVE minutes of it. I just wonder how I managed to sit through it. Just, wow. Loving U Thru It All; ballad-like, very gentle guitar picking, sounds a lot like Led Zeppelin, except the vocals are all slowed down and moany. It IS a pretty convincing imitation of Jimmy Page's guitar playing -- though they do screw the thing up at times. And the vocals are just plain funny -- they sing it in short bursts, and the double-tracking is hardly ever in agreement. Heh heh. Now it's Hey Fat Boy (Asshole). It's fuzzy and messy, and the vocals sound like they're shouted into a metal box. I can already tell it's going to me mindlessly repetitive and monotonous, but at least it's sort, and the sound effects are interesting. Wow, there are only three tracks remaining? I hardly saw the whole thing go by! Ok, I've already had enough of this song; I do know "Come here! You killed my mother" is a pretty weird thing to sing, but still...

Don't Get 2 Close (2 My Fantasy); the guitars are strummy and lightly flanged, sort of like a crossover between Led Zeppelin and prog rock ballads, and the vocals are kind of "serious" (in a parodic way, of course), and the chorus? Oh, goodness, this is CATCHY! As HELL! The lyrics are hilariously "serious" and inane and overblown, almost like a reprise of The Stallion, part 3. I love it. "Don't be afraid to clutch the hand of your creator"! Awesome. Great guitar playing. And the whistling near the end? Amazing. And it ends with an "a capella" chorus! This is MORE than just amazing; it's brilliant. And, to close the thing off, it's Poop Ship Destroyer, with a simple drum machine pattern, a moronic little "marimba" tune, sparse fuzzy guitar chords, and muttered vocals. The lyrics are kind of twisted, but funny -- I'm not a fan of scatology, but the "sci fi", space terms are so jarring in this context, it's brilliant. "Let's cruise past all the golden poo"? Unbelievable.

I'll be honest with you: I had listened to this album, I think, twice until now. The reviews and opinions I read on it were nowhere NEAR a consensus. All Music Guide gave a perfect score to it (the only one Ween got!). The first times I listened to it left me sort of, well, clueless. But NOW, listening to it, I'm convinced: it's a great album. It's SOLID, you know? Even if it's got some tracks I utterly don't care about, they at least are part of an overall picture, and this time it's a picture that I care about. GodWeenSatan: The Oneness was a mixed bag of brilliance, garbage and pointlessless, while The Pod was bogged down by unfortunate, LONG stretches of pointless mush, but this time around, the "mushy" bits are nicely integrated into a much more varied, interesting work. It DOES sound like a dead-end, though; it's the kind of album that just can't be built upon, you know? So, Ween took the logical, reasonable route and decided to upgrade their sound completely and rise into a new level altogether, and they did that masterfully.

What they did NOT do masterfully, though, was make a good album, so Chocolate and Cheese sucks. Hard. More on that later.

Of Politics and Twitter stalking

2009-07-03T22:33:00.003-03:00

This week I heard about an absolutely pathetic event regarding so called "celebrities" on Twitter. I'll briefly narrate it here. On one side, North-American actor Ashton Kutcher became a sort of celebrity in Brazil through Twitter, after the last football match between the USA and Brazil. On the other side, the Brazilian Senate is going through a very turbulent period, and its president is under pressure to leave his position. So, a group of "celebrities" started a campaign to get Kutcher to join the Twitter campaign against the president; the most notorious being a "humourist" (*snicker*), a "musician" (*pfft!*) and an "actor" (*choke*), here dubbed the Three Stooges. Yes, in case you didn't notice, those folks -- among others -- started bugging Mr. Kutcher PERSONALLY, on Twitter, to join a "campaign" against a politician he never heard about from a country that isn't his. I'll let you digest that for a while before I discuss it. But, suffice to say, after about half a dozen Twitter messages, Kutcher finally replies with an epic knock-out:

quote
Only U have the power 2 impeach your senator. It's YOUR country U have 2 stand 4 what you believe.
unquote

Fortunately the "campaign" died after that.

Now, I'm one who thinks the president of the Senate, José Sarney, is the kind of politician that needs to disappear from this country, and he definitely needs to take a hike. The important thing to notice is, as much as it's important for people to make their voice heard about these issues, it's NOT my impeaching that guy that all our problems will be solved; that is nothing but a single tiny piece of a huge, monstrous machine of corruption. However, this whole "campaign" -- contrary to what you may be thinking -- does NOT leave the realms of Twitter and invade real life. No: that "campaign" consists of a handful of "celebrities" and a load of people who can't bother to get their asses off their seats and go out to the streets, and merely want the Internet to magically solve their problems. I know the Internet has been changing the whole social and political scenery of the world dramatically, but it's still NOT able to singlehandedly heal our problems; and those people either can't see that, or willingly DON'T see it. I think it's the latter, honestly.

And to make matters worse, those people were trying to enlist the help of a foreigner. We're not even talking about an influential leader or an outspoken personality; no, we're talking about an actor who happened to get into a -- massive, yes, but still -- harmless football joke on Twitter. It's sad to see our country is in the hands of corrupt leaders, yes, but it's even sadder to see the "personalities" opposing corruption are brainless slugs engulfed by the comfortable numbness of their luxurious apartments. And as great as Kutcher's response was, it will NOT help change their minds; it's easy to misread "only YOU have the power" as "you can't depend on me, so just give up".

Click here to see the story in further details -- the text is in Portuguese, but most of the original messages are in English.

Side note:
Review of Pure Guava may take a little longer to come out. This term isn't over yet...

Just in case...

2009-06-28T00:16:00.002-03:00

... you bump into any old post in which I proclaim myself as an xkcd fan, PLEASE don't confuse me with the fanatical "forumites" which will go to the greatest lengths to proclaim ANY xkcd strip as comedic genius just to look cool and "in". In fact, I'm a fairly annoyingly and persistently vocal critic of the bad strips (which are becoming worryingly frequent recently), yet on the other hand I strongly oppose the highly illogical and inane rants from that xkcd: Overrated blog (yes, "blog", not "blag"; it's not funny anymore). So I'm sort of middle ground here: I'm not a very harsh critic of xkcd, and I usually enjoy the strips, but I definitely don't want to wear the "I'm an xkcd fan and that makes me insta-cool and I suck Randall Munroe's penis because that makes me awesome" card because, really, what the hell? Guys, you may think I'm exaggerating here, but, guys! Seriously, like, guys, really! Like, guys, like, really, seriously! Like, guys...

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 2)

2009-06-20T21:59:00.003-03:00

The Pod takes its title, allegedly, from the nickname the band gave to the place they were living in while doing the album. That is: there really ain't any "sci fi" connotations going on here. What there is, though, is a harsh return to the band's roots of recording music on a 4-track tape recorder. The album's sound is quite a mile away from the debut, but their sense of humour is still present. This means what you get here is a... Well, my opinion is that this is one of those albums that are definitely weird, but weird in such an aimless way, that it ends up being just pointless. They're just mashing up things that were done way too many times before, and there's little place for parody and humour that I could possibly relate to. As much as GodWeenSatan: The Oneness had parts that reached back to the awful homemade cassette tapes they did, this album sounds almost entirely like one. Perhaps they took some serious lessons on how to craft actual musical pieces, but there's little here to truly grasp and digest. "Oh, but this is their challenging album!", the rabid fans say. Well, I consider this "challenging" thing as an euphemism to "bloody stupid".

But let's go through the entire album so I can explain myself better.

The album actually starts off in a great tone: Strap On That Jammy Pac kicks off the way a country song or something would kick off, with quickly strummed guitar and a drum roll. And then... well, the song stays that way all the way through! It stops on its tracks from time to time, kicking back into action with a snare hit. Very funny trick. Other than you, you get this silly voice singing some weird stuff in a weird tone. This is Dean Ween singing, I suppose, but I really can only barely discern their voices, especially since they don't try too hard making them discernible here. Anyway, as for an album opener goes, it's great, and doesn't overstay its welcome at all. And, whoa, what's with that volume swell at the end?
Dr. Rock has distorted guitar, strangely electronic-sounding drums and vocals filtered through some phasing effect. The melody at the start sort of reminds me of Heroes and Villains. The song rocks, actually; it's invigorating and reasonably catchy. This is one of the tracks that's most probably be stuck to your brain on the first listens (though the rest of the album tries HARD to erase your memories of it completely). It sounds really convincing, and the nicely executed "spacey" break at the middle leads into a guitar solo. The vocal wails are great, too. It ends and leads into Frank, which already sets the tone for the rest of the album. There's a strange percussion loop going on, and it definitely sounds slowed down (pay attention to the snare drum and you'll hear), and they lay some fuzzy, SLOW guitar riffing and tuneless groaning vocals on top (by the way, I just noticed the lyrics mention "pork roll egg and cheese" -- read on). If this is supposed to be funny, I guess the humour just misses me completely. It's not a nominally bad song, and in this position it actually seems effective. But, ohh, WHY does the rest of the album have to sound like THIS instead of like Dr. Rock? Oh, ok, the "psychedelic" guitar solo is quite cool. It's pretty long, too, at 3:46 -- considering GodWeenSatan: The Oneness standards. At some point, it just goes on and on, only giving some relief with the cacophonous noise eats the song alive at the end. Sorry Charlie is a ballad, sort of, with a faintly "country" flavour and heavily filtered, barely distinguishable vocals. I'll say, it's a very convincing imitation of the kind of "country ballad" the Rolling Stones would enjoy covering somewhere in the late 60's. I can see that the filtered vocals, as exaggerated as they are, isn't really going overboard considering they're NOT doing a serious ballad ("And your girlfriend, she's in high school / she says she loves you a lot / lord knows she can't support you / so you better sell more pot," huh?).

The Stallion, part 1, already goes back to the Frank mood WAY too soon. This time, at least, the guitar is much, much more brutal, and the vocals are just a purposefully incoherent angry ramble with about one swear word in each line. "I'm the fucking stallion, man / The stallion". "You goddamn son of a bitch / You fucking piece of shit". Yeah, that's about it. They're just trying to puzzle you, really (though I wouldn't be surprised if the "stallion" is just one of those stupid inside jokes nobody other than Ween themselves care about). Pollo Asado is just completely wicked -- a plain little ditty with heavily clean and electronic "feel good" guitars over electronic rhythms, and one of the guys (Gene, perhaps?) ordering Mexican food with a stupid Mexican food. Really, it's just that, and it's actually very amusing. Now, Right to the Ways and the Rules of the World is absolutely unbelievable; a sort of cross over between pompous 70's Prog rock ballads and the folk epics the likes of Bob Dylan would perform before going "electric". I don't know exactly what they're mocking, but they do it well: the lyrics are pompous and completely senseless, and the solemnly strummed guitar is countered by a jarringly loud organ (listening to Sister Ray much?), and the passionately yelled vocals in the "verses" is niftily countered by the plain "moaning" of the song title. They actually start laughing on the last chorus. Again, it seems like they genuinely cracked up, and then tried to make it sound intentional. I'm actually sounding kind of incoherent, since the album's been actually very good so far, and nothing like the first paragraph suggested. But this song ends side one, and we're off into side two with Captain Fantasy, a slow rocker with a pretty passionate vocal delivery by Gene Ween (it SOUNDS like him, at least). It's pretty catchy! Really good falsettos in the chorus. You'll notice that the drum track is provided by a drum machine, and most tracks here are like that. Can't afford a real drummer, ya know!

Now, there's this slow tune called Demon Sweat. VERY slow electronic drum pattern, and a very interesting keyboard loop (you know what? This keyboard thing sort of reminds me of the stuff Aphex Twin did on Selected Ambient Works vol. II, which is definitely a good thing). Aside from that, they're playing some understated guitar and singing some "melancholy" stuff. And then, it just kicks off into an organ driven guitar climax. And for some reason, they're screwing up with the tape speed. Now, there's Molly -- a slowed down drum pattern with a sort of "metallic" echo effect applied to it (kind of reminds me of some experiments of "krautrock" bands or something), but on top of that, they just sing with a painfully obnoxious "stutter": "T-t-t-te-e-ell-me-what-you-wa-a-a-a-ant-and-I'll-give-it-to-yo-o-o-o-o-OUU!". SHUT UP, dammit. Nearly 5 minutes for an unfunny skit like this? Yeah, "challenging", I get it. And they screw up some more with the tape speed, and lead to Can U Taste the Waste, which at least is short. Less than two minutes, it's sort of a parody of heavy metal -- more specific the "doom" like, slow, heavily distorted metal that goes "CHUGA-ch-ch-chug-a-CHUG-ch-ch-chug", and I really care very, very little about those stupid metal sub-sub-subgenres in order to give it a specific name. It's just the chug-a-chug and a whispered voice repeating the song title. That's all. Don't Sweat It comes around, and I realise we're already into the completely dull and uninteresting portion of the album (that lasts until, oh, until the third to last track). There isn't much to say about this song: "bored" sounding vocals, slow electronic rhythm, distorted and phased-out guitar chords. It gets louder halfway through and features a guitar solo, but I really don't care anymore. Side two is over. Actually, I wrote that a good 20 seconds before it actually ended. Yeah, there.

We're off with Awesome Sound. Slow rhythm, fuzzed guitar and fat bass, moronic groaning vocals by Dean (again, I only suppose). "Pork roll egg cheese and bacon". Hm, I'm sort of noticing a pattern. It's short, but it's even more moronically repetitive than before. The guys sound like they're enjoying themselves near the end, but I sure as hell am not enjoying myself. Laura. Oh, crap, can I just skip to the end of the album now? Really, maybe I'm too shallow to get the humour here, and the brilliance lies exactly IN how these songs sound so bored and moronic. Yeah, the liner notes state they consumed 5 whole cans of Scotchgard during the recording, but the guys themselves later revealed it was just a joke (duh). Maybe they're emulating the feeling of actually being stoned; in which case, I couldn't care less. Damn, I'm not even describing the song. Slow rhythm, fuzzy guitar, obnoxious vocals. There. Ok, the guitar chaos gets pretty cool now, near the end; yeah, after three and a half minutes of garbage. Boing. Boing? BOING?? They aren't even trying anymore, are they? At least it breaks the mold a bit, with a sort of freaked-out quiet blues, with slowed down vocals. Mononucleosis, now, is actually written after a REAL case of mononucleosis the guys got. At least here I can see a justification for this kind of sound, since it emulates the sick feeling quite well. Great guitar solo. Sort of catchy tune, in fact; at this point in the album, it's a relief. Relief? Oh My Dear (Falling in Love) certainly sounds like that! A "gentle" little lighthearted jab at love ballads; sort of a more "mature" version of Don't Laugh (I Love You). Sketches of Winkle -- a fast, furious, distorted rocker. Gee, thanks for boosting up the energy a bit. I needed that, guys; but I wonder, maybe, if it's too late already? That stretch from tracks 9 to 15 just killed me. Great riff, though.

With Alone, we open side four; with a very, very quiet drum pattern and a very, very quiet (and really good) bass line. And very, very quiet vocals. I guess it's a good tune, but only contributes to the lethargy. Really, by now I'm just bored. More fiddling with tape speed. Moving Away; has a strange, "blues" twist to it, but like it's something out of those pompous 80's hard rock songs, with some restrained wails and "passionate" singing. Note: the instrumentation if very, very sparse; but I like it how the tension is boosted by this simple trick of making it sound like everything is just about to explode any time. Pretty funny, in fact. Yep, you read it right: I find it genuinely funny. Ok, the fake "gospel" female vocals (Gene with the tape sped up) are downright hilarious. Great stuff. She Fucks Me. Oh, damn. Very slow rhythm again, radically out of tune guitar, slowed down spoken voices -- two of them at the same time. One of the voices is just repeating "Pork roll egg and cheese on a kaiser bun" (I just realised that right now, reading the lyrics Amarok pulled up for me). I suppose the jarring mix of sentimental words of love and "she fucks me" is amusing, but the morose instrumentation at this point in the album just makes this thing sound like mush. And, goodness, is it long! They could have as well chopped it up in half. Now, 'Pork Roll Egg and Cheese' (yeah, you BET there was a pattern going on), and it's a relatively uplifting "pop" song, with Prozac-y vocals and clean guitars. It's pretty catchy, and at this point, it sure as hell is refreshing, and the freaked out ending is funny too. And, oh, FINALLY, the last track; The Stallion, part 2, is quite different from part 1, and it's... oh, crap: slow rhythm, distorted guitar, moronic vocals. At least the lyrics and the vocal performance are pretty entertaining, with the titular "Stallion" making a complete ass out of himself; you won't believe it until you hear him getting so obsessed with spelling out his name that he spells out nearly the entire alphabet just to show how absolutely awesome his name is. Gee, why did it take them so long to make something actually amusing out of the "slow and distorted" formula? Dammit. It fades out, and kicks back in for a final wind. Gotta dig those moronic, pompous lyrics. And it's over. Ohh, YES, it's over. Ok, I'll be fair: there ARE very good stretches of music in the record. Side A is pretty much entirely classy. But once it starts to sag, it REALLY, REALLY sags, and kills the whole experience for me. No, I don't get why it should be "challenging" and "difficult". Challenging and difficult don't necessarily mean "good": they just mean challenging and difficult, simple as that. And in this case, the reward is pretty much zilch. I just don't enjoy the record. Maybe I've listened to it too few times? Maybe should I keep on trying? WHY? You'll see, later on, why I give such little importance to this record.

Cheap excuse

2009-06-16T23:07:00.002-03:00

I'm absolutely loaded with stuff to do recently, and I'm seriously out of time to keep up with the annotated discography for now -- but instead of letting it die painfully, I'm keeping my energies to fully endure and write about The Pod the same way I did with the previous Ween record. I'm not giving up, folks, I'm just burdened. I've even put the work on my album on hold. But it'll end soon, and maybe this weekend I'll keep up with the posting again.

Aside note: Stereolab went "on hiatus" more than two months ago. That sucks. Of course the guys are certainly doing what's best for them, and they souldn't force themselves to keep the band up just because some lousy fans want them to and churn out half-assed albums, but... I feel sort of worried with that "hiatus". I hope they do come back, however long it takes. If they break up, it'll be a shame. Chemical Chords is one of the best records they ever released, and if they have it in them to make another album up to that standard, I want to live to hear it. Either way, Mr. Gane, Miss Sadier, rock on. You've done much, much more for music than one could reasonably demand. I'm honestly a fan of yours and of everyone who contributed to that magnificent legacy.

Annotated Discography: Ween (part 1)

2009-05-30T19:39:00.009-03:00

I've decided to do here a bit of what I used to do on my old reviews website. Sort of. Though I'll do it differently. Sort of. See, there are certain bands that certainly deserve to have their discography carefully "walkedthrough", for some reason. It's a completely arbitrary choice, but I'll do it anyway. So, what band do we have here? Ween? You might have heard their Push th' Little Daisies song. It's obnoxious, silly, and ear-wormingly annoying. And that's just the point. A lot of people praise Ween for their diversity, or for their originality, or for their extremely witty and clever way of parodying and deconstructing well known music styles. I praise Ween for none of those. Diversity? To the hell with diversity. I don't need to listen to 30 different genres coming from the same band -- I can just listen to different bands, you know! Besides, if they're versatile, good for them -- that's the LEAST I expect from a decent band. Originality? Hardly. Think Frank Zappa. Think os Mutantes. Parody and deconstruction? Sometimes, I wonder if they really intend to do that at all. Case in point: GodWeenSatan: The Oneness. Is it really a carefully thought-out parody of the current musical scenes, using nonsense and absurdity to reach the core of rock 'n' roll? Or were they just having fun? To boot, several of the "rocking" tracks were lifting from homemade cassette tapes they recorded and released in ultra-obscure labels and which now are only available as FLAC recordings of second-generation copies which you can find in BrownTracker. By that time, they were certainly having fun. So why wouldn't they be now? Okay, but let's slow down. Here the plan: I'll put the album on, and write down my thought as it goes. Don't expect anything real-time: I'm not that fast, and I'll occasionally stop the playback to let the thoughts sink in. Let's start.

You Fucked Up. Pounding, heavy riff rocker, with yelled vocals. Sets the tone for most of the album. It's so over-the-top, it DEFINES over-the-top. This is one of the songs that date back to the duo's homemade cassette albums. It's short. Matter of fact, it's over already, and here comes Tick. It starts "novelty" style with silly vocals and a thumpa-thumpa-thumpa rhythm before it goes into hard rock again. Guys, seriously, do you call THIS "deconstruction"? Parody? Parody of WHAT? It's just two guys having fun in the studio, because they can. So far, we can observe that their guitar playing is competent, and the riffs are GOOD. As in, ROCK OUT GOOD. Melody? None. Lyrics? Stupid. Fun? Yeah.

I'm in the Mood to Move. The first thing we could call "parody" here, and it seems to be mocking "macho" rock, with extremely sparse percussion and a two note bass riff. Repetitive as hell. Short. Obviously done for laughs. Gots a Weasel? Boogie style tune with a really clever diminished-chord ascending guitar riff and stupid lyrics and pretty convincing vocals. Really random yells alternating speakers. Okay, this IS really fun. It's a neatly constructed song, obviously silly but not going for excess just for excess' sake. Now it's... oh, Fat Lenny. Repetitive, dull guitar riff and obnoxious yelling on top. I've seen a comment somewhere that it sounds like Cartman, from South Park. It does! But it's not supposed to BE like Cartman, because this is just juvenile dickery. Pointless. Fun? Not really. Oh, and if you listen to Ween, you're gonna bump into the expression "lick my/your brain/mind" A LOT. Why? I think they forget they already used that "clever" phrase and use it again. And here we segue into Cold and Wet, and this stuff starts sounding like mush already. Nothing new here. At least the songs are short, and this time we have a foot-tapping rhythm and a catchy guitar riff and one guitar playing in each speaker, playing the same thing. Pretty competent!

Bumblebee. More juvenile dickery. If I'm not mistaken, this also dates back from the homemade tapes, and it does sound like something a 14-year-old would laugh his head off at. "Oh", you say, "but this is parody! It's deconstruction!" Oh, yeah: they're deconstructing... um... well, they're making a parody of... um... of WHAT, people? There's no parody here! By the way, I'm listening to the reissue that includes 3 tracks, so I'm now in part 2; and I wish they had left this out. This is just two guys making inside humour, and it only sounds neat because it was done in a studio. And now it's Don't Laugh (I Love You). Okay, this is great! Really great! Now THIS is something I'd call parody, and not a heavy-handed parody, but a lighthearted joke. Start with the title: awesome stuff. Sunshine bubblegum pop but with helium vocals. Catchy and funny. The "Ernest Hemingway" bit is awful, though -- WAY too "haha nonsense is funny" for my taste. The tingly rhythm guitar is also great, as is the "nyoo nyoo nyoo" solo. THIS is really great stuff, poking fun at excessive repetition as a way to force the "catchiness" into your brain. The coda? I could live without that one, actually. Guys, I did realise it was a joke, I'm not stupid. SHUT UP, goddammit.

Never Squeal has a very, very clever riff and a groovy boogie rhythm. The spoken vocals are worthless, but they're not really the point. The point is... uh, well, I guess they are the point. I just focus on the rhythm and the riff, which are great. Those breaks are great, too. And here comes... the chainsaw solo. This is one of the best parts of the album, really -- the song builds intensity, builds, and in comes the chainsaw! This is one of those great juvenile ideas that don't seem stupid. Side 1 ends, and we go into Up on the Hill. Can I be frank? The "Boognish" schtick is the worst thing they had come up with to that point. Even they admitted that by pretty much abandoning that shit later on. The a capella gospel parody is great, sounding pretty convincing even being an obvious joke. Great stuff. When it turns into "hardcore", the humour is lost completely, because like I said, this Boognish crap is worthless. Aside from that, the lyrics pick on gospel cliches really neatly. And then, Wayne's Pet Youngin'. Is it just me, or is the counting at the beginning the best part? Other than that, this is just mush, just like those first seven songs. Maybe it's just a way to pump up energy before the following track:

Nicole. As far as I know, this is meant to be a doo wop send up, but done with a reggae tinge. Hmm, did anyone else think D'yer Mak'r? True, it sounds completely different. Nicole is slow, and sounds more like the electro-fake reggae of the 80's or such. It's actually catchy, I'll admit. But it's nine minutes long. Why? Well, because it keeps building those weird sound effects and those off beat percussion echo effects (a reference to Jamaican dub). The combination of instruments, with that weird voicebox and the subtle electric piano and guitars is pretty good. It's enjoyable, and the singing is funny without being annoying. Halfway through, the verses go away, and we're left with the sonic marathon of hell. It's actually not very chaotic, really: the dub-ish percussion gets more intense, the sweeping noises become more frequent, the voicebox goes haywire, some "telephone" voices appear speaking shit, and that's pretty much it. What's the intended effect?... I'm at a loss. Man, I can only imagine how much time they spent making that stuff and layering them into a 9 minute song. So much ado about nothing. There's a funny use of the dub-echo, when they say "Fuck it! Fuck it! Fucker!-er!-er!-er!-er!". That's funny, but not that much. Most of the voices are just empty dickery. Yeah. This is not really "intelligent parody", is it? It's just silly humour. Nothing WRONG with that, but not my style. Common Bitch, now, does sound like a deconstruction -- it's not just over-the-top, but hateful and vicious. And the yelling at the intro is funny, too. This is not just "exaggerated" -- this is actually a good representation of what "angry" music sounded by that time.

And now comes one of those tracks that make the "diversity" fans have multiple orgasms. El Camino. "Oh, my God! A Mexican song! These guys are so diverse!" Ah, come on! They're just piecing together Mexican cliches that even a kid could assemble, and throwing rock arrangements on top. Not that it isn't funny -- it is! It's enjoyable as hell, because it shows the guys aren't doing it for fun, not to show off how clever they are. It's not a "clever" song -- it's an obvious song, but very well executed and fun. Old Queen Cole, now, is a song I always forget entirely. More mush, basically. Nothing to distinguish it from the rest, other than the wild guitar noise. Stacey, also an add on for the issue, is more of the same. I could as well skip it, straight into side 3.

Nan is great. Really, really wicked rhythm and guitar work these guys got going here. Even if it was entirely instrumental, it'd be one of my favourites, actually! But it has vocals, and actually, they work! They create this really, really obnoxious and atrociously annoying character who won't shut up, and their performance is brilliant. It seems they're abandoning the "juvenile" aspect here and going for something more convincing. As much as they're running amok with swearwords, they're not just gratuitous grossness. And we're into Licking the Palm for Guava... okay, forget what I said. We're back into the juvenile camp, except this time the sound is saturated to all hell, and when the vocals stop, it's flooded by ear-piercing feedback -- and it segues straight into Mushroom Festival in Hell, which sounds the same!! I'll admit: the squealing in the segue is awesome. The song itself? At least it pumps some energy into the sound, and the lyrics are an obvious send up of "menacing", pretentious heavy metal -- except with the stupid "lick the mind" line again. Guys, it's clever, but it's only clever ONCE. Funny singing, though. It's not a bad song. Maybe one of the best here, in fact. Now, L.M.L.Y.P. IS, by far, one of the best in here. A Prince parody! A hell of a convincing Prince parody! The guys do pretty much everything right! Matter of fact, I think I don't have ANY criticism here. Funny, intelligent, over-the-top at JUST the right measure, disgusting and ridiculous, and they get the wah-wah licks just right! Fantastic. And, unlike Nicole, the length is entirely justified. Love the "rap" section and the way it gets pretty much unintelligible. And the brilliant bass riff? Yup, that too. I'm also so, so, so very glad for them to make this kind of disgusting, gratuitous "sexiness" sound absolutely, laughably ridiculous. Thank you, guys, the world needs more of this. I know they didn't intend to attack Prince, since they're actually paying homage here, but I do want to attack and destroy that kind of thing, and this song suits me fine. That's not the biggest reason why I like this song, though -- I'm just being a pedantic prick.

"Shit, baby!" That's just priceless.

Shame it leads into the idiotic Papa Zit. More mush? BAD mush? Awful mush? Dammit, guys. Terrible.

Anyway, Hippy Smell is the only song on the reissue that I really like, though it sounds a bit out-of-place here. But it's funny, and actually a really catchy piece of "acoustic pop". It sounds out of place because side 3 originally ended in a very, very abrupt way with the 19-second-long country rant Old Man Thunder, which is meant to sound completely unintelligible and meaningless after the third word. THIS is funny! I like it.

Side 4 begins with a sample from Echoes, by Pink Floyd. Why? I don't know, but it leads into Birthday Boy, probably a parody of 80's "indie" pop, which is solely electric guitar (gently strummed and FUZZED ALL THE WAY TO OBLIVION) and voice. It's a great song, actually! It's obviously jokey, but the joke doesn't get in the way of enjoyment. Also, does anyone BELIEVE it when he says "Jesus Christ, the pain! Take one!". Take one? Yeah, sure. And it ends with another sample from Echoes. The guys are Pink Floyd fans, in fact. Good for them and good for everyone. Now, Blackjack, featuring a stupid little percussion loop done on what's probably an old Casio keyboard (I have one of those!), a single bass note banging on, waxing-and-waning, and the guys repeating dumb words rhythmically. This is probably the most gratuitously dumb song in the album, and I actually don't criticise it -- at this point, it almost seems like a joke on their own dumb jokes. And they start yelling, and shouting, THE SAME WORDS. And at four-and-a-half minutes, it does seem like an eternity. And that obnoxious "laugther" near the end? Ouch. In fact, I don't know if I'm listening wrong, but it sounds like they start laughing genuinely, and then fake the laughter all the way into obnoxiousness. I don't know. It's just a guess.

From there, we go into Squelch the Weasel, a very convincing and genuine parody of "medieval" ballads from British prog bands. Notice how the lyrics are completely inane, but peppered with "beautiful" words. And the singing? Who are they imitating here? I'd guess Greg Lake, and it sounds very convincing. Then it leads into a great contender for the spot of my favourite song in the album. Marble Tulip Juicy Tree is unbelievable, and if you wish to salvage a single song from the album (why??), I'd seriously consider suggesting this one: an absolutely awesome parody of psychedelic rock with JUST the right mixture of distorted guitar, backwards buzzy guitar and helium vocals, and the melody is brilliant! And the spoken word at the end closes everything with the golden key. Great, great song, up there with the Ween classics... only followed by the dumb "pot song" Puffy Cloud. I can't find any way to describe other than "dumb". And all that giggling? I can only guess they weren't supposed to be genuine, because if they were, they pretty much failed.

And it ends. And I'll admit, I didn't put myself in the best of the moods to review this album. But I was merely taking it for what it is: a "shut your brain off and enjoy" album. The problem here is that the album doesn't INVITE you to shut your brain off; and if I'm willing to go into that kind of fun, I won't look for two kids doing inside jokes. Besides, the album itself shows that things doesn't need to be brainless in order to be fun: Nan, L.Y.L.Y.P. and Marble Tulip Juicy Tree are extremely fun and enjoyable, and there's obviously something else going on other than sheer mindless fun. In short, this album shows potential. It doesn't show ONLY potential, though: some excellent songs made their way here, but they're surrounded by muck. But I'd be lying if I said I don't enjoy this album at times. I do. Or, at least, I did. But this is just the first of ten albums to be reviewed. Don't lose me yet.

Update on my next album: Of How a World Is Built

2009-05-14T22:51:00.002-03:00

Hold your horses: the thing still has a LONG way ahead before it can be considered finished. Still, I feel confident enough to give some info on how it's coming along.

This album has been a real headache. I'll be honest. Big Robot, Little Robot was challenging, tricky, somewhat time-consuming and sometimes frustrating to make. This bastard, though, is just time-consuming beyond all imagination. But then again, whose fault is it other than mine? I can't complain. The problem, basically, is that the songs are LONG, the arrangements are THICK, and the requirements I've set to myself are way beyond what I did on the previous album: brass, woodwind and string ensembles in nearly every song? Check; complicated and carefully balanced quiet/loud and slow/fast dynamics? Check; breakcore section with dozens of different drum sounds? Check; pseudo-neo-classical collages and juxtaposition of parts? Check. Yeah, all that and a bit more

Good news, though: the album IS progressing. My initial plans were to first write the album ENTIRELY, and only then start the recording. I felt that mixing those two processes was slowing me down and sidetracking me, so I decided to keep the recording details for later, until I had all the melodies, arrangements and instrument parts worked out. The result is that the songs are all in a pretty advanced state. Here's a rundown:

roughly 12 minutes long. Nearly finished. Only a few parts left to write and details to fix.

about 9 minutes long. Almost finished. A couple of parts left to write.

about 8 minutes long. Very advanced. A couple of difficult parts left to work out and closing portions left to write.

about 14 minutes long. Pretty much finished. Probably nothing left to write.

about 16 minutes long. Advanced. Several difficult parts left to work out, but might be more simple than I estimate.

As you can see, the whole thing will be about 60 minutes long. I had planned another 40 minute album or so, but the songs turned out to need more than that.

Anyway, I have now broken the plan to keep the recording stage for later. I'm already setting down the recordings for the first track, and let me tell you: I'm quite impressed. I had never imagined that I'd ever be able to make my MIDI works sound so vigorous, dynamic and convincing. I'm trying pretty hard to keep myself away from making it sound "realistic", because that was never my goal. The sounds, however, are very alive. The drums are amazingly dynamic and responsible; the guitars sound pretty thick, without falling headfirst into Uncanny Valley (at least it seems to ME); there are sampled MELLOTRONS, produced by a freeware VSTi called Tapeworm, by Tweakbench. Seriously, I'm really excited by it.

As for the title, I have settled with Of How a World Is Built (Music Without Emotion) several months ago. The primary title is justified by its "concept" (hint: it sort of follows the trend of the previous album), and the secondary title is something I've been carrying for a pretty long time, and I think this album is just the right one to put it in. The thing will be explained later on. The main point of this post is to inform that, yes, I'm STILL working. Maybe way slower than I wish, since college and work take away much of my time, and this album is littered with "dead ends" that I have to beat. But I'm doing it. Maybe by the end of the year I'll have a finished product, or something very, very close to it.

And, if my mood is good enough, I might put up the first track for a sneak preview once it's finished.

Things I like a lot less than I probably should, part 2

2009-05-12T23:25:00.003-03:00

Led Zeppelin.

For a long time, I thought my tastes weren't quite "attuned" to this band, and even though I enjoyed a lot of what they did, I seemed to somewhat "force" myself into their material. Then, I think this sort of backfired, and I got to simply not being able to stand them at all. Led Zeppelin sort of became my nemesis -- just like some people hate the Beatles because they're oh-so-overrated and stuff, I... well, I didn't hate Led Zeppelin, but I simply wanted to stay as far from them as I humanly could.

Time passed, and I thought I might as well give them another chance -- after all, I'm a man of many tastes and I'm open to everything, and I don't want to simply stay away from a band because of oh they seem not to be all that good, and oh, they were such rip-offs and jerks (yeah, look at the Stereolab fan calling other people "rip-offs", even though I got into this band WAY after I put Led Zeppelin on my black list). So I put on their forth album, the one with no title, and... ... yeah, I don't like them very much, really. Of course, I'm not making judgements based on only ONE album -- I only have the first, second and fourth LPs on my collection, and I'm missing quite a lot of important stuff. Still? I really, really like several of their songs (off the top of me head I can name Communication Breakdown, What Is and What Should Never Be, Ramble On, Thank You, Immigrant Song, When the Levee Breaks, Over the Hills and Far Away and maybe a few others), but their albums are the primordial hit-and-miss affairs: one time you have an awesome song going on, next time you have one of the worst drum solos ever (Moby Dick, of course), next time Robert Plant is being the most obnoxious singer ever, next time they're doing whatever the hell they feel like doing and doing it wrong. And then there are the stupidly puffed up lyrical affairs (Tolkien references? Really?? And people make fun of Rush!) and, oh, did I mention Robert Plant being the most obnoxious singer ever?

I don't care about the "sexual" aspect of it all. Whole Lotta Love executes its purpose very well, but I couldn't care less about the proposal. The lyrics are raunchy, and I tell them to shut up. Really, just shut up. Whether you're saying crap about giving someone his love, or saying crap about going to live in the misty mountains, or saying crap about anyone remembering laughter; just shut up, guys.

But either way, I still really like several of their songs.

Dwarf Fortress: the infinite possitibilies and the unwillingness to try them

2009-04-12T14:46:00.002-03:00

"Sandbox" games are a kind of thing that are quite en vogue recently, fuelled by the increasing hardware capabilities of computers and video-game consoles, and by the success of games like the Grand Theft Auto series and so on. In theory, and in our imaginations, it seems like the best thing on Earth: have an entire world, or an entire universe, entirely to your disposal, free from the shackles of what the game WANTS or EXPECTS you to do. You just do what you want: try things, see the consequences, try again, have fun. Awesome, isn't it? It's no longer "no, you CAN'T go over this tiny fence because you HAVE to stay inside this building and complete the boring mission you don't care about". Now it's "oh, if you don't want to do the mission, it's up to you. Come back later if you wish".

There are problems, though -- and I think it's very hard to determine how much of those problems are in the games themselves instead of in the heads of the gamers. As a "case study" of sorts, I bring my experience with Slaves to Armok: Good of Blood, part II: Dwarf Fortress (phew!), a game that is... how can I say it? So huge, so massive, so unbelievably detailed and meticulous that it got me wondering how much human interaction a person must have avoided in order to do it (sorry, I don't want to be offensive, but I have to be honest!). It was programmed by a single person. The game generates a world, with all its biomes, villages, rivers, mountains, aquifers and lava pools, simulates erosion, and presents it entirely to you to select a place and build a fortress, construct living spaces, workshops, collect food and water, build farms, produce valuable items, choose dwarf professions, keep track of their health (including which limbs and internal organs are damaged -- no, I'm not exaggerating), construct machines and contraptions, make trade -- all that without any objective. And you see all that happening in real time, in ASCII art, a la Rogue and Nethack.

First: there are so many things this game controls, keeps track of, lets you choose and decide, that not only it raises questions of how the hell one single guy was able to do it, but if it's all necessary. It's a basic fact of game designing: you'll never make something 100% accurate and correct, so there has to be a limit -- both theoretical and practical -- to the level of detail you're willing to descend to. How does one determine that? It's mostly up to what the game intends to be; and Dwarf Fortress intends to be EVERYTHING: no stone left unturned, no detail left unchecked, no variable unconsidered, no consequence ignored. And yet, the game throws you headfirst into it and lets you figure it out yourself.

Okay, so some people like that; They like challenge. Also, they have TIME start 200 games until they start getting the hang of the basics. The game's motto says: Losing is fun. That to me sounds like a way for the game's developer to ignore completely the fact that he's making, you know, a GAME, something to be PLAYED. Dwarf Fortress sets out to be a real universe, however, something to be LIVED, not played; it overloads you with possibilities and details, makes you feel like you're dealing with something savage, uncontrollable, that has your entire existence on its hands. And the rewards? Oh, they are many! They are... um... well, you... uh... oh, you know? YOU play the game 200 times before you figure out if the game is worth playing or not, AFTER you wasted all your time in it.

Second: ... ASCII art? In a real time game?... okay, so you can pause the game and take your time to make all the vital decisions. But, really?... Yeah, so some people say that the ASCII art HELPS the experience, because if forces you to visualise the world yourself and get immersed in it. I say: elitist garbage, just like when people once said that cinema was an "inferior" art because it gave you all the images, ready and done, while in books you had to use your own imagination. Those people didn't realise two things: cinema isn't there to replace the imagery suggested by books, but to push art forwards even further, present even more questions and suggest even more interesting possibilities; also, cinema CAN let many things to the viewer's imagination, and the more skilled film-makers know that and know how to use it (tell me 2001: A Space Odyssey DOESN'T leave a lot to your own imagination and prepare to duck the tomatoes). Cinema is just a different form of art, as valid and noble as literature.

So you see: computer games have been investing in graphics and visuals, realistic representation of objects, realistic simulation of physics and other real life concepts, and so on. This DOES NOT MEAN that the games are losing immersion. A game, even made in pure ASCII, can be every bit as shallow and lifeless as yesterday's generic FPS shooter. Bioshock, however -- at least in my opinion -- created an amazing experience due to the atmospheres, the environment and settings, the characters and the objectives. It didn't even need much of a "storyline": the basic concept is sufficient, and the visuals and physics help to enhance those characteristics. You see? It's not the visuals themselves, but the fact that they're working in favour of the game's design ideas. Now, imagine Bioshock done entirely in ASCII. Maybe the most hardcore gamers (by the way: "hardcore" is a class of gamer that I dismiss entirely) would love it, but think about how you'd miss the hilarious 50's style cartoon advertisements to the power of setting people on fire, the radio tunes merrily playing along to brutal battles with deformed freaks, and so on. When it comes to games, interaction is the key; and the difference between the "textual" and the "visuals" are not equivalent to the difference between reading the book and watching the film, but far closer to the difference between reading a textual description of a breathtaking landscape and BEING THERE, or the reading a technical review of von Karajan's recording of Beethoven's symphonies and LISTENING to them on excellent equipment. The final point is: in Dwarf Fortress, it's impossible (to me, at least) to truly see what's going on. I've played Rogue-like games, and the descriptions and ASCII maps mostly work because the games are turn-based, and the interaction with the world is done through the eyes of an adventurer; in Dwarf Fortress, the game is in real-time, and you're just watching things happening to their own will, and mostly trying to change its course. In the end, you're only watching ASCII characters flashing about -- the most you can do is pause the game, look closely at some of the elements and read the cold, precise, lifeless descriptions of what they are. What kind of immersion is that? With time you may be able to naturally associate the ASCII characters to the objects they represent, but you still will miss all the tiniest details -- which are CRUCIAL to the game. If you're into the game simply for the pleasure of abstraction, why not choose a text adventure then? At least you won't need to play 200 times before you realise you can't put too much salt on the food, or else you'll die of intoxication 40 days later. And if "losing is fun", just play I Wanna Be the Guy -- that one will knock your socks off. Dwarf Fortress, as it is, is the prime example that the difference between everything and nothing is minimal, when in fact it's the difference between something and everything that counts. The skill and effort put into the game are undoubtedly impressive and deserving of praise, but that alone doesn't make a good game. Still, it doesn't mean you shouldn't try it, though. If you're a hardcore gamer, you'll probably love it; and in that case, stay away from me.

Three extraordinary albums, part 3

2009-02-27T10:13:00.007-03:00

I guess I screwed up my plans for doing a post like this every other Monday. I don't know whether I'll be able to (or WANT to) keep this on a regular schedule or just post it whenever the heck I feel like it, so let's get started. This time, I'll repeat some artists I've covered in previous posts, but I'm using here, as a sort of criterion, albums that I've been obsessed with recently. They're the sort of "instantly extraordinary" albums in heavy rotation in my playlists, so don't expect anything perfectly balanced. Ok? So here's the three of 'em:

1. Chemical Chords - Stereolab

Once again, it's the stereophonic laboratory I'm talking about. Last time it was Dots and Loops, but if you play both albums back to back, there are only two things that can tell you it's the same band: Lætitia Sadier and the obsessively, microcosmically intricate arrangement and production. Because, you know, the music is a world apart. Gone are the days when Stereolab would listen to 'Hallogallo' by NEU! and write a song on top of it (even though I really like that part of their career) -- Tim Gane turned into a wild music devouring monster by the time Emperor Tomato Ketchup came around, and their discography shows. Even still, Chemical Chords represents a drastic rupture for the band -- not only in moving to 4AD, but in using Motown as inspiration. The rhythms, brasses and tuned percussion will probably give that away. But, MAN. I think that, in terms of combining sheer fun with insane complexity, only Mike Oldfield's Amarok beats it, and that's not saying little.

Let your finger randomly fall in any title on the track list, and you'll be SURE that there'll be something absolutely devious going on in the respective song. Really. The album is that good. Not a single moment goes by in blank -- to the point where the first listen will probably be a mess, with all songs becoming a big mush in your mind. But learn to distinguish them and you'll start paying attention to all the moments the album is consisted of: the childishly funny trombone melody of 'Neon Beanbag', the little xylophone melody near the last chorus of 'Three Women', the chromatically "falling" strings near the end of the title track, the tingling melody bookmarking the chorus of 'Valley Hi!', the call-and-response in the beginning of 'Silver Sands', the vibraphone breaks in 'Self Portrait with "Electric Brain"', the buzzing synth melody on 'Nous Vous Demondon Pardons', the dissonant string haze on 'Fractal Dream of a Thing', the vibraphone patterns on 'Daisy Click Clack', and that's only covering the surface. The band was obviously in a phase when the music should constantly do something -- and not merely to make it "intellectual". This is not labour for labour's sake: this is music to keep you entertained. CONSTANTLY entertained.

But not only that: many songs here are already impressive only for the songwriting. 'Neon Beanbag' is an endless succession of little melodies that bounce off each other, switching between vibraphones, organs, Sadier's voice and whatnot. The title track is a miracle, built entirely on an unbelievably effective rhythm pattern, with melodic phrases coming in on every turn (I speak sincerely: if there is one song I wish I had written, in the whole world, THIS is the one). 'Valley Hi!' is short and very sweet, the closest to "cute" that the band ever got to. 'Daisy Click Clack' is so fun and so childlike it's more Syd Barrett than Stereolab. And it works! The band sounds totally at home with it, and Lætitia mixes lyrics like "Clap clap, clap clap, all will join in / Tap tap, tap tap, simple rhythm" and "Sensing the symbiotic forces" like only she can.

The musical ideas just keep coming in this album -- and unlike some other review suggests, I don't think the sense of fun is undermined by the complexity and labour contained in the album. In fact: one amplifies the other, and to me, only helps to prove that they are not mutually exclusive. Try it on road trips.

2. Just a Souvenir - Squarepusher

Though I still think Ultravisitor is his magnum opus, this album finds Tom Jenkinson at the top of his game. With Hello Everything, he tried to stitch all his different influences and styles into a "patchwork" album, but here, he throws them into a blender and lets it all loose. Jazz? Check. Breakcore? Check. Classical guitar? Check. Rock 'n' roll? Ch-- what, rock? Squarepusher playing rock? Yep, check! The songs have such an amazing combination of skills and talents that they're nearly unbelievable. Need an example? Check out 'A Real Woman'. The only way I can describe that song is "The Ramones meet jazz fusion breakcore". The brutal simplicity of the 'Blitzkrieg Bop' verses never directly clash with the unusual harmonies from the Vocoder or the insanely twisting bass breaks, but they actually live together in harmony and cuddle.

The trend goes well for the rest of the album: the jazzy bass lines go right along with freaked out pseudo-disco grooves AND with copiously distorted guitar riffs. The songs go from pleasant soundscapes of tuned percussion and synthetic pads to twisted one-man-band interplay, and the drums many times blur the line between sequences samples and live playing. I think Just a Souvenir has Squarepusher finding HIS sound, something that only he can produce, something that mixes the extremely refined with the violently intense, the pleasant and the exciting, the ugly and the complex. Of course he has already done similar things in previous albums, like Music Is Rotted One Note and the aforementioned Ultravisitor, but THOSE albums didn't have themes dealing with shimmering coat hangers, women that are happy because they're real, and acoustic guitars that can distort time.

Okay, I'll explain: the album is titled so because it's a musical representation of a "souvenir", which is Jenkinson's memory of a daydream which featured "a crazy, beautiful rock band playing an ultra gig". The liner notes describe in detail his "daydream", mentioning the crazy guitar that distorts time, the band members being washed by an electrical storm that turns the entire building into a guitar amplifier, and a snare drum that floats in mid-air and explodes due to "electromagnetic radiation emitted by nearby neutron stars". Knowing Squarepusher's purposefully "mythical" and sometimes mysterious image, I'm quite comfortable with taking the whole narration as a put on (what kind of daydream would go into such detail and feature "a small dent where a pantechnicon lorry had smashed through the back wall of the stage to deliver a replacement snare drum"? I mean, I don't think it's dishonest at all for a musician to make up a "story" to envelop his work of art. And, really, the story is so funny in its mix of dream fantasy and incredibly snobby descriptions ("sounded as if the bass guitar was actually a RSJ played with a chainsaw, enclosed in a ventilated cabinet of fine mahogany") that it's definitely worth reading. And it's even better when you hear, in the music, cues relating to the story. The time-shifting guitar? It's actually there! Three tracks are pieces for acoustic guitar and digital effects that sound exactly like that. The "chainsaw RSJ"? Check out 'Delta-V' and the AMAZING 'Planet Gear'. The gleaming coat hanger? Yup: observe it, respect it. Really, what can be better than a virtuoso electronic jazz musician being pseudo-humble and attributing his creativity to a bizarre daydream? The answer is, of course, the resulting album. Check it out.

3. Heaven of Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins

I don't think this is their best album (that post is occupied by Treasure), but this is the album I listen to far more often. I have difficulty talking about Cocteau Twins, because, really, how can you talk about their sound? Unlike a lot of people, I don't get the "music from Mars" vibe from this band. They don't sound at all like "aliens" to me -- they simply concocted a very unique sound and made excellent use of it. But, really, how close is this to "pop" music, or to "synthpop" or whatever? I think labels like "ethereal" are pretty silly, ESPECIALLY when it comes to Cocteau Twins. Better leave it unlabelled, you know? "You wanna know what they sound like? Well, listen to it yourself! That's what YouTube is there for!" That's better. However, Heaven or Las Vegas is unique for a reason: it's POP! Really, it's POP MUSIC. All songs are meticulously crafted like pop songs -- all with their usual mix of instruments and layers, but applied to extremely catchy tunes. In fact, there's exactly one thing that prevents this album from being 100% radio friendly: the unintelligible lyrics. Just like with every other Cocteau Twins song made since then, you just can't understand what Liz Frazer is singing -- and that's the POINT. While it sounds sad that excellent songs like these don't fall into people's tastes ONLY because you can't discern the words, the move reveals a sense of humour that's very in tune with the band derailing critics by titling all songs in Treasure with names of people. Liz purposefully sticks in SOME intelligible phrases, that is, the odd "thank you for mending me babies" or "must be why I'm thinking of Las Vegas", but only to give you the wrong impression that there ARE actual lyrics there, and you must make more effort to pick them up. And so did many people. And the results are beyond absurd. It's not a "new" trick for the band, but here, it makes more sense than ever.

Some people complain that the album lacks the band's "edge", because the moods in the different tracks are more similar than before. There aren't any truly ominous or moody songs. But why should I complain about that when the songs are nothing short of brilliant? The title track, alone, is worth the entire album, with guitar layers that spread into vast infinity, vocal harmonies that are at the same time complicated yet catchy, and even gritty guitar solos. I'm obsessed with that song -- and many others get really close, like the vague yet catchy 'Cherry Coloured Funk', the insanely groovy 'Iceblink Luck', the beautiful and soothing 'Fotzepolitic' and the glorious 'Frou-Frou Foxes in Midsummer Fires'. Even the less catchy songs always have something nifty going on -- usually Frazer's vocal melodies. Just like Robin Guthrie can extract all sorts of amazing and wonderful sounds out of his processed guitar and synthesizers, her voice takes all sorts of shapes and forms, producing tiny symphonies in these otherwise simple songs. Unique sound and ingenious songwriting make this album truly extraordinary. Start here if you want a smooth yet effective introduction into the band.

Talkin' 'bout Flash Games (and how they can be the best thing ever AND the worst thing ever) Blues

2009-02-24T21:18:00.003-03:00

Yes, since this is a blag about music and whatever else (and since nobody reads it), I take this place to talk about Flash games -- not as a programmer, mind. I never programmed in Flash and have no means to make a Flash game. No, sir: I talk as a PLAYER. I'm not your everyday Flash junkie, but I do have an account at Kongregate and I like to collect badges (erk). So, what's up with Flash games?

They can be the best thing ever because Flash put A LOT in the hands of extremely creative and talented people who always wanted to make and publish games in a way that wouldn't attract the attention of only hardcore gamers who're willing to download and run .EXE files. Flash games are immediately playable by pretty much anyone - many systems already have the Flash plug-in installed, and most of the others make it very easy to install. To play, you just follow a link and -- presto -- no more needed. They allow fancy graphics, the performance is halfway decent, and many websites collect hundreds of Flash games because each game is a single, (generally) small file. Flash is a moderately easy tool to handle, it makes things very easy and simple, and ActionScript allows quite a lot to be done. People with a lot of ideas and a lot of willingness to break the rules and explore new territory are finally able to do so, without too many hurdles.

They can be the worst thing ever because, well, Flash put a lot in the hands of people who seem to have NO IDEA of what makes a good game. Really: go out there and see. It can become frustrating, as many games have great concepts and premises, but the execution? ICK. Horrid. It's not a matter of "knowledge" or things you learn at school, and it's not a matter of me talking because I never actually went there and made a game to see how hard it is: it's merely a matter of COMMON SENSE. It's concepts even a child can grasp. They are easy, simple things that we many times fail to realise exactly BECAUSE they're so easy and simple. It's things we take for granted, but forget they have to be actually implemented.

One example: go out, take the games you play the most and see how much your performance depends on luck. I'm not telling you to see how many games use luck as a deciding factor: I'm telling you to see to which extent luck is necessary in those games. I'm not kidding you: many games I've played DEPEND on luck to ridiculous extremes, to the point where you're simply left with nothing to do to save your skin if you're unlucky. An actual example: the game Death Dice Overdose is a very simple action game in which your character has to move left and right and jump in order to avoid dice falling from the sky. Get hit and die, simple. But not only that: you need to pick up "pills" to keep your panic down. Your panic increases over time, and if it reaches a limit, you die. The pills appear randomly (yes, ABSOLUTELY randomly) all over the screen, and there's a lower limit, so you can't simply pick up pills at will.

Bottom line: you have a limited amount of time to eat a pill in order to keep alive. The smart readers realise that if the game does NOT give you a pill before the timer expires, you're hopelessly dead, and there's nothing you can do. The game has to ENSURE that the rate of pills are enough to keep you alive, and you should only die of panic if you fail to reach the pills in time because of his limited skills. Well, to put it bluntly, the author of the game wasn't that smart. Yep: you can DIE because the game is too randomly. It does not calculate the rate of pills, and it simply gives them away at will. If it "decides" to kill you, you die. See? When you play the game, you DO NOT have the guarantee that you'll only fail because your skills are too limited. You can die without committing any mistakes. So what's the point?

It seems like programmers think that adding a bias will make the game too "easy" and not challenging enough, and that it HAS to be random and luck-based in order to be challenging. First: challenge is worthless if there's no fun. Second: luck and luck ALONE is not fun. If it were, people wouldn't bluff in poker, and people wouldn't need to prospect of earning money to bet on horse races and slot machines. Many games do depend on randomness and chance, but PURE randomness and chance is no way to make a game. You know why?

People play games because they want to be good at it. Just ask your friends and see how many of them play games because they want to suck at it and lose. They don't. People play games because they want to beat them, they want to play them once, lose, learn with their mistakes, get better at it, slowly advance, learn new tricks and tips, and FINALLY beat the hell out of it, and then try again at a higher difficulty. For that, people need an INCENTIVE to play. People need to feel rewarded by the game. I'm not talking about promising free cookies if they beat the game, no sir: I'm talking about making the game show the players when they're doing good, and KEEPING them at it. Did the player make a mistake? Punish them and let THEM see what they did wrong by themselves. Let them learn what they shouldn't do, and let them try again. You don't need to pat the player's back and say you love him, no way! It's not about being "nice": it's about being fair and balanced. The player wants to know he's playing well and want to see the consequences of that. He doesn't want to hang by a little thread and be brutally, unexplainably killed at the slightest mistake, or worse, see all his efforts WASTED because the game was badly programmed and was unfair to him. Didn't you ever wonder why many Flash games allow you to earn money or experience and "upgrade" your player as you go? It's a simple concept, see! As simple and obvious as you can be. I'm not saying the Gospel and dictating how all games should be: there are exceptions, but mostly, the player should be compelled to play. If he loses, he should sit back, think carefully, review his strategy and try again. Instead, many games have the player tearing out his hair and running his keyboard into the monitor in anger and disgust. Why? Because THE GAME'S AUTHOR SUCKS, that's it. Plain and simple.

Yet some people fail to grasp it. There's a game called Amorphous+, which is extremely frustrating. The concept is great: with a top down view, you control a guy with a sword who has to kill blobs that kill you at the slightest touch and in annoyingly long and stupidly violent ways (I'm talking Family Guy style here -- folks, gross-out humour is OLD. GET OVER IT). Basically, one touch and you're dead. And the stages are LONG. So, all the time, you have to watch your back and be careful and follow your strategy tightly. But that's not all: the smallest deviation, one millisecond you lose, one thing you failed to see -- or worse -- a completely insane and stupid situation means you're dead, and you have to start ALL over again and play through the BORING, SLOW early stages in order to get to the hard part. What was the "incentive" to the player? Achievements. Yep, the most dishonest and lazy way to keep the players hooked. And I'm talking about illogical, time-wasting achievements, and even some that depend on "one-in-a-billion" situations that, in order to be reached, either the player was born when all planers in the Solar System were aligned, or he's sick enough to play for a billion years uninterrupted. Months later, a "clone", called Cell Warfare appeared. It has achievements, but WAY fewer and more logical ones. The gameplay is instantly recognisable, and this time, the player can take more than one hit before he dies, AND he recovers his health with power-ups. This means, FINALLY, the premise was made playable. And just to give you a hint: the toughest, hardest achievement on that game is equivalent to the LEAST Amorphous+ expects from the beginning players. Yep: beating the easiest level without being touched once is the "ultimate" achievement on Cell Warfare. Wonder why!

Amorphous+ was fun, but it was unforgiving. It didn't give you the space to grow and sharpen your skills: by having to go through the boring parts ALL the time, the player loses patience and interest, only to be mercilessly killed by the slightest, most subtle slip. It's not a rewarding game: you don't tell your skills are paying off, because the game just throws them out of the window at random times through the level. And so do many, MANY games. You know, I sometimes wonder if the game makers actually PLAY their own games. Maybe they get so attached to their "brainchild" that they somehow refuse to see its most gaping flaws, and disguise them as "challenge". But if a guy does that, he's not fit to be a game maker, an artist or anything. The guy must be able to look at his own efforts with a critical mind if he wants to go. A guy that gets stuck to his illusion of "perfection" in his works gets stuck. He doesn't evolve. And worse: he unleashes garbage into the unsuspecting world. Don't do that, people: if you make a game, play it like an actual player would. Revise your expectations. Be clear on what you want the game to demand from its players. Is it a skill-based game? Don't make it too random! DO keep the randomness, because it adds unpredictability and interest. But see, chance and luck should merely force the player to learn to adapt to new and surprising situations. The player should be compelled to explore all the possibilities and adapt quickly, change his strategy when needed, NOT to pray for his life and hope the game doesn't throw him into unavoidable death. Make the game fun.

And please, PLEASE. STOP THE TOWER DEFENCE GAMES. Really, there are billions of them already. The formula got old ages ago. Stop it.

Things I like a lot more than I probably should, part 1

2009-02-08T22:07:00.004-02:00

Yep, MORE than I probably should. This is a counterpart to the previous post. And today's "thing" is:

Where the Streets Have No Name, by Pet Shop Boys

YES, I said Pet Shop Boys, NOT U2. Even if you know Pet Shop Boys reasonably well, you might not know about this relatively obscure item in their discography. Yep, it's a cover of the U2 song -- and predictably, done in early-90's synthpop/disco style. But not only that: it's not just a cover, but an actual parody, and maybe even a mockery of U2's song. Just to give you a hint, it was the B side of the single How Can You Expect to Be Taken Seriously?, a song that comments on famous rock stars that use their exposure and fame to taken on "serious" acts, and how they can often believe they're far more important than they actually are and forget they're still mainly seen merely as rock stars. By putting the U2 cover on the B side, it becomes more than obvious who Neil Tennant was using as an image for his lyrics.

The cover basically wipes out every significant mark the original song had: instead of the magical, mystical chords coming from another dimension and the Egde's echoed guitar picking, you're slapped across the face straight away with a heavy disco beat; Tennant's vocals are absolutely detached and unemotional; and to top things off, the main hook of the song is rightfully mocked as Neil turns it into "Can't take my eyes out of you", and the song launches into the actual titular song. It's absolutely cynical, disrespectful, and of course, brilliant.

Now, I'm talking here as an actual admirer of U2. I'm greatly fond of the band and their music (well... at least until they released Achtung Baby), AND I really like the original song. My feelings about Bono's "political" stance are... mixed. I have never been able to determine how seriously he takes himself and his actions. There's little doubt he has the best of intentions, but hey, no one said you can't use your good intentions for second intentions (ha ha, ha ha, ha ha ha), and I definitely can't tell if he's really determined to make a difference and show it's possible to do good things for the people, or if he's just stuck with a Messiah complex and is trying to show how badass he is. But I'm not here to judge anyone. I wouldn't ever try to judge Bono, especially since I never even met him. But Tennant's criticism is very valid, in my opinion, more as an "alarm call" rather than an angry rant -- and even more because Pet Shop Boys is a REALLY badass band, that was able to stick in bitter, acid social critique into a music genre that's supposed to shut off people's brains and make them dance. Tennant is a guy who knows what he's talking about, and Pet Shop Boys is great and I like them. And their version of Go West is one of the best 90's songs ever, in my opinion, hands down.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 10

2009-02-08T00:31:00.004-02:00

Noisy

Phew, that's the last one!

The concept to this piece was one of the very first ones to hit me, and the very last one to be finished. I purposefully left the writing and recording of this song for last, because I figured it wouldn't be easy at all to make. I wasn't wrong. It wasn't hard, but it's a song that needed quite a bit of care and attention to detail. Writing solos is a bit of a problem I have. After all, it's not easy writing and programming something that should sound immediate and spontaneous. The notes you're laying down might not have the same effect as what you have on your head -- and with me, for some reason, sitting down and opening the piano roll seems to make the ideas vanish from my head. I can make pretty cool sounding solos in my head, but I can hardly cling on to those ideas. And since this song was about 70% a solo, things wouldn't be easy. But it was a challenge to myself.

I guess this is the song that most literally translates the character. Noisy has a trumpet for a noise and often carries a drum around, and even her voice is naturally loud and rough. So, you get the drift. The idea was pretty much the first thing that hit me: Noisy's drum playing immediately evoked a marching band, and from there, it was a matter of finding the the way of making the most noise with a few instruments. My first idea was to have only a guitar solo, but then, the ideas I was having for solos started to become more suited for a violin, so I decided to include both. The chord progression is a slight deviation from the more cliché C → B♭ → G progression, by making it into a C → Bdim → G. It sounds a little more grating and sort of grabs your attention more. The recipe for the song is very simple: you have the percussion, the bass, a piano and a guitar. The problem: how the heck would I create the sound of a marching band?

See, I had the sound of the snare drum, but it had to sound bigger, larger, like dozens of drums being played together. Same thing with the kick drum, which should be turned into a large bass drum. The solution was the application of a chorus effect, with a few tweaks to make it change slightly over time. This makes some snare hits sound "tighter", and others "looser". The bass drum also has a bit of chorus applied, and only the splash cymbal is "dry". Too much chorus would add an undesired "phasing" effect, so it needed a bit of balance. Also, there are two different snare sounds and two different kick sounds used at the same time.

Another problem with the percussion is that the snare drums shouldn't repeat themselves too much. So, pretty much every bar is different from the ones close to it. There are triplets, quintuplets, rolls and other things going on to keep things constantly fresh. The same problem also plagued the rhythm guitar -- and if you're curious, the rhythm guitar was the last part to be written in the entire album. It was a slow, boring process that took several sittings.

The instruments are added gradually, until the solos end, and then this massive ensemble kicks in with a melody with north-eastern Brazilian overtones. This wasn't the first time I used that kind of music as influence: Thunders uses it as a rhythm in certain places of the second half. The melody was pretty much made up on the spot, using a few motifs as "building blocks" for the larger thing. As for the instrumentation playing the melody, there's brasses (trumpet and trombone, as well as alto, tenor and baritone sax), guitar, violin and piano. I wanted it to really come from nowhere, and keep up the heat until the final crashing chord. Initially, I envisaged it erupting into sonic hell, a wash of loud noise which would be jarringly cut short -- but I ended up opting for a simple echo effect which took a few resonant frequencies and made them louder and louder over time. Then, it's abruptly sped down, and seguéd into Sporty. That's the way I liked it better.

So all's good: but what with that weird intro? Once again, I thought of kicking in with a haze of weird, unrecognisable noise, but the idea I had made things a little bit more welcoming. And there couldn't be anything more simple than that: it's all ten tracks played at the same time. First, played at very slow speed, then pushed up to normal speed, and then into ludicrous speed. The metallic "twannng!" is, once again, the endless echo. I REALLY went overboard with it, didn't I? But to make it fun, I added a really strange effect -- I don't even remember what it's called -- that transformed the boring metallic hum into something that almost sounds like something out of an early Residents album. It was pretty fun coming across that effect, because I hadn't even imagined it, and even if I had, I wouldn't have had any clue of how to produce it. I reached it by accident. Poof: there I got it. Cool. So, I played with the speed a little more, and laid the song over an echoed, twisted, slowed down snippet of all ten tracks playing at the same time at hyper-speed. Is that EXPERIMENTAL enough?? Nah, it's not really experimental. It's just weird, and fun. Like the whole album! Ha!

Finishing this song was a great relief to me, and it meant that, FINALLY, I could listen to the album that lived in my head for more than two years. What a thrill! Never, I repeat, never did I have such a fixed and clear vision of what I wanted, and never did I expect to get so close to it. I had gotten attached to the album even before I started doing it, and there I had it, before me. Complete. I was genuinely satisfied with myself, not because I thought I had made an "awesome" album, but because I had beaten all the challenges I had set myself. After that, I took a little break, and started working on my next album, which was ALREADY living in my head.

Also, a small curiosity: the album is exactly 42 minutes and 2 seconds long, and each side (i.e. tracks 1-5 and 6-10) are exactly 21 minutes and 1 second long. I managed to split it exactly in half, and that wasn't planned beforehand. It was just something I realised upon having all tracks recorded. I noticed I had gotten very close to having a perfect 50/50 division, so I tweaked the noise bits a little here and there and settled it. Of course I could have further reduced it to 42 minutes exactly, but there's a special charm to that extra second per side... yep, it's an idea taken from Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, in case you're wondering. What can I do? It was just too good to pass up, you know.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 9

2009-02-07T18:34:00.003-02:00

Scary

I said below my modus operandi is to execute an idea no matter how boring it is to do. But that doesn't mean I can't replace those ideas with better ones!

This track is pretty much a record for me: between having the idea and finishing it, it took me less than two days. And I had kept this track for last because I thought it would be really long and boring to make!

I explain: Scary is this robot who wants to be scary. He isn't. He's an actor, and he's fond of playing creepy roles and frightening people, but he just can't do it. Doesn't mean he doesn't try, though. My idea initially was to make a song that wants to be creepy, but ends up being too goofy for it. So, my mind concocted a droning, rumbling song with a goofy, clumsy "pounding" beat to it. It would go up to 6 minutes, starting from the echoing sounds from the previous track (Stretchy -- remember the album is an endless loop, because I have to constantly say this to sound way more clever than I am), rising higher every time, staying fixed on a B minor chord, eventually crashing down into an F♯ chord, without ever making it clear whether it's minor or major. I liked this idea of tonal ambiguity, and here would be a great place to make it. So, yeah. Scary was going to be a five minute long drone.

Then, like I said on the Sparkies post, I had this strange idea to turn that track into a pseudo-classical piece for harpsichord and piano, and it morphed into a piece for piano. It was something like an "utopia", however, because I didn't think I was able to make it. But the ideas kept on appearing, you know? The starting point were the first few notes of the song, a melody built on diminished chords. I kept the idea safely stored in my head, and on the next day, I started writing it. I finished it on a single sitting. Something REALLY inspired me to kept doing it, and it was fun: it was something completely different from what I had ever done, it was tricky, but it was fun and sounded great. I just kept going.

The only material I had to use as "reference" were piano sonatas by Beethoven. I was listening to them quite a lot (especially my favourite, the sonata no. 21 in C major, "Waldstein"), and I tried to write the song in sonata form. Yep. Picture that. Of course, the piece itself has nothing to do with Beethoven (except maybe from the coda), but the structure was somewhat derived from it. The exposition presents the primary theme, in C minor, and later the secondary theme in D major. Yeah, that's quite radically far from the "convention" of making the secondary theme either in the dominant or subdominant of the first (or in my case, the relative major, E♭). One oddity is that there is a third theme that is not played when the exposition is repeated: instead, it breaks into that crazy ascending figure. Yeah, so there you have the first departure from "rigorous" sonata form. The development does the usual stuff of transposing the themes to other keys, changing them in some ways, and those pieces with insanely fast, random runs were a lighthearted parody of the "virtuoso" parts of classical pieces. The piece has loads of quintuplets (an idea taken from Frank Zappa) and other weird rhythmical twists. It was written chronological, with one part bouncing off the previous one. One of my favourite bits here is how the rising pattern crashes into the recapitulation, which has a slightly expanded version of the first theme. Another oddity is that it ends on D major, which has barely anything to do with the piece's key of C minor. A piece like that would end either on E♭ major or on C minor, but I don't care. I like it that way.

I really, really liked writing that song. In fact, I considered writing two other movements and turning it into an actual sonata, but I never got around to making it. I did have some ideas for a rondó, keeping up with the rhythm and tonality, but it's on hold. By the way, a friend of mine sent the song to a friend of his, a maestro, and sent me his comments. They were generally positive, with a few notes: he says the different parts of the song aren't well defined (which is a sort of stylistic choice of mine), and that it sounds more like a "piece for piano" rather than a "piece for pianist". While I wrote it, I tried to make something that WAS playable by a person, avoiding anything like twelve simultaneous notes, intervals too big for one hand and so on. But since my training in music theory is virtually zero, I dunno. It would take a score and a well trained pianist to tell me if it's playable. It's a dream of mine to see this piece played on an actual piano. I'd be delighted. I definitely can't play it, and I never even tried. But as it is, a synthesized sonata, I'm very fond of it and I love how strange it feels as an intro for the album. Listening to it, you can barely expect what's coming up next.

And the beginning? Well, those ARE the echoes from Stretchy, though I used more brutal and grating effects which caused that "infinite" trick. I actually didn't realise how loud it sounded, and how shocking it was to be placed at the very beginning of the album. But I can't imagine the album without it now. So, PLEASE, when you listen to the album, lower the volume! Thanks.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 8

2009-02-07T18:08:00.002-02:00

Sporty

Hold on there -- we're near the end.

This track, I believe, is the one that most radically breaks away from the "expected" representations of the characters. At the very, very early stages, I did consider making it into a stereotypically fast, bouncy and restless piece, laden with electronic sounds and everything. After all, that's pretty much what the character is. He sleeps on his feet, on a cartwheel -- and his "alarm clock" is activated by turning the cartwheel on at top speed and slamming him against a wall. He's the most slapstick character on the cartoon, though he's also temperamental and emotional. And, somewhere along the process, I came up with this "samba" melody. That's when the piece started more or less to take shape.

And I tell you: that is how my mind was working when I was doing the album. In no other time of my life would I ever have an idea for a samba, I tell you! I was coming up with all sorts of strange things, and this track was something of a challenge to myself: could I have the chops to pull off a samba song? How would it sound? But I knew I wouldn't start straight off into it, so I came up with that slow, ballad-esque intro, which is slightly reminiscent of the mood of Rusty. And, of course, the ending would finally launch into a more recognisable electronic robo-bop, the perfect cue for Tiny. Assembling those pieces in my mind wasn't hard, but then the challenge was to make it.

It was actually rather easy to write the samba part, and the only annoying bit was the piano. If you listen closely, the piano part never repeats itself, and it's constantly improvising. The other instruments are pretty much playing the same thing over and over. I felt really glad at how I could assemble the percussion part (there are a handful of instruments playing there, such as a tambourine, a cowbell, a surdo drum, and of course, more cowbell), at how the woodwinds are entwined, and at how the brasses rise from way below the mix when the A minor chord hits. The mixing was a bit problematic, though. This was the one moment when I had real trouble making the mix, because unlike the rest of the album, there are many different elements that need their specific space. Because the speakers I was using were quite bad, I don't think the mix is as good as it could have been. If you pump up the bass, though, it can get better.

The other parts were no big trouble. The chimes at the end were more interesting to write, because the "descending" effect at the end demanded a bit of caution. That bit is really the only part in the song that represents the most slapstick side of Sporty, by making it fast and clockwork but weird and puzzling. The trick is very simple: at every bit, the instruments are modulated down a semitone, and after a few bars it launches into all out atonality.

I like this track. I think it's a combination, once again, of elements that are very simple. The interesting thing comes from how they're combined with each other, and combined with the rest of the album. It stands out, you know? Besides, it's a bit subversive: samba was always meant to be groovy, loose, free of restraints, heavily syncopated and full of swing. Yet here, even though the rhythm is played "correctly", it's a lot stiffer and mechanical than usual. It's sort of "danceable but not much", a "my joints don't allow me to move as freely as I should, but I'm dancing anyway". It's robot samba. And, of course, with a very elusive intro: when it seems to be a "more of the same" thing, it deceives all expectations and launches into something quite different. You know that melody? Initially, I tried to make it so the notes would lead the listener expect those corny Hollywood clichés, but ending on something completely different. I'm not sure if the final product does that -- I ended up too involved with the melody to make it merely a joke, so there you have it.

Only two tracks remaining!

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 7

2009-02-06T23:56:00.002-02:00

Tiny

How much more simple than this can you get?

One chord, one rhythm, one nine note motif, and chimes. In theory, it sounds banal, empty, dull. In practice, it sounds... um... well, I personally think the song sounds a lot better in practice than in theory. And, in fact, its position in the album is quite convenient, because it follows three rather non-trivial songs. So, it stands as a sort of small "oasis" of simplicity and charm. And, after all, that's pretty much what Tiny represents on the cartoon. It's true that, as the main character and only character present in every single episode, Tiny can be perhaps a little TOO perfect and nice. He usually has The Right Things to Say, but I wonder if we really can blame them. After all, Tiny's greatest disadvantage is exactly what his name indicates. Every day he struggles to switch on the Day and Night Machine, and the more physical tasks are almost always beyond his reach, However, he compensates it with his skills with tools (stored in his head, which works like a lid he can open and close with a button on his belly), building and mending, and of course, his smarts.

As industrious and diligent as he can be, though, the aspect of his personality that really grabs me is his joy of living -- the sheer delight he gets from looking at the robots' world and seeing everything is fine, and the pure happiness he feels by just being there. It's pretty much the child's outlook of the world: it's a nice place to live in! Even though there are problems to fix and issues to resolve, it's great to be a live! Tiny shows this very often, and I wanted to transport that into the song. Thus, I wanted something inherently simple, catchy, perhaps a little bit quirky, but absolutely obvious and down-to-Earth. If you observe, the tempo and rhythm of the song is the same as that of Stretchy, but there are no drums. Thus, you have the momentum, but not the mechanic repetition, the endless clockwork motion; it remains suspended, hovering, and the meandering pad synthesizers are meant to be just like that. The only thing that actually keeps the rhythm is the bass, always alternating between two notes.

The melody was a very early idea, and it was very easy to come up with. I started simply with the A → E interval, an absolutely trivial and cliché interval, moved to the fairly unexpected A → G♯ interval, and tried to build a motif that would lead back to the beginning and, OF COURSE, like a good prog rock influenced musician would do, break into a 7/8 measure and twist the rhythm around a bit. It was fairly easy to come by. And from there, the final, badly needed descent through the keys of G, F, E and D were only a natural conclusion, and keeping the melody always on the same key is what really creates that "motion" in it. Also, if you observe, there is a string ensemble that arrives near the ending, and though they follow the descending chords, the pad synths remain in A major. That's why you get that strange dissonance.

Now, believe me or not, the tricky part here were the chimes. Like I already complained here before, this is some of that annoying manual, repetitive and uncreative work that slows me down. After all, writing it was more like making a painting rather than making music. It was all a matter of putting in the notes in a way they'd create interesting harmonies without repeating notes too often, AND also increasing their frequency steadily until they'd be playing in every single beat by the end. It's sort of mathematical and geometrical thing, and frankly, not very fun to do. And the chimes you hear were the first and only attempt I made of it. Since it took me several days to complete all the instruments (a celesta, a harp, a glockenspiel, a vibraphone and a dulcimer), once I made them all, I never dared to touch them again and just left them alone. This had an ill effect, though: if you notice, JUST as the bass arrives, the chimes echo the flute. It seems perfectly timed and intentional, but it was accidental. I only noticed it after it was done, and was too bored to change it.

And the annoying thing is that, while those chimes appear in two other songs, in Tiny, they appear OVER THE ENTIRE SONG. What a boring thing to make. But yeah, that's my modus operandi: if I have an idea in my head, I WILL do it, no matter how much it bores me. I just think of the final result and get on with it. Tiny wasn't what I'd call a challenging song to write. But hearing the final product, I quite like it. For a song so simple, I think it works. And if you wanna know, my favourite part is the intro, which was made by gradually fading in four notes in slow succession: A, E, D and B. I have no idea what that chord is called (probably something ugly and bizarre like Aadd9sus11), but I think it's beautiful, and the way it is resolved when the B finally moves down to A has quite a soothing effect. I have always been fond of those humming, electronic drone sounds. They remind me of sounds I loved hearing as a child, like the fan spinning and slowly moving from side to side, or the electric dryer in the bathroom. I think the intro and the finale, in fact, are what really make the song. The "middle" portion is simply something organic which grows out of the pad notes and slowly evolves and develops and builds the tension for the finale. You know, that ending in D? It's sort of deceiving, isn't it? Not only does it leave a feeling of tension unresolved, but it slams you straight into Messy. Does it sound melancholy? Hopeful? Dreamy? Sad? AMBIGUITY! Haha! Emotions are not absolute! See? To me, personally, it's sort of gazing absent-mindedly into the distance, with a feeling of joy, but also of wonder, curiosity for the unknown. But if it sounds sad to some people, I won't think it's wrong. There are slightly sad undertones to Tiny's character, and if the song unintentionally reflects that, it only goes to show how much is much more exciting when people don't try to enforce their own interpretation into others. I don't think music has to be absolute, and Tiny is a good composition to express that. Listen with your own ears and enjoy!

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 6

2009-02-05T15:41:00.003-02:00

Messy

Yeah, now we'll start some severe bouncing around. Messy is the only non-anthropomorphic character on the series that has a somewhat important role. As you must have predicted, he's a dog. He's pretty much the sort of dog you find in children's cartoons, only perhaps less clichéd. And the song, well... let's say I took a radical stance here. By associating that description with the track itself, it might even sound like I hate his guts and wanted to kill him. No, that's not the case. This time around, it was a purely musical decision, and the track came out like this to kill the sugar.

To give some background: many years ago, I started producing a musical piece to serve as a "tone poem" for a collaborative story written by a group of Simpsons fans, me included. One of the scenes was a creepy nightmare sequence, and my idea of representing that nightmare musically was to go completely haywire. The song sounded more or less like Messy does here, with high-pitched instruments clashing against each other in a complete atonal chaos. The idea is brought over here, but this time with a tinge of humour.

The instrumentation is similar to the "chimes" on Stripy, being formed mainly of glockenspiel, piano, dulcimer, celesta, harp and "tinkle bells". The most important thing when writing this track was keeping a balance, building tension steadily over its running length, and not creating much of an abrupt climax at the end. Once again, the notes are basically random, and the only care taken was not to keep the playing as non-harmonic as possible. This is a sort of joke, really: the idea behind "random" writing is that people are often bound to find patterns in things, like seeing images in TV static. And by writing completely at random, I wondered if it was possible that anyone could "analyse" the sound and find patterns and theories that I hadn't even dreamed of. And, believe me, people do that. You don't need to look too far to see people writing volumes about a piece by, say, Schoenberg, Ligeti, Varèse and so on and describe all its perfections, all its intricacies, all its complexity; and when you actually LISTEN to the piece in question, your final impression is pretty much "... ... is that IT?". To the "untrained ear", it might all just sound like random noise! And, frankly, I find it fairly silly that one would have to go through years and years of learning, training, studying and pain just to go back to that piece and go "oooooh, NOW I get it!", as in... if you should need so much time to "understand" music, then to Hell with music! The world is way too full of people who think only a selected, blessed few can truly understand music, and this puts them on the élite of the world. That's just pure garbage. Music should primarily entertain, and should be listened to with one's ears -- not with one's "education" and one's "skill". It's not a good thing that so many people "study" music in order to destroy it, to restrict it, to put barriers and limitations on what it can be.

I honestly don't think it "cheapens" the piece of music is the "common man" listens to it and finds it pleasant, or cool, or beautiful, even if he doesn't understand at all why THIS note should follow THAT note, and THIS note shouldn't be anywhere else other than HERE. Messy could have many of its notes shuffled around randomly, and it would still be the same song. People with actual musical training could produce pieces that are inherently more complex and better constructed than Messy, but I made my song so it could be enjoyed and be fun. If it reaches that goal, why should someone criticise it because THIS note is in the wrong place, or because there's no harmonic progression or no tricky modal twists and no display of vast knowledge of all the 20th century modern classical techniques? Of course, I spoiled the "joke" by spilling it all here, and however impossible it would be, I'd love seeing Messy being "studied" in that level. But nah, nobody should do that. There's music out there that deserves careful studying, due to the sheer talent and effort of people who have helped make music what it has been through all these centuries. There are people who are truly passionate about music, and if all that "knowledge" and "skill" is motivated by passion, then it's fully justified, I think, and people should keep it up.

(to be honest, though, I wonder if notable composers have ever done that kind of "joke" before me. MAN, would that be fun!)

The final piece to the "chaos" of Messy is the drum machine. It wasn't an "afterthought", but I did conceive that idea way after the outline of the song was fully formed. As obvious as it might be, those drums are pretty much an imitation/homage/parody of Autechre. There's no real "meaning" behind it; the basic deal is that it seemed pretty funny to me to counter all the "modernist" instrument noodling with a braindead, obvious house rhythm; and then, promptly subvert the joke with another joke, by making the rhythm follow the Confield route and sabotage itself along with the rest of the rhythms. The buzzing at the climax, my friends, is a "snare rush", formed by the snare sound being played at an insanely fast rate. Once again, it's sort of subverted, because snare rushes generally follow the rhythm, and are more "discernible" than that; instead, on Messy, the rush becomes simply a dull, annoying buzz. That's not a mockery or critique: I'm a massive admirer of Autechre, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher and the like. In fact, Autechre's music was very mind-opening to me, and to this day I'm a follower (Quaristice RULES, d00d!).

The tail end of the song was made by manipulating the speed and playing direction of the song, and then applying an "infinite echo" to the final milliseconds or so. An "infinite echo" is merely an echo with its equaliser tweaked to increase the volume after each iteration. This is an obvious subversion of echo, since the sound is amplified to the point of saturation, instead of faded towards silence. This trick is older than me, folks, I'm not inventing anything. The echo, however, is greatly sped up. If you apply the effect, what you get is a pulsating sound that becomes louder and louder until it becomes a barely recognisable, speaker-destroying drone that loops on and on for a while. Eventually, something goes haywire on the calculations and the echo turns into white noise, and eventually into absolute silence (I've never studied what causes this -- it might be a widely known effect). I sped up the effect, making the transition into white noise happen in a about less than a second. The noise, then, was looped, muted at semi-random spots, laden with reverb, and turned into the pulsating drone that segués into Sparkies. If you notice, the break between the tracks happens at a moment when the noise becomes almost inaudible. I made that so you could have a "break" between the sides of the record at that exact spot, and yet have a smooth segué when played straight through.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 5

2009-02-05T11:18:00.004-02:00

Stretchy

Ooo, I like this one!

So, Stretchy, the little robot. He's obsessed with work. His job is to stay in the junkyard, receiving the junk that arrives through the chute, sorting and organising everything. Everything. His obsession with his job has been in focus in a couple of episodes, and in one point, it injured him: since his neck is extendable and articulate (i.e. "stretchy"), an overload of work caused him to tie his own neck into a knot. So, yeah, picture that.

The song itself was one of the simplest concepts I could come up with. Basically, I wanted to make a slightly more direct connection between the album's concept of "robot" with the popular concept of "robot", and Stretchy bridged that gap. And the more obvious and simple way of doing that with music was to make a Kraftwerk parody. After all, they are the robots, innit? The iconic cover of Die Mensch-Machine and the image they created with it is unforgettable, and to me, it seemed inevitable to use that motif to represent a workaholic robot. The title track of Kraftwerk's album makes reference to the "Man Machine", the result of human beings turning (literally or metaphorically) into robots. By subverting it a bit, I could toy with the idea of an actual robot being somewhat stuck between his nature and the more humane attitude of his peers. So, presto: all I needed was a "blip-a-blip-a-blip" synth tone and a rhythm track that would be strikingly reminiscent of Die Mensch-Machine, but not exaggerately similar -- and from there, I'd build the joke, by using a completely random melody dabbling into microtonality, that is, notes "in between" the interval of two semitones (this makes the notes sound like either the result of a very complex and unintuitive algorithm, or like a friendly machine being playful, OR like a malfuncioning microchip). The rhythm would also morph from the ominous slow drone into the usual playful, upbeat mechanical robo-bop.

And THAT explains why Rusty would have had an extended ending with a synth solo -- together with Stretchy, it would have formed a massive Kraftwerk homage, by parodying Neon Lights AND The Man Machine. Eventually I gave up that idea, because it would have been a bit too overbearing and overlong. So, I came up with an even better idea: to incorporate the "waltz" orchestra INTO Stretchy. And, to me, that's what truly makes the song.

Stretchy was the first track I recorded which makes use of that 2/4 rhythm, which would also show up in a few other tracks. It's a very braindead thing, with just a few electronic percussion sounds, and an octave-bouncing bass. It's interesting how that same rhythm could be used to express something dull and lifeless, and yet here, there's an air of playfullness to it. Though I have to say, the song probably WOULD have been fairly lifeless if not for the orchestra. I really like the sound of it, but the orchestra in the end really makes it come alive and round off the album nicely.

The echoes at the end were produced by several tracks with slightly different echo effects applied. Some of the echoes fade out faster than others, some of them emphasize certain frequencies thus "changing" the sound as it goes, and some of them are slightly off-beat from the others. Most of those sounds are snippets of MIDI percussion samples, sometimes manipulated. Originally, these echoes would last a long longer and "wrap" into the next (i.e. first) track for far longer than that. The idea to cut off with a grating, unexpected noise was one of the oldest things here, and in fact was what truly completed the "concept" of the album, by making it not merely "circular", but inherently looped and locked. Even though I have already got myself used to the "two sides" thing, with openers and closers, I imagined the album as not having a definite beginning and ending, and that the listener could freely choose where to start playing and where to stop playing. So, yeah, folks: the last track DOES segué flawlessly into the first. Try it.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 4

2009-02-04T23:10:00.004-02:00

Rusty

Okay, I gotta be open and frank about this: I LOVE Rusty. She has always been my favourite character on Little Robots, and one of the TV characters I love watching the most. So, yeah. Rusty is a cute robot with her body shaped like a red dress (sort of like Lisa Simpson, but nifty) and who wears a funnel as a hat. Her appearance hints that she's an old and possibly obsolete model, since, like her name indicates, she looks sort of battered, and she overheats when under pressure -- i.e. often. Her jumpy and impulsive attitude often sends her into fits of near panic, and she blows steam off her head -- and in at least one occasion, only didn't overheat because Tiny fixed her up on time. This is not her most interesting aspect, though, in my opinion: her personality is somewhat frail, but always smart and full of good intent. She tries to be helpful whenever she can. She also likes decorating her house with items gathered from the junkyard, and has a crush on Sporty.

And my bias kicked in when I decided to focus Rusty's song not on her steam blowing attitude, but on her sweeter side instead. In fact, the song would focus on her "comic relief" side a bit more, but I don't think the result would have been as good. See, Rusty would have started right off the heels of Stripy, with the chimes modulating from A major down to G major, without the complete fade out of the other instruments, and it would lead directly into the piano and synths part. It would have been sort of a post rock tour de force, which would eventually break up the grandiose finale with an upbeat, boppy, long-winded synthesizer solo in A major with a steady, mechanical beat.

Things changed when, eventually, this waltz melody grew in my brain. I swear to goodness, I don't know where that came from. I think I was mentally fiddling with silly ideas and other things, and then I started to create this cute little thing. And I even wondered I was only unconsciously copying from some place else. But I guess I wasn't. I was out on the street when that happened, and I realised the little waltz would be PERFECT for Rusty. So, I had the idea to stick it in the beginning, kicking in from the chimes, and then leading into the "ballad" part. I didn't know if it would sound good or not, but in fact, I got quite satisfied with the result. It's a really, really simple thing: just your usual "rrum-pah-pah" rhythm accented initially by a piano, and with the main melody on flute. Later on, a brass band joins in, and the melody is taken over by a pair of oboes an a pair of clarinets, as well as an acoustic bass. I think what makes it works is the damn unexpectedness of it. A WALTZ? And it's not even a classical, Strauss-like waltz -- it's downright fairground-like! It's childlike, and naïve, JUST like the character I was representing. It was the right idea to present something different, unusual, and endearing.

The rest of the song would follow, with the usual Stripy-like piano and guitar this time used with a thick layer of synthetic pads and a melody for oboe. The twist into the part with the loud guitar is simply me being a Mogwai fanboy. I realised those dynamic twists were a quite cool way of creating tension in a way to grab attention in a sweet, but not corny way. I didn't want melodrama: I wanted a sort of "LISTEN TO ME, please" plead. I didn't really change the instrumentation too radically to achieve that: I just added the distorted guitar, changed the guitars from picking into strumming, and put banging chords on the piano. Presto: instant climax!... in fact, that piece sounds maybe a little more Sigur Rós-like than Mogwai-like. The oboe has a bit of Jón Þor Birgisson to it, now that I think of it. Well, both bands are wonderful. Maybe I was drinking from Sigur Rós's fountain thinking it was Mogwai's, but then, who cares?

Eventually, I decided to ditch the "boppy" part of the song. Partly because I felt the song was getting too long, and the solo bit would be too short and ineffective. And also because I thought the waltz worked so well, it would be a waste to use it only once. So, reprised it, using the same electric bass sound used previously, and adding a string ensemble playing staccato chords along. I really like that bit. And I think the waltz adds a necessary air of spontaneity and imagination to the piece, because to be quite frank, the middle portion was an absolutely "constructed" affair. THAT one was really a matter of fitting the right notes to the right chords -- right down to modulating from D major to E major with a weird twist of F major, right down to the key signatures and to the melody lines, and only the chord changes in the finale were chosen a little bit arbitrarily. In a way, I had to solve a sort of "puzzle", which was to build gradually from D major up to the 'D♯ → G♯ → A' interrupted climax. Even still, I think it's a really good track, I'm proud of it -- even though it's not my favourite song here (I can't name a favourite!!), in spite of it representing my favourite character. To me, it stands as an example that beauty is not exclusively a product of "inspiration". Making good music takes hard work, takes thinking, considering, experimenting and changing, trying again, thinking more, experimenting more and trying and trying again. It's not "whooop! Wow, I JUST got this idea to the greatest song ever oh dear it's beautiful and it's here, now, it's done!". It doesn't work like that. You don't need to be "enlightened" to write good music: you just need to keep trying. And I'm still trying.

Oh, really, screw that "humbleness" schtick. I hate hypocritical humbleness. Look, I've got a critical mind of my own to look at my own music and tell what I think is good and what I think is bad. I wrote a load of garbage in my life, and I think I've learnt enough with it to tell honestly that I think Rusty is a good song. It works a lot better on the context of the album (just like pretty much every other track!), so I wouldn't count it as a possible "hit". It doesn't deserve to be a hit: it's just a cute tune in an album. Listen to it. NOW.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 3

2009-02-04T10:46:00.003-02:00

Stripy

I've always been a bit miffed by the question of "emotion" in music, because I've been more and more convinced that emotion cannot reside in the music. Emotion arises from how people interpret sounds and music, and in theory, this interpretation is entirely subjective. However, possibly evolutive and adaptative issues, as well as social tendencies, lead people to associate certain melodies and harmonies with certain emotions. This means that when it comes to film scores, for example, people are being "manipulated" by people who have vast knowledge on how music can affect emotions. But that eventually means that music, as a form of art, is being restricted, by turning it into a language: with grammar, syntax, semantics and everything else. This is why I've become extremely cautious with the intentional use of "emotion" in music. I think it's a little discomforting to use music as a means of communication and expression, because in the end, nothing guarantees that people will get exactly what you mean; and on the other side, nothing guarantees that the music is an exact representation of its artist. After all, we're not in a shortage of people using music to acquire sympathy and affection they don't deserve and wouldn't get any other way: isn't that what Emo has become?

Stripy, as a song, sticks out like a sore thumb from the album so far. Like Spotty, it was intended to represent the character's personality somewhat accurately, but also vaguely. I'm of course biased to say that, but I'm not able to pin down one EXACT mood for each portion of the song. Even though minor chords are generally preferred to express sadness and melancholia, Stripy is entirely in the keys of A major and E major; and yet, some bits seem to betray a tinge of solitude, a tinge of pessimism, a sparkle of positivity, a bit of naïvety and so on. As I was writing the song, I intentionally kept myself away from trying to emphasize specific parts of his personality, and was mainly guided by my impression of the character as a whole -- which can be different from the impression other people have, and that's exactly the effect I tried to create here. In other words: your milleage may vary.

Stripy, the little robot, has a big, blocky, angular build, but his personality is better represented by the colourful stripes that form his body. He's imaginative, thoughtful and introspective, but his slow movements and low tone of voice give him a clumsy, clunky appearance, which end up making his true essence a sort of "hidden treasure". Stripy knows he has a lot to show, but is often unable to do so; this results in the other characters sometimes ignoring him, but other times being positively surprised by him. His most trustful companion is Teddy, a metallic teddy bear, that he talks to and takes care of, just like his garden of flowers. With the song, I tried not to be excessively "sympathetic" and corny to him, but I tried to hide a sort of poignant beauty, and contrast them with lonely, drawn-out passages devoid of melody, awkward chord changes and radical dynamic contrasts.

The song was born out of the piano line at the start, with the guitar parts and the clarinet melody almost growing naturally out of it. The "chorus" is built around the acoustic guitar line, and from then on, the song practically wrote itself. The passage with the clarinet solo was made to be intentionally confusing, with the time signature varying wildly and the chords being almost arbitrary, and I tried to make the clarinet solo not perfectly synched with the rest of the band. So yes, folks, I'm being quite frank: there's nothing "complex" in that passage, there's no underlying theory, and any sort of surprising conclusions reached with analysis of the chords and rhythmic twists will be accidental. I made up that part as I went, using only my ears and my sense of beauty to guide it. If you listen closely, I've only used major chords, and no complex modal tricks are used. The most tricky thing are the augmented chords that lead to that part, which ended up sounding a lot more dissonant than I expected, and thus a lot more satisfying.

The next parts were pretty much isolated ideas. The chimes are a combination of glockenspiel, harp, celesta and vibraphone MIDI patches, and they were supposed to represent Teddy, Stripy's companion, as well as the more childlike and positive vision of the world around him. And contrasting with it, the clarinet solo part is repeated, sans clarinet, and with a loud distorted guitar borrowed directly from Mogwai. One "accidental" thing happened here, when I was mixing the part, and felt the lack of something to smooth down the roughness of the guitars. I ended up sketching an "improvised" pad part that's somewhat buried on the mix, but that gave a very beautiful result. Myself, I was very surprised with how well it turned out to be, considering it was something sketched on the spot.

The ending of the song leaves only the chimes, that end up in a sort of circular figure. The chimes modulate from B major to A major, and originally, they'd modulate again to G major and segué into the next song. But then, things changed, for the better. Overall, Stripy is one song I'm quite fond of. As much as it's deceivingly simple and cobbled together, the finished product is pleasant and touching to me. Somehow, I feel I achieved just the result I wanted. Oh, and of course: that slow, tangled fabric of piano and guitars ended up becoming something of a personal cliché of mine. And the chimes would become a "leitmotif" for the album, but that's for later!

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 2

2009-02-04T09:45:00.003-02:00

Spotty

Spotty is, on her own words, "large and round and covered in spots". She's a robot with a strong attitude, likes being in control, and has the ability to retract her limbs and roll around for fast locomotion. On the album, I decided to emphasize her character with this pounding, spherical rhythm, sprinkled with "spots" of sound. The puzzle was how to create that. The melody problem was solved very quickly: it turned out to be a perfect opportunity to recycle a very old reggae melody, written in 1999 or so, which I always liked but wasn't able to use adequately. A reggae tune was pretty much a perfect fit, and I just needed to find the right arrangement.

The ingredients used to concoct that arrangement were, firstly, a "bopping" staccato synthesized chord, with a phasing effect applied to give it a sense of motion of sorts. The second piece was a loop of hi-hat like sounds played at the same rhythm, with a bit of syncopation added to give it a certain "jitter", or something. Finally, the "pound" of the sound is a brutally banal drum rhythm played backwards. Throwing in a stupidly simple reggae rhythm (staccato guitar, organ chord and a two-note bass) and the main melody played on a sawtooth synth, the song's ready. You don't need to listen to it closely to see how simple it is. That was, in fact, one of the big steps I took to understand how important it is to give the sound an interesting shape. Even though those first two minutes or so sound absolutely mechanical, with all the instruments playing in near-perfect sync, the little effects add a certain roundness to it, and a hint of something tricky going on. But in the end, it's very simple stuff.

Of course, halfway through, the song sort of "comes alive", with drums playing on the right direction, a guitar riff also lifted from the 1999 song, and finally a synth solo that breaks the song free from the same two chords and leads it into a crazy direction. The chords were chosen almost arbitrarily, and the synth plays entirely on whole tone scales. All in the name of quirkiness. Personally, I think the track as a whole is quite effective. Even though it's a bit "buried" under the lengthier, heavier songs, it sums up the spirit of the album as a whole in but three minutes. The quirky mood, the crinkly mechanical sounds, the lighthearted melody and the simple arrangement aren't supposed to be a "break" from the heavier stuff, but actually the "rule" that some of the tracks deviate from -- and the deviation happens soon afterwards.

Big Robot, Little Robot -- in depth, part 1

2009-02-02T20:50:00.003-02:00

Sparkies

We're starting with this song because it was the starting point for the album's recording. It started here because it was the opening of side B, and it didn't have a direct link to the previous track. The same was true for Scary, but I figured that one would take much longer to write and record.

This track, as odd as it may seem, has one of the strongest links with its corresponding character on the Little Robots cartoon. The Sparky Twins are these two sisters who look pretty much identical and whose preferred activity is to cause mischief. What greatly helps their plans is their ability to silently communicated through antennae on their heads, represented to us by crackling, visible lightning connecting them. The idea, thus, was to make a "twin song", which would be a very simple arrangement which would be played by different instruments, at the same time, on each speaker (that's why it's indexed as tracks 6/7 on the album's official page).

Musically, however, the link is not too strong. I decided on having this electronic "improvisation" with two synthesizer parts, doubled with slightly different synthesized sounds. It's entirely on Phrygrian G -- that means, it's played with the same notes that form the Eb Major scale, but it's rooted on G instead. This gives the song a faintly ominous feeling; and adding to that, I always envisioned the song to be slowly swallowed by a sort of haze; windy, spiralling waves of sound that I was unsure on how to do. The final piece of the puzzle were slices of noise of different kinds, which would form a dialogue between the two channels. So, the bits that ping-pong around your ears represent the Sparkies communicating. Clever, huh? The noises were created mostly with manipulation of different "colours" of noise, either by changing the speed or saturating them, and applying the same ideas to little bits of other songs. It was a quite slow process, actually, and it was important to find the balance to slowly increase their intensity until, by the end of the track, the noise would be constant.

The "haze" of sound was created with two layers of noise. The first of them was a copy of the track itself (sans noise dialogue) with a heavy dose of reverb, and then amplified until it saturated. This created a distorted "echo" of the song, which was buried under the mix and surfaced at the right points. The second layer was far more interesting: it was another noiseless copy of the song, played backwards, with a heavy dose of echo applied (which emphasised the lower frequencies and made them echo very quickly over a LONG period of time). The speed of the track was then heavily distorted, making the eerie "up and down" humming drone, with occasional hints of the melody line. This was also placed low on the mix and occasionally pumped up. Eventually, that track takes over when the instruments fade out. The cool thing is that the echo effect accidentally caused a VERY strange feedback-like effect at the end, which I decided to use as the segué with the following track. So, yeah, that sound was produced by accident, just like a lot of cool things in life.

The final detail is that, on the final months of recording, I had the passing idea to radically transform the song into a piece for piano and harpsichord. I'd make it into a jaunty, mischievous, atonal piece to be played by the piano in one channel and on the harpsichord on the other. But eventually that idea morphed into something else, and Sparkies remained to be what it is now. In my opinion it's not a standout song, but it gave the start to the whole process -- and in that sense, it was extremely important. Thank you, Sparky Twins!

Things I like a lot less than I probably should, part 1

2009-01-23T22:30:00.003-02:00

Tangerine Dream.

The title of this post explains just what it's like: things I like less than I probably should, not certainly should. And I include Tangerine Dream here because, well, I hear so much positive stuff about this band, but I never could get into them. Maybe I've listened to too little stuff? I have tried their biggest works, including Phaedra, Atem and Rubycon, but I just can't see what's so good about it. To me, it sounds like a mish-mash of different trends of electronic music, but taking the WORST of each world. It's not quite dynamic enough to be captivating, it's not quite soothing enough to be pleasant, and the textures and movement suggest that there is nothing to suggest. I don't get it. I'm a big fan of Jean Michel Jarre, and I'm a big fan of Brian Eno, and I'm a big fan of Vangelis and so on -- and I know, Tangerine Dream is quite a different league, but still, it seems to me that they are too involved in doing something way beyond than simply music, but failing. Is it technically outstanding? Maybe, but so is Brian Eno's stuff. Is it evocative? Perhaps, but Jean Michel Jarre is so much more it's not even funny. Really, if ANYONE can point me out what's so good about them, I might try again.

Three extraordinary albums, part 2

2009-01-19T21:01:00.002-02:00

I'm thinking of making this a "series", with new parts posted every two Mondays. And since this is the second Monday since the first triple review, here goes another selection of albums I consider extraordinary for my own personal reasons and which you shouldn't care about if you don't want to.

1. Amber - Autechre

Even though this is not my favourite Autechre album, it's one that marked me deeply. It took me quite a long while to listen to 90's electronic music, mostly because of the stupid and illiterate fear that it was a dangerously territory to explore, filled with traps that go "doof! doof! doof! doof!" for hours on end. Eventually I assembled my courage to get into Autechre, following "recommendations" (not quite) from one George Starostin, and got hooked into it. It was Untilted (sic) that knocked some sense in me and helped me realise the genre wasn't at all to be dismissed, but Amber... ahh, Amber. Sweet Amber. It even sounds like a lady's name, but that doesn't sound too cool since I'm a married man (um, to avoid misconceptions, face "married" like this: we know the theorem is true, and we only need to formalise and publish the proof). The album, though! There is this sweet, magical combination of sounds and approaches that sound abstract, evocative, beautiful, hypnotic and disturbing. Some tracks are marked by rough, intrusive, repetitive sounds meant to dig deep into your subconscious; other tracks are like sudden, unexpected sights of gorgeous landscapes that don't look real but feel like it; other tracks throw you in the middle of an ocean of unfamiliar sounds, and leave it to you to find your way around it. And that's the way I like it!

The songs are, of course, long and repetitive, but that's the way it's supposed to be. In fact, my only complaints in regard to length is that some tracks could be longer than that. If I truly get into the mood, even the longer tracks are over in a flash; and 'Nine' barely sounds worthy of being merely a "vignette". But everywhere else, there are gorgeous slices of genius like 'Slip', 'Nil' and 'Piezo', as well as brilliant works of electronic texture like 'Foil' and 'Glitch', as well as unexplainable masterpieces like the lengthy 'Further' and the scary 'Teartear'. This album is an example that it doesn't matter how coldly crafted, carefully calculated, how synthetic, precise, robotic and artificial a piece of music may be, it's still perfectly possible for a listener to achieve a very high degree of emotional connection to it. Booth and Brown are obviously two people who put a lot of care into what they do, and the result is not that the album sounds "emotional", but that the album sounds amazing, intriguing, fascinating and beautiful.

2. Boy - U2

This album is one of the most amazing cases in my collection of songwriting and production being nothing short of perfect to each other, to the degree of being inseparable. This notion was increased further by the release of the Deluxe version, which includes, on the second CD, the entirety of the U2 Three EP. The production on that release is vastly different, and almost makes the band sound like a New Wave band. But on the LP, Steve Lilywhite's production definitely makes things shine. Larry Mullen's drumming seems to come from the middle of the Grand Canyon, in its aggressive grandiosity; The Edge's guitar is laden with reverb and delay to unprecedented degrees; Adam Clayton's bass rumbles right through the mix and makes its presence heard and felt at all times; and Bono's vocals are always on the spot, given just the right amount of stress at the right times. But production really doesn't mean all that much without good songs, and about 75% of this album consists of real classics. The songwriting is just brilliant; the guitar riffs are always carefully constructed melodies, and not just a couple of chords jumbled together because they sound "cool" -- and even the most simplistic ones, like in 'I Will Follow', refuse to leave your brain for a long while. The vocal melodies always have an interesting twist to them as well, and adding to that, the lyrics are at times absolutely direct and clear, at other times vague and intriguing. There's always something going on, you know? All songs make an impression -- even 'Stories for Boys', which sounds awfully similar to the far bigger hit 'I Will Follow'.

Side A, in particular, is entirely flawless and brilliant. The poppy, fast and nagging 'I Will Follow' can barely prepare to what comes next: 'Twilight' and its intense contrasts between sneaky and all-out raging; 'An Cat Dubh' and its dissonant riff, wild dynamics and creative arrangements; 'Out of Control' and its sheer level of fun and energy; and particularly 'Into the Heart', a song that has mystified and fascinated me right from the days when I only owned this album on vinyl. The lengthy, quiet passage for bass and guitar and leads right off 'An Cat Dubh' couldn't possibly come from a band without at least an ounce of talent. Really. I can only say that the most raging U2 detractors never listened to this song, or if they did, dismissed it because it was too much for them.

One of the biggest "historical" charms of this album, also, is the fact that it's pretty much impossible to tell that THIS band would become the worldwide messiahs of an entire generation. Really, THESE kids? THESE Irish boys who write lyrics like "My body grows and grows / It frightens me, you know"? All the signs of religious larger-than-life-ness and I-wanna-change-the-world intentions are pretty much absent -- and in fact Bono criticises his own ambitions in 'The Ocean', acknowledging how small he felt before the whole world (humanity = ocean, see?). Oh, well, anyway, but not let those details get in the way of the enjoyment.

3. EP+6 - Mogwai

Hope you don't consider me a "cheater" for including a compilation here. But no, this ain't a "greatest hits" compilation -- its merely a package containing three EP's by one of the most influential "post-rock" bands, Mogwai. There's no overlap whatsoever with their studio albums, and I see this as an absolute essential release for the Mogwai fan -- either that or the three separate EP's, but you've gotta have it if you dig this band. But look at this: I dunno why, but this album works far, far better if you rearrange the tracks to play the EP's in reverse chronological order. Try it! Really!

See, we start with the more recent EP, opening with the extremely mellow and pretty songs 'Stanley Kubrick' and 'Christmas Song' on side A, giving way to the longer, more hypnotic and "Mogwai-like" 'Burn Girl Prom-Queen' and the "mini-epic" 'Rage:Man', with the usual contrast between quiet and OMG OMG LOUD LOUD. If you don't know Mogwai too well, it's a great way to get used to the band! All four tracks are fairly mellow, staying away from the noise and repetition and focusing a bit more on "song-like" structures. They're brilliant songs, either way, and makes you ready for the second EP: No Education = No Future (Fuck the Curfew).

Side A of that EP consists of the magnum opus 'Xmas Steps', which packs together an excellent bass motif, guitar layers carefully stitched together, relentless building up of tension, brilliant control over noise and chaos, and an extended closing section with a cello solo. This song was re-recorded for the album Come On Die Young, but I always preferred the EP version better for some reason, including the fact that the cello is left intact. Side B works as a little "break" on the LP, with the slow 'Rollerball' and the hazy shoegazer-like 'Small Children in the Background'. They're nothing particularly unlike what you've heard so far, but they prepare you for the most extreme release: 4 Satin.

For starters, this opens with a drum machine and synthesized chords. It's sort of like a disfigurement of hip hop, and over the course of its eight minutes, the band gleefully assaults it with loud, rude guitar noises: distortion, squeals and screams everywhere keep pushing the envelope further and further, beyond anything you could imagine from this band. The lengthy "ballad" 'Now You're Taken', featuring the only vocals in the whole album (supplied by Arab Strap's Aidan Moffat), closes side A and leads into the final track, the epic 'Stereodee'. The opening groove might make it sounds like a pleasant and fun finale, but the "coda" arrives about ten minutes too early. You know those live performances in which the bands end their songs with a long, "stumbling" final power chord? Well, Mogwai takes that concept and extends it into ten minutes of a loud, massive wall of pure noise. It's not too far from what My Bloody Valentine used to do in live shows, but the band is not really intent on blasting your eardrums off here. But I gotta say, there are VERY few moments in my entire collection that invigorates me as much as these ten minutes, and its closing moments are really awesome, sounding like the band short-circuited and turned into a heavily sabotaged "techno" pastiche for no reason whatsoever. It's a pretty brilliant work, and a perfect finale for the album.

See? THIS is the perfect track order. If you have the album, try it once! And if you don't have the album, well, it's a quite good place to start with Mogwai, AND one of their best releases, in my humble opinion. This, Mogwai Young Team and Mr. Beast are items that should not be absent in your Mogwai collection. Maybe Ten Rapid, too, if only for 'New Paths to Helicon'.

Talkin' 'bout old works and future projects Blues

2009-01-15T11:55:00.004-02:00

Sometimes I'm amazed at how long I've been producing music for. My first sketches of MIDI music date back to about 1999. Ten years ago! And worse: I was fourteen! Thankfully those pieces of music have pretty much disappeared, as they are laughably bad. Ok, perhaps not laughably bad, but more like laughably, absurdly amateuristic and aimless. You see, back then I was just piecing together little bits of music that I could come up with, and trying to stretch them up to 3 or 4 minutes or so. And usually, would you ever guess, I'd do all that stretching by picking up bits from other songs I listened to and admired. But to be fair with myself, I wasn't doing that as in "I'll steal these ideas and earn recognition and fame off of someone else's effort, MWAHAHAHAHA!", but more like "wow, man, THIS is what good music is supposed to sound like! From now on my songs will sound exactly like this". I was a kid, barely discovering music far above the fluff I was used to hearing until then, amazed at the still horribly limited possibilities. It would take LONG time until I started having ideas of my own (actually, do I have ideas of my own already? I'm still not sure!).

In fact, this style of ripping off went for quite a long while. In my first days, I'd just to a few compositions, produce MIDI sequences of other people's songs, download MIDI compositions I enjoyed, and one day I recorded a mixtape of that stuff. Yes, a mixtape of MIDI music. And eventually I felt like I was able to stand on my own two feet and write my very own ALBUM. And so I set off, doing lots of compositions, ranging from short snippets of stuff to a 9 minute magnum opus (yeah, right), including more and more borrowed bits and an entire "cover" of the first minutes of 'Into the Heart', by U2, a piece of music that to this day never fails to amaze and fascinate me. Back and that time, I didn't even have a CD recorder, so I asked someone else to record the CD for me. I titled it Electronic Rock and proudly published it on an Internet page. The album is disappeared. Really, I sent it off to some TV program, never heard about it and never got it back. I hope it has ended on some garbage deposit, because if someone ever finds it, my reputation (?) is gone. Gone!!

Well, ok, so the CD is not entirely bad. I could possibly salvage about five or six of those compositions; matter of fact, the so called 9 minute magnum opus ('Water') was recovered for another album of mine, and 'The Giant' was reworked into 'Spotty', from Big Robot, Little Robot; and maybe, MAYBE, a few other pieces might pop up in future projects. But I was still fairly proud of that album when I started working on the second one. This second one is Musics for Highways, an album which is still available for download on my music website. The first version of it was made entirely with MIDI, but a few years later I re-recorded it adding little sound effects and affecting the mix with some audio editing. Let me tell you: I'm still proud of that record. Really: as much as there are still things borrowed from other bands and bits of naïvety here and there, I like that music. There are several great little melodies and music ideas, and I still have difficulty in coming up with music as good as 'A Landscape in Red', 'Warm Breeze' and 'Somewhat Late'. As much as Big Robot, Little Robot is far superior an album in about every aspect, Musics for Highways has a charm of its own, including the misspelling "musics" (a mistake caused by a mistranslation from Portuguese to English, but which actually gives it an interesting spin).

The following album, The Binary Sounds of Nature, marks my dabblings with -- oh, the horror! -- Prog Rock. That was the time when I was into long songs and time signature changes, and I churned out a whole sixty-eight minutes of MIDI music, in eight songs. The album is also available for download, but honestly, I don't like that album as much. 'Water' and parts one and three of 'The Spirit of the Tree' are quite good, but the rest is highly dodgy. And for one, that MIDI sound is grating - mostly because I use only about six different instruments (synth strings, drums, picked bass, piano, electric guitar, acoustic guitar) all over the whole album, with just a few pinches of diversity (like a Morse code on track 2, which dates back to when I was a rabid, lonely fan of Lisa Simpson. Yes, I've been there!).

If that wasn't enough, "Buses" pushes the envelope forward into a SEVENTY-FIVE MINUTES LONG COMPOSITION. I was intent as hell in producing my own Tubular Bells, my own Amarok. Though I have to say, the music is a vast improvement over the previous album. It's also subtitled "Concerto Schizophrenia II" because "Concerto Schizophrenia I" was a piece written about a story written by a group of Simpsons fanwriters (me included) in collaboration. The story was never finished and the resulting album might still be up there somewhere, but "Buses" is the masterpiece. In there, I went ballistic, including some REALLY twisted ideas. For example, I commissioned a poem written entirely in Latin from a friend of mine, Christina Nordlander, and set it to music. However, I wrote the melody without knowing whether I'd be able to sing it, so when I realised my singing was crap, I double-sped it into a twisted, rather creepy nine voice chorus. There are several parts of the album that feature really good music, in my opinion, and some of the melodies are great. But here's the catch: the whole album hints are personal problems I was having, and I hate that. The album sounds dated to me, and there's even a spoken bit dedicated to -- AGAIN -- Lisa. I hate everything the album represents, I heartily despise Lisa Simpson, I despise everything I was and thought back then, and I can't listen to "Buses" without wincing.

Musically, though, I'm still rather proud of it (Chris's poem, for example, is fantastic, and my musical adaptation of it isn't really bad), but I was already starting to play and experiment with different sounds produced with different software, and wanted to go deeper into it. And since "Buses" was a way for me to stuff whatever idea I had into a wider musical frame, I took my time to "filter out" the ideas I deemed not good enough. Giving myself the time to develop actual ideas, I produced five tracks which I assembled into the recently re-published "Better Than the Beatles!". I already gave a long-winded description of its concept here, so it's uneeded to explain it again, but there's one thing I left off: the concept of "human presence or lack there of" was so fleshed out that the actual title of the album was "Better Than the Beatles!" The Adventures of Piggley Winks, and one of its "features" was the presence of a "rock band" formed by me and characters from the TV cartoon Jakers! The Adventures of Piggley Winks. I was really intent on showing, once and for all, that music doesn't need to sound "human" in order to sound "emotional" -- it all depends on the listener.

At this point, my interest in cartoon shows reached a new height, and I considered making an entire album inspired by one. Instead of using its characters as members of a fictional band, I'd use them as inspiration for the songs themselves. And I guess you know what came out of that idea: the album that was so superior to everything else that it basically rebooted my notion of musicmaking. Really, it just started all over again. The album was, at the time, quite challenging to make, because it incorporated tools that I wasn't familiar with, and demanded a kind of music making not based solely on putting notes on the screen. All those sound effects, playing with echoes, samples, reverb and whatnot, all of it was oriented towards a sound I had on my head. And it took me two full years between coming up with the first song ideas and creating the final mixdown. I was so satisfied that I now consider it as the beginning of my carreer, with everything that came before it as a mere warm-up.

So, what comes next? Currently I'm working on a "follow up", which is also based on characters from a cartoon, and took on a life of its own. Stylistically it's very different from Big Robot, Little Robot, with a more modest mix of influences, less abstract sounds and a more post-rock approach. I'm also planning ahead: I intend on trying something purely electronic and abstract, to try to rip me away from the conventions of "guitar and drums" music, and then I want to try and remake Musics for Highways. Yes, I want to reapply those melodies and themes with a different approach, maybe with a few new compositions as well. So, you might know what to look out for from now. And those old albums, well... let's say they gave me experience, so I'm not embarrassed of them -- except for the first one. That one deserves embarrassment.

"New" album

2009-01-13T12:07:00.002-02:00

So, after a short period of waiting, Jamendo put up my "new" album. It's "new" because it's not new, but I see it as a sort of reissue, in a more official fashion. "Better Than the Beatles!" (the quotes are part of the title, since it indicates it's a paraphrase and and irony) is the album immediately previous to Big Robot, Little Robot, and I'm publishing it mostly because I recently "rediscovered" it and realised it's actually quite good, even though it's quite a mish-mash of stuff. It's got but 5 tracks, and musically they're completely distinct, but conceptually, it does have a common thread uniting them.

The basic idea is that, after completing three albums using not much more than General MIDI sounds, I was being confronted with the idea that the albums were not very good because: a) they sounded unrealistic and annoyingly video-gamey and; b) they sounded unemotional. I can understand a), because I was only making music that way because of my poor equipment (an old AMD K6 computer with dial-up Internet), but b) left me quite puzzled. I highly doubted the notion that says the fact that I make music with genuine care and attention means nothing to the final product, and that merely tweaking the veloticies and positions of the notes slightly would make it more realistic and thus more "emotional". In that case, emotion is a fakery! A forgery! A blatant lie! That bothered me deeply, and I decided to put that to the test.

The idea here is that, basically, each track approaches that problem from a different angle. The two songs on side A have vocals. Yes, folks, I SING on those tracks. The first one is 'Thunders', a 16 minute monster with a sort of talkin' blues rant against, of all things, rain (that explains the cover artwork). The first half was recorded entirely on a very old Casio keyboard I owned since I was a kid. It's controlled via MIDI by the computer, and there's no handplaying at all - yet it gets VERY intense at parts, culminating in a massive ensemble with ALL of the keyboard's instruments playing a half-improv on locrian B, and from there are more "conventional" sounding rock band takes over, with two drumkits ping-ponging in stereo. It's still all entirely synthesized, with MIDI instruments and all, though. The second half also features the poem De Destructione Romae, written by Swedish writer Christina Nordlander specifically for me to use in a song (thank you, Chris!).

The second track is 'I'd Rather Be Home', a four minute pop tune with the same MIDI band and a slightly untrivial chord structure. The vocals kick in on the last third of the song or so, a style sort of borrowed from the Cure, though the vocals ain't worth of even a tenth of Robert Smith. Side B starts with a seven minute piece entirely handplayed on an electronic keyboard -- the main idea was to write a piece with little to no melody, but giving it the "human touch" by picking the most intense and mistake filled take. It's basically asking whether "emotion" compensates for the lack of actual content. The next track, 'Tetralogy', reverses that, by sticking entirely to MIDI and sampled percussion; the trick here is that the entire score is palindromic, and yes, it's an exact palindrome: the first half of the song was written, copied, pasted and reversed, thus creating an exact mirror image. But all the parts are written in a way to give the song a sense of flow and motion, and the palindromic nature of some isolated elements of the song results in "echoes" of things already heard.

In case you're scratching your head there, yes: this thing is very, VERY pretentious. I was indeed a bitter, annoying guy when I wrote that music, and everything oozes that kind of artistic irritation. And to lighten up things considerable, the last track bursts in with a sample of very weird canned laughter (taken from the Brazilian dub of the ultra-classic Mexican comedy El Chavo del 8, no less -- my Brazilian listeners will probably recognise that in a matter of seconds) which leads into a very upbeat, energetic and danceable piece of South-Brazilian accordeon-laden traditional music. Once again, the sounds are all synthesized, but the entire recording is augmented by sounds recorded live in my house and horrible bursts of feedback caused by swinging the headphones before the microphone! This is a sort of homage to the summer of 1996, when I grabbed a cassette recorder and made a whole side of tape with me playing keyboards and crackign stupid comments with my cousin, while all the sounds from the house flew right on top of the songs. Fun times!

I have to say, though: even all tracks are charged with that sort of cheekiness, I still enjoy them. And I think it's better to remove the "concept" and enjoy the songs by themselves (and for that you'll have to take 'Pompous and Pretentious' as a sort of Residents-y aimless improvisation), and I have far outgrown those issues. In particular check out the two last tracks, as that's a kind of music I probably won't be doing again for a long while; and the second track is a good example of what I'll sound like when I become a sell-out corporate whore (ha!).

Oh! And of course, in between the songs you'll find several recordings taken from very ancient vignettes from Brazilian TV. Those tunes were highly likely copied (illegally?) from North-American TV stations, so if you should complain about their use, blame them, not me. Ha! In either case, the end of 'Thunders' features the first movement from Entends-Tu les Chiens Aboyer? by Vangelis; the intro of 'I'd Rather Be Home' incorporates a barely audible 'Jamaican Girl' by Barry White's Love Unlimited Orchestra; and the album closes with a sample of 'The Fight', by Giorgio Moroder. The poem De Destructione Romae belongs to Christina Nordlander, and the rest of the music and words is mine.

Sometimes, making music can be a real pain

2009-01-12T00:32:00.002-02:00

I don't think this should be any news to anyone, but in case it is: yes, it CAN. Does not matter how you're making music, sometimes it can just simply suck. In my, specific, personal case, making music can sometimes be really boring, actually. It almost seems contradictory, because making music is basically exploring an endless universe, filled with exciting possibilities and combinations. But there's always a sour side to everything. I don't know if it's the tools I'm using and the methods I'm applying, but there are very manual, repetitive processes on it that can be beyond annoying. You see, I use MIDI for writing virtually everything, and as amazing as it might seem, a great part of the effort is in copy-and-pasting. Really! It might seem absurd that making music can just be CTRL+C-CTRL+V-CTRL+V-CTRL+V, but you know, that's how it can be. But as you can imagine, the problem is not with the repetition itself, but with making the repetition not sounding too repetitive, in creating tension, building-up, softening-down, changing, making variations and things in order to keep things moving. Just to create, for example, the effect of a guitar strumming up-and-down and changing chords every two or three measures can be quite boring. And on the song I'm working on right now, there's a whole ensemble of instruments playing chords on a cyclical pattern of going up 2 and then 3 semitones. It's a really braindead, non-creative effort, but it has to be done because the final product sounds really cool.

There were moments like this on the making of Big Robot, Little Robot as well. For example, 'Noisy' was the last song to be finished, because it involved making those snare drums keeping up the rhythm but adding little trills and fills in every measure, which was needed to make the rhythm actually exciting and fun -- and it was quite painful, having to come up with fresh variations that kept sounding new and different. Same thing with the guitar chords that kick in shortly before the final melody in unison. Very boring thing to make. But the end result? Frankly, I love it. It was worth every minute. There were uncertain moments as well, for example in 'Tiny', which on the screen looked like a really boring thing going on and on with lots of "magic dust" (no drug references intended!) sprinkled on it, and I wasn't sure if I was able to make it sound good. I think I did -- at least there seems to be a rising tension on it, to these ears.

And there are just times when it seems like the work isn't progressing. And what is particularly frustrating is that, in almost all cases, I can hear the whole thing in my head. The songs dwell in my mind for MONTHS, until I can actually lay them down on the screen. You know Big Robot, Little Robot? Practically THE WHOLE ALBUM was stored in my head for about one year, until I could get it finished. The album I'm working on right now is entirely there too, and I pretty much know and hear every nook and cranny. But HOW THE HELL will I be able to get it recorded? I just don't know, and the work mostly consists of jotting down notes on the screen and hoping to hell that I'll be able to get it done properly. And it doesn't help that the songs actually have a more complex sound than Big Robot, Little Robot: on that one, many songs were a very sturdy, solid base with melodic components on top. On this one, the sonic textures are far more complex and intricate. It's pretty tricky.

On the other hand, though, when the work consists of actively creative work, it tends to flow very fast and smooth if I'm in the mood. Believe it or not, but 'Scary' was written entirely in a single afternoon. It was funny, because originally, it was going to be a completely different piece, basically a song embodying everything boring I just described above - repetitive yet ever growing, copy-and-pastey but ever changing, with tension, build-up and all that shizzle. But then, while I was walking to the bus stop one morning, I was struck by an idea to turn 'Sparkies' into a faux-classical piece for piano in one channel and harpsichord on the other, and immediately I followed it with a little melody based on diminished fourths, and soon it morphed into a solo piano piece. I figured I'd never be able to write it, though, but I finished it the day after. In one sitting. The ideas kept flowing out, and it was done very, very efficiently and smoothly.

The same way, sometimes I can produce entire solos and melodies in a matter of a few minutes, just placing notes on the screen. But when it comes to doing those repetitive, monotonous, manual parts, the thing seems to grind to a halt. And it gets worse when I have little time to work, and I sit down, listen to what I currently have and think "... so now what?... urgh, I'll guess I'll play some solitaire instead". So now, basically, you know why I take so long to make new music.

Oh, yes, and even though I'm already working on an album, I already have plans for another one. But I keep myself fixed to a very tight, restrictive work plan because I KNOW that if I venture into something else, I'll leave those old ideas abandoned for good. And I don't want that to happen: I don't give up on good ideas just because they're hard to execute. So, I keep doing this boring work because I know there'll be a reward in the end. And that's how I make music.

And then again, if making music was always 100% fun and games, it would become boring quite quickly, don't you think? That's the beautiful contradictory nature of life: things can become boring for not being boring. Life is indeed wonderful!

Talkin' 'bout analysing music is NOT boring Blues

2009-01-08T10:12:00.002-02:00

Music is, I suppose, one of the most natural and intuitive art forms in the world -- at its most primitive, you don't need any sort of tool or equipment to produce, since your own body is all you effectively need. And bad or good, ANYONE can do it. Probably that's why music is one of the art forms that "speak" the most to people, since not only the sounds are something very easy to connect to, but it gives you a pretty clear interface to the artist producing them; those "emotional" singers emote like that exactly to make the listener "see" or "feel" it.

That's not ALL that music is about, though, and I think that's a common misconception. "Feeling" the music is good, but it's not sufficient, really. Ever since I reached a certain maturity in listening to music, I've been naturally leaning towards trying to understand my music makes me feel the way I do. And I say that not in terms of "oh, the artist puts so much emotion in this!", but in terms of "why does that arrangement fit the melody so well?". It's pretty crazy, but sometimes it's tough to realise that, in a music recording, every little detail and little sound has most likely been painstakingly and carefully PUT there. It just didn't appear by magic, or because it was "meant" to be there - somebody decided it sounded good there, and put it there. How did THAT happen? How do those ideas appear? It's a process that definitely fascinates me, and I like analysing music in those terms, searching and discovering the little combinations that make music work, sometimes without us truly noticing.

And I don't think it's a "cold" or "boring" way to listening to music, really. Sometimes people think that "overthinking" music takes the fun away from it. In my case, it's the opposite! It's a somewhat "scientific" way of listening to music, and I honestly think science is absolutely beautiful and fascinating. So, why not using that approach on art? You don't need to give up entirely your feelings in order to study music. Sometimes they seem like mutually exclusive things, but honestly, I think some people just like to show off. I certainly don't. But yes, I do believe that the emotional response to music is not something you can measure and describe, because it's FAR too personal and subjective. But the sounds themselves have objective properties, and they can lead to interesting observations. Emotions aren't to be observed, and they come from within us. I don't deny they exist and affect us, but they don't reach us through the air, like the soundwaves do. Emotions can be, at best, expressed -- which is fun too, of course.

Three extraordinary albums

2009-01-05T22:18:00.006-02:00

To "celebrate" the first day of this blag, I'm doing a post here to briefly "review" three albums that, for one reason or another, I consider extraordinary. Some of them you might already know, some you may not: what matters here is the insight into music, whether it serves as recommendation to try new stuff or to retry old stuff with different ears. I won't tackle on anything particularly obscure, so don't expect much snubbery.

Oh, and don't expect download links either. If you REALLY want to download this stuff, you should be able to do that yourself without my assistance, and I'm not here to promote that sort of stuff. AAAAnyway:

1. Selected Ambient Works, Volume II - Aphex Twin

Yeah, I'm definitely not breaking new ground here. This is a stone cold classic, and if you don't have it, you should. Why? Because there's hardly anything else like it! The previous "installment" in the "series" was hardly any Ambient the way Brian Eno originally coined it, but then again, Ambient was defined more by its intent and purpose, not by its sound. So, the music there was strongly rhythmic, accented, even quite dynamic at times. The difference is that Richard D. James invested a lot more on textures and layers than on dance patterns; thus "Ambient Works".

This one, however, dumps the rhythms almost entirely, and instead of merely focusing on textures and layers, it IS textures and layers. But hey, it's not at all what you would expect from your everyday Brian Eno record. In its original issue, the album has 25 tracks, is almost three hours long, and only one track has an actual title -- the only identification given to the tracks are "pie-chart" diagrams and images associated to them, which resulted in the tracks having "unofficial" titles given by fans, none of which are used by the record label or by James himself.

So with little else to focus on, we turn to the music. And what music! These 25 tracks actually cover up a pretty wide array of moods and textures; in parts, it's gorgeous to the point of bringing your defences down without pity; in other parts, it's radically unsettling and even -- dare I say it? -- frightening. Challenging the "Ambient" label, the album doesn't let down in terms of variety: some tracks have slow transitions between different parts, giving a feeling of motion; some tracks rely on melodies, chord patterns, percussion rhythms, musique concrète-like sound collages or hypnotic riffs; some tracks work marvellously as background "thinking" music, while others are so radical that they're bound to wake you up from your sleep and give you nightmares. And the album is structured in a way that you can treat it not like a "mood piece", but as an elaborate journey. It's true that sometimes the nuances between tracks are so minimal that portions of the journey end up as indistinct gobbles of sound, and since the tracks are long and samey, you might get the urge to skip to the next one in aching curiosity to see what awaits you. But be calm! The album is worth enjoying in its entirety.

Highlights I can mention are the first and third tracks on side A, two incredibly beautiful pieces that challenge the notions of "ambient" with unforgettable sketches of melody; track two on side B gives me the creeps, as its main synth pattern has a "breathy" quality that makes me think of crawling alien creatures, while the following track has an oddly bluesy swing to it. The following two tracks make great use of subtle, understated rhythms to add an hypnotic effect. The last track on side C and the fourth on side D have a collage-like structure, while the second on side D and the last on side E are pretty close to Brian Eno. For more gorgeousness, try "Blue Calx" and the second track on side E. Finally, the final side is just scary! The faint echoes on the first track barely prepare you for the relentless "drilling" sounds on the second track. The third track just goes on and on for 11 minutes with the same hypnotic plinky keyboard, while the last one is pretty close to a horror film soundtrack, with haunting string-like chords, echoeing percussion and menacing harmonies. Freaky!

If you're willing to chase it, the only complete issues of the album are the original UK vinyl triple LP editions, available on "limited edition" brown vinyl which is more common than the regular release. The UK CD misses the second track of side E, which is a darn shame, though it is available on an ambient compilation album. The US CD also omits the fourth track of side A, which is plain nasty. Either way, getting this album is a wise decision. Don't miss it!

2. Dots and Loops - Stereolab

Nothing fairer than paying homage to the band that inspired this blag's name, right? And Dots and Loops is not only my favourite Stereolab record, but also one I've been INTENSELY obsessed on during the second half of 2008. Somehow, everything about it just fits and sounds perfect. It's true that it lacks the hyperactive and playful experimentalism of Emperor Tomato Ketchup and the defiant boldness of Transient Random-Noise Bursts With Announcements, but it MORE than makes up with fabulous arrangements, deeply layered and detailed, and melodies that are bound to stick to your brain for a long while.

For starters, the focus here is on rhythm, but not just in clichèd percussive ways. The whole band combines rhythm and melody making one pretty much indistinguishable from another, so the music is booth groovy AND catchy. This goes from the gentle balladeering of 'The Flower Called Nowhere' to the irresistible "walk-to-the-beat" groove of 'Miss Modular' (gotta love those horns!!). Everywhere else, the famous combination of Lætitia Sadier and Mary Hansen's vocals slip through melodies taking their cues from everything from 60's American pop to (maybe) French chansons, from Motown to Bossa Nova. To me, the album reaches its "climax" in two distinct tracks: first is 'Rainbo Conversation', a rich, delightful and invigorating Bossa Nova; and the second is 'Parsec', a piece that miraculously combines warp-speed drum 'n' bass with Bossa Nova. The goods keep coming with the laid back 'Diagonals' and the multi-part pieces 'Refractions in the Plastic Pulse' and 'Contronatura'.

Stereolab has a quite varied career, so unless you get focused on the first five or so releases, you're going to bump into a lot of different, exciting stuff; and Dots and Loops is one I consider a mandatory stop. Put this one on and be mesmerised.

3. Ultravisitor - Squarepusher

So this Tom Jenkinson dude likes to program drum machines and his laptop to produce absurdly convoluted and disoriented "breakcore" beats, and he also likes to sit down on his drumkit and go tappity-tap-tappa-tap like a jazz dude would, and he also likes to pick up his bass guitar and play some insanely complicated jazz solos with a weird ring-modulator-like pedal effect that goes "wWAAKOooOOAAawoOWwAAAAKKkkow", and he also likes to play classical guitar pieces on a Spanish guitar, and he likes to send his electronic machines on wild rushes of drum-'n'-bass. So in this album, he decided to do... ALL OF THAT.

In short, you could take this album as his "self-portrait", an album that basically gathers everything he did until then and carefully puts it together as one long (it fills up THE ENTIRE CD), seamlessly flowing suite, and it works to the point of being extraordinary. The styles bounce each other in a clever, interesting way, and propel the album through vastly different approaches at making amazing music. It gets hard to accuse him of noise-making hack when '50 Cycles' is preceded by the classical guitar piece 'Andrei', and it gets even harder to accuse him of jazzy self-indulgence when 'An Arched Pathway' only comes after the relentlessly melodic and thrilling 'Iambic 9 Poetry'. In short, Squarepusher covers up pretty much all ground here, without ever exaggerating.

I'd be lying if I said I like everything equally, of course. One interesting aspect is that the album incorporates live performances and floods then with obnoxious audience noise. On interviews, Squarepusher seems to purposefully sound like a jerk, and this gives me reasons to wonder what exactly he meant with these noises: one theory is that he was just being mean and throwing the spotlight on the morons that keep yelling and cheering along to his frenzied bass guitar workouts pretending they're enjoying every bit of his playing without truly knowing what they're doing, just so they won't look "uncool" to admit they don't get it; other theory is that he was just being mean with HIMSELF, sabotaging his own pomposity with the boldness of people who're just having a great time and a load of fun with it; or maybe he was just willing to connect with his audience, so I dunno. What I know is that 'An Arched Pathway' spends more than one minute assaulting the audience with unbearable snare rushes, and even though it fits in perfectly in the album, it sounds more like a "statement" than a sample of exciting noise. But it's alright.

Elsewhere, I'm grooving along to the unstoppable 'Tetra-Sync' and its evergrowing mix of layers and melodies, or being utterly carried away by the sonic washes of 'Circlewave', or having my brain exploded by the amazing 'Iambic 9 Poetry', in which he takes a simple yet beautiful jazz melody and runs it through vastly different styles: one time playing it nicely to a strong and accented beat, other time trashing it to beats with chaotic percussion bashing and broken rhythms, and other time driving it into hyperspace with increasing fury. That track alone is worth the price of admission -- though you shouldn't ignore the "hip-hop-from-Hell" of '50 Cycles', the pseudo-industrial solemnity of 'Steinbolt' and the gentle beauty of 'Tommib Help Buss'. This album is a great way to get into Squarepusher, and a careful reading on Wikipedia can show you the best way to delve in further into his music. Check the guy out, if you haven't already.

"Why don't you write it in your blag?" - xkcd

2009-01-05T21:55:00.005-02:00

So, everyone and his mother (except you and your mom) has a blog. No, really. Like, man, really. No, I mean, like, really, like, dude, really. There's nothing special about having a blog anymore, and that should be pretty obvious to everyone already. In a way, this is good, because I can't pretend I'm teh speshul for having a blag to whine and express my opinions in it. It's just another dude, you know! I'm ok with that. Really, it's just fine. I don't need to be the enlightened guy in the Internet, because I'm just not. So... this blag here.

I'm a musician, you see. There's nothing particularly cool about that, though: my music is published only on a few Internet websites, it doesn't play on TV, or on the radio, you won't find my CDs in stores or on Amazon or on iTunes. It's just there, available for absolutely free download and for every sort of enjoyment. So I figured: why not just write about it?
I'll be fair: I REALLY like writing. I'm quite indulgent in it: I write a lot, if I'm able to. I can't control myself. So, this here blag is just a way for me to dump my own thoughts for my own fun and profit and with the added bonus that someone might read it and comment. Isn't that the very point of blogs, duh? So I'm happy with that.
And don't expect much of a focus or a theme: though I love music and love writing music and writing ABOUT music, I make myself free to talk about whatever the hell I feel like talking about here. You can read it or skip it: it's your choice. And I'd like comments: commucation is a wonderful thing. Value it. Treasure it. Use it.

A few things to clear up: "blag" is an intentional misspelling originated on the webcomic xkcd, which you might have heard of already. I'm a big fan of xkcd, without any shame to admit it. One problem I have thought is that I ALWAYS forget the names of the strips, so I can't link you to the actual comic that spawned the "blag" thing, but search the archives and you'll find it -- and you'll also bump into a load of great humour as well.

As for my music, you can download it on Jamendo. You can listen to and download Big Robot, Little Robot, an entirely electronic and instrumental album which is a sort of mishmash of several assorted genres and styles wrapped around a "concept" of sorts. Don't worry: there are no vocals. The link is HERE.

In short: hello!