panda bear at all tomorrow's parties, monticello, new york (9/11/09)
01 intro/chores
02 guys eyes
03 ponytail
04 new song 1
05 daily routine
06 bros
07 #1
08 i’m not
09 boneless
10 new song 2
i've read a few reviews that highlight how unappealing panda bear's live set is. makes me feel slightly sad for the people bored by being a part of his world while he's playing music. i've been beyond enthralled both times i saw him. he stands there virtually motionless, save the constant metronomic tapping of his leg. everything else seems to be tied up in each blip of noise he introduces while the last one takes its time to catch up with the backbeat. in fact, i'll take it one step further and say that the best way to experience panda bear live is to close your eyes and step into a world where chaos is filled to the brim, like in a double dare physical challenge. there are way more noises and samples than are necessary to make a coherent song, but, to paraphrase lennox, ample confusion in music is a very pleasing sensation; it's controllable chaos in a world where we have such little say in so much madness. if you want to be blown away by dudes rocking out their guitars, see another band perform; to me, compelling music is compelling music, and his music straight up boogies with my brain.
i know myself, and i know what i want to do
i'm doing my best and i want to know
is it good for you?
you give me trouble
you give me everything that you've got
i'll show you that what's right for me
ain't for you
when you listen to the same music hours a day for days on end, months at a time, any new formation of a song is like hearing it for the first time. it's easy to trust a musician who's been sending good vibes to your neurons for so long to do whatever he or she wants until the next recognizable hook in a song. these days panda bear draws out his tunes so long as to invisibly sew them together. when one is ending, the other lurks, waiting for the perfect time to spill over into a new song. the result is a spacey, highly enjoyable drift through the starry night sky on pandairlines.
says dan levitin:
say you're hitchhiking from davis, california to san francisco. you want the person who picks you up to take the normal route, highway 80. you might be willing to tolerate a few shortcuts, especially if the driver is friendly, believable, and is up-front about what he's doing. ("i'm just going to cut over here on zamora road to avoid some construction on the freeway.") but if the driver takes you out on back roads with no explanation, and you reach a point where you no longer see any landmarks, your sense of safety is sure to be violated. of course, different people, with different personality types, react differently to such unanticipated journeys, musical or vehicular. some react with sheer panic ("that stravinsky is going to kill me!") and some react with a sense of adventure at the thrill of discovery ("coltrane is doing something weird here, but what the hell, it won't hurt me to stick around a while longer, i can take care of my harmonic self and find my way back to musical reality if i have to").
to continue the analogy with games, some games have such a complicated set of rules that the average person doesn't have the patience to learn them. the possibilities for what can happen on any given turn are too numerous or too unpredictable (to the novice) to contemplate. but an inability to predict what will happen next is not always a sign that a game holds eventual interest if only one sticks with it long enough. a game may have a completely unpredictable course no matter how much practice you have with it--many board games simply involve rolling the dice and waiting to see what happens to you. chutes and ladders and candy land are like this. children enjoy the sense of surprise, but adults can find the game tedious because, although no one can predict exactly what will happen (the game is a function of the random throw of the dice), the outcome has no structure whatsoever, and moreover, there is no amount of skill on the part of the player that can influence the course of the game.
music that involves too many chord changes, or unfamiliar structure, can lead many listeners straight to the nearest exit, or to the "skip" button on their music players. some games, such as go, axiom, or zendo are sufficiently complicated or opaque to the novice that many people give up before getting very far: the structure presents a steep learning curve, and the novice can't be sure that the time invested will be worth it. many of us have the same experience with unfamiliar music, or unfamiliar musical forms. people may tell you that schönberg is brilliant or that tricky is the next prince, but if you can't figure out what is going on in the first minute or so of one of their pieces, you may find yourself wondering if the payoff will justify the effort you spend trying to sort it all out. we tell ourselves that if we only listen to it enough times we may begin to understand it and to like it as much as our friends do. yet, we recall other times in our lives when we invested hours of prime listening time in an artist and never arrived at the point where we "got it." trying to appreciate new music can be like contemplating a new friendship in that it takes time, and sometimes there is nothing you can do to speed it up. at a neural level, we need to be able to find a few landmarks in order to invoke a cognitive schema. if we hear a piece of radically new music enough times, some of that piece will eventually become encoded in our brains and we will develop landmarks. if a composer is skillful, those parts of the piece that become our landmarks will be the very ones that the composer intended they should be; his knowledge of composition and human perception and memory will have allowed him to create certain "hooks" in the music that will eventually stand out in our minds.
this goes on for another forty pages or so, all highlighted and underlined in my book. moral of the story: OPEN UP YO MIND TO NEW EXPERIENCES.
related: animal collective at all tomorrow's parties (9/11/09)
thanks again to money, money, music for the tip.
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