open up your mind

"a true critic ought to dwell rather upon excellencies than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation." /joseph addison



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.

living radically

datamining the collective unconscious

SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER explores the aesthetic synergies emerging from the contemporary use of collaborative internet technologies. Combining large-scale video projection and digital audio synthesis, SOCIAL SYNTHESIZER provides a recombinant flux of sensory information aimed at holding a mirror to the collective unconscious as it emerges from the internet in the form of social software and user contributed content websites.



via

related:

revolver

when you live in los angeles, in a condo surrounded on four sides by other discrete living units, people complain about noise all the time; these days, i don't play music on speakers past tenPM. it is a drag. my last day here, i will be blasting music all day long until the cops come so i can shove my future lease in their fat faces.

this morning, i was hanging out with the window open on the one side of this condo not attached to another living cubicle, and the people across the way had been blasting revolver for the past however many minutes. good day sunshine came on, and i started to whistle loudly out the window.

the guy whistled back! in harmony! strangers are the best. until you get to know them.



beatles - love you to
beatles - tomorrow never knows

related:
billy idol - tomorrow never knows
yim yames - love you to

word of the day

mountebank:

n.

1. A hawker of quack medicines who attracts customers with stories, jokes, or tricks.
2. A flamboyant charlatan.

v., -banked, -bank·ing, -banks.

v.intr.

To act as a mountebank.
v.tr. Archaic.

To ensnare or prevail over with trickery.

e.g. don draper is a mountebank of highfalutin proportions.



almost caught up to the current episode. limit your exposure.

tip o' the cap to brandon for introducing that word to my lexicon.

willow sky

whoa i walk and wonder why.



dutch baklavah - willow sky
mix 1

direct link: http://lklandes.faservers.net/dutch%20baklavah%20-%20willow%20sky.m4a

1. nick drake - northern sky
2. the kinks - big sky
3. beaches - the sky was white
4. queens of the stone age - the sky is fallin'
5. animal collective - what would i want sky
6. six organs of admittance - cover your wounds with the sky
7. geotic - greenery beyond clouds (the oaccas' city in the sky)
8. paul mccartney - vanilla sky
9. air - new star in the sky
10. pink floyd - goodbye blue sky

mixed/edited with garageband.

"we on earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. we are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. we have a choice: we can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. what happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

[the nuclear arms race] is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.

you can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.

the world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

it is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. but is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? it does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

it is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

more sagan quotes

related: list of misquotations

ants

sandy

likin': basic channel - bcd-2 (2008) part 1 part 2



some of these songs are borderline what you'd hear walking into an express men's store. others are very excellent.

basic channel - mutism
cyrus - presence (edit)

mystery album art:


lisa germano - magical neighbors


sandy:


high places - sandy feat
caribou - sandy
beaches - sandy

blue sky

the harmony of the spheres told me this is what it sounds like when a star implodes on itself:

1.12.2009 Koko, London
1.20.2009 Manhattan Center Grand Ballroom, NY
1.21.2009 Bowery Ballroom, NY
1.25.2009 BBC's Freak Zone Sessions
5.18.2009 Royal Oak Music Theatre, Royal Oak, MI

animal collective - what would i want sky (5.25.09 roseland theater, portland, or)


personally, i think it sounds like a phoenix rising from its own ashes. time will tell whose metaphor is more apt.

closely related: grateful dead - unbroken chain

form of magic

"painting isn't an aesthetic operation; it's a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seizing the power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires." /pablo picasso

picasso footage

via
--
deerhunter blog - micromix 16 (mixed by bradford cox) via

1. animal collective - chocolate girl (live on bbc)
2. the dovers - what am i going to do
3. the chills - pink frost
4. coil - the avatars
5. jet harris and tony meehan - some people
6. b-52's - theme from a nude beach
7. birigwa - okusosola mukule*
8. black sabbath - solitude
9. growing - disconfirm
10. beach boys - he gives speeches
11. white magic - day

*most excellent.

posted to his blog right before the ac micromixes. and another song called galaxy cruisers, of which he says,

Here's a song I made on the bus ("Galaxy Cruiser") its for the Animal Collective dudes and Braddax, Fitz, & Chris.

baybay

scientific american mind asks alison gopnik, "what's it like to be a baby?"

If you look at baby’s attention you see a related but very different picture. Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more generally “plastic”, more flexible and better at learning than adult brains. Young brains are bathed in the cholinergic transmitters that enhance attention in adults, but the inhibitory transmitters that damp consciousness down haven’t yet come on line. If you put all that together it suggests that babies consciousness is more like a lantern than a spotlight – that it illumines the entire world around them.

animal collective - baby day
sharon jones & the dap-kings - nobody's baby

where the wild things are

apparently spike jonze cast 10-year-old noah lennox as max:

long term trip in the works

olympic national park



specifically, the hoh rainforest:







within the next few months, i do declare. i'll be listening to this:

taken by trees - east of eden



taken by trees - watch the waves
taken by trees - my boys

and this:

src - the angel song (1969)

feel like dancing

taken by trees recording in pakistan:



fan video of grizzly bear's "two weeks:"



more of this:

foxy

missin' the foxter.

last post

"the fire which seems extinguished often slumbers beneath the ashes." /pierre corneille
--
via ongakubaka:

beaches - beaches

similar to: black mountain, sun dial, older spaced out hendrix



This is one of the more enjoyable all female bands I've heard in a very long time. They're five badass "beaches" from Australia who create churning krauty psych-rock jams. Mastered by Bob Weston of The Volcano Suns/Shellac, this album oozes positive vibes, and minimal vocals allows the music to shine through. Solid from start to finish. A great summer road trip album.

also, i decided just now after a lot of contemplating that this will be the last post of this blog. it's too torn between my own personal doings and music with a much wider appeal than all of that. there's too much amazing music out there that'd be better experienced alongside a proverb or enlightening idea instead of personal ramblings on my part. i'm starting a new one very soon that will feature a quote with a matching song. sort of like said the gramophone, but less watered-down and more prophetic. just simple and restrained, because simplicity and restraint are the new superfluity. except when it comes to cookies.
--


more norml ads

wow, we gotta try that steak

nytimes profiles past winners of top chef workin in new york:

With its curving wood bar and vases overflowing with freshly cut flowers, the neighborhood restaurant is stylish but comfortable — not the sort of place to eat at every night, but the favorite around the corner saved for special occasions. Perilla seems to occupy a different world from the scene at Centro Vinoteca, which is just how Mr. Dieterle wants it...

And Mr. Dieterle, for his part, quickly learned that investors were more interested in a solid business plan than a star turn on a reality show, and that his winnings wouldn’t go far.

“It’s kind of like being handed a case of vodka and saying, go open a bar,” he said. “It’s not going to happen.”

very closely related: patton oswalt - great food is cooked by psychos (from werewolves and lollipops)

i read the other day some verses

"if our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose all heart. if the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. if the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of boston or new york, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. a sturdy lad from new hampshire or vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. he walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not 'studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. he has not one chance, but a hundred chances." /ralph waldo emerson, self-reliance
--
i've been reading a lot of emerson lately, and i watched into the wild yesterday. as i read self-reliance and other essays from his first series i'm reminded of how often a good block of text can easily substitute for the company of any number of people. to come into contact with thoughts you've had as explained by someone hundreds or thousands of years ago is quite an intimate experience, indeed. however, in emerson's perspective, at least, a life is really not worth living alone with the company of only books and the ideas of people with whom you will never be able to converse or challenge. into the wild parallels that as chris mccandless writes in a book, as his final diary entry, "happiness only real when shared." intellectual fulfillment and deeper universal understanding may come with solitude, but true happiness can really only be experienced in the shared places between common-minded people.
--
pur ti miro, from l'incoronazione di poppea, is the first song i remember hearing in my music appreciation class focused on opera a couple years ago. originally it was sung by two castrati, or dudes whose you-know-whats had been you-know-whatted in order to preserve their prepubescent, pure voices. these days, since no male opera singer in his right mind would do that in order to conserve for himself a contralto of that calibur--not to mention, it's been an outdated opera modus operandi for centuries--the song is performed by two women, usually. all the clips on youtube of such performances are weirdly sparse, and at least one of the women is usually outfitted in skintight vinyl. it distracts from the intended mood somewhat, to say the very least.

ANYWAY the original song that i heard was a simple arrangement of a couple strings and a harpsichord with the two men singing this incredibly, and intimately, interwoven melody of love and dedication. each voice flies in accordance with the other like two birds swooping inches from the water as they careen through a brook (or some shit like that). it is supremely romantic--alomst too pretty to listen to in parts, but i listen to it on repeat, anyway, because it really is so beautiful. i could easily say this duet revolutionized the way i listened to and understood music from that point onward.



so, with that, comes animal collective's leaf house. i've always considered it one of my favorite ac songs, and probably my favorite song showcasing avey's and panda's harmonies and how lush they can become when finagled through mixers and multipliers and all sorts of what-nots.

it sounds amazing live. i'll be seeing ac in milwaukee on may 19, which is thirty-five days from today. five weeks is the length of time i spent in spain as a teenager, and they were the best of my life, still. everything else after that has been set against that initial bar of living abroad at fifteen. if five weeks could change my life and inspire me to the degree that living in spain did, i'm sure i can muster up some fireworks to kickstart my life yet again before experiencing ac live. good grief, i get goosebumps just thinking about it. bonnaroo is twenty-three days later. HUZZAH!

the happiness project

"a friend is a person with whom i may be sincere. before him i may think aloud. i am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, that i may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another." /ralph waldo emerson



animal collective - grass

we do the dance up on the plains
then i shake your shoulders
you push me down into the grains
who rubs our noses in the night?
we do, we do.


--
charles spearin - the happiness project



Meaning seems to be our hunger but we should still try to taste our food. I wanted to see if I could blur the line between speaking and singing - life and art? - and write music based on these accidental melodies. So I had some musician friends play, as close as they could, these neighbourhood melodies on different instruments (Mrs. Morris on the tenor saxophone, Marisa on the harp, my daughter Ondine on the violin, etc.) and then I arranged them as though they were songs. /charles spearin, co-founder of broken social scene and do, make, say, think