thekenshow's blog

My life was enriched the moment I first heard Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1. It was as though I had fallen in love with the mystery of being alive. NPR's All Things Considered looks at this influential composer through the playing of guitarists Jonathan Stone and Adrian Bond (audio interview):

Stone says that Satie's music achieves its effects in spite of — or maybe because of — his lack of technical ability. As an anti-authoritarian, Satie constantly found ways to break the rules of composition, including the use of the flat-fifth, an atonal chord.

The comments Satie sprinkled throughout his compositions ("Call me a cab", "Don't be proud") may seem merely amusing, but they also reveal the piece to a performer in an innovative way. You can listen to Stone and Bond render several Satie pieces on the NPR page.

Bernie Kraus, a researcher who records the sounds of natural environments, reports that it's becoming harder and harder to find environments free of man-made noise:

Krause has heard this happen all over the world. For example, the population of spadefoot toads in the Yosemite region of the Sierras is declining rapidly, and Krause thinks it's because of low-flying military training missions in the area. The toad calls lose their synchronicity, and coyotes and owls home in on individual frogs trying to rejoin the chorus.

Music depends on silence, ultimately. Without silence, sound loses its depth and to some extent its meaning. This is not only true globally but within the context of a song. One reason Damien Rice's album O has such power is the silence it contains. That sparseness highlights each sound in a way that can't be achieved by adding more - more production, more instruments, more harmonies.

Krause is pointing out that until fairly recently the natural world, including humans, evolved as a delicate sonic composition resting on silence. Humans have since lost the score and, like a stoned timpanist enthralled by the booming of his own drums, are trampling the piece.

PS. You can listen to the sounds of various natural habitats on this map of the Earth. The singing of wolves at dawn near Algonquin Park is astounding.

Derrick Carpenter looks at how we can consciously engage music as a positive influence for our lives:

By listening to the same 20 songs over and over for a few weeks during my best and most positive moments, I deeply associate the events, emotions, and experiences of that time period to those songs. And now if I pop a disc labeled “Fall 2001” into my oversized player, I am instantly taken back to a rich, vivid series of memories of all the things that mattered to me at that time. A musical diary, if you will.

This is exactly not the random shuffling of thousands of tunes on an iPod, although I think there's a place for both. Sometimes there's a world of difference between what actually serves us in any moment and what we think will. Still, Carpenter makes a good point. Your homework, iPod or otherwise, is to fashion a June playlist that's an hour or so long and then listen to it as often as you can for the rest of this month. I'm off to create mine!

On The Guardian, Rafael Behr holds forth on the surging quality of lyrics in British music today, while observing that the phenomenon is sliding by largely unnoticed on account of sagging industry profits:

But away from the gigs and the internet chatrooms there is little celebration of our collective cultural bounty akin to the 'Cool Britannia' hype of the mid-to-late Nineties. That is because the lyrical renaissance is not turning out to be a gilded time for the record industry, which has traditionally helped ramp fans' exuberance into national media hype.

I think music today is more diverse and interesting now than I can ever remember. If the business wasn't working so desperately to stomp out or bleed dry new music outlets, we'd already be a lot more familiar with it. Instead, we're still being treated to rehashed American Idol and Clear Channel drippings. Still, it keeps coming and eventually we'll get there. Who knows – maybe the current crop of potent songwriting is being fueled by the thrashing resistance of an industry in transition?

Via Metafilter, I discovered this collaborative songwriting project by Rivers Cuomo of Weezer fame. Cuomo starts it rolling with a theme and then invites viewers to submit their ideas for each phase – chord progressions, lyrics, production, etc. Start with Let's Write a Sawng (Step 1 and Step 2) and you can watch the song develop.

I found it interesting and instructive to see it unfold once I resigned myself to the annoying video and audio effects Cuomo applies to his posts. The tune that comes out of it is pretty damned fun. We're in the early stages of an online songbuilding project here so it was good timing to come across this effort.

Rob Trucks blogs on the Village Voice about Peter Case, a Grammy-nominated, lifelong singer/songwriter who he's invited to play on the streets of NYC:

Peter’s older now and, at least for today, noticeably more fatigued. It’s warmer of course, and more crowded, but on this corner is a man and his guitar and some songs that no one, in this setting, on this day, cares to stop and hear.

What does it mean to continue making music at age 53 in a world where the cultural currency of music trades primarily in fashionable novelty, youth and beauty? When your embodiment of art is a dandelion, simultaneously unseen and unwanted? When a vast chorus of gushing voices urges us on to the Next Sound? What does it mean to the Peter Cases of the world, and to us, that he keeps on making music in such circumstances?

People are impressed with celebrity and they're impressed with explosions. So if you're just a guy standing in a room playing a guitar, it's hard to get people's attention.
- Kevin Quain

PPND notes a series of Joan Armatrading programs that aired on BBC:

Last week British singer-songwriter Joan Armatrading presented a series of 15 minutes programs on BBC Radio about choirs, from gospel to world music and classical. In one, she interviewed medical practitioners who describe the various benefits that singing can have on both mental and physical well-being, as well as talking to several people whose own lives have been completely transformed as a result of starting to sing in a choir.

At its best, making music takes us out of our minds, out of that source of so much anxiety and tension. Freed, we participate fully in the moment as it is, not as we imagine is should be. It comes as no surprise to me that this space  heals and harmonizes body, mind and spirit.

My older brother put me on to the sweet songwriting and singing of Joan Armatrading when I was a late teen. I still have a couple of her records in my stack. Must be time to give those I another spin.

Some great news – we're in Summerfolk this year! We'll be doing a new variation of JumbleJam in which we'll curate three bands from a list of festival-goers who sign up. Each band will be anchored by a Summerfolk performer and they'll have a few hours to pull together an original tune using the JumbleJam framework. The three bands will take the stage in the beer tent on Saturday night to perform their songs. How fun is that?

We're very excited to be part of Summerfolk 2008! A special tip of the hat to artistic director Richard Knechtel, who's been a delight to work with.