The Second of Many Installments Of Me

All Of Them Are Mine by Stanley Jason Zappa

Of the many, many lingering regrets from my time at Bennington College, one of the big ones is not taking advantage of the computer music offerings.   

Joel Chadabe headed up the department.  I remember for some reason, in some class, he came and gave a lecture.  Maybe he just gave a lecture...I can't remember.   I do remember within moments of him opening his mouth having one of those d'oh! moments of bad, wherein I realised I should have been studying with him (as well) all along.

This one was made with a $1.00 (one dollar) MIDI keyboard, plugged into the computer via a high-latency cable, which may have come with the keyboard.  At the time of this track's creation, my computer had a Yahama XG midi card.

The way this one was most likely made was by turning the recording tempo up as high as it could go.  999bpm maybe?  Then, I pressed all the keys and all the buttons as fast and as frantically as I could.  From there, it was slowed down to 20bpm.  Thanks to the magic of MIDI, all the pitches stay the same.  Love that!  I made it, but I didn't make it.  Love that even more!

While I don't really seek it out all that aggressively, I've had my joys with electronica and computer music.  Conlan Nancarrow has to be thought of as a predecessor and antecedent to the world of MIDI, no?  Gotta love Jazz From Hell and Civilization Phase III.  There's nothing wrong with Kraftwerk, nor is there anything wrong with Matt Weston, nor is there anything wrong with Stalaktos.

I wish they'd hook some of these super computers up to a MIDI keyboard.  Can you imagine the sound(s) one of those things could make turned up to eleven?

Luca Turin, Matt Weston, Perfumes, Seasick Blackout

Luca Turin. Perfumes. That's right--Perfumes The Guide by Luca Turin. Luca Turin...greatest critic/writer since Mencken? The greatest critic/writer criticizing and writing today? Lord God King Luca Turin?

Here:

Dune (Dior) ***** fresh oriental

Forget suburban-gothic names, forget all the phony "noirs," from Angelique to Orris. True, menacing darkness is not to be found in upset-the-parents Alice Cooper poses, but in this disenchanted, ladylike gem. Loosely inspired by the excellent Venise five years earlier (Yves Rocher, 1986), Dune is a strong contender for Bleakest Beauty in all of perfumery. It is clearly headed from the very start towards that peculiarly inedible cheap-chocolate drydown that made Must, Allure (q.v. for a fuller account of the effect), and a thousand others, though Dune's is the best of the lot, dissonant but interesting. But the way it gets there is extraordinary, with a beguiling transparency, even freshness, particularly in the anisic carrot-seed top notes. It is hard to pin down what makes Dune so unsmiling from top to bottom: it's as if every perfumery accord had become a Ligeti cluster chord, drained of life, flesh-toned in the creepy way of artificial limbs, not real ones. Marvelous.

Laguna Homme (Salvador Dali) * trashoid oriental

If you drive a Moscow taxi at night, this one's for you

Remix for Her (Armani) * fruity floral

A trite, canned-fruit-salad confection of no interest except to illustrate the cynicism and idiocy of its makers.

...and so on and so on for a few hundred pages. Tania Sanches is no dummy, and no question she can write and write well, but after a while, once your totally drunk on Turin's totally electrifying virtuosity with the written word, she just gets in the way.

You have to admire how quickly Turin can drop the science. You also have to admire Turin's fearless critical directness backed by total erudition and cultural literacy, not to mention an encyclopedic knowledge of and totally cutting edge position as practitioner within the subject.

Something to which we can all aspire, no?

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Seasick Blackout (Matt Weston, 7272 music) ***** electronic future-memories

Hey, how did Matt Weston get the sounds in my head on to that CD? Seasick...blackout--been there, done that, and now I know what it sounds like: scary, ubercontrolled in an out-of-controlled way, dark and loud. A contemporary tone poem about Man cowering and pissing himself in the face of an/our/the ever increasing mechanized brutalization of society and the brutal mechanization of culture--and mechanized brutality's reaction. The experience of listening on the way to work (catering a wake) in a snow storm, driving a traction-free Ford truck that not only wants to bankrupt me but kill me too, Seasick Blackout was so totally appropriate it was as if the CD wasn't even on. Once it was over, in the silent din of my own thoughts amid winter driving conditions, I realized that should I ever find myself high on LSD, Seasick Blackout will either be the last thing I'll listen to or the only thing I'll listen to. One of those kinds of records.

+ + +

The Turin dimension: "remain(s) but fleeting illusions, to be pursued but never attained" To quote his holiness Haile Selassie I.

And yet there are a lot of CD's which deserve all the virtual attention they can get, and by gum, now that I got my scanner working, I'm going to scan the covers and write a paragraph about all of them. I can use the practice writing (and thinking and listening) and the two or three of you who regularly check in can just as easily not check in, since this is just the internet anyway and words mean less now than ever before.


copyright © 2010 Stanley Jason Zappa