This last season of LOST, I’m not going to try and recap every episode (there are other, better people on the internet doing that), but I will post any thoughts that I have on the episode if I feel like they have any value.
Author: Matthew Eilar
Just a dude with a stereo, a computer, and a brain.
New Addition to Blogroll: Atlas Obscura
I like to be surprised by the things in my blogroll, that’s why I follow blogs centered around art and design. I like to discover interesting concepts and objects from around the world.
That’s part of the reason that I’ve been enjoying posts from Atlas Obscura, a blog centered around interesting landmarks, museums, and geographical points of interest from around the globe. Their website is pretty interesting, and well designed, but they’re also good for a random point of interest that, more often than not, is legitimately interesting.
Modest Mouse
There’s video up at the Disney Parks blog of a scoring session for one of their new live shows at California Adventure in Anaheim. It’s a reworked version of “Night on the Bare Mountain” by Modest Mussorgsky, which was used for one of the segments in Fantasia. That piece has always fascinated me because of the dramatic difference between the circumstances in which it was written and the place it occupies now in our culture. The piece was reworked over and over again by Mussorgsky, and it was never played during his lifetime (in fact, the arrangement that is usually played in concert and in Fantasia was orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov). He is remembered only for “Night…” and Pictures at an Exhibition, and yet the music of this fairly minor and obscure Russian composer is heavily promoted by the Walt Disney Corporation, and people who have never gone to a classical music concert can hum its theme. It’s deeply tragic that the composer of one of the most widely recognized piece of classical music never heard it performed.
There are other examples of this. “A Lover’s Concerto” was a hit in 1965 for the girl group The Toys (it was later recorded by The Supremes); it’s a fairly literal translation of the Minuet in G Major from the Notebook for Anna Magdelena Bach. I was playing some Brahms, and one of my friends recognized the Violin Concerto from There Will Be Blood. I guess the strongest example is Also Sprach Zarathustra, used in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
On a more current front, Ethan Iverson of The Bad Plus has blogged (in a post focusing on David Byrne and Los Angeles Opera’s staging of The Ring Cycle) about a Bach 12-tone phrased used as the opening of Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” music video.
New Gorillaz Track
Even though their marketing campaigns and style seem to be aimed at 13 year old nerds, I have a deep and abiding love for Gorillaz, and any Danger Mouse produced project in general. I seem to like most Damon Albarn projects as well, so perhaps it’s this convergence that inspires such devotion. What I like most about Danger Mouse, and a small number of other artists (the Andre 3000 side of Outkast comes to mind), is the futuristic way that his music sounds by virtue of it’s complete disregard of genre and style barriers. Songs like “Ghost Train”, “Dare” or Gnarls Barkley’s “Run” and “Gone Daddy Gone” are uncategorizable. Their music is permeated with energy, the styles that they borrow from are many, and every time you listen to it, there’s something you notice for the first time.
The first thing I noticed about “Stylo” (featuring Mos Def and Bobby Womack) the first single (or at least the first released track) from their new album, Plastic Beach, is that it’s relatively downtempo. On the last two albums, the first singles were epic, frenetic songs (“Clint Eastwood” and “19-2000” from Gorillaz; “Feel Good, Inc.” and “D.A.R.E” from Demon Days), and while “Stylo” has a propulsive beat, it doesn’t command the same attention as those other singles.
The second thing that jumped out at me was that Damon Albarn is actually singing on the album. He seems to have abandoned the Garage Band megaphone distortion that was really effective on the Gorillaz albums, but is now becoming an Albarn cliche.
I was actually a little bored with the track, but that all changed when Bobby Womack started singing. There’s something about the soaring, powerful voice singing above an unchanging, metronomic beat that amplifies the drama of the vocal line, and also changes the beat into a subtle antagonist. It reminds me of both B.B. King’s sample in Primitive Radio Gods’ “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand” and the sample of the preacher in “Help Me, Somebody” from David Byrne and Brian Eno’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. In that moment, it captures the simultaneously despairing and joyful pathos that I’ve come to associate with Gorillaz.
Google Wave "killer app"
I don’t want to come down too hard on Google Wave. It’s in alpha release, and the biggest problem with it is that people don’t have accounts. Nevertheless, I haven’t really been checking it because after a flurry of sandbox-like posts, there wasn’t much activity.
I decided to start a Wave with my LOST watching buddies, all of whom are all around the country, and it’s been working out so far. My plan is to set up a wave for every episode this season. My friends on the East coast can use it like a chat room while watching it live, and I can check it after I watch the episode and participate in the post-mortem, even if nobody is still online.
hammer & jack 