words as soundtrack
from john cage’s indeterminacy
an interpretation from kostelanetz, in his 1992 introduction:
“One theme is that indeterminacy differs from improvisation, because indeterminacy incorporates imaginative constraints. The idea of the poetry-jazz duets was that speaker and musicians would respond to one another, each spontaneously trying to reenforce the other, customarily in habitual ways. The principle of indeterminacy allows each other, each with scores designed to minimize habit. If a reader is required to speak only fifteen words in sixty seconds, he or she cannot resort to pet ways of phrasing.”
soundtracks for words
apropos of soundtracks as you read, this:
drumming for take-off
i’m limited by indecision and myopic musical taste to even attempt a ‘top five’ of the year, much less the decade. instead i offer a song, “i knew” by lightning dust, that kept me company this summer.
it’s a brief, 2.5 minutes of burgeoning excitement — a fast, steady pulse of a drum machine that gives way to fluttering vocals painting an image of a love out of nowhere, of its headlong first moments. the song knows its limits, and doesn’t try to do more than it should, even though it seems like those pulsings and synths would burst into something big. “i knew” acts as poetry should: brief, disciplined, aimed at capturing, verbalizing, and representing (however inadequately) specific snapshots of thought/life/feeling that will always escape verbalization anyway.
pretty much summer perfection.
edit:
for further appreciation: live. in tiny desk concert form, starting at 8:30 (file under: hippy-like; pregnant; knowing glances).
a little off, this offing
in “yeah, oh yeah,” one of the magnetic fields’ 69 love songs, form, content, everything is unnervingly off. the guitar drags lazily just a little behind the vocalists, who are just a little ahead of the beat kept by the drum [machine].
“though i need you more than air, is it true you just don’t care?” the female vocalist asks, melancholy and desperate. “yeah, oh yeah” the male counterpart answers, lackadaisical but affirmative. he’s had a lot of time to think about this. “i can’t take your perpetual whining, and you can’t sing,” he complains.
the listener, this one at least, wants to throw something at her, make her not so melancholy and dependent, make her follow that guitar at least.
the song, the character that is the female vocalist, almost step right past each other, but i remain rapt at the sweetness of this aural and interpersonal disaster.
[you don’t get all this completely in the video. but i like that cello.]
silently, quietly
on repeat, and at the top of my early summer playlist –
and i don’t know why; it’s definitely not blonde redhead’s best song.
maybe it’s tictactictac … tumtumtumtumtum; or the sailor and port metaphor; or those wispy background vocals that inch up when the melody steps down; or a sound that crosses the rhythmic thumps of blondie and the melodic earnestness of 60s girl groups.
sounds like: leaving for the summer to the unknown known.
when side one was side one
a great series up at pfork, in which they ask indie rock-types what music they were into at 5-year intervals of their lives. you get glimpses like this, re: public enemy’s fear of a black planet:
It’s so arresting, especially the first half. I love records where you can’t stop playing side one– and that was back when side one was side one, you know. I didn’t get on to side two for about three months because I was just so blown away by the first side of the cassette.
a nice intersection of past obsessions, material markers of time, a bit of celebrity.
unforeclosed
Beach House: Used to Be from shoottheplayer on Vimeo.
i first heard this about two months ago, and swooned. still swooning.
where the songs on beach house’s last album were a slow but sweet drag, prompting slow motion noddings of the head, “used to be” has a steady heart beat moving the song forward. it’s cautious, expectant, hopeful [sf C flagged this for me] in content and form.
in an initial evaluation, i projected an unforeseen bad ending for the singer and whomever it is she’s addressing: ‘no, it won’t work out! you’ve both changed too much!’ it’s clear though, by that break in the middle of the song when the guitar recedes, that things are up in the air still. tragedy needn’t happen, just a steady, quiet, ongoing procession.
what i’m dreaming of
the dodos aren’t the most innovative band; the animal collective-ish sound comes about six years too late, and even then the most one could say about the comparison is that the dodos are a very safe version of the collective. in fact, their songs have a tendency to sound the same. to be more tactful, i’d say they have a very recognizable pattern of energetic percussion underneath lovely melodies and a guitar rhythm favoring dotted eighth notes. their penchant for the latter makes for lilting melodies, the aural equivalent of being on a canoe in the ocean, subject to the gentle back-and-forth motion of the waves.
still, i’m drawn to the dodos [as my last.fm will attest..] in part because their set was one of the most enjoyable at a music festival i went to a few weeks back. they play the hell out of their instruments. i was mesmerized by the trashed trash can their third member was giving a beating to: it was torn and bent in several places, looking like a major tetanus threat. i hope they weren’t traveling with it. the guitarist sat while he played, but he was equally energetic, which manifested itself [aside from the sound] in drops of sweat flying from his hair as he shook his head sort of crazily.
listening to the dodos in the privacy of my own apartment or car, i appreciate in particular the moments in their music when dark [minor or diminished key?] harmonies intertwine with the upward march of the melody. the bridge in the song “ashley” for instance, made ominous by a creeping, sometimes wailing counterpart.