More Junk Here

It's easier to criticize than create, but no creator should complain.

A Joker's Rage

Hey! Hey hey hey! At a New Year's party the other night, friends from Writer's Club were playing music. I heard some cool wah pedal work, bass chords (intervals), cool riffs, and stuff. I was playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl at the same time, and it was an attention-demanding round (playing against the only person I know that has a good chance of defeating my little brother). My attention was shattered, and my playing went out the window.

"Hey! Who is this band? What's this song?!" I asked, but then turned back to Super Smash. After a few seconds, I asked the question again, because I was too tired for multi-tasking.

Skipping more boring narrative: I got the name of the band texted to me. A Joker's Rage.

Right. I'll try putting them in a genre now. Or rather, putting genres into them.

I heard their stuff in the order it appeared on their album on their site, with the first song being "Disc-Over". The first thing you'll hear is a wah pedal riff, with that modulated reverb that The Edge made his signature. It sounds more distorted, more... impelling, just bordering aggressive (but it does cross that line completely later), than that post-punk sound U2 made. I suppose it's best to say that, like Coldplay, it echoes the anthems and exotic soundscape U2 created.

The singer holds a single note then, with the same distant reverb, and the percussion comes in as well, just quarter note hi-hat steps (Damn. Can't remember the proper name for them.) that drive forward, still in that same post-punk feeling. However, the bass line changes a bit (Enter the bass chords I do so like. :P), and an alt metal undertone creeps in. Then the guitar riff changes entirely for a phrase. It's not an undertone any more. It's a fairly heavy, alt metal riff. Or quite a heavy alt rock riff. The phrase could've been from a more technically inclined grunge rock band, if it weren't for the drums keeping it more modern.

The song alternates between the heavier, alt metal tone, and the more distant, post-punk tone, until the bridge, which briefly nods its head in the Red Hot Chili Peppers' direction. (Incidentally, they're labelled as funk, or mention having funk influences. I think it's more fair to say that they're influenced by alt rock that's been influenced by funk. The funk in their songs just seems far too diluted.)

Gah. Enough crap 'analysis' of their first song. Their album as a whole experiments with these genres, and one or two more, using alternating bits of post-punk and alt-metal as homes to fall back upon. The lyrics are... interesting. If I'm not mistaken, Disc-over is about the decision to be a musician - a travelling bard - and the resolve needed for that. (Hey, I can relate [and maybe that's predisposing me to interpret the lyrics as such], having existential crises for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.) They also do some cool, sarcastic numbers, like neighbourhood watch. Anyway, it seems one recurring theme is running away, or rather, forcing oneself to not run away from the things they've wrought, or should be following. But... Again, maybe I'm just wanting to see such themes.

The only thing I didn't like about the album was the last seven seconds. "Do you wanna do any more on this song?" "Naw, bollocks, we're done." 
They put together an album that can have a bit more self-respect than that.

I think that's all I can say about them for now. Go check them out!
...That and I want to get a Wii, so I can get better at Super Smash Bros. 
Actually, I'd rather get better at something more useful. I'm such an undedicated, crap gamer. :P

Juxtaposition

I came back from Rio to my hometown hoping that nine hundred meters over sea level would mitigate the heat, but I found it very stuffy and gray-skied. Moments later, it shouted ICE STORM! and in full Brazilian summer we had hail falling down from the skies. My grandmother said she had seen that happen some other times, but when the sun began to shed its weird white light through the storm I knew I was before something that was there to teach me.

*****

Often when I compose, I recycle old tunes from my extended library of unused roleplaying game tracks and such. When I bring those pieces with recycled parts to fellow composers, they tend to think of the recycled parts as variations or natural continuations of the original material. The composer might know the themes were composed at different times and didn't have a relationship to each other, but simple juxtaposition is enough to convince people they were made that way.

Is it?

When you are talking about contemporary classical music, it is true that anything goes and there are actual techniques of digression. I even remember once submitting a videogame music demo reel with crossfaded tracks to a friend and his compliments about 'the way the piano came in the song' (the piano - and a completely different instrumentation, functional harmony, anything you can think of - everything was from a totally different tune).

I usually don't do 'experimental', 'concept', 'contemporary' classical music per se - what I do is mix techniques I find useful to compliment my personal style. So my themes are supposed to be linked in a logical way, that's what I mean from the beginning - and I found out that my process of juxtaposition is a kind of composition itself.

Creating a relation between two previously unrelated tunes is a form of composition. First, you normally won't take any tune to correspond - having the right idea first is essential to the whole process and comprises half of the composition process. The other half is the way one inserts the new part on the work. Think mashups, pout-pourris. People look for structural similarities which are many times out of immediate sensory reach.

I tend to put all the blame from these complex processes on my subconscious composer.

The conclusion to this is that I strongly believe Teresópolis had this hail storm up its sleeve for a long time and, seeing itself in a composer's block, decided it was time to use it regardless of we being in Summer and all. Counterculture showed up in ternary form (ABA) with the glorious return of the sun still mid-storm. We had two or three really loud thunders, and one of the thunderbolts hit a building two blocks away from where I was. Good thing we don't have any active volcanoes.

Fancypants

English is a quirky language and I never understood the use of 'fancypants'. On a quasi-totally unrelated side note, I've read somewhere this week that it's customary to say a piece is 'pretentious' when you dislike it and don't want to admit the personhood of their aversion (this statement was bold). We are living a very fancy moment in 2010 and, as much as I hate to admit it, the year is coming to an end and we're saying goodbye to this round, harmonic number. 2010. It could have been the best year of the entire human history - despite all the bad things that insist on happening all the time, they pale if compared to what we had in the past.

People in the future have an disloyal advantage over us. Unbiased by the present reality, they will be able to better analyse the moment we are going through. I think we think we're doing pretty well, thank you, all the information systems that allow me to tell Dodom that my instrument, if thrown properly, deals more damage than his (2d4, pfff). We don't know if life will really worsen on the next decades or if it will keep getting better.

How can a piece not be pretentious? If it humbles before our cultural heritage, if it follows the lead of great artists of the past? How can a piece not be pretentious regarding the future? Can we really believe we are really living the best moment of human history?

It would rock if I kept on and started actually making references and developing a trail of thought, but finishing with unanswerable questions is cool too and buys me time to compose.

1000 tsuru birds

Yesterday I had this meaningful day - and I came home willing to write a piece, and I did, and I didn't have a name for it. I named it '1', and I remembered when my grandfather told me about the origami cranes, the tsuru: once you could fold a thousand of them, you got a wish realized.

I found this idea really elegant. Over the last years I have been increasingly interested in superstition and little rituals such as this. I remember my grandfather would fold any paper we'd come across even though he lost the count of how many he had folded. It didn't matter really much. I could relate to this: many times, when you write a piece, you don't really know whether there will be musicians to play it, when it is going to be played, if it is going to do you any good. Yet you do it, anyway.

When you study/work with music (and that probably means you have bands, recording gigs, school assignments and many things you wouldn't normally do by yourself), you can see many times people transforming their internal aesthetic sense to match the most appropriate to their routine tasks. They kind of die inside to become quicker workers and respond naturally to an environment that wasn't theirs naturally.

Many times, when artists do this, they turn to another form of art, or to something else in their lives. I've heard of a designer that worked in a big company that forced its style upon him and because of that, he had taken all of his artistry of visual arts. He became a part-time musician.

As much as I have tried drawing, I don't want to shift away from music nor kill my internal musicianship to become snappier on the outside. Yesterday I decided that I'll invest in a lasting nourishment for that guy - I will learn how to fold the tsuru, and for each tsuru I will compose a solo piece. If I made one a day, it'd be a three years' project, but I know it will take me longer - or, like yesterday, I will get very little sleep.

Trivial?

I wonder if other musicians or artists get the feeling that if they make music or their art into their life, they'll be living too pointless a life. (Don't kill me, please! Just read and then verbally abuse me.) Perhaps it's just my skewed outlook on my future, but it seems that songwriting puts forth very little in terms of novel philosophies. That's always been literature's role. Sure, countless songs go quite deep, but usually joining a minority that's otherwise been established. (*Glances at "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' To Die Rag". Well, okay, maybe it's not that deep, but it illustrates the joining an established minority.) And then there's the "Ziggy Stardust" type of introspective lyric writing, which does double as a decent commentary on pop music's whims. Still not the type of stuff that makes your brain feel like a contortionist. Huh. Pop music's whims could give the invisible hand a run for its mo— No, Pop Music's Whims would stab the invisible hand for its money. Anyway. Pop songwriting tends to either be about the same old, or joins a protest, which I'm all for (depending on the protest/movement), don't get me wrong, but never seems to create anything philosophic or political on its own.

I remember a bit in a book - This is Your Brain on Music - about how songs are by and large dealing with some aspect of love because the parts of the brain that deal with music are NOT the parts at all that deal with deeper thought. A pity I lent that book to the other author here, because I can't remember that part very well, so I can't talk more about that...

What I can say is that all good music, programmatic or not, pulls on and plays with emotions. That's not to say there aren't emotionless, objective aspects of studying music. Analysis, some bits of interpreting a piece to be played, etc. But the end result is something that pulls at emotions. And that's why adding lyrics that are deeper than usual is so difficult. At best, you get a very Romantic (notice the capitalised 'R'), subjective song. Hmm. That's funny. So here I am whining about how, in my worst moments, I find music to be trivial, because I want to do more with it, because I like how music feels. I suppose music works very well on me. So much so that I think it should be capable of more. It should turn out crazy, new ideas like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Das Kapital.

Heh. Set "Gott ist tot! Gott bleibt tot! Und wir haben ihn getötet." to melody.
...Oh wait. You can set ANYTHING to the tune of "Aqualung". Seriously. Try it. Rafael and I did this endlessly during the summer. XD



So sue me. I changed the second 'Gott' for 'und'.

All this said, music is not trivial. Not at ALL. I'm not sure what purpose art has in humanity, but we'd be screwed up without it. Using music to further a good purpose, to back a charity, is FAR from 'trivial'. I'm just bothered by literature's place at the forefront of philosophy, and it seems that brains are hardwired to continue bothering me. I guess I'm just unreasonable, and so I write weird, rambling, stream-of-consciousness blog entries at odd hours of the night. *Sits on a stool making an unreasonable grump face.*