TheBig3

In my second attempt at living forever I promise to cover a smaller number of topics with less coherent thought than I had prior.

Eventually this will become cave drawings, but genius cave drawing none-the-less.

I say in advance with all due confidence, you're welcome.

-Big3

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TheBig3

Tom Waits once said his favorite portion of the symphony was the seconds before the tap of the conductors stick, when the instruments of all stripes are in their own worlds without care to the sounds they or their siblings are making. This big mess of noise was what he loved most.

I can’t say I share that passion but I do share its sentiment. Years ago in some music appreciation class I’d be better off forgetting about, we discussed the possibility that there was music made not to be heard. Made to be made, or made for the self. If it could be made, then why would it? And what purpose would that music serve on the whole. I had no idea, and the clever answers given about some eastern religion and a flute never really impressed me.

The answer I would find years later is that music should be played by itself because (and this is going to blow your mind here) because you think it sounds good there. Generally this worms its way into acceptance. That spasm of music Waits enjoys has been implemented and used in his music for years – maybe not exactly the same but influenced enough- and many the novice ear would agree it’s a big snapshot of noise in every song he’s made. Music is best to me when it’s a slathering of crap that only sounds correct because I’ve heard this song before. And few bands do it quite like Modest Mouse.

Before I get into examples of why I like their approach I’d like to discuss what I don’t like. The art crowd loves to take this idea in concept and apply it mathematically to places it sounds good if you want to pretend you’re interesting; Fischerspooner, Mindless Self-Indulgence, Whirlwind Heat.

For every idiot with a dream of making their lack of effort into a million dollars, these three horrid examples serve as the vision of the dream realized. The difference here is intent. If the good examples sounds like the city streets; a bustling and busy kaleidoscope of noise, then these second-rate hacks sound like the screeching wheels of the subway cars beneath those Metro streets. If you suppose intent is too hard to determine, lets put it this way. There’s sloppy which implies a cultural dissonance, and then there’s the noises that make babies cry and adults crouch into battle stance. These are the differences I’m addressing here. Its really a battle of which sounds better, Godzilla or your High School Marching Band at the start of the school year.

Why Modest mouse does this best, and why any band does this well, is because these sounds have roles, they play characters and they very much add the right plot devices that are necessary to the performance that is the song you’re hearing. The crashing of broken accordions in pirate songs, the piercing lone howl of distant wolves that are eerily squeezed from bended guitar strings, the drunken frat-rat trumpets of renegade whales out on the hunt.

And the latter much more so, because the b-side scrap book released earlier this year has the outtakes in which those lone trumpets are met by an Issac Brock only prepared for the dry-run laughing on track saying “I love this ****.”

Don’t we all?

Men of Music and Messes tend to have a grander vision for their music of their impulses they are putting to music, and this is personified as it comes on the heels of a musical landscape that was immediate and thoughtless. Where red-faced screams are not the placeholders of real emotion, they are considered the real emotion. But like the empty calories of hamburgers at drive-thru’s these nuggets of music could neither sustain itself or the needs of its listening base.

Like conspiracy theories screamed in the streets of old Rome by snake-oil salesmen and mad priests, those looking for a more challenging challenge have looked to the masquerade of human engagement that is, for all intents and purposes, going on in the indie theaters and nowhere else.

While Brock continues to employee actors rather than musicians, the mess and its understanding are starting to recede, even if the assumption is that the music is becoming messier. But perhaps this won’t end as I assume, my expectations of Shakespearian scripts will devolve into the primal act of children jumping into a pile of autumn leaves. But if the end should be nothing more than the eruption of dead vegetation, crackling underfoot while children cackle then we should settle our minds upon the truth that intent however misdirected is best when it is honest.

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Engine

Uh..yeah, I like Modest Mouse too.

Anyway, I look forward to more of your bizarre phrasing.
Here is my favorite part..

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Like an arrow,
I was only passing through.

TheBig3

I sort of assumed it didn't make sense, but thanks for the words either way.

They won't all be this...odd.

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TheBig3

Could a band be made with the following instruments: guitar, tambourine, harmonica.

And if it could, what limitations would be set upon them, and what new freedoms might they find. There outta be a contest. 2 weeks to get your act together, and the first band to raise $2,000 wins.

Theres a value in driving toward minimalism. Phil Spector has gone to jail and he ought to take his “wall of sound” with him. I have to imagine (and I’ve read nothing on the subject) but spector was emulating the big bands through the kaleidoscope vision of the psycedelic 60’s. It was familiar, it was fresh, it was innovative. But its not anymore, and the idea that bombast equated to value is outdated and old. Let its final death knell be rung by the echo effect on the guitar of Edge. In fact let him please be the last acceptable notion and lets write these Nu-metal clowns off for good.

We go small, and we go simple because at some atomic level all noise has to have some meaning. As long as friction will exist, so too will sound. There’s almost an innate natural element to sound. You can tell when a belt on a car needs to be adjusted from across a parking lot because rubber and metal have a sound. Minimalism in music is primarily the idea that sounds to create noise is missing the point, that no noise is irrelevant, and that all noise can move together, as if forged, to create something. I’ve italicized that simply because I’m personifying sound. Sound cannot remain sound it must become an element of something larger.

If you’ve read my ramblings before, I always talk about musical instruments becoming characters as if in a play. The noise of an instrument becomes a character. In this regard, Phil Spector choose to ignore Shakespeare and embrace Stomp or Blue Man group; all visual bombast, the audio equivalent of the 4th of July, but without the culture, the flags, or Arthur Fielder.

The instruments selected above are for the most part played by hacks, or at least they can be played by hacks. They rise up, not in musty basements from the well watered soil of scale-training, or musical theory but of the gritty street corner notions of money, populism, and what sells. The street musician can tell when sounds great simply by the jingle of loose change in his instruments case, laid open on the sidewalk like a etherized patient.*

What comes from the roots of history and theory seem good, and what comes from money seems corrupted, but the technical always gives way to the techno: that mechanized autometry that sounds soulless. While its corporate origins seem bad, there is to be said in capitalism and music a very human element, as is most things in entertainment. Selling products can be about a fiscal bottom line, selling entertainment (services) is always about the emotion in people.

Their origins are simple and driven by fame and attention but they also make due with the tools at their disposal. Like survivalists in the woods, the novice musician will make a home from tinder wood, and a masterpiece from three notes. They also come to embrace a very technical element, counterpuntal interplay, as if through osmosis or telepathy. The musician that learns in a basement does so through a source of authority, with the implication being that the instructor is inherently correct. Learning to play with an instructor only serves to reinforce this notion when experiencing the styles of musicians out in the world.

But this argument isn’t new. This is the practical versus the academic. Can books beat experience, or tradition over innovation. While the notions discovered in the past aren’t overturned, the very premise of its application to music may begin a new trend not in droll theory but in how we perceive the noises and sounds people put to use. What was once background filler, let be political statement on most conducive theories to the brilliance of actors built from sounds.

*All due credit to T.S. Elliot

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SATCHMO

Amazing. An intellectual tour de force that is both thought-provoking and finished with farm-raised dry wit demi-glaze. A feel good thread the whole family can enjoy. Who wants some fiddle-faddle?

TheBig3

I can't tell if you're being a douche or not.

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SATCHMO

No douchiness, just fun.

TheBig3

Oh alright. But still, not as "intellectual" as you first mentioned.

I always worry I get lost in thought and become to confusing.

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SATCHMO

your thread needed a blurb. I gave it one.