Sounds from Innerspace

innerspaceboy · 09-29-2017, 04:53 PM

It was by the most serendipitous circumstances that I happened upon this magical musical discovery. It would be more accurate to state that the piece found me when I was ready to receive it. I’d recently revisited DJ Shadow’s complex turntablist opus, Endtroducing and found one particular track title resurfacing in my mind again and again after I’d put the record away. The track appears in two parts on the album - the classic, “What Does Your Soul Look Like?”

Perhaps it was the existential considerations which had been present in my mind of late, but at one fateful moment I felt curious enough to research the title and quickly discovered that the two segments from the LP are edits from a four-part extended work released as an EP fully-exploring the nocturnal and reflective territory hinted at by the selections on Endtroducing. I quickly secured a copy of the EP and cued it up.

It was instantly apparent that this was going to be an exceptional recording. Much in the spirit of Moondog’s microcosmic symphonies, What Does Your Soul Look Like Pts I-IV is effectively DJ Shadow’s own symphonique. There are even sonic similarities to what Moondog dubbed, “snaketime” in the way the focus and rhythm shifts constantly and fluidly throughout the four movements.

Before the session completed, I really felt it was a piece I’d like to have in an original pressing to enjoy spinning again and again. There was only one copy listed for sale in the States, belonging to DJ Tom Thump. Tom has played at shows or opened for Gilles Peterson, Kruder and Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation, Bonobo (5 times), Morrissey, Jamiroquai, Femi Kuti, Tricky, Morcheeba, The Original Meters, Gang of Four, George Clinton, Bonobo, and many others. I trusted that this would be a disc handled with care.

I dialed it up, loud, and extinguished all lamps until the sound engulfed the room. What follows is the play-by-play of my experience.

Pt II:

A brief horn instrumental innocently opens the disc, followed by a haunting voice singing lonely with interspersed bass-drenched speech:

“We are standing here at the edge of time…”

(Cold…)

“Our road was paved to the edge of time…”

(Steel... Sparks…)

“Come with me now to the edge of time…”

(Does anyone remember who I am?)

And then silence. And a narrator, (sampled from the 1983 film, Brainstorm), tells the listener that this is their last chance to turn back with a cautionary warning:

“In a few moments, you will have an experience which will seem completely real...

It will be the result of your subconscious fears, transformed to your conscious awareness...

You have 5 seconds to terminate this tape...

5, 4, 3, 2, 1.”

And on the “one” a steady, persistent guitar loop ushers the listener in and a swirl of sustained strings, snippets of soulful vocals, DJ scratching, jazz licks, and funky percussion gradually transport you into the dark, contemplative world Shadow has built on this EP.

The guitar and drums carry on for more than ten minutes while a vast array of samples weave their way in and out of the piece. There are glimpses of Richard Harris, a reflective soliloquy from the 1973 film, Johnny Got His Gun, Willie Bobo and company's "Shelley's Blues", and several others before the instrumentation finally relents, leaving the listener with the eerily emotionless android voice from George Lucas' THX-1138 speaking:

"Can you feel this? ... What is that buzzing? ... Are you now, or have you ever been? ... Move slowly."

Shadow brilliantly evokes a disquieting sense of unease while simultaneously creating a cerebral space that is endlessly intriguing and the listener eagerly presses on.

Pt III:

A rise of bubbling and echo-laden spoken word fragments, chimes, flute, and minimal piano create a mesmerizing atmosphere for the opening of the second movement. The speech is from the 1980 sci-fi film, Altered States.

"...I'm asking you to make a small quantum jump with me, to accept one deviant concept - that our other states of consciousness are as real as our waking state and that reality can be externalized!...

...We're beyond mass and matter here, beyond even energy. What we're back to is the first thought!"

And suddenly, a bass drum and hi-hat kick in full force front and center of the soundstage. Flute and piano are sprinkled in jazzlike hits accompanied by scratching and high-frequency tones from an indiscernible instrument. There is a momentary release from the percussion and the jazzy traces hang in the air before its energetic return to close the track. And not a drop of this sounds artificial or electronically-contrived. There is a brilliant fluidity and ever-present organic quality about this entire record, which keeps the sound fresh and timeless despite the nearly twenty-five years that have passed since its composition.

Pt IV:

A smattering of dystopian dialog (lifted from the movie Dead Calm), humming machinery, and ominous indistinguishable noises return the listener to the dark, melancholic environ that so much of this record occupies. And swiftly, a fleeting rest signals the introduction of the classic, “WDYSLL? (Pt IV)” we all know and love from Endtroducing. The track is an intimate, cerebral, and undeniably classy foray into minimal, soulful jazz turntablism. The vocal elements are restrained, subtle, and perplexingly elusive. This selection expertly captures the lonely, somber, and introspective space that DJ Shadow explored over the course of his universally-lauded epic debut LP.

Pt I:

A booming low-register voice utters the word, “...ONE…” followed by a single bell chime and an array of jazzy components for the briefest introductory moment before the percussion manifests and seizes your full attention. Fantastically sparse horns and traces of a choir appear… (or is it my imagination?) And a mournful voice (evidently sampled from Shawn Phillips’ “All Our Love”) sings words which drift into and out of comprehensibility:

“And why should we want to go back where we were, how many years... (could that have been?)”

“And why should we want to live a life that's past and nevermore… (will ever be?)”

Which is followed by crooning in Italian - the voice of Gianni Nazzaro singing, “C'era Già” which, I believe, translates thusly:

“...and there was already this love that we live long ago, there was already a rose I gave you... the songs I sang, the sadness in joy...”

There is a beautiful sorrow and sophistication from start to finish on this record, and it really works to create a world the listener can disappear into. The final “Pt 1” movement has seven distinct known samples, including “Nucleus” by The Alan Parsons Project, “Voice of the Saxophone” by The Heath Brothers, the aforementioned lyrical excerpt from “All Our Love” by Shawn Phillips, percussion from David Young’s “Joe Splivingates”, the legendary “This is not a dream” pirate broadcast from John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, and finally, "...It is happening again..." from the episode "Lonely Souls" of the TV series Twin Peaks. These elements coalesce seamlessly into one cohesive lucid dream of an album.

After a single breath, the female voice from the opening of the disc warmly repeats the now-familiar phrase, “here we are at the edge of time…”

And then, with tranquil grace and incalculable ease, the instrumentation trails off leaving silence, depositing the listener back to this mortal world. Enter the final, seventh sample for the closing movement - a dialog between two characters from Westworld saying,

“Don't you want to listen?"

...

"Nah, I heard it the last time."

And the needle raises and returns, leaving the listener awed and transformed.

innerspaceboy · 11-07-2017, 07:52 PM

Every now and again I like to publish book reviews on titles relating to music, the content industries, copyright reform, and the future of media. Recently a Joycean scholar recommended that I explore the writings of Cory Doctorow on these very subjects. I quickly realized I'd had a few of his titles on my reading list already, so I wasted no time and read two of his books this week. The first was CONTENT: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future from 2008, and the second was the more recent Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age from 2014.

Doctorow is no stranger to the legal world surrounding digital content. A Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author, Doctrow serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of Creative Commons, publishing many of his books under CC licensing. His writings and lectures focus on digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics.

Doctorow worked in London as the European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and helped establish the Open Rights Group. He was named a Fellow of the EFF and the 2006–2007 Canadian Fulbright Chair for Public Diplomacy at the USC Center on Public Diplomacy. He's served as a professor at the University of Southern California and was the first Independent Studies Scholar in Virtual Residence at the University of Waterloo in Ontario and is also a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the UK. In 2012 Doctorow was awarded an honorary doctorate from The Open University.

CONTENT features many of Doctorow's essays and keynote speeches on digital media and copyright. It opens with a talk he delivered to Microsoft's Research Group on the developing technologies of DRM outlining five key points:

that DRM systems don't work
that DRM systems are bad for society
that DRM systems are bad for business
that DRM systems are bad for artists
that DRM is a bad business-move for MSFT

The subsequent essays in CONTENT and the chapters of Information... expand upon and contextualize these ideas with discussions of copyright control at critical moments in digital content's history, and outline the true costs and inherent ineffectiveness of anticircumvention. Doctorow offers a brief history of copying technology, from the piano roll to the Luther Bible, to the Betamax Ruling, the proto-DRM of Discovision, RealAudio, OpenMG, Blu-ray, TIVO, the 3DS, and on through the present day. He calls attention to each of the industry's attempts to suppress the usability of a technology, from the Broadcast Protection Discussion Group to the Copy Protection Technical Working Grouptoclosed-door meetings of the RIAA and MPAA, noting that each attempt at anticircumvention imposes critical security flaws into the affected components and greatly hinders further development of that technology.

But Doctorow is clear to differentiate the impact of DRM on technological revolutions of the past from its catastrophic effect on the current climate of the Web. In a chapter titled, "It's Different This Time" he states:

We are remaking the world and everything we do in it. In the past, a regulation applied to VCRs would impact a few other industries or activities (making it hard, say, to record a home movie), but it wouldn’t have changed everything. You could regulate the VCR or the radio or the record player without regulating the automobile, the hearing aid, and voting machines along with them. That’s not true anymore. The stakes for getting copyright right have never been higher. There has never been a fight over entertainment-related technology where the consequences for everyone outside the entertainment industry were potentially more disastrous than they are now.

Later essays in CONTENT discuss the practicality and curious marketplace of ebooks, the grand potential but admitted caveats of metadata, and the world of fanfiction in an age of rampant copyright litigation. While earlier chapters establish a contextual history of content sharing innovations, the book closes with advice for content creators and artists and speaks for the viability of Creative Commons. The essays are brief and written in simple plainspeak, making the text a breeze of a read.

Information... picks up where CONTENT closes diving deeper into the impact of ever-restricting copyright laws. Doctorow examines the draconian consequences of unfettered censorship brought about by the engineered renewability of DRM technologies, citing the example of Amazon removing Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four from all its Kindle users' digital libraries in 2009 as just one case of potential abuse.

These texts also explore the consequences of The Digital Millennium Copyright Act and ruling surrounding The Pirate Bay, the Grokster decision, and other anti-piracy acts. He calls attention to the ramifications of these actions, adding some important context to the events:

In 2006, the Swedish police raided the data center that housed the Pirate Bay, an infamous BitTorrent tracker that had made a sport of taunting the entertainment industry. The circumstances surrounding the raid were contentious: it seemed the action had been improperly ordered by a government minister who was supposed to have an arm’s-length relationship with the police, at the behest of the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

But what was more controversial in wider Swedish society was the collateral damage of the seizure: hundreds of websites went down at the same time as the Pirate Bay, as the police enthusiastically seized a data center’s worth of servers. These other servers—which hosted sites for businesses, nonprofits, and individuals—had nothing infringing on them, but the police couldn’t be certain of this at the time, so they took the lot. It’s like they decided that, since one store in the middle of town was carrying unlicensed products, they were going to shut down the entire shopping district while they figured things out.

Doctorow's specific contextualizations always return to the broader global impact. In a chapter on the effects of copyright misuse on human rights, he describes the implications of the suit Viacom brought against Google and YouTube for not doing enough to keep their copyrighted works off their service. Viacom argued that YouTube was complicit in acts of infringement because it allowed users to mark videos as “private,” rendering them inaccessible to Viacom’s copyright-enforcement bots. He states clearly that:

Under Viacom’s legal theory—which was supported in amicus briefs filed by organizations representing all the major studios, broadcasters, publishers, and record labels—companies should allow the giant entertainment corporations to access all of our private files to make sure we’re not storing something copyrighted under cover.

Later chapters of Information... such as A World of Control and Surveillance, and What Copyright Means in the Information Age explore the present and future of copyright and cautions us of the consequences of unrestrained access in the hands of a few content distribution conglomerates. By this point, my notetaking consisted of highlighting entire chapters as every paragraph made a concisely-phrased critical remark about the state of technology and copyright. Snowden is mentioned, of course, as is the state of the music industry - both for the limitations brought about by licensing restrictions crippling the art of sampling as well as the transformation of the industry in an era of filesharing.

Doctorow points out that pivotal recordings like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique could never have been made in today's copyright climate. He notes that "extending the scope and the duration of copyright doesn’t just criminalize a whole genre of music—it also puts the labels in charge of the only legal route open to musicians, effecting a massive wealth transfer from artists to labels."

Doctorow's writing isn't all doom-and-gloom. He does propose that concepts such as blanket licensing have an incredible potential to benefit content creators, distributors, and consumers alike. And he is a tireless advocate for Creative Commons. He summarizes his position quite effectively when he states:

Content-blocking and surveillance are the province of book burners and censors, not creators and publishers. We have fought for generations for the freedom of conscience necessary to have a robust intellectual and creative sphere... ...And since the Internet is likely to be a fixture in our lives and the lives of our children, we all have a duty to stop arguing about whether the Internet is good or bad for us and our particular corner of the world—a duty to figure out how to make the Internet into a force for helping people work and live together, with the privacy, self-determination, and freedom from interference and control that are the hallmarks of a just society. It’s not enough for creators and their industry to love free speech. We have to learn to share it, too.

The final chapter is a statement of great hope for the future. The internet provides the world with a potential for connectivity and collaboration and a richly diverse domain of access for the history of creative works. Artists are empowered to distribute their content directly to their fans, and the relevance of the old world distributive intermediary is shrinking. There has never been a better time to be an artist or a citizen of global culture. Doctorow's books inspire both an appreciation for that fact and a participatory role in the shaping of our world to come.

Cory Doctorow offers his books for free at craphound.com. If you enjoy his writings, please consider purchasing a copy for your library.

OccultHawk · 11-08-2017, 06:43 AM

Quote:

Doctorow points out that pivotal recordings like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique could never have been made in today's copyright climate.

That’s a very important point. There’s probably 50 classic records that don’t exist due to copyright laws. It bothers me that people don’t see sampling in the same tradition as variations on jazz standards or the rewriting of classical compositions for different instruments. I also find it funny that rappers who brag about committing felonies left and right are meticulous about following copyright laws.

Great write-up as usual. That’s why you’re the best.

innerspaceboy · 11-08-2017, 07:00 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by OccultHawk

That’s a very important point. There’s probably 50 classic records that don’t exist due to copyright laws. It bothers me that people don’t see sampling in the same tradition as variations on jazz standards or the rewriting of classical compositions for different instruments. I also find it funny that rappers who brag about committing felonies left and right are meticulous about following copyright laws.

Great write-up as usual. That’s why you’re the best.

Thanks, OH! I appreciate the feedback!

The Batlord · 11-08-2017, 09:52 AM

Um... Imma skim that article if I can't keep from going crosseyed halfway through, but I think you and me are both looking forward to the day when the internet is a free, globally standard repository of every piece of knowledge and media that can be found in any corner of the earth. Everyone deserves to be able to learn and experience the full range of ideas of the human race regardless of income or country, and anything less is mental tyranny.

innerspaceboy · 11-08-2017, 10:06 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Um... Imma skim that article if I can't keep from going crosseyed halfway through, but I think you and me are both looking forward to the day when the internet is a free, globally standard repository of every piece of knowledge and media that can be found in any corner of the earth. Everyone deserves to be able to learn and experience the full range of ideas of the human race regardless of income or country, and anything less is mental tyranny.

It's okay, Batty. I know 1500+ words is a bit of a task for you so I sincerely appreciate you trying!

But yes - your ideas and mine are aligned as to our hope for the future of the free and open internet, and for a rich and accessible public domain from which content creators can draw to copy, combine, and transform ideas into new material that speaks to its generation and effectively expresses its ideas.

Cheers, Bat.

The Batlord · 11-08-2017, 10:52 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by innerspaceboy

It's okay, Batty. I know 1500+ words is a bit of a task for you so I sincerely appreciate you trying!

But yes - your ideas and mine are aligned as to our hope for the future of the free and open internet, and for a rich and accessible public domain from which content creators can draw to copy, combine, and transform ideas into new material that speaks to its generation and effectively expresses its ideas.

Cheers, Bat.

**** you? But the internet has done bad things to my attention span (I don't really care tbh) and I have literally 21 tabs open atm and buckling down to do one single thing for longer than ten minutes can be a bit of a chore.

The Batlord · 11-12-2017, 01:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

**** you? But the internet has done bad things to my attention span (I don't really care tbh) and I have literally 21 tabs open atm and buckling down to do one single thing for longer than ten minutes can be a bit of a chore.

Was that JUST approved? I posted that like a week ago.

OccultHawk · 11-08-2017, 10:44 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by The Batlord

Um... Imma skim that article if I can't keep from going crosseyed halfway through, but I think you and me are both looking forward to the day when the internet is a free, globally standard repository of every piece of knowledge and media that can be found in any corner of the earth. Everyone deserves to be able to learn and experience the full range of ideas of the human race regardless of income or country, and anything less is mental tyranny.

Well said!

innerspaceboy · 11-13-2017, 02:30 PM

A feature published in AtlasObscura today made my day!

Assembled by Gavin Bryars in 1970, and among its participants Brian Eno, The Portsmouth Sinfonia was an endearing trainwreck assemblage of musical ineptitude.

Bryars' "scratch" orchestra had little to no experience playing instruments, but that didn't stop them from releasing an incredible album. They developed such a cult following that the ensemble went on to perform a sold-out show at the Royal Albert Hall!

Check out the clips below for the hilarious results!