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We come from the land of the ice and snow

3 February 2010 in music, tech | No comments

Curious about what songs I’ve listened to most, I navigated over to my last.fm profile and saw this:

Do I love “Immigrant Song?” Yes. Do I imitate its opening vocal, Robert Plant’s reverberating war cry that gets as close to the heart of awesomeness as any lyric in the history of rock? Frequently. But have I listened to it 3,000+ times in the past couple of years? Roughly 5x per day?

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I would say that there would be no way of knowing, but I guess that there is.

Friday milkshake: Panda Bear meets Atlas Sound

31 July 2009 in music | 1 comment

Friday usually means Stevie Wonder, but today it’s Panda Bear and Atlas Sound, a guy from Deerhunter. I have been playing the 1s and 0s out of their new thing. Warning: It’s going to give you a craving to drink a milkshake with equal parts Beach Boys, organs of the Motown variety, and Animal Collective raspy echoes. Listen at your own risk.

Atlas Sound & Panda Bear. The song is called “Walkabout”

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Atlas Sound guy describes the beginning of the collaboration, from Brooklyn Vegan:

I toured for a period in Europe with Animal Collective, whose band dynamic was very inspirational to be around. On the bus, we often played improvised iPod games. We would take turns formulating a theme or unifying concept and then play three songs. The goal would be for everyone to try and figure out the theme. During one of these games, someone played “What Am I Going to Do” by the Dovers. I was amazed at the hook — a weird organ thing with drums and electric bass. I mentioned to Noah that someone should really sample that riff. He agreed and he taught me a little about sampling and matching up beats. This ended up as the collaborative effort “Walkabout.”

Via Tom Haverford, aka Randy, aka Aziz Ansari.

The 90s obviously didn’t totally suck

11 July 2009 in music, the ancient past | No comments

Karp, playing someone’s apartment/bedroom/closet in Atlanta, 1996. This video makes me regret not rallying to see them at Gilman Street even more. Thanks for the memories, Jacob. PS, you may feel moved to add your own vocal track.

Simple sounds for hard times

12 December 2008 in music, tech | No comments

The fallout of greed and incompetence is once again trickling down to Main Street. Kiss my ass, you greedy Wall Street bastards. And you bureaucrats and cronies can kiss my ass, too. Is there anyone out there who thinks beyond the current economic cycle? Anyone? Is anyone trying to do anything other than make themselves rich, or keep their friends in office? Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrg.

When I got laid off in 2001, I did a lot of soul-searching, ate a lot of Cancun veggie burritos (they were $3.29; they’re $4.99 now), and did a lot of reading at Green Apple. One afternoon, I came across Woody Guthrie’s autobiography, Bound for Glory. Now there was a guy who knows a thing or two about hard times. The title is deeply ironic, as Guthrie experienced a lot of hardship, but through it all he had deep confidence in himself and deep faith that he would do great things. Greed, incompetence and bad luck afflicted him, (and millions of others), but life goes on. And if you’re a person like Woody Guthrie, you take the hard lesson and you turn it into something like Dust Bowl Ballads.

[You should see a little Flash player below each song title; apologies if you don’t. Working on it].

Woody Guthrie, “I ain’t got no home” [Download]

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Of course, I was never close to being caught out on a literal road with other literally displaced people, but this passage deeply affected me:

My brothers and my sisters are stranded on this road,
A hot and dusty road that a million feet have trod;
Rich man took my home and drove me from my door
And I ain’t got no home in this world anymore.

2001 was no Dust Bowl, and I was nowhere near as destitute as Tom Joad. But the feeling of alienation and disillusion really rang true to me, the sense that “a million feet” have trod a much worse path gave me comfort, I guess. (Guthrie also hated Wall Street bastards more than anyone, which gave me a great deal of comfort).

So the next track is all about turning the corner, finding happiness, and being bound for glory. It’s from an incredible collection of music called Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1, a collection of recordings made in rural homes and churches over the past 50 years.

Lawrence McKiver and the McIntosh County Shouters, “Jubilee” [Download]

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For me, this track is an excellent reminder that a few people with a lot of spirit and some knee-slapping can make something deeply affecting. It doesn’t take much. And that’s the first step, perhaps, to being bound for glory.

Auto-Tune / An evening on the Internets

30 September 2008 in music, tech, web | No comments

We have a house guest this week, and we’ve been doing a lot of hanging out while reading and listening to music. Last night, the discussion turned to Auto-Tune, and it quickly revealed the beauty of being at least somewhat Internet-literate.

Speaking of Internet-literate, this is our houseguest: Dave.

It started with Lil Wayne. I mentioned to Mara and Dave that Stereogum has an irritating post about Lil Wayne’s use of Auto-Tune on SNL. It was irritating because, to me, there’s a difference between using Auto-Tune to compensate for your own inability to hit the notes (e.g., Kelly Clarkson in “Since U Been Gone”), and using it to increase the funky quotient, as Lil Wayne does in “Lollipop.” Anyway, Dave recalled a Pitchfork interview with Neko Case in which she has some salty words on the subject of Auto-Tune. [tappity-tappity]

Neko Case: When I hear Auto-Tune on somebody’s voice, I don’t take them seriously. Or you hear somebody like Alicia Keys, who I know is pretty good, and you’ll hear a little bit of Auto-Tune and you’re like, “You’re too fucking good for that. Why would you let them do that to you? Don’t you know what that means?” It’s not an effect like people try to say, it’s for people like Shania Twain who can’t sing.

(It gets even saltier). Then the conversation turned to Auto-Tune’s first major splash, which was recently discussed in a Sasha Frere-Jones piece in the New Yorker [tappity-tappity]

The first popular example of Auto-Tune’s distorting effect was Cher’s 1998 hit “Believe,” produced by Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling. During the first verse, Auto-Tune makes the phrase “I can’t break through” wobble so much that it’s hard to discern.

Of course, then we had to hear “Believe,” so Dave suggested Favtape. [tappity-tappity] Bingo; briefly, we revisited 1998. Then, it seemed like it made sense to listen to Bedhead’s cover as well. [tappity-tappity] It features a touch-tone phone as an instrument.

So what’s the story with using Auto-Tune on “Believe?” Did the producers seek it out because Cher couldn’t hit the notes, or did they just want to get funky? [tappity-tappity] The Internet has your answer, sort of. It’s from a 1999 article in the British magazine Sound on Sound, but the problem is that the producers don’t admit to using Auto-Tune; it was still a trade secret at that point:

The ... obvious vocal effect in ‘Believe’ is the ‘telephoney’ quality of Cher’s vocal throughout. This idea came from the lady herself — she’d identified something similar on a Roachford record and asked Mark if he could reproduce it.

He explains, “Roachford uses a restricted bandwidth, and filters the vocals heavily so that the top and bottom ends are wound off and the whole vocal is slightly distorted. It took a while to work out exactly what it was that Cher liked about this particular Roachford song, but in the end we realised it was the ‘telephoney’ sound. I used the filter section on my Drawmer DS404 gate on the vocal before it went into the Talker to get that effect.”

Actually, we now know the truth. It was Auto-Tune.

All of this happened in about 15 minutes; we explored the arc of Auto-Tune in popular songs, with examples of early incarnations and deep discussion about how and why it was applied. Nice. [tappity-tappity]