erhebung

Piaf Redux

This is great:

(via cluste­flock)

A Bit Used

This is some­thing I wrote weeks ago but forgot to post.

‘No Sound But the Wind’ is a track by Editors that I dis­covered by accident: I was looking for inform­a­tion about the com­posers who had scored Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse (Howard Shore, an amazing composer, produced one) and happened to see that Editors featured on the soundtrack to New Moon. I read some­where that the track was ori­gin­ally written for the film adapt­a­tion of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but was dropped and was changed a bit so it could be used in New Moon. I’ve not seen that film, so I’ve no idea where it features, or if it adds anything to the exper­i­ence. However, as a track in its own right, it has had me on a short leash, has truly cap­tiv­ated me, which frus­trates me, a bit, as there isn’t much sub­stance to it at all. After listening to it (and I’ve been listening to it a lot) I feel a bit used.

I managed to pull myself away from the track, but after reading this want to go back to it and listen again. Maybe a bad idea. But we’ve got to have guilty pleasures.

Watch the Modern Kids

The new Arcade Fire album, or what I’ve heard of it so far, is everything one expects an Arcade Fire album to be: vast, com­pel­ling, dramatic, delicate, poetic, anti-​intuitive. I’ll be listening to it a lot more. The way the rhythm of ‘Modern Man’ seems to keep cutting back on back on itself — almost tripping over, fal­tering — is fas­cin­ating. ‘Half Light II (No Cel­eb­ra­tion)’ has the verve you’d expect from the makers of Funeral and Neon Bible. At ‘Month of May’ things become punkier, more frenetic, and it’s a shift in gears which jalts in the right way. It is in no way dis­ap­pointing, thus far, but it def­in­itely needs more time. And it needs to be seen in the context of the other two albums. Which reminds me of a track by track com­par­ison I did, a couple of years ago, of Funeral and Neon Bible:

Arcade Fire: Old vs New

‘Neigh­bor­hood #1′ vs ‘Black Mirror — I think this one has to go to Funeral, as no matter how intriguing ‘Black Mirror’ is at times, ‘Neigh­bor­hood #1′ will always win over, for me, as it has so many mental asso­ci­ations, par­tic­u­larly from around the time I was staying in Moscow. But, the more I listen to Neon Bible (and I’m listening to ‘Black Mirror’ right now, in fact), the more I feel that the new album is a very inter­esting pro­gres­sion. But this one, for now, is going to go to Funeral.

‘Neigh­bor­hood #2′ vs ‘Keep The Car Running’ — This one is a bit trickier, as I like both the tracks, but don’t really love either. I guess I’m going to go with ‘Funeral’ again, because it seems a little less cluttered: ‘Keep the Car Running’ seems, at moments, to lack clarity. However, I might change my mind later.

‘Une Année Sans Lumiere’ vs ‘Neon Bible’ — I think the newer of the two tracks is the clear winner, here. Yes, the lyrics in the older track are great (“…eyes are shooting sparks…”), but ‘Neon Bible’ is excel­lent both lyr­ic­ally and music­ally (the segment from around 1:15 to 1:36 is lovely), so the winner by a mile seems here to be Neon Bible. But, wait, two minutes and forty-​six seconds into ‘Une Année Sans Lumiere’, some­thing amazing happens. And it keeps on hap­pening for almost a minute. So, I’m not sure. But I’ll be firm: this time, Neon Bible wins. Close, though — very close.

‘Neigh­bor­hood #3′ vs ‘Intervention’ — Much as I love the older of the two, not least because of that storming opening, I think ‘Inter­ven­tion’ was the first track on the new album that made me sit up and really listen. I’m prac­tic­ally listening to it on repeat right now, and the layering is mag­ni­fi­cent. So, yes — the winner here is def­in­itely Neon Bible.

‘Neigh­bor­hood #4′ vs ‘Black Wave, Bad Vibrations’ — I don’t actually like the old track, the fourth Neigh­bor­hood, all that much. But I really like the vocals and the arrange­ments in ‘Black Wave, Bad Vibra­tions’. It is funny: taking them one by one, Neon Bible is doing pretty well. But having said that, I think Funeral is hanging together better as an album, for me, right now.

‘Crown of Love’ vs ‘Ocean of Noise’ — Well, ‘Crown of Love’ is a mas­ter­piece, and I need to keep reminding myself of that, as I some­times forget. But ‘Ocean of Noise’ is cool, too. Here, though, Funeral gets it, even though “an ocean of violence, between me and you” is a fant­astic lyric.

‘Wake Up’ vs ‘The Well and the Lighthouse’ — I don’t actually like ‘Wake Up’ all that much, and ‘The Well and the Light­house’ has a spec­tac­ular opening, so this is an easy one: Neon Bible gets the prize.

‘Haiti’ vs ‘(Anti­christ Tele­vi­sion Blues) — ‘Haiti’ has this slightly dreamy, upbeat quality, which I really like; but the newer of the two tracks as a punchi­ness and passion, par­tic­u­larly in the lyrics, that really works for me. Another, then, to the newer of the two albums.

‘Rebel­lion’ vs ‘Windowsill’ — O, this one is tricky. ‘Rebel­lion’ is epic and very powerful, but I may actually have tired listening to it now, after over a year with the album in my life. But ‘Win­dowsill’ (if that is the correct title) needs to be with me a little longer before I can really be sure it is better than ‘Rebel­lion’. Actually, the segment from 2:02 to around 3:30 may just have swayed me, as some­thing about that portion really does walk all over the now over-​familiar ‘Rebel­lion’. But if you take 3:00 to on ‘Rebel­lion’, you get some­thing very, very special, too. Par­tic­u­larly that little hand-​clap at around 3:20. Problem, right now, is that the track feels too long. No, okay, if I allow for the fact that I’ve listened to it too much, I have to give it to ‘Rebel­lion’, right now.

‘In the Backseat’ vs ‘No Cars Go’ — I have to be in exactly the right mood to enjoy ‘In the Backseat’, which is a bit of a problem, right now, as I don’t think I’m in the right mood. ‘No Cars Go’ is won­derful. So, Neon Bible, again.

The last track on Neon Bible, ‘My Body Is a Cage’, really doesn’t work for me, though, so it is lucky it doesn’t have to go against anything on ‘Funeral’, as it would almost cer­tainly lose. And it is an awful reprise of those organs from the wondrous ‘Intervention’.

As a side note, the cover of ‘Maps’ per­formed by The Arcade Fire on Radio 1’s Live Lounge might just beat everything on both of those albums. And the same is probably also true for the live version (also from Live Lounge) of ‘Rebellion’ — simply extraordin­arily beau­tiful, par­tic­u­larly that piano playing.

I’m not sure who wins overall.

I’d com­pletely for­gotten about their cover of ‘Maps’. Need to dig that out. And digging out anything by Arcade Fire is always worthwhile.

Arcade Fire, live. (Source)

Mind Heist

Who is Mike Zarin? What about Zack Hemsey? I’m not sure, but they both appear to have been involved in creating music for Chris­topher Nolan’s Incep­tion. Zarin’s con­nec­tion to the film is con­firmed (I think) by this site. Beyond that, I can’t find much inform­a­tion. More inform­a­tion on Hemsey’s con­nec­tion can be found here and here.

The “official” composer for Incep­tion is Hans Zimmer, but the “official” website keeps crashing in this browser, so I can’t hear much of Zimmer’s score (parts of it are over there, if you can get it to load). If it’s anything like the music featured in the third trailer for the film, music by Hemsey, it’s likely to be epic (the trailer itself is spec­tac­ular, and not just because of the excel­lent score — check it out).

Zack Hemsey’s put up a bandcamp page for the music featured in that trailer (it’s called ‘Mind Heist’), and if you like what you hear, you can buy it. You can embed it, too, which is handy:

A still from Incep­tion. (Source)

Random Random

After a night watching old editions of Question Time on YouTube, I come home to a download of the original Night of the Living Dead; and while watching that, I find this random, random download:

For more than 30 years the Short­wave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intel­li­gence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are trans­mitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Short­wave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way com­mu­nic­a­tion. Spies located anywhere in the world can be com­mu­nic­ated to by their masters via small, locally avail­able, and unmod­i­fied Short­wave receivers. The encryp­tion system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreak­able. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recip­i­ents once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid sched­ules, and transmit in many dif­ferent lan­guages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and inton­a­tion; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that trans­mits a female child’s voice!

One might think that these espi­onage activ­ities should have wound down con­sid­er­ably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by infer­ence, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Tan­tal­ising oddness. Wiki­pedia has more inform­a­tion, here. One “mys­ter­ious, powerful short­wave numbers station” was nick­named “The Lin­colnshire Poacher”, appar­ently. And more inform­a­tion on the influ­ence of The Conet Project, here; and an article from The Wash­ington Post; and another article on the subject from Salon.

Less Unless

I had a look at The Hype Machine a couple of months back, I think (there was a Jolicloud app for it?), but didn’t get into it, for whatever reason. This morning I went back via a link on Last.fm (tracks played on The Hype Machine can now be auto­mat­ic­ally scrobbled into your Last.fm account) and became utterly hooked. Every channel (cur­rently you can choose from: “latest”, “popular”, “twitter”, “radio show”, “spy”, and “zeit­gesit”) is cap­tiv­ating in some way, my favourite probably being “spy”, as it just feels alive: tracks that are “loved” by users stream down the screen, mys­tic­ally refreshed by the magic(k) of the tubes.

The dis­covery of the day has to be ‘Less Unless’, a track by CIVIL CIVIC: tre­mendous music, begging to be played again and again, louder and louder. I’m hoping there is much more from this group. You can hear the track on The Hype Machine, here. And this is the video:

Tuning Russia In

While digging around for a netlabel (Umpako.com, pro­du­cers of such gems as ALOAB (Arti­fi­cial Limb of a Beard) by Mi ZOT) this morning, I fell upon a website about “new music from Russia and beyond” that goes by the name Far From Moscow. I’ll be adding it to Google Reader in the hope that it helps me to find new tunes from that part of the globe (the Western bias of my music col­lec­tion bothers me, at moments: last week I found myself down­loading a whole bunch of con­tem­porary Indian music; and I’m also trying to figure out more about music cur­rently coming out of Turkey).

Texan Texan

When I woke up this morning, the last thing I expected to see was footage, set to music, of the ines­tim­ably Texan Texan, Lyndon Baines Johnson. But life is full of these little sur­prises. I predict there will be other such sur­prises today: it feels like one of those days. Check out the video for ‘Please Don’t’ (Feat. San­tigold), a col­lab­or­a­tion between David Byrne and Fatboy Slim (via Ste­reogum) [Edit: the video might not be dis­playing in RSS feeds, annoyingly.]:

Yorke’s Ghost

I used to listen to Radi­o­head fre­quently, have listened to them since I was a teenager, but haven’t listened to them much over the last couple of months. I’m not sure why I stopped, but this evening I was browsing Pitch­fork and heard a couple of Thom Yorke’s won­derful new songs (see and hear them here), and now I think I’m going to go back and listen again to some Radi­o­head, and to Thom Yorke’s solo work. Here is ‘Give Up the Ghost’:

Music of the Ox

Over the last few weeks I’ve fre­quently found myself drifting to sleep to the sound of Amiina, an Icelandic musical quartet with a dreamy, min­im­alist sound. I’ve also been listening to múm, who I may have men­tioned on erhebung earlier, Library Tapes, a group whose backlist I have only just started to explore, and Jóhann Jóhannsson, an artist with a very pleasing sound (I’m listening to ‘Bangkok Norðursins’ from Dís right now).

The Year of the Ox just ended, the Year of the Tiger just began; fire­works are still exploding (Explo­sions in the Sky, Friday Night Lights — good stuff), and will continue to explode for a few more days. Last year I listened to a lot of music, and I’ve been going through my Last.fm account, con­sol­id­ating my memories. There was a lot of Regina Spektor (I can’t remember when I first heard her, but it was love on first listen), quite a bit of Laura Veirs (a fas­cin­a­tion with Viers’ voice has been creeping up on me slowly), not enough Basia Bulat (I heard Bulat while walking to work in Mianyang one day, and pro­ceeded to listen to the same track all morning), lately a con­sid­er­able amount of Emily Haines (as with Spektor, love at first listen, and as with Spektor, I’m not sure when I first heard her voice, although it might have been while I was in South Korea, after Chris recom­mended Metric), a smidgin of Char­lotte Gains­bourg (daughter of Serge Gains­bourg), and a dose, here and there, of Seu Jorge (thanks to Hugo for that one).

Here is what I wrote about Jorge a week or so ago:

I won’t ever tire of listening to Seu Jorge’s Por­tugese rendi­tions of songs ori­gin­ally sung by David Bowie. What grabs me is in part the genius of the ori­ginals, in part of the beauty of the trans­lated words, words I under­stand only tent­at­ively, each clause or sentence calling on memories of the English, but remaining, always, a little mysterious.

These are some of the Por­tuguese lyrics to ‘Starman’:

Adeus amor
Não sabia que horas eram as luzes eram baixas oh como
Debrucei-​me para trás em meu rádio oh oh
Alguns gato foi deitada abaixo um pouco de rock n roll lotta soul, disse ele
Então o som alto pareceu desvanece-​se uma ade
Voltou como uma voz lenta em uma onda de Hase ha fase
Jive que DJ não werent que foi nebulosa cósmica

Há um Starman waiting in the sky
Hed gostaria de vir conhecer-​nos
Mas ele acha que ele ia explodir nossas mentes
[…]

It’s a beau­tiful version, full of seductive sounds creating very vivid imagery. I like, in a way, that in these versions, for me, the meaning of the lyrics is at a remove from the music.

Also, recently, a lot of Beirut. Aston­ish­ingly beau­tiful music. The Flying Club Cup has been played almost every day for the last couple of weeks, either at work or at home. Beirut can be con­nected to Arcade Fire via Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy), and then from Arcade Fire it is only a short leap to David Bowie (the version of ‘Life on Mars’ recorded at Fashion Rocks is spine-​tinglingly good). I imagine this concert was memorable.

Broad­cast & The Focus Group Invest­igate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was an unusual col­lab­or­a­tion between one group I knew of, one I didn’t. I listened to it a lot, for a time, and need to revisit it. When I first got it, it was, like Amiina, some­thing I listened to before sleeping; but I should listen to it while walking, to see what thoughts it inspires when released into the wild. (Walking, music, pho­to­graphy — I am happy to think about the first of these things, right now; the third is off-​limits, thoughts of cameras and images cur­rently creating a numbness.)

In my mind, that album is clustered together with albums by Elegi, Natural Snow Build­ings, and Max Richter. Richter’s music is dense with meaning, but light on the ears; pos­sessing density, but touching gently. I always feel that the com­pos­i­tions are like self-​contained poems. I hope to be listening to Richter a lot more this year. Natural Snow Build­ings have a darker hand, perhaps, but are no less beau­tiful for it. Their album Ghost Folks can be down­loaded in its entirety from Last.fm.

Related to those three, to dif­fering degrees, is Philip Glass. I listened to Koy­aan­isqatsi very fre­quently last year. The music is so effort­lessly, tire­lessly good, and the world does feel, “out of balance”, so the tracks became, at moments, con­cil­itary: like old friends who nod in silent agree­ment at some mutually acknow­ledged problem. Other music by Glass that stood out this year: his score for Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, and also his score (from 2002) for The Hours (I had failed to make the con­nec­tion with The Reader — has Stephen Daldry really only made two films in ten years?), a film about Virginia Woolf (I have been listening to a dram­at­isa­tion of The Waves, and have also been won­dering if I should read, again, To the Light­house).

On a com­pletely dif­ferent note, there was also a lot of Tegan and Sara and Belle & Sebastian, this year, according to Last.fm. I can remember the Tegan and Sara (it was some­thing about Shanghai, and cleaning, and needing to feel upbeat — “I feel you in my heart…”); the Belle & Sebastian, however, is explic­able (I have listened to them since before uni­ver­sity — 1997, or there­abouts; and I always listen to them, peri­od­ic­ally), but a bit strange (I don’t remember listening to them much over the last six months; I don’t remember my nos­talgia, or cravings, pointing me in that dir­ec­tion). Also con­nected to this is a fairly recent burst of Pulp (‘Mile End’ still sounds so vividly alive). (From ‘Mile End’ my mind goes straight to my time in London, nat­ur­ally, and to a com­pletely dif­ferent set of memories, but not memories that seem to have a dis­tinctive musical signature.)

And so ends, a little abruptly, a little glance at the music of the last year. There is more, I am certain, but that is what comes to mind, right now. May the Year of the Tiger be equally intriguing.

Old Friends, Old Photographs

Last night was a night of Metric, everyone wanting to fall in love, everyone wanting to play the lead; and yes­terday, daytime, was a day of talking with old and dear and too-​long absent friends. And during one con­ver­sa­tion, someone asked how I achieved the look in the pho­to­graph below, and I explained that the figure was moving, and the camera was also moving, the camera fol­lowing the figure, and so everything else became blur, a wash of light; and that that the light of night had a greater intensity on film than the light of day. I think my friend described the pho­to­graph as hyper-​real. The music of Metric also has a greater intensity at night (as does much music). So: night and day; moving and tracking; clarity and blur; old friends, old photographs.

Xi’an, 2006.

Do Anything

The most con­sist­ently inter­esting thing I read last year was Warren Ellis’ Do Anything, a series of columns pub­lished on the Bleeding Cool website. Here are links to each of the indi­vidual install­ments: 001, 002, 003, 004, 005, 006, 007, 008, 009, 010, 011, 012, 013, 014, 015, 016, 017, 018, 019, 020, 021, 022, 023, 024, 025, 026. I highly recom­mend taking a look.