03.18.10: Collaborations [updated]

[Note: this is an expanded version of the original entry.]

Sat in with St. Vincent on a Friday night in January at her show at the Allen Room in the Time Warner building.

Here’s a picture from Brooklyn Vegan — she pulled in some extra horns, as well as Bon Iver and Bryce D from The National to help out.

Photo: Chris La Putt

At her suggestion, we did a song we’d been writing together, one of about 8 or so. Our collaboration was partly inspired by the Dirty Projectors/Björk thing at Housing Works many months ago that we both attended. We agreed to do something similar there, though there is no timetable. Annie (her real name) has been on tour, on and off, for quite a while, so the collaboration proceeds in fits and starts. It was a good idea of hers to get this one song at least up to speed, as it gave us a deadline and allows us to see where problems and musical issues might lie.

Annie also came up with the concept of using a brass ensemble as the core band for these things, which gives us a unifying musical direction and coincidentally will also work nicely in someplace like Housing Works, where the “less in the PA the better” rule applies — the acoustic volume of brass instruments means that if we are careful the balance in that room could be natural, and mainly the voices will require amplification. It’s a case of music being written for a specific situation for sure.

Another one of our pieces looks like it’ll see the light of day this summer via Bang on a Can’s Asphalt Orchestra, which is kind of a new-music marching band. They’re larger than what we’re envisioning for most pieces, so they’ll help reconfigure and orchestrate what we’ve begun for their special needs and situation — outdoors, a large specific ensemble, in motion. They’ll perform around Lincoln Center in August. More news at 11.

I’ve done a slew of collaborations over the years — more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early.

The Here Lies Love project — due out in early April — was largely a collaboration with Fatboy Slim, and one of the most extensive I’ve done in while. Not all the 22 songs on that project were collaboratively written, but more than half were.

How do these things work?

My last record — the Byrne/Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — was, as far as the process goes, typical in some ways. Brian had a slew of tracks on the shelf, tracks that seemed to want to become songs (as opposed to ambient tracks or film scores), but he was unhappy with his own attempts at completing them. So, from his point of view, he has nothing much to lose by passing them to me to “complete” — they were just gathering dust anyway (although one did get passed to Coldplay), and unless I did something horrendous (which we agreed he could veto), it was a win-win situation.

I was sent stereo mixes of his musical ideas, which I sometimes left alone and worked over as is, but just as often I slightly restructured them to bring them closer to a song form. However, I never even thought about requesting musical changes in the tracks — key changes, changes in groove or instrumentation. The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.

This always presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon. Freedom within strict confines seems to be ideal.

I work in a home studio, which I’ve carved out of a larger room.

Tidy, eh? Embarrassing, actually.

There is no professional sound baffling, but the floors of this industrial building are concrete — and I put industrial carpet down on the floor, and one wall is a kind of sound absorbent sheetrock. Unless a truck backfires or an ambulance goes by it is OK for vocals and guitars. There’s no room for drums or anything like that… but for writing it is fine. There’s a good tube mic for singing, a radio studio mic for the little old guitar amp (woops, you can’t see it), and a nice pre amp and compressor. That’s pretty much all you need to find out where things want to go.

Serial numbers and security codes for software are pinned to the wall, along with a Tammy Wynette poster. The computer is under the desk. It’s a mess, it’s not much, but it’s enough for writing and, amazingly, some of the vocals I’ve done here end up being keepers. Guitar parts too — and of course, midi stuff, if it survives the evolution of a tune. The vocal I did on the hit version of the song “Lazy” — the collaboration with DJs X-Press 2 — was recorded using a decent mic into a G3 laptop! So clearly pro gear is nice but not super essential. The track those guys sent me sounded completely different texturally than how it ended up — they stripped it down and made it more “housey” after I sent in my vocal.

With Annie we’ve worked in a similar fashion to those collaborations, though from both directions. Sometimes (as in the song we did at the Allen Room) she’d give me some instrumental tracks she’d done in Garage Band using brass (and other) samples, and then I’d organize those using the music software Logic, and add some stuff of my own. In the case of this particular song I first added a “virtual” acoustic rhythm guitar and some percussion — which cemented the nice herky-jerky brass parts she had recorded. I sent these via email to her for approval. After that (she liked what I had done) I improvised a vocal melody on top — thus far without words. She liked that too.

She sent back some new brass chords and harmonies under one of my vocal verse sections — and that eventually turned into a middle 8 (sometimes called a bridge in the US). She also sent some melismatic vocal improvisations of her own that pushed the verses into being nicely asymmetric.

I did some further restructuring and began to write words — written to fit the metric and rise and fall of the vocal melody I’d improvised earlier. Many drafts later we had a song. While I was writing the words, I brought in Tony Finno, who had done arrangements for brass and strings for Here Lies Love and the Big Love score material I did a couple of years back, to do charts for her brass guys — who turned out to be horn guys more than brass guys, but they were flexible enough to cover the parts.

Although writing words to fit an existing vocal melody and meter is what anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively — every rapper improvises to a meter, for example — I was encouraged to make the process more explicit when Talking Heads made Remain In Light. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit existing structures often resulted, eventually and somewhat surprisingly, in words that did in fact have an emotional and sometimes even narrative thread. They may have begun as gibberish, but often, though not always, a “story,” in the broadest sense, emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.

With other St. Vincent collaborations that are in the works, I have sometimes started the brass parts on my end and then sent them to Annie; I’ve also sent her words, potential lyrics, that I had written. The latter is unusual, as I don’t usually write words in advance, but I wasn’t sure what form of collaboration she’d be comfortable with. So far none of those have achieved true song status. It’s all still evolving — where these will end up? We don’t know — and that’s a nice place to be in.

It seems she doesn’t like writing words — and she’s not alone there. Brian hates it as well. I find it to be the most labor-intensive part of songwriting, but when it works, and it doesn’t always, then the song can seem more like something whose constituent elements magically flowed out — something that emerged naturally, rather than something that was made in incremental pieces or layered up.

But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about “that” (“that” being what the words say literally) and nothing else. They can, if not done well, destroy the pleasant ambiguity that is a lot of the reason we love music so much. That inherent ambiguity means that we can psychologically tailor music to our own needs, sensibilities and situations — but words limit that, or they can. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others’. So I understand some folks’ trepidation, and my own sometime-failures.

Once I have a melody and vocal arrangement I, or both collaborators, like I’ll transcribe that gibberish as if it were real words. I’ll listen carefully to the meaningless vowels and consonants and try to understand what that guy emoting so indistinctly (that’s me) is actually saying. It’s like a forensic exercise. I’ll follow the sound of the nonsense syllables as closely as possible — if a melodic phrase of gibberish ends on a high ooh sound, then I’ll transcribe that as a word that ends in that syllable, or as close to it as I can imagine.

I do that because the sound, the difference between an ohh and an aah, and a B and a TH sound is, I assume, integral to the emotion being expressed. I want to stay true to it. Admittedly that emotion has no narrative or literal text thus far, but it’s there — I can hear it. I can feel it. My job is to find words that match it, that don’t destroy it.

Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right, if the tongue (wooo!), and the mirror neurons of the listener (isn’t that part of why we love music and performance — mirror neurons?) are made to feel (neurologically) the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that rightness sometimes trumps literal sense. We “sing” in our minds and muscles when we hear and see singing. In a sense, performance and listening to music is a participatory activity. So the writing of words — the putting them down on paper — is certainly part of songwriting, but the proof of the pudding is in the singing. If the sound is untrue, we can tell.

After the initial transcription of verbal sounds into nonsense sentences made of real words, a long, tedious process begins. I then begin to write out every phrase I can think of that matches that sonic/syllabic flow — no phrase is too mundane or stupid. I try not to pre-judge anything that occurs to me at this point — one never knows if something that sounded stupid at first will, in a new context, make the whole thing shine.

Sometimes sitting at a desk trying to do this doesn’t work. I never have writer’s block, but sometimes things do slow down. (And sometimes the shit backs up.) My conscious mind might be thinking too much — and at this point, one wants surprises and weirdness from the depths. Some techniques help in that regard — I’ll carry a small micro recorder and go jogging on the west side, recording every single phrase that matches the song’s meter as they occur to me. On the rare occasions when I’m driving a car, I can do the same thing — are there laws against driving and songwriting? Basically anything that occupies part of the conscious mind and distracts it works. The idea is to allow the chthonic material freedom to gurgle up.

I’ll accumulate many, many pages of this stuff, and then begin to sort through it. Sometimes just a verse, or even a phrase or two, will resonate — but that’s enough to “unlock” the thing, and from there on it’s more fill in the blank, conventional puzzle solving.

With Norm (Fatboy), I sometimes wrote songs over simple drum loops of my own, which Norm and Tom (Cagedbaby) Gandey then replaced with their own funkier and more characterful grooves. Other times Norm sent me basic groove loops — sometimes with some bass or instrument samples mixed in, sometimes not — and I sliced and diced those and wrote melodies and words over them. The songs in that project that I initiated myself tended to be more harmonically complex — to have more chord changes — than the groove-focused ones that Norm sent me. Together they made for a nice variety.

The lyrics on that project came about in a slightly different way for me. As I did research on the characters and their story, I took notes — emphasizing both curious and emblematic events, and things that the characters said. Often a direct quote from one of the characters put their feelings and point of view in such a perfect nutshell that much of my meandering lyric process was shortened. I often used the character’s own phrases: “Just say — here lies love” was one. “Please don’t — don’t let them look down on us” was another.

“I knew if I did not react they’d kill us, every one,” and, “I made a promise to my mother that for every tear she shed there’d be a victory” — these and many more were ever so slightly tweaked, and integrated. It was the easiest lyric writing task I’ve ever had.

I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing (though now I hear it’s a duet with me); a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. I’ve joined the roster of artists covering Peter Gabriel tunes in response to him covering our tunes. His record — orchestral versions of songs new and old — reminds me in some ways of the first Cat Power Covers record, in which it was sometimes halfway through a tune before you figured out what the song was. This is nowhere near that extreme, but he takes liberties with the songs — changing grooves and even melodies — in an effort to make them his. And in most cases he does. It’s a tough assignment covering songs that folks are familiar with, and sometimes a radical reassessment is the only way to make them new again.

I’ll have to do something similar to the song I cover — though exactly what remains to be seen. So many of his tunes are instantly texturally identifiable. In the era of recorded music, we have often come to think of one specific recording of a song as being “the song.” Is it? Legally, it’s not. Though it might seem unjust, I don’t think one can copyright sounds, a groove and a mix — though sometimes that’s what draws us into a recording. Anyway, I’ll have to somehow subvert that identification — as he did, but in some other musical way.

A writer at Pitchfork critically said I’d collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular (“Lazy” was a huge hit everywhere except the US).

Beyond the reward of the bag of Doritos, why collaborate at all? One could conceivably make more money not sharing the profits — if there are any — so why collaborate if one doesn’t have to? If one can write alone, why reach out? (Some of the most financially successful songs I’ve ever written were not collaborations, for example.) And besides, isn’t it risky? Suppose you don’t get along? Suppose the other person decides to take the thing in some ugly direction?

Well, as I said earlier, one big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom in the writing process. There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless musical possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions in the writing process, and sometimes, faster results.

Another reason to risk it is that others often have ideas outside and beyond what one would come up with oneself. To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes. When it works, the surprising result produces some kind of endorphin equivalent that is a kind of creative high. Collaborators sometimes rein in one’s more obnoxious tendencies too, which is yet another plus.

There are also some more market-oriented, pragmatic arguments for collaboration. If both collaborators are sort of well known, then there is a natural interest among the combined set of music fans. Part of the marketing has been done without having to do any corny PR. Even if the collaborators are not all that well known there is often some curiosity at what friction might result and what sparks might fly.

But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?

03.15.10: Collaborations

Sat in with St. Vincent on a Friday night in January at her show at the Allen Room in the Time Warner building.

Here’s a picture from Brooklyn Vegan — she pulled in some extra horns, as well as Bon Iver and Bryce D from The National to help out.

Photo: Chris La Putt

At her suggestion, we did a song we’d been writing together, one of about 8 or so. Our collaboration was partly inspired by the Dirty Projectors/Björk thing at Housing Works many months ago that we both attended. We agreed to do something similar there, though there is no timetable. Annie (her real name) has been on tour, on and off, for quite a while, so the collaboration proceeds in fits and starts. It was a good idea of hers to get at least this song up to speed, as it gave us a deadline and allows us to see where problems and musical issues might lie.

Annie also came up with the concept of using a brass ensemble as the core band for these things, which gives us a unifying musical direction and coincidentally will also work nicely in someplace like Housing Works, where the “less in the PA the better” rule applies — the acoustic volume of brass instruments means that if we are careful, the balance in that room could be natural, and mainly the voices will require amplification.

I’ve done a slew of collaborations over the years — more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early. The Here Lies Love project — due out in a few weeks — was largely a collaboration with Fatboy Slim, and one of the most extensive I’ve done in while. Not all 22 songs on that project were collaboratively written, but more than half were.

How do these things work? My last record — the Byrne/Eno Everything That Happens Will Happen Today — was, as far as the process goes, typical in some ways. Brian had a slew of tracks on the shelf, tracks that seemed to want to become songs (as opposed to ambient pieces, or film scores), but he was unhappy with his own attempts at completing them. So, from his point of view, he had nothing much to lose by passing them to me — they were just gathering dust anyway, and unless I did something horrendous (which we agreed he could veto), it was a win-win situation.

I was sent stereo mixes of his musical ideas, which I sometimes left alone, but just as often I slightly restructured them to bring them closer to a song form. However, I never even thought about requesting musical changes in the tracks — key changes, changes in groove or instrumentation. The unwritten game rules in these remote collaborations seem to be to leave the other person’s stuff alone as much as you can. Work with what you’re given; don’t try to imagine it as something other than what it is.

This presents some musical challenges, of course, but the benefits generally outweigh them. The fact that half the musical decision-making has already been done bypasses a lot of waffling and worrying. I didn’t have to think about what to do and what direction to take musically — the train had already left the station and my job was to see where it wanted to go. This restriction on one’s freedom — that some creative decisions have already been made — turns out to be a great blessing. Complete creative freedom is as much a curse as a boon.

I work in a home studio, which I’ve carved out of a larger room.

Tidy, eh?

There is no professional sound baffling, but the floors of this industrial building are concrete — and I put industrial carpet down on the floor, and one wall is a kind of sound absorbent sheetrock. Unless a truck backfires or an ambulance goes by it is OK for recording vocals and guitars. There’s no room for drums or anything like that… but for writing it is fine. There’s a good tube mic for singing, a radio studio mic for the little old guitar amp (woops, you can’t see it), and a nice pre amp and compressor.

Serial numbers and security codes for software are pinned to the wall, along with a Tammy Wynette poster. The computer is under the desk. It’s a mess, it’s not much, but amazingly, some of the vocals I’ve done here end up being keepers. The vocal I did on the hit version of the song “Lazy” — the collaboration with DJs X-Press 2 — was recorded using a decent mic into a G3 laptop! So clearly pro gear is nice but not super essential. The track they sent me sounded completely different texturally than how it ended up — they stripped it down and made it more “housey” after I sent in my vocal.

With Annie we’ve worked in a similar fashion to those collaborations, though from both directions. Sometimes (as in the song we did at the Allen Room) she’d give me some instrumental tracks she’d done in Garage Band using brass (and other) samples, and then I’d organize those using the music software Logic, and add some stuff of my own. In the case of this particular song I first added a “virtual” acoustic guitar and some percussion — which cemented the nice herky-jerky brass parts she had recorded. I sent these via email to her for approval. After that (she liked what I had done) I improvised a vocal melody on top — thus far without words. She liked that too.

She sent back some new brass chords and harmonies under one verse section — and that eventually turned into a middle 8 (sometimes called a bridge in the US), and she also sent some melismatic vocal improvisations of her own.

I did some further restructuring and began to write words — written to fit the metric and rise and fall of the vocal melody I’d improvised earlier. Many drafts later we had a song. While I was writing the words, I brought in Tony Finno, who had done arrangements for brass and strings for Here Lies Love and the Big Love score material I did a couple of years back, to do charts for her brass guys — who turned out to be horn guys more than brass guys, but they were flexible enough to cover the parts.

Although writing words to fit an existing vocal melody and meter is what anyone who writes in rhyme does naturally and intuitively, I was encouraged to make the process more explicit when Talking Heads made Remain In Light. I found that, remarkably, solving the puzzle of making words and phrases fit often resulted in words that did in fact have an emotional and sometimes even narrative thread. It may begin as gibberish, but often, if one wants, a “story,” in the broadest sense, emerges. Emergent storytelling, one might say.

With other St. Vincent collaborations that are in the works, I have sometimes started the brass parts on my end and then sent them to Annie; I’ve also sent her words, potential lyrics, that I had written. The latter is unusual, as I don’t usually write words in advance, but I wasn’t sure what form of collaboration she’d be comfortable with. So far none of those have achieved true song status. It’s all still evolving — where these will end up? We don’t know — and that’s a nice place to be in.

It seems she doesn’t like writing words — and she’s not alone there. Brian hates it as well. I find it to be the most labor-intensive part of songwriting, but when it works, and it doesn’t always, then the song can seem more like something that magically flowed out — something that emerged naturally, rather than something that was made in incremental pieces. But at times words can be a dangerous addition to music — they can pin it down. Words imply that the music is about “that” (“that” being what the words say literally) and nothing else. They can, if not done well, destroy the pleasant ambiguity that is a lot of the reason we love music so much. That inherent ambiguity means that we can psychologically tailor music to our own needs, sensibilities and situations — but words limit that, or they can. There are plenty of beautiful tracks that I can’t listen to because they’ve been “ruined” by bad words — my own and others. So I understand some folks’ trepidation, and my own sometime-failures.

Part of what makes words work in a song is how they sound to the ear and feel on the tongue. If they feel right, if the tongue (wooo!), and the mirror neurons of the listener (isn’t that part of why we love music and performance — mirror neurons?) are made to feel (neurologically) the delicious appropriateness of the words coming out, then that rightness sometimes trumps literal sense. We “sing” in our minds when we hear and see singing. So the writing of words — the putting them down on paper — is part of songwriting, but the proof of the pudding is in the singing.

With Norm (Fatboy), I sometimes wrote songs over simple drum loops of my own, which he and Tom (Cagedbaby) then replaced with their own funkier and more characterful grooves. Other times Norm sent me basic groove loops — sometimes with some bass or instrument samples mixed in, sometimes not — and I sliced and diced those and wrote melodies and words over them. The songs in that project that I initiated myself tended to be more harmonically complex — to have more chord changes — than the groove-focused ones that Norm sent me. Together they made for a nice variety.

I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing; a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. A writer at Pitchfork critically said I’d collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular (“Lazy” was a huge hit everywhere except the US).

Why collaborate at all? One could conceivably make more money not sharing the profits — if there are any — so why collaborate if one doesn’t have to? If one can write alone, why reach out? (Some of the most financially successful songs I’ve ever written were not collaborations, for example.) And besides, isn’t it risky? Suppose you don’t get along? Suppose the other person decides to take the thing in some ugly direction?

Well, as I said earlier, one big reason is to restrict one’s own freedom in the writing process. There’s a joy and relief in being limited, restrained. For starters, to let someone else make half the decisions, or some big part of them, absolves one of the need to explore endless musical possibilities. The result is fewer agonizing decisions in the writing process, and sometimes, faster results.

Another reason to risk it is that others often have ideas outside and beyond what one would come up with oneself. To have one’s work responded to by another mind, or to have to stretch one’s own creative muscles to accommodate someone else’s muse, is a satisfying exercise. It gets us outside of our self-created boxes. When it works, the surprising result produces some kind of endorphin equivalent that is a kind of creative high. Collaborators sometimes rein in one’s more obnoxious tendencies too, which is yet another plus.

There are also some more market-oriented, pragmatic arguments for collaboration. If both collaborators are sort of well known, then there is a natural interest among the combined set of music fans. Part of the marketing has been done without having to do any corny PR. Even if the collaborators are not all that well known there is often some curiosity at what friction might result and what sparks might fly.

But one might also ask: Is writing ever NOT collaboration? Doesn’t one collaborate with oneself, in a sense? Don’t we access different aspects of ourselves, different characters and attitudes and then, when they’ve had their say, switch hats and take a more distanced and critical view — editing and structuring our other half’s outpourings? Isn’t the end product sort of the result of two sides collaborating? Surely I’m not the only one who does this?

02.14.10: Valentine’s Day

TED talk — Creation in Reverse

I did a TED talk in Long Beach. TED stands for technology, entertainment and design and it’s a conference that was started some decades ago by Silicon Valley types to essentially bring part of the world to their doorstep.

From the TED website:

“TED was born in 1984 out of the observation by Richard Saul Wurman of a powerful convergence between Technology, Entertainment and Design. The first TED included demos of the newly released Macintosh computer and Sony compact disc, while mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot demonstrated how to map coastlines with his newly discovered fractals and AI guru Marvin Minsky outlined his powerful new model of the mind.”

(It was originally held in Monterey, a beautiful seaside escape just over the hills from Silicon Valley.) I suspect that the valley geeks and entrepreneurs didn’t usually get out much — they hardly ever even make it up to San Francisco! — so inviting innovators from around the world to come to them was a smart idea.

Here is Mandelbrot doing a return engagement this year, in reverse color.

It’s gone well beyond technology, entertainment and design by now, but still has a bit of a nerdy, techie vibe. I’d been watching their free video podcasts of various TED talks for years, and never really thought of attending until within the past year or two some other musicians who had been in the past all said, “You HAVE to go.”

Luckily, I got invited to do one of their talks this year, which saved me from worrying about the costs (this time, at least). The lineup is mind-boggling. TED talks are famously restricted to 18 minutes (or less — some folks are only given 3 minutes!... and some only got 1 minute!!) and they are very strict about it. I watched one elderly scientist almost get the hook as he exceeded his time allotment.

The time limit is a brilliant strategy — it forces us talkers to be concise, and the audience also knows that if they’re less than thrilled or stimulated, a new topic and speaker will be along in a few minutes. Being concise is one thing, but the time limit also conveniently means one has to stay “on message,” as the Cheney regime referred to it. In that time frame one can really just present one idea — and often it seems like just the inkling or introduction to a new idea was what was being presented.

Months ago I went to meet the TED folks at their New York offices after I was invited to participate. I was being vetted. I’ve done a few talks in the last few years — on bicycles and cities and Powerpoint — but they seemed to want something that pulled in my musical life. So, I mentioned to them that there was another talk, one about music in context, that I’d only done once — and I believed it could include musical examples and personal anecdotes. That seemed to satisfy them, though I said if they had doubts they could uninvite me, and that would be fine, no offense taken.

I practiced by talking on my subject over the last couple of months — at Pete’s Candy Store in Williamsburg, Bell House in Park Slope, and at Bowery Ballroom as part of the Stories in High Fidelity series. I never got it down to the requisite 18 minutes at those venues, but I did refine and re-order the thing quite a bit. I got some feedback and some beers.

I was terrified going in front of the TED crowd — they never boo, but they’re a pretty heavy-duty lot. Walking in I glimpsed Daniel Dennett, the author whose amazing talks I’ve seen on the podcasts. Later I caught sight of über geeks like Bill Gates (who talked about a new kind of nuclear reactor), Google founder Sergey Brin (who was interviewed about the China mess) and Temple Grandin (who wore old school Western wear all the time)… and while I was talking on the phone during a break Will Smith walked by, accosted by two nerds. Some of the major science speakers sported science fashion straight out of central casting, while others were beautifully surprising in the disconnect between their appearance and their deep skill sets. The attendees were predominantly male.

The conference has evolved, as I mentioned — and with all the money that is now connected to and surrounding the tech world, many talks almost seemed like pitches for support in developing the speaker’s new medical miracle, for example. Your potential funders are probably sitting right in front of you. Thankfully, not too much overt hustling was in evidence, but there was lots of business card exchanging. Many talks seemed to be about new medical or other technologies that can be of use in the developing world. One can see that the Gates Foundation and many many others would naturally emerge from this milieu.

It’s not all science. There are musical acts as well — they play a few songs interspersed between the talks on the wisdom of whores and mathematical models of alternate universes. Thomas Dolby is the one-man house band, and this year he was joined by NY string quartet Ethel. Other guest acts were Jake Shimabukuro, ukulele virtuoso; Andrew Bird; and Natalie Merchant, who appropriately integrated a slide show into her short set. I sat in with Thomas and Ethel for an edited version of “Nothing But Flowers,” a song well suited to the venue where Gore first did his climate change talk (he was there too).

Sarah Silverman’s shock comedy routine wasn’t exactly well received by all… but overall most attendees seemed to be enthralled by the majority of talks. Naturally there were a few high points and spontaneous standing ovations (I didn’t get one), and those tend to spread around the web very quickly. The Jamie Oliver rant about American eating habits is online already. (There’s an amazing video clip included in it of West Virginia school kids who can’t identify common vegetables.)

There wasn’t much time for biking around — there wasn’t much time for anything beyond listening — but I did manage to rent one and ride down the beach bike path. Really lovely, though not a very viable means of commuting. Long Beach has oil wells in the harbor; larger offshore drilling rigs can be seen in the distance. The ones close to the beach were disguised to look like skinny condos or office buildings, as if that would somehow be less offensive than looking at an oil derrick.

 

Anyway, here’s a slightly expanded version of my talk, minus the musical excerpts.

Creation in Reverse

What I'm going to talk about is an insight I've had about creation. That insight is that context largely determines what kind of music is written. Maybe the analogy applies to other forms of creation as well — painting, sculpture, programming or performance — or at least the shape of them.

That doesn't sound like such a big insight, but it's actually backwards from what I perceive to be conventional wisdom — which is that creation emerges out of some interior emotion or from an upwelling of passion that inevitably and must find an outlet. This is the romantic notion of how creative work comes to be. Here are the lyrics to a new song by the group One Republic: “I need another story/Something to get off my chest…When a situation rises/Just write it into an album.”

It doesn’t even rhyme, but more than that I think it’s based on a mistaken assumption.

I do think that despite the fact that this old notion of how creation comes into being is mistaken, passion is inevitably present in most work. Just because the form things take is self- or (in the case of my examples here) architecturally-restricted, and just because our response to a given context can be viewed as opportunistic, it doesn’t mean that creation is therefore cold and heartless. Those dark and emotional materials usually find a way in — and the tailoring process is largely unconscious. Emotional content is formed and shaped to fit the available context and circumstance instinctively. So, the order of the process is the reverse from what is often assumed: the consideration of the vessel comes first, and that which fills it comes afterwards. Most of the time we’re not even aware of this tailoring we do. Opportunity is often the mother of invention. The emotional story — “something to get off my chest” — still gets told, but its form is guided by contextual restrictions.

Paintings are created that fit and look incredibly good on the white walls of galleries. They might not look quite as good in your living room, filled with furniture and AV gear. Music is written that sounds good either in a dance club or a symphony hall (but probably not both). The architecture, the space, the platform, the software, in a sense “makes” the art. After art or music succeeds in a space, more similar venues are built to accommodate more production of similar sounding or looking pieces, but that happens later, after the form has been established. I sense that this mostly internalized tailoring process applies to everything, but I'll use music as my example, as people will believe I know something about that area.

Here is the room where some of the music I wrote as a young man was first heard.

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The sound in there was remarkably good — the amount of crap everywhere, the furniture, the bar, the uneven walls and ceiling made for a great sound absorption. The sound system was decent as well — better than in many other clubs, which was great, for this music anyway. Because of the lack of reverberation one could be fairly certain that details of one’s music would be heard. The lyrics would probably be understood and the rhythms and bass would be punchy and clear. Given the size of the place, intimate gestures and expression would be appreciated as well, at least from the waist up — whatever went on below the waist was generally invisible, obscured by the audience.

This club was initially meant to be a bluegrass and country venue, sort of like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge in Nashville.

The audience behavior was pretty much the same too — the musical differences between the two venues are less important than one might think. Structurally, the music emanating from both places was pretty much identical.

[Photos source]

As both of these places are bars, people drink, shout and fall down, so, the music performed also has to be loud enough to be heard above that — and so it is. (The volume in Tootsie’s is MUCH louder than it was in CBGB.)

In years that followed I’ve performed in nicer halls — Disney Hall, Carnegie Hall and others — but I noticed that some of the music I’d written didn’t sound as good in those rooms. I began to ask myself if some of my music was written, maybe unconsciously, with specific kinds of rooms in mind.

There are many strains of music in the world, of course. One strain evolved in the context of being played and heard outdoors.

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In this outdoor context, percussive music typical of West Africa carries well, and the extremely intricate and layered rhythms don’t all get sonically mashed together as they would in a reverberant hall. This music tends to be steady state — dynamically it doesn’t vary much, but rather maintains a constant volume.

Alan Lomax has argued that the structure of this music — essentially leaderless — emanates and mirrors egalitarian societies, but while that’s a whole other level of context one could argue that social context counts for as much as physical space and acoustics.

Some folks might say that the instruments used here — derived from easily available local materials — determined the nature of the music, and that this was the best they could do musically given what they had available. I would argue the opposite — that the instruments were carefully fashioned, tailored and played to best suit the physical, acoustic and social situation. They work perfectly in their context, and that’s no accident. Just as non-realistic art isn’t necessarily more primitive, this music is incredibly complex on its own terms. It works brilliantly.

It would turn into auditory mush in a place like this:

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Western music in the medieval era — Gregorian chants and such — was performed in these stone-walled Gothic cathedrals, and in monasteries and cloisters, which had somewhat similar acoustics. The reverberation time in those spaces is very long — more than four seconds in most cases — so a notes hang in the air and become part of the present. Shifting keys would inevitably invite dissonances and a sonic pileup, as the previously sung or played notes would overlap with the new ones. So, what evolved is what sounds best — it is modal in structure. This music often uses very long notes and slowly evolving melodies with no key changes whatsoever. It works beautifully in these spaces — in fact, the space even improves the music… it gives it an otherworldly ambience.

It’s often assumed that this music was harmonically “simple” (having few key changes) because these composers hadn’t “progressed” to complex harmonies yet. I’d argue that in this context there would be no need or desire to include complex harmonies, as it would have sounded horrible. Creatively they did exactly the right thing.

Here’s the church where Bach did a lot of his playing and writing in the early 1700s:

[Source]

As you can imagine, there was already an organ there and the sound would be less reverberant than in the Gothic cathedrals, but still echoey. The reverb was so much less that, famously, Bach and others could introduce key changes into their music.

Later on, young Mozart wrote for rooms like this in the late 1700s:

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And sometimes for rooms like this:

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They’re slightly smaller than Bach’s church, and when filled with royalty, patrons and furniture they allowed Mozart's music to be heard in all its frilly detail. People danced to it too. Imagine people dancing to classical music today!

My guess is that in order to be heard above a dancing mob who might also be gossiping, one might have had to increase the size of the orchestra, which is in fact what happened.

Meanwhile, some folks were going to hear operas. Here’s La Scala as it is now.

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Built in 1776, the original orchestra section at that time was more a series of booths or stalls rather than the rows of seats that are typical of opera houses now. People would eat, drink, socialize and holler out to one another during the performances. They’d holler to the stage too, for encores of the popular arias. The vibe was more like CBGB than the typical opera house today.

La Scala and other opera venues of the time were fairly compact — not much deeper than a small theater or large club — so the sound turns out to be pretty tight. I’ve performed in some of these old opera venues and if you don’t crank the volume too high, pop music survives surprisingly well.

Here’s Bayreuth, the opera house Wagner built for his own music in the 1880s.

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You can see it’s also not that huge. Not nearly as big as most opera halls today. What’s different about his hall isn’t the space itself, but the bandstand. The orchestra pit is larger and more accommodating of the more extensive orchestras that he required to conjure the requisite bombast. He had new and larger brass instruments created, and he also called for a larger bass section to create his big orchestral effects.

I believe that later, as symphonic music tended to be performed in larger and larger halls — the kind built in recent centuries — the music, originally conceived for rooms, palaces and modest-sized opera houses, was now being asked to accommodate ever larger and more reverberant spaces, which tended to be less musically dead.

Quiet please

Around 1900, according to Alex Ross in a New Yorker piece (“Why So Serious?”), another development occurred which would affect the music that composers wrote. Classical audiences were no longer allowed to shout, eat and chat during the performances. One was expected to sit frozen, immobile, and listen with rapt attention. Ross hints that this was a way of keeping the hoi polloi out of the new symphony halls and opera houses. Music that sometimes used to be for all was now for an elite — something to be enjoyed without showing it or shouting about it. Audiences were intended to be “respectful,” which meant hiding their emotions until the very, very end.

This policy obviously affected composition — it meant that since no one was talking, eating or dancing anymore the music could now have extreme dynamics, and very quiet passages, as the composers knew they’d be heard, and harmonically complex passages could be appreciated. Combined with the increased reverberation of the larger symphony halls, these factors transformed music. All 20th century classical music could only work in (and was written for) these socially and acoustically restrictive spaces.

Although the quietest details and complexities could be heard, these larger halls meant that rhythmically things got less distinct and fuzzier. Late 19th and 20th century composers like Mahler therefore wrote music that took those emerging qualities into account. They emphasized texture, and sometimes audio shock and awe, as the back row was further away — and if you wanted to reach them, you needed to adapt. And adapt they did.

Here’s one of those rooms — Carnegie Hall:

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Groove music — percussive music featuring drums, for example, like what I do — has a very hard time here. I’ve played Carnegie Hall a couple of times, and it can work, but it is far from ideal. I wouldn’t play that music there again.

Even the jazz now occasionally played in these rooms becomes a kind of chamber music. No one dances or drinks — at least not in the hall. (Although I’ve gotten audiences up and dancing in many of these places.) Jazz clubs followed suit — no one dances at the Blue Note or Village Vanguard. Great music resulted, but folks often forgot that jazz was once music for dancing — that spiritual uplift and dancing were never mutually exclusive.

Popular music

Looping back to the early part of the 20th century to pick up jazz, it was originally played in bars, riverboats, funerals and joints where lots of dancing and drinking were going on. There was little reverberation in those spaces so the groove could be strong, precise and clear.

It’s been pointed out — by Scott Joplin and others — that the origin of jazz solos and improvisations was a way of stretching out whatever section of the tune the dancers were getting into. During a performance the dancers might really be getting off on one part, and if the “written” melody of that section ran out, the musicians would be required to extend it. So, in order to keep the dancers going, the players would jam on those chord changes over the groove rather than simply playing the same melody over and over again. The improvisations evolved out of necessity, and a new kind of music was born.

If anyone’s been to a juke joint or seen the Rebirth or Dirty Dozen brass bands at a place like The Glass House in New Orleans, then you’ve seen lots of dancing to jazz. Its roots are as spiritual dance music.

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Not only the form but also the instrumentation of jazz was modified so that the music could be heard over the sound of the dancers and the bar. Banjos were louder than acoustic guitars, trumpets were louder than fiddles, and this tendency repeated until amplification and microphones came in (which I’ll get to later).

Like West African music this is texturally steady state music. The volume doesn’t vary much, for to do so would risk getting lost amongst dancing and jabbering.

Likewise, country music, blues, Latin music and rock and roll were all (originally) music to dance to, and they too had to both be loud enough to be heard above the chatter and also work for the dancers. They were all performed in similarly sized rooms as well — so rhythmically they were sustainable.

Recorded music

Around the first third of the 20th century a new music venue emerged. People were now listening to music on the radio or on home stereos through one of these things.

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People probably heard more music on them than they would ever hear face to face. This technology, this appliance, became the concert hall. In some ways music was now free of any live context — or more properly, the context became the living room and the jukebox, as well as the still ongoing ballrooms and concert halls.

The microphones that brought music to radios also changed the way we sang as well as how we played instruments.

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One no longer had to have great lungs to be a singer. Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby innovatively sang “to the microphone” — they adjusted their vocal dynamics in ways that would have been unheard of and unsuccessful earlier.

Others went even further. Chet Baker sang in a whisper, as did João Gilberto, and millions followed. These guys were whispering in your ear, getting right inside your head. Needless to say, without microphones, this intimacy wouldn’t have been heard at all. And mostly it wouldn’t have been heard that well either, except in the privacy of a living room.

[Source]

Recorded music emerged around this time too. Technology had turned the living room or any small bar with a jukebox into a concert hall. It seems to me that music composition and the whole situation for musicians had now come upon a forking path. The performing musician was now expected to write and create for two very different venues — for the live venue and for a recording — and the compositions were expected to be the same, as one medium was thought to promote the other. It seems unfair. The performing skills, not to mention the writing needs, the instrumentation, and the acoustic properties for each medium, are completely different.

Recorded music allowed music venues to now come into existence that didn’t even have performers. Bars with jukeboxes became venues without any live musicians at all.

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For example, music written for contemporary discos, in my opinion, usually ONLY works in those social and physical spaces. Not only that, it works perfectly on their incredible sound systems. It feels stupid to listen to club music at its intended volume at home — though people do it. And, once again, it’s for dancing, as was early hip hop, which emerged out of dance clubs in the same way that jazz did — by extending sections of the music so the dancers could show off and improvise.

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Live performance didn’t go away — the social attraction was too important. The most successful pop music acts ended up performing in the largest man-made indoor spaces available. Basketball arenas and hockey rinks have terrible acoustics — so only a narrow range of music really works at all. The music that arena rock groups composed was, like the sounds written for Bayreuth, Wagnerian… tending to medium tempos and fairly simple harmonic structures. Otherwise, despite advances in technology, it turns to mush.

[Source]

Here the masses gather in an architectural space that demands that the music not only sonically but socially perform a different function than what it does on record or in a club. Arena rock works pretty well in arenas, but if you’ve ever heard a band who’s spent decades playing in sports arenas do an “intimate” club date, you might hear that they’ve often evolved into an animal that doesn’t fit outside their contextual element. The outsized gestures and the music itself are a fish out of water.

Contemporary music venues

What’s new? One of the newer musical venue is the car. I’d argue that contemporary hip-hop is written, musically at least, to be heard in cars with systems like this one.

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Or maybe this one?

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I’d say the audio space in a car with these speakers forces a very different kind of composition. Full spectrum. Bass heavy. The vocal is often allocated a space where not much else lives. Although this music may have emerged from dance-oriented early hip hop, it’s morphed into something else entirely — music that sounds best in cars.

One other new music venue has arrived.

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Presumably this MP3 player plays mainly Christian music.

Beginning with the Walkman portable cassette player, private listening is musically and socially partly an extension of the “sitting very still in a concert hall” experience, combined with the pristine virtual space that studio recording allows. You can hear and appreciate extreme detail and subtlety when the earbuds are in your ears, which is similar to concerts that demand silence — but as opposed to most concert halls, the lack of reverb means that rhythmic material survives beautifully and completely intact.

That said, extreme dynamic changes can be painful on a personal music player. If there’s a quiet passage then we turn the thing up, only to have our ears assaulted when the loud bit comes along. I never listen to traditional classical music on one of these, for example. As with dance music 100 years ago, it’s better to write steady state music for these.

Interestingly, it seems we’ve come full circle in many ways. The musical techniques of the African Diaspora, the foundation of much of the world’s contemporary popular music, with its wealth of interlocking and layered beats, works acoustically incredibly well as both a private listening experience and as a framework for much contemporary recorded music.

[Source]

African music that might have been originally created based on being played in the open — steady state music loud enough to be heard outdoors above dancing and singing — turns out to also work well in the most intimate of spaces, our inner ears.

Yes, people do listen to Bach and Wagner on iPods, but not too many people are writing new music like that — except for film, where Wagnerian bombast works really well.

Birds do it

This adaptive tendency isn’t just limited to musicians and composers. It extends into the natural world as well. David Attenborough and others have claimed that bird calls have evolved to fit the environment. In dense jungle foliage, constant, repetitive and brief signals within a narrow frequency work best. The repetition is like an error-correcting device — if you didn’t hear the song/signal clearly the first time, here it is again.

Birds that live on the forest floor, however, have evolved lower-pitched calls — sounds that don’t bounce off or become distorted by the ground. Meanwhile, birds in the plains and grasslands have buzz-like calls that carry longer distances, like the Savannah sparrow:

[Source]

Water birds have calls that cut through the ambient sounds of water, and Eyal Shy of Wayne State University says that there are even variations within the same species. Scarlet tanagers vary the pitch of their songs in the east, where the woods are denser than in the west.

[Source]

There’s more: birds of the same species in the same place adjust their singing as their habitat changes. Birds in San Francisco were found to have raised the pitch of their songs over 40 years, in order to be better heard above the increased traffic.

So it’s not just composers who do this — who adapt to the context and to venues — it’s an interspecies phenomena.

Conclusion

Music composition being shaped by the venue in which it will be heard is an easy example for me to use. I also have a feeling that this somewhat reverse view of creation happens a lot, maybe in many very different areas of creativity.

What’s interesting to me is not that these practical adaptations happen — that seems predictable and even obvious — but what it means for our perception of the creative process.

It seems that creativity is adaptive, like anything else. When a space becomes available, work emerges to fill it. The genius, the emergence of a truly remarkable and memorable work, happens when the thing is perfectly suited to its context and is also surprising. And when something works, it strikes us as not just being clever — a good adaptation — but as strongly and emotionally resonant. When the right thing is in the right place we are moved.

What seems obvious by now is that emotion, passion and personal expression can be poured into whatever form or vessel becomes available. And that form and those structures are determined primarily by the available venues — be they a club or an arena in music, a blog entry, a forest, or a white gallery wall.

Sometimes if I say things like this I get accused of being cold and calculating — the implication being that by adapting, work is somehow spineless, without integrity, inauthentic. The old idea that true creativity explodes into existence out of the heart and soul, and somehow emerges and insists on the form it wants to take, still lingers.

This romantic attitude applies to politics too. Thomas Frank wrote on one possible reason why voters often vote against their own best interest:

“Authenticity has replaced economics as the driving force of modern politics. The authentic politicians are the ones who sound like they are speaking from the gut, not the cerebral cortex. Of course, they might be faking it, but it is no joke to say that in contemporary politics, if you can fake sincerity, you have got it made.” [Link]

That’s where the danger lies. We need to accept that our evolutionary connection to the birds is not just physical, as a member of a similar branch of the evolutionary tree, but our expressions are like birdsong as well. Whoever writes the songs for One Republic, it’s true we do “get things off our chests,” but the way we do that, the art of it, is to put them into proscribed forms. That’s part of the creative process, and we do it instinctively — we internalize the process, like the birds do — and it continues to be a joy to sing, like the birds do.

12.12.09: Art Funding or Arts Funding

The LA Opry production of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” is budgeted at $32 million. 32 million! Jeez, Broadway shows don’t cost that much; U2’s concert tour might, but then that’s a stadium show… and in those latter two instances the people who wrote them are still living! (And presumably get paid, which is part of the cost.) Wagner has been dead for a long time last I heard, so one assumes it’s not the composer or the librettist whose agent is charging the moon. Granted, it is a 4-part epic so that budget might be divided in 4. A recent article reported that they are worried about being able to cover $20 million right now. I shouldn’t wonder they’re worried, especially in LA, not known for its arts funding.

Here’s a production picture. Who knew that Wagner anticipated the light saber?

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Or that he was into profound silliness:

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A $14 million bailout for the opera is coming from the county, as the LA city government is called. The opry folks need that $20 million this week… so, reach into your pockets, opera fans. What makes this situation notable is not the amount of money — movies often cost a lot more than $32 million to produce — but the fact that the audience will be so small, and that the state is footing part of the bill.

Simultaneously, a number of museums around the world have scuttled their plans for new buildings or expansions, some of them designed by starchitects. Part of these austerity measures are of course due to the economic downturn, but my guess is that most of these projects were underway well before the crash, and were going to result in a mess anyway — as these insitutions simply thought that, like Bilbao, if they built a wildly impressive new museum in, for example, Milwaukee (Calatrava did the new entranceway and the car garage — the car garage!) or in Indianapolis, that folks from all over the world would come to visit. I was in Indianapolis recently, and would have gone to the art museum, but as we only had one afternoon, we went to the Indy 500 museum instead. Never was there ever any mention of what amazing and innovative shows would go into these future spaces, which were regularly featured in magazine articles with lovely renderings attached — that didn’t seem to be a priority.

Granted, Bilbao did work, in the sense that it gave tourists a reason to visit a place that many US citizens had never heard of before. It was truly amazing to behold how one building could change a whole town. The show that’s up there now is a Frank Lloyd Wright survey (previously exhibited in NY’s Guggenheim), and a permanent collection hodgepodge — not exactly reasons to make a special trip. One can imagine how tempting it must have been for city councils and museum board members to hope that the Bilbao Effect could be replicated in their own town. LA’s Disney Hall looks almost exactly like the Bilbao Guggenheim. Everybody wanted one.

However this mess ends up, my thoughts are that maybe it’s time to rethink all this museum, opera and symphony funding — and I refer mainly to state funding. A bunch of LA museums just got a bailout from LA real estate king Eli Broad, and that’s great, but I suspect there will be county money involved there somewhere too. I think maybe it’s time to stop, or more reasonably, curtail somewhat, state investment in the past — in a bunch of dead guys (and they are mostly guys, and mostly dead, when we look at opera halls) — and invest in our future. Take that money, that $14 million from the city, for example, let some of those palaces, ring cycles and temples close — forgo some of those $32M operas — and fund music and art in our schools. Support ongoing creativity in the arts, and not the ongoing glorification and rehashing of the work of those dead guys. Not that works of the past aren’t inspirational, important and relevant to future creativity — plenty of dead people’s work is endlessly inspiring — but funding for arts in schools has been cut to zero in many places. Maybe the balance and perspective has to be redressed and restored just a little. Plus, there are plenty of CDs and DVDs of the dead guys out there already, should one be curious.

Funding future creativity is a real investment — there’s a chance these kids will build, write, draw or play something that will fill theaters, clubs, stadiums, web pages, whatever. The dead guys won’t write more symphonies.

The problem of course, as far as private funding goes, is that what billionaire wants to fund school education? Where’s the glamour in that? You don’t get your name etched in marble on the outside of a hall for that, or get invited to amazing galas, so what’s the point? That’s why I’m focusing on public and state funding — let the private funders bankroll the opry halls, if that’s where they want to hang out.

I sense that in the long run there is a greater value for humanity in empowering folks to make and create than there is in teaching them the canon, the great works and the masterpieces. In my opinion, it’s more important that someone learn to make music, to draw, photograph, write or create in any form than it is for them to understand and appreciate Picasso, Warhol or Bill Shakespeare — to say nothing of opry. In the long term it doesn’t matter if students become writers, artists or musicians — though a few might. It's more important that they are able to understand the process of creation, experimentation and discovery — which can then be applied to anything they do, as those processes, deep down, are all similar. It’s an investment in fluorescence.

So how did things end up like this?

Well, there is the aforementioned glory of getting your name on a museum or symphony hall rather than on an elementary school — David Geffen got his start managing popular folk rockers, and now his name is on art museums (and AIDS charities). But I think there are other factors.

Thomas Hoving, the former king of the Met Museum in NYC during the ’60s and ’70s, just passed away. He and his rival, J. Carter Brown, king of the National Gallery in DC, both felt that democratizing art meant getting everyone to like the stuff that they liked. It meant letting everyone know and feel that HERE, in the museum, was the good stuff, the important stuff, the stuff with aura and depth. Here is a promotion the Met did in the ’60s in LIFE magazine:

[Source]

The idea was that even reduced to postcard size, reproductions of verified masterpieces still had enough power to enlighten the American heathen. It seems almost humorous — as if postcards of certified works of art had some mystical power to educate — or, more accurately, to indoctrinate.

Music is the same. Here’s an ad in today’s NY Times book review section:

This isn’t about learning to play for enjoyment, creation, expression or fun — it’s purely about valuing the classics more than anything you and your pathetic friends can make. It’s a little more expensive than the $1.25 the Met was asking back in the day, but then, times have changed.

Hoving and a couple of others, following this line of thinking, created the blockbuster museum show — which famously brought Tut to the masses, and made the Met and other like-minded museums into temples for all, instead of the dusty halls for academics they had become. Hard to remember, but the Met was once a fussy old place, and now it’s super popular — which is not in itself a bad thing. Although the idea was loudly espoused that art was for all, and all could benefit from exposure to it (something like a flu shot), this idea was not exactly democratic, not as I would define it — though it was certainly portrayed as democratizing art and culture. What the movement was actually doing was letting more people know that culture was, and is, HERE, and you slobs, you hoi polloi, are over HERE. We want you all to look at it, and listen to it, but don’t even think you could ever make it, or that your feeble efforts are anywhere close to these Himalayan peaks we have on display.

I know it’s not exactly the same, but I would say: show someone three chords on the guitar, show them how to program or play beats, or play a keyboard (something I can’t really do), but don’t expect virtuosity right away. Everyone knows you can make a song with almost nothing, with really limited skills, so be satisfied and enjoy that, and don’t feel inadequate because you’re not Mozart. I myself wish I’d learned keyboard, but I did find that on guitar, I gravitated to where my interests (and abilities) took me. Over time I learned a lot more chords, began to be able to “hear” harmonies and tonal relationships, and, of course, I learned a lot more grooves over the years — how to feel and enjoy them. But at first I found I could express something, or at least have fun, with my really limited means. When I made something, even something crude, I could momentarily discredit the feeling that if I couldn’t match the classical model, then I was less of a musician.

There are some classical musical works that I can groove with — but, for example, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven I never could get, and I don’t feel any the worse for it. There’s plenty left to love and enjoy. This whole rant, I guess, derives a little from the fact that I resent the implication, and sometime-feeling, that I’m less of a musician and even a person for not appreciating those works. It’s not true!

Ditto with visual art and literature — some of the classics I love deeply, but like many people, there are many Great Works of Literature that lie unfinished on my shelves, and thank God for that, as I was probably doing something more interesting instead… maybe reading something more inspiring, or even trying to write something myself.

It’s true that sometimes the newest thing on the block is 500 years old — and sometimes the way forward is through the past — but not exclusively! And we don’t have to stay there. It’s more important to encourage creativity than to imply that good work can only be made by professionals — your betters.

Hoving, however, did ride a bike, so he can’t be all bad. In fact, his stint as Parks Commissioner before his Met years was incredibly fruitful — and he was offered the job with no prior experience (so much for letting experts tell us what to do!). He closed Central Park to cars on weekends and established over 100 pocket parks around the city, using vacant lots and weird, unused parcels of real estate.

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11.09.09: Estoril, Portugal — The Future, the Past, the Present and…

C & I accepted the offer to be jurors along with a couple of others at a modest film festival in an off-season, seaside town 25 minutes outside of Lisbon. For me it’s a way of taking a forced vacation, as I dove right back into various kinds of work and projects as soon as my year-long tour ended.

We had dinner with some of the other festivalgoers, along with a classical pianist who was visiting. Some wondered what was to become of music as filesharing and illegal downloading becomes more prevalent. I offered that yes, it is a huge problem for record companies and for some types of musicians — but it seems that not coincidentally, the illegal downloaders are the same people who spend the most money on music and music-related “products” (concerts, etc.). More than anyone else, these “offenders” are passionate music fans and consumers. I suggested that maybe if buying music online had been encouraged sooner, and if the process didn’t have so many catches (like DRM-hampered files), things might not have gone badly so quickly for the record companies.

I mentioned that this digital technology gives many types of artists more power over the means of production, and even distribution — which might not be such a bad thing. I then began to speculate about other media beyond music that are going digital — films, books, television — and that the “view on demand” technology that Netflix uses, or something similar to it, might allow indie filmmakers to take charge of their own distribution (not via Netflix, but through their own sites, giving them a larger income percentage). The communal theatrical film experience might be lost, but that seems to be the case for those small films anyway — so there isn’t much of a trade-off. There’s little downside in trying out a non-theatrical kind of distribution.

I could sense the eyes glazing over as I talked excitedly about various possibilities and somewhat optimistic scenarios for the near future. The conversation then turned to European cultural history, and the patronage that supported Mozart and Bach. Our fellow juror, choreographer Rui Horta, mentioned that André Malraux had been innovative and influential in this regard in the last century. Malraux was, from 1959 to 1969, the Minister of Cultural Affairs in France under De Gaulle, during which time he developed maisons de la culture in several small French towns. These were the first state-supported culture centers in France — basically performing arts centers with rehearsal rooms attached; the latter implying that new works would be created on-site. This aspect was the innovative and radical part, as it meant that creation would be decentralized — that more than a few officially sanctioned organizations and artists would be allowed, theoretically, into the fold of cultural production. Rui had been artist in residence at one of these centers in France, and had more recently initiated a similar center in the Portuguese countryside.

Malraux was also a novelist and anti-colonialist activist in Indochina and elsewhere. I’ve read his book The Voices of Silence — an amazing art history book in which he proposes that art has replaced religion in the West. Here he is editing Museum without Walls, in which he argued that art books are portable museums — again a move towards decentralization, putting creation in the hands of folks all over the country.

[Source]

Days later, during a magazine interview with Inês de Medeiros, the senator for culture in Portugal, I put my foot in it. I suggested that it was more important that children, and everyone really, be imbued with a sense that they themselves might make things — that the things they might make have value — as opposed to learning mainly to appreciate the great masters, whether they be Bach, Picasso or the literary canon. I proposed that the value of art might be of more use to society in that regard, rather than focusing on supporting, well, museums and symphony halls. Naturally, to a senator who has made it her noble mission to argue for more support for the arts, this is slightly heretical and, as she said, “very American.” America’s lack of state support for the arts and skepticism of the value of fine art is legendary.

I qualified my opinion by saying that I myself love a lot of “refined” contemporary art, and some highbrow or academic music as well — but I don’t assume that everyone should. Those who enjoy that stuff are not all wealthy, but they do constitute an elite, rarified world. By this definition, comic book fans and heavy metal fans are elite bunches as well. Every subculture is, in a way. I don’t presume that my tastes or those of my friends require lots of state support — although a little more in the US would be nice — and I would argue that supporting the arts and culture in schools at all levels is worth a lot more to our future quality of life. Encouraging students to write, to make stuff, to cook, design, to draw, play an instrument, record music, sing, edit films, etc. — all of that creates a sense of self-worth, curiosity and experimentation that has applications way beyond each of those disciplines. I would argue that this is where the greater percentage of state funding should go. Of course in the US, it’s the part that has been eliminated almost completely.

A couple of days later at the hotel breakfast table, I overheard FF Coppola at the next table espousing the merging of live performance and film as where the future of film might lie. C and I thought that he must not be aware of many of the performance groups we know who already do this — the Wooster Group has been doing it for years, and Big Dance Theater just did a short run at The Kitchen in NY that was a seamless blend of live projected video and live performance. But yes, other than in isolated scenes it hasn’t caught fire in a big commercial way just yet, although arena rock concerts do it all the time.

I noted to myself that we North Americans (and I’m not even native born) tend to get excited (with reservations) about future possibilities. We are curious about what is to come, good or bad, and how we might be part of it, and possibly find our niche or avoid the worst. Here in Europe, where admittedly things are often more “civilized,” the weight of the past consumes people’s thoughts. While a European sees oneself as part of a continuum — a long line of culture receding into the dim and distant past — North Americans can only feel in their guts that they are standing upon a thin veneer of history. They are both excited and stimulated by the idea of what can be imagined, what might come into existence that never existed previously — sometimes stimulated to the point of dangerous insanity. This is, I guess, a bit of a cliché, but here I was having examples thrown in my face. There might be a grain of truth to it at least.

In a recent New Yorker article on murder, German sociologist Norbert Elias is mentioned as promoting the concept of the idea of a “civilizing process” that encompasses many of our behaviors…a process that requires increased self-control and restraint. The growing dominance of the state, especially in Western Europe, is seen in this view as part of this process, whereby the application of justice is entrusted by the people to the state. It involves the “replacement of a culture of honor [and honor killings] with a culture of dignity… Duels replaced feuds,” resulting in fewer casualties.

In much of the US, it might be argued, this process has a ways to go, as many North Americans are loathe to give power to the state, and prefer to exact revenge and justice on their own (and to take responsibility for their own medical costs and health — or lack of it). This is one possible explanation as to why the US has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy — we are the least “civilized.” Our wildness is often a well of creativity and gumption; it’s a font of opportunity and hope, a draw and seduction for immigrants, and maybe equally an explanation for the extremes and prevalence of stupidity that exist in the US as well.

In the end, I wondered to myself, if we assume, cliché though it might be, that Europe focuses on the past, and North America on the future, then does it follow that there is another continent that is more oriented to the present? Africa? The line of reasoning is ridiculous, but I’m curious where it leads. I wonder if each continent might have a temporal focus. And if so, does this mean that there are more kinds of time than past, present and future?

10.24.09: Internet Antichrist

I started thinking a few days ago about how the digitization and networking of so much of what we hold dear has changed things. I see that in my lifetime I will witness the end of books, or most of them, physical copies of recorded music and probably physical newspapers too. Stuff that’s been around for a thousand years will be gone in my lifetime! Film based photography is pretty much a remnant, an art form, an artisanal craft used by fine artists and high-end fashion photographers. And writing letters to one another? On paper? And dropping them in the mailbox? When was the last time I wrote and mailed a physical letter? All those academic books filled with Auden’s or Jane Austen’s letters — it’s hard to imagine a collection of someone’s text messages, tweets and e-mails. I suspect that television as we know it will be gone soon as well. All right, film and recorded music have only been around a hundred or so years, but books! All of which led me back to wondering — how did this get started?

The Internet, the World Wide Web, as much of a boon as it has been, has left an awful lot of wreckage in its wake, beyond just the elimination of those formats we thought of as eternal and the industries that produced and delivered them. Interconnectivity has facilitated the loss of privacy of many of the world’s citizens. We’ve been liberated and captured at the same time. I sense that the loss of privacy — which to me seems inevitable — is part and parcel of the whole project. You can’t have efficient search algorithms, cloud computing and digitized everything and anything and expect to retain the anonymity of the past.

Security races to keep up, but I wonder if the dream of unlimited access and personal and corporate data security aren’t simply incompatible. Maybe we just can’t have them both. Maybe we need to throw up our hands and give in. Stop resisting and surrender. Live totally and completely in public. The world would truly be the village that McLuhan predicted — a small town where everyone does know your business. Maybe that would keep us honest, and push the realization that as custodians of the planet we really are all in this together.

This “creative destruction” began in the ’60s, as did many things that we now both love and regret, and it was initially a spinoff of a project funded by US military agencies. The military (along with the space agency) gave us Velcro and (I believe) cheap integrated circuits (i.e. gizmolandia), as well as the blowback that helped nurture the current mess in the Middle East, South America and Afghanistan. The Internet’s connection to the military, as much as I would love it to be a big secret conspiracy, seems a lot more benign than that. Mephistopheles came to Faust in the form of a poodle. After all…in some versions of the story, he cannot enter your house unbidden — you have to invite him in, like a vampire.

One man foresaw a global network before any such thing was close to being possible. J. C. R. Licklider (sounds like a character in a Coen bros movie!) envisioned, in a 1960 paper called Man-Computer Symbiosis, "A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines…[which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." [Source]

In other words, he saw it all coming.

[Source]

Is this man the antichrist? Or merely a prophet?

In a weird coincidence, Licklider began his career studying psychoacoustics (more on that later), and wrote a paper called “Duplex Theory of Pitch Perception” in 1951 that forms the basis of contemporary concepts of how we perceive pitch, even though it sounds like it might be about two-story apartments with uneven floors. That the man who predicted a worldwide information exchange network was initially interested in how we perceive music is slightly uncanny.

More about Licklider from Wikipedia:

“His ideas foretold of graphical computing, point-and-click interfaces, digital libraries, e-commerce, online banking, and software that would exist on a network and migrate wherever it was needed. He has been called ‘computing's Johnny Appleseed’ for having planted the seeds of computing in the digital age.”

Now, it’s been pointed out that he didn’t actually invent any of this stuff — he merely “planted the seed.” But often it seems that putting out the idea that something might be possible encourages others to actually make it possible. In a way, to imagine is to create.

In the ’50s, Licklider “worked on a Cold War project known as Semi Automatic Ground Environment (better known by its [weirdly appropriate] acronym ‘SAGE’) which was designed to create a computer-aided air defense system. The SAGE system included computers that collected and presented data to a human operator, who then chose the appropriate response. In 1957 he…conducted the first public demonstration of time-sharing,” [Source] which is when multiple parties can share the use of a single large computer. And in 1958, he became president of the Acoustical Society of America.

“He played a similar role in conceiving of and funding early networking research, most notably the ARPANET [acknowledged to be the predecessor to the Internet]. His 1968 paper on The Computer as a Communication Device predicts the use of computer networks to support communities of common interest and collaboration without regard to location.” [Source]

“Without regard to location”— the phrase resonates for me. It implies disincorporation — an out-of-body experience. In this case, it’s data that has no fixed place, no physical manifestation. But I sense it’s happening to us, too.

I had thought that the Internet began with the linking of some military computers in the Pentagon (ARPANET) in 1969, and that this network was an experimental project to create a system which was specifically designed so that its data could survive a nuclear attack. It turns out my hunch was wrong, although the military were indeed involved in funding the research. ARPANET (which Licklider was involved with) did give birth to internet protocols — how computers “talk” to one another — sometime later in the 1970s, but it was not, it seems, all about securing secret data from the electromagnetic pulses associated with nuclear weapons.

Bob Taylor, the Pentagon official who was in charge of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (or ARPANET) program, insists that its purpose was not military, but scientific. Though we might take whatever the Pentagon says with a big grain of salt, he could be telling the truth. Larry Roberts, who was employed by Taylor to build the Network, states that ARPANET was never intended to link people or act as a communications and information facility. So, the evolution into the Internet was completely unintentional, though Licklider foresaw it. ARPANET was primarily about finding a more efficient way of time-sharing.

Those were the days when computers looked like this:

They were extremely expensive, and there weren’t a lot of them, so many people, like my friend C’s brother, made a good living managing access to them. Time-sharing was a big issue. If however, access could be accomplished remotely, through a network, then the efficiency of the time-sharing would be increased. Time-sharing via these networks was focused on making it possible for research organizations (and the military) to use the processing power of other institutions’ computers when they had laborious calculations to do, or when someone else's facility might do the job better.

Because this research (used to develop ARPANET) was government-funded, its use was restricted to the military and university research facilities — C’s brother couldn’t use it to create or enhance the commercial enterprise he had established to manage computer access, for example.

“During the 1980s, the connections expanded to more educational institutions, and even to a growing number of companies such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Hewlett-Packard, which were participating in research projects or providing services to those who were.” [Source]

We can see by the involvement of these companies that the line between non-commercial use and commercial and public access was already getting fuzzy.

“Several other branches of the U.S. government, the National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the Department of Energy (DOE) became heavily involved in Internet research and started development of a successor to ARPANET. In the mid 1980s, all three of these branches developed the first Wide Area Networks based on TCP/IP.

“In 1984 the NSF…supported departments without such sophisticated network connections, using automated dial-up mail exchange. [For those who don’t remember or are too young, one used to access the Internet and send e-mail by modems that would “dial-up” using regular phone lines…a web page in this era would take many minutes to load; these were NOT the good old days in that sense.] This grew into the NSFNet backbone, established in 1986, and was intended to connect and provide access to a number of supercomputing centers established by the NSF.

“In 1992, Congress allowed commercial activity on NSFNet with the Scientific and Advanced-Technology Act, permitting NSFNet to interconnect with commercial networks. University users were outraged at the idea of noneducational use of their networks. Eventually, it was the commercial Internet service providers who brought prices low enough that junior colleges and other schools could afford to participate in the new arenas of education and research […and soon the rest of us].

“By 1990, ARPANET had been overtaken and replaced by newer networking technologies and the project came to a close.” [Source]

The mother, seed or egg that gave birth to the Internet was gone, and the floodgates had opened.

By the mid-’90s, access became easy enough that the commercialization of the Internet proceeded rapidly. I wondered to myself if the military kept a parallel World Wide Web, inaccessible to civilians, since they were so involved in the early stages of its development. They do, or did — it was called MILNET.

[Source]

A quarter of the earth’s people now use the Internet and the World Wide Web. We don’t know how many use MILNET. Finland and France are about to make Internet access a right, like a legal right to a trial, free speech or health services (well, these rights exist in some countries). The Finns want everyone in their entire country to have broadband (5mb) in a few years. (FYI, 5mb allows streaming video like most of us can see now, 10mb would allow HD streaming video and 100mb, which the Finnish government proposes offering by 2015, would, well, increase not only ease of access to information, but interactivity on a level and with repercussions we can hardly imagine.)

In the Meantime

While these networks were evolving, there were simultaneously a number of innovations and technological breakthroughs that allowed for the digitization of all sorts of media — the stuff that would soon be flying around those same networks.

The technology that allowed sound information (and soon all other information) to be digitized was largely developed by the phone companies. Bell Labs, a research division of AT&T, wanted to find more efficient and reliable ways of transmitting phone conversations. Phone lines up until that time were all analog, and with that technology the only way to squeeze more calls through a line was by rolling off the high and low frequencies, and turning the resulting lo-fi sound into waves that could run in parallel without interfering with one another — like terrestrial radio transmissions. TV and radio communications had the same problems.

Bell Labs was huge, and they had branches in many states, most of which are closed now. They invented the transistor and the semiconductors that made the integrated circuits in our tiny devices possible, they developed the laser — the list goes on and on. Their scientists won a lot of Nobel prizes.

When Bell Labs figured out how to digitize sound — to, in effect, sample a sound wave and slice it into tiny bits in a way that was not prohibitively expensive and that still left the human voice recognizable — they applied it to long distance calls, switchers and all manner of phone technology, allowing more calls to be made simultaneously, especially considering the limitations imposed by underwater cables. Much of the research regarding what makes a sound understandable (like a voice, in AT&T’s case) involves applying lessons from the science of psychoacoustics — how the brain perceives sound in all its aspects. We’re back to Licklider!

Out of this combination of psychoacoustic and technical research emerged digital equipment that was used in, among other places, recording studios — where I saw this technology. In the ’70s, the Harmonizers and digital delays that appeared little by little were in effect primitive samplers — the samples were usually less than a second long. These were quickly followed by machines that could hold longer samples of greater resolution, and manipulate those “sounds” more freely (clumps of data more than sounds, technically). All sorts of weirdness resulted. Bell Labs was involved in manufacturing a sound processor called a vocoder that would preserve certain aspects of talking (or singing), like speech formants — the shape of the sound apart from its pitch. Using this machine one could transmit these aspects of the voice separate from the rest of the vocalization in ways that rendered them unintelligible. One use for this was a sort of cryptology for the voice — a garbling that could be “decoded” at the other end. These machines were also adapted for music production. Here is Kraftwerk’s vocoder, made especially for them:

[Source]

I once used a vocoder borrowed from Bernie Krause when Eno and I did the Bush of Ghosts record. It was beautifully made, but rather complicated and very expensive.

A Harmonizer cost thousands of dollars, a digital reverb set a studio back maybe 10K, and a full-fledged sampling device like a Fairlight or later the Synclavier cost much, much more. But soon the price of memory and processing dropped, and the technology became more affordable. Inexpensive Akai samplers became the backbone of music like hip hop and DJ mixes, and sampled or digitally derived drum sounds took the place of live drummers in many recordings. And we were off to the races, for better or worse. With the digitization of sound, digital recording and eventually the CD became possible — and not too long after that, the capacity and speed of home computers was sufficient to record, archive, and process music.

Some years ago I visited Bell Labs and was shown the famous anechoic (perfect, sound absorbent) chamber. This was where John Cage claimed that he could hear both his heart pounding and the high-pitched whine of his nervous system. His insight was that true silence doesn’t exist — even if we can block out everything else, we can’t stop hearing ourselves.

Here is one such chamber:

[Source]

They also showed me a processor that could squeeze what seemed to the ear to be CD-quality sound into a miniscule bandwidth. I’m not sure, but I believe encoding music as MP3s had at that date already been invented in Germany, so this compressing/encoding was not a big surprise — but like most people, I worried that something in the quality of the music might have been sacrificed in this rezzing down process. I was right, but MP3s have improved quite a bit since then, and now I listen to most of the music I own in that format. I believe what Bell Labs was working on is used for satellite radio — getting more hi-fi sound into smaller transmissions.

In 1988 I went with designer Tibor Kalman to visit a printing studio on Long Island. It had a machine that could digitize and then subtly manipulate images (we wanted to “improve” the image on a Talking Heads record cover). This machine was, like those early computers, incredibly expensive and rare — we had to go to it (it couldn’t be brought to the design studio), and we had to book time in advance. Sytex I think it was called. This was exciting, but its cost and rarity meant we didn’t think much about incorporating its talents into more projects at that time.

After a while, though, the price of scanning dropped, and manipulating scanned images using something called Photoshop became common. Who would buy a film camera these days? Who buys film for their old camera? There are some holdouts, and I have no doubt that there is a richness or at least some special qualities that have been lost, but, well, for most of us, the trade-off seems fair — and inevitable. Needless to say, as these images became digitized they could enter the river of networked data.

Photojournalism went digital a number of years ago. In the beginning, the photographers, realizing that their images would be reproduced in newspapers no larger than 8x10 (if that), didn’t need to shoot at the highest available resolution on their new digital cameras, allowing them to squeeze more images onto their data chips — and giving them fewer problems with storage and developing in the field. To compare these low-res images to video, it’d be like if movies past a certain date were all captured at the quality of YouTube files. While researching archival news footage at some point, I discovered that when it migrated to videotape from 16mm film, the quality went way down.

The confluence of digitized media and the capability of digital information to be shared, transmitted and stored anywhere in the world — this volatile, disembodied mixture that Licklider predicted and whose seed he planted — has, duh, had a huge effect on countless institutions. Many that deal with physical objects — newsstands, record stores, bookstores — will all go away, along with their support structures: trucks, warehouses and all the people that worked in those places. For many of us this is not all bad. The record stores like Sam Goody or Coconuts were never great experiences.

Maybe the first institution to disappear almost completely as a result of this process was the letter. Conventional mail still exists — I get bills, junk mail and announcements — but communication related to my work and between my friends and me is almost all by e-mail or text, as has been for a while.

Television, not a big part of my life for quite a number of years anyway, is bound to migrate online and become something very different.

It’s not so surprising to witness the end of many of the delivery systems for recorded music — vinyl, cassettes and CDs. Somehow those changed from one form to another so rapidly over the decades that to see them all go away isn’t that much of a shock. I don’t really miss them all that much, to be honest. But to imagine that I might live to see the end of print — books, newspapers and many magazines — is mind-boggling. Publishers and news organizations might argue that they are not like the music business, but the patterns are too similar to ignore, except by those who don’t want to see them. Print and books have remained more or less unchanged since Gutenberg, but all that seems about to become history.

I’m not advocating trying to stop this — it all seems inevitable, and the access to information and convenience will be unprecedented — although without newspapers as a Fourth Estate, a check and balance, democracy as we were taught it, will not be, um, the same. We can’t rely on bloggers to police the entire government. Danielle comments, however, that the death of physical newspapers isn’t the same as the death of journalism — if the NY Times can find a way to make money as with digital distribution, it will continue to provide a similar function in society. Whether that will be possible is still an open question — but digitization doesn’t necessarily equal death, at least not yet.

The End of Privacy

Now that the Internet and the World Wide Web have enabled data, content and information to be shuttled anywhere in the world — even around China, sometimes — it seems inevitable that the flow goes both ways, or actually in many ways. The ability to access the Internet is incredibly useful to us and we can’t imagine life without it, so we don’t seem too bothered that as a result of this interconnectedness, the National Security Administration, for one, has access to our web lives and loves — and we don’t seem all that nervous that cloud computing will eliminate any real sense of privacy (despite assurances), or about the massive amounts of information Google and other commercial enterprises have about us.

Danielle points out that many people are in fact very nervous about this — that privacy & the Internet is a huge topic of concern. Google data mining, the ownership and confidentiality of social networking data, security of financial data, etc. — these are all topics that are regularly reported on in the press and about which people have very strong feelings. However, the sense I get on the street is that most ordinary folks are happy (so far) to give up some personal security for all the convenience they’re getting.

Google’s batteries of server farms allow us to search, so, naturally the NSA can also search, dredge and process. I typed in someone’s name yesterday and found that for a small fee, I could see how much they paid for their house, who their neighbors are and what their credit rating is! I was flabbergasted. That’s me, a private citizen, who can know stuff I’d sort of rather not know, not some corporation or governmental agency.

Here’s an NSA data mining facility in Yakima, Washington. (A massive one is being built in Utah.)

[Source]

So far I’m not aware of malicious use of all that information, not on a large scale anyway — though identity thieves and guys sucking up US credit card numbers by the truckload in Ukraine are a start.

I recently read an article regarding the security of so-called “scrubbed” data. Netflix or some other company wanted to employ a third party to analyze some of their customers’ patterns of purchase — but as a precaution they removed (scrubbed) the customers’ names off the data. So theoretically, the people being analyzed were now abstract entities. However, out of curiosity they hired another company, to see if any of those unidentified customers could possibly be re-identified. It turned out they could. Not due to a fault of the scrubbing, or some security or software malfunction, but because other data and patterns of customer and citizen behavior were available online, and correlating these with the patterns of the anonymous customers led to conclude, beyond a reasonable doubt, the re-identification of many.

To me this means that, yes, information already flows both, or rather all, ways. Privacy and security, as much as we might strive for them, are phantoms that we chase but can never truly catch. As much as we love getting information, data, media and connections, so we ourselves become available as data. Social websites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter seem to use these conflicting urges — the urge to reveal oneself to the world, in all one’s intimate details, and yet simultaneously maintain some kind of privacy. Good luck with that.

The end of privacy in parts of the world is near. It will be traumatic for some, and a comfort for others — for to relinquish one’s privacy is to become a part of the hive and the herd, and there is a certain reassurance there. How our corporate culture and its twin, the government, make use of this process and this massive change in society leads one to imagine something closer to a paranoid Phillip K. Dick scenario than a return to the nurturing tribe (or the Global Village) that it will be for some. I suspect it will be both — liberating and restrictive. Conflicting and opposite tendencies, operating simultaneously.

So, there it is. The free flow of information, and the ability to digitize all media as it enters the river, has a lot more repercussions than the end of books, newspapers and CDs — it portends a massive social and political shift. Licklider may have seen this coming as well, but he didn’t let on about it.

10.13.09: Space Is Deep!

I had a dream in which I was on a tractor, lurching along, pulling a wagon that was piled with large backpacks. Along for the ride were some rather well-known German DJs, one of whom was named Luke Vibert. (Luke is a real guy, and is not German — I had been listening to a Warp Records compilation earlier in the day, so maybe that’s how he got into my dream…)

[Source]

Then there was a kind of intercut scene, away from the slow tractor travel, of these DJs in a club, behind their decks and laptops on the DJ platform. Some had guitars slung around their necks (but were not playing them), shouting into a special DJ mike with their German accents, “Ve are African men!, Ve are African men!” The crowd was dancing wildly.

Cut back to the tractor, still lurching along, and the DJs begin some other shout outs — “Space Is Da Place!”...”Space is All That!”...and...”Space is Deep!”

At the time (in my semi-sleep state), I thought these phrases were wildly inventive.

09.07.09: The Invisible Manifesto — Battles @ Terminal 5

Biked up the west side to Terminal 5, a venue that has put on a lot of shows recently, but that I hadn’t been to since its days as a kind of sleazy disco, when I saw Fischerspooner some years ago. The physical aspect of the place hasn’t changed much — it still feels like a massive, cold, corporate club — but tonight’s show was a parcel of acts on the innovative Warp label, with Battles headlining, so it promised something new.

[Photo: Global Graphica]

I liked much of their first record, and the video of the band playing in a mirrored room is incredible, so I was curious. I heard they’d be playing new stuff, so I wondered where they would take whatever it is that they do.

It was pretty amazing — fairly constant driving beats over which guitars, keyboards and loops, fed through all kinds of effects, were layered. The vocals, if you can call them that, were also looped and treated so that they emerged as incomprehensible textures, articulating vaguely melodic riffs. All this leapt from one section to another in ways that made it hard to discern the underlying form or structure of each piece — though the sounds were generally and consistently engaging and involving. They could have been making it all up on the go, but I sensed there was a lot — a LOT — of pre-planning that went into the set. (This was confirmed by some friends who know them and said, yeah, they practice all the time and it’s all very worked out.)

[Photo: Music Slut]

Their poor drummer sometimes looked shagged out, his shirt soaked as he slumped over his kit catching his breath during the few moments when he wasn’t playing — though he never tired or flagged. When the time came he started up again, like a machine recharged. Some of the loops and abrupt changes were hilarious — I laughed out loud — as they sounded like they wouldn’t work, like they were all wrong, but then somehow the insane part would find a context and surprisingly plop into place and it all seemed right. There were pedals all over the stage; even the drumming was going through pedals and loops. The guitarists had their instruments slung way up high, and I realized that was because they were constantly leaning over to hit pedals on a table or tweak the software on their laptops, and if the guitars had longer straps they would have been swinging around smashing all the gear to pieces. It made for a semi-geeky look, but they’re obviously geeks with a mission and purpose, no nonsense.

The “songs” had plenty of dynamic structure within them — ups and downs, and quiet bits and explosive bits — but there were no crescendos and the set as a whole had no typical dynamic build, unless we were all supposed to recognize the last two songs, which from an audience point of view would have signaled “here’s the single.” The dynamics within each “song” were also fairly abrupt — the changes from one section to the next were sudden, like edits. The band is often grouped under the “math rock” genre — which I guess refers to the “cold,” abrupt lack of transitions and inscrutable structure. Parts started, went on for bit, and then ended, just as suddenly as they had begun. No easing into sections, no chorus and verse, no emotional builds and transitions — those seemed to be verboten. There’s a dogma at work here — rules that guide, restrict and limit the music — but I’m only guessing regarding some of the clauses in this invisible manifesto. It was pretty amazing, but not for everyone.

08.07.09: London — Playing the Building at the Roundhouse

Here is a tube station poster for this installation:

I spent the day talking to the British press and demonstrating the workings of the Playing the Building installation, which opened here tonight in a building called the Roundhouse, a former Victorian industrial train repair facility in north London (near Camden Town, and sort of near Kings Cross station). Because the building is round, steam engines could be rotated over troughs radiating from the centre, positioning them in the proper direction for repair.

In the ’60s it was the site of (UFO) psychedelic rock shows, some promoted by my friend Joe Boyd — Ten Years After, Pink Floyd, etc. It also hosted The Living Theatre and other scandalous naked performers. I played my first UK gig here — Talking Heads opened for the Ramones and the Stranglers in ’76. We had a single out at the time, no album yet. The place was pretty grotty, and here we had our first experience of gobbing — the quaint UK custom of audiences spitting on bands as a sign of appreciation. Yes, it’s for real, and it was disgusting. One could see, like little shooting stars in the stage lights, the white gobs of phlegm flying your way. I didn’t get hit that much, but the Ramones really got pelted. They REALLY didn’t like it. Luckily their leather jackets served to protect them and, in this case, went beyond just presenting a unified look. Beers in plastic cups were also thrown — one landed right on my hairline and tipped its half-consumed contents over my head. Funny how England, the country fairly well known in centuries past for fulfilling its self-proclaimed duty to export “civilization” to the unwashed and the heathen of the world, has a flip side on a par with any unsavory sport or bizarre cultural practice anywhere else. Well, we all do I suppose, but gobbing is a pretty weird way to show your love by any measure.

The venue fell into further disrepair, though being an industrial landmark it was never torn down, and its unique shape made it recognizable. Occasionally it was used for performances that took advantage of its funky rawness, but that also limited its use. A few years ago it went under extensive renovations, and a new structural shell was built that, miraculously, is almost invisible — the Victorian era scrollwork, and cast iron pillars and girders still appear to hold the building up, and are what my installation “plays” — and the new supporting structure is now largely hidden from view, sandwiched between the exterior roof and the massive, original wood beams of the inner roof.

Here is a view showing where new and old interact:

The new roof can support 20 tonnes of weight if needed, more than ample for flying PA systems, lights, stage gear and sets. None of that was possible before, so now this is poised to become a much more viable and active venue in town — though the round shape still makes it unique, and inappropriate for shows requiring a conventional proscenium.

Photo: Matthew Rankin

07.26.09: Cagliari — A Dream

I am in an African village, staying with a local family. It is a Sunday (or similar day off) and family, relatives and friends have all assembled for a backyard get together. There is a large table with food, and people are in attractive local dress (instead of the Western stuff worn during the regular week).

After some festivities, I notice a high, mournful voice singing – not too far away. I follow the source of the singing, and just beyond the gathering I come upon a young African man, maybe 20 years old, at a keyboard singing Neil Young songs. He’s got the high, whiney voice down perfectly, and for a moment I am simply stunned. He sings one song, then goes on to the next one in the Neil Young songbook. I think to myself, “Some Peace Corps person must have left a Neil Young cassette behind, and this kid has taken it upon himself to learn all the songs.”

My hosts and some others appear and ask me if I am impressed with the young man’s talent. “Is he not great?” I tell them yes, I am impressed, he’s amazing, but I politely omit the fact that his talent is, to me, completely useless. My hosts press on, “Since you recognize this man’s talent and skills, don’t you think he could surely be a success in your country?” I am flummoxed, and try to explain nicely that his talent is astounding and surprising — if you close your eyes it really could be Neil Young — but to me, it is of no interest past the moment of initial shock. My hosts aren’t having it. They KNOW this man is talented — and they’re right — and are therefore absolutely certain that he could be huge outside of their village and surrounds. I again try to explain that in my country, a Neil Young already exists, and an African copy, however faithful, is simply unnecessary.

The discussion peters out in mutual misunderstanding and incomprehension.