Mile Zero
no matter where you go, there you are
Feb 16, 2010
You may have heard that there was a blizzard last week, trapping the entire East coast indoors for about five days straight. Walking the dog in the morning after a big snowfall was like stepping into an apocalyptic movie cliche: howling wind, half-buried automobiles and buildings, and no sign of other life to be found. Even for a misanthrope like me, it was a little creepy. Belle started to go stir-crazy around day 2. I lasted a bit longer, but by Wednesday I needed something to do that wasn't beamed through an LCD screen, so I broke out my bass and pedals for the first time in a while, and started rearranging things.
For the serious pedal-head, it's possible to enter a kind of trance-like feedback loop while searching for new sounds: you shift between playing a lick, twiddling a few knobs, and listening intently to determine whether the new sound has moved closer to the ideal in your head. Play, adjust, listen, rinse and repeat. And there's no better way to trigger this kind of behavior than to scramble the order for your pedals and randomly activate a few of them--it creates a totally new sound, acts like a mental reset button. My drug of choice, of course, is distortion, and my current favorite is the Z. Vex Woolly Mammoth that replaced an MXR M-80 Bass DI+. Since picking up the Mammoth, I'd put the MXR on a shelf temporarily, but addled by the snow and the confines of the apartment I decided to put the two of them in series and see what kind of overdrive I could get.
The Mammoth doesn't like hot input from a preamp of any kind, pedal or bass, so the first experiment with the M-80 first in the signal chain didn't work out. And running the Mammoth into the M-80 with the usual distortion settings on both was interesting--it triggered a kind of overcompression effect--but the distortion from the MXR (which was once semi-accurately described to me as "bees in a tin can") was washing out the low-end from the Z. Vex. But when I kicked off the distortion and just tried the SVT-emulating clean channel on the M-80--wow. The preamp took the Mammoth's fuzz, thickened it and tamed some of the high-end. It was monstrous, and very cool, and I played with it for probably an hour and a half until I had it tweaked perfectly and my fretting fingers were sore.
The lesson here is not that I've got a new bass distortion that can level continents, although that's a nice bonus. It's the process of serendipity that got me there: being able to rewire or adjust my pedals in possibly stupid or odd ways, just to see what would happen. A good toolkit gives you that kind of freedom. That's one of the reasons I'm so keen on single-purpose effects boxes: multi-effects are just now reaching the level of sophistication that allows something as simple as shuffling the order of the signal chain, and they rarely make it fast or easy. A multi-effects unit is good if you already know what you want, but it's murder on creativity.
When I think about it, this is true for most of the tools I like to use. Javascript and PHP are ungainly, hackish languages, but the flexibility of loose typing and hash-based objects makes it easy to throw data around and see what sticks. Pro Tools is a mess from the perspective of plugin APIs and efficient resource use, but its flexible routing mixer is unmatched for patching audio around in a project. I remember first falling in love with word processing when I realized that you could move paragraphs around instantly--no more endless recopying drafts (and how I hated teachers in grade school who required handwritten reports). And we won't even get started on my unhealthy MacGyver obsession.
The Make crowd tends to say that you don't own a tool unless you can hack it. I think it's also a question of convenience--how easily can you surprise yourself when patching something together? When Mark Pilgrim wrote Tinkerer's Sunset, reminiscing about how he got started on an Apple IIe, the gateway was BASIC. And while computer scientists hate BASIC for the bad habits it spawned in a generation, it had one thing going for it: it's really easy to read and understand, as the programming equivalent of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure books. The only modern language with an equivalent level of ubiquity and cost is Javascript, and even it is much more difficult for a newcomer to grasp. It's harder to rewire it, harder still to find a serendipitous solution.
Or take electronics: when I was a kid, which was not that long ago, you could still take apart a stereo or a TV and see all the wires and bits inside. You could still blow a circuit breaker poking around in there, even if you never did understand what everything was (I speak from experience). Nowadays, it's all disposable system-on-a-chip engineering, even in an industry as low-tech as music. Those analog pedals of mine are a dying breed, and while I'm as big a fan of digital as you'll find, I hope there's room for both. The Z. Vex Inventobox and the Arduino are responses to the rise of black-box hardware, but they're also tacit admissions: that we have to special-order creative tools, separate from those designed for media consumption and ease-of-use.
I hope we don't lose the idea that it's possible to combine the two. You can have tools that are easy to use and easy to hack, even if we're told by designers that it has to be one or the other--that letting people open up the box would make it too complicated for the average user. Maybe it just takes a new model. If so, I nominate the humble, patchable, routable effects pedal. Because hey, if guitarists can learn to use them for boundless creativity, anyone can.
Nov 30, 2009
You know, once I get this b-boy thing under control, parkour is next.
Nov 25, 2009
I miss a lot of things about college--the classes, the sense of intellectual engagement, the unreasonably late hour I could roll out of bed in the morning--but one of the things I miss most is the opportunity for obsession that comes from a flexible schedule. The more I work on learning breaking and popping, the more evident it becomes that I just don't have time to vaccuum up skills at the same rate that I did as an undergraduate.
I tell this story a lot, but I started learning to play bass around the end of my junior year, and I was completely obsessed with it. I spent three or four hours every day practicing. I took it to class. I played along with my roommate's awful techno music. I drilled the same basic riffs--Flea's slap routine for "Higher Ground" and his solo during "Aeroplane," Commerford's simpler runs in Rage Against the Machine, every song from Stop Making Sense--and simple scale exercises over and over again. I got blisters, put superglue on my fingers as prosthetic calluses, eventually grew thick skin on the first two fingers of my right hand from plucking the strings.
I was, in short, pretty hardcore about my practice routine. The result is that while I claim no particularly exceptional skill as a bass player, I'm pretty sure I'll be able to play the instrument at some level until the day I die. It's totally-engrained muscle memory at this point. But looking back on it now, I'm pretty sure that there's no way I could have learned to play at the same depth--even allowing for a slower pace--if I were to start today. I just wouldn't be able to make the time, or the intensity. And when it comes to the speed at which I'm learning to b-boy, that's a hard mental adjustment to make, because I unconsciously expect to improve at the same rate.
Clearly, it's just a symptom of adult life. I work an 8-hour day with two hours of commute, so I don't have blocks of time between classes or shifts that I can devote to hobbies. Since the CQ purchase and resulting transition shakeup, I've gotten a few extra responsibilities (including some team management), and when I get home often the last thing I really want to do is sweat profusely in my apartment's laundry room. So at this point I practice popping and breaking two, maybe three times a week for around an hour at a time. Progress is slow, my footwork is still awful, and my shoulders are still way too stiff.
That said, what can you do? I enjoy my work, and don't have any desire to cut it short in any way. It's already hard enough to coordinate with Belle between my classes and the ones she teaches at the gym. And let's face it: my goal for dancing can't be (and isn't) to be the greatest, since I'm starting it late and from a very poor foundation. There's a lot to be said for aiming high--but just as much value in keeping excessive expectations from ruining the learning experience as it changes.
Nov 23, 2009
Review: Know Better Learn Faster
"Wry melancholy" is perhaps the best I can do when describing "We Brave Bee Stings And All," the first album from Thao and the Get Down Stay Down. "Did he hurt you/In a new way?" she asked in one song, as if she was too bored for a romantic crash-and-burn that didn't at least offer a little novelty. I liked it quite a bit.
The group's new record, "Know Better Learn Faster," marks not so much a shift in attitude as a refinement: the humor is drier, the victories more hollow, the outlook even bleaker. The title refers to the two things you want to do as a relationship begins to come unmoored. The joke is that they're impossible. This is, according to interviews with Thao, a break-up record, but it's one that can't quite take its own melodrama seriously: from the first track ("The Clap"), in which the lyrics "If this is how you want it/Okay, okay" are transformed from a dirge into a foot-stomping rallying cry, to the last ("Easy," introduced with a muttered admonition that "sad people dance, too").
A big draw has always been singer/songwriter Thao Nguyen's voice. It's soulful at the low end, reaching into a wounded yelp during crescendos. But lots of singers have good voices. Part of what sets Nguyen apart for me is less in the tone and more in the relationship between her melodies and the lyrics. She's good with ambiguous pauses: in "When We Swam," she adds a hungry emphasis to the line "Oh, bring your hips to me" that leaves the listener momentarily unsure why she wants said hips, or her interest in the person attached to them. Likewise, the way she sings "We made it/Won't we save it?/And I fixed it!/What you hated" betrays a mixture of petulance, anger, and surprise at her own admission.
Other standout numbers include the title song, with its soaring violin accompaniment, and the self-destructive "Body," which builds repeatedly to a raging call-and-response. It's not all roses, of course: "Oh. No." lapses into mopiness, as does "But What of the Strangers." They're also, tellingly I think, the two songs that find Nguyen alone with a guitar instead of pulling energy in from the rest of the band. But these kinds of misfires are really minor symptoms of a group that's stretching out and becoming comfortable with their sound. And what a sound it is: one that looks for the grim punchline behind a broken heart.
Oct 19, 2009
For years, I listened to music through the cheapest headphones I could find. This usually meant those $10 Sony earbuds, the awful plastic ones that leave your ears physically sore and boast of "deep bass" (read: less midrange). But since I was pretty much broke all the time, and rarely bothered to bring my CD player anywhere anyway, the earbuds had to do.
I didn't buy better phones until a few years after I started working with digital audio. While I was at the World Bank's Multimedia Center, the standard for all the video stations was Sony's MDR-7506 (or its original variant, the MDR-V6). The MDRs have been pretty well-known professional units for years--they're staples of mastering and post-production studioes--and lots of people hate them, saying that they're unsubtle and overly bassy. All of which is probably true, but they were miles above anything I'd used before. Suddenly I could hear all kinds of distinct parts in the music that had previously been masked by poor equipment. It was eye-opening, like the first time that I used a condenser mike instead of a dynamic.
Today I own three sets of nice headphones. I have a set of MDR-7506s for work, a Beyerdynamic DT 770 for those increasingly rare times that I do audio editing at home, and some Etymotic earbuds for portable use. I'd say these are reasonably-priced now--only the 770s cost more than $100--but there's no way I'd have seen them as "affordable" during my painful-plastic-earbud years. Which is not to say that I couldn't have saved up for a pair, but it would have been hard to convince me to do so, since I had no exposure to anything better.
Most people, I assume, are basically in the same position. Surely that's the only thing that can explain the proliferation of those awful white earbuds on the Metro. It's a catch-22: the only way people would consider better cans would be if they listened to them, and that probably won't happen until they actually buy a pair, which they won't do because they've never heard good headphones and can't justify the expense.
Some may argue that digital compression makes headphone quality irrelevant, and that could be true in some cases. But at modern bitrates, psychoacoustic compression isn't nearly the sound-muffler that it was during the Napster days. To the extent that it has an impact, compression is way less harmful than a poor speaker setup.
So this is a plea to all those people I see on the train with $10 headphones plugged into a $200 music player (or worse, using the pack-in earbuds). I feel your budgetary pain, guys, I really do. But the next time you feel the urge to upgrade, consider putting the cash into the other end of the headphone cord. I'm pretty sure you'll appreciate it.
Sep 15, 2009
Steve Lawson, solo bass player extraordinaire, on the relationships between musicians, fans, the Internet, and the industry:
I'd like to call attention to two great points that Lawson makes here. First, he talks extensively about the house concerts that he does, where he literally goes to play in someone's living room, then has dinner with the audience. What takes people by surprise, he says, is that he's a perfectly normal person who is nice to them--by breaking down the barrier between audience and artist (instead of maintaining the fiction that the musician is an untouchable figure), he's able to make a much more rewarding connection.
Second, Lawson makes a strong argument against doing what he calls "thinking aspirationally." Musicians evaluate business models from the perspective of million-dollar superstars, he notes, when most people will never reach that kind of income level (and probably shouldn't want to). The goal isn't to close out a month with a profit, he says, but to not end it with negative numbers on the balance sheet--aim to break even, in other words. From that point of view, the definition of "professional" musician gets both wider (no wedding-band gigs!) and more comfortable (no uncomfortable, money-losing tours!).
You may remember that I mentioned Steve Lawson when talking about Free, and this speech demonstrates why he's such a great example when talking about the levelling aspects of the Internet. To be sure, he's leveraging free social media to build his community--MySpace, Twitter, ReverbNation, Youtube, etc.--but while Anderson's book seemed to concentrate on how free distribution could make your business marketable, Lawson's mainly interested in using new media to do more satisfying work, and to eliminate the parts that he doesn't enjoy. In a world spawning a million Twitter PR drones every minute, I think it's refreshing to see someone using these tools to rethink the basic assumptions of their vocation.
Sep 03, 2009
Breakin' 3: Thomas Breaks a Knee
Thanks to Jeff for the title.
Last Friday was the last lesson of my first breakdancing class (the next session starts in two weeks). If I could find my camera, I'd embarrass myself with a movie clip, but conveniently it seems to have gone missing. So what have I learned?
I've learned it's going to take a while for me to get up the nerve to enter an actual cipher with people I don't know. Which is good for me, honestly: in general I'm a quick learner, so I have a tendency to acquire new skills and then lose interest once I hit a basic level of competency. The hobbies I've maintained for longer periods--like bass, for example--required more sustained effort but are ultimately more rewarding. I think this could be one of those.
I've learned a lot about movement. I am not what you'd call light-footed: my normal gait is somewhere between a stalk and a strut. My favorite part of toprock is its constant motion, and its sense that the dancer is never really settling their weight. Although I need a lot more work before it's completely natural, I'm really having fun practicing those kinds of steps--it's a new way for me to move. The same goes for footwork and freezes: even if I'm terrible at them (and I am), they're entirely new movements for my body, and thus both a challenge and a kind of puzzle.
And technically, I've learned how to: sidestep, kickball change, hip twist, indian step, kick step, CC, six-step, four-step, three-step, helicopter, shoulder freeze, and backward roll. I may not be able to do them well, or to move from one to the other gracefully, but that's about twelve more dance moves than I've ever had before. I guess I'm all set to go be highly awkward at family weddings now.
Aug 18, 2009
Electric Boogaloo sold separately.
Who Can Roast The Most?: Lessons Learned
On Sunday, the "Who Can Roast The Most?" b-boy competition came to DC for the first time ever, and my dance teacher encouraged us to go. "You'll learn a lot," she said, and I did--not the least of which is how much I've got to learn. There were some seriously skilled dancers there.
My favorite part was seeing really smooth top-rockers. Floorwork, spins, and power moves may get the biggest reactions from the crowd, but they don't always match up with the beat. The really good top-rockers, being less worried about keeping their momentum up for acrobatics, could react to the music and play with the crowd. They had more stage presence, so to speak, and as a musician I thought their performances were a lot more fun to watch. The music was great, too--a mix of funk (James Brown, in particular) and old-school hip-hop (they opened, of course, with Black Star's "B Boys Will B Boys").
I only stayed through the end of the second round, but it was enough to get me excited about learning breakdancing all over again. I'm heading to an open class in DC tonight, and will try to be better about practicing at home from now on.
Something From Nothing: Youtube As Cultural Transmitter
One thing that's been really helpful for me has been the wealth of video tutorials available online for the basic steps. Some of them suffer from Sudden Jump In Difficulty Syndrome, where they go directly from doing basic steps to a mile-a-minute routine, but there's also some really good amateur lessons online. At the very least, it's good to be able to look up how things are supposed to look, or to refresh my memory of the steps involved, when my memory starts to fade a few days after Friday's class.
I'm curious how--or indeed, if--it changes the process of cultural propagation, when it's mediated this way. And that's not just for breakdancing, obviously: I learned to play bass at least partially via online communities and resources. I learned harmonica in much the same way (thanks, HARP-L!) in high school. Eventually, I found communities both on- and offline for playing music, but it was certainly a modern twist on "self-taught" skills.
One of the interesting tidbits from my classes so far has been the way that a lot of breakdancing moves have multiple names, depending on which part of the country (or world) you're in. They're often named after the crew that invented them, or at least got the credit for introducing them in an area. Will that kind of idiosyncracy survive a transition from geographic identification to something more nebulous?
There's a paragraph from Jeff Chang's collection Total Chaos, in the section written by South African hip-hop students Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams, where they compare hip-hop to alchemy:
We don't mean this only in the old-school mystical chemistry way. We see hip-hop as the resilience of the human spirit, that process of transforming yourself and your environment, kinda like Common's observation that under the FUBU is a guru untapped. Imagine the oppressive conditions caused by the barbarism of Ronald Reagan's neoliberal economic strategies. The youth of South and West Bronx had little resources, were systematically marginalized and alienated, but filled with an audacity and inner capacity to want to rock the planet. No musical equipment? Well, then beatbox! We've heard many heads equate hip-hop with producing something out of nothing. We disagree. Hip-hop is about seeing the something in what we are often told is nothing.
It is, no doubt, lazy tech-utopian thinking to say something like "YouTube could influence hip-hop"--or to act like a bunch of largely middle-class kids uploading videos means anything about the direction of a culture I'm largely unqualified to comment on (like, I read a couple of books and took a class, so I'm an expert now, right?). It might be more accurate to say that the reverse is true--that YouTube's untidy mix of professional content, cultural detritus, and amateur-authored mementos sounds very much like the spirit that Ariefdien and Abrahams identified for hip-hop (even down to the critics who dismiss said content as nothing but valueless narcissism). Something to think about.
Aug 07, 2009
Tonight I'm attending the second of five Intro to Breakdancing classes in Bethesda. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I'd been reading Jeff Chang's Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation and watching Planet B-Boy on Netflix. And I've always had trouble A) dancing and B) exercising, so why not learn to do both?
It didn't surprise me that I'm a bit short on the coordination necessary to be a natural breakdancer, or that my hip-hop attitude is somewhere between Don Draper and Michael Bolton. It shouldn't have surprised me how out of shape I am, especially given how athletic a style of dancing it is, but for some reason it did. I'm hardly able to switch feet during basic floorwork, much less perform something like a chair freeze. I'll probably be able to manage a decent top-rock (dancing from a standing position) by the end of the classes, but the rest is anyone's guess.
Belle has been very gracious about all this. She snuck me into one of the gyms where she's an aerobics instructor so I could use the mirrored room, and did some practicing of her own in the other corner. I know she feels like she could be in better shape herself, but she's capable of jumping around (while simultaneously shouting directions) for one-hour classes multiple times a week, while I do about thirty seconds of indian steps and then stagger around the room gasping for air. "You looked good," she says, perhaps on the principle that the last words I hear before my atrophied lungs give out should be encouraging ones.
I'll get through this class if it kills me. But let's hope it doesn't come to that.
Aug 05, 2009
What can we do about a band like the Noisettes, a band with two full-length albums as different as salt and sugar? As lead singer Shingai Shoniwa said on What's the Time, Mr. Wolf's "Iwe," who are these people? And how do we get the band from that album back?
What's the Time was one of my favorite albums of the last five years--a raucous, almost lascivious collection of rough blues-rock. Their follow-up, Wild Young Hearts, is a total about-face. It's a pop album, slick and forgettable. It's dripping in strings, overdubs, and synthesizers. I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
When the album is strong, it's not bad: "Don't Upset the Rhythm" is a decent dance groove, followed by the retro-sounding "Wild Young Hearts." The 50's imitation sound is also present on "Never Forget You," and the shift into doo-wop bopping doesn't really play to the Noisettes' strengths--it's all a bit me-too. "Beat of My Heart" sees band's original rock sound re-emerge momentarily, although it starts off a bit limp and then transitions into a bizarrely out-of-place, metal-esque guitar solo. Shoniwa lets her voice stretch a little on the softer songs, like "Atticus," but the material (a lengthy, rambling metaphor touching on both To Kill A Mockingbird and Pandora's Box) doesn't really justify what she can bring to the table. And the less that's said about 80's dance number "Saturday Night," the better.
Perhaps the biggest problem with these songs is not that they're bad, although they're certainly a bit weak, but that their energy is so low. Shoniwa has a powerful voice, and she's capable of shifting almost instantly between mocking, pleading, and menacing ("I dig your smile, too/And you dig my poker face"). Seen live, she's a force of nature on stage. But here, that manic presence has been pulled back into something more polished, more restrained, and the album suffers for it. Only on "Don't Upset the Rhythm" does she come close to cutting loose--small wonder that it was chosen as the radio single--and nowhere does she reach the heights of "Nothing to Dread" or "Scratch Your Name" from their first record.
Combined with the reduced presence of the other band members (among other things, their backing vocals have largely been replaced by overdubs of Shoniwa), it's tempting to speculate that this album is an attempt at grooming her for a role that's less confrontational, more mainstream--less Sister Rosetta, more Gwen Stefani. Personally, I think that'd be a real shame. The Noisettes of What's the Time were a breath of fresh air in an increasingly stale world of garage rock (at least half of which is apparently helmed by Jack White, in one form or another). But who's to say? With a sample size this small, and a shift this great, the Noisettes could go anywhere from here. Here's hoping they'll take the chance.
