Mile Zero
if challenge had a taste, you'd be quite delicious
Mile Zero is the personal website of Thomas Wilburn. All statements and opinions here are my own, and do not represent the views or policies of my employers at Congressional Quarterly, Ars Technica, or other publications.
If you love the sound of kalimba as much as I do, you may enjoy the pad I created for CQ's upcoming DTV Transition explainer:
Best soundtrack instrument ever. It's just exotic enough to add interest, but not so strange that it distracts from the video. If I had a set of gamelan samples to mix with it, I'd be a happy man.
18:40 x Thomas x /music/recording/mp3 x link x 0 comments
Wired reports that Pandora will be partnering with Clear Channel to stream music on CC websites, although founder Tim Westergren insists that Clear Channel will not be altering the feed in any way.
The last time that I got a chance to speak with Westergren, for an Ars interview that didn't work out (I wasn't happy with my questions, and my recorder malfunctioned), he said that Pandora actually saw Clear Channel (and the rest of terrestrial radio, to be fair) as their competition. I wonder if this is a step forward for them, or a step backward?
13:49 x Thomas x /music/business/distribution x link x 0 comments
Tonight the Black Keys are playing at the 9:30 club here in DC. Gotta remember my earplugs--they're loud.
In the last couple of albums, the Keys have stepped away a little bit from the dirty garage aesthetic that originally drew me to them. It's good music, but Rubber Factory's still my favorite album.
Live, though, the band still pulls out all the stops. And they've got a few new songs with that old energy. This is them doing "I Got Mine" on Letterman about a month back.
13:45 x Thomas x /music/artists/black_keys x link x 0 comments
There's a new NIN album out--online only for now, and it's completely free. Reznor's been prolific lately, what with the Ghosts halo just late last year. As a friend said when he forwarded the announcement email, "Is there a new NIN album every month now?"
Maybe. Because--and I don't know the man, and he doesn't know me, so this is just conjecture--I suspect that Trent Reznor is really enjoying this. It seems to me like he's enjoying the feedback, and he likes being able to put out material direct to his fans, and perhaps most importantly, he's getting a real kick out of frustrating his label's plans to monetize his output.
I mean, this is a musician who has had a long, long history of label fights. There was the lawsuit and public struggle with TVT, followed by a lawsuit against the guy who helped him found Nothing Records, and then most recently his disparaging remarks about pricing in Australia and UMG in general. This is a musician who used to release something once every five years, and now it's more like every five months. It sounds like he's energized to me.
Which I'm not complaining about. But it is a real change from the guy who used to literally write songs based on his notebooks of goth poetry. Even if the music's not as good, I'm kind of happy for him.
Update: The music's not bad at all, actually. And Reznor's done a very cool thing with the MP3s: they've got huge, high-res, individual pieces of artwork as the "album" art for each, by longtime collaborator Rob Sheridan. It strikes me as a very cool update of the LP album art, which was thought lost after CDs created packaging that's so much smaller. Now the music's shrunk to insubstantial dimensions, but it's reacquired that visual, almost tactile element. Between his earlier commercial experiments and this small touch, it's obvious that Reznor has put a tremendous amount of thought into this whole online music thing.
16:39 x Thomas x /music/artists/nin x link x 0 comments
For my own future reference, two free tools for making music on a Symbian smartphone:
17:31 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Musical Sketchpad, Session Thirteen
Better Off Dead, as made famous by Bad Religion:
Download
Been a while. Give me a chance to explain this one.
Bad Religion's Stranger than Fiction caught my ear again a couple months ago. It's the album with a lot of the classic BR songs on it: Infected, 21st Century Digital Boy, and Incomplete, for starters. But there's an impressive level of songwriting in evidence, with sharp lyrics and chord progressions that--if not incredibly original--are more complicated than they sound, and certainly more involved than punk deserves.
In fact, I like the songs so much, I've had an itch to do the whole lot of them as acoustic, voice-and-bass covers, inspired in part by the sound of the baritone guitar on the most recent Evens CD. "Better Off Dead" just happened to be the first one I picked. I think it'd be a fun project, to cover the album from start to finish this way.
There's not much technique on display here, either in terms of production or musicianship. I experimented with doing some fingerstyle arpeggios, but in the end I just strummed and sang. This mix has barely even been mixed, and has had no EQ or compression or mastering, as far as I can remember. I don't know how it'll sound through your speakers. But I'm pretty happy with the performance, and still oddly taken with the idea--although I won't subject anyone else to it anymore. Just this once.
12:26 x Thomas x /music/recording/sketchpad x link x 0 comments
File under "Things I Write for Ars Which Are Also Very Cool on Their Own:" MySong is a Microsoft Labs/University of Washington project that creates simple accompaniment for a vocal melody. You sing into a mic while it plays a metronome to keep you on tempo, then the software figures out a basic set of chord changes to go with your song. The chord choices can be tweaked using "happy" and "jazz" sliders, which is one of the best user interfaces I've ever heard about. If only Word had sliders for "happy" and "jazz" it would make my writing much more fun.
What's interesting about this is not that it's some kind of advanced technology--it's actually very simple, and could probably run on a cell phone. But if you watch the video on their project page, it looks like the kind of thing that's just naturally enjoyable--the audio equivalent of the Photo Booth that comes with OS X. People with media production experience tend to look down on "beginner" tools like Sequel or Garageband, but we forget that there's a whole class of people for whom even those tools are both difficult to use and unnecessarily ambitious. I know a lot of people who are not necessarily musical, but would still be delighted to sing a song to their computer and have it add a backing band, no matter how simple or generic.
16:59 x Thomas x /music/tools/digital x link x 0 comments
Monster Magnet has a line in one of their songs, "Bummer," that basically sums up the entire genre of stoner rock:
It's against my second natureAlthough it's not quite the same without Dave Wyndorf's derisive "HAW HAW HAW HAW" after it.
Not to chase you down that hole
I need a fistful of medication
Just to keep it in my pants
What other lyrics so succinctly sum up their genre? There's got to be a bunch, but I'm having trouble thinking of them. For the blues, it's probably hard to beat this gem from Willie Dixon's "Third Degree":
Got me 'cused of taxesDixon, of course, wrote a great deal of Muddy Waters' repertoire, and had his songs ripped off by Led Zeppelin. If anyone represents the genre, it's him.
I ain't got a dime
Got me 'cused of children
And ain't nary one of 'em mine
Bad luck
Bad luck is killin' me
Anything coming to mind for anything else? It seems to me like it's harder to do the less codified the subject matter for a given genre--blues has a pretty straightforward thematic set, so it's far easier. Hip-hop, metal, and country are probably likewise simpler to find (and subgenres like stoner rock or nerdcore are even easier). But what to do for something like indie, or jazz?
Trivia experiments like this always make me want to try to write something that goes way outside of the standard definitions for a genre's subject matter. A nerdcore blues song, for example, would be a fun thing to attempt.
15:46 x Thomas x /music/technique/lyrics x link x 3 comments
Why Records DO Sound All the Same
There's a little-watched video on Maroon Five's YouTube channel which documents the torturous, tedious process of crafting an instantly forgettable mainstream radio hit. It's fourteen minutes of elegantly dishevelled chaps sitting in leather sofas, playing $15,000 vintage guitars next to $200,000 studio consoles, staring at notepads and endlessly discussing how little they like the track (called Makes Me Wonder), and how it doesn't have a chorus. Even edited down, the tedium is mind-boggling as they play the same lame riff over and over and over again. At one point, singer Adam Levine says: "I'm sick of trying to engineer songs to be hits." But that's exactly he proceeds to do.
...from Tom "Music Thing" Bramwell's article in Word Magazine.
Every year someone writes an article along these lines--between digital technology, aggressive mastering, and the monolithic industry control of radio, they say, music's all shot to hell and we're all going to die. I mean no disrespect to Tom, who (as always in these articles) raises a lot of points I happen to agree with. But you're preaching to the choir, friends.
A lot of this is just disguised fervor for the good old days of analog, when making music was hard and expensive. That can be safely discounted. For the rest, which basically laments that "commercial" sound, what's there to say? I personally doubt that cheap earbuds are going to end the trend, and frankly high-def sound formats show no sign of taking off. Compression and pop mastering are here to stay.
But look at it this way: The Shins made Chutes Too Narrow in 2003, and no-one would call that a "polished"-sounding record. After Garden State, everyone may well be sick of the album, but the point remains that people are still making music without a stereotypical studio sound. I can name three or four without even trying hard. They're not on the radio, though, and they're not going to be.
In the meantime, berating the music that is on the radio when it's commercial-sounding is a lot like burning yourself on the stove and then getting angry at it for being hot. What did you expect? That's what it's for. If you don't like it, quit sticking your hands in the flames.
15:16 x Thomas x /music/recording/production x link x 0 comments
Rain Recording, an company that makes computers for audio production, asked if they could use an old post of mine for their "Pro" section. It's up now (with some revision) as the newest addition to the page: In the Garageband. Yes, there is some irony in writing a piece about cheap and free music software for a company that makes a $10k recording workstation, but I guess after spending that kind of money you'd be tempted to cut back elsewhere.
14:34 x Thomas x /music/recording x link x 0 comments
