Trouble With Classicists

Recently on the I Love Music message board, I wrote about Orchestra of Bubbles, an enjoyable IDM-ish collaboration between Ellen Allien (of the Berlin-based BPitch Control label) and Apparat from last year. What struck me about the record was that even though I'd been listening to it a ton, I felt curiously unsatisfied. I wondered whether it had something to do with a distinct lack of solid melodies, writing: The tension inherent to even the best of these records is almost entirely of the textural and rhythmic variety — not anything to do with melody or harmony, really. I guess...

So having bought a MacBook on the cheap, I enter the world of laptop-dom in full-force. While I spend inordinate amounts of time this holiday season configuring the damn thing, I am working on Apple's GarageBand, which is to music composition software what cell phone cameras were to photography. I had all this stuff written about how programs like GarageBand have rendered professionalism no longer an indicator of quality, but it seems stupid now. Let's instead get right to these three minor sketches I did while at my parents' place over Xmas. I know I'm supposed to post everything when...

Ok, so despite a similarity in the opening bars, here's a substantially different version of "Shino" — a different , smoother vocal, a sharpened instrumental mix, a few new lyrics, and a new section: a coda. Is it there yet? I'm not sure — probably not. The vocal may still be a touch too mannered and structurally it's still a bit misshapen. A few interesting things to compare to the last version of this: The vocal now has now been processed to a cold metallic sheen — I think it works, given the subject matter, almost as if it's being...

Ok, well, this wasn't exactly the debut of my vocal and songwriting skills I had in mind for TWC. But I pledged to do a warts and all process here and received some encouragement from the masses to go in that direction. Besides, producing something I wasn't terribly sold on was going to happen sooner or later. Adblock Download shino_vox_mix_1.mp3 So what we have here is a moderately-interesting J-pop technopop track that has now acquired a lazy vocal of dubious intonation and some post punk overtones of questionable necessity. Still, it's a start. A few observations, and let's begin with...

Another really over-the-top "technopop" homage in the vein of Sakamoto's B-2 Unit and YMO's Solid State Survivor -- again, with a heavy focus on precision programming, featuring lots of herky jerky starts and stops and metallic FM-y sounds. The idea here was to kind of merge a late-70s analog computer music sound with that of the slightly colder records that emerged early in the following decade. As a result, you have a few Kraftwerk-y percussion sounds underpinned by some pretty leaden Linn Drum samples. There are a few cut-up vocal effects in there -- a complete nod to the Sylvian...