It's been a bit of a paradox that I'm most productive on this blog when I'm not having the best time at work. 2008 and 2009 were the lowest points in my time blogging when I was close to ditching it even though I had so much spare time from finishing work early from the latter half of 08. I got moved in 2010 to a much more physically challenging duty and yet turned the blog right around with a prolonged burst of activity. Now I'm back to being shafted and yet I've let the blog slide for the past month. Truth is, I've been busy in another medium. I usually think of writing as my hobby, and the various other interests I have more as on-off projects which wax and wane in my focus. I'm sure they're all tied together as creative outlets, probably all stemming from my love of building with Lego many many years ago. I mean, it's easy to use a hammer to wreck things, but wasn't there underlying symbolism in Jesus being a carpenter? Amongst the projects on the go are occasional dips into programming (or scripting, strictly); and, of course, my long-running conlang efforts which comes and goes depending on how much I've exhausted myself in completing some aspect. So as I mentioned in my end of year post, I've dipped into making music in the past two months.
The power of punk was that you didn't need to be able to play an instrument to make a catchy tune - I'm not insulting The Slits when I say 'Cut' wasn't noted for its masterful instrumentation, I love 'Typical Girls' nonetheless. Similarly, when synthesizers became more affordable around the turn of the 80s that DIY aesthetic was carried by new wave and resulted in a completely new sound. Hip hop and rap for the most part completely sidestepped original instrumentation and re-purposed the record player to provide a rhythm track by sampling existing music. By the turn of the millennium it was possible to record and mix an album on a home computer like the so-called bedroom artists. It seemed to me with Vaporwave, or at least the genre at its most derivative, took sampling to its logical conclusion and lifted everything. That effectively meant there was little barrier to entry, which is why I decided to venture into it - and also to see how difficult it would be to rise above that kind of simplistic fare.
I had one experience with editing music way back in December 1999. I bought the Beastie Boys' 'Sounds of Science' compilation with some birthday money and got hooked by the guitar riff in 'Time for Livin'', so much that I ripped the track from the CD and manually extended the bridge in Sound Recorder. Just for my own pleasure. I've never been musically adept - I always felt playing the mandated recorder in music class that I didn't quite have the dexterity for interfacing my brain to the instrument. Kind of like Fry in the Futurama episode The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings. I think in terms of consuming music (for everything is about consumption in the economy) I was quite late to paying much attention to pop. The furthest back I can remember hearing something I liked on the radio was Annie Lennox's 'Walking on Broken Glass' which would make it mid 1992, but I didn't know what it was called or who sang it at the time. It wasn't until 1997 that I really paid attention to the Top 40. At the end of Top of the Pops, during the second week of R Kelly's contribution to Space Jam being at the top, I picked up on the credits voice-over plugging the chart countdown on Radio 1 on Sunday afternoons. Before that time I had mostly been raised on the CDs and cassettes belonging to my parents - best of compilations of new wave groups like Spandau Ballet and ABC, that I would later re-gravitate towards when devouring my parents' vinyl collection.
It was in this time that I bought my first CDs. I always say I cringe that the Spice Girls' début album was my first record, yet we've all got to start somewhere. After all, humans start off eating baby food not haute cuisine. It was last year when I stopped being so hard on myself for that when I heard an atrocious cover of Blondie's 'One Way or Another'. It really sounded out of tune to my ears; and probably more to the point, practically offended me in that way that Iggy Pop doing car insurance adverts offended some of his fans. These commercial intrusions clash with the personal memories and associations that are invoked by a song we treasure for whatever reason. What 'offended' me was the fact that Blondie's 'Parallel Lines' was one of the albums amongst my parents' vinyl cache. I know at the time that album was considered too lightweight, even though American punk was really new wave compared to what was happening in the UK - to me, though, it represented musical maturity. To me it was a large step as a teen to acknowledge the output of the preceding generation had merit when as a kid you always had to defend music on the radio from their criticisms.
Anyway, whilst never musically adept, I've for a long time felt like I wasn't hearing the music I wanted to hear, or maybe didn't know how to find. At best I could scratch the itch humming a tune and drumming a crappy beat on a desk in an imitation of what I was after. It was really music by oblique references, like trying to communicate through pictograms. I knew I liked some of the menu music in Gran Turismo 2, so I had a desire for Jazz-Fusion even though I didn't know that's what it was. The Pages From Ceefax library music I liked was also in that genre, but I only knew I liked something vaguely jazzy. When it came to utilising my extensively obscure knowledge as a basis for an intended vaporwave track of my late-to-the-scene own, I selected one of the most iconic Ceefax tracks. 'Great Ocean Road' was the first track played on the final Pages From Ceefax broadcast, and one of the first I came across on YouTube that sounded like the tracks I remembered at 6am on a Saturday morning in the mid 90s. 'Surf Coast Highway' was not my first attempt at making a track. In mid November I tried a relatively so-so track I wasn't attached to in order to feel more free to cut it up. I abandoned that in favour of Great Ocean Road because I knew the track well and had an idea about what elements I wanted to pick out and rearrange. The opening is fairly untouched except for overlaying the following trumpets on top of the beach sounds. Later on there was a clean sample of the faintly bossa-nova rhythm that nicely looped to provide backing for the remainder. The first version I uploaded to YouTube was fairly simple and after listening to it a number of times on headphones (as I should have like what professionals do) I made it less repetitive by adding some guitar in the middle section and neatly trimmed some of the ragged samples. I was very satisfied with what I made, though ironically I don't think it's really vaporwave. I was intending to re-appropriate the cheesy reputation of the library music the BBC used in their downtime slot, but maybe I loved it too much in the first place to issue a sly critique of capitalism.
Whilst I am extremely sympathetic to the political manifesto of Accelerationism which is seen in the background of some vaporwave output, I think I'm too interested in the sound itself. The alleged low-end of the genre is simply sampling a song from the 80s and pitch-shifting, slowing down, and cutting it up. So I suppose I'm doing that with my non-Ceefax tracks. I had been sticking loops pulled from my music library of 80s material into a big Audacity project file where I generally played with them until something sounded good and got a file of its own. Right before Christmas I re-cut Yazoo's 'Situation (US Mix)' into a minute and a half track that I quite liked, but it was far too dependent on the original beat. Irony of ironies, in attempting to produce something in a genre obliquely anti-capitalist I made something I was very pleased with from Hue & Cry's 'Labour of Love' - a obliquely anti-Thatcher song. I love Hue & Cry (see Sunday Herald supplement front cover on my wall since 2005) so I hope I haven't desecrated that song in my attempts. I like that 'Pseudo Satisfaction', as I named it, is balanced between recognisable and heavily rearranged. I also find the tempo change at the minute mark infectious. I tried to repeat the formula with Level 42's Dance on Heavy Weather to less satisfactory results. There's a couple more unpublished and others in progress that would be enough to constitute an EP some point this year.
It would probably be more appropriate to describe these efforts as remixes since I've only used the source tracks for samples. Though it didn't occur to me at the time, 'Surf Coast Highway' probably owes something subconsciously to Skalpel who sample Polish jazz records from the 50s (which were then further remixed in the bonus disc for their second album). The tempo change in 'Pseudo Satisfaction' is also probably a subconscious reflex of the outro on one of my favourite remixes, Stereolab's version of The Manic Street Preachers' 'Tsunami'. A track which seems to have been rebuilt from the ground up as it's virtually unrecognisable from the source and yet quite of the Stereolab 'lounge' sound.
There you have it, my excuses made. I didn't want to skip a month lest I lose steam on this whole blogging fad after eight and a half years. So much for going to bed early tonight.
No comments:
Post a Comment