January 27ths

 1/27/1998

Fascinating book by Edward Hall, The Dance of Life, The Other Dimension of Time. On the Zuni songs: perform an experiment, formulate a function, because they came from an unconscious, unverbalized layer representing group sentiments and beliefs. This is why very good songs have congruence on all levels. Music represents a rhythmic consensus of the core culture.

 

[1/27/2025: What’s interesting and unique about primitive cultures is that they don’t memorialize or tokenize music as recordings, but can be represented (re-presented) in visual forms, perhaps depicting dancing, which is a transference from rhythms to the body and then to painting, fabric, pottery, etc.]

1/27/1999 
            
On Bernie Krause’s autobiography, Into a Wild Sanctuary: Interesting to read about his involvement with the first Moogs. It was a brand new medium that changed the face of music forever–like Dylan’s going electric in 1965. 

1/27/2020 
            
Music has become “diffused”. In some sense, it is as vague as hashtags that anyone can create. Hashtags are also only marginally useful but can become viral if people start to use them and follow them. This is how Sea Punk, Vaporwave and lots of others have started. Personally I think they are stupid, but once the vibe is established people might follow it and develop it further. In practice, it really hasn’t worked. Not that it can’t, but once you can make up a genre, why follow anyone else?

1/27/2021 

Starting with the easy stuff at the beginning is often useless because it probably doesn’t spark any ideas and has little energy for staying interested. This is the whole idea of rock ‘n’ roll avoiding linear scholarly approaches: Rock ‘n’ roll is a shortcut to extrinsic rewards, yet ironically has also proved to be highly creative and generative. Sometimes the more heady stuff can also be ‘shortcuts’ to more ideas and a way to keep things fresh.

1/27/2025

I still think even 6-string basses are overkill, especially if you have a guitarist in the group, although overlapping and dove-tailing in the mid-range around middle-C can be contrapuntally interesting. The 6-string easily gives you that range as opposed to playing all the contrapuntal lines (uncomfortably) above the 12th fret.