April 23rds

4/23/1999

Interesting program on WBEZ (“Odyssey”) about how recordings changed our perception of music. Steve Albini made the interesting point that digital sound will degrade over time, unlike vinyl recordings which last much longer. He liked the idea of having the recording as a physical object rather than having just the data on a hard drive, as a type of ‘time capsule’. It is also an interesting idea that we let culture mutate on its own in cyberspace—anathema to the idea that things are preserved [in a fixed form]. In this scenario, archived copies become relics.

April 23, 2009: He must be using his I-told-you-so’s as vinyl (and even well preserved tape) is still the most durable medium. Digital media is already degrading and precipitously disappearing. The only thing perpetuating it is the fact that it is collaged into other works.

[4/23/2025: This reminds me of a recent visit to my local record store to donate vinyl. It's interesting that in a record shop you're not thinking about AI music, or streaming music. It just doesn't exist in that arena. A record shop represents what music should be and how it should be made. Once the people who run them pass on, it's very unlikely that their children will continue the business. But all the records will still exist, and someone will do something with them. The only thing I can think of are vinyl records museums ("Final Records").

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4/23/2023

Video 45 for Ukiyo-e (The Japanese single)         

4/23/2024

I tried the new AI search engine Perplexity, and “Googled” “What kind of music does Lee Barry write?” and pulled up the following: “...creates atmospheric, ambient electronic music often inspired by or intended to accompany specific places, photographs, or architectural styles. His album “Music For Places V” is described as having a “modern, streamlined, care-free, ‘breezy’, and leisurely” style evocative of Southern California architecture. [Bandcamp] shows his album “Rhythm By Addition” contains tracks with titles like “Sprockets”, “Use Blues”, and “HuZu”, suggesting an experimental electronic/ambient style.  His music seems to blend atmospheric textures, subtle rhythms, and evocative soundscapes, often drawing inspiration from specific visual art, locations, or conceptual themes. The overall style can be characterized as exploratory ambient/atmospheric electronic music.” 

The problem with any kind of web scraping is that it’s limited by (popular) digital textual elements only. It deduces that I’m an ambient and electronic musician, but it doesn’t know the 60s and 70s roots, the prog phase, then classical, then jazz, then experimental/avant-garde. It couldn’t possibly know that but it’s hugely important to my musical history.

4/23/2025

If there was a metronome or beat running in the background while someone was speaking, some words and phrases would align with it. This is when they start to become singable and can become a basis for lyrics. But music has very strict constraints on word use based on their ability to be sung and the meaningfulness of the rhymes. This is where meaning takes a turn: to make lyrics meaningful sometimes requires quite a bit of wordsmithing or a sculpting of words, which might cause you to change your original meaning and let the arrangement of words tell you what the pieces is about.