July 6ths

January 6ths 

7/6/1999

Reading Alan Lomax’s Folk Song Style and Culture. Fascinating chapter on how different cultures use text. The Navajo have very few concept categories, using mostly nonsense syllables. The function this has is to produce consensus. All the singing group agrees upon is that a certain series of verbal bits are pleasurable and/or appropriate. In this way any sense of conflict is kept out of the text.

[7/6/2025: “Folk music” is an interesting topic to explore in the AI age, when we can generate it with an LLM simply by selecting the genre in a drop-down. We’re using text in a different way as well as instructions. So a poem or lyric serves as those “instructions”. Gone are the days of the spirituality of a concert of folk music. But there’s always the possibility of actually performing the folk song you generated].

[7/6/2026: Use of nonsense in lyrics is now more doable with AI because no one has to sing it. To do that kind of nonsense you have to do it yourself because you couldn't pay someone to do your wordplay your way. However, the Beatles did it, but Lennon's wordplay was sung by him mostly].

7/6/2003       
        
Watched Koyaanisqatsi. I never knew about Godfrey Reggio before and I find him interesting. I love those IRE PSAs, They were made in 1974 and they talk about subjects that remain relevant: the media, surveillance, etc. Phil Glass was talking about there being no space between the image and music in commercials. They don’t want you to think or be skeptical. Commercials are about impulse, film about contemplation.

[7/6/2025: It's less likely that these kinds of long-durational contemplative/aesthetic  films will continue to be made in the same way. Who would have the attention span for a Glass repetitive minimalist work?]    

7/6/2019

Second of Summer–The American Carnival (Cover of Frontiers)

 

7/6/2025

A bunch of bass in 25 seconds:

7/6/2026

I've realized that ever since the advent of multi-track recording we've been cheating. It gives us the illusion of perfection, when actual skill might not exist to reproduce things live. So far, audiences have been ok with bad live playing, but AI music raises the bar.  Now multi-track recording can go back to being experimental and wacky, and more of a visual art.