Music For Places V: Music For Photographs (2021)

Individual Song Posts

This is a "scoring" of iconic photos that many people have seen, but I'm only suggesting what they are. Some are less iconic, but popular nonetheless, such as "Still 21". The titles are the internet search for the photograph. (This is essentially an "Easter Egg" album).

Even though this is a streaming release, I spent quite a bit of time sequencing the tracks. If pressed to vinyl, Side 1 is the US and Side 2, Europe and Asia, and would be a voyage through the locations in which the photographs were taken. It starts in LA and goes up the coast to Nipomo, then southeast to New Mexico for two tracks, one track in Amarillo Texas, then east to Greenwood, Mississippi, then up to New York City. Side 2 starts in Switzerland, then into France with two tracks in Paris, then down to India and ending in Saigon.

In many of the tracks, most of the interest is at the end of the tracks where I incorporated cinematic treatments in the audio (with the use of binaural recordings and so on), which is the opposite of a typical song where the first second determines whether the whole song will be played. It's essentially ambient music informed by the places the photos were taken in, so Side 1 will have more folk, blues, and roots influences, and I'm using more guitars, piano and organ. Side 2 has more world music influences and is ambient in the sense that you can put it on in the background. 

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Every Building On the Sunset Strip

The genesis of the piece was from singing the title as if it was a chorus, then I played all minor chords against it for a somewhat "Bond" vibe, but has other more upbeat sections in a major key, such as the bridge.

Once you finish something as an artist or a musician you get to look back on it and figure out what you did and you see the path that was created as you worked on it. This piece took about six weeks, yet is the shortest pop song I've ever written at 1:48 seconds and has a middle-eight in it as well. A piece of music only needs to be as long as it needs to be and pop music seems to want to be around three minutes. That's as long as you can spin it out. Pop music in the 60s and the 70s got a little bit longer because there were solos and jams but this one works under two minutes.

At the mixing stage I took the chords in the middle-eight and made a separate piece out of it. One day I was playing around with the guitar part and it sounded nice just on solo acoustic so I put that on the end of it as an outro. There was another mix where I'm using a field recording of street noise set against a lo-fi mix so as to make it more cinematic, where you put things in the background such as a radio playing in a room.

For the video, the idea was not to have the street strip with the buildings on each side but rather car commercials on each side. I'm using a lot of fast cuts as if you're traveling down Sunset, not look at looking every building, but 60s car commercials. For the audio, the idea was to have compressed 60s sound as would have been listened to on a transistor radio or on an AM radio in a car. It's still stereo but I EQ'd it so that it kind of had that that 60s vibe.

It's interesting to look at culture at that time. Recently, I was reading the book "Conquest of Cool". There was was a paradigm shift happening at advertising agencies in the mid 60s, switching to a culture that was more controlled by artists. The older people were bailing out because it was so drastic of a change.

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Havenhurst

After I finished the primary mix, I had some acoustic guitar ideas that I was noodling around with which I thought would be an interesting outro, and I titled in Havenhurst, which is one of the side streets off of Sunset which I took from Ruscha's book. It was fairly arbitrary. I started to do some research on it and apparently Havenhurst is a horror film as well as an old mill in Missouri, Havenhurst Mill that apparently burned down in the 1920s. So it's interesting to conflate those things because you can associate them, yet they all have separate places within them and you start to develop another world for the piece.

The chord changes in Havenhurst are the chord changes from the bridge in "Every Building..." so it's become generative and it can continue to be generative. It was essentially a "happy accident". 

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Bronson Tropics

What I realized is that when you write music for a location in a film, or even a still from a film, you consider the history. If you compare a photograph of the building taken in 1966 and the way the location looks now, there's a stark difference. If you then look at how Ruscha stylized it there's also a stark difference. What I found interesting about the painting that he made was that it was just it was an abstraction of the place, and that's what these songs are. You don't necessarily have to think about all the things that happened there, but it's interesting to think that those things can be embedded--all the people that lived in that apartment building over 60 years and what happened to these people throughout their lives. When you research images, that history is there and either you're going to look at it or you're going to ignore it. For me it's the latter: I wouldn't want to delve into everything that happened in the building but that's an interesting aspect of it.

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The reason I wanted to set music to this photo (and subsequent painting) is perhaps with the same wonder and fascination of Ruscha himself. This style of architecture (the Dingbat, each with a unique signature) is decidedly Southern California: modern, streamlined, care-free, "breezy", and leisurely. ("Beautiful blue skies and golden sunshine--all along the way...") At the beginning of the piece is one of David Lynch's daily weather reports, as a kind of DJ leader. It's interesting that when I was doing the airy synth parts, the weather was exactly like the weather in L.A. per Lynch's weather report.

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Nipomo 

The original of this song ("Americo" was its working title, I think perhaps because of the Chilean singer) was written in the early 1990s on an acoustic guitar onto a cassette 4-track. There's some various percussion in it like castanets and shakers, as well as banging on the body of the guitar. What I really liked about the original recording, even though it was otherwise terrible, is that it had a nice vibe to it, almost a Morricone vibe. I realize it's kind of a cliche but it really fit with the photograph. I wanted to create a scene where the music is a soundtrack but there are other things that are in that scene as well so I am using diegetic sounds like the sound of the room and the sound of the street and a radio playing. The music is non-diegetic as soundtrack. At the end it becomes a mixture of both.

I like using found sounds for their musical (melodic as well as rhythmic--as if the spoken word were a melody) quality and I am using a bit of dialog from a French documentary post-German occupation, as well as a bit from a Roosevelt Fireside chat in 1936, the year the photo was taken.Videos:

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Route 285 New Mexico

Very often you set out to do one thing and something completely different happens. That's what happened with this piece. It's starting to be more frequent that it's "photographs for music" because if I start by thinking "music for photographs" and I start scoring photographs as I would a scoring a film it becomes too much of a constraint.

Typically what happens when I'm working things will come up and I'll like the new approach. What I did in this case was to change the photograph for existing music.  

Route 285 is a north-south state road in New Mexico that's mostly a barren landscape and in is in the vicinity of Area 51, and wanted to incorporate that "vibe". At the end, I shift from Eb Major to Eb Minor which I think works well with the vibe of the photo, and the dark cloud at the end of the road and some rain falling from it. I thought it was perfect for the end--moving from a light pentatonic melody as a foreground element shifting abruptly to the minor mode with found audio elements.

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The image is decidedly contrasty. If you look at the images on the internet, you'll see a wide range of contrasts, some very light and some even sepia-toned. What I thought was interesting about the contrast issue is that it informed the mode switch in an abstract way.

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From the book, The Americans:

In the Introduction of the photo book, The Americans, Jack Kerouac refers to the "long shot of night road arrowing forlorn into immensities and flat of impossible to believe America." The assumption is that this photograph was taken at night and was instead made using the cinematic technique known as "day for night". To achieve the effect he drastically underexposed the negative yielding the impression of moonlit landscape in the finished print."

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Moonrise In Hernandez

In July 2021 I took a ride to Saganashkee Slough, a man-made lake in the Palos area south of Chicago. Sometimes little riffs come to me and this one stuck with me as a vamp:

We're going to the Saganashkee Slough
We're going to the Saganashkee Slough
Saganashkee Slough, Saganashkee Slough

When I got my hands on a guitar this is the idea that it generated. It's kind of an odd piece in that it has a 5-bar phrase, rather than the typical 4 or 8-bar verse or chorus section.

Then I saw the Adams photo and realized it was perfect scoring for it.

Lyric for the re-arrangement with a vocal:

Moonrise in Hernandez
Moonrise in Hernandez

A burning of the sky
At the roadside
A moment that remains
Forever in our mind's eye

Moonrise in Hernandez
Moonrise in Hernandez

Inversion of the sun
At the right time
The light against a cross
Emblazoned on the black sky

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Madame Bijou

This piece uses the Hungarian Gypsy scale primarily. I thought that the scale really was appropriate for this particular photograph. It's very iconic--you can just search "Madame Bijou" and you'll find the photo immediately. I was surprised how many people used it for various things, such as jewelry and art. I was surprised that it's as popular as it is.

The approach that I took was to score it like I would score a film. It's essentially a period piece set in Paris in 1932 in Montmartre. There was a bar there, Bar de la Lune. I took several different approaches but wanted to stick to the most traditional sound and instruments, although I did create an EDM version. It's interesting because I began the piece in standard notation for string quartet. I wanted to more accurately capture the Paris 1932 vibe. A real string quartet would sound great obviously, as would a more florid piano part, saxes and perhaps concertina. I like working this way because it gives me a good framework. I did several mixes, one a "cinematic" mix, where I'm taking the final mix and placing it in the distance as if you were standing outside the bar and hearing the music from the sidewalk, with traffic and other street noise in the foreground as diegetic sound using some of my own field recordings. 

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Brassai 1934

This started as a lead sheet as jazz player would make a lead sheet with chord changes and melody. This gives me a chance to consider the outline of the piece and how it's going to unfold, and is essentially a blueprint.

It's difficult to decide on the iconic Brassai photo. I've been through a number of photo books which informed my decision to some degree. It's not that their choice would be my choice necessarily. I see his his entire body of work as iconic, especially that those done in the early 1930s in Paris.

The  particular photo that I'm using was taken at a particular place in Paris, so that is the Place that is being scored. I'm trying to incorporate his Hungarian ethnicity into it as well.

The other thing that struck me as I was looking at photographs for the album was that when we look at photographs on Google we see all the different variations of it. Sometimes we see the original image before it was [manipulated] so you see a really contrasty dramatic black and
white photo of some location and then you see the actual place and it's such a shock--there's really nothing there, it's just banal. But that's the essence of photography: you can make it more cinematic which changes our emotional response to it. Subsequently, you might see the actual place and it changes you again, which is part of the idea for the album. It makes it a "movie", and once the movie has been made of reality then reality changes.

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Still 21

One of the more interesting aspects of working on this album was doing the research for the photographs. For this image, there are so many variations and parodies. It's interesting when you try to replicate something that exists in the moment it's very difficult to do and they never look right. Another one that that people like to do is Andy Warhol's pose with his hand on his chin and that one is never done well either. It's like tribute bands where everything sounds like the album and the players look exactly like the band members. It's kind of a wax museum thing. It's still creepy to me in a way.

Several years ago, I went to and exhibition of Magnum photos taken during the Depression. They had three or four different variations of Migrant Mother with different exposures--some with very high contrast some were low contrast. It's also interesting to compare them on a Google search result, where you can see her other photographs, which also seemed to suggest audio or music, which I've done with audio snapshots, where I took images and added my binaural field recordings.
Red Room Mississippi

This was actually a re-working of an older song and video called Vintage Smoking, a G Phrygian blues transcribed into notation which I then used as the form. The original was really kind of organic which had started with a blues shuffle with the bass line following the same rhythm of the kick drum. The new version has tremolo guitar and some organ which was a binaural composite of the original organ part and another one that was basically a drone, created by playing the organ through some computer speakers and then I moved them around my head with my ear mics for a swirling Leslie effect. As to "swirling", it's interesting that when I was working on it a swarm of tornadoes broke out in Mississippi while I was lying the lap steel parts and was watching some of the videos, which created an eerie vibe to it, similar to Virga, also released in the March, the beginning of the spring tornado season, which had a track, Dreaming of Tornadoes.

What I'm using here is called the Droste effect, essentially a picture within a picture. The backdrop of this the scene are the photographs of Lee Friedlander, who took lots of pictures of TVs in motels and other places and I'm placing clips from Vintage Smoking within the TVs. So we have that layer and then we have the layer of photographers, we have William Eggleston who's off-stage as a cameo, and we have Lee Friedlander creating the stage itself, so there's three things there and they're embedded within each other.

While working on this track, I was reminded of an Eggleston exhibition at the Art Institute back in 2010.  I can really get lost in his work. Whenever I look at his photos I try to get into the photographer's brain and think about what are they seeing and thinking at the time of the capture. Taking photographs for me is sometimes like being in the temporal space of a film, or how photos can really be cinematic, hence my interest in scoring photographs. Just as period films need cars from that period, seeing old photos with cars in them dates the photo and I try to get into the headspace of what that world sounded like in terms of the music that might have been on AM radio at the time. I was thinking that Eggleston was the "Ed Ruscha of the South" in the sense that the work was banal and dead-pan and in a strange way, Americana. So I tried to make the music sound that way.

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Standard Amarillo

Part of the mythology of the United States is its highway system built postwar and one of the more popular roadways as we know is Route 66, one of the main thoroughfares to the West coast.

There's this idea of heading west that I've come across in various books as a metaphor for moving towards the future. It's interesting that it is more of a universal and not unique to the United States.

One of the images that I picked for the album was taken on Route 66 while the artist was heading west from Oklahoma to California. The photo is in effect a milestone from that point in his life where he steps out of the car takes a picture of this and then years later inspires paintings just as iconic.

What I'm trying to depict in this is that there's a radio playing in the car. I want to make it both diegetic and non-diegetic in the world of the photograph.