Curio No. 90
Based on the diary entry: 5/21/1997 Cold/windy, 50 It’s been such a cold spring that the birch trees don’t even have buds yet. Such a cold spring The birch trees are bare Seed:
Posts
The Music Box
Song about the Music Box Theater in Wrigleyville in Chicago. The small black box theater had lumpy seats and terrible sight-lines. You'd have to watch a film constantly shifting your head. Seed entry: 2/21/1998 John Lennon said that whatever changes we go through, whether they be permanent or not, last forever because it brought the relationship to a point where both people changed, and that change would not have been possible without the relationship. Film: Mother and Son by Russian filmmaker. Visually seductive. I would have liked to have seen more image manipulation rather than long static scenes of them in existential discourse. Not much of a score, which gave me lots of ideas of how I do it. Film was in a small theater at the Music Box, replete with lumpy seats and poor sight lines. Funny to watch people before the show switching seats to audio while looking at the back of someone’s head. Assembled lyric: Went to se...
August 21sts
8/21/2004 Flexible identity, rather than “brand loyalty” to oneself allows for the search of a deeper truth. [8/21/2024: This ultimately became Dynaxiom 0001] 8/21/2010 Remote Control [8/21/2025: The phone he's holding could be either a flip-phone, a Blackberry, or an early iPhone. It's interesting how technology embeds in photography--like old cars.] Black-out lyric idea: [The only two photographs I took. Not a time for futzing with a phone. There are thousands of photos of total eclipses that you could look at online]. 8/21/2022 Artificially created work makes for nice prototypes. Sometimes the prototypes can stand alone as art, but it has to function as art, like a readymade. In terms of work, perhaps AI can serve as the artisan, doing the mechanical and repetitive parts, and the Artist can delegate those tasks. But we’ve had that capability since the ea...
July 21sts
January 21sts 2 studios, 26 years apart: 7/21/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary) John hadn’t offered a new song since April and did vocal takes on Come Together. John sings while clapping his hands with tape echo, and immediately after each time he sang the line “shoot me”. On the finished record you only hear the word “shoot” because the bass covers “me”. 7/21/1995 (Brian Eno Diary) Uninspired day in studio. Beautiful weather, and the last thing I want to do is make a piece of music for the Swarowski museum. 7/21/2015 Moonlight Cafe 7/21/2022 It is true that jazz is more “intellectual” as much as I want to avoid making it pejorative. But like the “Mozart Effect” it won’t make you smarter just by listening to it as a form of hypnosis. Perhaps there is something in the harmonic density that makes it sound smarter than other things. But it’s just plain old harmony. Culture has a way of over-complicating things that are otherwise prosaic. 7/21/2024 When I sit down to writ...
0721
7/21/1969 (Beatles Studio Diary) John hadn’t offered a new song since April and did vocal takes on Come Together. John sings while clapping his hands with tape echo, and immediately after each time he sang the line “shoot me”. On the finished record you only hear the word “shoot” because the bass covers “me”.
0621
A piece of music derived from the rhythm of the phrase, "Cross-written letter from Annie Lister", also using the lyrics from The Letter by the Box Tops as a parallel or "cross-written" lyric. Lister's letter was dated June 21, 1824, 200 years ago. It was 140 years after that there was a "psychedelic" music played on instruments that you would "plug in". Back in the 1820s, "popular" music consisted of (in Anne Lister's world) going to performances of solo flute music, then going to purchase the sheet music to learn how to play it. String Arrangement: 200 Years (Strings) by meta4s The Short (Single):
Deep and Cold
An example of going from prose to poetry to lyric. AI music generation is a challenge because you have to take so much out in order for it to work with the algorithms. It's an interesting process, but if I were to create a song manually, it certainly would not have this kind of simplistic harmony, but it does work as a finished recording. Seed: 4/21/2022 New idea inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s Field Guide For Getting Lost, particularly the “Blue Of Distance” bit. The prose sounded musical. The poem: The blue on the horizon Is a special place where light unfolds It is a deeper space; there's more sky to hold But it is deep and cold And in the deep and cold it rolls In the deep and cold it rose Touch the soil The soil, the land Touch the water Then touch the sand As you catch the sun And walk the beach Heard from on the cliffs An echo's reach
March 21sts
3/21/2001 Piece on NPR about Paul Horn’s new solo flute disc recorded in the Taj Mahal. The interviewer asked, “How is this different from all the other thousands of new age recordings?” “It has a sense of place”, he said. If you don’t know the context in which it was recorded in India, you wouldn’t know the difference. A stereo recording obviously captures an immersive environment such as the Taj Mahal: You have to physically be in the space to get the full impact of this kind of work. This is the type of piece that makes a recording superfluous. [4/2021: An interesting play on words for Music For Places would be “Music For Palaces”. Sometimes music requires a place and recordings can provide that by padding the music in some way with the use of some kind of an effect or reverb. Otherwise it’s just too flat and reverb is a way to not only add a space but it also decorates the music and creates a production “look”, as there would be a “look” or color space applied to a fil...
February 21sts
2/21/1998 John Lennon said that whatever changes we go through, whether they be permanent or not, last forever because it brought the relationship to a point where both people changed, and that change would not have been possible without the relationship. Film: Mother and Son by Russian filmmaker. Visually seductive. I would have liked to have seen more image manipulation rather than long static scenes of them in existential discourse. Not much of a score, which gave me lots of ideas of how I do it. Film was in a small theater at the Music Box, replete with lumpy seats and poor sight lines. It’s so funny to watch people before the show playing musical chairs to audio, while looking at the back of someone’s head. *** As a "redacted" lyric/poem: *** Reduced to lyrics: Went to see a movie Visually seductive Long static scenes In the music box Too ha...
January 21sts
1/21/2000 Some say the web is overhyped. I think it’s underutilized and used for the wrong things. [1/21/2025: One technology that proved not to be hyped is cloud computing]. [1/21/2026: As a technology matures from its infancy or "pet trick" phase, flaws and defects begin to emerge--the first one that too many people are doing it and it makes it too unserious. The reason that art mediums are pronounced dead is for this reason. They are rather injured--not dead] 1//21/2008 As more and more artists realize that our strength is in our solidarity, we can produce and publish our own recordings, and efficiently market them using the myriad tools now available on the internet. We should all be grateful that the music business gravy train is dead anyway, and we can move on with better ideas such as the fee-based model for music consumers. 1/21/2013 ...
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9/21/2009
On Van Buren at Wells, there’s this seedy tavern (Cal’s), and in one of the windows they made this strange “shrine” with a broken guitar and a Sinatra record. Went to performance of Turkish military ensemble at Millennium Park. I don’t know why but I have an affinity for Turkish folk song and Taqsim—almost a form of jazz riffing, but at the same time ritualistic and devotional.
June 21sts
The other side of the year: December 21sts 6/21/1999 Lunchtime concert by Nigerian group. Summer solstice. Came and went at 2:49 p.m. while I was in a meeting. 6/21/2000 The web is about “meaningful miniatures” [Shorts]. A short video clip that’s meaningful is better than a 2-minute clip that takes 5 minutes to download and winds up being not worth the time. [6/21/2026: Meaning can be a feeling of satiety, but then there can never be enough meaning (or satiety)]. 6/21/2009 Bought the iPhone. When you get one of these, they become a body organ you can’t live without. It remains to be seen if it informs life or becomes another distraction. 6/21/2012 The greatest shadows from June light around 530P: 6/21/2014, Saturday Field recording at Lurie Garden . There are three spatial layers: sound of birds (foreground 1), human voices (foreground 2); mechanical noises (background 1), w...
