Lee Barry's Blog, page 18
July 10, 2022
Hemispherics
As many musicians may remember, the 80s were a period of fusing philosophy, self-help, and general New Age mysticism with music, from Jung and Joseph Campbell to Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson.For me, it was the Police's Synchronicity album. Sting saying that he saw himself as a Jungian analyst when he got older somehow piqued my interest in both what he was doing musically and what he was
Ambient vs. Traditional Composition
Other painters paint a bridge, a house, a boat…I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, and the boat are to be found, the beauty of the air around them. To me the motif itself is an insignificant factor, what I want to reproduce is what lies between the motif in me.--Claude Monet While a song can have atmosphere, atmosphere can't have too much "song" in it. Classical music is "
Building a Life (In America)
Every once in a while I have to go back through my Dynaxioms to see what needs to be changed. Searching the word "America" there was 0449:America is a progressive nation--always building on what it already is, not going back to what it was before. (2005) In my notes I wrote, "deprecate?" but I'm going to leave it in for now.In Revolt of the Masses, José Ortega y Gasset writes:"Everything is
July 3, 2022
Cool Tools
Recently, a Google engineer was claiming that one of the robots that he was working on had sentience.Another article rebutted it by saying that notions of robot sentience should be "left to poets". But poetry and music overlap in many ways. For me, poetry can be the engine for music, even if it winds up being an instrumental. AI can be "instrumental" in that process, but not its raison d'tre.As
July 2, 2022
The Keys To Music
Every new generation gets the keys to music and it's to be determined what they'll do when they get in. The Greatest Generation created, among other things, Big Band and Musique Concrete, the Silent Generation gave us Doo-Wop and Be-Bop, Boomers gave us Rock 'n' Roll and Heavy Metal, Gen X gave us Synth-Pop, Grunge and mosh pits, Millennials gave us Remix and Social Media.Older generations see
June 28, 2022
Owning Sound
There was a piece of art that I created years ago called Just the Red Garments From 16th and 17th-century Painting, which involved photographing just the red garments worn in Old Master paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, stitching them together in a digital file and printing it on silk, so as to embed the "aura" from the paintings as well as things that were happening in the world at that
June 25, 2022
Black Mass
Ad Reinhardt ~1975
A book I have been grazing on over the past few months is Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray, published in 2007 in the midst of the Iraq occupation. I always find John Gray somewhat depressing, but not unlike a good depressing film drama or documentary.The primary premise of the book is that Utopias of any kind are unachievable. In 2007 the
A book I have been grazing on over the past few months is Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia by John Gray, published in 2007 in the midst of the Iraq occupation. I always find John Gray somewhat depressing, but not unlike a good depressing film drama or documentary.The primary premise of the book is that Utopias of any kind are unachievable. In 2007 the
June 19, 2022
Uses of Nostalgia
Music has become very postmodern in the sense that architecture or painting became postmodern. Architectural postmodernism, which started around 1980, was a reaction to minimalism by pulling out the stops on decoration. That same moment happened in music around the same time with MTV, with the "decoration" manifesting as a focus on image.In art, postmodernism was a return to representation (the
June 18, 2022
Using Distance In Ambient Music
Sometimes when I work on mixes I push the louder things to the background. For example, really loud distorted guitars sound like they're two blocks away.Here is a passage from The Wisdom of Psychopaths (of all places) which I thought was a good metaphor for pushing things to the background and pushing things out of attention:"The monk who at the moment of the blast had been practicing a
Emojification of Culture
Untitled Rayograph by Man Ray, 1924The interesting thing about an image-based culture is that it doesn't require articulation of any kind--or very little. This has evolved from Web 1.0 circa 2000 when people were more inclined to write more--not that there isn't writing now--but people were used to more excursive discussions over e-mail or bulletin boards or listservs. Images were simply more
