Lee Barry's Blog, page 22

Tedious Play

 I watched an interview a while back with Todd Rundgren in which they were asking about his process for the A Capella album where he was using a very early sampler, or perhaps the Fairlight, to record and elaborately orchestrate vocal samples mapped to individual keys. One of the interviewers was nonplussed: "What drove you to do something that was so tedious?" But that's the way it was then and

Sonic Cubism/Futurism

 
Tullio Crali, The Forces of the Bend, 1930

With all the news that's being generated these days about music AI, It's not enough just to read about it or watch videos. What you have to do is listen to the music! If there is a link in the article, I'll go directly for that. But what I've been hearing for about five years now is not encouraging or interesting. It's essentially a fixation on the

The Intergenerational Band

The current book I'm reading is The Generation Myth. In some ways, it's the counterpoint to The Fourth Turning. Generations can appear to fall into patterns, but perhaps it's only because we're primed to find patterns, and then spin myths to live by. The author is GenX, and I suspect that the readers are in that generation and before, perhaps Millennials. GenZ is perhaps too young and

Why Old Music Is Killing New Music

 Neo-Victorian Maximalism
It's not necessarily killing it--it's just not nourishing it. By design, anything that wants to be radically new must make a clean break. It just wants to do its own thing.  Typically, old music informs new music because musicians delve into the past just out of curiosity--like I did when I first heard Stravinsky. At least there should be some reverence for older music

Bookstore As Sanctuary

 
Even when the weather is sub-freezing, you can cool off at your local bookstore (if you have one), as a kind of sanctuary.I feel lucky to have The Book Table in my town and they always have something interesting playing in the background. There can be interesting synchronicities: The other day I was browsing through the guitar book, Immortal Axes, and while I was looking at photos of Brian

Wordplay Is a Form of Music

 
Music is a form of wordplay. (Incidentally, it's also antimetabole).It is almost needless to say that there is an intimate connection between music and language. But the connection is not at the higher levels of music: a symphonic work relates to specific meaning through language, such as a composer basing the work on literature. Many composers were also writers in the sense that they had

Podcasts Circa 1970

 Almost everyone had some kind of a tape recorder when they were in grade school in the 1970s. I had several, my first a Panasonic (several perhaps) because the Panasonic catalogs were so compelling. I was essentially making very lo-fi "Podcasts" back in the early 1970s. Listening back to The Monkees Headquarters after Nesmith's death, I realized lots of those recordings are very lo-fi, even

Music in Language (Cont.)

Dynaxiom 2370. It's easier to find poetry in prose than prose in poetry, but music can be in both. I like re-using existing prose for musical purposes. Simply mapping syllables in a musical context is a way to make it naturally generative. If you think in this way, writer's block is never a problem. There is no such thing as a blank page in the digital space because the words are already there

Blues Riffs

 Creativity can start anywhere for me. Sometimes I loop back and review my collected aphorisms (Dynaxioms). It's a way to refine them, and get other ideas in the process. It's always been like sitting down with an instrument working with ideas in progress, then getting sidetracked into something else while riffing. Blogging is a form of cultivation just for the sake of itself.  Blues got into

Jazz Riffs

   Some Dynaxioms with the word "jazz" in it:Jazz sounds like art, but it's really more like a science. My definition of improvisation: taking set structures and using developed skills in rhythm, harmony, and melody to create organized sounds that comport with the set structures in a listener's brain. When you define (or create a Definition for) something it helps you understand what's involved.