Lee Barry's Blog, page 25

Music Isn't a Vending Machine

I've been following music AI for some time, and the thing that I realized is that a lot of these softwares and apps exist for making music as a kind of convenience when nothing else is around--like a vending machine when no other options are available. A better metaphor would be that it was like a jukebox, but jukeboxes boxes aren't about convenience, or as a "drive-thru" experience. That said, I

Some People Will Do Anything To Sell Singles

 More thoughts on MTV@40, specifically Duran Duran's then "controversial" Girls on Film video. Kevin Godley of 10cc fame directed the video. “The original idea, I guess, was an ironic take on exploitation, because that's what the song was about,...We were trying to stay true, in our own way, to what the song was about and be ironic about it. But particularly in America, irony isn't a hugely

The Alternative Music School

 
The original page I had on Quora was meant to be an annex of this blog, Musing On Music, but it fell fallow. Now that Quora has introduced Spaces (as its attempt to compete with Facebook pages), I had considered changing it to The Alternative Music School ("AMS"). It is a riff on the London Free School idea, but I had envisioned it being more of a music magazine with feature articles and music

Give Music What It Needs

 A question asked on Quora:  "Kanye West has stated, “Music with guitars is inherently worse than music without guitars-- Do you agree?"
This is an interesting question about an interesting statement. We shouldn’t take anything he says at face value. He has the social capital to say just about anything with credibility. It’s an old artist trick.
Rick Beato did an episode on this a while back. He

You Know Its Hue

Try imagining a new sound. Like imagining new colors, shades, or hues, or new smells and tastes, it is difficult. It is only by experimenting and making prototypes that we can realize what the possibilities are.Trying on new identities works the same way. We see ourselves as a set of possibilities but we keep the default, perhaps because of the way we are genetically built. But changing a style

Props

  Ambiguity is sometimes the most interesting thing in art. Everyone has seen this kind of art that is so bad that it is good. But in this case it's good because it's been celebritized, and not the result of aesthetic naivete. It's possible that it was created as a prop, and on the news, you never really can tell. It's a different kind of ambiguity and slightly more suspicious. Suspiciousness can

At the Edge of Metaverse

 
The other day when I was walking down the main street in my town, there was a fellow in the distance walking towards me. From a distance, he seemed to be wearing VR goggles but it was actually a large black mask. Then I thought, this is how the future will be in a fairly short time with the advent of the Metaverse--with people walking around talking to themselves with VR goggles on. And it will

MTV@40

In August of 1981, I was already starting to move away from progressive rock towards classical and jazz. As I wrote in a previous post, certain types of knowledge and ways of working can get replaced. 1981 was a watershed year for me because that's when the shift happened. A quote that I like and that I keep going back to on the issue of MTV, is from a talk that Brian Eno gave at the

Some August

     Clinton8/1/1997Lunch with D., then Projekt Festival. He said that in his improvisations with the Nervous Center that he thought someone just pushing buttons on a sequencer takes no talent. It does take talent to put thought into it, program the buttons and consider in detail how the buttons will be pushed vis-a-vis the actions of other players. Festival was more scene than substance and the

Displacements

 Thoughts and ideas can sometimes encode the place in which they arose. If you create something from those initial impressions, the location gets encoded in memory, and replays every time you encounter the piece. In the piece Moonrise in Hernandez I’m not recalling New Mexico when I play it, but the much less remarkable Saganashkee Slough in Palos Illinois. That’s the place that’s recorded in