Lee Barry's Blog, page 6

Getting The Idea

 Lots of good takeaways in the Geddy Lee Memoir, to wit, mid-80s when they were doing their Power Windows album and Geddy started to use keyboards and their whole approach changed. Alex Lifeson was feeling his ideas were being snubbed. It’s the classic band rift when someone starts to feel diminished and resentful. What I realize is that if you’re going to be a writer, you have to be a

No Words

 Languages only work if they become standardized or universalized, such that perhaps hundreds or thousands of people are using it over a longer period of time. Languages die if that process doesn’t continually evolve and stay the same at the same time. Many people still can read and write music, but much less than 100 years ago. What parts of a universalized language remain after one or two

Birth Order and Culture

 It's interesting how generations overlap regarding the music they listen to. There are the younger people in a generation (the "firstborns") and the older people in a generation (the "laterborns"). For example, someone born in 1956 is a younger Boomer and someone born in 1966 is an older GenX, and they usually listen to the same music within a range of about 10-20 years.Take the year 1994

On Morricone

 Thoughts on the recent documentary:Influence of John Cage, aleatoric music, Nuova Consonanza Group. Playing instruments in ways they weren't intended. Traditional melodies were banned, anathema to how Morricone worked. But it was his deepest root. His mother said it would be the secret to his success. To this day, people can sing the melodies.Worked at a desk as opposed to the piano-

Change As a Routine

 When you work in systems, particularly creative systems, they can continue indefinitely. The way I work, especially in art is to create a series, e.g. my Intervals and Macrophage series. The problem with New Year’s resolutions is that they don’t really rely on systems--it starts over again at the beginning of a calendar year and isn’t connected to any serial framework. If you work in

Art Versus Music History

  There are times when I think artists have had more interesting lives when you look at them in retrospect. At least from a museum perspective, you get to view an artist’s work in a wing in a museum, curated with other works in the same period. You can’t do that with music because you have to experience each separately.I’m also more fascinated by modern and contemporary art, or the

Is It Craft Yet?

  The flip-side of  Is It Art Yet?Edward Weston, June 1930: "Photography suits the tempo of this age...it is a perfect medium for one whose mind is teeming with ideas, imagery, for a prolific worker who would be slowed down by painting or sculpting, for one who sees quickly and acts decisively...one does not think during creative work: any more than one thinks when driving a car...

Postmodernism As Modernism

 One of the features of postmodern art is that it’s clever and can be puns or send-ups. That’s actually modernist. Just because there is humor in art doesn’t make it postmodern. Warhol’s and Lichtenstein’s appropriation of advertisements is postmodern in the sense that “anything goes”. But the whole act of painting, regardless of subject matter, is modernist, or even pre-modernist. There was

The Sound Of The Future

The Sound Of The Future is a book about the vanguard of voice-assisted technologies as the new way to interact with the internet, specifically a chapter about accessibility and inclusion of different languages in the voice models. In many African countries and especially in India, where there’s not enough support for all the dialects, one person was saying it was very hard to interact with the

DIY/DIA

Ambient records are easily self-produced because of their more conceptual sound design. As a “producer”, I have to admit I have a bias against certain things that don’t fit with the overall vibe. This also includes things that relate to musical things like chord voicings, which can sometimes slip into jazz when you want to avoid jazz, or vice-versa. When you’re self-producing you can make those