Another month.

So this blog has sunk back again. Listened to some short story on NPR about a man who was recording his whole life, every day... and had been doing it for well over a decade. Seems utterly ridiculous, but i realized that this blog is itself a snapshot of my thinking about music over the last 4 years. When I read my old posts, i remember my state of mind, i remember where i was and what i was listening to. Its great to leave these crumbs behind. I dont know if anyone else will ever follow them, but I enjoy revisiting my thoughts from time to time.

Im going back to France in two weeks for a trip. Visiting and vacationing family and friends is the central reason... but it'll also be wonderful to be back in la france, i can get back to speaking french regularly. Then Turkey! thats by far the most exciting thing this year... visiting turkey and seeing the ruins there. I really look forward to it!

Ive found i havent been listening to much of the music in my collection... Its OK by me, ive heard all of it pretty well through now. Im greedy, and I'm begging to know where i can find the next interesting thing.

Anyone heard anything interesting recently?

My lazy summer:

Ive having a wonderfully self-indulgent, sunny, warm summer. Basking in the post-graduation glow, I am being incredibly lazy.

On lala I've had the chance to listen to the lush electronics of the Helio sequence. Particularly their first and second albums.`This surreal track, filled with floating, spiraling processed sounds appeales to my taste for heavlily layered musical anarchy. Animal collective holds the same attracton.

But compared to the earler tracks of Animal collectve, the vocals here are more conventional, fitting in with typical indy-rock Sprechgesang melodic patterns .

Now that school, and its associated thesis is firmly out of the picture, I'm going to try and concentrate on music again. My goal is to write out the entire Music for a Suburban Scene out by the end of the year. Its high time I get the damn thing finished in some form (even if means later re-writes). I've also decided I want to undertake an even more personal project, the creation of pieces for all my close friends and family.

Right now I have written out one of these kinds of things. A short, simple piece called For February 18th (my friend's birthday) and I Have every intention of writing a For December 18th, For July 2nd, For September 26th, and so on. Its a little more personal than a card. I always liked doing art projects for friends. Gives me a purpose to make something. I mean, if its just for me, whats the point?

Graduated.

Now what?

(post #300, woo)

Me messing around (Improv )

So i have this etude idea i came up with the other day, and a friend of mine recorded it for me on cam. Sorry for the squeeky chair. Its an improv that kinda sputters out. The first part is supposed to be a little flashy.

Thoughts on Machaut.

One of the most striking observations of the west Ive ever encountered was written by an Egyptian novelist in the late 19th century. I forgot his name, and the work he wrote, but in it he expressed a bewilderment with the western worlds obsession with representation, reproduction and detached observation.

Westerners, in his mind, wanted nothing more than to place everything under glass to study. They wanted to re-create and represent something for scrutiny, for the academy. Life itself would become a museum, with this constant, futile aim to comprehend something through some kind of mirror, through a painting and a model, or a sculpture or a novel.

It could be argued that this mentality arises from the scientific method, from rationality, from the impulses of "modernism" in the western sense, and from the academic aim of expanding our knowledge. These mirrors westerners create may be, in the eyes of an egyptian, only two dimentional deceptive depictions of reality.

Listening to some of this, early notated music, looking at ancient cartography (Arab, Roman, Indian, Western Medieval), I cant help but think this wasnt an isolated western phenomenon. One cultivated by the academies, certianly. Machaut's gorgeous Notre Dame mass is music from the middle ages, written down hundreds of years ago and preserved like the scripture it recites. This begs the question, why was the notation of music seen in other literate civilizations? The arabs themselves during the period of Machaut were readers and critics of Plato and Aristotle long before Erasmus or Francis Bacon, and probably maintained much higher literacy rates among the general populations than in Western Europe at the time. Yet, why did they not leave an extensive musical notation system?

These were the people that introduced the Persian Tar to Spain, which evolved into the lute of Renaissance Europe and celebrated Spanish Guitar, these were people who influenced western musical development in this same period though trobador song. But where is the notation of this Arab music from the time of Machaut? We still have the traditions of Andalucian song in Morocco, Algeria, Tunesia, but was it a lack of this impulse for the preservation, representation and reproduction of music that kept beautiful arab script out of music? and is the fine-tuned precision of western notation the result of this same impulse?

...

There is a universe of music waiting to explored. Yesterday, thanks to Smithsonian Global Sound ( accessed through my university) I fell in love with music from Azerbaijan and its neighboring Armenia. Hearing these sweet melodies and unfamiliar instrumentation brings out urges to travel and explore, the exuberance in this music lifts my ears. I look forward to getting to know music from the Caucasus region. Yet it is daunting, hundreds of tracks of music recorded in this small region (about the size of my state) and I still have so much to hear.

Just the other day I was enjoying the beauty of Oumou Sangare's music. From Mali to Azerbaijan, there are so many incredible corners of the world, and an equally dizzying number of beautiful pieces of music. Lala.com is great for connecting up to this music, as it contains an incredible number of tracks online.

I need to travel again. I'm getting antsy.

Currently working on my thesis on 20th century urbanism in Marseille, France (not focusing on Corbu), who would of thought that it would have been so difficult to find writing on? ah well, that cosmopolitan city is my favorite in France.