Sound Art... and Large Slow River

Addendum to the below Micro-poems post: my one and only own foray into spoken-word-over-music realm is the song "Large Slow River" from the "Sonorous Susurrus" CD by K.I.A., where I use (an officially approved) sample of the sound artwork "A Large Slow River" by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. More on it in a moment.

Spoken word is so tricky-- it often comes off as pretentious/artsy/faux-poetic, boring, or worse, in some cases, funny. Good funny is bad; it's like a joke, and once you get it, why hear it again? (Never understood why people buy comedy albums, however brilliant, for this reason.) Bad funny is bad, because... well, that's self-explanatory.

There are so many examples of bad spoke-word-over-music, from the William Shatner stuff (bad funny) to the tracks on the "Dead City Radio" CD by William Burroughs to "Fire Coming Out Of the Monkey's Head" by Gorillaz, and I think even Leonard Cohen ventures into it a few times... and certainly the vast amount of music that samples film dialogue at length (Star Trek, Apocalypse Now, Scarface...yawn.)

Of course, there are some exemplary examples of spoken word too: Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" (not rap, not yet, it's only 1970, but you can see where it's going) and... um, are there any others? Oh yeah, "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb from "The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld" CD.

So anyway... "Large Slow River". Janet Cardiff is a Canadian sound-installation artist. She has done a series of walking audio tours where you place on headphones and listen to the sound installation (which is her talking about what you're seeing, what she saw, memories, surrounding sounds, her footsteps, etc.) as you follow the path she originally took. It's binaurally recorded, so the sounds have a 3D effect and sound very 'real' (unlike stereo, which is only left-right.) So the reality of what you are hearing is the same, but different, from what you are actually experiencing... it's like an overlay from another time or dimension. In the case of "A Large Slow River", a piece that starts in a gallery and moves you outside through a garden, for example, there's a moment when you hear a jet overhead... a very common sound in any urban enviroment, but in the context of the art-piece it forces you to wonder if it really is overhead or just in the recording... and this particular piece also deals with time, as it has splices of an 'earlier' recording in it; so you're not only moving along in 3-D as you walk, you're moving through the same space in a few different time realities... to me though, what elevates this piece is that the writing is so good that it actually is emotionally moving. (See previous post on "John Lilly" by Laurie Anderson)

I was working on this long (dare I say 'epic') track that evolves significantly from beginning to end, and that was sort of in the IDM (intelligent dance music) genre but not quite, and the song needed something to lift it... I came across Large Slow River, started to use pieces of it and it was perfect lyrically: "I wander through the house" fit in with the house beats; "Time travels around me like a large slow river", "turn to the left" and "turn to the right" were great to use with some interesting panning effects; her footsteps I used as a syncopatic drum pattern (something I'd already done with the song 'Freedom', also on 'Sonorous Sururrus'); hell, I was even able to use the lyric "the bridge" for my musical bridge and 'stop' to drop out the beats...anyway, the result is the song does take you on a journey musically and lyrically (yes that old cliche but hopefully a little cooler,) ending on the line "...there are so many moments that we forget about, it's like we're underwater most of our lives, and we only come up for air every once in awhile".


Large Slow River at iTunes

Micro-poems: John Lily, and Dubmarine

I've always been a fan of e.e. cummings, because his poetry is so song-like; you can hear the music in this quote from his poem "somewhere i have never traveled":

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands

Generally, I'm not a big fan of spoken-word, or poetry with music... except for Laurie Anderson's work, because she's so good at it. Of course as in the song "O Superman, but for me especially in the song "John Lilly", where in a micro-poem, she manages to compress more meaning and emotion than there is in many a novel. Here's the lyrics, but go listen to the song:

John Lilly, the guy who says he can talk to dolphins,
said he was in an aquarium and he was talking to a big whale
who was swimming around and around in his tank.

And the whale kept asking him questions telepahtically.
and one of the questions the whale kept asking was:
do all oceans have walls?

Songs that really are poems with music function in a different way than songs that are, well, songs... if they are good, there's an element of revelation, and re-evaluation. Like with that Laurie Anderson song, you're listening to the lyrics, wondering what is going on, and then the very last line opens up the whole story and gives the previous lines so much more meaning. The hook is the lyrical meaning and the emotion, not the vocal or beat... and to hear it again you have to replay the whole song, because it doesn't repeat because it doesn't have a verse/chorus structure.

So the idea behind "Dubmarine" (from the chill-out side of the "Sonorous Susurrus" CD by K.I.A.) is to have what seems to be an ambient instrumental suddenly open up lyrically, with the vocals occuring only in the middle of the song, and then drifting away. The lyrics are these two haikus (that is with a 5/7/5 syllable structure, and a concrete image in the third line that brings together the meaning of the previous two lines), sung by the reggae singer Prince I:

carry us along
take us down till we drown in
an ocean of song

nothing disturbs us
adrift with grace, breathing bass
under dub's surface

Why the haiku structure? For one it enforces brevity (it's the antithesis of a blog) and the compression I was talking about... and two, I think it's kinda interesting having a singer from Jamaica performing lyrics written in a traditional Japanese poetry style. Just kinda continuing exploring the Shinjuku Zulu cultural/temporal themes...

Dubmarine at iTunes

The Wheels of Steel... and Da Riddm Griffin

Collage songs and chimerical music; I've always loved 'em (which is why I also make 'em.) Like poetry, it is a powerful way of combining a multitude of things; emotions, eras, information, cultures, even architectural spaces (because different songs were recorded in different 'rooms') in a very, very condensed way.

I remember hearing "The Wheels of Steel" by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five for the first time and being electrified... Chic/Queen/Blondie and and and...all in one song.

So here's a list of fave 'meta-music' songs to check out, with a list of some Shinjuku Zulu and K.I.A. songs at the end...

"Duck Rock" by Malcolm McLaren, a major influence. Hip hop, Juju, double dutch, merengue -- the song "Buffalo Gals" of course, but also the track "Punk It Up": African singers, Soweto-style funk, lyrics about the Sex Pistols... and later "Madame Butterfly combining opera, electronica, scratching, and spoken word elements...

"Paid In Full" (the Coldcut Remixes) by Erik B. and Rakim was another influence... the "Im Nin Alu" sample by Ofra Haza, so beautiful and suprising when if first appears...

"Pump Up the Volume" by M/A/R/R/S, tons of references, great dance track.

"Deep Forest" with its pygmy chant and "Enigma" with its gregorian chants, combined with electronica-- yes, a little cheesey, but still...

"Praise You" by Fatboy Slim. Soulful, weird.He has a 3rd degree blackbelt in sampling.

"Little Hop of Horror" by Akufen, who introduced (or at least popularised) micro-sampling, where a sample is under a second long, at most.

"Smells Like Teen Booty". Mash-ups often combine the worst of two things: clever-cleverness and nostalgia. You like it only because it combines your favorite songs, or you get the 'joke'. Having said that, this one was pretty good.

"The Grey Album", by Dangermouse, and other projects he's involved in: Gorillaz, Gnarlz Barkley especially. Very good at integrating elements so that they don't sound like references or samples but something entirely new.

The list above of reference/influences could go on much longer, of course but I've got to get back to recording... so here's the Shinjuku Zulu and K.I.A. tracks that I'd describe as chimerical in style (chimerical where one element grows from another, as opposed to collage, where elements are stuck together):

Da Riddim Griffin by Shinjuku Zulu - it's been described as japanese cheerleaders vs. german cabaret vs. electro vs. dancehall vs. square-dancing.

Rashomon by K.I.A., where 30+ previous tracks by Shinjuku Zulu/K.I.A. are micro-sampled.

Allelujah by K.I.A. 17th century dancehall reggae.

Brando
by Shinjuku Zulu. Neil Young & Africa.