Music Is My Hot Hot Sex, Music Is My Radar...and Music Is My DNA

I was dreaming, and I heard a very beautiful sound, familiar, like it had always been in the background, but strange, like I'd never heard it before.

As I concentrated on it, more distinct parts became audible. It was, in fact, a song-- and it was coming from my body. Specifically, my DNA. Each strand was vibrating, like a harp or violin or guitar string, and emitting its own melodic sound, and the combination of the melodies created a song...

At that moment in the dream someone passed by, and I heard the song specific to her resonating DNA. Next to her was a man, and he had his own song... and a child near them, who had his own song... in the dream I then had an aural birds-eye-perspective... I heard all the songs from all the people in the plaza, and how together, they formed a much larger and more complex song. It was symphonic, not cacophonic.

Sometime later, in the real world, I read about string-theory, which is where, to quote the Wikipedia entry, "... the fundamental constituents of reality are strings of extremely small size... which vibrate at specific resonant frequencies":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/String_theory

That is, the stuff that makes up the universe vibrates like a harp string...and if people are made of of different and unique combinations of those resonating strings, then everyone is their own symphony (or LCD Soundsystem).

So the genesis of "Music Is My DNA" by K.I.A. (from the "Sonorous Susurrus" CD) was to make a song that had very distinct parts (or DNA) spliced together to make a cohesive sound. So in it you'll hear some middle-eastern chants, a hum that makes up a background beat, some flutes, a latin tango, an African chan,t some electro-funk, some disco and digi-reggae... even some piano and glockenspiel, all of course mosaiced with electronica.

Of course there are many artists building music from disparate DNA (don't call it frankentronica please,) but the obvious ones are Fatboy Slim, the Chemical Brothers, Manitoba (Caribou), Four Tet, Kid Koala, Cut Chemist, Gorillaz... the list could go on forever. So for fun, here's a different list instead, of some more "Music Is My..." songs, links to clips on iTunes:

Music Is My DNA by Shinjuku Zulu

Music Is My Hot Hot Sex by CSS

Music Is My Radar by Blur

Music Is My Boyfriend by The Hidden Cameras

And for fun here's an iMix of 13 songs

One final thought: I'm also a visual artist (more on how that relates to the music in another post) and what recently struck me was how you cannot invent new colors never seen before, but you can invent new sounds never heard before (synthesizers didn't exist two hundred years ago).

Singing Pi... and Massive Ballerina

So I made the mistake of mentioning the idea for a song to Sinead O’Connor, and Kate Bush ended up stealing it.

Really.

Well, maybe. A few years ago (when I was writing for the music mag, see other posts below) I was interviewing Sinead O’Connor, and we were talking about how songs originate, and I mentioned that I’d had a dream where a person was singing the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard… the song was perfect, it was mysterious, and it was endless.

It was the number pi.

But in the dream the song didn’t feel dry, abstract or mathematical; it was very emotional and meaningful and passionate… and you weren’t even really able to hear the numbers, it was more a connection to the energy conveyed through the syllables of the words of the numbers… sort of like how Elizabeth Fraser chooses her words for the beauty of how they sound (including taking words from foreign dictionaries) not for any literal meaning (i.e. “Frou Frou Foxes In Midsummer Fires” by the Cocteau Twins.)

So I didn’t record the song, but I did write a story in which the main character is a performer and she sings the song Pi. She sings it as a love song to her husband. (She is married to a visual artist who exhibits his work in his stomach. As far as I know there haven’t actually been any artists who use their belly as an exhibition hall… but hey now that I’ve mentioned it… please don’t do it. It’s a (purposely) bad idea.)

I’m not sure if you can ever claim an idea, or if you even should. I do believe in the collective unconscious, and that certain ideas are maybe ‘out there’ in the ether and can be thought of or discovered simultaneously in different locations (a la the product nylon, discovered in New York and London at the same time). And anyway music, maybe more than the other arts, (writing, sculpture) is all about building and evolving on ideas, like say the tradition of when you write a ‘new’ traditional Irish song that at least one third of it should be taken from previous songs as an ode/recognition… or like say sampling, building from sounds or components lifted from songs, or mashups where whole chunks of two or more songs are spliced together.

So back to Kate Bush, song-stealer. Did Sinead talk to Kate at a music festival, or talk to someone about the song idea who knew someone who knew Kate, or did someone read the magazine interview who passed along the idea who… well in a six-degrees-of world, maybe. It is a very very specific and unsual idea for a song. But who cares? Really, the idea sucked- the song would come across as very cold and abstract and well, mathematical, unless you had an extraordinary singer to give the number lyrics a haunting, ethereal, transcendence, a singer like, say, Kate Bush…

So I’m reading CD reviews about Kate Bush’s newest (this was in late 2005) because I’ve always been a fan, and every interview and review mentions this particular song Kate sings called, you guessed it, Pi, where she sings 3.14…

At first I’m a little bugged, but then upon hearing it I’m immediately glad she did it (hey, she walked it, I’d just talked it); her voice makes the dry numbers sing, and she leavened the numerical with the lyrical- the verses are all words -and, here’s the best part, the song is a love song… to (or about) her husband.

Her song is much better than I would ever have been able to do anyway- I mean, she’s Kate Bush. When the genesis of a song is an idea (rather than an emotion) the whole point is to bring it back to the level of feeling… otherwise the song is just sound… and of course Kate “Wuthering Heights” Bush is an expert at emoting.

A lot of electronic artists like Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, and countless artists from Berlin have songs that are head-based, but unfortunately they often seem to remain there, never moving down the heart. So wheras BoC’s “In A Beautiful Place Out In the Country” is emotionally transcendent, they have a lot of songs like “Music Is Math” which have a certain intellectual appeal but leave me cold. So what if you use Fibonacci sequences, or use medical equipment (Matmos) to make a song if it doesn’t make you feel anything? And where I appreciate Aphex Twin, records like “Drukqs” are hard to listen to more than once (if even that). Even Kraftwerk, those Teutonic geniuses, often fail to do engage more than the grey matter- I far prefer “Hall of Mirrors”, a very moving song, or even “The Model”, to “Numbers” or “Pocket Calculator” or “Autobahn” or or or… all of which I suppose are meant to be empty. (however, I do love the sounds in all of them).

So the genesis for the song “Massive Ballerina (Pirouettes For Millenia)” from the “Various Chimeras” CD by Shinjuku Zulu was primarily to see if an obvious computer-generated voice could sing an emotionally transcendent song. (A few artists have used that Mac robo-voice… I think Radiohead used it in “Fitter Happier ” -a song that’s basically a list, which reads well but doesn’t listen-well).

Massive Ballerina (Pirouettes For Millenia), for those of you who don’t bother listening to lyrics, is not about an overweight dancer in a tutu. (However, if you do a google on “Massive Ballerina” all sorts of weird sex stuff comes up related to just that. Who knew?) As to what the title imagery is about, here’s a hint: the lyrics start off small and close, but end very huge and very far away.

Anyway, because the words only appear briefly in the mostly-instrumental song, below are the lyrics. The track is available worldwide at iTunes here:

Massive Ballerina by Shinjuku Zulu

intimately, beneath a digital moon,
fractal flowers, in full bloom,
sway back and forth as one…
infinitely dreaming of the analog sun

massive ballerina
on a dark stage, pirouettes for millenia;
starred arms out, awaiting a hero…
only to embrace endless night, and absolute zero