So I was talking to Melissa (XO) today about a film project she’s working on involving sudden brain damage & it’s effect on artists. Which reminded me of Frank Frazetta & him having a stroke & then teaching himself to paint/draw left handed. Anyway, here’s a documentary on him (don’t know if this is legally up on YouTube or not, so it may get taken down at some point):
So when I was driving yesterday I was listening to the classic rock station (my CD player is on the fritz on & off) & Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” played. Wow, it is interesting because it is so clearly assembled using sampling riffs/drums/vocals/etc rather than being a live performance, I can just see the graph & squares listening to it. Interesting given that it’s theoretically a rock song rather than a dance/pop song. I don’t know if this sound is so obvious to non-musicians (do any non-musicians read this blog?) & maybe it felt fresh & interesting at the time (just like autotune did when Cher used it on “Believe” in 1998 & now it’s just annoying) & now it just feels strangely clunky & amateur in the engineering department though still quite adequate as a beer drinking fight anthem. Anyway, here’s the video which surprisingly has a lot of female nudity….
I’m reworking last year’s SPACE Anthology & putting up the last touches on the current one. I downloaded a shareware that is supposed to convert PDFs to CBZs, so we’ll see how it works out. For those of you that aren’t comic geeks, while PDFs are the standard ebook document format, CBZs are basically a zip file containing image files that can be opened without unzipping it & are quite popular amongst the 1% (or less) of the population that enjoy reading comics on the computer or their cellphone.
I talked a bit with Jason Ward today about the new Irata record & recording techniques. They’re talking about going to Canada to record the next album. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with it. They’re going to be adding vocals on the album. A debut of some of the new material will be at the Silber Showcase on April 2.
I finally got my robot to finish sorting who I should contact on MySpace sending direct messages about the blog moving over here & all that. Roughly a third of the friends I had on MySpace fit the profile for bothering to send a message to (one of the big parameters was they had to have logged into MySpace in the past 90 days). Now I just need to write up the message & spend 30 minutes each morning for 20 days getting them sent out. So some of you may be getting that message. We’ll see if it regenerates some of the interest that I feel like has been lost in Silber since MySpace’s decline (as MySpace’s decline seems roughly the same as the economy, it’s hard to pin it all directly to that).
Funny you’d mention the Kravitz thing because I was listening to some of his stuff today and thinking the same thing. The album that Fly Away is on, 5, has a few songs on it that I really like (I Belong to You, Straight Cold Player, Thinking of You). One of them came up when I was listening to my mp3 player, and I had to change it because the loops were just too bland to listen to over and over again. I really do like the bass lines and the overall progressions in those songs, but it’s just too much for me sometimes. From what I understand, he didn’t use loops or ProTools up until 5, so Fly Away and the other tracks are the first time he did it and it’s probably really obvious because he was new to it.
But I know you were commenting on samples and listeners as opposed to Kravitz. So sorry for the tangent! But anyway, my opinion on it, being a musician that works with loops, is 1. most people don’t notice them or even understand how they work exactly, 2. to take it a step further, they don’t even listen to music wondering how it gets put together, and 3. you’re average non-musician doesn’t care whether it’s a loop or full performance, only how the song feels when they listen to it.