My brother Daniel leads a band called The Silver Seas, which has seen a lot of press after their recent name change (from The Bees (U.S.)) and the re-release of their album High Society on the Cheap Lullaby label. They scored a glowing review over at Cool Hunting, and AMG (Allmusic) calls the album “A stunning achievement.” If you’re in Nashville by chance, you should come see the Seas at the Basement this or and next Wednesday night. You won’t regret it.

Update 12/14: A long interview with my brother at Puremusic.

One Christmas, my brother and I compiled a mix CD from his vinyl record collection. It’s filled with records we had growing up. We hooked his turntable and receiver up to a laptop and recorded each song as it played, being careful to include all the space between songs, so the final CD would never leave you alone in cold silence. We sat on the floor, looking through stacks of LPs while putting the mix together. We read the liner notes, examined the record covers, and listened intently, and it felt like we were tapping into a cultural tradition that was lost long ago. It was a listening style that is way outside of today’s digital music experience.

As packaging has shrunk over the years, digital music has gradually degraded the visceral connection with artists. Brian Eno often talks about the importance of identifying the inside and outside of art—of asking yourself, “Where is the frame?” With packaged music, the frame is everything but the music. The frame brings the artist closer to the listener. The Velvet Underground is universally associated with Andy Warhol’s banana print from the LP cover. Michael Jackson brings himself closer to us with his fold-out portrait on “Thriller.” But we have taken so many steps backward since the arrival of digital music. With CDs, the frame was reduced by 75% and placed in a plastic cell.

Now the iPod is our frame for listening to digital music. A slab of white plastic and chrome, sterilized and dissociated from its creator. White like the walls of an art museum; there is no cultural context. Instead there are three lines of text: song title, artist, and album title. This is not a rich experience, this is a radio request line. With the latest digital music technology, the life-sized headshot of Marvin Gaye on my “What’s Going On” LP is represented as a 200x200 pixel scan of a CD cover. It’s a fuzzy JPEG that I can squint at—just enough information to recall the splendor of the actual foot-square album cover. But there is nothing to open up, nothing to read, and no interaction. There is no deeper discovery, and certainly nothing physically collectible. MP3s may have the advantage of simplicity and atomization, but they alone deliver so much less metadata than even CDs did. There’s a thick curtain between me and the performer.

How can the experience be rescued? Does anyone care about the visual aesthetic of music anymore, or is it all really just MySpace and mp3s?

Under the iTunes model of digital music, a single song is the new album. It’s not much different from what they were doing with radio hits before, but nowadays a hit doesn’t have to have a whole album behind it. At this moment, half of the top ten selling songs on iTunes are singles. You could picture one day having a slow-release model: pay $10 now and we’ll send you a new Green Day song every month for the next year. After the year, the 12 songs are grouped together into an album. Green Day can spread the hype about their music across the whole year and gradually add new material to their set list to keep the show exciting. CDs never provided a convenient way to do this.

now the clock is striking one
so we might as well begin it
as there’s dancing to be done
and our time is not infinite

if there’s such a thing as love
if there’s such a thing as love
I’m in it.

- from The Magnetic Fields’ new album, I, which is pretty fantastic. They’ve got my kind of melodies and lyrics. Funny and sweet, but not without a good dose of dark irony. And no synths.

Sasha gave me this fantastic Talk Talk CD today, called Laughing Stock, released in 1991. This is really a beautiful and underappreciated disc. It has lyrics but might as well be an instrumental disc, very relaxed, but loaded with texture. This is the kind of CD I hear one time and just know that I’ll be listening to for a while. (prior to this, it was Neil Finn’s Try Whistling This)

I own Talk Talk’s Natural History greatest hits CD, but Laughing Stock is entirely different. No pop hits on this one, just straight up vibe. The songs are odd and eerie but beautiful. I’m reminded of Radiohead because of the arrangement and musical experimentation on this disc, and of Doves because they’re willing to take you over the edge and then reel you back in. But you can tell that Talk Talk is something different, that the members combine to form an unmistakable style. I like it when a disc is heavily layered in the sonic space but the micro scale is left intact (you can still tell which pieces make it all work, isolate the individual musicians, and so on).

Anyway, after rereading the previous paragraph, I’ve realized that music reviews are bullshit when discussing the music alone. I don’t know the people story behind Talk Talk, and there are only so many adjectives that describe a sound—so isn’t it sort of futile? In citing people—influences rather than my sonic perception—I could point vaguely to “jazz” and Brian Eno and perhaps Pink Floyd’s DSotM, but I’d say this only to serve your understanding of how it sounds, when you should really just listen for yourself and get whatever it is you get out of it.

here’s a mildly interesting one.. musicplasma. See links between related artists, and their particular spheres of influence. Graph sites like this are always exciting to see, but consistently leave something to be desired. What is to be desired?

I think more fluidity in the interface would help. But also more information, somehow. Actually, I think different information is what I want. Why does a graph model help show the relationships between artists better than a simple list with links ala. allmusic or amazon’s related artists? Musicplasma isn’t showing me more, as far as I can tell. The lines between artists seem arbitrary (is it “people who bought Fleetwood Mac also bought Paul Simon”?). I know the artists are related without any lines. If lines are made, I want them to have meaning. For example, the color or thickness of the line represents how likely I am to enjoy that other artist, based on which artist I’m looking at and what the system knows about my tastes. Now that’s something Amazon doesn’t show with a list.

An excellent article in the NY Times Mag on Timbaland and the Neptunes. My favorite bit:

”The best music right now is country music,” he went on. ”The old country music, the old bluegrass stuff — the lyrics in that stuff are incredible. And the damn melodies? Think about Bonnie Raitt. She’s country, right? She made the illest song ever, ‘I Can’t Make You Love Me.’ ” He sang me a line: ”Turn down the lights, turn down the bed/Turn down these voices inside my head.”

Timbaland also thinks Pat Benatar’s ”Love Is a Battlefield” is the ”illest song ever,” and he adores old hits by Men at Work and the Human League. ”Eighties music is music to me,” he said. ”Those are records that make you feel good, you know? I’m tired of stuff now, even stuff that I do. Coldplay and Radiohead are the illest groups to me. That’s music. Norah Jones is music. I love real music that I can play and never get tired of. The stuff I don’t get tired of is the stuff that’s musical.”

Made a half-decent koresh tonight. The chicken, onion, saffron, turmeric, cinnamon half was decent. I could have stopped right there. But then I added tomato puree and simmered for a while.. and it got too tomato-y. Deliberating about what to do with it next. Turn it into a soup? Let it hang out in the fridge, and see what kind of crust forms?

Bought the #1 selling iTunes song: OutKast’s “Hey Ya!” from their latest Speakerboxxx/The Love Below 2-disc set. I’m not an OutKast fan, but I have to respect how good this is. They understand intensity, coupled with the kind of simplicity that sticks with you. In fact, I’m shocked by the simplicity. This song could have been put together on an 9-track recorder:

• lead vocals (duet) with tons of energy
  
• simple backing vocals, and “uh!” and “ah!” fills
  
• bass guitar, which carries the whole melody
  
• simple acoustic guitar strum
  
• simple bass/snare drum
  
• hand claps
  
• a great warped synth bass thing
  
• a synth keyboard sound for some upper end/complementary melody
  
• a few other noodling synth sounds, very electronic, but only used to boost the energy in the second/third verses.

OK, maybe it’s not that simple when you lay it all out, but it sure sounds simple. I guess that’s the trick with almost any music: Not to muddle things up. Missy Elliot understands it; her current single Pass That Dutch, on This Is Not A Test!, has little more than vocals, hand claps, and a very simple bass synth sound.

All the good stuff is in the spaces, as usual.

I put together a holiday mix with Daniel, and I’m giving it to friends. We made it on Christmas Day from vinyl records my brother has lying around. The idea was that vinyl would give it the nostalgic vibe, and most of the songs are quiet and warm. It’s like someone got ahold of Starbucks’ holiday christmas CD and removed all the evidence of 2003, replacing it with evidence of the mid-20th century. All that Nora Jones, Alicia Keys, and whoever else is replaced by Nat “King” Cole, Stan Getz, et al., then augmented by Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and the like, just to spice it up.

Here’s the track listing:
1. The Christmas Song (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire)
Nat “King” Cole
2. Baby Lets Swing
Todd Rundgren
3. Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
Bob Dylan
4. Les Paumes du Petit Matin
Jacques Brel
5. Corcovado
Stan Getz w/Astrud Gilberto
6. Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat
Bob Dylan
7. Dreamsville
Henry Mancini
8. Gone with “what” wind
Charlie Christian
9. Woman in Love
Streisand
10. Everybody Needs Somebody to Love
The Rolling Stones
11. Boots of Spanish Leather
Bob Dylan
12. Mama Miss America
Paul McCartney
13. You Can’t Always Get What You Want
The Rolling Stones
14. January in Bombay
Chet Atkins

The Lizard Lounge is a club beneath a restaurant in Harpo, that section of Mass Ave between Harvard and Porter Squares in Cambridge. The club is intimate and friendly, it has nice oriental rugs, red curtains and red lighting, and it always delivers a good show. The stage is right there on the floor, so if you show up early and get a seat, the perfomer will be singing into your beer. Last night I went to there to see Nashville “alt-folk” singer Sarah Siskind and the Cambridge-based Maybe Baby. It was really an all-star cast up there. Sarah sounded great with and without accompaniment. I haven’t heard her sing in years, so it was a real treat because I think she’s zoned in on a style and written some great songs since then. Sometimes Sarah looks and sounds like she just stepped out of the 1800s, though her arrangements have a modern twist to them. She has really good control of her voice, and she can really hit upon some haunting melodies. If you get a chance, pick up the record Covered.

Maybe Baby was also pretty tasty. Last night it was five-piece band with petal steel replacing the usual organ/piano. They sounded pretty excellent, and it was great to see Jennifer Kimball again (I saw her probably 10 years ago with Jonatha Brook & The Story). I liked being so close to the stage, watching Duke Levine’s insane guitar solos and Billy Beard’s drumming. Good show!

I tried out Reason this evening out of curiosity (Daniel kept talking about it) .. though the demo is very limiting, I get the idea of it. If you had a $10,000 G5 with all kinds of audio cards and a modicum of skill, you could do some serious damage with this program.

To Freddie:

I finally visited CafePress this evening and was impressed. I love the idea of personalized, one-off goods. I like being able to charge whatever I want.

Here are the downsides:

• CafePress doesn’t allow limited editions. I want scarcity, and they don’t have it.
  
• Almost every product is white. Maybe I should consider this a blessing. But I really wanted to make a line green T-shirt with white lettering.
  
• The products are also pretty cheap. Where’s the super soft Italian cotton t-shirt, with nice stitching, etc?
  
• You’re limited in where you can print. No special messages on the bottom of the beer stein. etc.
  

But I can find “flaws” in anything. Overall, I must say I’m pleasantly surprised. Here’s my store. Do you think my prices are too low?

To Patrick:

I just read an article in the New Yorker this week about the current state of the music industry. They said the major labels control something like 85% of the music market. So I was wondering where you’d heard that indies had surpassed the majors.

It’s an interesting read because they talk about the decline of the mega-hits.. albums that used to sell 5-10 million copies (ie. Alanis Morisette) are now selling 3-4 million (ie. Avril Levigne). Thanks to KaZaa, of course.

But the upshot was: People will always need information filters. They talked about having a government-levied monthly fee you’d pay the music industry, whether you get any music or not, and in return you can download whatever you want and they would provide a nice filtering system for you— something like amazon’s recommendations. Artists might still get paid based on number of downloads. The fee would have to be government regulated, though, for every IP address. Apparently TVs work this way in Britian…

Were this to happen, it’d raise three points in my mind…
- how might the actual music change as a result? and the listening experience? my brother and I were talking today about vinyl records.. and what a visceral “art experience” they can be. getting to look at this big piece of accompanying art (the album cover, liner notes) while listening. people used to sit down and just listen to whole records together.. but you’d never dream of doing that with a CD. The smaller format is only partly to blame, I’m sure, but it leaves me wondering if listening will ever make a comeback.
- what kind of filtering would the labels impose, and might they be able to figure out what I really want? (amazon still hasn’t…)
- A change like this could cause the outside of the art to become the future money maker. Forget about the music, it’s really just a jingle for the artist’s “brand” .. clothes, posters, tea…physical goods.