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I heard in Tietchens’ compositions diffierent characters and started writing up a (classic, cliché) story about an opera singer in Hamburg in the early 50′s. She is quite successful, indeed so much that people come from all around listening to her voice. Tourist agencies organize trips for people to even listen to her practising on stage. The opera singer has a personal assistant, a misformed little man with a lisp. Then, one day the opera singer is found killed. An inspector of the police starts an investigation. Who did it? The tour guide? The personal assistant? Some fan? In the EAR 2 EAR suite every character gets a part on stage, but there is no solution (as in: who did it).

I worked on the music on and off for a couple of years, until 2004. I negotiated with Die Stadt, the label that originally released the three 7inches of Von Mund Zu Mund. Unfortunately, after a year or so, Die Stadt decided not to go ahead with the release. This was of course a disappointment but in the meantime I had found another direction for experimentation: video. I had stumbled upon the software of [ VVVV ] , an open source tool, much like MAX/MSP but not that expensive (in fact it was and still is free). So, I decided, I will not let my head hang down but make the endeavour even more ambitious: start a video project which supports the audio. And so I took off, working for months mastering the art of VVVV, video editing, rewriting the audio parts to fit in with the video sequences. The final edits were done early 2006.

As you can guess, getting the video material released as a DVD was even more problematic. The material has been gathering dust since 2006. There have been a few public viewings but not with all of the material. The reviews were favorable but the commercial viability wasn’t.

This is the first publication of the entire suite, consisting of six sequences.

Just click the picture to go to the entire album.

You can watch it in one go, or pick one of the sequences.

Unfortunately VIMEO has not transfered the individual sequences properly. This means that there are hiccups during playback. The complete sequence “EAR to EAR, video opera suite (2001 – 2006)” does not have these problems. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This speech, delivered at TED.com is an excellent comment to the debate.

I had to think about this ad when I listened to a song that I had uploaded to Soundcloud last Friday. The original was a 24bit wav.file but Soundcloud compresses the sound to a 128kbs mp3. But then, there’s compression and compression. When I listened to the mp3 version I was appalled by what I heard. The mp3 sounded flatter (dynamics), the soundcolor seemed to have changed and transients had become blunt. So I decided to record the mp3 back to 24bit file and make some comparisons.

On the picture to the left you can see three wave forms (please click to see full detail). The one above is the Soundcloud crunch, the middle one is my own compression and the lower one is the original. You can clearly see that the Soundcloud version is quite distorted from the original and even rather different from the mp3 that I did myself (within Reaper, btw). Actually this Soundcloud file has already been altered because I found out that, for one reason or another, Soundcloud also reversed the phase of the file. So I had to correct this in order to make visual comparison easier. On the pic to right I have gone into more detail. It is at the point where the sound goes from silent suddenly into loud sound (like a drumbeat). The upper wave form is the soundcloud version, the lower one the original. In the original you can clearly see the wave suddenly rise high (red arrow). The picture below is an even better example of how the sound is ruined distorted by the Soundcloud engine. 

Okay, so what you hear when you listen online is definitely NOT what it really is. I would like to ask all people listening to my music on [ soundcloud ] to download the material. I upload everything in FLAC or WAV format and the downloads are in that quality. This is not a post to bash Soundcloud because I think they are really offering a great service. BUT:  if you listen to something and you even remotely like the stuff, then PLEASE DOWNLOAD the original!!!

Denis sent me four tracks in various stages. All of them were ready as far as composition was concerned. Denis just had some concerns about sonic issues and asked me to look into them. Fortunately I was able to make some suggestions that he was enthousiastic about. Of a few compositions, most notably “Proud To Be Loud” he sent me submixes. I simultaneously love working with submixes and find it very challenging because sometimes you drive into alleys that the composer doesn’t appreciate. I always ask composers to be clear about their intentions. If I give a suggestion (a certain mix sample) and they don’t like it, I want to hear it straight away.
Denis’s assignment was very rewarding and he is proud of the result. The Polish music label [ mathka ] will release the music any time soon. Please check it out. In the mean time you can listen to an excerpt below.

A new major assignment is for the next release of Franz Fjödor aka [ Wouter Jaspers ]. Thursday he and I had a good discussion about his intentions and he showed some of his new recordings. I can’t of course not go into the details of what I heard but it will feature a very interesting progression from his previous release (which I also mastered, btw). Wouter is not a composer who lingers within a genre and is always searching for new horizons. His new work turns away from droney work (although it’s still present) but will also drift into the fields of both electro acoustics and vocal work. So stay tuned about this!! We agreed that I will do both mixing (second stage) and mastering. We will start in the last month of this year and hope to have a finished product at the end of February 2011.

In track 4 you can see the render (mono) of the tracks above and below that is a spectral view of the render. The brighter the color the louder the volume, low is low frequencies, above is high frequencies. I have made markers (the orange lines) in a 3 minute tempo. I have always measured the attention span of a listener in sections of 3 to 4 minutes , and so I try to make a ‘movement’ every 3 minutes. As you can see there is a ‘gap’ between 15 and 18 minutes and I will make something work there in a next phase. The green blocks on top of the picture indicate  where there is really something rhythmically or percussive  going on. This too is of some concern. When I take the original intention in mind I think that some parts are insufficiently related to the idea of popular rhythmical music. So that will take me back to the drawing board as well.

I HAVE been producing a lot of stuff, though. And it’s becoming more and more pop/funk/whatever like. I wouldn’t call it commercial but it’s in that area. I try to do a song every 2-3 days. See what happens. That, too, is experimentation. Producing pop music also means working in a ‘time =  money’ context. So I built up a drum, bass, melody construction on day 1 and from then on work towards a structure, and production, mastering  structure on day 2. If it’s difficult I allow myself a day 3. Then I leave it alone.

All of this is because the Radio Dub Soundtrack, step 1 is in hibernation now. As you may have read [ here ] the electro-acoustic stuff is finished and I need some time to distance myself. Just today I gave the project where all the mixes are stored in a preliminary order a quick listen. That was cool. I immediately kicked out stuff that wasn’t good enough and rearranged some elements. Tomorrow there will be a second session and then I will leave it again for a week or so. The next stage is to critically check sonic aspects and do a first mastering session. Sections which are not right will be mixed again. This requires a tight administration of versions of mixes and remixes and parts or remixes. I now have some 25 projects (compositions) underway. That is, with the rhythmic material, part of which will be included in Radio Dub Soundtrack, step 2.

I also did a rework of the Xilopi set which I published earlier through [ Soundcloud.com ] and the dubs are going better and better.

The focus of my attention was on four things:

1. what’s it like to work with large quantities of repetitive modules?

2. how can I work with ‘grooves’ and still use 3/4 and 7/8 measures?

3. experiment further with commercial production techniques

4. if I start working in a rhythmical context, what will come out of that?

It’s been quite educational, so far and thus serves my purpose very well. The overall process made me think of the next step in the Radio Dub Soundtrack project. Currently I am reworking some of the tracks of the first series. You can read a lot about the original aims and my adventures down the road in the blog (just click on the tag Radio Dub Soundtrack to learn all about it). This second series takes parts or just single samples from the first series and uses them for a pure rhythmical sequence.  The next step will be to take the modules that are used in this second series and deconstruct them again for a third series. The third series consists of deconstructed rhythmical elements and thus returns to the original genre of electroacoustics.  In short:

1. the original series, consisting of a combination of popular sounds/modules/parts with more traditional electroacoustic structure

2. the second series, where the rhythmical parts and random samples from series 1 is converted into pure rhythm oriented constructs

3. the third series, where the rhythms and grooves are deconstructed again

To me, it’s all about the path. Going from 1 to 2 and from 2 to 3. It’s interesting and challenging to watch what will be the result after working my way back, just like I liked to struggle with basses and percussion and melody. The second series for instance for me relates very much to my previous post about structure and content. In this case I used the structure of rhythmical 3-5 minutes lasting compositions and dressed that structure with my personal (typically Jos Smolders) content.

What do we, consumers and artists, use/need to be able to determine the quality of a piece of art? A lot of things, I know. Context (social, psychological, upbringing, etc) is extremely important, on all sides. The consumer, the artist, the work of art ánd the place where and the circumstances under which consumer and work of art ‘meet’.  To name a few.

I tried to divide a work of art into two parts: the framework or the structure and the ‘content’. Every work of art has content, of course, but it also is hung up inside/fastened to a structure. There are thousands of structures, like the painting of a tree.

Mondriaan did a lot of studies of a single tree. In the Gemeentelijk Museum in The Hague I saw them. The tree is framed on the canvas and depicted with the stem below and a crown of branches higher up. When we just look at that painting we see that the structure for depicting the tree follows a certain structural principle. Next to that framework Mondriaan had countless options to add to it. For instance he chose to work with black and white and greys.  (I will not go deeper into other choices he made; you can see for yourself) This tree has been painted several times by Mondriaan.

A year later (1912) he painted this one. As you can see the structure of the tree is still there but a lot more happened here. The painter added different content to the same structure (and slowly started compromising the structure itself).

For centuries structure was something that was firmly positioned. A still life needed to be painted this way, a portrait that way (person in chair, looking away from the viewer in a fixed angle). Symphonies followed this pattern, cantates that pattern. Only the bold ones like Caravaggio and Rembrandt) dared to deviate. Actually it was by the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th that artists started to fuck around with structure.

By the 1960s the ‘anything goes’ attitude in the art scene became widespread. For a long time I loved that thought myself, as well. Anyone can be an artist. Sure. And indeed anyone can be but that doesn’t mean that we have to accept all that is produced as equally valuable. Let’s go back to the olden days when structure was still a basic rule to measure quality with. That made it a lot easier for a consumer to qualify a work of art. As a viewer/listener one can concentrate on the ‘content’ because the structure are a give fact. So, as a consumer you focus first and very quickly the quality of the structure (does it follow the ‘rules’?) and then you can fully concentrate on the content. This has been valid for centuries but in fact still is operational in pop music which follows a lot of (structural) standards and varies (only) in the content.

Art music (whatever that may be) is a different piece of cake. Structure is for a lot of musicians a difficult subject. The whole ambient scene sort of let structure completely go. They are like Rothko canvases. Change happens on the borders of the canvas, nothing much in between.

TO BE CONTINUED?

comments are welcome