Not content with starting a whole new business model for selling music, Radiohead have also now worked to subvert the remix business by making the stems of one of their tracks, Naked, available here.
Nice touch. Release the DNA, see what evolves.
See what people have grown, and vote, here.
Technorati: Naked
A quite brilliant piece of TV on BBC 4 tonight. Worth the license fee on its own, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives traced the journey of Eels front-man Mark Everett uncovering the life of his father, the eminent physicist Hugh Everett III. Everett Snr, in a radical challenge to the Quantum Mechanical orthodoxy of the day, proposed his 'Many Worlds Interpretation', in which parallel universes split off at each moment of decision. Derided at the time, he became depressed and withdrawn. He died young, and Mark's mother and sister followed soon after, his sister taking her own life, writing in her suicide note that she was 'going to find her father in one of his parallel universes.' He was a hidden man, who rarely spoke at home. It was only a few years before his death that his theory was finally accepted; it is only through this documentary that Mark discovers just how important a figure in science his father was.
And, strangely, I wrote a poem about Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation a few weeks ago. Which it seems timely to put here, and add to the probably already huge canon of poetic works on the subject ;-)
Perhaps I Prefer The Inefficiencies of This Universe
To The Cold Efficiency of Your Myriad Others
Relativity,
Two clocks moving apart
At light speed never separate
And, in time, are forever together.
Yes, Albert,
As soon as you Equalled the product of m and c-squared,
You locked us in:
No information shall travel faster than light,
Yes, our infinity, given a limit:
46.5 billion light years
To the edge
Of us.
But you are there, and I here,
And strangely, from each centre elsewhere,
A new spacetime arcs out,
Socking the eye with an infinite number of
Observable universes.
And thus, inevitably, an infinite number of you.
Some mother said I was unique, but now
A father’s physics wants me to believe in
Another me,
Beginning 10 to the 10
to the 29 metres far away.
Too far, and yet too close,
For my comfort.
Quantum physicist,
Hugh Everett III, what have you done?
“The existence of other universes
is inevitable”
Said your Many Worlds Interpretation,
Which denied too the objective reality
Of wavefunction collapse.
And I’m like, WTF?
You go on:
“Between 0 and 1:
A single random number
With all its infinite decimals,
Is expressed, computationally,
Longer
Than
The computational expression
Of the whole set of numbers
That exist there.”
Meaning?
Apparently this:
A universe of infinite parallels
May be more economic
Than a straight, linear,
Singular
One.
Meaning?
Somewhere you and I are together,
Though, in this universe, we are apart,
And somewhere else there are more in betweens
Than we could ever fathom.
And that may be more efficient
Than this.
And now my gourd is swirling,
Thinking,
What is love, and life and us,
Other than to trust in this membrane-thin world,
And chose to forego
In the infinite possibility
Of the efficient multiverse,
And dig long
And deep
For life,
And love,
In this
One?
Technorati: Eels | Parallel Universe | Everett
Last night I went to see Iron and Wine at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, where we were up in the gods rather; the night before I'd been looking for some theatre tickets for a Christmas show, and was shocked at how much it was going to cost to be anywhere near where we might see.
The brilliant folky-dub got me thinking about ideas of proximity, and the value we place on it. Being physically near costs. If you want to be at the front, within touching distance, you are going to have to pay a huge amount more. Sitting near the front of a meeting says something; the physical layout of the space insists on it. Most of us are left wallowing at the back, with restricted views.
And somehow my mind skipped to the second coming; it struck me that one of the most powerful arguments against a standard physical interpretation of the second coming is this idea of limited proximity. We couldn't all get anywhere near close. Rich and powerful Jews like Maxwell get buried in the hugely costly cemetery on the Mount of Olives outside of Jerusalem, overlooking the spot where Elijah is meant to return, and one feels that there would be a similar stampede for wherever the JesusShip™ decided to land.
We used to joke back in old-church about good deeds pushing you forward a couple of rows. No. Whatever we might think about eschatology, or post-life experience, SpaceTime must collapse, and ideas of distance and proximity will be irrelevant.
Strange where thoughts take you when you're tired at a wonderful gig.
Technorati: Escatology | Iron and Wine | Jerusalem | Proximity | Robert Maxwell | Shepherds Bush
I love the look of fierce concentration
on the faces of musicians,
playing live,
struggling to hear the foldback,
straining to keep within
the bounds of the beat...
The rush of performance
and I think of my own struggles
to live life,
playing live,
no click track.
This is not a recording.
The energy and passion,
with the bum notes,
make me... live.
Mika Brzezinski recently refused to lead with a story about P@&i$ Hi%ton over the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In a similar vein, Wired reported in 'A Tale of Two Cities' that a trawl of the web revealed more interest in the iPhone than the recent triple-attempted bombing on London and Glasgow.
Celebrity::Security::Gossip::War :: These are all the hallmarks found branded on the urban belly. We'd be foolish to try to pare them. London wouldn't expect us to stop and stare in the face of car bombs. Crowds and spectacles, criminality and terrorism. Londinium's clay has been trodden on and burnt by them for millennia. It's a wise and rooted place.
On Thursday and Friday I was fortunate enough to see the resurrection of two of the city's iconic buildings:
Continue reading "Tales of Two Buildings::Two Cities::The Divine Vision" »
I had a snoop around the sale items in a department store the other day. A guy in an ill-fitting suit bee-lined me and was desperate to show me the new hard-drive recorders they had in. Tempting, but the prices are crashing and the capacities are inflating, so we'll hold for a while yet.
One machine intrigued me: a VHS / DVD / Hard-drive player in one. We've clearly got format-change overload here. I'm only surprised it didn't have Blue-Ray and Laserdisc capability too. It played CDs too... if it had only had cassette and vinyl... ;-)
No doubt I'll switch soon. There are those who are always early adopters, but most of us continue to live 'within' a format while new ones become properly established...
Had a great time chatting to Barry Taylor yesterday - who's over in the UK 'writing a film score' (yeah right Barry - we believe you ;-)
We got on to talking music. I'd recently heard John Bell talk about protest music, and, harking back to the good old days of Dylan and Joan Baez, he complained that there wasn't really any good protest music around these days. I took him to task on this afterwards, and challenged him to think again.
Barry is in an excellent position to talk on this, and he talked about his theory that 'no one listens to music any more'. The basic idea is that music creates an emotional space, out of which actions and thoughts are born. As he said, no one really knows what Thom Yorke is singing about, but, regardless of the words, the emotion of the music resonates with strong messages of protest. According to Barry, most bands begin by writing the music, and the words come after. So perhaps the message of the music is located somewhere else than the lyric.
I like this idea for a number of reasons. Firstly, I think it affirms that, while there is less 'obvious' protest music, there is still a lot of music that is there to challenge, if we let ourselves encounter fully the emotional spaces the music creates. Ironically, the folk/protest movement of Dylan's hey-day could be seen as a failure. While the shallow, glitzy rock-fest of Live Aid was, in many ways, an enormous success.
Secondly, I think this has something to offer in the debate on Christian music. Worship is an emotional space. We need to affirm that, and need to realize that we don't need obvious lyrics to make music 'Christian.' Moreover, where obvious lyrics are put in, they actually tend to detract from the emotional space, making the music too fixed and preachy... And, personally, leaving me cold. Connectedly, I think this is why ambient music has really been embraced by the alt.worship community. It's often been a criticism that it's 'not really worship' because the words aren't there. But that is missing the point, and the key truth that alt.worship seemed to pick up on was precisely that it was the emotional space that music created that was the space within which worship was offered.
Technorati Tags: Baez, Dylan, Language, Meaning, Protest, Worship
This year's Reith Lectures, to be broadcast shortly on the BBC, are to be given by Daniel Barenboim under the title 'In the Beginning was Sound'. I'm hoping they live up to the excellent title, which reminded my of Claude Levi-Strauss' Overture introduction to his seminal work on myths The Raw and The Cooked, which he dedicates 'To Music'.
For Levi-Strauss, music is:
"the only language with the contradictory attributes of being at once intelligible and untranslatable, the musical creator is a being comparable to the gods, and music itself the supreme mystery of the science of man."
Nature, he goes on to argue:
"spontaneously offers man models of all colours and sometimes even their substance in a pure state. In order to paint he only has to make use of them. But...nature produces noises not musical sounds; the latter are solely a consequence of culture..."
I have argued in the book that the city is the place where we best see the divine and human co-operating. We take the raw materials of creation and process them into glass, concrete and steel. So the city stands as a testament to both the beauty of that co-operation, and the dangers of doing so assymetrically.
What I love about Levi-Strauss' comments is that it puts music on a similar plane. Nature is full of colour and sound. But music only comes when we co-operate with nature and arrange those sounds. Music is therefore another symbol of the possibilities of the divine/human co-operation.
In other words, at best,it is essentially metaphysical. Good is an epiphany. Music touches us, universally, in ways that no other art form can even begin to. It appears to have direct access to the most ancient areas of our brains. The areas that existed before language (making it, as it were 'pre fall').
And this is the beauty of music: it takes us to that ecstatic place - ex stasis - off the ground, where language has nothing to add.
Last night I went to hear Sigur Ros. It was for the most part a good gig, but the final piece they played was one of the amazing pieces of music I have ever heard, and fully supported Levi-Strauss' opinions above. It was the last song on their second album. A translucent screen came down over the band, so all we could see of them were distorted shadows back projected. (Nic told me the best way to enjoy the Sigur gig would be to keep my eyes closed. He was right: the visuals were not great. I've always thought MTV a paradox; surely music that needs video support is inherently impoverished?)
It was as if we were meant to see through a glass darkly. We weren’t to look. For this most euphoric of moments, the visual was minimized. This from a band whose lyrics are basically glossolalia… Beyond language. And the power of the sound, the volume and the sheer richness was overwhelming.
It was music that was literally ‘obliterating’. Destroying text or language or explanation. One felt as if one wanted to be annihilated by it. That if one could jump into it, one could actually rejoin the divine myth. And this, I believe is the promise that true music sings to us: the promise that one day we will be finally caught back up in the divine composition.
Now that's what I call worship.
(Thanks to Jana for the photo)
Technorati Tags: Art, Beauty, Creativity, Levi-Strauss, MTV, Myth, Sigur Ros
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