By Melissa Hunter on May 31, 2009 7:40 PM
|Permalink
Breakfast at Sulimays is a hilarious web video assignment I
saw on Stereogum where 3 senior citizens listen to popular songs and blab their
honest opinion.The 3 reviewers
are: Bill, who doesn't say much that is interesting, Ann, the schizophrenic
"ditty ditty bang bang" bitch, and Joe, my favorite 121 year old.Ann likes to babble and make annoying
comments throughout all the songs.She refers to the Doves as a country band, "If this is a country and
western thing, it's not Rascal Flats but it's pretty good."I get a little nervous when they show
clips of Joe because his extra long blinks make me pray his eyes will open
again.His comment is always "it's
not my cup of tea" but his music critiques are surprisingly spot on.The only song out of 6 that two
out of the three geezer listeners liked was Bon Iver's "Blood Bank" from his Blood Bank - EP (January 2009).
By Rocky Ramirez on March 6, 2009 2:24 PM
|Permalink
Yesterday, I was in the studio assisting on a singer-songwriter type project and had the opportunity to track a melodica. A melodica is basically a small hand-held keyboard that you play by blowing into a mouthpiece that is affixed to the side -- and the sound it makes is somewhere in between a harmonica and an accordion. The keyboardist was working out his parts with the artist in the mix room and I thought I was going to break down into tears because of how amazing this little toy instrument sounded (not really a toy but they sure look like something you would play in 5th grade choir).
When the keyboardist actually got into the isolation booth to record his parts it became evident to me that this was going to be an instrument that I was going to have to put into any song I ever arranged for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, everyone else in the room disagreed. While they thought that the instrument sounded great, they ultimately thought that the part that he was playing was too busy and added too much complexity to the overall arrangement. I thought it sounded perfect, but I was just the assistant engineer, so my point of view didn't carry a lot of weight. So rather than playing the beautiful chords over the verses, they opted to have the keyboardist just play single note pads -- to keep it simple.
Honestly, I see their point. When you are tracking singer-songwriter stuff, your audience isn't really looking for density of composition -- usually. Either way, after leaving that session I was really in the mood to bite into something complex. This morning my thirst for depth was fully satiated by this awesome piece on Pitchfork.tv documenting Dan Deacon's recording process for his new LP; Bromst.
Dan uses a piano retrofitted with a MIDI capability. This basically means that you can compose unplayable piano parts -- super-high bpms, crazy rhythms, time signatures -- on a laptop and then download them onto the piano which will play it with perfect timing. I've played around with retarded compositions using MIDI on a computer, but I've never seen a real-life piano with motorized hammers which can play MIDI. This piece shows how they comp together multiple highly dense piano parts and at the end give you a listen to the final product -- which I have to say sounds incredible. This is just part 2 of the mini-documentary, I highly recommend watching the entire thing -- this album is going to be great.
