The View from the Spaghetti Factory

From Gizmodo… Apple Lossless on the Way to iTunes?

Having whined at length about the service offered by Apple’s iTunes Music Store, I certainly hope so. Tracks encoded at 128kbps are fine for quick’n'easy download purposes, but pretty pathetic when you’re paying for them, especially when you can often get actual CDs from Amazon for only a little more. I know the price issue is largely due to extreme money-grabbing by the record industry, but still… Apple knew all of that before they set up the store. Thanks to this unfavourable combination of quality and price, I’ve bought maybe nine or ten tracks from the iTMS, certainly no more.

I would have been happy with a two-tier mp3/AAC service (128kbps and 320kbps, for example) but lossless compression would be fantastic, bringing us one large step closer to the “music on demand” ideal. Of course, this could all be just another frothy internet rumour, but if not, the next question is: how much will the lossless downloads cost? If Apple don’t compete with Amazon’s prices, the whole thing could die a very early death, but if they can absorb the extra storage/bandwidth costs, I’ll be a very happy punter.

Guardian obituary and
later article.

I only discovered Ligeti’s music quite recently. I found 2001: A Space Odyssey unbearably dreary and didn’t really register the presence of Ligeti’s music in the soundtrack, so it wasn’t until the recent Proms retrospective (2004, I think) that I was inspired to investigate his music. I wish I’d taken the trouble sooner.

I was pleased to find a couple of familiar reference points right away… “Melodien” and “Mysteries of the Macabre” remind me of some of Frank Zappa’s chamber music, while “Lux Aeterna” bears a resemblance, in its shifting washes of choral sound, to Penderecki’s “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima”. Some of Ligeti’s music is pretty challenging (the Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes is interesting, but not a piece I’d put on heavy rotation) but there are also many examples of incredible beauty. In every piece I’ve listened to, though, the common thread is the sense of a restless, inquiring musical mind and a deep appreciation for the possibilities of musical sound.

Whatever did we do in the days before Youtube? Here’s an excerpt from the US current affairs debate show “Crossfire”, featuring Frank Zappa and Washington Time writer John Lofton slugging it out over rock music censorship…

Frank Zappa on Crossfire 1986

Twenty years on, the hysteria over sexually explicit lyrics and videos has now largely died down, with only occasional outbreaks of angst over rap and, of course, the Jerry Springer Opera here in the UK. However, some things haven’t changed, as this quote from Frank illustrates…

“The biggest threat to America today is not communism, it’s moving America towards a fascist theocracy, and everything that’s happened during the Reagan administration is steering us right down that pipe.”

The shaved monkey has changed, but the message is the same! By the way, if John Lofton’s contributions to the debate irritate you as much as they did me, you’ll just love his blog, full of right-wing fundamentalist drivel.

Zappa made another appearance on Crossfire the following year, which you can watch via iFilm. Faced with the icky self-righteousness of the PMRC’s Rev. Jeff Ling, you can hardly blame him.

It’s 25 years since Brian Eno and David Byrne released “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” and you can learn all about this groundbreaking album on a shiny new website.

Of particular interest to musical types, though, is the related “remix” site where you can download the multitrack master recordings for two of the tracks. Within the bounds of the Creative Commons license, you can then use those recordings as you wish, remixing the tracks or using elements in your own music. It’s no cheap gimmick… as well as mp3s for quick access, the tracks are available in wav format!

Bush of Ghosts Remix Site

Working through the vast backlog of “ooh, that looks interesting” podcasts I’ve downloaded recently, I found a great little feature on Alf Clausen, composer of all the background and incidental music on “The Simpsons”… basically, everything except for Danny Elfman’s title music. I’ve always been intrigued by the process of creating music around the structure of film, and quite fancy having a go at some point. As a fast-paced cartoon show with multiple layers of cultural references, “The Simpsons” must be pretty challenging to compose for, especially as the music ranges from short bursts of “aural scenery” right up to full-length parody songs.

With the hope that my bandwidth doesn’t get completely SLAMMED, I’ve uploaded the 21-minute chunk here…

Mitt i Musiken: Alf Clausen feature (14.75MB)

It’s from the Swedish radio programme “Mitt i Musiken” (*mumble*… sorry, Sveriges Radio…) but the chunks in Swedish are mostly translating and summarising what Alf says in the interview portions. It’s worth ploughing through for the rehearsal excerpts (now that’s what first-call session players sound like!) and there’s a few interesting nuggets of information. For instance, Matt Groening likes having real orchestral music on the soundtrack, in order to provide smooth continuity and sheen when the animation is a little rough and ready. Also, it turns out that Alf Clausen is hugely influenced by Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, which, on reflection, doesn’t surprise me. I’ll be talking about that piece right here, once the Proms season starts…

A letter to the Guardian…

As Patrick Collinson says, the legality of Russian download provider allofmp3.com is questionable, but his dogmatic insistence that “real music fans should choose legal services” is simplistic and reminiscent of music industry propaganda. While the allofmp3.com model is certainly not the way to develop a healthy online music industry (I speak both as a professional musician and a user of allofmp3.com) it’s not enough simply to condemn users without examining why they shun the alternatives.

The biggest supplier, Apple’s iTunes Music Store, is typical of legal download services in that its prices barely compete with the major online CD retailers. Plenty of top name CDs can be bought for £8 or £9, often less, from Amazon or Play.com, but what do you get for your £7.99 at the iTunes store? Low bandwidth digital files, crippled with copy protection. Meanwhile the Russians are offering mp3 files up to 384k bandwidth, with an option of lossless (CD quality) downloads on selected albums. Many consumers are clearly happy with the bog standard listening experience, but others demand quality, and if the official marketplace can’t satisfy their (technologically undemanding) needs, they’ll go “underground”.

As Bobbie Johnson reported in the Guardian (4 March) the fault for this situation lies not with Apple and other legal download services, but with the major record labels, who charge exorbitant wholesale rates for their digital product. The fact that so many people are paying to use allofmp3.com (rather than simply using free, illegal P2P networks) shows that there’s an increasing willingness to behave ethically online. However, unless the music industry is prepared to charge reasonable wholesale prices reflecting the vastly reduced overheads of digital distribution, disillusioned music fans will continue to seek other options.

Edward Nalbandian, the LA tailor whose TV adverts inspired a daft parody song by Frank Zappa, has gone to that great textile warehouse in the sky.

LA Times Obituary

All together now…

# I’m coming over shortly
# Because I am a portly
# You promised you could fit me
# In a fifty dollar suit…

Ivor Cutler 1923-2006

The world will be a duller place without him…

[I started writing this entry on my phone last year, trying to relieve the boredom of an airport lounge. I couldn't get GPRS access at the time, so I forgot about it. Hey ho. It's still relevant.]

Adding a few rules to tighten up my “everything random” playlist in iTunes the other day, I started thinking about how my music listening habits have changed over the years.

I started to get an idea of my musical tastes at 12/13, gravitating towards the louder, hairier bands on Top of the Pops. However, my scope for musical gratification was limited. I could afford to buy only the occasional record or tape, and otherwise had to rely on birthdays, Christmas or the local library’s meagre selection of rock and metal singles. As a result, my musical awareness was restricted to isolated songs by a handful of artists.

As a teenager, starting to explore beyond this rock/metal starting point, the album became my unit of musical currency. Listening to just one track, even one side, was unheard of; it would be a CRIME AGAINST MUSIC not to listen to the whole album right through. I could probably recite the tracklisting for every album I owned ;-)

With a small group of friends (and in contrast to most of the kids at school) I spent hours browsing Lincoln’s secondhand record stores, unravelling music history and the complex system of influences that led to the sound of my favourite bands. We usually arrived at school clutching bags of records under our arms… borrowing and lending kept things moving, stopping the process of musical discovery from becoming stale. Budgeting for blank cassettes was vital… remember the “home taping is killing music” warnings on record sleeves? It didn’t, and I suspect downloading won’t, either.

Fast forward a decade… in my 20s, earning money and living in London, there were now fewer limits to my musical exploration. The medium had changed (CD replacing vinyl and cassette) and my tastes were even broader than before, but things were still pretty much the same. I bought albums by artists I liked and listened to them in one go. However, I was having trouble keeping up with all the music I wanted to listen to, and as a result, several obsessions of previous years were all but forgotten.

Another ten-year hop in the time machine, and we’re up to the present day. One particular technological development has changed my listening habits in several ways…

Attached to this Mac is a 250 gigabyte external hard drive, named “Media”. I use it for digital photos, videos, scans and… MP3s! I’m a bit of a geek when it comes to sound quality, so I only encode mp3s at high bitrates (320 or 256kbps) because I have more than enough disk space to do so. Almost all of my CD collection is there, always available for instant access, and here’s the really good bit that I’d never have envisaged ten years ago… it can be RANDOMISED. Although I still buy whole albums on CD and listen to them as single musical units, I’m guessing that the majority of my listening involves setting iTunes to randomise absolutely everything on a track-by-track basis.

See what’s happened? I’m right back to where I started at the age of twelve… the song is my unit of musical currency. Lots of songs really work well in the flow of a whole album, but they can often work even *better* when framed by totally unrelated sounds. It wouldn’t be unusual for me to hear Opeth followed by Thomas Tallis followed by Djelimady Tounkara. And unlike ten years ago, I finally feel like I’m on top of things musically. I might not know every second of every album, but at least I’m not neglecting huge piles of CDs any more.

Now, here’s what’s weird. If you saw the ads for Apple’s iPod Shuffle last year, you’ll know that “Life is Random”. Now, while I use my full-size iPod for a mixture of random and standard listening, I use my little Shuffle very differently. For me, it’s a way of applying restriction and limitation to the vastness of musical possibility, focusing my ears on just one artist. I’ll usually fill it up with five or six albums by one artist and listen to the whole lot sequentially. In this case, the musical unit is the artist’s career, or at least a decent chunk of it. Life *is* random, but sometimes it’s nice to pick a thread and follow it through to the end.

I think I’ve mentioned this before… considering how much time I’ve spent listening to Frank Zappa’s music over the past twenty years, I’ve barely played any of it, given the vast quantity available. I put it down to a mixture of its complexity and my own perfectionist streak. You just don’t really “jam” or “busk” Frank’s music… if you play it wrong, it’ll sound *very* wrong.

However, I’m gradually chipping away. At last year’s annual UKMG social weekend, a few of us performed a version of “Peaches en Regalia”. The original features a very dense, multi-textured instrumentation, so I constructed an arrangement with the intention of fitting as many details as possible into three guitar parts (backed by bass and drums). A couple of people urged me to do a recording, so here it is…

Peaches en Regalia (5MB mp3)

Back in the home studio, with the infinite protection of the ctrl-z safety net, there’s no need to be quite so strict with the three-guitars rule, but I only took a few liberties with the arrangement. More details on the sfocata site.