This is a really quick little jingle I did tonight for our first project for the class The Recording Studio as a Compositional Tool. Made from sounds recorded during a little free improv sesh in class… trumpet, piano, guitar, flute, and drum sticks on bottle I believe were the sound sources.
I haven’t been doing a lot of pure sound work in the past couple months (a lot of time spent on video) but I’m getting back into it. I’m going to try to do at least one short “ringtone” sized piece a week… I’ll start posting them here. The title of this one is:
The secret of snarking out on a school night is to get to bed extra early and then wake up in time to Snark - usually about 1:00 A.M.
(title taken from the book, The snarkout boys and the avacado of death)
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Pretty happy that David OReilly just won the first prize at the 2009 Berlinale for his animated short Please Say Something (first 5 episodes are above). I’m not much of a follower of the festival circuit, but the Berlinale is a big one with big films and PSS is a little one made by one person in his apartment. Part of what I love about PSS (and a lot of the other OReilly animations) is that it needed to be done by one person sitting in his apartment lost in his little created universe. The narrative sense, the animation (3D but…), the sound design, and the pacing are all pushing against conventions but are still simple and coherent. You can’t see all of PSS online but there are a bunch of OReilly’s other films over on vimeo. Check out WOFL and his music video for the Venetian Snares (and if you have the stomach RGB XYZ is where it all started but…)
UPDATE: The full-length version of “Please Say Something” is now online (and below)
http://www.davidoreilly.com
A troubled relationship between a Cat and Mouse set in the distant Future.
Written, Directed & Produced by David OReilly, Sound design & Voice synthesis by David Kamp, Sound design & Music by Bram Meindersma. Distributed by Future Shorts.
I’m taking a class right now with Dennis Miller, a composer and animator who is a visiting professor at Brown this semester. The class is called Sound and Image and the focus is on creating integrated audio-visual video pieces based on musical forms. Here is a little experiment I did for the first assignment. I wanted to keep it pretty simple, explore one idea, and give it a definite structure (A-B-A).
(4 minutes long, use headphones instead of those silly laptop speakers)
One of my friends just released his debut solo album and it’s dirty good. Erik is a drummer, guitarist, keyboardist, vocalist, bassist, computerist and a huge jackass for not dropping this on us earlier. Erik plays guitar for NOMO and has also worked with a ton of other great mid-west artists in the past few years. In Tall Buildings is the name of the CD (also the name of the band) and although the album isn’t out quite yet, here are a couple tracks to get you started:
The Way to a Monster’s Lair:
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Alarm will Sound:
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Y.H. Chang is a duo that creates literary/musical flash art… simple but amazing, especially as a medium for web art. They use a lot of jazz music (I tend not to love jazz [although I like it a lot live]). But the tunes they use are some of the best of the genre and the way the text works rhythmically with the music is just splendid (yes, splendid). Check out the site… its hard to recommend one piece over another, but I tend to like the more narrative linguistic adventures (Miss DMZ). Dakota is a good place to start as well.
For a while I had a tough time embracing John Cage. He is studied extensively in music composition courses, and his work is influential in literature, visual arts, and modern art theory so I feel like I know the guy personally (he died in 1992). Last semester was no exception… I took four courses and we talked about Cage in every one of them. He starts creeping up on you. At first you need to hate him, because he stands for the opposite of what you think you’re doing. But I got tired of what I was doing and realized that a lot of what Cage reacted against was what I was now reacting against in my own work. It is really difficult for people to let go of their work. They spend years trying to gain control over a medium and then Cage comes along and tells you to leave it up to forces you have no control over.
For me, writing a piece using Cage’s methods is much like have a kid, raising him for 7 years, then giving him a bow and arrow saying, “come back in 40 years and show me what you’ve become.” In many cases the kid comes back fully grown, insane, and indisputably amazing, free from the vices and scars of over-parenting.
This is a video of Cage performing “Water Walk” in January, 1960 on the bizarro TV show I’ve Got A Secret. To get a good idea of what Cage was like, watch the whole thing, or skip to 4′35″ where he starts the piece… let me know what you think. (I wish the quality was a little better)
At the time, Cage was teaching Experimental Composition at New York City’s New School. Eight years beyond 4:33, he was the most controversial figure in the musical world at that time. His first performance on national television was originally scored to include five radios, but a union dispute on the CBS set prevented any of the radios from being plugged in to the wall. Cage gleefully smacks and tosses the radios instead of turning them on and off.
While treating Cage as something of a freak, the show also treats him fairly reverentially, cancelling the regular game show format to allow Cage the chance to perform his entire piece.
