Month: July 2011

Silent TV & Not-So-Silent Movies

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There was a nice little scene on the TV show Leverage this past Sunday evening, a rare instance of “silent television.” The episode, titled “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job,” exemplified the playfulness that the series manages to achieve, in part as a counterbalance to the fact that Leverage clearly doesn’t have the biggest budget on television. The show is about a bunch of ex-criminals who take on corrupt big businesses, and it stars Timothy Hutton, who plays Nate, the ringleader, though the real standouts are a thief named Parker (Beth Riesgraf) and a fighter named Eliot (Christian Kane). (The latter’s ability to think, in advance, through a fight like it’s a chess game suggests his creation was maybe influenced by the character Midnighter from the comic series The Authority, which had been written for some time by Warren Ellis, whose series Global Frequency was almost turned into a TV series by Leverage co-creator John Rogers. [Update: apparently this is the case, thanks to a commenter’s citation.])

Anyhow, this past Sunday’s episode of Leverage, written by Geoffrey Thorne, involved a death that occurs during a costume-party murder mystery that is staged at the home of an exceedingly corrupt businessman. At one point, the Timothy Hutton character, who has dressed like Ellery Queen, and Parker, dolled up like Nancy Drew, find themselves at opposite ends of a stairway, needing to get by a guard. They have to remain silent, so they read each other’s lips. There are subtitles for us non-lip readers, but the whole thing already has the feel of a silent movie when a tinkling piano appears in the show’s score to seal the deal — not to mention that the guard is wearing a bowler hat, straight out of a Charlie Chaplin flick. (Hutton playing Queen is an in-joke, because his father, actor Jim Hutton, played the character in the 1970s TV series.)

True Grift: The characters Hardison and Parker dressed, respectively, as a Hardy Boy and Nancy Drew in an episode of the series Leverage that briefly flirted with the concept of “silent television”

The sequence is one of the longest wordless non-action/non-sex/non-people-in-labs-with-colorful-test-tubes scenes on television in recent memory. TV musicals, as series and as standalone episodes, have been the rage for some time now, and despite being a huge admirer of the late Dennis Potter (whose The Singing Detective is the ur-text for most fourth-wall-breaking, singing-and-dancing television spectacles), I’d say it’s high time that silent TV episodes had their moment. Being an intimate medium watched generally in the privacy of one’s home, television lends itself to the silent treatment.

What’s sort of funny, as a side note, is that neither Ellery Queen nor Nancy Drew has ever been the subject of silent movie, at least to the best of my knowledge. The two earliest Ellery Queen are streaming online for free and are titled The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) and The Mandarin Mystery (1936). The first Nancy Drew movie appeared in 1938, more than a decade after The Jazz Singer (1927) popularized the “talkie.”

If the fun Leverage sequence brings to mind the ctheory.net essay on “silent television” by Robert Briggs that I wrote about last September, the quasi-anachronism is straight out of this great xkcd.com webcomic:

There’s an episode recap for “The 10 Li’l Grifters Job” at tnt.tv, and in the next week the full episode should stream there for free.

Shhh! It’s a Theater: Speaking of silents, as well as of history as viewed through the lens of the present: it’s pretty genius that the San Francisco Silent Film Festival teamed up with the local public library. Read about it at examiner.com. Truth be told, though, this is one of those situations when words in common suggest correlations where they don’t necessarily exist. For one thing, the projectors that played silent movies were notoriously loud. For another, live music performances were part of the experience, and the music was anything but silent, as part of its role was to cover up projector noise. The showings could, reportedly, get pretty rowdy. We only call them “silent” movies in retrospect. It’s an example, as debcha (in a message from her twitter.com/debcha account) recently reminded me, of what is called a “retronym”: Until the introduction of the talkie, silent movies were simply movies, just as until the introduction of the electric guitar, acoustic guitars were simply guitars.

Look: Monome, No Hands (MP3)

Sound and light, melody and motion

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s funny that people used to talk doubtfully about what a laptop musician was — or, more to the point, perhaps wasn’t — doing up there on stage. There was for a long time a significant gap between the effort a laptop musician exerted, and the impact that was experienced by the audience. That gap will persist, even as it diminishes. (Much as there are still “Sushi isn’t a fad” stories being published.) One reason it’s funny is because of the proliferation of instruments people don’t even have to “play,” in the continuous, hands-on sense of the word — instruments such as the Monome, which are pleasant to watch all on their lonesome: “Look, Ma, no hands.”

Case in point is this video by ioflow, who is based in Southern California. His hands appear early on, but once the sequence is triggered, it’s hands-free. The only digits involved are the ones being processed by a computer. It’s lovely, as with most Monome video documents, to trace the correlation between sound and light, melody and motion:

Titled “Lines and Angles,” the piece is also streaming, and freely downloadable, as video-less audio at soundcloud.com/ioflow. (The video is hosted at ioflow’s YouTube account, where there are several others like it.) It’s an elegant, twitchy bit of minimal techno whose main success is how it manages to feel simultaneously anxious and sedate.

But it also means you, as a listener, are faced with liner notes like “grayscale monome 128, ricochet 0.3.1, renoise 2.7, ardour 2.8.11,” which, clearly, is community-only reading. (I believe Ricochet is the Monome port of the Game of Life–inspired Otomata, which I’ve written about previously, including an interview with the creator of Otomata.) Fortunately, ioflow provided additional background information, tracing his frustrations and the input of fellow Monome users that guided him to the end result. He also lists the three audio sources for the samples he employed (1, 2, 3).

More from inflow at ioflow.bandcamp.com.

This post was updated on November 3, 2024.

Kind of Bloop: The Politics of Pixelizing

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Why does altering a photograph differ from altering a song? Or does it?

The discussion that followed my recent post about the Kind of Bloop/Kind of Blue legal melee involved some questions, each politely put if strongly felt (exactly the sort of comments appreciated at this website), about why exactly it was that altering Miles Davis’ music seemed more egregious to some parties than did the alteration of Jay Maisel’s cover photograph. That is, why the holder of the copyright for Davis’ music deserved repayment, while perhaps the holder of the copyright for the photograph did not. I am, it feels at times, among those parties.

For background: Kind of Bloop is a remake of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album, with the original five jazz songs redone as “chiptune” music — that is, as music that sounds like it might emanate from a video arcade circa 1984. To complete the package, the original album’s cover art was processed to transform it to the blocky style called “pixel art.” The remake album was released in 2009, on the 50th anniversary of the original album’s release. In September 2010 Andy Baio, the creator of the Bloop project, agreed in an out-of-court settlement to pay $32,500 in fines to the photographer, the famed Jay Maisel, who had shot the iconic cover of the Blue album. Only in late June of this year did Baio go public with his legal entanglement.

At the risk of sounding like President Obama discussing gay marriage, I realized in the process of responding to these questions that my opinion on the subject of copyright regarding portrait photos versus music is still developing. Please understand that the logic I lay out below is at best exploratory. Partially it is exploring the issues at hand, and partially it is exploring my thoughts and thought process on the subject.

Though copyright protection has been repeatedly extended, it feels still like 50 years is a good long period of time to profit from anything before it becomes part of common vernacular, visual or otherwise. (And yes, feel free to ask me again when I am 75 and someone decides to make use of something I made when I was 25.)

No offense intended to photography, but framing a photo of a man as charismatic as Miles Davis seems like a far different proposition than composing original tunes such as those on Kind of Blue.

The musical notes in those pieces of music are Davis’ own, while the visual source material in Maisel’s photo is not his own.

Of course, this cuts both ways, which is where my still-developing status on the subject (aka wavering) comes in. (Wavering is when one considers flip-flopping to be a cognitive process.)

If you spend a lot of time listening to Kind of Blue, as with any music, great or not, you begin hear to the influences of others, some pronounced, some deeply seeded and coded. Rarely if ever are those influences repaid directly and financially for their effort.

One might say, by way of comparison, the subjects of photos by Jay Maisel and Annie Liebovitz do not profit financially from the ongoing sales of those works.

To acknowledge the way that prior work, that source material, figures in the development of music we habitually call “original” is to draw a comparison, rough as it may be, between the source of those melodies, and the subject in a photograph.

It is also to consider the process of creative sublimation that is required by a musician to make the source material his or her own, versus the lesser burden on a portrait photographer to make the subject his or her own.

It is this very matter that is at the heart of remix debates following the birth of hip-hop. Hip-hop absorbs its influences in a more literal, fixed manner than did most of the music that preceded it, and it has literally paid the price for this, with the systematized legal process that was developed for clearing samples.

I’ve argued here that there may be a case to be made that portrait photography may not necessarily deserve the same degree of protection as musical composition. I’d also say that sound in general tends to play second fiddle, as it were, to visual images in culture, and that is because images are indelible in our minds in a way that music is not. And yet we protect certain visual images in different ways than we do others. Logos, graphic design elements, typography, photography, architecture: these are all handled differently by the courts.

And if we handle different visual elements differently, it’s not clear why we should necessarily correlate a musical composition and a portrait photograph — in particular a portrait photograph whose primary role was as a piece of commercial packaging.

In the end (to the extent there is an end, since as I said up above, I am still pondering the subject), I have no firsthand knowledge of why Andy Baio, the creator of the Kind of Bloop project, understood the need to pay the publishers of the music, and yet did not explore paying the photographer who shot the cover image. But I do have some sense of the disparity.

And the way it has all played out seems to be less a critique of Baio’s thinking process, and more a critique of just how broken our copyright system is, and of the financial threat that hovers over individuals who wish to take the culture around them and make something of it. As I’ve said before: the laws as they’re currently enforced protect the interests of companies (and individuals) who actively territorialize our memories and then charge us to access them.

(Animated GIF image of the American flag found on Tom Moody’s tommoody.us website, where he writes frequently on electronic music, pixel-intensive art, and copyright.)

The Drones of Moscow, WV (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

There is much to recommend the light yet deeply sublimated drones that constitute Moscow, WV by Accentor. There is the strongly felt sense of hush. There is the intended energy, as the album is by its authors’ description (Accentor is two individuals, Aidan O’Flynn and Jacob Thomas) the first in a dozen monthly installments. There’s the absolute negation of songness, traded for a reveling in soundness — often the standout track on a drone album is the least droney track, but no track on Moscow, WV really stands out in that regard.

And then there is the blissfully slight variation, in tone and what would be described as momentum, if the tracks — 10 in all — weren’t so self-evidently still in nature. That variety can to some extent be described as bookended by two tracks in particular, the somewhat shrill celebration of “Nelly Chapel” and the singsong lull of “Winter in Moscow II”:

O’Flynn is credited with electric viola, Thomas with vocoder, synths, and sequencer, though you would be hard put to locate self-evident instances of any of those tools, so dense and sinuous is their music.

All 10 tracks of Accentor’s Moscow, WV are available for free at accentor.bandcamp.com, but it’s in a pay-what-you-like system, so why not toss in a few bucks? What’s next from Accentor? This much we know: “All profits for the next month will got to help the victims of the recent tornadoes in the mid-west.”

The Music of Fireworks (MP3)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s Fourth of July, which in the United States means Independence Day, and fireworks. And as is generally the case in popular culture, the look of fireworks gets far more attention than does the sound. When attending a fireworks presentation, it’s worth considering closing one’s eyes for just one minute and taking in the full breadth of sonic experience, especially to witness live the multi-stage sonic spectacle that is a single firework event unfolding.

Here are two tracks, one of them downloadable, that appear to use field recordings of fireworks as their raw source material (neither, it’s worth noting, is by a musician based in the United States). First up is “Fireworks” by U.K.-based Zama Zama Valentine, who uses the explosion as a downbeat below a sparse, chiming melody. The effect is a bit like hearing carillon bells amid some massive bombardment. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/zama-zama-valentine.

And while sadly not downloadable, this is “Fireworks” by GunFingers, who is based in France. It’s a real marvel, taking a single explosion and then sending it through numerous processes, each of which retains the original sound but creates something new, including instances of repetition, cut-ups, off-kilter counterpoint, and a deep dubby echo. Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/gunfingers.

And while we’re at it, here are some past Disquiet.com entries about the sound of fireworks: “looking” at the sound of fireworks rather than at the fireworks themselves, field recordings of fireworks in China, and a recording from Paris of an orchestra heard amid fireworks on Bastille Day.

(Fireworks portion of the photo-illustration from opencage.info and waveform from flickr.com, both via Creative Commons license.)