Well, it being Mother's Day, and since I blog now, and this is "Blog," I can think of nothing better to 'blogabout' than my mom. Her name is Kathryn and she is fierce and brave. There was this one time she aggressively swore at a group of teenagers because they laughed when some ice cream I was eating fell to the ground. They looked like total jerks, and I understood then what it was to be guarded by a lioness.
This ferocity is but one facet of a greater vigilance in my mom; her staunch support for social justice and the strength and grace with which she carries herself lend me the courage to keep my own proverbial fire burning. Also, being a snotty 27 year old, I find myself pompous and overtly proud when I realize my mom is a Generation X-er whose social politics and taste in music are still relevant and evolving. Mom, you are really cool and I love you for that. She also happens to be one of the few members of my family who can carry a damn tune and while this may or may not be attributable to genetics, in the case that it is, I have her to thank for my predilection toward the noisier art. Thanks also for the garage mom, if I didn't have the escape of that room, if I wasn't afforded the space to blast my ears with amps while lying on the floor feeling depressed, I don't know how I would've turned out. God, she even still comes to my shows. At a DIY punk space in the middle of La Puente, I'm playing music with friends that is generally, too loud, angry, and misanthropic, but there she is, just to my left, bobbin her head with several punk kids at least half her age. Did I mention how cool my mom is? I could espouse cool-mom anecdotes all day, but really the point I'm trying to make is love. Mom, I'm very thankful to have had someone like you growing up, you've never not been there, and even if we now live in different cities 8 hours apart, you're never far from my thoughts. I love you so much. -Alex
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Man, you know what really grinds my gears? Merriam Webster's definition for harmony: "the combination of different musical notes played or sung at the same time to produce a pleasing sound" First half we're doin' alright, different notes, same time. Yes, I am on board. However, I take issue with the concept of "pleasure" being included in this definition. I very specifically enjoy harmony others (of perhaps less refined palettes) might find displeasing. Maybe it makes them cringe in their seat a little, maybe there isn't that safe cadential figure leading back to "one." Guess what friends, there is no "one." Western music theory and harmony, and everything we listen to in this tradition, while a very neat and impressive collection of rules and ideas concerning organization of sound, is totally arbitrary. One may contend that the overtones in the harmonic series (those perfect 5ths and 3rds) are why we hear certain combinations of notes and sounds and we be like, "oh hey that sounds nice, what sweet pleasing sound." But naw dawg! The early Christian church (from which pretty much all contemporary music theory is derived) just had to control everything and codify things into rules, because God loves rules. So that really "dissonant" harmony, the one where there's two notes separated by six semitones, we're gonna call that "diabolus in musica," and you are NOT allowed to play it because it is so ugly and gross. Well, fortunately musicians quickly determined that the church was a goofball, and the "tension" present in this harmony (commonly referred to as the tritone) was resolvable, and as such could reflect the ebb and flow of life, like an exhale after holding your breath for too long, it could become something expressive. And it's true, to the Western ear, hearing an F against a B resolve into a C and E, sounds pretty satisfying, but also... saccharine. Why does that tritone have to resolve? Why can't it just hang out there and sound nice, be fine on its own, I think it sounds nice. Here are some of my favorite pieces of music that dare to subvert these Western traditions, as well as some resources if you're curious about some of the subjects mentioned: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overtone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritone http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atonality Schoenberg was a German composer from the Late Romantic period and began composing in that tradition before switching gears entirely, and inventing his own serialized approach to harmony organization. This piece predates his more organized 12-tone serialism, but it does a pretty beautiful job of ignoring a tonal center while remaining particularly Romantic in its expressivity and dynamics. Portal is a death metal band hailing from Australia. While this piece of music has trace elements of tonality, particularly around a minute and a half in, there is a very purveying sense of dissonance and atonality. The deliberateness in which they do not pander to Western tonality I find both hauntingly beautiful and terrifying. Also the video. Honestly I should've put this first. Ornette Coleman, and all pioneering Jazz musicians, were immediately pushing harmonic boundaries (all boundaries for that matter). This is an example of "free jazz," a musical movement with which Coleman was strongly associated. I will not begin to try to explain "free jazz" beyond mentioning that it is rooted far more in independent improvisatory melodic lines, but the resulting harmonies as we can hear in this piece are supreme. That poor lonely woman tho :( The electric guitar. What a concept. You grab an axe, plug it in, flip the amp off standby, feedback starts rollin in and... obviously we know what happens next. A chord is struck! Six vibrating strings upset the magnetic fields generated by copper-wound pole pieces, generating a voltage in the alnico or ceramic cores, which is then sent through a cable to an amplifier and BLAMF! You are now rocking super hard. It's pretty cool. When we consider all of the minutiae taking place between the moment of that strum and those sound waves reaching your ears, one may feel intimidated, or maybe just ambivalent, which is totally fine! Many a great guitarist has considered little more than their amp and guitar to rockin results. But wooooah can it be fun to get into all of those micro-processes, or altering your signal with a slew of stompbox effects, or making up your own chords, or, in general, just doing things with your guitar people tell you not to. Try new things, try new tunings, instead of playing out of your bridge pickup all of the time, try slamming the treble on your amp and playing out of the neck pickup. Throw a reverb pedal before your distortion pedal and get scared! Use your pick like a bow, I don't know! There are so many different approaches you can take to this ridiculous instrument; so many unique ways to craft a sound that is more personalized and expressive for the player, but to me it seems like few dare to. So I guess I'm gonna occasionally update y'all with some of my own anecdotal experiences, or ideas I've tried that I thought were neat, alarming, confusing or whatever really. Anytime I hear a guitarist coax something "legit-fresh" out of their instrument, I get a little giddy, and ultimately I hope to get some other players out there to see the versatility of sound available to them. Anyway, here's a dope video of Nels Cline demoing a cool Zvex pedal we have in stock: -Alex Alex works the sale floor at Sylvan Music five days a week. He uses way too many effect pedals and spends most of his time plumbing the depths of sound and annoying his neighbors. |