So that's it for my fall 2010 semester. That mean's I'll be able to devote more time to this blog, and maybe even post some content that people would like to read. Additionally, i'm thinking about expanding the scope of this blog to encompass not only music, but technology as well. Not so much a "here's the coolest gear and software" kind of technology blog, but more like a "what the hell does the singularity mean?" kind of technology blog. Additionally, i'm going to be getting some new gear, namely the Numark Mixtrack and the Lexicon Alpha. This will allow for a more 'hands-on' manipulation of my music, and let me DJ when i'm bored/need to get the party started.
Additionally, Tron: Legacy (Or as I like to call it; DAFT PUNK...and some kind of movie) is coming out TOMORROW! Hopefully I'll be able to provide the internet with my interpretation of this film as soon as possible.
-Spectre Sound
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The Genius of Trent Reznor
I'm here to talk to you today about someone who I feel has gotten a bad rap. When I talk to my friends about Nine Inch Nails, I tend to find myself just talking about Trent Reznor, to which I almost inevitably get the response "Who's that?"
In this information age, it's easier for me to be lazy and repost the most current wikipedia snippet about Reznor instead of just explaining his career to you, the reader.
Michael Trent Reznor (born May 17, 1965) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Founder of the industrial rock musical project known as Nine Inch Nails, he was previously associated with the bands Option 30, Exotic Birds, and Tapeworm, among others. Reznor left Interscope Records in 2007, and is now an independent musician.
Reznor has often been cited as one of the most influential figures in music, and is often credited with bringing industrial music to the attention of the mainstream media, which thankfully never latched on like they did with most other types of music they find.
All I can say at this point is poor Trent Reznor. For all of his genius (which I'll get to in just a bit, don't worry) he is constantly associated with Hot Topic kids, spending their parent's money on t-shirts and black eye liner while pacing the halls of your local mall spreading their teenage angst as far as the eye can see.
Hopefully this stigma will evaporate once Reznor really comes into his own as a renegade musician, who has thrown off the chains of dependancy and can really serve as a model for independent musicians everywhere.
Anyways, I'm sick of talking in generalities about Reznor, and it's time to get to the nitty-gritty specifics of his genius. As far as I can see, there are two main reasons for really following and admiring Reznor; his musical genius, and the way he has broken from the music industry to provide a model for how a musician can survive in a radically different, post-industry business.
1.Musical Genius
I realized the genius of Nine Inch Nails back when I was in high-school. This was around the time when music had become boring, and flat. I gave up on radio and stopped buying CD's. Then Nine Inch Nails came out with Year Zero and the whole game changed. Just try listening to tracks like "Great Destroyer" and tell me that this isn't amazing. This song is actually revolutionary for one important reason, it accurately and effectively brought electronic music aesthetics to a relatively mainstream audience . I say relatively mainstream because this is a post 90's NIN, one that has to manage the burden of the stigma that has been placed upon it by Hot Topic and associates. This song, namely the second half of this song, introduces electronic music as a medium for understanding music as sound in time and not any combination of melody, harmony, or rhythm. Granted, these elements of modern music do appear in the song, but the most important part of the song are its sounds not its melody.
Another great way to describe this is with a more recent Reznor release. Trent Reznor recently scored the music for the new movie The Social Network and this article by Pitchfork has a streaming example of why Trent Reznor should be considered a musical genius.
For the movie, Reznor covered the famed classical piece "In The Halls of the Mountain King," a piece that almost everyone has heard. Up until this point, I had never really listened to the piece, however, Reznor's industrial-electronic aesthetic really brings the piece alive for me. The ways that the classical atmosphere of the piece "degrades" (or transcends depending on your position, I guess) into a bit-reduced, frantically panning, filtered masterpiece really changed my life and the way I view music. This is also one of the asthetic elements that really gets me excited for the new Tron movie, but I'll talk about that later on in the year. Anyways, I encourage everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, to check out this song, and the article that goes along with it.
In The Halls of the Mountain King
2.Model for a Post-music-industry World
My realization of Trent Reznor's brilliance in terms of the music business began around the same time as Year Zero came out. First of all, the promotion for Year Zero was my first introduction into the realm of viral marketing. Reznor concocted all of these websites that fit into the concept album's story line, and would leave USB drives with info pertaining to the album in various venues he played. That being said, his marketing plan for the album was amazing, but he really began to shine after October of 2007, when Reznor broke with Interscope Records and entered the realm of independent music. The next couple of NIN releases, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip were both released on the internet. As far as I can remember, they came out for free (or pay as you like) and were available for download online. Next came Reznor's new side project which I've just started listening to. It's called How To Destroy Angels, and is a collaboration between Trent Reznor and his wife, Mariqueen Maandig. The EP they released, which is self titled, is pretty good, and is available for download on their website for free.
The route Reznor has taken, both musically and professionally, prove that once you have enough people watching, you don't need the industry to back you. And with the advent of the internet, I start to wonder if the industry is even necessary at all. If all music could be self-produced, managed, and distributed via the internet, then what's the point of giant record labels?
In this information age, it's easier for me to be lazy and repost the most current wikipedia snippet about Reznor instead of just explaining his career to you, the reader.
Michael Trent Reznor (born May 17, 1965) is an American singer-songwriter, musician, producer and multi-instrumentalist. Founder of the industrial rock musical project known as Nine Inch Nails, he was previously associated with the bands Option 30, Exotic Birds, and Tapeworm, among others. Reznor left Interscope Records in 2007, and is now an independent musician.
Reznor has often been cited as one of the most influential figures in music, and is often credited with bringing industrial music to the attention of the mainstream media, which thankfully never latched on like they did with most other types of music they find.
All I can say at this point is poor Trent Reznor. For all of his genius (which I'll get to in just a bit, don't worry) he is constantly associated with Hot Topic kids, spending their parent's money on t-shirts and black eye liner while pacing the halls of your local mall spreading their teenage angst as far as the eye can see.
Hopefully this stigma will evaporate once Reznor really comes into his own as a renegade musician, who has thrown off the chains of dependancy and can really serve as a model for independent musicians everywhere.
Anyways, I'm sick of talking in generalities about Reznor, and it's time to get to the nitty-gritty specifics of his genius. As far as I can see, there are two main reasons for really following and admiring Reznor; his musical genius, and the way he has broken from the music industry to provide a model for how a musician can survive in a radically different, post-industry business.
1.Musical Genius
I realized the genius of Nine Inch Nails back when I was in high-school. This was around the time when music had become boring, and flat. I gave up on radio and stopped buying CD's. Then Nine Inch Nails came out with Year Zero and the whole game changed. Just try listening to tracks like "Great Destroyer" and tell me that this isn't amazing. This song is actually revolutionary for one important reason, it accurately and effectively brought electronic music aesthetics to a relatively mainstream audience . I say relatively mainstream because this is a post 90's NIN, one that has to manage the burden of the stigma that has been placed upon it by Hot Topic and associates. This song, namely the second half of this song, introduces electronic music as a medium for understanding music as sound in time and not any combination of melody, harmony, or rhythm. Granted, these elements of modern music do appear in the song, but the most important part of the song are its sounds not its melody.
Another great way to describe this is with a more recent Reznor release. Trent Reznor recently scored the music for the new movie The Social Network and this article by Pitchfork has a streaming example of why Trent Reznor should be considered a musical genius.
For the movie, Reznor covered the famed classical piece "In The Halls of the Mountain King," a piece that almost everyone has heard. Up until this point, I had never really listened to the piece, however, Reznor's industrial-electronic aesthetic really brings the piece alive for me. The ways that the classical atmosphere of the piece "degrades" (or transcends depending on your position, I guess) into a bit-reduced, frantically panning, filtered masterpiece really changed my life and the way I view music. This is also one of the asthetic elements that really gets me excited for the new Tron movie, but I'll talk about that later on in the year. Anyways, I encourage everyone, and I mean EVERYONE, to check out this song, and the article that goes along with it.
In The Halls of the Mountain King
2.Model for a Post-music-industry World
My realization of Trent Reznor's brilliance in terms of the music business began around the same time as Year Zero came out. First of all, the promotion for Year Zero was my first introduction into the realm of viral marketing. Reznor concocted all of these websites that fit into the concept album's story line, and would leave USB drives with info pertaining to the album in various venues he played. That being said, his marketing plan for the album was amazing, but he really began to shine after October of 2007, when Reznor broke with Interscope Records and entered the realm of independent music. The next couple of NIN releases, Ghosts I-IV and The Slip were both released on the internet. As far as I can remember, they came out for free (or pay as you like) and were available for download online. Next came Reznor's new side project which I've just started listening to. It's called How To Destroy Angels, and is a collaboration between Trent Reznor and his wife, Mariqueen Maandig. The EP they released, which is self titled, is pretty good, and is available for download on their website for free.
The route Reznor has taken, both musically and professionally, prove that once you have enough people watching, you don't need the industry to back you. And with the advent of the internet, I start to wonder if the industry is even necessary at all. If all music could be self-produced, managed, and distributed via the internet, then what's the point of giant record labels?
Friday, October 15, 2010
Die Antwoord - Enter The Ninja (Official)
So I've stumbled on this video, and this group, this week. I must say, I'm blown away.
It really shows you what you can do as an artist with nothing but a "PC Computer" and some "Mad gangsta skills".
Die Antwoord has also been one of those artists that's way too hard to get a hold of. Finding their music online has been a chore, but it's definately worth it.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
The beginning of the rest of our digital lives.
So, this is my first post here, and I figured I would lay down some thoughts about what a blog is, what this blog is, and what kind of place it (and I) have on the internet.
1. Blogging.
I often ask myself, why the hell would anyone care about what some no-body has to say about their daily life, or the mundane asinine things that they are able to derive some type of pleasure from? Have we really devolved into a state of perpetual boredom that is so thick that we just sit and write to imaginary audiences all day and hope and pray that the mindless dribble that we type onto the screen makes any kind of measurable difference in this vastly growing (and simultaneously shrinking) world?
In my cynicism, I realized that the very reasons I initially dismissed blogging are the very reasons that make blogging something important. While the blogosphere may be just an over-sized popularity contest of poorly composed ideas, it also allows us, as autonomous humans in a world that is always trying to take that away from us, to shout whatever we have to say to the stars. And while we, and what we write, is largely unimportant (mind you, I use "we" very purposefully here, because I am in no way exempt from anything I've written so far) it may be important to SOMEONE. And for that very reason, we should write. Even if that person who derives importance and meaning from our words is ourself, or a random student/child/adult/elder/lost-soul in NYC, Dubai, Paris, or Ulaanbaatar, we need to write in the off chance that we help that lost-soul find meaning, hope, importance, or at the very least amusement.
2. My Blog
This blog is, first and foremost, about music. I have always wanted to be an "expert" on something, and since I live, breathe, eat, and shit music, I figured this would be a good enough place to start. I've gone through a variety of musical phases in my life (drifting from metal to grunge to folk to jazz and back, always picking and choosing what I take forward with me) I have realized the one thing that connects all music in this day and age: electronics. Electronic music is such a narrow term that is used to specify and separate very specific types of music. However, almost all music in this day and age is electronic music. Even the folk band that shuns the even thought of an electric keyboard, and would not even think of using electric guitars is making electronic music as soon as the studio engineer opens Pro Tools to record their newest folk-concept album about the evils of technology. Even if that band realizes the paradox of their very nature in this day and age, and decide to only use analogue methods of recording, the chances are that their creations will be spread on the internet.
So while (nearly) all music is electronic music, I would like to focus on what I'm calling electro-muzik (which I admit is a shallow attempt to create a term that is encompassing of a very specific idea in an innovative way, which is itself an antiquated and passe idea). While I will at times talk about the different types of electro-muzik I find along my journeys, the idea of this specific blog is documenting the ways in which I, as a human living in the 21st century, create and relate to electronic music. Entering this digital coil as Spectre Sound (or 5pectre//5ound if I want to be 1337), creating music with my comrade and partner in crime Mars Blastoff, combined to form Nexus 6, I wanted to document the ways in which the ways I look at the world change as I delve ever deeper into the digital rabbit hole.
3. The Digital Coil
The Digital Coil, is what I like to call the personas and lives that we create on the vast frontiers of the internet. I was watching one of my favorite episodes of Cowboy Bebop this past summer, the one involving a cult that attempts to transcend the Mortal Coil by uploading their consciousnesses onto the internet. I realized that once we reach that point, transcending the Mortal Coil by moving our lives (at an alarmingly increasing rate these days) onto virtual mediums. If half of our lives are spent in virtual worlds, what point does the Mortal Coil have? When we die our Facebooks, MySpaces, Twitters, iTunes accounts, and every mailing list we have joined since the 90's live on.
If Marx and Locke both recognized that in production we put a small fraction of ourselves into our product, what does this mean in an age where we aren't actually producing things that are tangible? This blog, which will live on (presumably) after I am gone, is just a string of words that are translated into various coding languages that are, in turn, translated by computers into ones and zeroes, stored in virtual space, and back to coding and then words. But I've put time and energy into this blog entry. Marx and Locke would probably agree that I could have spent this time doing homework, or working for the industrial complex, or building birdhouses. An actual portion of my time on this earth was spent on writing these letters that are in reality an endless string of binary. Does this mean that a part of my soul is now stored on the internet?
These are the only reasons for this blog.
Document
Write
Listen
Think
-Spectre Sound
1. Blogging.
I often ask myself, why the hell would anyone care about what some no-body has to say about their daily life, or the mundane asinine things that they are able to derive some type of pleasure from? Have we really devolved into a state of perpetual boredom that is so thick that we just sit and write to imaginary audiences all day and hope and pray that the mindless dribble that we type onto the screen makes any kind of measurable difference in this vastly growing (and simultaneously shrinking) world?
In my cynicism, I realized that the very reasons I initially dismissed blogging are the very reasons that make blogging something important. While the blogosphere may be just an over-sized popularity contest of poorly composed ideas, it also allows us, as autonomous humans in a world that is always trying to take that away from us, to shout whatever we have to say to the stars. And while we, and what we write, is largely unimportant (mind you, I use "we" very purposefully here, because I am in no way exempt from anything I've written so far) it may be important to SOMEONE. And for that very reason, we should write. Even if that person who derives importance and meaning from our words is ourself, or a random student/child/adult/elder/lost-soul in NYC, Dubai, Paris, or Ulaanbaatar, we need to write in the off chance that we help that lost-soul find meaning, hope, importance, or at the very least amusement.
2. My Blog
This blog is, first and foremost, about music. I have always wanted to be an "expert" on something, and since I live, breathe, eat, and shit music, I figured this would be a good enough place to start. I've gone through a variety of musical phases in my life (drifting from metal to grunge to folk to jazz and back, always picking and choosing what I take forward with me) I have realized the one thing that connects all music in this day and age: electronics. Electronic music is such a narrow term that is used to specify and separate very specific types of music. However, almost all music in this day and age is electronic music. Even the folk band that shuns the even thought of an electric keyboard, and would not even think of using electric guitars is making electronic music as soon as the studio engineer opens Pro Tools to record their newest folk-concept album about the evils of technology. Even if that band realizes the paradox of their very nature in this day and age, and decide to only use analogue methods of recording, the chances are that their creations will be spread on the internet.
So while (nearly) all music is electronic music, I would like to focus on what I'm calling electro-muzik (which I admit is a shallow attempt to create a term that is encompassing of a very specific idea in an innovative way, which is itself an antiquated and passe idea). While I will at times talk about the different types of electro-muzik I find along my journeys, the idea of this specific blog is documenting the ways in which I, as a human living in the 21st century, create and relate to electronic music. Entering this digital coil as Spectre Sound (or 5pectre//5ound if I want to be 1337), creating music with my comrade and partner in crime Mars Blastoff, combined to form Nexus 6, I wanted to document the ways in which the ways I look at the world change as I delve ever deeper into the digital rabbit hole.
3. The Digital Coil
The Digital Coil, is what I like to call the personas and lives that we create on the vast frontiers of the internet. I was watching one of my favorite episodes of Cowboy Bebop this past summer, the one involving a cult that attempts to transcend the Mortal Coil by uploading their consciousnesses onto the internet. I realized that once we reach that point, transcending the Mortal Coil by moving our lives (at an alarmingly increasing rate these days) onto virtual mediums. If half of our lives are spent in virtual worlds, what point does the Mortal Coil have? When we die our Facebooks, MySpaces, Twitters, iTunes accounts, and every mailing list we have joined since the 90's live on.
If Marx and Locke both recognized that in production we put a small fraction of ourselves into our product, what does this mean in an age where we aren't actually producing things that are tangible? This blog, which will live on (presumably) after I am gone, is just a string of words that are translated into various coding languages that are, in turn, translated by computers into ones and zeroes, stored in virtual space, and back to coding and then words. But I've put time and energy into this blog entry. Marx and Locke would probably agree that I could have spent this time doing homework, or working for the industrial complex, or building birdhouses. An actual portion of my time on this earth was spent on writing these letters that are in reality an endless string of binary. Does this mean that a part of my soul is now stored on the internet?
These are the only reasons for this blog.
Document
Write
Listen
Think
-Spectre Sound
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