The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.
I’ve never met Brian. Love his work, but he wrote a 30-second theme and basically got the same credit as us. They used him because of his name value, so people attributed our work to him and his work to us, and it was confusing. It was much hipper to say Brian Eno wrote the score than Toto at the time. If they didn’t like the movie, they’d go after us. If they liked it, they’d give Eno all the credit. I have no beef with Brian Eno, I have no beef with David. That’s what he wanted so he should have it. I love Brian Eno.And later in the interview, David Paich, the primary songwriter for Toto, on visiting David Lynch's home:
I remember when I went to his house, he had this haunting, low, whistling sound. I said, “What is that?” He said he went to Scotland up into the hills where there was supposedly a haunted castle. This was the wind whistling through the castle, and he recorded that. He puts it on all of his movies. This low wisp of a sound. It’s almost like a foghorn.
The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.
Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale were on campus, and after the shootings, they developed the band Devo based on the concept of 'De-Evolution,' meaning the human race was regressing. Said Casale, 'It refocused me entirely. I don't think I would have done Devo without it. It was the deciding factor that made me live and breathe this idea and make it happen.'
This is a Harper's article about "ghost artists" – sound-alike muzak created for "mood" playlists that Spotify encourages the creation of because it's cheaper to play these tracks than music created by real artistic effort. It's presented as yet another eking away at musicians' ability to make a living from their art, yet the deeper issue I wonder about is the listener's inability to tell that they're listening to pandering, derivative slop. Quoting one of the musicians hired to create these tracks: It comes as little surprise that the muzak companies behind this have close financial ties to Spotify, and are also starting to lean into AI-created music, because of course they are.
And then there's this Hacker News comment about the Harper's article, from a person claiming to run one of these muzak firms, which passes no judgement, but does add a new point-of-view: Not to be a snob, but... (I am a snob) listen to real fucking music, people.