Matt Marks Music -
Rants and musings on everything from radical politics, pop culture as seen from a contented apocalyptic viewpoint, to zany music from all genres.
As many of you know, I recently transcribed and arranged The Beatles Revolution 9 for Alarm Will Sound. It was definitely the largest arrangement I have ever done, and probably my largest completed project (The Little Death is on its way...). We performed it at the Kitchen a couple weeks ago and I got a lot of good feedback. There was a decent response on some blogs about the performance, but a little birdy told my that New York Magazine was looking to do a feature on it, so I wanted to wait until that came out before I posted.
Well, it came out today! Here is an excerpt of the review by Justin Davidson:
A French-horn player whimpered like a newborn into one microphone, as a violinist murmured through a trumpet mute into another mike so that her voice sounded watery and indistinct. A percussionist smashed and stirred a bagful of broken glass with a hammer, and a clarinetist blurted the tune to “There’s a place in France / Where the naked ladies dance.” A sober young man, unaccustomed to performing, wielded one of those old-fashioned squeezable car horns and in an impassive baritone kept repeating: “Number nine … number nine.” Yes, you got it: Welcome to the live, all-acoustic version of Lennon and McCartney’s foray into musique concrète, “Revolution 9,” as performed with irresistible panache by the twenty-member ensemble Alarm Will Sound. ... Nonchalantly virtuosic and unburdened by conventional wisdom, the players in Alarm Will Sound invent challenges that some might regard as mystically pointless—Matthew Marks’s obsessively detailed transcription of “Revolution 9,” for instance. The payoff lies in performances that make complexity sound crystalline, that dismantle a piece’s purity but leave its energy intact.
For some reason, my full name is used (I defer the use of my full name to the realMatthew Marks), but whatevs, this is pretty cool. After being solely a performer for so long it is nice to approach the music from this side. It is a lot less high-stress and you get a great deal more praise. Why'd I ever choose to be a horn-player? :)
It was cool to, ya know, talk to a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer from a major magazine about my latest creative endeavor. Although, I was a little worried I had made a bad first impression. I was introduced to Justin Davidson just after a Revolution 9 rehearsal, while I was still in my buoyant creative high. My first words to him were, "You know, you kind of look like John Lennon!" He looked at me oddly and proceeded to ask me about the arrangement as I slowly removed my foot from my mouth. Whatever though! He had these great round Lennon glasses just like I had when I was a young obsessed John Lennon fan.
He was very interested in the garbage bag full of glass bottles we were smashing, as well one would be expected to be, mainly because at one point in the rehearsal Jonathan Shapiro advised the woodwinds to step back as he took a hammer to it, in case any shards were to fly in their direction.
If you missed it at The Kitchen we'll be doing a slightly-revised version at the Bang on a Can Marathon on May 31st. Come see it. It should be pretty cool in that crazy glass garden they have at the World Finance Center.
Here are a couple more responses to the arrangement:
AWS horn player Matt Marks arrangement was stunning not just because it showed for certain how dynamic and lively "Revolution #9" really is but also how funny it is too and even melodic in places. Using bike horns, megaphones and horn mutes to recreate the sinister, strange music that makes up the piece, AWS also filled in the blanks with Marks and others recreating the taped voices, chants and cheers also heard in the song. "I am for peaceful revolution," a AWS member said quoting Lennon before the song was played and afterwards, they made you feel that he was, if not advocating for a sonic one that Stockhausen, Berio and others had already arrived at. Among these other composers, the song finally had its context and made sense. The crowd seemed to appreciate that too, awarding them with rousing applause.
The topic of revolution, though, is not a lighthearted topic. “Revolution 9,” the Beatles’ work, arranged by Matt Marks (horn player of Alarm…) was a dazzling display of orchestration and recreating sound effects and tape loops live. But the entire evening left me feeling less like I was present at a revolution than at the study of one.
UPDATE: Justin dropped me an email. Apparently he was shocked because just a few days prior, some man on the street had called him John Lennon as well! Nice.
I like movies. A lot. I'm kind of a geek. I have a decent, and growing, library of DVDs and VHSs in my apartment full of films I've seen several times and would watch again in a heartbeat. If you were to visit me way out in the depths of Brooklyn I would no doubt have in the back of my head a desire to sit and share with you one of my favorite films of that lot, no matter if you were visiting to rehearse, borrow some eggs, or just say hi after a long absence. The trouble is um, my taste in movies...
A glance at my library:
A lot of Japanese horror, samurai, and children's movies
A good amount of Cronenberg, Lynch, Tarantino, Scorsese, Kubrick, Pasolini, Mamet, and Greenaway.
A bunch of obscure musicals
See, sometimes people just want to sit back and watch Knocked Up or something. I can understand that. But, and maybe this is the masochistic part of me, I like a film to demolish my sense of morality, reality, and normality.
Now, this may be sounding like: I have such great taste in film, and everyone else just wants to watch Hollywood crap. Nein! Not the case. Because, I also have a decent collection of excessively bad movies. The problem is that I find it very difficult to casually watch a film. Often I can find as much soul-destroying sublimation in Wild Women of Wongo as I can in Aguirre, the Wrath of God. As Melly often points out, watching a movie with me can be work.
So this brings us to my latest cinematic excursion, Funny Games by Michael Haneke
Funny Games is not necessarily a "good" movie. It will not leave you feeling fuller for the experience. It does not serve to guide us further in this game of life.
It is there to fucking rock.
Following the film, I stood outside the theater people-watching the traumatized viewers exiting the theater. One dazed couple exited, the women groping for an explanation of what she had just seen. "Listen to Heavy Metal, girl. Listen to Heavy Metal and you'll understand.", her boyfriend suggested. I laughed and we shared knowing nods. The movie features some of John Zorn's excruciatingly energizing speed metal experiments. Zorn made a lot of music to be ugly, to show ugly. This is what Haneke provides: a violent, psychologically ugly portrait of a horror movie, presented to you from the perspective of the killers, two charismatic young men dressed in outfits that are part yuppie-tennis chic/part commedia del arte.
Critics have shredded this film, most deriding it as "pointless", as in a pointless exercise in directorial sadism. Um, excuse me. Who the fuck ever decided that movies need to have a point?
New York Daily News - Elizabeth Weitzman A patronizing, self-satisfied piece of work, Funny Games is Michael Haneke's way of chastising us for blindly following the traditional rules of entertainment.
Variety - Derek Elley As shocking and deliberately manipulative as the original movie and -- some may reckon -- even more pointless.
New York Post - Lou Lumenick The joke is on arthouse audiences who show up for Funny Games, which is basically torture porn every bit as manipulative and reprehensible as "Hostel," even if it's tricked out with intellectual pretension.
San Francisco Chronicle - Mick LaSalle Just because it's a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn't make it any less vile, useless and pointless.
New York Magazine - David Edelstein Haneke’s assault on our fantasy lives is shallow, unimaginative, and glacially unengaged--a sucker punch without the redeeming passion of punk.
Boston Globe - Ty Burr If this is daring in theory, it's a failure in practice. Exactingly well-made, the movie is grueling and unpleasant in the extreme - that's the point - but it's also working from a specious premise, that film-school Brechtian devices can bring on mass enlightenment.
And my favorite:
USA Today - Claudia Puig So sadistic and disturbing, Games is easily the toughest movie to sit through since 1994's "Natural Born Killers."
Ha! What? Natural Born Killers? You call that tough? In 14 years, you haven't seen anything worse than Natural Born fucking-Oliver-Stone Killers?? But I guess that kind of sums it up. When your job consists mainly of watching the latest Disney anthropomorphicism, then I would think that Funny Games would freak you out.
The scary thing here is that these reviewers seem bent on ferreting out a message, finding some clue to the director's desire to transform our lives for the better, and their failure to find, or manufacture, a satisfactory "point" signifies the failure of the film. I don't believe that Haneke is trying to "shame-the-viewer"; I don't think he is "chastising" us (how could a horror-film director chastise a horror-film viewer??); and I certainly hope that he is "manipulating" us! I want to be manipulated! I'm paying fucking 12 bucks to see this, I don't pay 12 bucks to stay in control.
These reviewers seem to want their movies to be agreeable and easy. Which is fine as a consumer, but you're a fucking reviewer! You don't hear of food critics ordering caviar and complaining of its pungency. Movies like these should be the reason you became a reviewer. Criticize its form or its philosophical message, but not its audacity or pretentiousness. Every substantial work of art is pretentious. It has to be because it came from a mind confident in its statement, a mind free of speculative criticisms. What I find most troubling, though, is the perspective that art should have some sort of societal merit.
Ayn Rand. Say what you will about her economics or politics, her perspective on the creation of art is monumental (I encourage every artist to read The Fountainhead). She dismisses the philosophy that art should serve the greater good, that art has any sort of social responsibility - aside from the gratification of the artist. Art for a purpose: to cure some social ill, for the betterment of mankind, will always be lacking, in that its inspiration is deluded. Funny Games' end was in itself. Sure there are statements and messages you can take but really, as Andrew O’Hehir from Salon put it:
the conclusion I reach after a great deal of high-powered cogitation is this: He's fucking with us.
Yes! It is manipulative and sadistic and pretentious and self-serving! He breaks the fourth-wall throughout the film, why?, because he fucking wants to! And I loved it. I want a director to put me through the wringer, I want to be "sucker punched". I don't need a message that will change the world. I want to be changed, and ya know, Forrest-fucking-Gump may have had a redemptive aim, a desire to warm our hearts and make us more compassionate (or some shit), but it did nothing for the art of film. Maybe it made critics feel better about themselves, but it was Chicken Soup for the film-goers soul. Funny Games was a fucking Lamb Phaal for the film-goers soul. It scalded your senses and seared your insides for days. Just how I like it.
After watching the movie, I made the long trek home from Times Square to Kensington at about 2am. My thoughts were locked on the movie (I actually spent most of the night awake in bed, pondering what I had just seen). Just as I was turning the corner to arrive home a cab passed me. The ad on the top of the car read:
NO, WE DON'T THINK SMOKING SHOULD BE IN PG-13 MOVIES EITHER!
This is what got me thinking of the socialist approach to art. Those that would value public health and safety over expression would have no qualms about compromising artistic integrity, vision, and honesty for the "greater good". I really don't see any difference between banning smoking from films and banning sex or drugs from films, aside from one movement comes from the left and one from the right. Is there really a substantial idealogical difference between this and this? Sure, there is a difference between a critic deriding a movie for the lack of a "point" and a movement to censor actions from films as a whole, but I believe they are from the same perspective: one that believes art has a responsibility, art should be created for the betterment of society and mankind, art should illuminate us out of the darkness and into the light.
I just joined Muxtape. I was skeptical, but it's pretty cool. I browsed around and found a ton of bands I had never heard of. It's endearingly minimal - no frills, no fancy stuff, just click on a song and it plays. Let's bring back the era of the mixtape!
24/7 Wall St. has a list of the 25 Most Valuable Blogs. Interesting to see the breakdown here on how they make their money, readership, etc. Unsurprisingly, the top (by far) is Gawker Media. Aside from Lifehacker, I kinda think that the Gawker scene is a bunch of bullshit. I loathe their main site, which is really just sassy gossip with a condescending hipster air (I mean, Perez Hilton is nothing but gossip, but at least it doesn't try to be anything it's not, ya know?).
I guess the troubling thing for me, and a lot of people, is the fear of corporatizing the blogosphere. Gawker has 15 blogs, ranging from sex to gaming. Yes, they all kind of have that Gawker feel to them, but the tone is increasingly seeming less individual and more of a style. I think that writers entering that scene might become encouraged to adopt the sassy tone and the snarky attitude, at the loss of their own voice. I mean, yeah I'm kind of a snarky fellow, but when snark becomes the norm it loses its effect.
For example, take Pitchfork Media, a site that is blessedly past its prime. A few years ago, Pitchfork was your destination for finding new indie rock/pop and reading unique reviews of recent releases. Sure, some of the reviews were a little over-the-top, but that was their thing, so ok. It quickly devolved into a circle-jerk of: Who can write the most overwrought pretentious bullshit? Now its a joke. All of the hipsters who used to suckle at its indie-teat have now deduced that its now cool to hate Pitchfork and ditched them. I mean, they are still popular, but that scene is dead. (PS check out David Cross's classic column in Pitchfork where he skewers them for their evil evil ways.)
Ok, its about time for me to be grasping for a point to hold this all together. Alls I'm saying: Centralization in the blogosphere is new, precarious territory. Fads are fleeting and site fads are even worse (how much time do you think is left for Stuff White People Like?). Where does Gawker go from here? (PS I also like Gizmodo and Fleshbot)
Ok... Now, I hate to jump onto the bandwagon, and I also loathe the politics of, "but if Obama lied Hillary would be all over it, so we'll be all over her!", but... Dammit, come on... This is as blatant as you can get. She doesn't even really have a good excuse:
I, I, I, Look, I made, I, ya know, I uh made a mistake in describing it...
She just straight made some shit up. I mean, when Sinbad is calling you out, you're in rough shape. As much as I hate the politics of smear, after all of the Rev. Wright bullshit, I really hope this sticks to her.
Hey, remember OurTunes? Remember that awesome feeling you felt when you realized that your could grab music from your friends' iTunes, merely by being in close proximity to their Mac laptop? Aww... them was the good old days...
Oh wait, now there is something much, much more incredible. Enter Mojo. Not only can you share your music via your airport, you can share it over the internet. Yeah. I/you can listen to your/my iTunes and share songs at the click of the mouse.
I encourage everyone I know to get on this service and let's start sharing the wealth.
Alarm Will Sound made this week's Approval Matrix on the New York Magazine website. Not only that, but we are apparently the pinnacle of Highbrow meets Brilliant. Gewd Schtuhph!
Yes. A brilliant speech. Probably the smartest, most honest speech I've heard a politician make in my lifetime.
Three thoughts:
1. I'm not saying that Obama doesn't take politics and spin into account, but the fact that he would not disown Rev. Wright is a shockingly brave position to take. He rightly denounced his comments but wouldn't toss the press the fresh meat they wanted.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Hillary wouldn't have hesitated to sell out anyone who threatened her campaign. The same goes for McCain, and pretty much any other politican I can think of. Obama is tactful as well as moral though. He knows that transparent disowning of a close friend would only poke holes in his image as an honest, moral politician.
2. I've come to realize that the main thing that appeals to me about Obama is his intellect and eloquence. This is hardly surprising after enduring over 7 goddamn years of Bush. I want a president I look up to, a president I respect. I think this is his broad appeal. America wants to have a president they can be proud of again. His "lack of experience" doesn't really bother me. Not to ya know, tow the line, but experience in Washington isn't exactly something I look up to...
3. A criticism: Obama needs to ignore the conservative pundits. He mentioned them a couple times in the speech with a degree of bitterness. He cannot allow their insanity to affect him in the slightest. Responding to them and reacting to them will only encourage them. Everyone knows: do not feed the trolls.
I remember the beginning of the war very clearly. Back then I was much more of a lefty than I am now, so I was pretty active in the anti-war protests. I was also living in London at the time. It was strange to be an American in Europe during the build-up to war. Not a lot of love...
I watched the bombing of Baghdad (aka. Shock and Awe) on Al Jazeera while at a hookah bar I use to frequent. It was a pretty surreal experience. I was with a few friends who were also American and we spent the evening smoking strawberry flavored tobacco and watching the night sky over Baghdad light up with explosions. There was a oddly casual sense of, well, that we were fucked.
The odd idea I had to grapple with, and I still grapple with, is that even though I believed the war to be a horrendous decision, it was something that we as Americans bought, and we had to pay for it. Even though I thought it was a terrible idea, I had to hope that it went well. And actually, one of the things that disenchanted me with the left is that I came to believe that many writers and commentators actually didn't want the war to go well. There seemed to be almost a delight in reporting the escalating death toll, as if each successive death was further justification for their position.
I simply cannot understand why so many on the left and so many libertarians demand an immediate withdrawal. The fact that our troops are dying is a terrible thing, but we made the horrific decision to go to war, we can't just quit when our stupid decision yields less-than-appealing results.
Yes, yes, I know... The Republicans have been using the same rhetoric: "we can't cut and run", "we gotta stay until the job is finished", etc. They are largely full of shit and always have been. But it doesn't mean that they are wrong. As much as I hate to say it, I respect McCain's position on the war more than Hillary's. Hillary was for the war when it was popular and is against it now that it is unpopular. It is a profoundly cowardly position, the worst kind of opinion-poll-politics. McCain was for it when it was popular and is still against it now that it is very unpopular. Even though I couldn't have disagreed more with his position, I have a certain respect for it.
What people need to realize is this: we as a country started this war. Bush didn't start it. He may have lied, been unbelievably deceptive, but come on. It was pretty obvious that he was full of shit. The majority of the country was for the war. The majority of the people who voted, voted to reelect Bush. The war is killing our young people; the war is taking money from schools; the war is ya know, generally fucking up our country? Tough fucking shit America. This is a democracy. When we make a major decision like, say... blowing up a country and killing a bunch of people, there tends to be consequences.
It kills me that Americans and Iraqis are dying. I would much rather have the money and resources used to build our own country. But it would be incredibly hypocritical and destructive of us to renege on our decision to rebuild Iraq, no matter how fucking retarded a decision it was.
It's official. The G train will be extended to Church Ave. in Brooklyn! It should happen in November of this year, which will make getting to North Brooklyn and Queens a hell of a lot easier, as well as possibly offering us a way to catch missed trains if it goes express to Smith and 9th. Yippee!
Unfortunately, it will be accompanied with some major work on the F line. So there may be some tough roads ahead, but still it's getting better!
I've resolved to start listening to more music on Myspace. Quite a resolution huh? No, but actually there are a ton of fantastic musicians on Myspace and I'm always kicking myself for not spending more time on the site, just listening to music from my friends and strangers.
I thought I'd put up a few finds from my recent listening excursions. I don't know any of these people. Here we go:
Michele Zayla- Her Myspace says Boulder, but her website says Brooklyn, so who knows. Alls I know is that her voice and music are ridiculous. She has an effortless silky strong jazz voice, but she adapts it to several styles: folk, soul, standards, etc. Here's a song from her website. It's real good, and I think the ones on her Myspace are even better:
Vincent Bergeron- I don't really know how to describe Vincent Bergeron's music. Yeah, ok... eyes roll. You've heard it before. I'll attempt. It's sounds kind of like Zappa meets The Books meets The Shaggs. Does that make sense? Bergeron is a proudly unphotogenic geek who writes vivacious music, mostly in French (he's from Quebec), and the rhythm seems to follow the rhythm of speech more than that of a metronome. He needs to hook up with Florent Ghys.
Early Songs- Early Songs is the pseudonym for David Scott, who writes and plays all the instruments on his album. It's nice instrumental folk that can border on the sentimental, but I still dig it. It kind of sounds like a less self-conscious Iron and Wine, sans voice. It's end-of-the-day chill out music.
Here is one person's description of my neighborhood of Kensington, Brooklyn:
A very weird community in Brooklyn, has many ethnical backrounds ranging from Italians, Russians, Jews, Muslims, Irish, Albanians and others. Everyone always seems busy in this area and it's usually all overpriced victorian houses. Kids all know each other but never really socialize and bring kids from other neighborhoods over. Very weird place but home to only two types of kids : extremely smart or extremely dumb. The smart kids usually go to Stuy, Brooklyn Tech, Midwood and other well rep'd school meanwhile the other kids go to F.D.R, Erasmus or some really fuked up school. The nerds usually never go out or are major pot heads/drunks who chill in other neighborhoods, the other kids usually hang around the corner. Adults have different jobs ranging from doctors, public health directors to taxi cab drivers. If you live around or in Ocean Parkway your used to the noises the russians make when its 2 am and they're drunk as hell
Billy: I live in Kensington Bob: Oh that deserted place?
The Direct Note Access feature coming in the new version of Melodyne is exactly what sample-based producers like me have been waiting for. We doubted it's possibility, but it's here. Change pitch on notes IN a chord. Not just monophonic material, polyphonic. Yeah... Here's a presentation
I urge you to watch the whole thing, but for the crazy shit, fast-forward to about minute 10, for a string quartet demo, damn!
For a more concise explanation, check out the video on their website.
I see no reason why Sally Kern, the batshit fucking insane Christian lawmaker from Oklahoma, should apologize for her anti-gay speech. I hope she doesn't, and it boggles my mind why so many people are demanding her apology?
Why??
You are essentially demanding her to lie. If that could possibly make you feel better then you are as deluded as she is.
BTW in case you are in the dark about all this, here is her speech:
Yeah, she's pretty evil.
I saw an interview with her today where she refused to apologize for her beliefs. Right on to that at least.
Look, to everyone who is outraged (and I am as well!): You want to this kind of speech to end, make sure she doesn't get re-elected. If you believe at all in democracy let it do it's work, and help it if need be. But don't pretend to yourself that this woman is going to somehow feel bad about this. This is what she thinks and believes, and no matter how callous and evil she is, she ain't gonna change. On the bright side, millions of people are going to know what a crackpot she is.
I wasn't sure how happy I felt about Spitzer going down (presumably) for the Prostitution thang. I don't think it should be illegal, so I didn't want the fact that he's kind of a douche to sway me too much. But after, ya know, reading a bit more about MY governor, including this gem thrown my way by my buddy Clayville:
Media content has gotten more graphic, more violent and more sex-based… Currently, nothing under New York State law prohibits a fourteen-year old from walking into a video store and buying… a game like ‘Grand Theft Auto,’ which rewards a player for stealing cars and beating people up. Children can even simulate having sex with a prostitute…
Yeah, it kinda feels good. Still, I was somewhat ignorantly happy to have a Democrat as governor after more than ten years of Pataki, oy...
Ok, while I'm at it. Does anyone think that Pataki,
This is incredibly silly. Like all anti-drug alarmist speech, it completely ignores the fact that drug prohibition is the REASON for the drug trade in Africa. Governmental prohibition is what is killing people, funding organized crime, taking money from the poor; it is not Amy Winehouse.
That title of the Telegraph (big surprise!) story is apparently paraphrased from this quote:
"The good old dichotomy (male predators, females patiently awaiting the warrior's return in front of the cave entrance) is in big trouble", said Le Nouvel Observateur.
Tacky and misleading. But I clicked, so... I guess it worked. I think it was the WTF factor.
As much as I hate to see Clinton make gains by employing dirty tricks, I guess it's good preparation for Obama, if he makes the nomination. Still, aside from the attack dogs on both sides, I believe that an Obama vs. McCain election would be a remarkable civil one.
Sigh... But alas, the media. This primary season is highlighting the true bias in the media. It was never about a liberal bias or conservative bias, in the mainstream media (of course diregarding the pundits). It is always about the story. It is always about what would attract the most viewers. This makes sense; they are a business. So the stories they seek are about what will capture the imagination of the people, captivate them, draw them into the drama that they can sculpt out of real events.
The best story that could come out of the democratic primary is a razor close, bitter fight for the nomination, taking it all the way to the convention if possible. So the media will naturally attempt to engineer this. I don't think there has been a clear pro-Obama bias. But when Hillary was in the lead, and seen as inevitable, the press appeared to highlight Obama as a "challenger" and a "visionary", the adoration parodied on SNL was tactful. They wanted Obama to catch up with Hillary, but not because they wanted him to win. Because they wanted a good story. And so Obama surpassed her, and now they are hounding him, and presenting her as a "fighter".
It will go back and force as long as they have any influence. Clinton did well in the recent primaries, but she's still down about 100 delegates. They'll be shouting "comeback kid!" about her for the new week or so, presumably until Clinton's polls catch up with Obama's. Then we'll see.
