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Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Moving to New Site, New RSS Feed

Hey all, I'm finally making the move and upgrading to a real website:

www.mattmarksmusic.com

This is mainly for folks who are following this blog via an RSS reader - direct traffic to mattmarksmusic.blogpost.com will be automatically redirected to the new site.

Please update your RSS readers, my new feed is:

http://mattmarksmusic.com/feed

There's also a link to subscribe on the front page.

The new site is a big upgrade; it's still pretty bloggy - it's a Wordpress site - but there's some nice new stuff: a calendar of upcoming events, some cool pics, and a lot of tunes, surely some stuff you've never heard before.

So give it a look and thanks for reading!

Sunday, July 12, 2009

"The more brutal it is, the better"

Yo, check out this awesome story in the NJ Star-Ledger about badass composer, and friend, David T. Little:
"I grew up very much outside of the classical tradition, not really knowing that it existed, not knowing that composers existed or that people still wrote music," Little reflects.

At first, classical music, particularly Mozart, felt foreign and false. "It represented this polite, neat, well-packaged culture which I didn't really relate to. Aside from the musical theater, I was listening to death metal, which was the opposite of that. It was aggressive, messy -- brutal is a term that's used a lot in that genre. The more brutal it is, the better."

"Classical music struck me as living in denial. You have this music that is so perfect and that's just not true, that's not life."

But as Little searched websites for ways to become a film composer and feverishly tried to follow their instructions, he came across recommendations for certain classical works. He started with Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring." Nearly every day for months, he spent hours listening to the composition. He bought himself a score and flipped the pages while listening to his cassette -- until he could follow Stravinsky's challenging notation through the end.

"'The Rite of Spring' was huge," Little remembers. "It was such a visceral piece. It was brutal in the same way that this extreme metal was -- it acknowledges the sort of underbelly or the non-enlightenment period sorts of things about humanity."


Ditto, man. The Rite was a major turning point for me too. It was also the first piece that I didn't feel ashamed to play for my non-classical musician friends (which vastly out-numbered my classical musician friends). When in doubt I'd try and convince them of how "trippy" it was, especially when in the correct state of mind (ahem...).

What has lingered of my Rite-ophilia has been an appreciation for the effective marriage of raw, tribal emotion and extreme precision. For myself, this evolved into a love and appreciation for intense electronica - jungle/drum 'n' bass, hardcore, breakcore; for David it seems to have developed into a love for intricate metal - death, speed, math-metal, etc. Even attempting to integrate these styles into concert hall is a daunting task, but luckily for David, it's less an act of integration than it is a natural fusion. A great example of this is Sweet Light Crude, a piece written for his rock ensemble, Newspeak (you can hear SLC and more here on his website).

Read the whole article, it's good stuff. And make sure to come check out several of David's pieces (including excerpts from his upcoming Opera, Dog Days, a collaboration with the wonderful librettist, Royce Vavrek) this coming Friday (7/17/09) at Galapagos Art Space.

Auto-tune the News 6



I don't know how to tell you how much I love these guys.

Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Rhapsody in Blue Remix

Hey folkies, I'll be performing a live remix of Rhapsody in Blue tomorrow (Wednesday, July 8th - 6:30) @ The Greene Space in NYC for the 85th anniversary of WNYC. If you're around please come check it out, tickets are FREE! :)

If for some reason you cannot make it - out of town, in hospital (really the only two acceptable reasons...) - you can listen to it live on wnyc.org. Broadcast begins at 7pm EST.

Now, if there's one thing I hate it's a straight-forward remix, so I'm a little notorious for making remixes that eschew the spirit and style of their source material, in favor for something completely different (quite often I'll take something simple and naive and make it dark and twisted - not too original I know, but I loves it!). With this source material, though, I completely respect and love it. In fact, performing a solo piano version of Rhapsody in Blue as a young teen in a recital was one of my first serious musical experiences. Irony seems a little out of place.

I'll give you a sample of what you can expect tomorrow. All of the sounds are from various recordings of the piece, with the exception of two: the Amen break, and a few 909 samples.

Enjoy:




It'll be a great show. Also performing will be Alicia and Jason Moran, Marta Eggerth, and Dave Burrell, performing music by Puccini, Antheill, and Jelly Roll Morton.

Check it out!