Monday, February 25, 2013

cheap guitars and weird tunings

[Sonic Youth] could only afford cheap guitars, and cheap guitars sounded like cheap guitars. But with weird tunings or something jammed under a particular fret, those humble instruments could sound rather amazing – bang a drum stick on a cheap Japanese Stratocaster copy in the right tuning, crank the amplifier to within an inch of its life, and it will sound like church bells.

—Michael Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life, pg. 243

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Have Yourself A Double-Dip Recession

Have yourself a double-dip recession
let the tax cuts die,
now our expectations will be not so high.

Have yourself a fiscal cliffjump session,
speculators pray.
From now on austerity will be the way!

Here we are, as in recent days.
Congress gridlock days of yore.
Faithful cronies, lend an ear to us,
fear the boom and bust no more.

Through the years
the deficit will pile up
If the Fed allows.
Some think Congress must be muddling through somehow,
so have yourself a double-dip recession now.

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Music isn't what it used to be.


"A study of music from the '50 to the present using the Million Song Dataset has concluded that modern music has less variation than older music and songs today are, on average, 9dB louder than 50 years ago. Almost all music uses just 10 chords, but the way these are used together has changed, leading to fewer types of transitions being used. Variation in timbre has also reduced over the past decades."
via Slashdot

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Parodicality Aphorism

Counterpoint means never having to ask a dissonant interval how it expects to resolve back to the dominant.