Crack
Ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering.
There is a crack in everything
that is how the light gets in.
– Leonard Cohen
The Venue Shapes the Music
David Byrne Journal: 8.14.06: Duisburg, Germany: The Venue Shapes the Music
The space in which music is to be heard can determine what kind of music the artists create. The physical shape, acoustics, floor plan, and layout of a venue can contribute to the sound. For example, The Kitchen, which was an art-music-performance-loft in SoHo, was austere, reverberant, and echoey. The resultant music, from Phil Glass to Rys Chatham, was pretty spacey and trancelike. Jazz clubs tend to be extremely intimate. The music that results is one of details and an intricate, narrow focus of expression. Arena rock is written to be performed in an arena—it sounds and looks ridiculous in an intimate club. Symphony halls work best for classical music written during a particular era, opera halls…you get the idea.
Indeed. Anything that shapes the sound also shapes the music…
A really big change happens when you fill a venue with bodies! This is what makes a great live sound engineer: the ability to anticipate how the bodies in the venue will change the sound for the performance. I have performed in venues where I hated the sound during soundcheck in the afternoon, but once the venue was filled with bodies it sounded wonderful…
David Byrne also writes:
Is music being written and recorded expressly to cater to the iPod wearer? Is music being written for an audience of one? Private music, intimate, personal — full of details and space?
I always felt that’s what Bjork did with Vespertine. To me that was the first music written for iPod! And I do love listening to One Guitar on an iPod, because even the smallest details stand out… the reverb becomes a hall inside my head…
Thanks for the tip, DK.
Recording
Day two of our recording session at Jon’s studio. We have recorded about two hours of material so far. Much editing lies ahead… Some of the most precious moments happened spontaneously. At one point yesterday I started playing some chords and Rahim began to sing beautifully. Then the music drifted toward a 6/8 rhythm and Rahim started playing the oud. Lucky for us that Jon was recording! Rahim told us today he could not sleep until four this morning because he kept hearing that piece in his mind… With me it was the other way around: I woke up at four and could not go back to sleep. When we listened to the piece today, I could not remember playing the music. It was like listening to somebody else’s performance…
This evening I started playing guitar without wearing headphones, thinking that Barrett and Jon were working on something in the control room. Rahim played the oud and some magical stuff started happening. To our surprise Jon had quickly captured the whole thing…
Barrett has a great feel on the drums and it is great to hear him with Jon. It’s funny, Al Masocco was my product manager at Epic Records and since he was also the Screaming Trees‘ product manager Barrett and I have heard about each other for about a decade, but we only met yesterday.
Billboard
Aisa Jadoo Remix
I think you will agree that the guitar sounds very familiar, yes?
Heard at the Indian restaurant in Santa Fe, where Barrett, Rahim, Jon and I ate dinner on a break from recording.
Above link is dead now. Try this link to a YouTube vid containing the same song and sample.
