I’ve been listening to a bunch of Philip Glass while working on papers and revisited his opera about the life of Gandhi, Satyagraha.

Glass has a reputation for sort-of cheesy, new-agey stuff, so focusing on Gandhi as a topic doesn’t do much to reduce the overall corniness of his oeuvre. My cynicism requires me to ignore the silliness of the “message” and the overarching themes Glass tries so earnestly to get to by focusing each act on Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, major literary figures with ties to Gandhi’s life. Luckily, the best part of the opera is not the story. (If you could even say it has a “story.”)

As I’ve been sending out links to some of the music on the site to people, I have noticed that I am loath to direct people to zShare (where I used to host my music files), on account of the videos of girls in thongs that surround the download links. So, to remedy that, and because I don’t have all that much download traffic anyway, I’m rehosting all the music stuff myself, so I can send links to people that don’t involve multitudinous fannies. So all the links through the sidebar should go to files hosted on my site. Please right-click and download rather than listen online to save me the bandwidth!

I’ve added “Won’t Get Fooled Again and Again” to the sidebar (for better or worse–I’d recommend listening to the beginning, then find the guitar solos, then skip to the end), along with a The Books-inspired piece I composed for a multimedia course in college (in the archive-dredging spirit of the last post, and a previous draft of the Ciara piece from my Pop Studies. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure that has overcome me, a piece simply titled “Song 1” composed in Apple’s Garage Band, made solely from royalty-free loops. Highly recommended comedy listening.

For the completists out there, here is a list of all the musical cruft lining my website tubes:

• Pop Studies The whole album of ‘em.
• Ciara Drone The early version.
• Estefan on the Beach Philip Glass, a la Miami Sound Machine.
• My Claps Steve Reich, a la Black Eyed Peas.
• Seaver Final Project The elegantly named Books rip-off.
• Song 1 Royalty-free and comedy gold.
• Won’t Get Fooled Again and Again Keep in mind the listening notes above.

More to come…..?

In honor of today’s internet Radiohead-style release of Girl Talk’s new album, I’m going to liveblog it, because it seems appropriate. Let’s see how much of this turns into “name that tune.” I’ll try to make it moderately interesting.

Turned out kind of long. Scroll to the end for my incisive conclusions, after the break.

Won’t Get Fooled Again (played five times simultaneously)

After the runaway success of my Pop Studies, with the public clamoring for a follow-up, I retreated into my creative space to develop a new idea.

Listening to the radio on some errand, I heard the beginning of Gloria Estefan/Miami Sound Machine’s “1-2-3” (ironically enough, on that video they cut out the opening counting sequence, but you get the idea). I thought, “Wait a minute, is that Einstein on the Beach?”

(here’s a video of some lego men performing “Knee Play 1,” the opening of Einstein on the Beach)

It was not Einstein on the Beach, of course, but I decided to make it so, using the magic of computers. I took samples from 1-2-3, a couple other Gloria Estefan songs, and an interview with Gloria that I substituted for the spoken word parts, and came up with:

Estefan on the Beach.

I won’t bore you with too much of the technical detail, but it might interest you to know that:

1. I had to reconstruct the “eight” out of parts of a “seven” and a “three,” because the “eight” in the original has a big snare hit behind it.
2. The spoken word text has been arranged to mirror the motifs and repeats of the original spoken word part, for example: “Will it get some wind for the sailboat?” becomes “and he was playing ‘Do the Hustle’ on the accordion.”

Overall, I think the result is pretty crazy, and significantly less calming than the original.

My Claps

The second piece I’m putting up today is a new one, continuing the pop-sample covers of minimalist landmark pieces:

My Claps

This one is a version of Steve Reich’s “Clapping Music,” using a sample from the Black Eyes Peas’ “My Humps.”

In the original piece, a 12-beat rhythm is clapped by two people. They start in unison, but at the end of each 12-beat phrase, one clapper offsets his rhythm back by one beat. This happens repeatedly until the two clappers are back in unison. The result is the generation of new rhythms from repetitions of the same pattern.

I took the first twelve beats of “My Humps” and repeated them according to the same rules in “Clapping Music,” as you can see in the small excerpt image above, and ended up with My Claps.

These are the first two drafts from what I intend to be an album’s worth of ‘Minimalist Studies,’ so stay tuned!

and if you were worried, you can always download the newest goodies over in the sidebar at the bottom.