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5 comments
Strangely have an ache around my low back waist. I’ve been taking quite a few meds, and have some back related issues from chronic illnesses, so I can’t exactly tell if it’s anything related to that. 🙁
Perhaps just a muscle pain though? It does hurt when I push it so I don’t know lol. The timing is a bit bad for it but I’ll probably go to the doctor in some time if I can. Has been several days so I just hope it goes away by the time I’m available for it but nonetheless.
It is a bit of a vent but hopefully it’s okay here.
People in the baking subreddit are already doing Christmas cookie drills. Don’t people have Thanksgiving and stuff first?
Yesterday I was a bit exhausted and foggy in the head after work, so I decided to sit down and try to sight-read some Bach. I love Bach but I don’t play them very often (mainly because I never thought it sounds great on a modern piano, or maybe it’s just me). It was soooo nice. I started the two-part inventions (the Czerny edition mercifully has the fingerings written down). They’re like little puzzles fitting together. It was deeply therapeutic. I will definitely keep playing them.
I also saw that there’s a Finnish company who’s producing a meateggmilkcheese substitute from bacteria, which has a ton of protein and micronutrients. It looked really interesting. I checked, but they don’t have any jobs on offer 😞 I could have moved to a town under a rock to solve the world’s food problem.
Next week we have an official inspection at work so it’s been a long and boring week of collecting, copying and in some cases making (inventing?) all the different bureaucratic documents that are needed for such occasions.
I’ll be glad when it’s all over! Luckily a full inspection only takes place once every 4 years.
I changed to winter tyres today. When I drove the car inside it wasn’t raining and the ground was clear. Then when I drove it out it had started snowing and there was a centimetre or so covering the ground. Perfectly timed, I guess.
Though it doesn’t look like this will hold. Either way, first snow today.
There’s apparently an upcoming movie adaptation of Wuthering Heights, called Wuthering Heights, and Charli xcx has made original music for it. I listened to her song from this project called [House](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xgp7wlBfASA), which features John Cale from Velvet Underground. First of all, I love the song. But second, I think it is yet another example that contemporary alternative pop, especially hyperpop, has very many attributes you find in post modern music.
Main thing being the obsession with tone and sound itself. You could hear this already in early hyperpop in for example Sophie’s work from around 2016. Her sound design was so intricate, detailed and intentional. It places less value to whatever function a particular chord or note might have, although it is more often than not functional, but rather focuses on the characteristics of the sound itself. This is just like spectral music, which in its core is inspired by spectral analysis of a sound.
You listen to this Charli xcx track, House, and you right away hear a simple string ostinato repeating just one note where all interest comes from its texture. The sound has a lot of noise in it, it would be more at home in a Kaija Saariaho piece than a movie soundtrack song by a pop girl.
The spoken word vocals are escorted to the foreground by a lower string line, which is more obviously synthesised. I’m not going to do any super detailed harmonic analysis of the sound, but it has a metallic quality reminiscent of Claude Vivier’s Les Couleurs technique. The sound of ring modulation, frequency modulation, something like that. It has an inharmonicity to it, which again places it on the tone-noise spectrum. Eventually more industrial distorted sounds come in and the whole thing expands, but the focus is so heavy on this sonic landscape.
It’s not completely new though, I think this focus on timbre has been inherited from earlier electronic dance music, the focus on timbre is an obvious route to take considering the design of synthesisers themselves. But the early pioneers of synthesisers were in part also the early pioneers of post-modern spectralist ideas.
I just find it so interesting.