(”Little Conversation” from The Ghost Transferences)

LMM 3.2 – Neapolitan Shake is a collection of three EP-length suites.

The Big Sell EP is music written to accompany imaginary television commercials. The lyrical themes are derived from the three song topics supposedly most requested by advertisers looking for songs to place in commercials: “Thinking Ahead,” “Brand New Day,” and “Things Are Getting Better.” These are happy songs, optimisticly celebrating the great corporate takeover of American hearts and minds. Like the mythical corporations they accompany, these pieces avoid risky innovation, rather glorifying popularly (a.k.a. commercially) successful ideas of the past.

The three pieces that make up The Way of A. O. K. each conceptually combine a sound found in modern life (an ATM, a turn signal, a baseball stadium) with a short quote from Lao Tzu’s Toa Te Ching. The keyboard sounds are meditations recorded at half speed, giving upon (faster) playback a broader perspective of their combined revelations. This music is unashamedly inspired by the sounds of Terry Riley’s Rainbow in Curved Air. Though I’m not sure of the technique he employed to make that piece, it must have been similar to this. When Rainbow was made, it may have been theoretically impossible to recreate in a live-music setting, as the performances were (I believe) temporally altered. Modern music technology, however, may now be able to alter such instrumental performances as they are happening. Such an approach to music performance could be the next step in the blurring of conceptual lines between “live” and recorded musics.

The Ghost Transferences are stream of consciousness pop rants sung in part by channelled spirits, addressing topics of identity crisis and the random hauntings of modern memory.

Download LMM 3.2 for FREE from www.LearningMusicMonthly.com

:: permalink