The final Learning Music album of season two is available now. For their 24th release, they invited some special guests into the studio, including Gabe Noel on bass/guitar and Mike Green on drums. TendaLoin also produced a few tracks. Enjoy these samples – or follow the link below for a free stream + download of the full album. Don’t miss this one…
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LMM 2.12 is an album about sex. As a musical subject, the topic is not uncommon. But it’s one that I’ve for the most part neglected until now. This work attempts to take the common pop-music perspective on sex and expand it to include (and in fact tell a story of) the entire reproductive process. If you want, you might think of it as a tribute to humanity’s oldest and perhaps greatest creative (artistic) act.
:: John Wood
There are three shows tonight in Echo Park. With a little bit of commitment, a designated driver, or a bicycle – you can make all three!
#1. Learning Music @ Pehrspace – 9pm
• 325 glendale blvd / los angeles ca 90026 // $5
#2. Larry Goldings @ The Bootleg Theater – 10pm
(with Gabe Noel on bass and Mike Green on drums)
• followed by Obi Best at 11pm
• 2220 Beverly Boulevard / Los Angeles, CA 90057 // $10
#3. Bobb Bruno @ Echo Curio – 12:30am
• 1519 Sunset Blvd / Echo Park, CA 90026 // $5(ish)
• BOBB BRUNO’S RETIREMENT SHOW – NO JOKE – NOT TO BE MISSED…
We launched a new website for Learning Music this week.
It’s hard to believe that an entire year has come and gone – but the release of LMM 2.12 marked the end of Season Two. Thank you to John Wood and the entire laundry list of Learning Music contributors, collaborators, and supporters for their unrelenting dedication to the project.
In preparation for the off season, we decided to make some improvements to the website. The entire Learning Music catalog – all 24 albums – is now available for free streaming and download. There are also integrated liner notes with each album and direct mp3 links in case you want to share a song (or 20) with a friend.
Our sincere thanks to Jesse von Doom, the executive director of CASH Music, for lending his expertise during its development. We’ve blogged about CASH frequently in the past – and we will continue to do so. CASH is building a platform of web tools designed for musicians and music organizations – and their open-source codebase is the foundation of the new site.
(That gives you a few months to catch up … there’s a lot of music to be heard).
PS. Effective immediately, we will be tweeting a free Learing Music MP3 every day. Maybe twitter will be out of style by the time we run out of songs in 2011 sometime. Follow: @learningmusic
PPS. Learning Music plays this Saturday at Pehrspace! They’re on early – followed by Ing, Detangler, Josh Ottum, and Rats (most likely not in that order). Details at pehrspace.org.
#1
Social Science Recordings, home to LA’s Obi Best & Vincent Minor, has just released a digital EP from their remix contest. vosotros is excited to kick off the collection with our remix of “Origami” by Obi Best. The EP is available on iTunes and AmazonMP3 – but you can also download it free from Social Science for the remainder of January.
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#2
AOL Music just featured our remix of “Your Powers Are Magic” by Apache Beat on Spinner. Download it HERE.
We couldn’t think of a better fitting design than the faces that graced the cover of The Years. Thanks to Alexis Demetriades for her incredible drawings. They looked real good on an album cover – and they look damn good on a t-shirt.
The new shirts are available in our webstorea la carte or bundled with a copy of The Years (recently named the #6 best R&B album of 2009 by Amazon.com). Buy the bundle and get the album for 1/2 off.
[ps. you can download all the faces as iPhone wallpapers HERE]
LMM 2.11 is a merging of artistic techniques dating from several relatively distinct eras of human history– as old as the 17th century B.C. (and even earlier) and as recent as 1982.
Mostly, this is a tribute to J. S. Bach’s fifteen two-part inventions. Written between 1717 and 1723, these thematic, contrapuntal pieces, following a simplified fugal form, were intended as etudes for keyboard and composition students. Likewise, writing fifteen brand new inventions was for me an intense study of Bach’s technique. Even with just two voices, this album is vertically dense and very German (in the sense that it is harmonically complex, even though #14 is intended as a melodious shout out to Rossini [Italian, 1792 -1868]).
Though these Learning Music inventions are written in the same keys as Bach’s, they follow a different order. Bach’s inventions are numbered by harmonic ascension (C, D, Eb, E, etc.). I chose to arrange mine following the order chosen by Glenn Gould for his recordings of the Bach inventions and sinfonias in the 1960s, moving through keys as they relate harmonically, much as the theme in each piece itself is modulated from key to key. Another unifying technique borrowed from Gould is the mathematical modulation of tempos from track to track.
Also concerned with math, Bach is known for building symmetrical shapes within his music, including the inventions. Symmetry is found in countless examples of art through the ages. It appears in Chinese bronze castings from as early as the 17th century B.C. It is aslo a recurring theme in religious and philosophical concepts from all over the world. This album as a whole uses a symmetrical structure. The inventions at the beginning and end are very traditional, following most closely the style of Bach. Moving toward the middle of the album, each piece becomes more abstract harmonically, moving more freely between keys, and stepping away from the rules of traditional counterpoint. Similarly, the first and last composition are both in a duple meter; the ones next to those are in triple; and as we progress toward the middle piece, which is in no set meter at all, we use meters of increasing odd numbers (5, 7, 9, 11). Time signatures of 5, 7, and higher prime numbers were uncommon in written music until the late 19th century (and are non-existent in Bach’s works), even though they were employed even before Bach’s time in pieces by Giovanni Valentini (1582-1649).
The recording of this album employed (obviously) much younger techniques than those studied to write it. Each invention was performed on a digital keyboard with rudimentary MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) capabilities, from which both the audio and MIDI information were recorded. The original MIDI protocol was developed in 1982 as a way for different digital instruments to work together. I used this technology to play back each performance through different keyboards (also dating from the early 80s) plugged into guitar amplifiers, using my now-free hands to twist the keyboard control knobs, and re-recording their sounds in sync with the original audio signal. I also used this MIDI information to trigger two samples of my voice in unison with the keyboards. All these sounds were combined together to create these odd resultant tones. The electronicization of contrapuntal baroque music began (famously) in 1968 with Walter Carlos’ (now Wendy Carlos) Switched-On Bach, which featured a handful of Bach compositions (including three inventions) performed on an early Moog modular synthesizer.
This month’s artwork is by “graphic artist, daydreamer, pseudo-scientist, wanna-be astronaut and untrained intellectual” Christopher David Ryan. Many thanks to Christopher, and to Autumn for getting him on board! To me, this image successfully represents all the things I find important about the album.
I hope you also find something in this collection. Please consider it as a candidate for semi-official theme music of 2010.
Bobb Bruno has been all over the interweb these days. There are a few copies of his Dreamt On EP left in the vosotros shop – so grab one while you can! (release limited to 108 copies)
• Glenne Kotche of Wilco’s Top 10 albums of 2009 (via Brooklyn Vegan)
• “this is definitely not an album for everyone, but it won me over after a single listen.” – #19 – Best of ‘09 list (via Mugpuerh)
• Bobb Bruno + Avi Buffalo @ the Echo – named one of the best shows of 2009 by Amnion’s Aaron Embry (via Radio Free Silver Lake)
• “a collection of six vocalless sonic experimentations that emulate the fantasy, peacefulness and disorienting nature of dreams” (via Creamteam)
• “thoroughly peaced out keyboard ruminations” (via Rose Quartz)
• “Bobb’s just put out an EP for Vosotros that moves like water between spacey atmospherics, pop sheen and country clarity; even meandering down to the grit and vinegar of noise.” (via Raven Sings The Blues)
