Author: rwolf

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Zach Hill’s “The Sancto Smile”

Zach Hill is a drummer and visual artist from Sacramento that has been involved in numerous influential bands throughout the last 15 years including Hella, The I.L.Y’s and Death Grips. This particular track comes from his self released album, FACE TAT. His music is generally stupidly fast and has a crazed energy to it. It also should be said that his drumming chops are borderline too good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCWiogdCMY0

The music video for “The Sancto Smile” stuck out to me because of the rapid camera movement as well as the general plot of the video. The plot is relatively straightforward; a girl goes crazy with rage all of the sudden and starts breaking everything and disrupting the peace around her. She also starts making out with herself in the mirror, steals and blows up a car, and gets into other sinister things. The plot is accelerated by shortly cut clips of video linked together in rapid succession. This fits nicely with the plot and the music, which is also fast and features indecipherable lyrics and quick interruptions of noise within the song. The video is also interrupted repeatedly with closeups of her making out in the mirror and paint peeling off a wall as she carves an upside down cross in it with a knife. I’m not sure if there’s any deeper meaning to this video.

Most people in the comments were fans because of the relative obscurity of this video/artist. People are sharing background information on the actors and making jokes mostly, nothing analytical. “Herbert” wants to talk about the explosion effect on the car, which was understandably done cheaply. “Gabriel Molina” notices that an actor in the video was another member of Death Grips, Andy Morin. “The Scare Pusher” realizes that this video is an excerpt from a longer project, “California Bird Dudes”.

 

Overall the comments make you realize how close knit fans of different artists have become, and how segregated different styles of art and the artists of these groups are. You realize that all the people in the making of this video are supporting each other in each individual’s artistic endeavors, which is not immediately apparent. This re enforces the fact that making connections with like-minded people early on is essential.

 

Even though this video was made 7 years ago it still brings up the question about where this style of music could go from here. It seems like the music has gotten as fast and crazy as possible and is on the verge of exploding. Fortunately, soon after the release of FACE TAT, Zach Hill met rapper Stefan Burnett and brought his talents and ideas to Death Grips, making radically different music.

“The Sancto Smile” also shows that music videos can now be easily made by independent artists on their own terms, and can be made for lots of different songs without much cost. For example, the Death Grips album, “Government Plates” features a music video for every song. Artists can now easily intermingle their musical art with their visual art. With this there will and already have been music videos that are basically short movies centered around a song. Kendrick Lamar has done this as well as many others. Combining and mixing more than one song into what becomes a short film. I’m still waiting for a single video to accompany a whole album.

 

When listening to and becoming a fan of a style of music nowadays, you’re throwing yourself into a whole culture and way of life that includes music, fashion and visual art, and as I’ve said before these different cultures will multiply and segregate as the internet allows people to satisfy themselves the niche or niches that are just right for them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zach_Hill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Grips

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_I.L.Y%27s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hella_(band)

https://www.facebook.com/deathgripz/

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The Politics of 1960s “Free Jazz”

Regardless of the intentions of individual artists, in times of struggle and political there will always be a demand for music to be a part of that struggle. When the public hears a music that seems like a good voice for the struggle, the public will latch onto that voice. There will also be later artists that are more politically driven and use the previously worked out art as a platform for their rhetoric.

 

It took a few decades for the theory atonality pioneered by people like Schoenberg and Webern in the 20s to permeate into the realm of jazz. The earliest evidence of atonality in jazz showed up in the music of Lennie Tristano in the 40s, and a few years later in the music of the “Third Stream” movement, an attempt to bring classical and jazz together. But there is a big difference between atonal jazz and Free Jazz. Composers and performers of early atonal jazz inserted elements of contemporary classical music into their writing and playing. The atonality in Free Jazz came simply from an advance from the highly chromatic music of bebop to free tonality. Free Jazz originated entirely from previous jazz, and the language developed entirely through improvisation. Another point that might be noteworthy is that the first people to bring atonality into jazz were white, and “Free Jazz” was invented by black people.

In 1961, Ornette Coleman released a groundbreaking album entitled “Free Jazz; a Collective Improvisation”. This album not only gave a name to the type of music the likes of Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor had been putting in motion for the last five years, but also segregated the listeners, critics, and very culture of jazz and influenced countless artists, each using the pillar of “Free Jazz” differently, notably John Coltrane and Peter Brotzmann.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbZIiom9rDA

What was so controversial about the album was that while it maintained traditional jazz instrumentation, it was almost completely improvised and featured a double quartet; one quartet in each channel so the music is difficult to listen to if you have never heard anything like it before. This improvisational free gave power to the instrumentalist in the creation of melodies as well as form.

 

The music’s upfront and powerful sound as well as its name, Free, being similar to the freedom riders and freedom schools made it immediately associated with the civil rights movement, regardless of the intentions of its creators.

While the album “Free Jazz” was not explicitly related to civil rights or black power, it inspired other artists that were, in particular Archie Shepp and Max Roach. Both artists released albums containing politically charged music, for example Roach’s “We Insist!” and Shepp’s “Fire Music” and “Attica Blues”.

At the time “Free Jazz” was considered forward thinking, but some people have considered the movement to be a return to roots. The highly chromatic harmony of bebop was disassembled, and in many free jazz albums there was a return to multiple instrumentalists soloing together, harkening back to the dixieland days. Many free jazz artists were also exploring the roots of different music from around the world, particularly africa. This relates to the black power movement’s rhetoric of a critical look at western culture.

 

In the end, Ornette Coleman didn’t intend for his album to be politicized, but it was the perfect voice in a time of struggle, and therefore became iconic. However, it is dangerous to look at the music through this lense of politics, as it distorts the original intentions of the artists such as Ornette Coleman. His music is beautiful in its own right and doesn’t need to be attached to a movement.

 

http://www.furious.com/perfect/jazzpunk.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_jazz

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/ornette-coleman-mn0000484396/biography

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The History of the Sample

With the vast quantity of recorded music, now in an ever more accelerated pace of expansion with the music sharing sites such as Bandcamp and Soundcloud, and technology (logic, ableton, pro tools) in place to quickly download, move, and tamper with audio files, the question arises, is there any point to creating new sounds or composing new pieces, of utilizing analog sources to create familiar sounds and songs of all too familiar character? The catalog of recorded material is already so great that it would take thousands of lifetimes to listen to it in its entirety, but perhaps even more exciting or intimidating are the countless ways in which to alter and create entirely new purely from this great catalog.

 

While the radical idea of all modern music being entirely created from past records hasn’t taken hold, sampling in fact entered into the mainstream years ago and has remained there today. For example the music of artists like Kendrick Lamar includes samples, and his new album is on the billboard top 200. I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the music on the billboard 200 includes samples, as samples are ingrained into the way a lot of pop music (primarily black music) is produced. While the process and utilization of sampling has changed, its popularity has remained constant in changing populations for roughly 40 years.

 

This idea to create music purely or partially from previously recorded material began in the late 1940s with a man named Pierre Schaeffer. He spliced together and looped different tapes together to create music. Schaeffer’s believed that classical music began as an abstraction that was later produced as audible music. He strove to start with “concrete” sounds and late abstract them into music. This began the term “musique concrete”.

This process of tape loop sampling was taken up by a wide range of artists from minimalists like Terry Riley to people like John Cage to jamaican dub producers like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. All of whom utilized tape recordings in their own unique and preconditioned musical language.

 

In the 1960s a new process of sampling emerged, this was digital sampling. The most notable early samplers were the Mellotron, the Fairlight CMI, and later the Akai MPCs. The digital samplers took pre recorded sounds into an interface which could be played with ease; the musician could play and sample he or she want to with the push of a button. The earliest innovators with this new technology were bands like Yellow Magic Orchestra and Big Audio Dynamite.https://www.dawsons.co.uk/blog/the-sampler-a-history-in-5-landmarks

Sampling however became most widespread and popular not in synth based pop music but in hip hop. In fact, sampling has been engrained in hip hop from the beginning, hip hop has a history not of analog or digital instruments, but of utilizing turntables and samplers to create music from pre-recorded sounds. The beats in popular hip hop from the 70s to around the mid 200s centered around break beatsl; beats taken from isolated drum sections of funk songs and looped. For example, the isolated drum beat from the James Brown song “Funky Drummer” has been sampled countless times in both hip hop and jamaican drum and bass and jungle music.

Not only were break beats sampled though, hip hop producers looking for melody and harmony as well as good bass lines turned to whatever they had in their record collection in order to create good music derived from a patchwork of previously recorded material.   

Today sampling is more fluid and there are mountains sampling software. Altering the sample is also very easy- there is software for it. At this point one finds that as a composer it’s equally acceptable to be fluent in the language of theory as it is to be fluent in the language of the sample.

 

http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/albumsbands-who-use-lots-of-samples

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)

http://120years.net/musys-and-mouse-audio-synthesis-language-peter-grogono-untied-kingdom-1965/