INT. ROB’S APARTMENT – NIGHT

Rob is surrounded by stacks of records on the floor. He looks to camera.

ROB
I’m reorganizing my records tonight. It’s something I do in times of emotional distress. When Laura was here I had them in alphabetical order, before that, chronologically. Tonight, though, I’m trying to put them in the order in which I bought them. That way I can write my own autobiography without picking up a pen. Pull them all off the shelves, look for Revolver and go from there. I’ll be able to see how I got from Deep Purple to The Soft Boys in twenty-five moves. What I really like about my new system is that it makes me more complicated than I am. To find anything you have to be me, or at the very least a doctor in Rob-ology. If you wanna find Landslide by Fleetwood Mac you have to know that I bought it for someone in the fall of 1983 and then didn’t give it to them for personal reasons. But you don’t know any of that, do you? You would have to ask me to –

For those fans of the movie, yes this is the scene from High Fidelity. I thought the concept was a fun exercise that I’d like to try. I wondered what my life would look like spread out by the album covers that I’ve listened to. I started from the very beginning, the stuff my parents would listen to around the house. For instance my mom would often spin Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits while cleaning the house on Saturdays so to this day when I listen to them it takes me back to childhood. I distinctly remember the explosive BOOM on the intense parts on the live version of “The Boxer” and it just blew my 8 year old mind.

It’s funny how music can tether itself to memories of your life. When I listen to “Revolution 9″ I remember the 5th grade, hauling my dad’s copy of The Beatles White Album to my friend Patrick’s house and totally freaking out by that song (delightfully so). My dad later got the album on CD and I would listen to the whole thing on repeat while playing Contra on my Nintendo during lazy Saturday afternoons. I remember seeing the video for U2 “Where the Streets Have No Name” for the first time and being BLOWN AWAY by this massive wall of sound. I remember in High School listening to Peter Gabriel’s So for weeks on end and how “Mercy Street” provided the perfect soundtrack to the early morning dawn. It was the first time that I realized some music enhanced (or was enhanced by) certain times of day. I remember borrowing a copy of Radiohead’s Kid A and listening to it for the first time while working on a project for a design class in college and realizing that my musical mindset was changed forever.

The experiment was a very enlightening experience. I’m sure I’ll have several “Crap! I can’t believe I forgot _____ album!” moments but this is a pretty good snapshot. This is by no means exhaustive. There was quite a bit of stuff in-between but I mostly included music that I owned, or borrowed extensively, for the entire album’s worth. There were singles that I wore the tape out on (or mix tapes!), but that would have been a bit trickier to map out so I just stuck with albums that I appreciated the entirety of. So enjoy, make fun of me if you like (just remember the musical skeletons in your music closet!).

(click to enlarge)

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This song has probably been one of the most challenging things I’ve ever worked on, but that’s exactly why I wanted to do it. The challenge itself was very compelling. I can’t even say how the ideal first occurred to me. One day the idea just popped in my head that it would be fun to record a song that is exactly the same backward as it is forward. I have coined the term Palinphonic*, a combination of Palindrome (a word, phrase, number or other sequence of units that can be read the same way in either direction. Root – pálin – Greek “again”) and Phonic (of, relating to, or producing sound).

I had a game plan worked out in my head but figured out most of it out as I went. Rather than break down my step-by-step I’ve broken this down by concepts used.

Language:
My original idea was to simply have a forward vocal melody going against backward one but it just sounded terrible. So I started researching palindromes, phonetic palindromes (a portion of sound or phrase of speech which is identical or roughly identical when reversed) and phonetic reversal (the process of reversing the phonemes of a word or phrase which doesn’t have to be identical when reversed. This is called back-masking when applied to recorded sound).

Now writing those types of things from scratch would have been quite a daunting task. Luckily the magic of the internet gave me quite a few ready examples. One that I used is actually a latin palindrome – In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni (“We go wandering at night and are consumed by fire”). I liked the English translation so much I used that.

An example of phonetic reversal that I thought was very cool is “you” and “we”. When used in conjunction and reversed, each word sounds like the other backwards. So if you record yourself saying “you… we…” and play it backwards it sounds like you’re still saying “you… we…”.

Music:
One of the biggest surprises I had in this whole process was how easy the music was to put together. I was originally planning on having a forward part playing against a different backward one, similar to what I was planning for the vocals.

After messing with that a bit I realized that if the part was somewhat simple I could actually reverse the part against itself and it produced an entirely new rhythm with a lovely “swooshiness” about it. It also sounded less “obviously” reversed.

So what I had to do is come up with segments to an arrangement, then reverse the audio recording for individual segment on top of itself, then reverse the arrangement pattern. To illustrate, if the song is an A – B – A – C structure, I reversed each segment’s recording against itself (A-reversed is played at the same time as A-forward, etc.) and then I reversed the structure (A – B – A – C followed by C – A – B – A). Basically the arrangement mirrors itself at the halfway mark. Since each segment is reversed against itself and the arrangement mirrors, then the whole song plays the same backwards as forwards.

When you reverse a vocal track it sounds very unnatural because all of your speech patterns are backward. To help some of the vocal bits sound a more natural I recorded the part, reversed it, and then recorded a new forward part mimicking the reversed part. Applying this technique “padded” the vocal so it sounded a little more like a foreign language than a reversed recording yet still retained all of the backwards/forwards functionality.

Beatles Influence:
The Beatles nuts out there will immediately notice the blatant influence across the entire piece, even the title itself. For those who aren’t as familiar, here’s a brief history… The Beatles where one of the first artists to employ reversed recordings on their album Revolver. On the song “Rain” (which is actually a B-Side from the album) the last verse are the vocals from the first verse simply played backward. They also used reverse recording effects on “Tomorrow Never Knows” and “I’m Only Sleeping” from the same album. One of their other most known examples of this technique is their song “Revolution 9” from the White Album which actually employed back-masking (the repeated phrase “number 9” when played backwards supposedly says “turn me on, dead man” which fueled the fire of the Paul is dead conspiracy).

I noticed that the word revolver itself was basically a phonetic palindrome. So I took the “you… we…” phonetic palindrome mentioned above and wrote the line “we love you revolver” and notice when it was reversed it sounded like “we value revolver” which was a pleasant surprise.

The use of a tanpur in the intro/outro was directly influenced from “Tomorrow Never Knows” and the tabla from several Beatles songs like “Within Without You“. I also included a line “everybody’s got one” taken from the garbled vocals in the outro from “I Am the Walrus” (“get one, got one, everybody’s got one”).

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*Actually my friend Ned came up with Palindrome-phonic. I simply shortened it.

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So you’ve perused the menu and you think “Hmmnn…. I’m not sure what I want. Let’s see… oh Neil Diamond, yeah that’ll work.”, but then after a few minutes it’s just not doing it for you. So you crack open the menu again and your eyes cross Paul Simon’s Graceland. You switch to that and WOW… now that really hits the spot. That is exactly what you were needing.

For those world music buffs you could even go so far as to look over your menu and wonder “Am I in the mood for Chinese today? Indian? Mexican?”. Ok that was a joke.

Now you could take this metaphor to a literal sense and talk about music’s benefits on the physical body. I’m sure everyone has heard dozens of studies on the effect of music on anything from plants to comatose humans. There are even studies on how different types of music can affect biology, like heavy metal vs. classical music on plants, or Barry White and the backseat of a car.

Have you ever had a craving for music? A particular band or artist? A specific song?

yum yum

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So here it is. I’m not a legal expert (quite the contrary) and not extremely well-versed in the history and intricate details of Creative Commons Licensing. This is merely my personal observations and opinion.

A) Why not? You said why bother releasing under CC Licensing when you can just write it out in plain English yourself. When we’re dealing with copyright issues, protection and permission is important. CC is already in very plain, easy to understand English. Because of their clear, concise website, it’s easy to find out (which types of licensing you need). And the description of each type is written out in quite plain and easy to understand terms. I’m a legal idiot and I can understand it.

B) Flickr, Wikipedia, and even Google image search now have Creative Commons functionality. The first time I posted to Wikipedia (before CC) I had a headache trying to figure out under which licensing to post photos. Now is easy as could be. Also if I want to find images released under CC on Flickr or Google they’re just a click away.

C) The very phrase “Creative Commons” itself specifies unique search terms. If I’m a remixer, a film student looking for music for my project, or just a regular schmoe looking for material for my YouTube videos, it just takes a quick search for “Creative Commons” to come up with ample material that I can use. Searching for “royalty-free” or similar terms comes up with hordes of bad links or packages you have to buy just to get the royalty-free material. Also with YouTube and similar sites cracking down on copyright violations, there are hundreds of people who find themselves without supplemental material for their work. It just takes one person to tell them about Creative Commons to open up a world of available material for them.

D) Community and association. People who issue work under CC and people who use CC are creating networks amongst themselves. Creative Commons itself even has a remixing website (ccMixter.org) in which I issue all of my song stems for the hundreds of members across the globe to remix. These type of communities are invaluable to DJ’s and students, etc..

Here’s an excellent blog post by Curt Smith of Tears for Fears on why he uses Creative Commons http://www.curtsmithofficial.com/blog/about-creative-commons

*** UPDATE ***
Here’s a really nice post on some prominent organizations using Creative Commons Licensing which includes a much better description of Google and Wikipedia’s usage:
http://creativecommons.org/about/who-uses-cc

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i had a quasi-epiphany last year when i heard david lynch talking about creativity (and forgive me if this sounds new age or hokey).
he talked about how creativity in and of itself is great, and i realized that he was right.
and i realized that, ideally, the market should accomodate art, but that art shouldn’t accomodate the market.
i know, it sounds idealistic.
i had been trying to make myself happy and make radio happy and make the label happy and make press happy and etc.
and it made me miserable.
and i also don’t really aspire to selling too many records.
see, my friends who are writers sell 20,000 books and they’re happy.
my friends who are theater directors sell 5,000 tickets during a run and they’re happy.
i like the idea of humble and reasonable metrics for determining the success of a record.
and i like the idea of respecting the sacred bond that exists between musician and listener.
again, i know this sounds hokey, but it’s where i am at present.

This was forwarded to me by a close friend and I must admit that it floored me quite a bit. It goes on but this is the part that got to me. I fully realize that A) this is very idealistic and B) it’s a bit easier for Moby to follow this direction than it is for a less-famous-musician (cough cough). However, although I consider myself a Realist in many ways, you may say that I’m a Dreamer (but I’m not the only one… sorry had to say it). I also believe that you need to follow your creative muse whether it’s the popular thing or not. I haven’t always felt this way. I tried to play the game. I tried to force my creative outlet into the popular mold in a vain effort to get my proverbial foot in the door. It didn’t do me any favors and it certainly didn’t get my foot in many doors. As the great Bill Shakespeare once wrote “To thine own self be true”. This was hard for me to grasp. I didn’t burst from the womb with the self-confidence of Picasso. It was something I learned over time. When you chase the tail of fame, for the sole purpose of fame itself, you wind up only chasing your own. It’s a never ending cycle even if the desired “fame” is eventually reached.

Now I also believe that we all play the game to a point (there’s the Realist side coming out). If you’ve ever read anything about this history of Radiohead, arguably one of the most popular bands who are paving their own creative road, would know that even they have always played the game when necessary. Even today, having shed the shackles of their record label, you will still find them doing magazine interviews, performing on the Grammy’s, etc.. They certainly don’t have to. They could fall back on their Kid A format and just release albums via word of mouth and still live out a comfortable existence for the rest of their days. You just can’t forget to separate the game from the dream.

History has shown us that it’s the ones that follow the road less traveled, the ones that damn convention and dive-in head first that tend to make the largest splash. They’re also the ones that stand the test of time. Salvador Dali, e e cummings, Stanley Kubrick, David Lynch, Pablo Picasso, John Lennon – just some of my personal favorites that I believe hold true to this. Can you truly follow creativity for creativity’s sake? I, personally, am willing to give it a go.

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The first post is always tough so I’ll just give an update of where I’m at with things. I have not had time to do any visual art in a loooong time. Too long. But music has been the priority so music has been the focus. I’ve been doing some design work but I try and keep a delicate balance of having enough work to bring in some supplemental income but just enough to not drive me insane.

The music stuff has been good though. I am incredibly behind on a commitment to product my friend Tomas Glass’s EP. I feel guilty about it. I’ve been forcing some time to get some work done on it. On the Wayside Drive front we’re busier than ever. We just took some band photos last Sunday with the very talented TracyLynn Tesmer. It was a lot of fun but incredibly exhausting. I’ve been in deep thought lately trying to come up with a more interesting way to convey the new material live. After a few revisions I came up with a plan but it lacks that spark. I’ve been digging deep to find a more innovative way of going about it. Will probably update that on the Wayside blog.

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