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“As any recovering alcoholic can tell you, practice works just as well in the realm of not-doing as anywhere else. My not-singing skills grew by leaps and bounds thanks simply to the fact that entropy takes its cut. Musicians are a bit like sharks. If they do not keep swimming, going through the specific physical motions of their music-making, their skills wither and die. I could feel muscle memory getting fuzzy, my instincts growing less reflexive. When it saddened me, as it inevitably did, I told myself I wasn’t a singer any more, and it could not possibly matter.” — Hanne Blank’s Deep Throat #4: On Being and Unbeing a Singer -
When I first started playing around with my voice, I had a guitar pedal that would loop. But you could only loop one thing. With the thing I use now, the RC-50, you can have three different ones going at the same time—a lot more dynamic. I just started making sounds. Instead of saying something on the spot, I would just sing, kind of like I’ve always done. I’ve done it my whole life. My mom does it too, humming, singing. …My first album is pretty much all those loops I made when I first started playing around with it. It’s completely wordless. I just liked the way it felt.
The Rumpus Interview with Julianna Barwick
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Nick Cave Monday #34: “The Ship Song”
“The Ship Song” can induce emotions of love, lust and affection. It’s a sexy and soft ballad. If you listen to the song and no one is around to kiss or fondle, there is no shame in showing your affection to a soft pillow.
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Rumpus: I read that Nirvana was the band that actually inspired you to start playing guitar. How do you feel about them now?
Arnalds: It’s a bit funny that I was never a fan of any band or singer and never knew who was who except for guys like Schumann or Schubert, Berlioz or Berio. I first saw Kurt Cobain on the Icelandic National TV news announcing his death and immediately became a devoted fan. Just now, answering this question it popped into my mind that maybe I was conditioned only to like dead composers and Jesus. I could sort of find both in Kurt Cobain. Being sensitive to anything that is loud I guess I found my connection with Nirvana through the MTV Unplugged show. I saw it on TV, bought the CD, decided to learn the record on guitar and did. One song at a time, and then often played with the record all the way through. It’s funny, now when I hear it I know every interlude, every noodle between songs.
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One thing that is beautiful about The Next Day is David Bowie’s face. David Bowie’s face is a thing that has often been written about, and which has been often fetishized in the context of his work, especially in the period between ’72 and ’77 or so, when he was more than beautiful, when he was radiantly beautiful and oddly casual about how beautiful he was (what else could he do). …the package of The Next Day casts off the earlier Bowie. And the jacket of The Next Day, which uses a cocktail napkin, a white square, to block out the David Bowie of “Heroes,” lies in wait for those who would make the mistake of looking for David Bowie the fetish; likewise, the highly stylized photograph of Bowie in the package makes him look about as haunted and rough around the edges as he could possibly look, and it’s the beautiful Bowie that seems like an albatross now, even to Bowie himself, it’s the whippet thin androgyne from outerspace wearing a g-string or a dress that’s the effigy, or all those suicidal coke-addicted paranoids who can’t even remember making Station to Station, who gave interviews high saying things much regretted later on, those effigies are bodies left to rot in a hollow tree, and the challenging part of the metaphor is that Bowie can still, apparently, feel the too-famous-for-his-own-good young man back there, in the wreckage, and feels him like a sequence of ghosts informing what he has to write, and he keeps trying to kill them off (like on the back cover of Scary Monsters), the effigies, the undead, they keeping coming back, because everybody has to come to some compromise with the early work, you know, when it’s produced in public, and the effigies, here, haunt the enterprise, in the lyrics and occasionally in a wafting of melody of texture from the past, which drifts over the dark landscape …
Swinging Modern Sounds #44: And Another Day by Rick Moody
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NICK CAVE MONDAY #32: “WEST COUNTRY GIRL”
What do you do when you think a girl is hot and you really want to get with her? You write her a song.
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“Recently, alone in my room, I played his legacy on my turntable, a device he hadn’t owned for over forty years. His name spun around at 45 revolutions per minute – Sheldon Shapiro, Sheldon Shapiro, Sheldon Shapiro – a child’s script handwritten in ink, a permanent reminder of my mother’s love, and a blur of Sheldon’s years rapidly spooling and unspooling, as confused and beautiful as our own.” — From Aaron Gilbreath’s RECORDS OF YOU, an ode to a secretly musical uncle. Readable at The Rumpus!
