Riffs

Every new medium extends the options and possibilities for audio and video production. The Metaverse will probably enhance spatiality in music--or at least we'll be thinking more about it.

Listen on Bandcamp: https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/track/route-285-new-mexico

Background on this Cindy Sherman photo (still).

Even though this is exclusively a streaming album, I do spend a lot of time sequencing the tracks as if they would be pressed to vinyl.  

The album is geographically ordered moving south and east from California, through New Mexico (with a trip to the Moon) then into Texas, then Mississippi, then skipping to NYC, then overseas. If pressed on vinyl, Side 2 would begin in Switzerland, then into Kashmir, and ending in Vietnam. 

Titles, places, and the photographers. The titles are the search that you would do to find the photograph, so essentially it's an "Easter Egg" album. For example "Still 21" will locate that photo immediately.

Side 1:

01. Every Building On the Sunset Strip/Havenhurst [Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles]
02. Bronson Tropics [Ed Ruscha, Los Angeles]
03. Nipomo [Dorothea Lange, Nipomo CA]
04. Route 285 New Mexico [Robert Frank, Gallup NM]
05. Moonrise in Hernandez [Ansel Adams, Hernandez NM]
06. Mare Tranquilitatis [Buzz Aldrin, The Moon]
07. Standard Amarillo [Ed Ruscha, Amarillo TX]
08. Red Room Mississippi [William Eggleston, Greenwood MS]
09. Still 21 [Cindy Sherman, Manhattan, NYC]

Side 2:

01. Boden Sea 1993 [Hiroshi Sugimoto, Uttwil, Switzerland]
02. Boden Sea 1993 (EDM Mix)
03. Brassai 1934 [Brassai, Paris]
04. Madame Bijou [Brassai, Paris]
05. Srinagar 1948 [Henri Cartier-Bresson, Kashmir]
06. Saigon Street 1963 [Malcolm Browne, Saigon]
07. Brassai 1934 (Jazz Mix)
08. Madame Bijou (EDM Mix)
09. Havenhurst (Reprise)

While a song can have atmosphere, atmosphere can't have too much "song" in it. Classical music is "atmospheric" in some sense, but has a through-composed structure. Even though ambient music doesn't have structure, spatiotemporality creates form over time in context of all the songs on an ambient album, or in an ambient playlist.

The things we've always valued in culture ripple through the generations. They're like gravitational waves which affect us in subtle ways.

On Bandcamp: https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/track/red-room-mississippi

Videos:

• Mashup of the original Vintage Smoking video.  https://youtu.be/OIxTLBLlINI
• Original "Vintage Smoking": https://youtu.be/aEIUfeJGcWQ
• Guitar Video: https://youtu.be/VeLD64N7ob8

Notes recorded March 25, 2021.

Various forces are nudging us in one way or another, including yourself. So should we proceed through our lives with wu wei (trying not to try), or trying until we know that the nudges are moving us in the "proper" direction?

De-skilled art is sometimes more cunning.