The new blog is live!

In this quick week at home between vacations, I’ve thrown together the start of my new sound theory blog, with the idea that it’s better to just start writing than to get finicky over every little detail (see: this blog). The new blog is going to be a mix of short-form media link posts, tumblr-style (with a little commentary sometimes), and longer-form sound theory stuff on historical examples and contemporary things. I’m going to use it to try out ideas for the thesis, and hopefully it will be interesting even to those who aren’t into sound theory per se.

I’m going to try to keep metablogging to a minimum over there, so I have to focus on content (for another example of me messing that up, see this blog again). So, go visit www.noiseforairports.com, comment, and subscribe to a new RSS feed!

Part of the research I’m working on is figuring out what research I’m going to be working on. As part of that, I’ve been on the lookout for compelling artistic practices, cultural objects, social constructions, and other sorts of media studies-related hoo hah.

For a class last term, I found an artistic practice that played with what I called “the aesthetics of disintegration,” but might better be called “recursive remediation,” or something along those lines. For the benefit of the Internet (and mostly me), I’ve collected a bunch of examples of this kind of work, and interspersed my own comments on why I think they’re interesting. (RSS folks may have to click through for the second part until I get my full feed set up.)

I’ve been listening to a bunch of Philip Glass while working on papers and revisited his opera about the life of Gandhi, Satyagraha.

Glass has a reputation for sort-of cheesy, new-agey stuff, so focusing on Gandhi as a topic doesn’t do much to reduce the overall corniness of his oeuvre. My cynicism requires me to ignore the silliness of the “message” and the overarching themes Glass tries so earnestly to get to by focusing each act on Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, and Martin Luther King, major literary figures with ties to Gandhi’s life. Luckily, the best part of the opera is not the story. (If you could even say it has a “story.”)

As I’ve been sending out links to some of the music on the site to people, I have noticed that I am loath to direct people to zShare (where I used to host my music files), on account of the videos of girls in thongs that surround the download links. So, to remedy that, and because I don’t have all that much download traffic anyway, I’m rehosting all the music stuff myself, so I can send links to people that don’t involve multitudinous fannies. So all the links through the sidebar should go to files hosted on my site. Please right-click and download rather than listen online to save me the bandwidth!

I’ve added “Won’t Get Fooled Again and Again” to the sidebar (for better or worse–I’d recommend listening to the beginning, then find the guitar solos, then skip to the end), along with a The Books-inspired piece I composed for a multimedia course in college (in the archive-dredging spirit of the last post, and a previous draft of the Ciara piece from my Pop Studies. Also, in the spirit of full disclosure that has overcome me, a piece simply titled “Song 1” composed in Apple’s Garage Band, made solely from royalty-free loops. Highly recommended comedy listening.

For the completists out there, here is a list of all the musical cruft lining my website tubes:

• Pop Studies The whole album of ‘em.
• Ciara Drone The early version.
• Estefan on the Beach Philip Glass, a la Miami Sound Machine.
• My Claps Steve Reich, a la Black Eyed Peas.
• Seaver Final Project The elegantly named Books rip-off.
• Song 1 Royalty-free and comedy gold.
• Won’t Get Fooled Again and Again Keep in mind the listening notes above.

More to come…..?

In honor of today’s internet Radiohead-style release of Girl Talk’s new album, I’m going to liveblog it, because it seems appropriate. Let’s see how much of this turns into “name that tune.” I’ll try to make it moderately interesting.

Turned out kind of long. Scroll to the end for my incisive conclusions, after the break.