I’m going to SMC! If you need me, I’ll be in Stockholm talking about mappings on iOS, and drinking fine Swedish aquavit.
I also (finally) got a writeup of my McGill Music Hack Day project up, from last November. I tried to make the Leap recognize solfege signs, with decent-but-not-great results.
It is one of the great cliches of DJing that the best of the best “take you on a journey”, and “tell you a story”, and so on. It is much less common for either of those to actually happen. It is still less common for a DJ to tell you a story featuring recurring, developing characters, inclusive of how they met, what they did together, and how they parted.
Kenzie Clarke‘s NYPD mix (made to promote the clubnight of the same name) is one of those mixes. It’s actually a tragic opera, in three acts, complete with a Greek chorus, a villain, a hero, and a heroine. And it’s a hell of a mix as well.
This post will talk about the characters, how they’re represented in each track in the mix, and what happens to them. Don’t worry, it’s not that tragic: like all good nightclub dramas, there’s potential for glorious redemption the next night….
The two main characters are:
The minor characters are:
And finally:
NYPD opens in a small town in France.
Most important of all – here’s what happens, and how it happens, lyrically and emotionally.
Act One: Before the club
1: Little Boots – New In Town [Golden Filter Remix]
As sung by the GIRL to the new BOY. “I wanna take you out tonight, I wanna make you feel alright” – and does she ever.
2: Glass Candy – Beatific
As sung by the GIRL, again, while on the train to Paris with BOY. “City light to country side, this trainride guarentees”. As of now, they’re just friends, as will be made clear in the third song.
3: Friendly Fires & Au Revoir Simone – Paris [Aeroplane Remix]
Our GIRL again, singing about the life she’ll have in Paris with BOY. “One day, we’re gonna live in Paris. I promise. I’m on it”. The genderswap on this song makes the lyrics complex; regardless, they imply that our pair are not yet head-over-heels, or even admitting their attraction to one another yet.
4: Lovelock – Maybe Tonight
BOY gets a word in, about how, maybe, the two of them might be in love / lust. “Maybe tonight, we’ll be alone at last”. GIRL sings the chorus. They’re just about to arrive at the club…
Act Two: At the club
5: Panthers – Goblin City [Holy Ghost! Remix]
The arrival / nightclub montage scene. The chorus / hook “and on and on and on and on” is sung by the CHORUS.
6: Circlesquare – Dancers [Russ Chimes & Anoraak Remix]
An ode to dancing, sung by the entire cast, with the CHORUS led by the VILLAIN. “Now everyone starts to dance and now we’re all dancers”.
7: Metronomy – Heartbreaker [Discodeine Remix]
FRIEND ONE sings this to BOY, advising him to stay away from GIRL. “That girl’s a heartbreaker”. As usual, the chorus is always right…
8: Sam Sparro – Hot Mess
FRIEND TWO sings this to the GIRL, telling her off. “I know you fancy yourself as a sexy bitch”. What would we do without choruses?
9: Calvin Harris – The Girls
Gasp! The VILLAIN sings this as he seduces / is seduced by the GIRL. “I get all the girls, I get all the girls”.
Act Three: After the club
10: Anoraak – Nightdrive With You [Grum’s New Wave Edit]
Our BOY is finally willing to admit that he’s madly in love with GIRL, and makes starry-eyed plans to get home with her: “You beat my heart, You know my eyes, I guess it’s love, I guess it’s love”.
11: Cut Copy – Far Away [Damn Arms Remix]
But! She’s left with the VILLAIN! The wench! The scoundrel! Our BOY makes a show of rejecting her: “And you could be a love to me, but you were far away”.
12: Bag Raiders – Shooting Star
Of course, on the inside, he yearns for his lost love. “I’m in love with a shooting star, and she move so fast that I can’t keep up”. He also has an intuition that she’s not gone forever.
13: Lifelike – Sunset
GIRL, as the curtain comes down, thinks about BOY: she’ll find him, and all their early promise will be realized: “I can feel it when the sun goes down, I can see the sky so blue when I’m with you”.
At the end of the day, the girl hasn’t quite got the right boy, but (probably) will the next time out. Both characters have grown, as much as is possible in a one-CD DJ set (or even in an opera, for that matter) – from halting attraction to dancefloor lust to (hopefully) romantic love. And all this from thirteen tracks in a row.
Nothing happened this week. But I’ve been reading, listening, and working:
– What We Talk About When We Talk About Beethoven can now do basic chord extraction, based on Echo Nest chroma data.
– Reading about how people parse comic book layouts, about musical UIs for music education, about the UPIC, and about the art of Mark Dorf and Mark Reynolds.
– Finally finally got the Purity Ring album. Also picked up the self-titled Saa EP, which is also great.
– Got stuck on the top-secret mixtape, found a potential solution that involves Fatboy Slim, Dr. Dre, James Brown, and Jimmy Edgar.
– I wrote a bunch about nightclub layout back in January. Last week, I went back to Zuzu, in Boston…and found that things had changed. Specifically, they had opened a door in the back left of the room that allowed people to go and relax in a non-sweaty, well-lit room.
This is a terrible idea. You’re giving people a road back to reality, where they can calm down, clean up, realize that the person that they wanted to sleep with is actually ugly, etc. You’re allowing people to break the spell of the dancefloor.
And the party was less good for it. I have not been in Boston for two years, so maybe the party just got lame…but I have a deep suspicion that a simple, open door is not helping.
– We Think Alone, by Miranda July, is an amazing thing.
– I’ve been thinking about how I write code, which is badly, and the legends of people like Knuth and Dijkstra, who could, apparently, write things that worked first time, because they were amazing coders / mathematicians, people, etc. Specifically, I was thinking of the impact of interpreted languages like Python, etc, vs. writing nasty stuff on punch cards, and how that, in a McLuhanish sort of way, that affects your brain. This also ties into Bret Victor’s work around displaying how systems work in an explicit fashion, and Donald Norman’s work around the design of every day things, and making their changes obvious to the user. Do these things matter? Or are they the same as bemoaning the lack of oral culture? Or did that matter too?
If you need me in November, I’ll be in Brasil, talking or postering about the importance of timbre in selecting and ordering tracks in DJ sets.
– I went to HAMR – many thanks to Colin, Brian, Daewen, and Dan for having us all. I started trying to do research into beatmatching, and end up just making a bunch of graphs on the interweb. They’ll be made public soon, once they work properly.
– Also got to meet Ben Lacker, which was a life highlight. And CJ, the man behind Dadaist Remix Bots! New York has cool people, it seems.
I need to send some serious props to the students and performers at NEC’s tragically named “Sick Puppy” (http://www.sicpp.org/) summer new music week. Despite the iffy branding, they play and premiere great music. Highlights included two Xenakis percussion jams, an Earle Brown structured improv piece, piano suites by Dorothy Chang, a Murail piece about a magic boat, and two cello premieres: one from Adam Roberts, and one from Ulrich Kreppein.
I look to be going to NYC for HAMR at Columbia: will probably be doing some stuff around detecting shitty beatmatching, and will be talking about Remix a bit too.
Quick hits:
– Books about DJing and club culture that I need to read.
Probably 54?
– I went to New York! There are pictures.
– Via Theremina, I have a crush on the paintings of Paul Morstad.
– I’ve been thinking about software engineering and Marshall McLuhan: how do our tools influence the quality of our code? Does being able to run code quickly in, say Python, lead to lousy code? Or have there always been terrible programmers, regardless of language?
– I am delighted to say that the most prosaic paper I will ever write (‘A Quantitative Review of Mappings in Musical iOS Applications’) has been accepted by SMC 2013. In theory, this means that I’ll be in Stockholm in early August – get at me if you will be there also.
– I also started a mix for a friend’s wedding. It is already the hardest thing I have ever done. I also have to keep it a hushmost secret, but I can say that it involves doo-wop, Digital Underground, and Tom Waits. More as it breaks.
– I changed this website! I need to add the cute JS songwriter and it will be done.
– Some great work about The Future: Sensory Augmentation. This is at least half the promise of AR for me, not just the Glass / HUD that everyone’s hating on these days.
– I saw Four Tet: he was amazing. I can’t say enough good things about his music or his show. I also need to shout out Anthony Naples, who has great taste in music but is an adorably iffy beatmatcher, and the crazy-deep opener, Ricardo Donoso, who played a live set straight out of deepest Bedrock circa 2001: no drums for 20 minutes, no hi-hats for 50.
There was also a serious raver there: baseball cap, big pants, strung-out beard, doing a liquid-skip sort of dance. He was apparently totally sincere, and looked my age or younger. So given that I was 7 years too late for actual rave culture, where did this cat come from?