Sunday, March 6, 2016

The Heartbreak of the Wall Street Journal

The only two newspapers I read on a daily basis are the Globe and Mail (from Toronto, which I often read to remind me why I left) and the Wall Street Journal. Oddly enough, the WSJ often has articles on the arts and culture that are worth reading. But they also have a distressingly large number of ones on music that disappoint. How it works is this: they put up an intriguing piece about some music you have never heard and, because of the way it is described you decide you just have to listen to it. Then you discover if you click on a clip of the music you are taken to Spotify where you have to sign in. I don't subscribe to Spotify so I just go to YouTube where pretty well everything is available without having to subscribe. But that is not the only disappointment.

For example, in today's WSJ there is this article: "Electronic Music Meets Post-Bop Jazz." If you are blocked by the paywall, try googling the title. Here is how they portray the credentials of the artists:
Messrs. Wendel and Darlington have long experimented in myriad genres. Kneebody’s members play funk, hip-hop and rock, and its recordings include a collection of Charles Ives compositions. Mr. Wendel has played saxophone with Prince and Snoop Dogg and released “The Seasons” (2015), a Tchaikovsky-inspired series of duets featuring contemporary jazz artists. Mr. Darlington plays both major festivals and avant-garde underground events, reworking compositions on the fly. His mastery of technology goes beyond the glitchy and hectic: Among his 30 or so albums and EPs is “The Light Brigade” (2014), in which synthetic sounds, acoustic guitars and layered voices form a moving soundscape to memorialize the Crimean War.
Ok, sounds really interesting with name-dropping of classical composers and popular genres. What could go wrong? Let's have a listen. This is the cut "Loops":


It seems that just as contemporary classical composers seem to have rediscovered the "groove" or pulse, that folks like these are determined to uglify it as much as possible. Honestly, I haven't heard anything this unpleasant and unlistenable since the last time I listened to Captain Beefheart. "Thoroughly satisfying"? Not in any aesthetic universe I can imagine. Well, I find Thai music pretty unlistenable too.

But why is it that every single time I see one of these pieces touting some new group that is supposed to be so great, the actual experience itself is so definitively disappointing?

What do my readers think?

9 comments:

Christine Lacroix said...

I made an effort, Bryan, because it's you, and you make an effort for us. So I listened twice. You wouldn't expect three times would you? Sounds like a bunch of teenagers in the basement pretending to be musicians. Not to be scornful towards teenagers.

Bryan Townsend said...

I only listened to one piece all the way through and part of another. So thanks for taking the trouble! I really do believe in giving new things a chance, but there is a limit. How can we reconcile what the music actually sounds like with the unstinting praise in the WSJ article, that's what puzzles me...

David said...

Bryan, I agree that the Kneedalus sound is pretty ugly. I think the problem is the mix of jazz and electronica: the very thing they were "exploring": the theory of technological singularity - the notion that humans and computer technology will increasingly blend together. There is some of the Kneebody jazz on the web that is not nearly so off-putting. The Tchaikovsky reference is explained in the article at this link: http://www.benwendel.com/theseasons. The saxaphonist is a Vancouver born musician trained at Eastman, what could go wrong? Kneedalus is the answer.

David said...

Bryan, sorry I didn't answer your question about reconciling the sound and the praise in the WSJ. A couple of possible answers: 1. The reviewed performance was in LA and the mind behind the new music website here: http://renewmusic.net/; 2. Different strokes for different folks. (although I agree that there is a very low aesthetic content in the Kneedalus sound). I guess I am not an adherent of the theory of technological singularity.

Bryan Townsend said...

Wave after wave of modernism, post-modernism and post-post-modernism seems to have gone to the same well and drawn up the same water: if the compositional method or manifesto is progressively correct, then the result must be good.

Alas...

Christine Lacroix said...

We just don't hear the same thing. That's what so hard to believe, but it's true. We must process music very differently, you know, what they say about marching to the beat of a different drummer? How about listening to the beat of a different drummer?

Bryan Townsend said...

Unfortunately that opens up an epistomological can of worms. If they are playing an F#, I'm hearing an F#. If they're playing paradiddles in 4/4, I'm hearing paradiddles in 4/4. I think it has to be talked about differently. What they want to do, aesthetically, is different from what I want to hear, aesthetically. This runs us right up against the usual aesthetic problems of objectivity and subjectivity. What they are doing and what I am hearing is, objectively, the same thing. How they feel about it and how I feel about it are different.

It's actually a pretty interesting problem...

Jeph said...

Well I got to the end of it. I love me some jazzy trumpet. I can even get my head around the organ stuff, and is that a harmonica? I have no issue with the raw materials here, but the busy percussion track is static and intrusive at the same time, and there doesn't seem to be any interaction between it and the other players. They might have held my attention if they had a real drummer back there.
I think there is fertile ground for the intermingling of the melodic and harmonic language of jazz, and the endless variety of texture and groove that electronica can produce. A dude who goes by "Anenon" is doing some cool stuff in this area, with sax, synth and percussion. I've enjoyed albums "Petrol" and "Sagrada"
To your point...yeah I don't understand why the WSJ would hold this up as exciting and groundbreaking when there's so much more appealing music out there.

Bryan Townsend said...

Yes, I think I could find the rest interesting if it weren't for that horrible drum track. "Static and intrusive" is a pretty good description.