Fall In Love

(from Fantastic Vol. 2: Goodvibe 2000)

“Fall in Love” is the centerpiece of Slum Village’s opus Fantastic Vol. 2. The track finds Dilla and crew constructing the rarest form of inventions within the world of hip hop: a beat both emotive and thematically on point. It succeeds in this way because of its resistance to succumb to some of the game’s most glaring cliches. In other words an over-sung Mary J. Blige hook “Fall in Love” has not. Instead it constructs a breathing, undulating, sensual universe from its roots in Dilla’s cracker jack drums and impeccable samples. The keyboard sample from Gap Mangione’s 1968 composition “Diana in the Autumn Wind” (which I highly recommend you check out to fully appreciate the track’s ridiculous flip), offers a great example for what makes this and every other song on Fantastic Vol. 2 work.

The sample’s presence floats in an out of both the track’s mix and its pulse creating a sort of audible moire effect, the look of overlapped vinyl coating turned sonic. This in combination with the relentless emphasis of beats 2 and 4 in the drum loop creates a unique sense of pacing not easily achieved in hip hop wherein the drums maintain consistency while the melodic samples push and pull incessantly. It’s almost as if the listener is watching a mountain gradually being surrounded by and relieved of dense fog. This effect produces a strong emotional current for the beat, almost mirroring the pace of one’s heart beat and breath and the focus that comes in when the two are linked correctly with thought. Indeed whenever I hear the first four bars of this beat everything quiets down in me and I assume an entranced, salted grounding. When this happens the lyrics and flow don’t matter so much as the track’s timbre and physical feeling. It pushes me to make music, to compose for the odd tangibility sound can produce. “Don’t sell yourself to fall in love with the things you do” it warns and I won’t, as long as I can count on the pursuit of meaning within the music of samples and beat.

Friction (For Gyorgy Ligeti)

(from the album Beat Reader: Atavistic, 2008)

A beat and it’s off. What a massive shit pile of a song.

The genius of “Friction” lies in its negotiation of Ken Vandermark’s expansive list of influences and infatuations, a common theme of which is the arising tension of beat and no-beat and chaos and the funk and time and space and oh-god-the-wonderful-noises. The composition is dedicated to the irreverent 20th century composer Gyorgy Ligeti and, like Ligeti’s work in strict timbre, “Friction” goes sonically all out in a way only achievable by a group as versed in free improvisation as Vandermark’s is….oh, and that bass, and that cello. Taking notes from the inventions of the likes of early Ornette Coleman, the group abandons the stale tradition of chordal instrumentation and, rather, opts for the murderous combination of Kent Kessler on bass and Fred Lonberg-Holm on cello. The frenetically bowed, rising chords the two produce throughout the piece are life incarnate flowing at the perfect speed of thought and feeling and yanking at the place in the center of the chest where all good music gets at where your expectations and preconcepts can’t  keep ahead of the temporal space in your ears and oh there it is something new is going on inside something that you can’t control as much as you might want and real the danger and excitement of sound flows in.

“Friction” is dependent on a-parallel frames and movements, one leg moving a hundred miles an hour faster that its mud trodding companion. This is a fact that stands true for much of the Vandermark 5′s music. The group is a key member of the Chicago jazz and free music world and reflects the scene’s intensity of sound and purpose. Within a contemporary jazz scene dominated by limp members, rotting tradition, and Wynton Marsalis, the music of Chicago is fiercely independent, risky, and very often ugly. It is a wonderfully fresh and, at its best times, an actual forward-looking version of America’s music. “Friction” symbolizes the advances happening in this midwestern metropolis well. It’s ear leafed and bloody edges combine with the rhythms and harmonies of its ancestorship (one which includes not only jazz but almost all other forms of creative expression, music and non-music) to form a cipher of influences, the likes of which jazz has not seen since Miles’ cocaine period. This piece is an alarm call for its musical background, giving props where need be and brushing off the dead leaves of sounds and experiences long past.

Avril 14th

(From the album Drukqs: Warp 2001)

A leftfield inversion of Dylan’s now textbook shift to electric, Aphex Twins’ fifth album descended onto the electronic community in a similarly divisive manner. Yet where the statement at Newport was an antithetical revolutionary step away from the unamplified , Drukqs finds itself instead harboring a new synthesis of acoustic (analog) and electric (digital). The album is more than an attempt at marriage between these two oft-warring domains. In a manner befitting a pair of developing adolescent twins from wildly different social worlds, Drukqs presents Richard D. James’ work as a composer for the computer and the piano as two sides of the same Cornish token. The songs found within could seemingly have been produced using either tool and, indeed, the fact that it’s sequencing often alternates between piano (prepared and non) and electronic (303′s and non) provides a less than subtle cue toward James’ intention. “Avril 14th” portrays such intention better than any song in the Aphex catalog.

“Avril 14th” is engineered in a such a manner that the listener feels inside James’ decaying piano. Such intimacy forces one to feel the marrow of the instrument’s real wood and the fact that it, in some way, was once living. If seen as a language analog, the piano provides the phonological grounds for the piece and James’ composition and performance fill in its semantic content. Phonology and semantics here represent the acoustic and the electronic, respectively. Each tickle of the piano’s tongues on its strings is heard, the soft fuzz drawing out a reverberant subduction of waves. Within this aural context James pieces together melodic and harmonic figures that match the most subdued and compelling of his pre-Drukqs catalog (“Film” from 1997‘s Come to Daddy EP comes to mind), reflecting the precisely square-edged composition techniques he so keenly developed through years of midi programming. “Avril 14th” at times seems to require a third appendage to played, filling in its electronic semantic content by the highlighting the sheer difficulty of performing computer music.

Actually, on this note, the beauty of the song comes through it’s consideration of numbers and form. It features two melodic lines constrained by James’ signature take on major arpeggios that are accompanied by a series of ascending bass chords. These three sonic agents follow through four sections (A, B, C, and, D) and are arranged as ABCADA. The song is roughly two minutes long but by the time the D refrain comes in it feels like a wash has come over the moment, re-orienting your sense temporality with the pace of the song’s strolling, melancholic gait. Like many great compositions “Avril 14th” exploits its brevity for emotional benefit. It ends with an equal sense of pin pricks and longing, electrified (pun intended) as its syllables float into the amber silence of James’ studio whilst longing for more of the consistency that only an electronic concept might provide. It is for these reasons that “Avril 14th” is one of my favorite songs of the decade for, as we increasingly adopt the technological, there must be times where it deconstructs into our pulsing hands, allowing itself to be molded by the best of our generation into a music that speaks to the ancients of the already composed.