Weird music.
July 31, 2002
I told Elf this story yesterday, and she said I should write about it here because it was such a great story. Personally, I think she might have had too much wine. No, wait, I was the one drinking wine. Never mind.
Anyway, it’s an early music memory.
I’ve always been interested in music. I was reminincing at the Red Lobster about some of the songs I used to listen to when I was really young because I some godawful remix of “Bette Davis Eyes” was playing in the background.
My mother and I were living with my grandparents because Dad had been stationed in Berlin, Germany and there weren’t any family quarters available yet. That reminded me of how much time I spent with my mother in a laundromat in Bristol, Virginia, feeding quarters into a jukebox to make it play Blondie songs over and over again. I was six. I really dug that song, “One way or another I’m going to find you, I’m going to get you get you get you get you….”
But when we did move to germany English radio options became practically nil and there was only one broadcast chanel in English. So entertainment was pretty sparse.
But dad got me a small silvery boom box that, besides having FM and AM bands, also had two short-wave bands. One day I was playing with those trying to get something to come in when I heard some really strange music. It had no discernable structure (although I probably wouldn’t have used that phrase at the time) and was facinatingly electronic. It would go woooHEEEEOoooaaa …. aaaaWWWWWoooEEEe…. and it did this for the longest time. I must have sat there listening to it for half an hour before Mom stopped in the doorway:
“John, what are you doing?”
“Listening to the radio. This is a really long song.”
Mom tried to explain to me, and it took some doing, that what I was really listening to was shortwave static, not music.
Nevertheless, fifteen years later when my friend Ted introduced me to ambient music I thought to myself “this sounds really familiar.”
Posted in Art and Writing, Diary
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July 31st, 2002 at 10:13 pm
That made me laugh out loud! I, too, sometimes get random noise mixed up with music! I guess that’s because we’re both such geeks! ;-p
September 4th, 2002 at 5:21 pm
Ahhh! That just shows your age ;)
October 21st, 2002 at 6:51 pm
That’s wonderful.
Actually, it reminds me of a part in Contact (the book, not the movie), where she’s listening to the weird noises from the radio telescope looking for patterns and confuses it with music sometimes.
But… yeah, trance, short-wave static (my stepdad is an engineer, so I actually know what you’re talking about). Might I add that some punk music sounds like the everyday static you get from an FM radio station with someone screaming over it?
(by the way, I only scored 46% on the geek test. I’m okay. I promise. Really.)
December 18th, 2002 at 6:20 am
Since you said you were in Germany, I thought it might have been one of the broadcasts from the Cologne electronic music studio, especially if it had been back in the ’60s. They broadcast a lot of odd stuff then, by Stockhausen, Ligeti, and the like. That most mothers would have said was static, even though it was music. And great music too.
February 23rd, 2003 at 11:44 pm
Cage defined music as organized sound.He didn’t specify the agent of organization.Mozart actually wrote some pieces based on the throw of the dice.I would reflect that the rise of styles from ambient to various really loud,harsh forms result in part from the fact that the modern world is so noisy and obnoxious that it’s become common to screen out the audio range.Many people do this unconsciously.Try walking around and really noticing what you can hear. So after screening audio the desire for aural sensation becomes attenuated,smaller focal area greater intensity.Loud rock music can be a stimulus barrier,a wayb of moderating input to maintain some illusion of control over one’s environment .Ambient music can be away of doing the same w/ a different strategy ie expanding the field so that one can relax.
Though I know it to be true I’m still surprised that listening to shortwave randomness(or even better, stochastness)is weird.I’ve liked things like for at least 40 years.There is now of course expensive euipment do create such sounds with.virtual Stockhausenism I highly reccomend the work of Reed Ghazala the inventer of circuit bending browse for antitheory.com
April 5th, 2004 at 2:54 am
O_O WOW
as a music theory geek, ill have to say thats shameful
:p