musical mind-games

During my study of music at uni, I picked up an appreciation for musical experimentation. I heard, and participated in, musical expressions which played with more than just notes and rhythms and instrumentation — music which rearranged the concept of music itself as a part of its performance. This was music which was more often described with words than with traditional notation. Or perhaps not even described at all, just existing as the result of a process.

One of my favourite examples was a piece called "I Am Sitting in a Room" by Alvin Lucier. You can find a description and a recording here. Basically, Lucier recorded himself reading out a script in a room, then recorded a playback of the recording in the same room, and repeated the second step many times. By the final repetitions, you can barely hear his voice anymore; you can only hear the resonant frequencies of the room corresponding with the rhythm of their production in his voice. It's not exactly pleasant listening, but I find it fascinating.

Another which I was quite impressed by was "Dripsody" by Hugh Le Caine. It uses the sound of a drop of water falling into a bucket, re-recorded on tape at different speeds, to create something astonishingly complex.

From the sublime to the ridiculous... I found this today: "Call Me Maybe Acapella 147 Times Exponentially Layered" by Dan Deacon, obviously based on "Call Me Maybe" by Carly Rae Jepsen.

If you can get past the unfortunately original-sounding beginning, and the fact that the ludicrous lyrics are repeated ad nauseum, you can find another iteration of what intrigued me about the two more serious pieces above. When you mix sounds in unconventional ways, you can hear things you did not expect. The formerly-prominent elements sink into abstraction, while the background sounds take on new and unrecognised forms, somehow bigger and more elaborate than you thought they could be. I know it's based on one of the worst and most insidiously catchy songs ever, but I do admire the kind of musical mind-game that this, and the more venerable works above, are playing at.

albums you’ve probably almost forgotten #1 – Savage Garden (self-titled)

Savage Garden’s first and penultimate album holds the auspicious honour of being the third CD I ever bought. I bought it in Canberra for $10 from some little second-hand record store, and it was awesome. The songs I’d heard on the schoolbus were even better on my still-new CD player, that technological marvel. Mine just so happened to be identical to my mate’s CD player, on which I’d first heard Savage Garden in full. It’s amazing the things you remember... like my mate explaining to me how profound “Santa Monica” was. You really could pretend to be anyone on the phone, he elucidated.


I can’t help but be a bit fond of this album. Savage Garden’s simple format of a guitar, some synths and a kid who learnt to sing by mimicking Michael Jackson didn’t stop them from churning out a solid attempt at a pop album, and it’s still mostly palatable after fourteen years. There are a few pieces of mildly funky electro-pop stuck in the middle which are getting a bit cringe-worthy, but they’re made up for by the smoother, deeper tunes which book-end the album. Like everything from the 90s, this album tries a few too many fusions for its own good. But some of it just works, unlike a lot of Australian pop music from this era. Even after a thousand plays, “To The Moon & Back” is still an emotive song, and “A Thousand Words” can still get you deep enough into its groove to make you overlook glaring arithmetical exaggerations.


Probably among the least embarrassing of Australia’s cultural exports of the 90s. Chances are that you or someone in your family already played it until you were sick of it. It was that good at the time, and it’s still kinda got it.


Stand-out song: “To The Moon & Back”
How did we stand this stuff: “Violet”
Still surprisingly decent: “All Around Me”