Seabuckthorn's Crossing: What is Timbre?

Review and discussion on Seabuckthorn’s 2019 release, Crossing, framed by a special deep dive into the acoustic phenomenon of timbre.

Seabuckthorn's Turns was my 2017 Album of the Year.

Near Misses and Coincidences: Beauty Pill's Apt Description

Sometimes I put albums to my Amazon list as a reminder to do more research on an artist. I think that this was the case with Beauty Pill. I don’t remember what prompted me to add their album, Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, to the list, but when I was finalizing my summer CD order, it cost almost the exact amount I had left in my budget.  Without ever listening to a single note of the album, I ordered it sight on scene.  It ended up being an excellent purchase.  Its deeply lush, astoundingly well-performed, and layered approach to art-pop has been a continually rewarding listen.  The lead single, Steven and Tiwonge, one of the most elegant, haunting, and subtly political singles that I have heard in a very long time.  Pretty lucky to have stumbled across it.

But was it luck? Some say that there are no coincidences, implying that everything happens for a reason.  By extension, this idea might suggest that we are fated to collide with people and events in our life that propel us to our end. The philosophical argument against this kind of “fate,” as it were, is that it robs us of free will. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, to be sure, so I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea of a coincidence-free existence. I think that there are coincidences, but I also think that they are far from meaningless. I think they matter. Surely, each of us have had enough happenstance events and near-misses that there seems to be some master plan behind the veil pulling the strings.



Our “plan” doesn’t seem to be a straight line with a predestined end, though. It branches off into multiple outcomes, with only a couple that result in our optimal path. We have responsibility in the way things turn out. I think that we can be guided along this path, however, if we keep our minds open and listen.

I was recently reminded of this when my wife and I struggled with a terribly difficult decision as the school year started up. Throughout the Little One’s life, we have been very fortunate with our child care situation, but circumstances recently forced us to seek out a different venue. Nothing to worry about, of course, because we had planned ahead. For several months, we had outlined plan “B,” and it looked great on paper. The reality, however, was much different. After two days of chaotic classrooms, disengaged teachers, and unprompted reports from her of friends that “don’t listen or share,” it became very clear to us that it wasn’t going to work. We pulled her before the first week ended.

But then we had a real situation. School was in session, and we were reporting to our own jobs. We were anxious, desperate, and without a solution. I had an urge to beg the powers-that-be for an answer, which would traditionally have been gently worded in my mind as a demand alongside a hollow promise for some sort of improvement (if You do this for me I'll....you know the rest). Through the years, however, I have developed the sense of how misguided this sort of transcendental deal-making is.  I shouldn't expect a solution to be handed to me without taking on the responsibility of finding the answer.  So I awoke in the morning and, before I had a chance to formulate a negative thought about our situation, I told the universe that if there was a plan out there, I would keep my eyes open for suggestions.

The night before, I stumbled across the website of a small Montessori school with very positive reviews whose front doorstep was exactly halfway between my front door and the front door of my school. I drove by and, to be frank, it was not much to look at. My first instinct was to drop the idea, but I promised that I would keep an open mind. I called them later in the afternoon and set up a visit.

Despite its humble exterior, when we walked in, all the kids there were happy, welcoming, and well-mannered. We sat down with the director to talk, and noticed that there was a string of decorative Indian elephants hanging from the door of her office. The Little One has a similar set of elephants that hang by her bed (pictured at left), and she often plays with when she goes to bed at night.  Hm.

We liked the school, so later that day we brought the Little One back by the campus to visit. The elephants were the first thing she noticed. Then one of the students volunteered to show her around and she went on to have fun for about an hour before we had to go home for dinner.

By the evening, we narrowed our choices down to a couple of acceptable options, but none of them were clear.  I was apprehensive about the shift to Montessori’s open-ended pedagogy, but we were faced with a very big decision that needed to be made quickly.  Of all things, I could not stop thinking about the elephants, so I did a bit more research on the school.  I discovered some reviews and was flabbergasted to find one of them was written by a good friend of mine from the Fletcher days. When he relocated to Austin a few years ago, he enrolled his daughter there.  In fact, when we made our visit, we had missed running into him there by an hour.  He spoke highly of the school, and if the elephants weren’t enough of a sign, his advocacy certainly was.

We enrolled her, and I am happy to say that there was a night-and-day difference in the Little One’s attitude after the first day at her new school. In contrast to her exhausted, overstimulated state when she came home from the “puppy mill” (as her gramps called it), she has been happy and talkative about her days. I am incredibly happy and satisfied with our decision, and am looking forward to her progress this year in the new environment.

I would not have seen the positive atmosphere of the school if I had not let go of my initial judgement of the physical space. Additionally, I would not have been able to talk to my friend about his experiences if I had not paid attention to the little details. By getting out of the way and seeing things as they are, though, rather than through the lens of my expectations, I think that we are where we need to be right now.

Oh, yeah, and by the way. Beauty Pill.  This is the Little One's favorite:



The whole album is well worth your time.   It will probably be a top 10 album by year's end.  Check it out - maybe it'll lead you somewhere.

Frozen Music: Beach House's "Bloom"

I was considering Beach House’s Myth as I wandered though a disconcerting, labyrinthine mosaic of kitchens and bathrooms. Most of the designs were quite extravagant, and they changed in the blink of an eye. Hardwood floors under white marble would transform into deeply textured granite over patterned tile. Glass backsplashes gave way to smooth river rocks, and although the cabinets retained the same physical shape, they varied wildly in hues that exploited the potentials of the wood spectrum.



This may sound like a scene from a David Lynch movie, but it adequately describes the grueling design meeting I was in with our house builders.  Obviously, I needed a break.  I felt quite sure that I had spotted a coffee machine when my wife and I entered the design center, but alas, that was four hours previous. When I found the pot its contents were painfully cold. I remained undeterred, though, and I fumbled through the unfamiliar controls of a high-end, but functional, microwave to warm it up.  Two minutes to think......

Like Lynch’s work and, consequently, Angelo Badalamenti’s, Bloom has a lovely veneer that seems to harbor a melancholic and perhaps ominous undertone. Although its misty textures are its most prominent feature, the individual songs are brought into sharp focus by the band’s keen melodic sense. Eloquent guitar work weaves the vocals to a radiating aura of keyboards, underpinned by loping, fluid grooves that don't propel as much as undulate. As a band, Beach House never quite erupts into a driving backbeat like Mew is known to do, but they capture a similar oneiric quality.



The accepted idea of what a "band" is, however, has changed pretty dramatically in the past decade. Beach House, for example, has no dedicated bass player, and for a band that emphasizes atmosphere so strongly, that's kind of an issue.  It is not unusual for current groups to sequence parts that, in the past, would have been played by a live musician.  Beach House's solution compliments their aesthetic beautifully.  The low end is handled by a set of Taurus-style foot pedals that guitarist Alex Scally plays while sitting (watch that first video again closely). The buzzing analog synth provides a satisfying and distinctive foundation for Beach House's bleak texture.

Goethe once famously said that architecture is like frozen music, the kind of deep metaphor that only a true polymath could make.  Like a house, music can be constructed out of  a multitude of materials.  As long as the dream home stands strong enough to be lived in, the details of its construction are an expression of personal aesthetic and circumstance.  Beach House's instrumentation has a positive and global consequence on their sound.  It is a subtle but absolutely necessary aspect of their identity.  At the heart of Bloom, however, lies consistently superior songs and poignant performances, and that makes the album a compelling experience worth dwelling within.

Oneohtrix Point Never's "Replica," Places, and Worlds

Although I know that some people insist that a house is "just a place," I don’t fully buy it. We have a strong relationship to the places in which we live.  We shape our environments as we carve out our existence within them, and conversely, our environments shape us.  The house, the workplace, the college dorm room – all become imbued with the memories and sensations that we experience as we walk along our path within them: even more so when those places are shared with other people.  A couple of months ago, I posted about the nostalgia-fueled mourning process I was going through as my old dojo changed locations, and sure, empirically, the old dojo was "just a place," but, for a long time, it was also my world. 

I had the good fortune to attend the dojo's grand (re)-opening a few weeks ago.  The new place is beautiful and I am very happy for the amazing practitioners there.  It will always be a space I look forward to visiting, but I will probably never "live" there as I did in the old space. That relationship is disconnected from the present, and a new world has arisen in recent years with its own set of meaningful interrelations.

After classes, I got a chance to explore Denton on a rainy afternoon and checked out how things have changed since I left in 2009. I noticed a rarity on the Square: a new record store. I could not resist the temptation to go in and poke around.

There were just a couple of albums that had the potential to break my self-imposed year-end moratorium, one of which was Replica, by an electronic/ambient project called Oneohtrix Point Never. I had happened across some reviews and interviews surrounding the interesting process and concept that generated Replica. Daniel Lopatin, the creative force behind Oneohtrix Point Never, constructed the album’s rippling auras out of 80s commercials, very tightly cropped and looped so as to imply new rhythms and atmospheres. The articles are worth reading, but one idea in particular stuck out to me, so much so that it is worth quoting in full:

I had this really corny Ray Bradbury science-fiction scenario in my head: These samples I'm using are the last remnants of society in a post-apocalyptic world, and the survivors think they're putting together a replica of what society used to be like, but they're getting it totally wrong. Like someone getting artifacts wrong for a museum in the future.

I found this concept to be anything but corny. The sea of mediated sounds that we unconsciously swim in is profoundly influential in our everyday existence. What sort of musical potential might lie in this material if it were stripped of all context, reduced to snippets and reconstructed from a totally unfamiliar perspective? Lopatin’s concept seemed so compelling that, even though I was not sold on what I heard of the album, I had to try Replica out. I decided that it would be an immediate purchase in January, but I had not counted on finding a physical copy sitting on a shelf.

Oh, well....we'll call it the first entry for 2012, albeit a few weeks early.

I’m quite sure the quote above planted the seed of this dystopian vision in my head, but if it was Lopatin’s intention to create the post-apocalyptic soundscape of the future out of repurposed sounds of the past, he succeeded admirably.

Oneohtrix Point Never - Power Of Persuasion by Mexican Summer

Admittedly, Replica initially sounded like a CD skipping uncontrollably, or maybe even like the kind of jarring sounds that the Others might use to torture prisoners on Lost. Incredibly, though, once the preliminary shock wears off and the human organization becomes more perceptible, the musicality of Replica really shines through.  It was an amazing listen on the rainy drive back to Austin.



Despite its electronic, cut-and-paste construction, there is something almost primordial about Replica. It generates an aura of circumspection in its ambient moments while its more jagged qualities can be unsettling. In any case, the albums unifying concept is intellectually engaging enough that, despite several months of play, it has not left my player. Replica may sound like the future, but doesn't try to predict what that future will sound like by today's instrumental and aesthetic standards.  Instead, using the mediated environmental castoffs of the past in an alien set of interrelations, Lopatin proposes a disconnected future that quizzically looks back and wonders what we were doing.

Surreal Listening With The Hot Sauce Committee

I associate a lot of personal music with the people and places that band trips have taken me, both as teacher and as student.  Although I can certainly recall, for example, listening to Rush’s Vapor Trails as I moved percussion equipment down a particularly steep hill in San Marcos in 2002, it is often the people that were with me on these trips that I remember most vividly.  This seems odd to me because listening in these situations necessitates the use of personal media and headphones, which is often, for me, an isolating and almost surreal experience.

Don’t misunderstand - I do enjoy the fidelity of current earbud earphones.  If I want to have a focused, nuanced listening to an album, there is probably no better way than to pipe it straight into my skull, but it is impossible to have any kind of conversation with the people around me.  Even more disorienting is the schism between what the ears hear and the body feels.  My ear often perceives frequencies that I would, under normal circumstances, also feel in my chest or with the hairs on my arms, which creates a feeling of dreamlike disengagement from “regular” perception.

Sometimes this detachment is almost empowering, like I am walking around with a secret that no one else is hip to.  This was certainly the case when I popped in the earbuds at Sea World with a dual purpose: to listen to the Beastie Boys’ long-anticipated new release The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 and to escape the park’s musical mandate.  The park's unending and nearly unbearable cross between an unhip instrumental version of Dire Straits’ Brothers in Arms and Kenny G’s pentatonic noodling seemed to say nothing more than “welcome, now move on” over and over again.

Although the first listen to any album is rarely forthcoming, The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 was in no way disappointing, particularly in the immersive environment that personal audio provides.  As I meandered through the park watching the activities of all the “normal” people on that pleasant spring afternoon, I was simultaneously engulfed in a seemingly cavernous auditory space circumscribed by humming bass, distorted vocals, and reverb-drenched drum loops.  Several tracks brought on a smile, but this one stood out on my initial listen.  

In retrospect, this post is probably more about my listening practices than the album itself, but I think that personal music players create a particularly unique listening experience that is worth the diversion.  I reserve the right to come back to The Hot Sauce Committee Part 2 in the near future once it has simmered a bit.  For now, it will undoubtedly satisfy my craving for some new hip-hop.