The three sections are of Miles Davis' 28-minute-and-change "Great Expectations", from 1970's-and-change Big Fun. Meaning, I don't know how long the track is, and I don't know when the album came out. I'll even say that it doesn't seem possible to "know" when "it" (the track, the record, the sound?) was made. Miles' music in the late 60's through mid 70's, when he vanished post 1975 into a silent bedroom of white cocaine magic is all vague cosmetics, blurry rainbowed edges, smudged makeup -- all which show the weird similarity of skin and bones and costume between it -- is music of complete indefiniteness, undefinable as praxis. There's a lot of documentation on "what actually happened" at this time -- and a good article here by Electric Miles Scholar Paul Tingen. I'll leave the detective work to you, whoever you are. Let me know what you find and if we learn anything that defines this weird washout period of Miles' music -- from 1967 to 1975 -- that helps us to know any more about HOW to listen to what happened there. To me, all of Miles' music in this time period appears to be about something that hasn't yet happened, but which is always threatening to split the sky in half. It reminds me of a moment in Andrei Tarkovsky's "Mirror" where a little boy may have seen a ghost. How do we know? Because the camera fixes on the evaporating condensation from the cup of hot tea upon the wooden table, the vanished cup of tea that the ghost may have been drinking, but the boy who saw the ghost is now, of course, alone in the room.
I recently restumbled upon this track in making a mix through 8tracks, which allows you to upload tracks from your iTunes collections to make web-based mixes that you can share with other users. Pretty cool. My innovation is to narcissistically make mixes for myself so that I can listen to tracks not uploaded to my iPhone's iPod on our iPod dock while taking a shower (say that 10 times fast, then silence yourself, which is what I did). Pretty silly, and also pretty wonderous. The best part of doing this isn't "making mixes", which I personally dislike -- I'm an album listener, a staunch traditionalist, and a pain in the ass all at once, making pleasing me impossible, so I stick with myself sometimes -- the best part is rediscovering music that, in iTunes, becomes no more than a list of names and titles, so voluminous that one's categorization of music is the shorthand mechanism for the possibility of listening to it. Great Expectations, indeed. (We all hope that iTunes will mean we never have to LOOK at a record cover ever again. But the thing about looking at a record cover is that, through it, we actually associate image and sound, color and depth, timelessness and time passing.....)
But, enough technology aggression for now, since the point is the music and what it SOUNDS like. Because of this weird double technical of iTunes and 8tracks, I found myself looking at my music as if it were an email inbox with messages whose value I suddenly needed to prioritize -- or at least refamiliarize myself with, since the messages were mine, yet I had forgotten them, or what they might mean or say or do or be. And so, I saw "Great Expectations 28:25" and uploaded it to my mix, curious what I might hear later, in the shower, after I had forgotten what I hadn't read or heard but wanted to remember....
Ever since I was a kid, I've always thought the long songs on a record were the best songs. Exactly what a kid ought to think... I mean, more doesn't mean better, does it? Except for the Big Gulp is better than a 12 oz can of soda, and what makes it better is that it is a better value, penny for penny, sip for sip. I think from the start, part of me was a total capitalist consumer of music -- I figured that the song was longer and had more music in it, and because it was more, and the others were less (shorter is less music) -- then it had to be better....I know, that is some deeply circular logic, tautological and impenetrable. A=B because A and B are equal, so if A>C, then A>C. Yet, even now, I can't quite dispute this immature thinking. Perhaps because what I want to do, when listening to music, is be occupied by something, to be taken by something, to have something be there for me to attend to, in time, through time, with everything that I am that listens. If there is MORE TIME in the music, there is more for me to attend to, and more listening for me to do across time (diachronic). Music happens in time, and its happening through time is part of what it engages us within -- time passing, things moving or repeating, things starting and stopping, things vanishing, things appearing, things thinging through something that is a space we can't see, that we know is moving because it gets later when we are hearing it.
I thought Great Expectations, being 28-minutes-and-change, would make good sense to have on a "mix" because it would kill the mix, since a mix gets its power from the movement from track to track, from sound to sound, from artist to artist or style to style or time period to time period or all of these. A mix needs to "move". But I wanted to confuse that for myself, I wanted my mix to get stuck in the mud of the horizon, which stretches out to infinite blindness. I wanted to hear "Great Expectations" again with no expectations of anything -- I've been listening to it for 20 years now, but what have I really heard?
It's hard to describe music -- I've said it elsewhere, and I will say it even more so now -- in fact, one can't describe music, and yet, there are words to know it with. On Miles Davis' Live Evil, there's a really freaky track called "Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts". Basically, it's a spaced firefreeze where, at some unknowable point, the music receding into an echo chamber, a deep, dark voice narrates a poem of the impossibility of speaking of, of knowing through speech, what music is. He chants "Can the Ocean Be Described?" He kinda takes the fun out of everything there. But the fun is gone, because we fall mute at the center of it. Yet Conrad knows Miles' game -- he ends his poem game with the bext next move: "I love.....tomorrrow". Great Expectations! (You can hear Roberts below, at 6:12 of the 9:33 below. Volcanic Ash Wowzer. Relistening to it, I want to run and hide and have his voice blanket the earth so that I can come out from below and lie down on top of it and forever sleep....)
So, in the center of the mix, anonymously, it came on. How to begin with it? Great Expectations has a riff in 7/4 time. What does that mean? Well, generally, most figures in much western music -- rock, pop, jazz, blues -- have lengths that fall into some category of beats, and that category is "even". Meaning, it usually is 4 or 8 or 16 bars of "pulse". If you tap your foot, every 4 taps, something ends and starts over, or every 8 taps, or every 16, or 16 is made of of 4 somethings that start over once again after 16. There's more to say about this, but for my point, most western music uses phrases that are EVEN, for every yin a yang, for every odd an even. Yet, Great Expectations is built on a phrase (really a guitar riff, but, then, everyone is playing a "riff" here, meaning a series of single notes that repeat in some foundationally rhythmically spaced way) that is 7 beats. Tap your foot and count -- when you get to seven, start back at one. And go on, from 1 to 7 each time. The thing is lopsided, asymmetrical, oblong, jutting out into space, contained yet in the rollicking of its repetition. Because your hips move. There's a drum riff, a percussion riff, a bass riff, a tamboura wave, trumpet soaring echoed over it like a discontinuous seagull. In the depth of the night behind it, a rhodes is plucking away, a bird pecking at the heart of the sky. But "Great Expectations" keeps shutting down after a few phrases, the riff resisted, resetting, releasing. It's very weird. You keep thinking the song will push again out into something else, but the expectation, the loved tomorrow, is the same uneven keeled thing that crashes into the edge of the sea and reemerges careening.
At 13:30, though, the song totally resets. Whatever restarting happened once and many times before does not restart. The day is now awaking, the sky placid, plastic, performed. They bide their time, and you wait. For something. Else.
I've only actively sat and watched the sun rise a few times in my life -- on one hand, enough to know what it looks like, on the other, not enough to be fair to myself and the world around me. One thing about the sun rising is that even while you are watching the sky and you see it change, you also see nothing. Because changing is like something and nothing all at once, it is the fact that things become different and express difference through the repetition of and reiteration of their sameness. Perhaps something is drastic -- as in "Great Expectations", every time the rhythm escapes and there is only floating sky sound of horn, rhodes, tamboura, percussion -- but even what is drastic only expresses everything that came upon it, everything that preceded it.
As you wait out the sky in "Great Expectations", you wonder if everything has always been this way, if things will ever change, if difference is only in your perception, if perception is only in what you have had to unknow.
Eventually, as in everything we come to know, a rhythm settles in, the drums are the end result of it, and everything reiterates into a blend of earth and sky, all of which makes the world return, reappear, remain.
I guess what we can expect, then, always, only, is the world unfurled, unfolded, recapitulated. That is, we can expect only what is always great. This is the essence of Miles' silence, the ocean undescribed in, as music.
But, enough technology aggression for now, since the point is the music and what it SOUNDS like. Because of this weird double technical of iTunes and 8tracks, I found myself looking at my music as if it were an email inbox with messages whose value I suddenly needed to prioritize -- or at least refamiliarize myself with, since the messages were mine, yet I had forgotten them, or what they might mean or say or do or be. And so, I saw "Great Expectations 28:25" and uploaded it to my mix, curious what I might hear later, in the shower, after I had forgotten what I hadn't read or heard but wanted to remember....
Ever since I was a kid, I've always thought the long songs on a record were the best songs. Exactly what a kid ought to think... I mean, more doesn't mean better, does it? Except for the Big Gulp is better than a 12 oz can of soda, and what makes it better is that it is a better value, penny for penny, sip for sip. I think from the start, part of me was a total capitalist consumer of music -- I figured that the song was longer and had more music in it, and because it was more, and the others were less (shorter is less music) -- then it had to be better....I know, that is some deeply circular logic, tautological and impenetrable. A=B because A and B are equal, so if A>C, then A>C. Yet, even now, I can't quite dispute this immature thinking. Perhaps because what I want to do, when listening to music, is be occupied by something, to be taken by something, to have something be there for me to attend to, in time, through time, with everything that I am that listens. If there is MORE TIME in the music, there is more for me to attend to, and more listening for me to do across time (diachronic). Music happens in time, and its happening through time is part of what it engages us within -- time passing, things moving or repeating, things starting and stopping, things vanishing, things appearing, things thinging through something that is a space we can't see, that we know is moving because it gets later when we are hearing it.
I thought Great Expectations, being 28-minutes-and-change, would make good sense to have on a "mix" because it would kill the mix, since a mix gets its power from the movement from track to track, from sound to sound, from artist to artist or style to style or time period to time period or all of these. A mix needs to "move". But I wanted to confuse that for myself, I wanted my mix to get stuck in the mud of the horizon, which stretches out to infinite blindness. I wanted to hear "Great Expectations" again with no expectations of anything -- I've been listening to it for 20 years now, but what have I really heard?
It's hard to describe music -- I've said it elsewhere, and I will say it even more so now -- in fact, one can't describe music, and yet, there are words to know it with. On Miles Davis' Live Evil, there's a really freaky track called "Inamorata and Narration by Conrad Roberts". Basically, it's a spaced firefreeze where, at some unknowable point, the music receding into an echo chamber, a deep, dark voice narrates a poem of the impossibility of speaking of, of knowing through speech, what music is. He chants "Can the Ocean Be Described?" He kinda takes the fun out of everything there. But the fun is gone, because we fall mute at the center of it. Yet Conrad knows Miles' game -- he ends his poem game with the bext next move: "I love.....tomorrrow". Great Expectations! (You can hear Roberts below, at 6:12 of the 9:33 below. Volcanic Ash Wowzer. Relistening to it, I want to run and hide and have his voice blanket the earth so that I can come out from below and lie down on top of it and forever sleep....)
So, in the center of the mix, anonymously, it came on. How to begin with it? Great Expectations has a riff in 7/4 time. What does that mean? Well, generally, most figures in much western music -- rock, pop, jazz, blues -- have lengths that fall into some category of beats, and that category is "even". Meaning, it usually is 4 or 8 or 16 bars of "pulse". If you tap your foot, every 4 taps, something ends and starts over, or every 8 taps, or every 16, or 16 is made of of 4 somethings that start over once again after 16. There's more to say about this, but for my point, most western music uses phrases that are EVEN, for every yin a yang, for every odd an even. Yet, Great Expectations is built on a phrase (really a guitar riff, but, then, everyone is playing a "riff" here, meaning a series of single notes that repeat in some foundationally rhythmically spaced way) that is 7 beats. Tap your foot and count -- when you get to seven, start back at one. And go on, from 1 to 7 each time. The thing is lopsided, asymmetrical, oblong, jutting out into space, contained yet in the rollicking of its repetition. Because your hips move. There's a drum riff, a percussion riff, a bass riff, a tamboura wave, trumpet soaring echoed over it like a discontinuous seagull. In the depth of the night behind it, a rhodes is plucking away, a bird pecking at the heart of the sky. But "Great Expectations" keeps shutting down after a few phrases, the riff resisted, resetting, releasing. It's very weird. You keep thinking the song will push again out into something else, but the expectation, the loved tomorrow, is the same uneven keeled thing that crashes into the edge of the sea and reemerges careening.
At 13:30, though, the song totally resets. Whatever restarting happened once and many times before does not restart. The day is now awaking, the sky placid, plastic, performed. They bide their time, and you wait. For something. Else.
I've only actively sat and watched the sun rise a few times in my life -- on one hand, enough to know what it looks like, on the other, not enough to be fair to myself and the world around me. One thing about the sun rising is that even while you are watching the sky and you see it change, you also see nothing. Because changing is like something and nothing all at once, it is the fact that things become different and express difference through the repetition of and reiteration of their sameness. Perhaps something is drastic -- as in "Great Expectations", every time the rhythm escapes and there is only floating sky sound of horn, rhodes, tamboura, percussion -- but even what is drastic only expresses everything that came upon it, everything that preceded it.
As you wait out the sky in "Great Expectations", you wonder if everything has always been this way, if things will ever change, if difference is only in your perception, if perception is only in what you have had to unknow.
Eventually, as in everything we come to know, a rhythm settles in, the drums are the end result of it, and everything reiterates into a blend of earth and sky, all of which makes the world return, reappear, remain.
I guess what we can expect, then, always, only, is the world unfurled, unfolded, recapitulated. That is, we can expect only what is always great. This is the essence of Miles' silence, the ocean undescribed in, as music.
