Memory is a strange thing. Random and slender chains of association revive moments that have slept for decades... and sometimes puzzle pieces you've been holding on to all along suddenly fit together.
Late last night I started thinking about the Robbie Nevil song "C'est La Vie".
At the end of 1986, it was all over the radio in Miami, but a couple of local pop/dance-oriented stations would also sometimes play the Arthur Baker remix. Clocking in at 7 minutes, this version spaced out the lead and backing vocals over drum breakdowns, bass licks, horn riffs, synth chords, and other bits and pieces of the original.
At the time, I used to record songs off the air and make mixtapes. The "C'est La Vie" remix made it on to one of my dozens of cassettes. Last night, recalling long-lost family times, I had a flash of listening to this track over and over again, on a small red boombox, in the back of our minivan, during a winter roadtrip to New Orleans. (Speaking of long-dormant memories awakened: That was my first visit to the city since we'd moved away when I was three and a half.)
As I listened to the remix again on YouTube over the past day, something clicked. I'm pretty sure that it was then, at age 15, that I started to understand what a remix really was, and how it could transform and expand a song thru studio wizardry. And I think it must have been this track that opened my ears.
The original song was admittedly fairly insipid, overproduced mid-'80s fare... and even then (having only recently become a nearly omnivorous consumer of top-40 FM) I recognized its blandness. But the remix lifted it into a different realm.
Nowadays, any song that hits the radio or the internet gets remixed a dozen times, legally or illegally, as a matter of course. It's hard to remember that in the era before filesharing and audio editing software, only an elite few producers had the skills and equipment to painstakingly deconstruct a song and put it back together, amped up for the dancefloor.
A remix was an elusive, exotic thing... emanating, most likely, from faraway New York, and trailing a perfume of nightlife, sophistication, and the glossy technological future. I was familiar with a few remixes already -- mostly Jellybean Benitez versions of Madonna singles. But it was the "C'est La Vie" rework that lit up my mental circuits, for whatever reason.
The funny thing is that listening to it now, I notice that it's chock-full of elements that have become staples of my own production work: selectively echoed vocals, syncopated kickbeat, timekeeping snare, high, chiming synth notes, funky synth bass pattern, sudden dropouts and returns, and a panorama of Roland 808 percussion -- rimshots, cowbell, claps, hi-hats -- exploding across the stereo field.
These had been part of my inner soundscape for a while already at that point... but I don't think I'd ever understood how masterfully a producer could deploy them, until then. The remix builds, peaks, subsides, rebuilds, suddenly leaves you hanging, then comes in from beneath you again, time after time in those 7 minutes.
What I realized back then, on an intuitive level, was that all those sonic techniques were being used, not just for random effect, but to create a tight, multi-act musical drama. I couldn't yet fully decode the logic of it, nor did I have a clue as to how those magically perfect rhythms were created. But I could feel the excitement.
More than half my life has passed since that road trip; my family is scattered across the country; my old mixtapes are (almost) all gone; Robbie Nevil's career (and the city of New Orleans) are much the worse for wear. I haven't thought about any of this for ages. I know that the song, even in the remixed form that captivated my younger self, is too shallow to justify the odd nostalgia, tinged with slight melancholy, that I attach to it.
Still, I can look back and see that 23 years ago, playing and rewinding that cassette till it almost wore out, I was beginning to grasp some things about music that would have a much bigger impact on me than I could imagine at the time.
(You can find the Arthur Baker remix of "C'est La Vie", and 3 other versions, at Burning the Ground.)
posted by Maximus |
1:15 am EST |
2009.07.02 |
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SPRINKLE THE CROWD WITH UNIMAGINABLE SPICES
»General
This Tiga "interview" (part 1, part 2) is genius... right down to the randomly-shifting-film-stock effect.
posted by Maximus |
12:17 am EST |
2009.06.30 |
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OLD FASCINATIONS / WE CRAVE NEW SENSATIONS
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The Guardian's Alex Petridis says La Roux's album is "as flat, synthy and funkless as any 80s pop band … and that's just fine":
In fact, sounding a bit rinky-dink and Bontempi organ turns out to be an occupational hazard of La Roux's 80s fetishism. Still, there are plenty of songs here that sound like hits – not least Fascination, on which Jackson's fragile voice floats affectingly over the bleeping electronics before another ridiculously catchy chorus erupts.
posted by Maximus |
1:47 pm EST |
2009.06.29 |
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The Splice / Xray Outside INSIDE Broadcast @ Solas
IMPORTANT UPDATE: Due to forecasts of heavy rain on Sunday, this event will take place indoors at Solas (232 E. 9th St., between 2nd + 3rd Aves.), 2 blocks away from Astor Place.
T H E S P L I C E / X R A Y I N S I D E B R O A D C A S T
SPLICE, NYC's "eclectic electronics" series, joins futurist cabaret XRAY and the Make Music New York crew for this special showcase!
Come help us celebrate SPLICE's third anniversary at this FREE outdoor show on Sunday, June 21. We'll have an all-star lineup of live electronic performers:
In keeping with the truism that the Times usually only picks up on trends after they are well under way, I note that La Roux has been on to this one for a while now.
posted by Maximus |
10:19 pm EST |
2009.06.10 |
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I've got to get my hands on Melodica, a sequencer app for the iPhone.
Here it is in action:
UPDATE: There are other iPhone apps that also use this paradigm. IR-909 is a drum machine with a nice sample kit. Randgrid is a full-featured, highly tweakable virtual analog synth sequencer, that also has a drum machine component.
UPDATE 2: Melodia looks almost identical to Tonematrix, a Flash-based program that you can start playing with right away by clicking that link.
posted by Maximus |
1:11 pm EST |
2009.05.29 |
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Depeche Mode have been canceling European tour dates. Rumor suggests Dave Gahan is having serious health issues, but so far, the band has offered no explanation.
posted by Maximus |
8:24 pm EST |
2009.05.25 |
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What is it like to be a fan of electronic dance music in middle America -- surrounded by people who don't know, understand or like any of the music you love?
The other day Boing Boing Gadgets posted a video showing a Polish apartment building whose windows had been turned into the pixels of a giant display.
Turns out Projekt P.I.W.O. is a group of college students, and the building in question is a dorm. Their blog shows how the light modules were built, and features various clips of the system in action.
It figures: I move out of Greenpoint, and one of my favorite bars in the area becomes host to not one, but two intriguing live electronic music parties.
I'm sure I'll be riding the G train back to the old nabe soon, for one or both of these events.
posted by Maximus |
1:44 pm EST |
2009.05.13 |
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THERE'S CERTAIN THINGS THAT SHOULD BE LEFT UNSAID
»General
Yes, it's a blatant Yazoo ripoff (with a bassline and some keyboard riffs that producer Ben Langmaid seems to have cribbed from FPU's "Time Safari"). Almost everything La Roux does is an act of recycling. But it's done with panache and sure-footedness.
Their videos have a perfectly '80s kind of high-gloss, super-designed futurism -- with all the requisite nods toward Japanese technology, French couture, and retro-modern style. It could come off as lifeless pastiche... but it hums with energy.
There's the heat of the baroque: the candy colors and polyhedral shapes of this video, the animal prints and sunset pastels of Quicksand, the lurid red and blue lights and glowing eyes of In For The Kill, and always, Elly Jackson's crazy hair and vibrating soprano wail.
But it's all tempered by a cold minimalism: this clip's too-perfect computer-generated grids, "Quicksand"'s boxy jackets and almost-blank looks, "In For The Kill"'s endless midnight drive, and the double-tracking that reveals how precisely rehearsed and controlled that wail really is.
It's the sense of emotion in restraint -- strong feelings trapped in the precise strictures of sequenced, synthesized sounds and art-directed tableaux, revealed only in that voice and that penetrating stare -- that give La Roux's pop artifice such intensity.
I look forward to their album's release on June 29. Meanwhile, I'm happy to have won a copy of the Quicksand EP from Music Slut. Thanks, guys!
posted by Maximus |
4:41 pm EST |
2009.05.11 |
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A belated salute to Tom Whitwell's excellent blog Music Thing, which ceased publication back in January. I found numerous fun, outrageous, educational, and nostalgic items there about music and technology.
posted by Maximus |
2:38 pm EST |
2009.05.04 |
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The Susan Boyle phenomenon: a planned and packaged Paul Potts 2.0.
I have nothing at all against Susan Boyle herself. But I'm mystified that lots of smart, normally cynical people seem unable to recognize how totally manufactured (and blatantly, cheaply, calculatedly melodramatic) this whole spectacle is.
posted by Maximus |
4:15 pm EST |
2009.04.22 |
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As a fan of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I'd pretty much resigned myself to believing that the spectacular April 10 season finale was also the end of the series:
Last week, Entertainment Weekly's Michael Ausiello declared the show terminated. But there are glimmers of hope.
One of the show's writers, and its creator, have debunked Ausiello viaTwitter. One of its stars has talked positively about the plans for season 3 in an interview.
We'll know for sure what's going on by May 18th, when Fox announces its fall schedule. Stay tuned.
posted by Maximus |
2:17 pm EST |
2009.04.21 |
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Yesterday, I discovered that Mike Skinner (The Streets) is also Twittering -- and posting some of his new tracks as free downloads. Check out his feed here.
posted by Maximus |
11:18 am EST |
2009.04.21 |
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