then we saw the stars again

Bolero, Maurice Ravel.

“Don’t you think this theme has an insistent quality? I’m going to try and repeat it a number of times without any development, gradually increasing the orchestra as best I can.”

Maurice Ravel wrote this to one of his friends in reference to his landmark piece, the Bolero. Composed in 1928, it clearly wasn’t groundbreaking in terms of tonal explorations, and it wasn’t breaking away from the traditional importance of melodic lines found in Western music before the 1900’s. Instead, Ravel used a very simple idea to a very effective end: let’s see how loud an orchestra can go. And what you hear is what you get: an uninterrupted 15-minute crescendo, a constant increase in volume, texture and sound layers, built on the repetition of the same melodic pattern, on a 3-beat rhythm.
And this is where you realise the beauty of Bolero: nothing ever stays the same, as much as surface listening would suggest. A single flute opens the piece, followed by a bassoon in an unusually high register, then a clarinet, and this chain only gets thicker as more instruments are added, even though they may all play the same thing. There is never any stasis in the repetition of the theme, the music can only get louder and more layered. And in truth, the only instrument (and I really admire the performers for that) that shows a constant throughout the piece would be the snare drum, and even there the execution goes from i-need-to-turn-that-up soft to he’s-going-to-break-the-skins loud.
And of course, stick around until the end, and the inevitable climax is even more of a payoff, hearing what (and how long) it took the orchestra (and the listener) to get there.

Similarly, dynamics play such an important part in post-rock that the genre itself has dangerously become close to cliche, when abused and overused. And yet, you listen to Mogwai’s Young Team, you listen to Godspeed’s F#A# and you can’t help but being lifted by this inexorable force, a force that carries the music and the listener through its most subtle nuances and up, all the way to a resolution that threatens the life of your speakers, or a good relationship with your neighbours. Because, let’s face it: you can’t really play post-rock at low volume, can you? The first time I heard “Like Herod” I was terrified by that sudden outburst of sound. And that only got worse after each listen!
(Slight aside: this aspect got a bit lost in the latest Mogwai offerings, and their dynamic range has reduced, which makes you miss those sweeping contrasts found in Young Team or CODY…)

Of course, post-rock is not just about the contrast in dynamics and texture, but that’s the thing that first attracted me to the genre. And I still don’t tire of the good old ’soft/loud’ pattern, when done well.

So, do not adjust your volume controls. For best results, you should stick to the volume you are at while listening to the snare drum intro. And it will get loud. Hope your neighbours are ok with that.

————

There is a fantastic short documentary about a rehearsal of Bolero, featuring a young Zubin Mehta conducting the LA Philarmonic. In the following clip you can see the end, the final payoff, and the way it is shot would sit quite nicely in a Kubrick flick, or a David Lynch dream sequence.

The Los Angeles Philarmonic, dir. Zubin Mehta

For their latest album, Mono played a few ‘orchestral’ concerts to celebrate their 10-year anniversary. Reviewers have often noted how Mono are one of the most ‘classical’ bands in the post-rock circuit, and the album closer is reminiscent of the same rhythm pattern used by Ravel (barring the change from 3/4 to 4/4)

Mono, Everlasting Light. Live in NYC

———-
As usual, pieces here are for illustrative purposes only. If you like what you hear, buy the composer’s records, or go to their gigs and get a t-shirt!

compilations are sometimes a hit and miss affair, but there is nothing remotely mediocre here.
I’m still in shock after hearing Sufjan Stevens’ 10 minute closer. I’ll probably write something on this, later…
In the meantime, please listen, enjoy, and if you like, buy the album. As corny as charity CD’s go, all proceeds are directly helping to fund AIDS research.

I’ll write more. Soon…

It looks like we are all set, and on course this time. After a few delays we’ve decided to release the album on 09.09.09, which works great whether you live here or in the States, or anywhere else. I found out last week that EMI was doing the same with the entire remastered catalogue of the Beatles, so we shouldn’t worry too much about topping the charts. Not that it was our main intention in the first place…

So what is the reason? Why do we take the time, spend the money, make the effort to piece an album together when we already have a job, a family, a ‘normal’ life?
I often ask myself the question, as I’m sure most musicians do. First of all, I play because I love music. I love listening to it, and I love making it, whether I’m just covering my favourite songs, mangling Beethoven, or recording amberhaze material. But I’d be insincere if I pretended that I happily make music in a vacuum. Because the truth is, we don’t. Not at this point, when social platforms and media give you almost instant validation. Or not. And these days there is really no knowing what will take off and what will be largely ignored. So, do you decide to pay attention to the trends, or stick to doing your own thing?

amberhaze really started a little over 2 years ago. In 2 years I’ve made music, but more importantly I’ve made friends. Releasing an EP by yourself is an opportunity to connect to your listeners, and though I may not have shifted thousands of copies, I’ve been able to thank many of my listeners personally. And to this, to you, I am very grateful.
2 years on and we are trying to up the ante of course. Some bands progress faster, some people take a little more time. Health has been inconsistent at times, gigs are sometimes hard to get by in the small club scene here, but recording the album has been a constant throughout. After the months spent getting the songs right, mixing them, listening to them, taking them apart and mixing them some more, we came to a point where we were all happy with the way the record sounded. And this is what you can hear now, too.

So why do we still make records? Why do we trudge along, knowing that we’ll doubt ourselves along the way, as it often happens with any creative process?
Maybe it’s hope. Or belief. A 50 minute dream you share with a friend, and maybe, just maybe, those 50 minutes will make their day a little bit better.
Here’s to the stars we’ll see together.

So Nine Inch Nails finally made it to Singapore. And after all the years I’ve been trying to see Trent Reznor bring his music in front of his fans, it had to be for the wave goodbye tour… bittersweet, but I’ll take that against not seeing NIN at all.
A little confession: I do not entirely subscribe to the cult of Trent. While I really think he is a peerless producer and creator of sounds and textures, I wouldn’t say that his lyrics mirror every feeling and experience I’ve ever gone through in my life. I do not exactly recognise myself in the voice speaking to me in The Downward Spiral, though I would easily rank that album among my ten favourite records of all time. So let’s just say that I take the whole NIN package with a slight grain of salt, and let’s keep it at that.

Not that this would matter much to the crowd at Fort Canning. After all, it is bands like Nine Inch Nails that enable fans to be thoroughly involved in the music they support, through the internet, through their local fan communities and groups. This idea of identification to a band/brand is fascinating, and few artists right now are more aware of this fact than Trent Reznor.

But brand recognition can ultimately be shallow without substance and artistic vision, especially on a live format. You know it’s going to be your last tour for a (presumably long) while. You know your fans will want to hear the songs they’ve grown up with, the early repertoire, the greatest hits. How do you still have fun with that?

The Wave Goodbye lineup is nothing short of amazing, and that’s a reason why the older songs still sound fresh and new. Since NIN parted ways with their full-time keyboardist last year, the keyboard/piano duties are shared by all members now, and synths were literally everywhere.
Justin Meldal-Johnsen is a great bass player, and much more than that. He played the mini-Moog on many songs from TDS and switched to guitars just as frequently. I remember seeing him with Beck during the Odelay tour, and at the time he was sporting an afro and doing robot moves. With NIN, his stage presence is obviously a little less funky, but he does what the best kind of bass players should do: be the unobtrusive yet indispensable backbone of each song.
Of course, if you are talking about foundations, you’d better have a solid drummer. And Ilan Rubin seems to be made out of an alloy or rubber and titanium. He was unstoppable, and for a show that relied so much on pre-recorded loops and sequences, his ability to keep the beat for 2 hours is just incredible. But the best part was to see him run from the drums to the piano and back for the fills in March of the pigs. Considering how punishing it must be for a drummer to play a song at 260 BPM on a totally irregular time signature, being able to take a break and lay down a sprinkling of piano notes is almost comic relief, in the best silent-movie-era-kind-of-way.

But the main reason why this latest (and last?) incarnation of NIN works so effectively is because of Robin Finck. His versatility as a guitar player is quite unusual these days. He can lay down some brutal chordwork on Terrible Lie or Reptile and bring out the more psychedelic and experimental textures in The Fragile or La mer. On quite a few songs he actually used a heavily effected lap steel to get some incredible tones. And one of the highlights of the whole show was his inspired ending of Piggy. When you play a solo you basically have two options: dazzle the audience technically and take no prisoners, a la Malmsteen, or take your audience to a higher realm of consciousness, a la late 60s. And there is no denying that Finck’s soundscapes were trippy.

So with a band as strong and hard-working as this, the challenge for Trent Reznor would be to match their intensity for a whole 2-hour set. And he clearly was indefatigable, to say the least. I’m not going to ponder whether I prefer skinny Trent or buffed-up Trent, and I find it a bit hilarious that so many reviewers write whole paragraphs on his biceps. The guy is sober, the guy works out, the guy has a life besides being Trent from NIN. End of story.
I’d rather emphasize his proficiency. He literally did not stop for almost two hours, and NEVER even remotely sang out of tune. He is not exactly an effusive showman, but then again you wouldn’t expect him to break into a stand-up comedy routine. So instead, he did what he does best: take you along down the spiral. By the throat.

And that was what the crowd had been waiting for all these years. Like Radiohead, NIN had been one of the great acts eluding Singapore, and at least the promoters chose Fort Canning over the Indoor Stadium for the venue. As an outdoor stage, Fort Canning has an incredible acoustic presence, and provided you have decent sound engineers, the sound will be ideal: loud but never deafening, bass heavy but not absurdly gut-churning, and no metal or concrete structures to send your high frequencies into freakout mode. More than anything, I was impressed by the crystalline quality of the silence in-between chords, something that makes somewhat damaged such a visceral experience on disc, and an even more thrilling one live. And for the bands who believe that white lights are so last century, well, they can go back to the drawing board. The colour doesn’t matter: it’s the number of spotlights! And what you do with them…

So why don’t I feel like I’ve just seen the best show in my life?
Don’t get me wrong, I am not complaining about anything. If you are merely calculating how much bang you get for your buck, well, you got a lot of bang, for sure. But I never really take material concerns into the equation. All I can say is that I saw one of the tightest bands play songs from a repertoire spanning 20 years. And maybe that’s what I ultimately found slightly underwhelming. It was a farewell tour, not an album tour. It’s very different when you’re watching Radiohead support OK computer as opposed to them showcasing songs from yet-to-be-published Kid A, and NIN shows are just the same. I really like the Beside you in time DVD because it represented the vision and continuation of With Teeth, and that’s the album I can identify with the most.
A farewell tour will ultimately feel like a greatest hits showcase, and to a certain extent a performance by-the-numbers. And though it is impossible to fault the band, you know the stakes just aren’t the same when you know you are waving goodbye.

Monk is one of the pianists that inspire me the most. While not as technically dazzling as Oscar Peterson or Bud Powell, there is no mistaking his sound for somebody else’s. And that’s his effortless way of playing, striking dissonant chords here and there, following tempi of his own, that makes him so special for me.

I first heard a Monk tune in HMV in London in 1998, where I was living at the time. I remember HMV on Oxford Street having a great collection of classical and jazz CD’s at the time. Heck, I remember HMV having a great collection full stop (but I digress)

The cashier was playing Monk alone, his collection of solo pieces, both personal compositions and standards that have been associated with Monk ever since. And here was a pianist who was in a world completely his own, playing a brand of jazz that had distanced itself from bebop but at the same time hadn’t totally adhered to the tenets of free jazz.

What I really like about Monk’s improvisations is the sense of rhythm and restraint. He could play more notes, he could articulate longer phrases, but he chooses to play like a child, in the most unselfconscious way. And when you listen to him, either alone or with his quartet, you really feel that fun is what it is all about. And this, for a musician, is priceless, and to a certain extent, I think we have lost a little bit of that playful approach to making music.

It’s Monk’s time features both solo pieces and full quartet takes. Personnel: Thelonious Monk-piano, Charlie Rouse-tenor saxophone, Butch Warren-bass, Ben Riley-drums.