https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVVxom8GpY
Here, a tied experience: working late in the ACES library near Allen, doing CS or something, not particularly impossible, but a challenge — due at 8:00 am, working overnight to get it done. It's possible, it's doable, I'm getting help online, but it still feels like an island — it's midnight, 1am, 2am, and I'm looking out over the dark fields around the library, the greenhouses full of weird light, and my dorm out there in the distance like a beacon, a reward for when I'm finished with this assignment. You get the sleeplessness, eyes waxy, thinking is fuzzy, words read screamed inside your head, and you get dizzy, thirsty, tired, but you can't sleep yet, there's more to be done, swearing off this, never again. You snap back to attention for a moment, focus in on the problem, work steady for 10, 15 minutes, and then it gets worse, you realize how little time is left, and how much there is; how could you have waited this long?
This was the song playing. It's gorgeous and slow and beautiful and secret.
Showing posts with label peter gabriel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peter gabriel. Show all posts
Friday, May 10, 2013
Monday, April 8, 2013
In Your Eyes (Extended Mix) — Peter Gabriel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5sgYYE-J3w
To find out suddenly that one of your favorite songs, imbued with significance over many years, played on repeat, sometimes laughed, cried over; company on train rides and slow dances and drenched in adolescent hormones; to know a hundred other people who all attribute the same significance to this song, so regarded it's nearly scripture; to find out that this song, a song I once recognized from the triangle line alone, able to hear the treble on the speakers in a Starbucks through another song I was listening to, to be jolted to attention by a mere fraction of this song; to find out that this one song I'd been listening to for all these years was but a part of another, longer song, a deconstruction thereof, beginning and ending with extra content, isolated motifs from the height of the song — the sudden, deep, in your eyes that first appears around the 1:12 mark, the verses at the climax sung in Wolof — to disassemble a pop song whose parts have never been dissociated — and better yet, for it to be done not as sacrilege, but as part of the original intention, like finding a new book of the New Testament — I cannot express.
To find out suddenly that one of your favorite songs, imbued with significance over many years, played on repeat, sometimes laughed, cried over; company on train rides and slow dances and drenched in adolescent hormones; to know a hundred other people who all attribute the same significance to this song, so regarded it's nearly scripture; to find out that this song, a song I once recognized from the triangle line alone, able to hear the treble on the speakers in a Starbucks through another song I was listening to, to be jolted to attention by a mere fraction of this song; to find out that this one song I'd been listening to for all these years was but a part of another, longer song, a deconstruction thereof, beginning and ending with extra content, isolated motifs from the height of the song — the sudden, deep, in your eyes that first appears around the 1:12 mark, the verses at the climax sung in Wolof — to disassemble a pop song whose parts have never been dissociated — and better yet, for it to be done not as sacrilege, but as part of the original intention, like finding a new book of the New Testament — I cannot express.
Sunday, April 7, 2013
Listening Wind — Peter Gabriel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ2omdkdk2k
An entire album — Scratch My Back — of sublime, beautiful, prolonged and slow covers of songs from the past thirty years or so — some modern, some ancient, from Bon Iver to Bowie, Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Paul Simon. And they're all so, so wonderful, but Listening Wind is the largest jump up from weird, etherial Talking Heads song to something transcendental, updating the timbre and tone for modern listeners, making it slow and dramatic and tense, a horror movie of a song — is the man building a bomb? What is going on? Who's being driven away? And it builds in tension and harmony and beauty, the determination of the man and the strings and the soft horn in the back swelling until you can't break away, you stop what you're doing and stare, thousand-yard-stare, out the window, and it builds and builds and builds, and the song is so quiet and gentle, Peter Gabriel is soothing, but the music is not, like a horror soundtrack, building in swells and sweeps, always harmonic, — and then it breaks out, and you're left hanging over a canyon, only echoes.
An entire album — Scratch My Back — of sublime, beautiful, prolonged and slow covers of songs from the past thirty years or so — some modern, some ancient, from Bon Iver to Bowie, Radiohead to Regina Spektor to Paul Simon. And they're all so, so wonderful, but Listening Wind is the largest jump up from weird, etherial Talking Heads song to something transcendental, updating the timbre and tone for modern listeners, making it slow and dramatic and tense, a horror movie of a song — is the man building a bomb? What is going on? Who's being driven away? And it builds in tension and harmony and beauty, the determination of the man and the strings and the soft horn in the back swelling until you can't break away, you stop what you're doing and stare, thousand-yard-stare, out the window, and it builds and builds and builds, and the song is so quiet and gentle, Peter Gabriel is soothing, but the music is not, like a horror soundtrack, building in swells and sweeps, always harmonic, — and then it breaks out, and you're left hanging over a canyon, only echoes.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Mercy Street — Peter Gabriel
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoVVxom8GpY
Watching a planetarium show today, they show a glimpse of one of the Voyager spacecraft which left the solar system armed with messages from planet earth: patterns to represent chemical, physical, and astronomical knowledge. They play a clip of a child saying "Hello from the children of planet earth."
I think the best way to communicate with aliens would be to send them music: to communicate the fine harmonies, rhythms and patterns of music would demonstrate more culture than a specific clip of language.
If Biology is specific to earth, so is language. But, as Physics and Chemistry and Astronomical knowledge are independent — worth communicating across the stars — so too is music, showing harmonic frequencies, rhythm and repetition, motifs and patterns, a form of art based on mathematics.
My vote would be for Mercy Street.
Watching a planetarium show today, they show a glimpse of one of the Voyager spacecraft which left the solar system armed with messages from planet earth: patterns to represent chemical, physical, and astronomical knowledge. They play a clip of a child saying "Hello from the children of planet earth."
I think the best way to communicate with aliens would be to send them music: to communicate the fine harmonies, rhythms and patterns of music would demonstrate more culture than a specific clip of language.
If Biology is specific to earth, so is language. But, as Physics and Chemistry and Astronomical knowledge are independent — worth communicating across the stars — so too is music, showing harmonic frequencies, rhythm and repetition, motifs and patterns, a form of art based on mathematics.
My vote would be for Mercy Street.
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