yay props!

Levi, head hauncho over at The NIN Hotline, recently posted a short and glowing bit of praise on my recent (generally positive) review of Ghosts for TMT. Thanks Levi! I was actually kind of embarrassed at it's ridiculous length, but I'm glad the NIN community has been directed towards it's glorious hugeness as they're probably the only ones who will read it all the way through. Big shoutouts to all my old-school ETS chronies (Exit Domina, Abominari, etc), and to the whole Hotline crew, who've pulled off yet another brilliant April Fools page today (making fun of Radiohead NEVER gets old!).

Have I now completely shattered any illusions of my being an even remotely objective critic? We can only hope!

Sensory Overload (Ph'nglui Mglw'nafh Huygens Titan Wgah'nagl Fhtagn!)

I love this show entirely too much. It's actually embarrassing; any semblance of the meager social life with which I occasionally indulge myself is completely dismissed every Tuesday night after I get home from work, the dying afternoon spent preparing for the show. Joints are smoked and popcorn is popped as I set about soaking up every little bit of information released via the unique online feature Nova hosts on their site for each episode - and tonight, dear reader, you're getting dragged along for the ride, as for this episode the Nova crew are once again falling back upon everybody's (my) favorite topic: Space!

We're being taken to Saturn tonight, Titan specifically, and I couldn't be happier. Every few weeks my day gets made just a little bit more exciting by some wild fragment of reality hitherto unseen by human eyes (hey, Lovecraft was an amateur astronomer too; hence all those gibbous moons over cyclopean masonry, Polaris, etc), exquisitely captured by the Cassini mission before being broadcast back to Earth and disseminated online. The images get most of the press for their breathtaking immediacy, but the sounds sent back are, to an audiophile, just as awe inspiring. Here's the official "Sounds From Saturn" page NASA's set up for us, and here's the U of Iowa's "Space Audio" page, which has a few Saturnian sounds not found on the NASA page (along with a great multitude of otherworldly audio from previous probes and terrestrial telescopes). There's so much information compressed into every second of these recordings, every moment an immense flood of data inaccessible to the unaided human ear; scientists will spend months of their lives deciphering them and reverse engineering the exact circumstances of the cosmic electrical disturbances responsible for the squeaks and squeals picked up by our dutiful instruments. When listened to in this context, the indescribable tweaks and moans sent back to us become delightfully overwhelming, and like the best field recordings, evoke specific atmospheres and even emotions.

I've recently been exploring "music" that evokes a similarly mind-blowing concentration of information; John Zorn, naturally, has satisfied my criteria with flying colors due to his unending experimentations in arranging and rearranging micro-fragments of sound and music, and has been involved in two of my favorite works in this vein: John Oswald's singularly devastating pop-music collage Plexure (which Zorn commissioned, co-produced, and released) and Zorn's own Necronomicon suite off his album "Magick", released in 2004 and brilliantly executed by the "Crowley Quartet" assembled specifically to perform the work.



Plexure is both a monumental achievement in sound design as well as in sampling, which upon it's release in 1993 was a still fresh legal debacle. Seemingly inviting a crippling wave of litigation while simultaneously avoiding it via the microscopic samples from which it is composed (sampling law demands that a sample must be "recognizable" and of a certain length for the copyright holders to receive compensation), Plexure manages to crush about 1000 different pieces of otherwise highly recognizable rap, pop, and rock music into 19 minutes and 19 seconds of total chaos, shitting in the face of a mashup culture still in it's infancy with the sheer balls of it's mammoth concept and sound; I've yet to hear such an undeniably original work based on "stolen" source material.


The Necronomicon suite, on the other hand, is an original work in five parts, composed for a string quartet. References to the frantic screeching of Xenaxis's works for stringed instruments (and in it's slower bits, Jerry Goldsmith's unforgettable score for the original Alien film) are abound, but transcend such influences thanks to Zorn's own perverse and highly unique compositional touch, successfully evoking the incomprehensible horrors of it's namesake with a veritable flood of screaming and scraping strings. But both of these multi-movement masterpieces test the limits of listenability with an average running time of about 20 minutes each, and as such I have come to find the four scalding minutes of Autechre's Gantz Graf to be the pinnacle of my auditory quest for the immeasurably complex. I wrote out a moment by moment commentary on the track based on years of listening (I've listened to it regularly since picking up the untitled E.P. featuring the track in 2002, though I didn't start enjoying it properly until at least 2004) attempting to unravel it's bizarre internal logic, but it ended up doubling the length of what I've written so far, so I'm providing instead the video for the track as well as the full song in FLAC (as the sound quality for the video is predictably awful). A warning, however, for the less adventurous or more headache prone listener: appreciating Gantz Graf's Merzbowesque intensity and overbearing level of detail requires confronting each moment with your full attention, as grotesque as the task may seem, and stepping beyond the initial recoil one may feel due to the unfamiliarity of the music's structure and texture. Enjoy:




Oh Snap! The show's coming on!

***

Holy Shit! Saturn!

What I love about Nova is that they make real science as sensational as it ought to be - they really pull your heart strings and get your pulse racing, and the effect is not dissimilar to that feeling of being manipulated you might get sometimes (or all the time, depending on your level of paranoia) while watching the news, but in this case with a transparent and entirely productive agenda. This episode was no different - they really went all out on soundtrack licensing this time around too, weaving in some Massive Attack, John William's Indiana Jones Score (WTF?) and the curiously aforementioned score to Alien (it's just that good!), all utilized for maximum emotional impact and arranged with an acute sense of pace. Great television!

As ought to be entirely obvious, the program consisted primarily of looped computer generated footage of Saturn, her moons, and the various probes we've sent to Saturn with short, epic cuts to the bogglingly awesome images they've provided us with dispersed at even intervals throughout the show. There were some juicy interviews with various individuals responsible for executing the Cassini/Huygens mission from it's inception to the present as well, in addition to a segment on the potentially life sustaining properties of Titan's environment - probably the most exciting part of the show. And those CGI closeups of the rings! Mmmmm.

Oh, and while we're talking about educational television, the illustrious Cosmos has recently been put back on the air by The Science Channel, which has been re-running each episode of Carl Sagan's landmark television series in order for the last few months, a different one each week. Check it out, record it if you can!