Mountains Sprout

It is incredulous the way

Mountains sprout

Up from flat earth, with

Tectonic shifts           

Or water washed minerals

Broadcast asunder

Leaving the landform

In some small way

Bigger.  Or the way

Guttural rock can spit

From its lips

Hot and liquid

Leaving the mountain fatter

And new skinned.

Its growth unsubstantial

Enough to catch

Their silent shift

Through slow time.

If we like gods could speed it up

And watch

The dance of landscapes,

The mountains

Shuffling their feet.

5ive Albums That Would Change the Way You Listened to Music: If You Were Me.

Part 2: The Soft Bulletin - Sound Science


       What do you do with a second?  Is it worth consideration? In a sense, a work of art is encapsulated time.  It contains the time it took for the idea to germinate, the time it took for the idea to mature, time for the idea to be instigated and constructed and then, of course, the time it takes to digest the finished product.  It is composed of many things, but incorporated with every ingredient; there is time.

Theoretically, in audible art, any second of sound could be filled up with any sound from any source.  Unlike most modern popular music, a song does not arbitrarily have to be conceived as a composition of three major chords and one minor chord played in succession at a particular tempo in order to support a specific melody.  Instead, every divisible instant of a song could be occupied by any conceivable sound and still support the melody.  Music as science.

Imagine a laboratory filled with hundreds of test tubes.  Each tube is filled with millions of bits of sound—sounds of every variety from every possible source, natural and synthetic.  Imagine picking up a test tube and pouring out a few hundred bits of sound into a beaker.  Then choose another tube and pour out a few hundred bits of something else.  Repeat a dozen or so times.  Next, cork the beaker and place it into a centrifuge to combine.  If you poured in too little of this, you ended up with something like generic pop.  If you used too little of that, you might have created something like folk.  If there were too much of too few ingredients yet combined quite thoroughly, you may have ended up with the tedium of speed metal.  If you used too much of every component or mixed them at the wrong speed or pitch, you may have created nice, thick noise.

Thinking about song construction in this way could lead to insanity.  When you open up your mind to the endless possibilities of sounds and the infinite amount of ways that they can be combined to occupy any conceivable amount of time; the task of selection, elimination, and inclusion becomes daunting.  This is what I had never thought of before—to me, song construction was a simple task: write some lyrics, find a melody, support it with three or four chords and you were done—until 1999.  It was the year I heard The Soft Bulletin by The Flaming Lips.  It sounded as though the authors began each idea with, “What if we could…” Each song seemed to be instigated by imagination rather than inspiration.  Instruments were deconstructed, manipulated, and reassembled in order that they might then meet the imagined demand of a specific second of sound.  Songs were not composed: they were invented.

These concepts had been taken to an extreme with their previously released album entitled Zaireeka.  If, as we previously stated, any second of sound is a space, which has the potential of being occupied by any sound, then that also means that the space could be occupied by any of an infinite number of sound combinations.  Imagine that the y-axis is the sounds themselves.  It is an infinite line where every point is a precise sound plotted vertically from low pitch to high.  It intersects the x-axis at a midrange point, let’s say for example middle C.  The x-axis represents time moving from left to right, past to future.  At a given point a sound on the y-axis could be plotted along the x-axis to occupy that moment of time.  If multiple points on the y-axis are plotted on the same point along the x-axis you have simultaneous sounds.  These sounds could be a simple chord (three points) or a complex combination of beats, beeps, bells, whistles, or plucks from any conceivable source (remember we are dealing with infinite lines both vertically and horizontally).  You can see how this way of thinking could get infinitely complicated relatively fast. 

Back to our laboratory experiment, our beaker would represent a finite amount of space.  It could only hold a specific amount of sound.  If the composer wanted to fill a given point on the x-axis with more sounds then the beaker could hold the composer would have to use mutable beakers.  But how many beakers can fit into a CD?  A compact disk, like a beaker is a finite space.  Zaireeka, you could say, was a project that required four centrifuges to spin four beakers simultaneously.  Four CDs would have to be played at the same time on four separate CD players.  It was an ambitious project that required quite a bit of work on the part of the listener.  But the point was made.  They had managed to fill a second of the listener's sound space with more distinctly audible plotted points on the y-axis then anyone had previously done with recorded sound. 

With The Soft Bulletin they scaled back their vision to include less distinguishable sounds per second.  In spite of it being less it was still more than enough. Though the concept was not exaggerated like it had been on Zaireeka, as each track moved along the x-axis every second was packed full of big, complex, dense sounds spread thoroughly along copious vertical points within audible range.  Sounds had weight and texture.  Sounds seemed to move up and down the axis with scientific precision.  Nothing sounded arbitrary.  There were no accidents.  There was an affection and an attention given to the composition that you just don’t hear in pop music.  It was Bach.  But maybe even more meticulously composed than a classical piece because with advancements in technology and electronic sounds the possibilities were almost endless. 

The Soft Bulletin is hard to swallow at times because of its limitlessness.  If we listen to the radio often we are used to digesting a limited serving of sound.  The sounds many vary widely from song to song or album to album but The Soft Bulletin can have those variations within one specific song.  Again, there is no randomness to be found.  If the tonal palette suddenly changes; it is always with thoughtful reason.  Every sound has a purpose.  Sounds become important to the narration.  They lead you through the story sonically.  They carry you to emotional extremes by adding and blending succulent sounds to create a devastating concoction with each track—each one pressing the limits of the beaker walls.  Trying to shatter the glass.

Would You Rather Try Spitting Infinitives or Kicking up Appearances in a Well of Malformation?

We are spitting images at each other.

we are fraternal twins. we are busy

making sentence while striving for

perfunction. we are two-piece pods,

two sides of the same clone, appalling

contraception prematurely immaculated

with multiple organisms then gradually

redressing. we are dancing on heirs with

standing oblation. we are injourned

internally, pleading profusely, and barely

responsible. we are starved for infection

and gambling convulsively, tracing our

routes through the banter of dialects,

raping our locks through the keyholes of

innocence, babbling of relevance to ears

that hear circumvent. we are setting bids.

we are accepting goals. we are waxing

inaudibly. we are epitomized. we are

puzzlesolved. we are quiettouched,

guiltriddled, inkstained, and quicklysolvent.

we are roadwary and scarred to death. we

are brackish waterfalls merging in middles.

we are financially insewered. we are

underworked and overpaid. we are

troubleshot, pilestocked, paperworked, and

piddleproduced. we are frenzy franchised

and pleasantly surplused. we are

druggeddown, rockbottomed, footmouthed,

sextoothed, soundbitten, assfatted,

fiddlefingered, palletskinned commercials.

we are excessive compulsively date raped

till blue in the mouth. we are flying safe to

straighten our lives and it is not working.