The Way of the Flesh
Sep. 26th, 2004 10:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI've asked John Talaga, aka Fashion Flesh and one half of the Super Madrigal Brothers, to make 'song morphs' for my new album, 'Otto Spooky', due in early 2005. Here's an extract from our correspondence:
Momus to Flesh, September 9th:
'Basically, my album is finished. Listening to it, I'm somewhat missing the sense of disorientation/disorienteering that 'Oskar' had. I think it lacks your magical touch, John! What I'd like to propose is that instead of working on whole songs, you could make transitions between tracks. The order of the songs is already fixed. You'd take musical elements from the end of Track 1 and do a kind of improvisation with them which would segue into musical elements of Track 2, thus paving the way for the next track. Your morphs should be experimental and mental, without being 'glitchy'. They should give listeners a space to relax, wonder, get lost, dream, and appetize them for another song. Each 'morph' could last anything from twenty seconds to two full minutes. Another idea I had was to reproduce the effect of Cantonese Opera, where songs are surrounded by dialog punctuated by drum crashes... My idea was to have voices as stylised as the Cantonese opera singers, but sort of muffled and indecipherable. Just these voices somewhere suggesting an interlude with absurd conversations going on. Sort of Renaldo and the Loafish, or like the skits on hip hop albums, but much more surreal and sound-oriented. You could make the voices yourself, or I could do some, with the help of friends, or we could even use actual dialog from Cantonese Opera. I'll make the final assemblage, combining the songs with the morphs.
If you do get involved in this way, I'm thinking of making a conscious reference to 'Oskar Tennis Champion' by calling the album 'Otto The Ottoman' or 'Otto Bantam Boy' or something like that, cos there's a character in the first song called Otto.'
Flesh to Momus:
'Yes, I'd love to do this by all means! This will be very enjoyable and natural, not at all a forced venture...it's an honour to be part of your vision again... No matter what I've got going on for the next month I'll certainly spend a large/ample amount of time working on this material, focusing fully on its deepest pigmentation and materialization. No glitch indeed, wouldn't even dream of it at this point in my life... I'm thinking a lot more of sweeping blurs that gel into cables and soft cordings (like those piping a silk pillow), smokey analog weavings in place of digitized dodgings. I really like the idea of the voices scattered throughout... perhaps you could include a track on the disc you'll be sending me of just your voicing of fake words, at the end of the disc? I'd love to do a bit of mouthing myself in sparing sprinkles... I think that if I actually overlap our words in quiet spurts here and there it would be the most mysterious. Please do write me back as soon as you get this e-mail to let me know that you have received it. I'm very excited to be included Nick!! The ideas are starting to churn around in my brain already!'
(Later...)
'I got the discs in the post today...I listened to most of it once through already and I think it's absolutely amazing. It sounds soooo great, I'm really sincerely amazed... I'm not going to go into too much detail now, but I really love the overall non-digital sound of it all. It's all got a beatiful smell of psych-folk about it. I'm going to listen to it throughout the whole day today and begin working with it tomorrow night. I feel like a lot of it has both a dusk and dawn fell to it, so I'd like to add an element of night to it... does that make sense to you? I hope you do, and I hope you also think this is a good concept to keep in mind.'
Momus to Flesh:
'Yes, night sounds a good thing to put in. Night is both disorienting and restful, both coffin and bosom. Give it some!'
Flesh to Momus:
'Disorienting yes, restful not necessarily. I was thinking of the auditorial concoction of night to be a bit scarier and stranger than coffin/full slumber... for the times it creeps us out it often seems the coffin is an easier swallow, don't you agree? What I'm getting at is that I wasn't really considering making any of the bits restful really, but more restless. Do you think I should maybe include a bit of a din-ful lullaby to a few of the pieces' ends? If the answer is yes, I'm voting for the more uptempo playful songs to have the nighty-nite feel at the end.'
Momus to Flesh:
'I'm writing this on the bullet train heading down to Kyushu. Tiny houses and tiny mountains flick by at 150 mph. It's the kind of landscape I used to doodle on notepads when I was at school, thinking it was science fiction. But here it is, as real as can be. Factories swing past sporting the audio-electronic brand names that also defined my youth: Panasonic, Sanyo, Sony... This is where those electronics were born, where they're from. If electronic reproduction defines our contemporary reality, this landscape is its Platonic realm.
The main thing is that your morphs should be disorienting and unfocused. A sound lens pulling attention slowly away from one sharply-defined song and making a sort of kaleidoscope which suddenly pulls into tight focus for the next one. The simplest metaphor, though, and perhaps the only important one, is that you're a DJ fading between two records. But you're a much more creative DJ: someone pulling the music around like putty in the cross-fade, and taking it to places DJs can't reach, with effects they don't have. Also, instead of just the 'two places' a DJ moves between, you can go to a 'third place', an intermediate territory of your own invention, before leading the listener back to the tone palette of the next track.'
Flesh to Momus:
'Wonderful, you've supplied all the answers to my questions. I've already begun work on two transitions...I'm in the perfect mindset to be doing this project right now (things seem to be working in this sort of odd magical way for me as of late, which is both weird and great). Your view from the bullet train sounds amazing, especially the tiny mountains image. Okay, well I'm going to get back to the album now. I'm thinking I'll complete three or four of these pieces before I send you mp3s to hear, that way I'll be able to have a bit of time with them to see if I want to alter any of the colors or shapes. Hope all is well with you, and never ever again compare me to a DJ!'
...
Well, as of today seven of the fourteen Flesh Morphs are completed, mysterious little one minute bridges between the fifteen tracks on 'Otto Spooky'. They're fantastic, exceeding my expectation and completely redefining the album, putting mystery and invention into every corner, making it melty, bendy, spooky, chirpy, baroque, dreamy, absurd -- more varied, and even more of a trippy travelogue than it was before. John Talaga is one of the most talented and daring sound designers around today. Judging from the projects he's beginning to be offered, it seems that other people are at last starting to recognize that.
Momus to Flesh, September 9th:
'Basically, my album is finished. Listening to it, I'm somewhat missing the sense of disorientation/disorienteering that 'Oskar' had. I think it lacks your magical touch, John! What I'd like to propose is that instead of working on whole songs, you could make transitions between tracks. The order of the songs is already fixed. You'd take musical elements from the end of Track 1 and do a kind of improvisation with them which would segue into musical elements of Track 2, thus paving the way for the next track. Your morphs should be experimental and mental, without being 'glitchy'. They should give listeners a space to relax, wonder, get lost, dream, and appetize them for another song. Each 'morph' could last anything from twenty seconds to two full minutes. Another idea I had was to reproduce the effect of Cantonese Opera, where songs are surrounded by dialog punctuated by drum crashes... My idea was to have voices as stylised as the Cantonese opera singers, but sort of muffled and indecipherable. Just these voices somewhere suggesting an interlude with absurd conversations going on. Sort of Renaldo and the Loafish, or like the skits on hip hop albums, but much more surreal and sound-oriented. You could make the voices yourself, or I could do some, with the help of friends, or we could even use actual dialog from Cantonese Opera. I'll make the final assemblage, combining the songs with the morphs.
If you do get involved in this way, I'm thinking of making a conscious reference to 'Oskar Tennis Champion' by calling the album 'Otto The Ottoman' or 'Otto Bantam Boy' or something like that, cos there's a character in the first song called Otto.'
Flesh to Momus:
'Yes, I'd love to do this by all means! This will be very enjoyable and natural, not at all a forced venture...it's an honour to be part of your vision again... No matter what I've got going on for the next month I'll certainly spend a large/ample amount of time working on this material, focusing fully on its deepest pigmentation and materialization. No glitch indeed, wouldn't even dream of it at this point in my life... I'm thinking a lot more of sweeping blurs that gel into cables and soft cordings (like those piping a silk pillow), smokey analog weavings in place of digitized dodgings. I really like the idea of the voices scattered throughout... perhaps you could include a track on the disc you'll be sending me of just your voicing of fake words, at the end of the disc? I'd love to do a bit of mouthing myself in sparing sprinkles... I think that if I actually overlap our words in quiet spurts here and there it would be the most mysterious. Please do write me back as soon as you get this e-mail to let me know that you have received it. I'm very excited to be included Nick!! The ideas are starting to churn around in my brain already!'
(Later...)
'I got the discs in the post today...I listened to most of it once through already and I think it's absolutely amazing. It sounds soooo great, I'm really sincerely amazed... I'm not going to go into too much detail now, but I really love the overall non-digital sound of it all. It's all got a beatiful smell of psych-folk about it. I'm going to listen to it throughout the whole day today and begin working with it tomorrow night. I feel like a lot of it has both a dusk and dawn fell to it, so I'd like to add an element of night to it... does that make sense to you? I hope you do, and I hope you also think this is a good concept to keep in mind.'
Momus to Flesh:
'Yes, night sounds a good thing to put in. Night is both disorienting and restful, both coffin and bosom. Give it some!'
Flesh to Momus:
'Disorienting yes, restful not necessarily. I was thinking of the auditorial concoction of night to be a bit scarier and stranger than coffin/full slumber... for the times it creeps us out it often seems the coffin is an easier swallow, don't you agree? What I'm getting at is that I wasn't really considering making any of the bits restful really, but more restless. Do you think I should maybe include a bit of a din-ful lullaby to a few of the pieces' ends? If the answer is yes, I'm voting for the more uptempo playful songs to have the nighty-nite feel at the end.'
Momus to Flesh:
'I'm writing this on the bullet train heading down to Kyushu. Tiny houses and tiny mountains flick by at 150 mph. It's the kind of landscape I used to doodle on notepads when I was at school, thinking it was science fiction. But here it is, as real as can be. Factories swing past sporting the audio-electronic brand names that also defined my youth: Panasonic, Sanyo, Sony... This is where those electronics were born, where they're from. If electronic reproduction defines our contemporary reality, this landscape is its Platonic realm.
The main thing is that your morphs should be disorienting and unfocused. A sound lens pulling attention slowly away from one sharply-defined song and making a sort of kaleidoscope which suddenly pulls into tight focus for the next one. The simplest metaphor, though, and perhaps the only important one, is that you're a DJ fading between two records. But you're a much more creative DJ: someone pulling the music around like putty in the cross-fade, and taking it to places DJs can't reach, with effects they don't have. Also, instead of just the 'two places' a DJ moves between, you can go to a 'third place', an intermediate territory of your own invention, before leading the listener back to the tone palette of the next track.'
Flesh to Momus:
'Wonderful, you've supplied all the answers to my questions. I've already begun work on two transitions...I'm in the perfect mindset to be doing this project right now (things seem to be working in this sort of odd magical way for me as of late, which is both weird and great). Your view from the bullet train sounds amazing, especially the tiny mountains image. Okay, well I'm going to get back to the album now. I'm thinking I'll complete three or four of these pieces before I send you mp3s to hear, that way I'll be able to have a bit of time with them to see if I want to alter any of the colors or shapes. Hope all is well with you, and never ever again compare me to a DJ!'
...
Well, as of today seven of the fourteen Flesh Morphs are completed, mysterious little one minute bridges between the fifteen tracks on 'Otto Spooky'. They're fantastic, exceeding my expectation and completely redefining the album, putting mystery and invention into every corner, making it melty, bendy, spooky, chirpy, baroque, dreamy, absurd -- more varied, and even more of a trippy travelogue than it was before. John Talaga is one of the most talented and daring sound designers around today. Judging from the projects he's beginning to be offered, it seems that other people are at last starting to recognize that.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-25 08:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 12:40 am (UTC)And just adorable as well.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 01:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 10:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 03:01 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 05:15 am (UTC)aww
Date: 2004-09-26 09:06 am (UTC)Big In Japan
Date: 2004-09-26 09:24 am (UTC)sybil@kojapan.com
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 10:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 03:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 04:25 pm (UTC)Sound design
Date: 2004-09-26 10:58 am (UTC)I’m curious about collaboration and the kind of ground rules and understandings that essentially have to be set up beforehand in order to define roles and satisfy mutual expectations regarding art and business.
Re: Sound design
Date: 2004-09-26 03:21 pm (UTC)John isn't asking for a co-composition credit on the tracks for his work, and I think that's fair, although I do want people listening to know that the last minute or so of each track is, in a sense, a mini 'composition' by John. The ground rules in this case are that although he doesn't get a writer credit, the morphs should be heard, morally, as 'songs' by John, or 'remixes', or 'creative crossfades', or 'arrangements', or 'reproductions', or 'sound design'. As usual when I work with John, what we're doing is something there isn't a clear precedent, or even a word, for. We make it up as we go along.
Re: Sound design
Date: 2004-09-26 04:33 pm (UTC)step
Date: 2004-09-26 12:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 04:31 pm (UTC)c'mon.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 04:34 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 06:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 06:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-26 07:04 pm (UTC)Neil Old
Date: 2004-09-27 06:04 am (UTC)I don't know why I'm being so defensive about Neil Young, when I should be jumping with joy and exclaiming how it's such a brilliant idea bringing in Mr. Flesh to handle the segues and entractes. But what of Mr. Flesh's erstwhile madrigalist, Mr. Bruneau, who has produced the scintillating "Phonepunk"? (Adam, if you ever read this, I owe you a long letter of thanks.)
(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-27 05:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-09-27 08:16 am (UTC)Adam
pm payment
Date: 2004-09-28 08:55 am (UTC)A correction: Mr. Oyamada disbanded his label, Trattoria, back in 2002. PM came out on Polystar Japan, Matador, and Matador Europe, the same large labels he's on. Everyone at Polystar has been very pleasant; it certainly isn't an act of malice, just corporate sloggery. Apparently the keyboardist on Jimi Hendrix' Electric Ladyland album is also still waiting to be paid.
Tokyo Fun Party, Kawatory's CD-R label, threw a non-Polystar-affiliated pro-PM remixers event called PM Sessions back in January 2004, and Cornelius caught wind and asked if he could play! Very exciting, though John wasn't able to participate and I was only there in video form. It was certainly appreciated, since the label did very little to promote the album.
Thanks, Nick, for trying to keep one of us busy and fed! John is an intimidating master of sound, and I only hope to get my collaborations with him done before he's too busy and famous to work with me! (Though I did read on this website that you never paid him for Oskar...)
Channing aka Animal Family feat MC Cat Genius
Re: pm payment
Date: 2004-09-28 03:15 pm (UTC)I'm English so this may explain why I don't get the reference...
Thanks,
Darren
Re: pm payment
Date: 2004-09-28 05:42 pm (UTC)PICCOLO: Leave it all to me, baby, because I’m gonna rock your world, like when I stuffed Shaq and Aaron Carter. And when I stuffed Aaron Carter into Shaq. In Tokyo.
The reference is: Aaron Carter is the little brother of Nick Carter, one of the now-forgotten Backstreet Boys. Aaron had his own music career for an album and a half -- not the pop-dance dreck of his older brother's group, exactly, but a weird, Disney-fied old-school preteen blond white rap career, doing family-friendly fourteen-year-old raps about fleeing fourteen-year-old fans and staying in school and dancing. Aaron's big single was "That's How I Beat Shaq," an inspired piece of joint marketing where he tells the tale of how he "stuffed" (defeated) basketball superstar and sometime sex offender Shaquille O'Neal in a friendly game of basketball. At the end, the story is all a dream... but how did he end up with this jersey? Ooohh!
MC Cat Genius strives to make the lamest references possible, so it goes without saying that he would not only reference the song, he would also claim to have stuffed (defeated) both opponents, then to have stuffed (stuffed) one into the other, to be gross.
related links:
http://www.catjams.com/mccg/corneliusremixlyrics.html
http://www.catjams.com/mccg/momusmail.html
http://aaron-carter.lyrics-songs.com/lyrics/7059/
Re: pm payment
Date: 2004-09-28 05:43 pm (UTC)PICCOLO: Leave it all to me, baby, because I’m gonna rock your world, like when I stuffed Shaq and Aaron Carter. And when I stuffed Aaron Carter into Shaq. In Tokyo.
The reference is: Aaron Carter is the little brother of Nick Carter, one of the now-forgotten Backstreet Boys. Aaron had his own music career for an album and a half -- not the pop-dance dreck of his older brother's group, exactly, but a weird, Disney-fied old-school preteen blond white rap career, doing family-friendly fourteen-year-old raps about fleeing fourteen-year-old fans and staying in school and dancing. Aaron's big single was "That's How I Beat Shaq," an inspired piece of joint marketing where he tells the tale of how he "stuffed" (defeated) basketball superstar and sometime sex offender Shaquille O'Neal in a friendly game of basketball. At the end, the story is all a dream... but how did he end up with this jersey? Ooohh!
MC Cat Genius strives to make the lamest references possible, so it goes without saying that he would not only reference the song, he would also claim to have stuffed (defeated) both opponents, then to have stuffed (stuffed) one into the other, to be gross.
related links:
http://www.catjams.com/mccg/corneliusremixlyrics.html
http://www.catjams.com/mccg/momusmail.html
http://aaron-carter.lyrics-songs.com/lyrics/7059/
Channing
Re: pm payment
Date: 2004-09-30 01:03 am (UTC)The deal was always that he should do Oskar for nothing. I had precisely zero budget. However, when we toured we split the profits 50/50. If we tour again in 2005 we'll do the same thing.
Re: pm payment
Date: 2004-09-30 10:38 am (UTC)If you tour the American midwest in 2005, I can hook you up with a venue and a couch for at least one college town, and probably some Taco Bell coupons. Hm?
Bullet train of thought
Date: 2004-09-27 10:52 am (UTC)The conceptual element of your work is one of your major strengths. Even though this is a different place ( i.e. "Desert Shore" ) that you are moving to, I still believe that an album is always better with an overriding theme or set of concerns, rather like the investigations put forward in one of your essays. The convention of disparate pop songs book-ended with singles is a tired one and I wish more people gave thought to the sum of the parts of an album (of course you don't release singles but there are always songs where your pop demon is at work). So bringing the spooky kabuki back into this work will add a new shape and some soft shading. Albums can be microworlds one enters as a mood enhancer, so making that soundscape more rich and populated ( like the fleeting glimpses of your bullet train of thought ) is going to contribute a lot to that world.
This song-stitching will help to tie all of the elements together. I loved what Fashion Flesh did with "Oskar", so I am sure it will be daring and add a whole new non-glitch component to the sound.
Richard G