Category: aesthetics

On Slowing Down

At Christmas time, I shared with my wife that I was thinking about getting a vinyl turntable and records. She had asked for gift ideas, and being pretty content with things and not feeling immediately drawn to any shiny new toy, I reflected that I’m starting to look for gift ideas to help me slow down and appreciate things more. With all the access to music through streaming services, listening to music sometimes feels disposable – something you put on in the background instead of silence. I thought with a turntable, it would force me to be more mindful of the activity. I had grown-up with a turntable in the house, but I never appreciated it until my adult life. There is something alluring about a single-purpose device that is a centre-point of a room. You put on a record and sit and listen to it. It doesn’t last very long before you have to flip sides, so you can’t just walk away to do something else. It’s a point of focus in the room; something people can gather around.

My wife, being the wonderful partner she is, surprised me with a turntable and my first album. While I tested it out at Christmas time, it was only this week that I finally set up the space in my office with the turntable. It was great to quietly sit and listen to music, doing nothing else. The pops and crackles of the needle, creating a sense of imperfection, gave the affair a unique analogue experience compared to the perfect replication of digital playback.

Of course, I noticed right away a difference of pitch in the playback, indicating that the turntable was playing slightly off from the 33-1/3 speed it was set to. With new toys come new maintenance responsibilities if we want to keep enjoying things. Still, despite the altered playback, I found the sensory experience a satisfying way of capping off my day. Always more to learn.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan

Beyond the European Default Follow-up (7/4 time)

Last week I shared some thoughts on appreciating musical languages developed beyond the European music theory standard, and how it can be inappropriate to judge musical modalities using the vocabulary and standards of your cultural (musical) heritage. This isn’t to say that viewing art through different lenses can’t bring about interesting discoveries of the artform, but rather using one standard to pass a value-judgement of the merits of an artform can be fraught with problems.

Thanks to YouTube’s algorithm, the recommended videos feed provided some great gems appreciating the original. Through a drum cover, I learned the original was in 7/4 time (whereas I thought it might have been alternating 2/4-2/8 measures; sounds like I missed a 1/8 beat).

And here was another drum cover with some artistic interpretations on the beat.

I was able to learn a bit more about Konnakkol, and how it builds increasing complexity to the music.

And here was a great beatbox cover that got a shoutout from the male performer in the original video, Somashekar Jois.

Finally, I found that Somashekar Jois has a YouTube channel where he teaches lessons in Konnakkol. I was a little nervous about posting this since one of his past videos was an artist’s endorsement for Prime Minister Modi of India, but I still felt it important to provide the link here to learn more about the artform. If possible, I’m trying to focus on the art, rather than the artist (or his whatever his politics happens to be).

Oh, and a recent video from Adam Neely again touched on the problems with passing judgement on musical performance when you don’t critically engage with the sources of your musical taste. At best, you are falsely applying a single standard as a universal judge of taste, and at worst you are using music theory to justify sexist bullying of people just trying to have fun creating.

Stay Awesome,

Ryan