Swedish TV Documentary: New Order 'The Story Of Blue Monday'
"I år är det 30 år sen New Order släppte Blue Monday. I Hitlåtens historia berättas det om hur New Order reste sig ur en personlig tragedi och med Blue Monday tog ett slutgiltigt kliv från rock till dansmusik. Låten är en modern klassiker men också en stilstudie i bandbråk, klantigheter och hur man kan slå försäljningsrekord och samtidigt gå med förlust
Många låtar vill kallas klassiker och banbrytande. Få förtjänar det på riktigt. Men New Orders Blue Monday klarar alla testen. Den lät som ljudet av framtiden när den släpptes. Och 30 år senare har den fortfarande inte passerat bäst-före-datum.
Blue Monday är också ljudet av ett band som hittar sig själva. Tre år tidigare spelade medlemmarna i New Order i Joy Division. Men när sångaren Ian Curtis tog livet av sig 1980 fick Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook och Stephen Morris starta om. Det skulle till ett publikupplopp för att få dom att hitta sin egen identitet.
Med Blue Monday byggde inte bara New Order helt nya instrument. De byggde en bro mellan rocken och dansmusiken. Men om New Order gjorde alla rätt i studion, gick desto mer fel utanför. Blue Monday har ett av musikhistoriens mest mytomspunna omslag. Bland annat för att det sägs ha varit så dyrt att tillverka att skivan gick med förlust.
Och sen många år tillbaka är New Order ett splittrat band efter ett infekterat bråk. Men i Hitlåtens historia pratar samtliga medlemmar om Blue Monday, en av musikvärldens piggaste 30-åringar.
Måndag 16 december 22.15 i SVT2 och SVT Play"
(SVT.se)
[2013 Sveriges Television (Swedish television) documentary about the seminal New Order single 'Blue Monday'.]
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Virtual Choir
American composer Eric Whitacre has made several pieces using Youtube to invite participants to sing his works. This TED talk demonstrates how he can also achieve this with a live audience and remote singers.
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Mik ParsonsSHARE
The Largest Vocabulary in Hip hop
"Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare's vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.
I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist's first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay–Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
35,000 words covers 3–5 studio albums and EPs. I included mixtapes if the artist was just short of the 35,000 words. Quite a few rappers don't have enough official material to be included (e.g., Biggie, Kendrick Lamar). As a benchmark, I included data points for Shakespeare and Herman Melville, using the same approach (35,000 words across several plays for Shakespeare, first 35,000 of Moby Dick).
I used a research methodology called token analysis to determine each artist's vocabulary. Each word is counted once, so pimps, pimp, pimping, and pimpin are four unique words. To avoid issues with apostrophes (e.g., pimpin' vs. pimpin), they're removed from the dataset. It still isn't perfect. Hip hop is full of slang that is hard to transcribe (e.g., shorty vs. shawty), compound words (e.g., king shit), featured vocalists, and repetitive choruses.
It's still directionally interesting. Of the 85 artists in the dataset, let's take a look at who is on top."
(Matt Daniels, May 2014)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Musical sense-making and the concept of affordance: an ecosemiotic and experiential approach
"Is music something 'out there', a kind of structure or artefact, that can be dealt with in a static way? Or does it rely on processes which call forth interactions with the sounds? Should we conceive of music users besides the music, and think about music as something which is perceived, conceptualised and enacted upon in order to be meaningful? Is music an ontological category, or a sounding phenomenon that calls forth epistemic interactions with the sounds? And can music be considered as a sonic environment and the music user as an organism that generates music knowledge as a tool for adaptation to the sonic world?
These questions revolve around the ecological concept of coping with the (sonic) world (Reybrouck, 2001a, 2005a, b). Musical sense–making, in this view, can be addressed in terms of interactions with the sounds, both at the level of perception, action and mental processing. It is a position that broadens the scope of music research, encompassing all kinds of music and sounds, and going beyond any kind of cultural and historical constraints. Music, in this broadened view, is to be defined as a collection of sound/time phenomena which have the potential of being structured, with the process of structuring being as important as the structure of the music. As such, it is possible to transcend a merely structural description of the music in favour of a process–like description of the ongoing process of maintaining epistemic contact with the music as a sounding environment. A central focus, in this approach, is on the role of musical experience and the way how listeners make sense of music as it sounds (see Blacking, 1955; Määttänen, 1993; Reybrouck, 2004; Westerlund, 2002)."
(Mark Reybrouck, 2012)
Reybrouck, M. (2012). "Musical sense–making and the concept of affordance: an ecosemiotic and experiential approach". Biosemiotics, 5 (3), 391–409.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Eduardo Paolozzi: Turkische Musik, 1974
"Eduardo Paolozzi's work often, as in the Türkische Musik series, may be printed in different color schemes or on different papers. All these elements combine to suggest that the image is often discovered in the act of creating it; the artist's role is integrally balanced between active calculation and chance. No longer confined to a single plan, the artist–printmaker and his work signify an exciting new order of print– making, one in which technological expertise becomes a useful vehicle for personal expression."
(Georgette Lee, 1986)
Precision of Image: Technology in Printed Art : 20 April – 7 September, 1986, The Joe and Emily Lowe Art Gallery at Syracuse University in Syracuse.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
