What's cool - Rebekka Karijord, "Use My Body While It's Still Young"

Comfortably numb? Not necessarily...

Is it time to turn away from what we take for granted and challenge ourselves? The path of least resistance promises a smoother trip, but without stepping off that path, we'd never know what we're missing. I think about this as my high school aged son is an exchange student overseas, immersing himself in another culture and other assumptions. It also rears its head when I talk to my friends about the bands that excite them the most. Music can be like comfort food; many of us just want to soothe away the irritants of the day with familiar soundtracks. It's nice to know that that band you loved in high school never changes...well, they never change if you don't listen their later work or clean your palate with some fresh sounds. I have my comfort foods, but if I were still only eating the food I loved at 15, I'd never have tasted curry, harissa, or wasabi. And even though I never became a big fan of wasabi, I'm a better person for having tried it.

Norwegian born singer/songwriter Rebekka Karijord has never blipped on my radar before this, but I just came across her song, "Use My Body While It's Still Young" and it made a strong impression. The piece is the first single off her 2012 album, We Become Ourselves, which is due to see its American release on February 5, 2015 and I'm looking forward to hearing more. She describes the song as a "momento mori", a cautionary reflection on mortality, and the lyrics take us to a place that most of us would rather not think too much about:

Use my body while it’s still strong.
Wrap yourself in all of this warmth,
This aching love
Come use it while it’s alive
This aching love
Come use it while it’s alive
We’ll all be gone in hundred years

Those philosophical lines are paired with a dreamy electronic pop groove. The music takes a song that could be brooding and nihilistic and turns it to celebration. Just as Karijord's words recommend, the song surrenders to the joy of dance and movement. Sweet and sour, she savors her gifts even as she feels the passage of time.



The video complements this with a powerful collaboration with Siv Ander, a Swedish dancer in her 70s. The visual contrast is sharp, with loving closeups of Ander's body and her choreography evolving from stiff and static to richer physicality.

This is the perfect finish to a day: discovering fine music from an artist I've never heard of, seeing a video that moves me, and having it help me think about the choices we make from day to day, while we can. Let them be conscious ones.

Commentary - The media IS the message

What does music mean to you? Is it just audio wallpaper? Something to fill up the space, but hardly worth noticing? Maybe it's a tool to keep time during your workout or to create a wall to keep the other sonic distractions at bay.

Maybe only a few songs really reach you -- those tunes from your youth that can take you back or the emotion trigger of a shared song -- and the rest don't matter.

It seems like I've always had music playing in my head. My personal soundtrack varies from songs I've listened to recently, old favorite tunes that resonate with my mood, or sometimes a new idea for a song I hope will come together. I've been comforted by Miles Davis solos, cocooned by Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun, and tortured by ear worms that won't go away (Mandy... curse you, Manilow).

Despite having a host of old favorites, I've never lost my interest in finding new music. There's a magic when some band comes out of nowhere and finds a home in my head. Whether it's the compelling noise lurking within Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the surprising blend of Dengue Fever's Khmer rock, or the Porcupine Tree's heavy intensity, I appreciate finding a new musical friend.

I started this blog to capture and share the albums I add to my collection and the shows I see, but I've stayed with it because it provides me with a window on a wide world of interesting music. Each new band I check out offers the chance that I'll find a spark of novelty. Some albums turn out to be old friends I hadn't met yet and sometimes a whole new world opens up.

I love music because it's a fundamental part of me. I write about music to share that deep connection. I get a payoff when I help a friend or reader discover a new band or rethink an old one.

So, what does music mean to you?

Essay: Musical feng shui

Whether you believe in feng shui or not, it's a useful concept to apply a set of rules to bring things into balance. Things like the balance of parts within a song, the flow of songs in a setlist or album, or even the emergent collective arising from the members of a band -- all of these can fit together or fall apart. Like feng shui may be used to improve an environment, I believe there are tools that can be applied to making better music.

Feng shui relies on a few basic ideas such as energy, polarity, and direction. In the musical setting, energy can be anything from an attitude (of a song or player) to tempo or dynamics. Polarity provides context for that energy: loud or soft? structured or chaotic? passive or aggressive? Finally, direction adds an element of relativity -- going from here to there -- that creates flow.

Just as feng shui builds rules upon these foundation concepts, we can invent rules for our musical world. One of the core rules I've internalized is cooperation and contrast. I came to understand this with my reggae band, Cool Runnings. There were seven of us playing and we each needed to create our place in the song.

Cooperation comes first: what can I play that fits together with another part to support it? This could be matching a rhythm or echoing a melodic line. By supporting another musical element, it validates my part. But cooperation is not enough. Without contrast, my duplication is pointless because it can't be heard. I need to add an element of contrast that justifies my part and helps create complexity. So, if I echo a melodic line, I can expand upon it. At a higher level, if everything else in the song is pure harmony or strongly structured, it might be appropriate to contrast that with controlled discord or a little chaos.

Another rule is to work for dynamic balance. A situation that shifts but holds together is more interesting for the players and for the audience. A static balance can be challenging to achieve, but ultimately it's less interesting because it can't offer the novelty that arises from disparate parts coming together without settling into predictable ruts.

This rule pushes me into band and jam situations, because it's harder to create a dynamic balance alone. Playing with other musicians not only forces me outside my comfort zone to become a better player, it also creates another musical context to display my playing in a new light.

The power of dynamic balance can be seen when comparing solo artists with the bands they arose from. A single solo album may be great, but the lone player doesn't often hit the heights they reached in their band. The Beatles' post-breakup work serves as a great example. A richly artistic solo career is often dependent on the musician partnering with the right people to maintain that dynamic balance. So, David Bowie has collaborated with Mick Ronson and Brian Eno. Likewise, Peter Gabriel has worked with a variety of strong producers like Bob Ezrin, Robert Fripp, and Daniel Lanois, as well as iconic musicians like Tony Levin.

Other rules I've used include dedication to the groove, which is about following flow rather than driving it, and swapping figure and ground as a technique for emphasizing elements with low dynamics. But like feng shui, the challenge isn't learning the rules, it's figuring out how to apply them.

Character study - Diego Stocco

Experimental music? The term is all too easily applied to "difficult listening" music or music that merely seems strange. Musician and sound designer Diego Stocco is literally creating experimental music, almost adhering to the scientific method. He looks at the world around himself and sees opportunities for interesting sound. He constructs instruments and experiments to see what kind of sounds he can capture. Then he takes those sounds to build musical statements that vary from delicate to thunderous.

It was chance that I came across Stocco's Bassoforte video. This was an instrument that he assembled using a castoff piano keyboard action, a bass guitar neck and miscellaneous other components.

Diego Stocco - Bassoforte from Diego Stocco on Vimeo.

Stocco plays the bassoforte with the keyboard, bowing the strings, and percussively striking the various components. He's multi-tracked these elements into a lumbering dinosaur of a tune. The polyrhythms lurch forward and the jangle and whine build a distant desert feel. Musically, there are elements of Robert Fripp, Pink Floyd, and Sonic Youth. The driving bass sounds somewhat Stick like.

This video was a gateway for me. Creating a Franken-instrument was noteworthy, but I was intrigued by a series of "Music from" videos. Music From a Bonsai? This was an experiment he came up with after making Music From a Tree. It's unsurprising that the music is percussive, but there's a richness of sonic components that come from bowing and plucking. When Stocco started playing the bonsai leaf, I had to laugh and nod in admiration. In his write up, he mentioned his technique of finding the lowest pitch note to select the key for the piece.

In addition to his curious approach to finding musical sounds and using them, Diego Stocco applies this to his work. He designs musical sounds for film, TV, and video games. It's deeply satisfying to see his "Experibass" and then find out that he used it to contribute to the score of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes.

Stocco seems to tap into the musical potentiality of the world around him. More importantly, he's able to actualize this into something useful and interesting. In that spirit, I'll think back to an earlier batch of ginger cherry beer I homebrewed years ago that was eventually brewed commercially by Pikes Peak Brewing. Salud!