Björk knows how to balance the coldness of electronic production with hotly unpredictable vocals and instrument textures. Her approach is eccentric and her sound gets on some people’s nerves. It took me a couple years to be convinced by her. I’m glad I hung in there, because she’s been one of my best teachers in the art of making music with computers.
Now that I have an office job, I’m spending a lot of time under headphones while I correct people’s grammar. It’s a good opportunity to explore the outer reaches of my music tastes. The office has some networked Itunes libraries heavy on the Pitchfork 500, and I have whatever I’m bringing from home. I’ve also been making my first serious adventure with internet radio. I arbitrarily picked Pandora because they have a free iphone app. The web version is nothing to write home about design-wise, but the iphone version is fun, and over wi-fi there are none of the buffering delays that have kept me from enjoying internet radio in the past.
The drum intro from Led Zeppelin’s “When The Levee Breaks” is, as far as I’m concerned, the very embodiment of The Awesome Majesty Of Rock.
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John Bonham’s staggeringly heavy drum performance was recorded by engineer Andy Johns in Headley Grange, a Victorian-era poorhouse in England. Bonham played a brand new drum kit at the bottom of a stairwell, recorded by microphones placed three stories above. This arrangement made for a big and powerful, yet oddly diffuse and distant sound. To make it even more humungous, the band slowed the tape down a little, lowering the pitch and giving the track a thick, sludgy quality. Zeppelin only ever played “When The Levee Breaks” live a couple of times. On the recording, the tempo is seventy beats per minute, and it’s hard to maintain a heavy groove when you’re playing that slow. Also, it’s impossible to replicate the pitch-shifted timbre acoustically. It’s almost as if “Levee” was meant to live in the electronic realm. (more…)