My favorite Missy Elliot song out of many is “Work It.” Unfortunately, YouTube only has the clean version; it’s well worth seeking out the explicit version, which is unspeakably filthy but flows better and is much funnier.

This song came out eight years ago and it still feels like it fell out of the future. During the chorus, the part that sounds like gibberish is actually the lyric “I put my thang down, flip it, and reverse it” played backwards. There are more backwards lyrics in one of the verses — the line “Listen up close while I take you backwards” is followed by the reversed line “Watch the way Missy like to take it backwards.” There’s nothing new about backwards masking, but you don’t usually hear it as the hook of a pop-oriented dance track. Hip!

“Work It” uses three great samples. The beginning is from “Request Line” by Rock Master Scott & the Dynamic Three. If you care about eighties fashion and dance at all, you must not miss this video.

The cowbell rhythm at the end is from Bob James’ recording of Paul Simon’s “Take Me To The Mardi Gras” as famously sampled in “Peter Piper” by Run-DMC.

Here’s a mashup of Bob James, Paul Simon, Run-DMC and Missy:

Peter Piper Mardi Gras Megamix by ethanhein

There’s also a synth percussion loop that runs throughout “Work It” sampled from the intro to “Heart Of Glass” by Blondie. Sorry, no embedding on this one.

This has nothing to do with the song, but it’s so awesome I can’t not share it: Missy’s turntable ring.

Like my other favorite hip-hop artists, Missy understands that the record player is the defining musical instrument of our time (along with its cousins the tape recorder, digital sampler and Pro Tools workstation.) There’s nothing intrinsically cold or alienating about electronic music production technology, if it’s in the right hands. Herbie Hancock once compared the synthesizer to an axe, that could be used to build a house or murder someone. Missy uses her axe to build awesome houses.

From left to right, you’re seeing an Mbox, the audio interface that goes with Pro Tools. We plug the vocal mic into it so that the computer can perform its magic, like Auto-tune and compression. Next is a little mixer sitting on top of a headphone amp. Then there’s Babsy’s laptop running one of our Pro Tools files, showing some of the backing vocals she’ll be singing over. On the right is a Line 6 Pod, a guitar effects unit and amp modeler. It’s a lot easier to carry to gigs than a real amp. Using a fake amp modeler isn’t very rock and roll but it fits perfectly with the spirit of electronica. For the show we’re going to use two computers, Barbara’s to run Pro Tools, and mine for Reason synths and playback of ordinary audio files.

Using canned tracks causes me some residual philosophical angst. It lacks the risk-taking that jazz-trained cats like me associate with a good live performance. But sonically, accompanying ourselves with stuff we prerecorded and sequenced is a no-brainer. We want the tracks to sound a certain way. Doing our synth and sample-based sounds completely live would be either difficult or impossible. So our show is taking on the aspect of a highly skilled karaoke experience. This runs directly against the spirit of rock, jazz, country and most of the other music I’m trained in. But it fits in well with the music I’ve become most interested in lately, hip-hop, contemporary R&B and electronica. All of these styles use recordings in live performance heavily.

I’ve had a few different bands with Barbara at this point. We started out doing live techno remixes of pop and rock songs, mostly using preprogrammed beats. Then we entered our free improv period, combining a groovebox and live instrumentation to do a more electronic version of seventies Miles Davis. Now we’re back to pop, using very tightly structured songs with meticulous arrangements. We still use loose improvisation as a way to write during the recording process, but the finished product gets heavily edited, and most of the improv winds up on the metaphorical cutting room floor. I love improvising without a net in front of an audience, but the supply and demand equation for that kind of music isn’t too favorable. That’s as it should be. Unstructured jamming is more fun for the performers than the listeners, and our focus now is on making sure the audience has a good time. If you’re in NYC this Saturday night, come on down! We promise it’ll be fun on wheels.

I grew up in the eighties. Cassette recorders were just starting to be ordinary household gear. My sister and I made a bunch of random tapes as kids, not knowing what we were doing or why, just that it was fun. We also taped songs we liked off the radio. We waited until the song we wanted came on, and then held up the tape recorder to the radio speaker. Go ahead and laugh, millenials, but this was such a widespread practice among my generation that there’s a whole Facebook group devoted to it.

Recording to a single-track tape from a single mic was the only way to record music until 1955. In the single-track era, music was recorded more or less the same way it was performed for an audience. There was a single mic in the middle of the room, and everybody played into it simultaneously. The only “mixing” was done by placing quieter instruments closer to the mic and louder ones further away. Recording as an art form unto itself came into being with the invention of multitrack tape, which made it possible to record different sounds non-simultaneously.

Multitrack is an enormously big deal for recorded music. It enables you to capture ideal performances more easily, since you record each voice or instrument in isolation from the others. An error on one track can be fixed while leaving the others intact. Multitrack also opened the door for mixing, since you can manipulate the volume and tone of each sound independently of the others. This might not seem like such a big deal, but that’s because we’re all so used to spectacularly high-tech sculpting of sound. When I listen to old jazz records, the bass is a vague muffled presence buried in the murk of the low end. It took until the sixties for recording engineers to really figure out how to make the bass jump out of the speakers; now we take for granted that it’ll be as crisp and defined as any other sound.

Even with all the flexibility it offers, tape recording is still relatively unforgiving. I recorded a few songs on tape with my first band in college. Correcting mistakes was tedious and took considerable skill and timing on the engineer’s part.

Since 1997 or so, everything I’ve recorded has been on the computer. There are some pros and cons. The major con is sound quality. Tape is analog. The waveforms it captures are infinitely smooth and continuous. By converting the continuous electrical signal from the microphones or instruments into digital files, you necessarily sacrifice some signal quality.

So that’s the bad news. For me, and for most recording musicians at this point, the good news enormously outweighs the bad news. Digital recording is cheap and constantly getting cheaper. Good quality audio tape is expensive; hard drive space costs next to nothing. A computer costs a heck of a lot less than a decent tape recording console and you can use it for other purposes. But cost is only the tip of the iceberg. The really big deal with the computer is that it visualizes music, turning it into screen objects that you can drag, drop and otherwise manipulate the same way you’d manipulate words in a word processing document. For a visual thinker like me, this is a transformative and revelatory change. It’s radically easier to do complex edits on the computer screen than keeping track of a bunch of pieces of identical-looking tape.

The other big deal about digital audio is perfect copying fidelity and endless editing. Every time you copy a tape, the sound quality degrades a little. Also, as tape ages, it chemically degrades. Digital audio files are highly robust. They’re just long lists of numbers, so you can copy them flawlessly and endlessly across any data storage medium. You can edit digital audio non-destructively, so you can try out ideas to your heart’s content without ever harming or losing your original tracks. Digital audio is also nice and portable. You can lay down basic tracks in your basement, overdub more sounds in someone else’s bedroom and then mix and master in a million dollar studio. And while there’s no undo with tape overdubs, you can effectively undo anything you do on the computer.

Music is intellectually a lot easier than it looks. The big challenge for me, and for most would-be musicians I encounter, is anxiety. We have a crippling fear of being judged, and when we’re doing a recording, the panel of potential judges is enormous. Digital recording has done a lot to reduce my anxiety in front of the microphone. Knowing that nothing is carved in marble takes a lot of the pressure off. I’m much likelier to lay down a perfect take or a cool new idea if I’m feeling relaxed, and recording in my apartment on a computer is as relaxing as it gets.

I’ve been recording an acoustic singer-songwriter’s album for the past year. Aside from the vocals and guitar, everything on the album is fake: the bass, the drums, the percussion and keyboards. The vocals and guitar are processed using Auto-tune, digital EQ and reverb and compression, and various other tricks. The “performances” are stitched together from many different takes, with sections repeated and individual notes corrected for timing and volume and decay. None of these techniques are unusual in the age of computer recording. Some people feel that the computer is harming musicianship by making it so easy to sculpt a flawless performance. My feeling is that the computer just shifts the locus of creative work from the original performance to the editing process.

After doing enough of my own projects using the full digital toolkit, I started questioning the wisdom of recording instrumental performances at all, when it’s so much easier to use sampling and synthesis. The turning point came while working with a soul/R&B band called Love Child. The singer and I were writing and arranging songs using samples, drum machines and all the other hip-hop tools. We gave these tracks to the band to teach them the parts. I made charts too, but the tracks were better for conveying the vibe and nuance we were after. We had a bunch of ace musicians in the band, but they never sounded as good as our sample-based tracks. We’d meticulously sequence a bassline, and then the bassist wouldn’t play it exactly. He’d do variations and little improvs, the usual embellishments that musicians add almost unconsciously. The problem wasn’t his ideas, they were all good. The problem was that by straying away from the extremely sparse parts we were writing, he was deflating the tension, turning our hip-hop feel into a generic-sounding funk.

So it went with all the musicians. Also, it was a logistical nightmare getting everyone together, and it cost a fortune. Eventually we asked ourselves, why are we doing this? The songs sound better on the laptop, why don’t we just commit ourselves to life in electronic world? So we started doing gigs with just the laptop and singers, and it sounded terrific. I feel bad for contributing to the rapid drying up of gigs all musicians are facing in the computer era. But meanwhile, we were going for a sound, and the human beings weren’t giving it to us.

Samples and loops give you a lot of freedom. They also carry their own constraints. When you use, say, two bars of a Miles Davis tune in a particular scale with particular chords to a particular beat played on particular instruments, that forces you to fit the rest of your musical elements to fit. This constraint is a stupendously valuable songwriting tool. Repeating the loop identically is easy and varying it is hard. So by default, sample-based music uses a lot of repetition, and you have to justify each variation because it takes so much more effort than another copy and paste. You’d think this would be true with live musicians too, but it’s not. Getting a band to play a loop without variation is just about impossible. I’ve tried many times, everyone gets bored or feels the need to express themselves. We in the western musical tradition undervalue repetition, and having the computer encourage it has improved my writing and arranging enormously.

Sampling is such a useful framework for structuring musical ideas, now I take a sampling approach to live recordings of instruments whenever I can. If I’m doing a rock track with Barbara Singer, we’ll record a take of her flailing freely away at the guitar over a beat, and then find the best bar or two and loop them. If we need a variation or another section, we’ll use the second-best bar or two, and maybe the third. The less material we use, the better it sounds.

In the future I would wish for a more porous barrier between the recording artist and the listener. It’s been a bottomless source of pleasure for me to remix and mash up other people’s recordings. With all due respect to my fellow musicians, I know what I like better than they do. For the vast majority of recordings I have, I’d rather hear the key musical ideas repeated identically in groups of four or eight over hip-hop beats. If recording artists don’t want to oblige me by structuring stuff that way, I can just edit their music to suit myself. It would be a lot easier to do this if I had access to the individual tracks. A few, very few, artists release tracks with the stems separated out. I wish for the day when it’s standard practice.

Update: for hilarious insight into the process of making a top ten hit in 1988, don’t miss the KLF’s Manual.

Part one:

Part two:

Part three:

Part four:

Part five:

Part six:

Steve Albini says that sampling is cheap and easy. He’s right about that. Anyone with a computer and a few pieces of inexpensive software can do it. Mr Albini also thinks people should be “embarrassed by sampling, like a bad dance move.” It’s a funny analogy, because while I like the albums he’s produced for the most part, they aren’t dance friendly. Pick any song that you’ve danced socially to in the past thirty years and the odds are high that it was produced electronically.

Anyway, in response to the charge that sampling is cheap and easy, why is that a bad thing? George Clinton points out that rock and roll was originally all about cheap and easy: three chords, repetitive beats and structures, singable choruses. Now, rock music is expensive and difficult, and thanks to people like Radiohead, every bit as technically inaccessible as jazz or classical. This is why rock has mostly become every bit as lame as jazz or classical. Making an art form expensive and inaccessible makes it elitist and conservative. The big artistic risks are mostly being taken by the electronic musicians, not the guitar tribe.

The documentary makes the intriguing analogy between DJs and photographers. DJs are to traditional instrumentalists as photographers are to painters. You can’t make blanket statements about the validity of the entire medium; you need to go on a case-by-case basis. DJs and photographers have a lower barrier to entry than cellists or painters but the path to mastery is every bit as long.

We’ve become accustomed to lavish production values in our recorded music, and that comes at a steep price tag if you want live instruments and analog tape. The expensiveness of lavish, dense live recordings forces conservative choices. The effortlessness of sampling leads to more risk taking, more experimentation, more innovation. Also more amateurish nonsense, but that’s the nature of the beast. A low penalty for failure is a necessary precondition for success.

Even if money is no object, there are still some strong artistic arguments in favor of sample-based music. The loop is different from a human playing a phrase over and over. I used to play in an R&B group. The singer and I wrote the songs with samples and loops and then taught them to the band. We had a Miles Davis sample that the trumpet player was supposed to use for his part. He played it pretty accurately, but never with the exact phrasing, tape compression and ambiance of the original loop, and it never quite sounded as good. It was cool that he could riff and improvise, but it gave us a looser, jazzier sound than we were going for. The identical repetition effects you to hypnotic effect. Check out the squealing trumpet sample under Public Enemy’s “Don’t Believe The Hype” – even James Brown couldn’t have that disciplined a horn player, not with all that insane noise swirling around. Humans get bored and distracted, they have opinions. Computers don’t. What if James Brown and band had been necessary to appear in person in order to create “Fight The Power”, and they had refused? What a loss.

The entertainment lawyer in the movie equates my sampling your song to me coming into your house, helping myself to the food in your fridge. Sampling might recontextualize old recordings in ways their creators find offensive, but very often sampled works add something of benefit to old recordings’ cultural standing. I’m thinking of all those classic seventies funk and disco songs with incredible beats but outdated lyrics and arrangements. George Clinton is outspokenly grateful to hip-hop producers for putting him back on the map, culturally and then commercially.

Meanwhile, the law is a serious obstacle. Clearing all samples in advance is crushing to the creative process, which depends on immediacy and spontaneity. It’s a lot cheaper and easier to get a license to perform or record a full cover of a song than it is to get the rights to a three second sample. Some copyright holders are laid back or indifferent, but some charge extortionate license fees. Erick Sermon had to pay Marvin Gaye’s estate a hundred thousand dollars for a sample clearance. Unless you’re a major pop star with serious backing, this is prohibitive, and we’re back to the conservatism imposed by high costs that plagues instrumental music.

Clyde Stubblefield’s reaction on first hearing how widely he was sampled: “Cool!” But he’s bitter about not getting credited. He’s not as upset about not getting royalties, maybe because he wasn’t getting those before sampling either – James Brown owns all the copyrights to “The Funky Drummer” and “Cold Sweat” and so on. Public Enemy explains they have to be secretive about their sources to not get sued. A healthier sampling culture would make it easy to use samples and encourage attribution and reasonable payments.

Sampling artists like to use the phrase “fair game” – I’ve used it myself to describe the contents of my iTunes library, and some of the musicians in Copyright Criminals use it too. What’s fair game? Depends. The Beatles are notoriously litigious copyright holders, but they themselves use unauthorized samples in “Revolution 9″, “I Am The Walrus” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.” I’m hopeful that as sampling moves from the fringe into the mainstream, the law will eventually catch up and the absurdities will iron themselves out.

Update: this post and another of mine are quoted in a Brands Plus Music post about the impact computers are having on music making. It’s a good one, thought-provoking, worth a read.

Revival Revival vs Janet Jackson

mp3 download, ipod format download

Right-click or option click the links to save the track to your computer.

There are as many different ways of writing songs as there are songwriters. Barbara Singer and I have arrived at a good one, so I figured I’d share it with you in the hopes you find it inspirational.

Like all of our tracks, “Boys And Dance Floors” began life as a string of looped samples in Reason. Here’s the sequencer window.

Each brick is eight bars of four-four time. The top two tracks are different samples of “What Have You Done For Me Lately” by Janet Jackson, just synth bass and drum machine. Both loops are the same basic groove, but with subtle differences: one has a backwards cymbal crash building up to the end and the other has a quiet crash at the beginning. The third track down is a sample of Barbara singing “Fire, fire” in an intense voice that we have filter sweeping in at the beginning and end of the song.

Peach is for the intros and outtro. Light blue is verses. Green is choruses, with the darker green as the prechorus and the lighter green as the chorus proper. Orange is for instrumental breaks and purple is the bridge. If we ever try to release this thing commercially, we’re either going to have to license the samples or program something else. Hope Janet’s people are willing to make a deal.

We built the song as a complete instrumental before adding any vocals. Barbara improvised several tracks of guitar over the beat, and then we went through, found the best licks, and copied and pasted them into phrases. The bassline is just a guitar part pitch-shifted down an octave.

We shuffled the sections around and layered them into verses, choruses and a bridge. Then we bounced the instrumental and spent a few weeks living with it. Barbara prefers driving around and listening to work in progress. I like having it on my ipod while going about my daily life, having it come up in shuffle, hearing it juxtaposed against our other tracks and whatever else is in the playlists.

Barbara “wrote” the vocal melody by recording some scat-singing and improvised nonsense syllables. She also did some recordings singing and playing live guitar with a drummer. We ended up using the cymbals from one of those recordings in our final track. Finally, Barbara sat down with all of the rough recordings and a legal pad and spent an hour sweating out lyrics while I hung out and read Facebook.

In cutting the final vocals it became apparent that the chorus melody worked better as the harmony part to a different, lower melody, so it took us a few passes to build that out. We ended up with a ton of overdubs on that part, nearly all of which stayed in for a nice thick sound. About half the vocal tracks have Auto-tune on the T-Pain setting, half are dry, and there’s one through guitar distortion for texture.

The songwriting process is a lot like cooking. Everyone has a preferred method. There nevertheless is a core set of best practices, and while you’re free to invent your own approach, some of the rules are inflexible. People have certain metabolic and sensual needs from food, and we have certain emotional needs for music. People like repetition and symmetry, but they like the patterns to break a little bit unpredictably. It’s a delicate balance. You want your song to be orderly and structured enough to be memorable, but it should be chaotic and open-ended enough to make each subsequent pass through it a lively experience.

You can assemble the components of your songs together in whatever order suits you. I’ve tried assembling the pieces in many different orders, and this is the one that produces the most consistent results for me:

1) The beat.

I prefer a literal beat, a sample like the Funky Drummer or a drum machine loop. The right hand part of guitar playing is good for figuring out beats. You can just tap your foot or hear beats in your head. But for the music I like, the beat has to be strong and definite, the foundation of everything else.

2) The key center.

Something I learned from hip-hop producers is that drum loops are usually strongly pitched. A lot of the time, the pitch of the kick drum establishes your key for you. Even if you end up using a different key, try tuning your drums so at least they’re on the fifth or somewhere similarly early in the overtone series.

The key might be as simple as a drone or as complex as the rapidly shifting harmonic progressions of classical or jazz. I myself prefer drones because I find key changes box me in, they inhibit improvisation and audience participation.

3) Some loops.

In my current practice I like to have literal loops, samples or copied and pasted pieces of recorded improvisation. When I write with an instrument, on paper or in my head, I’m still hunting for good loops, it’s just a different storage method. If there’s going to be a bassline, what are the bass loops? If there are going to be keyboards or guitar, what are the loops going to be there? Are there going to be repeated licks and countermelodies, chord progressions, percussion parts? Where do the loops stop and start?

4) A line.

The melody, or a chant, ideally vocal, or played on an instrument with vocal qualities. The focal point for the casual listener. In my jazz life I used to start with melodies and build around them, but now I find that too much like picking furniture and then trying to build a house around it.

5) Lyrics.

Outside of hip-hop, Cole Porter and the sixties folkies, I can take or leave lyrics. Humming, wordless vocalizing and scat singing work fine for me most of the time. There are plenty of songs I like where I can’t understand the lyrics at all. If there are going to be words, they have to make musical sense before semantic sense. Some of the best song lyrics are meaningless.

Lyrics do have the virtue of making a sung melody easier to remember. If you want to learn a bebop solo, see if there’s a version by Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, it’ll be a lot easier. Like, I learned most of the solos in Freddie Freeloader thanks to Jon Hendricks’ version. Flatten out the melodies and update the slang and you have rapping.

As I argue at length in this post, I don’t believe much in originality in music. It’s easy to be unique, you always sound like you. But it’s hard to generate ideas that have never been used before. In my opinion, the quest for novelty is a waste of energy. It distracts from the hunt for what’s hot, right now. Even this “original” song by me and Barbara is composited together from pieces of existing music in our respective heads. It’s not just the Janet Jackson beat. The guitar parts are directly inspired by PJ Harvey and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Some of the vocal parts come from the Supremes, some from Britney Spears. Some of the production techniques come from Justin Timberlake, some from Daft Punk. It’s all a big collage.

But that’s us. How do you guys like to write?

Update: the KLF give a detailed and hilarious accounting of the writing of their number one hit from 1988, “Doctorin’ The Tardis.” They use mostly the same process I do.

Nasty by ethanhein

Janet has been on my mind a lot the past few months, what with Michael, and I was driven to go listen to Control again.

Control must have been quite a shock for Ms Jackson’s fans when it dropped in 1986. I wasn’t aware of her teenage bubblegum pop stuff as a kid, though I suppose I must have seen her on Diff’rent Strokes. And then, all of a sudden, “Nasty.” It scared the heck out of me in the sixth grade. But the music was irresistible. I didn’t know why I liked it then, but now I can articulate: bebop phrasing over industrial drum machines and synths, that’s the sound of all the music I like as an adult.

Control was produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis. I always thought that their stuff sounded a lot like Prince, so I wasn’t surprised to read on wikipedia that they were part of Morris Day And The Time.

The other song we’re working on remixing is “What Have You Done For Me Lately.” The chorus has that ear-grabbing E flat dimished scale lick in the big synth, but this song’s most lasting effect on musicians was due its bassline, played on a Yamaha TX81Z, which blends overtones into a distinctively harsh sound. The module in the photo just generates electrical signals; you need an external keyboard or sequencer to control it and speakers to hear it.

The Lately bass sound is so popular that now every synth comes with a preset called LatelyBass. I’ll bet you there’s some LatelyBass being played on some dance floor in your town on any given night.

The drums on Control are programmed on a good old Roland TR-808, the drum machine beloved by Kanye West and Lil Wayne.

Some of this music from the eighties, man. I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do.

Here’s my favorite track from a much later Janet album, The Velvet Rope, released during the peak of my Grateful Dead obsession so I totally slept on it at the time.

Some notes about the Nasty remix/mashup:

The three singers, in order of entrance, are Candida Haynes, Babsy Singer and Nicole Bishop. I use slightly different sounds on them. Candida’s vocal is doubled, with one copy dry and the other Auto-tuned to the chromatic scale. There’s quarter-note delay on both copies. The song she’s quoting is “Certainly” by Erykah Badu. Babsy’s sound is the one that’s emerged as our standard Revival Revival patch: three copies of the vocal, one dry, one Auto-tuned to the key of the song and one Auto-tuned to the tonic for extra wide warbles and posthumanness. The tonic track also has Amplitube on it for dirt. (When Babsy first enters, the posthuman track is soloed.) Nicole’s sound is the simplest, the same as Candida’s minus the delay. Everything else on the track is sampled from the Janet Jackson original, with some slicing and dicing in Recycle. Nasty!

See also a post about Janet and Michael’s mutual influence.

Iceland

Björk famously is from Iceland. She did for her homeland what the Beatles did for Liverpool — she put her country on the hipster map forever. Anna and I were lucky enough to get to go, and we’re looking forward to hopefully going back. It’s an easy place to be an American tourist. Almost everyone speaks English with a BBC inflection, except one guy who did a flawless California surfer dude. The accent is a little otherworldly — all the r’s are rolled, even the ones in the middle of words.

Icelandic shares a common ancestor with English in the not very distant past. Two languages are alike in a few weirdly specific ways. Icelandic and English are unusual for both using the th sound. Icelandic has two different letters of the alphabet devoted to it: one voiced, as in that, the other unvoiced, as in thing. Tolkien’s Elvish is partially based on Icelandic, thus mithrandir and mithril and way Sir Ian McKellan rolled the r’s in Sauron and Mordor. Mirkwood comes from mirk, the Icelandic word for forest. So outside Reykjavik is Thorsmirk, Thor’s Forest. I was in nerd heaven with the road signs.

They wanted to shoot Lord Of The Rings in Iceland but it was going to be too expensive. It would be a perfect spot to shoot science fiction if money were no object. Iceland has volcanos and glaciers and black cliffs looming over black sand beaches with puffins circling over them. There are places where superheated steam just shoots out of the ground with jet engine force. There are earthquakes and landslides and occasional catastrophic eruptions. We went by a restaurant that bakes bread by burying it three feet underground and leaving it there for a few hours. The middle of the country is like Yellowstone if it was on the moon.

Björk and sampling

Björk has access to the same popular culture as any European with a music background, but she’s viewing it through this peculiar cultural lens. Nobody interprets the computer music they play in clubs and at raves quite like Björk does. She comes from classical training, so she mostly writes on the keyboard. But she uses samples too, or at least her producers and collaborators do. They choose their samples well. Here’s one of her first big hits, “Human Behavior,” produced by Nellee Hooper.

Here’s a mashup I did of the Quincy Jones/Ray Brown tune, every version of “Human Behaviour” I have, and a hip-hop track by Heiroglyphics:

Human Behaviour Megamix by ethanhein

Samplers and remixers love Björk. Here’s my favorite usage of a Björk sample, in the remix of “Hit ‘Em Wit Da Hee” by Missy Elliot and Timbaland. At the end it uses the cello part from “Jóga.”

Here’s a diagram of all of Björk’s samples and quotations. Click to see it bigger.

Björk and remixing

Almost every Björk tune is a remix of a remix right out of the box. The tracks she releases are wildly different from what she works out on the keyboard or on paper. She and her producers use Pro Tools to merge composition, notation, performance and recording together, the way Brian Eno does with tape recorders.

Once everything is all gridded out in the audio editor, it’s easy to do alternate mixes and versions. You can toss chunks of audio in and out of the grid effortlessly, so you can do radical remixing just by muting and unmuting a few tracks. Björk has released quite a lot of these alternative versions officially. Every single she puts out is backed by three or four remixes. She’s put out entire albums and compilations of them, like Telegram, which is mostly remixes of the tracks on Post.

Björk naturally takes a relaxed attitude toward unauthorized remixes, and has managed to convince her label and management to be cool about them too. As a result, the internet is loaded with Björk fan music. There are web sites like bjorkremixes.com and the bjork remix web archive. “Army Of Me” in particular seems to inspire a lot of new interpretations.

Maybe this is due to its hybrid nature, since the song itself includes drums from “When The Levee Breaks” by Led Zeppelin and “Get Thy Bearings” by Donovan. Björk releaseda charity album comprised entirely of “Army Of Me” remixes and covers. The standout is the unhinged Morris dancing version by Dr Syntax ‘n’ CB Turbo vs Rivethead. There’s also a bluegrass version, a metal version and a lot of terrifying experimental techno.

Björk’s singing and songwriting

And how could we not talk about her voice? Björk’s unearthly, chameleon-like sound gives her music some of the same pleasures as Michael Jackson’s, who she quotes explicitly in “I Go Humble.” The first paragraph of this quote of Thomas Bartlett’s Salon article could just as easily refer to MJ.

‘Childlike’, ‘feral’, ‘alien’: All three words have been used repeatedly in describing her pipes, and their apparent incompatibility alone gives some sense of just how unusual the sound is. Billie Holiday’s voice famously combined childishness with world-weary wisdom. Björk has pushed the paradox a little further, combining childishness with ferocity and unbridled sexuality.

She is the only major songwriter in recent memory for whom the apparently inescapable influence of Bob Dylan is irrelevant. Her lyrics stand out for a simple reason: They don’t rhyme. Other songwriters have experimented with non-rhyming lyrics, of course, notably Lou Reed and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, but it remains an unusual technique.

David Byrne is another great user of nonrhyming lyrics. Björk’s vocal melodies and lyrics remind me of ee cummings, whose peoms she has set to music a couple of times.

Her phrases are anything but regular; rather than a series of four-bar phrases, she might have one of three followed by two of five, finished with one of four.

Even more singular, her melodic phrases often display little or no connection to the beats beneath them. The melodies themselves are often developed through motifs, with short phrases repeated and elaborated, in a manner more similar to Brahms than to other popular songwriters. Björk’s ten years of conservatory training show here — the influence of the composers she despised is clearly in evidence. Listen to the opening of “Hidden Place” from Vespertine: The verse melody is a four-note motif, resolved differently each time. It repeats more frequently as it becomes more agitated, never matching up comfortably with the beat beneath it. Finally, it snowballs into the chorus.

Because of these irregular melodic phrases and unrhymed lyrics, it always takes a moment to adjust to Björk’s songs. They can sound clumsy at first, strangely forced, unfocused or simply incomprehensible. The end result, though, is that her music has a freshness, an air of the unexpected, that is unusual. In most pop songs, an attentive listener can pick up the basic structure almost immediately. Consciously or not, he or she anticipates the rhymes, the call and response of the phrases. Björk’s songs keep even the most exacting listeners a little off balance. There are no rhymes to guess at, no way of predicting what will come next. They force you to listen intensely.

As a songwriter, Björk is less of a pop musician and more like an avant-gardist with enough personal charisma to have attracted a pop-scale audience. She’s the only contemporary songwriter I can think of who will set a whole tune in diminished scale, as in “An Echo, A Stain.” She uses melodic minor and lydian on “Possibly Maybe” and lydian dominant on “Pluto.” Even when she writes in plain-vanilla major scale, her angular phrasing can make it sound awkward and dissonant, as on “Anchor Song.”

Björk and jazz

The harmonic and rhythmic complexity of her music makes Björk irresistible to jazz musicians. What’s a jazz arrangement but an analog remix? Every jazz group I’ve ever been in has done her tunes. Travis Sullivan’s Björkestra is a seventeen-piece big band based in NYC that plays nothing but tunes by or associated with her. Their arrangements are a little too fuzak for me, but it’s such a cool idea. I think NYC could do with some more all-Björk jazz bands. This city at one point had two different rock bands who only played songs about hockey. Surely we can support more Björkestras. Björk herself did a jazz album called Gling-Glö with an Icelandic trio, which was a good idea but sadly is nothing too special in its execution. I’d like to hear her do more jazz, but maybe not with Icelandic musicians, who, and I say this with all due respect, play extremely white.

Björk’s sonic palette

Sonically, Björk’s palate is as diverse as anyone who’s ever recorded. She seems to be one of the only high-profile white musicians who understands that rock and roll is over. There’s almost no guitar in any of her work. There’s a sample of distorted electric guitar on “Human Behavior,” nylon-string guitar on “So Broken,” pedal steel on live versions of “Possibly Maybe” — I think that’s about it. Her stringed instrument accompaniment of choice is the harp.

Like the hip-hop artists she admires, Björk contrasts her vocal asymmetry with the posthuman perfection of electronic beats. Most of her tunes rest on four-four grids, using drum loops and MIDI patterns in groups of two and four and eight and sixteen. Björk brings out the best in her tech-savvy collaborators. Nellee Hooper’s work with Massive Attack can sound too much like the lobby of a high-end hotel, but behind Post he’s brilliant. Matmos albums are so experimental as to be unlistenable, but on Vespertine, they’re heartbreaking. More from Thomas Bartlett:

Her wholehearted embrace of electronics, combined with her unquestioned dominance of them, makes her our most optimistic musician, blasting the matrix apart.

It’s ironic that this guy should describe Björk as such an optimist, because from what I can tell, she’s also a high-functioning clinical depressive with social phobia.

Björk and depression

I’ve noticed that Björk’s lyrics make several references to suicidal ideation and self-harm. From “Hyperballad:”

Every morning I walk towards the edge
and throw little things off
like car parts, bottles and cutlery
I imagine what my body would sound like
slamming against those rocks
and when I land, will my eyes be closed or open?

From “All Neon Like:”

Don’t get angry with yourself
I’ll heal you
with a razor blade
I’ll cut a slit open

The video for “Pagan Poetry” includes graphic closeups of Björk’s flesh being pierced with large needles. Some of my friends think she might be kidding. She isn’t. Her body language in interviews and onstage indicates to me that she’s as serious as a heart attack.

This is music’s greatest optimist? In a way, yes. Björk’s affect may be bleak at times, but it doesn’t keep her from being a fearless sonic adventurer. The coolest and weirdest track on Telegram is “My Spine,” a duet between Björk and the deaf Scottish classical percussion sensation Evelyn Glennie playing a set of tuned exhaust pipes. You have to be confident to be a deaf drummer. You have to be confident to be an Icelandic person singing in English. You have to be confident to play very far outside the standard western tuning system on a weird instrument. And you have to be confident to stick this song in the middle of a bunch of remixes of your previous album.

Live electronica

All electronic musicians face a challenge when it comes time to play live. Standing onstage and pressing “play” on your DAT machine or laptop is pretty lame. Björk’s solution is an ingenious one. She has a DAT of the basic tracks, the drums and crucial synths. Then she can layer whatever live sounds on top that she wants. So, like, she can tour with a tabla player, harpist and pedal steel, or a symphonic string section, a choir and two laptop guys, or ten horn players, a drummer and a reactive touch surface controller. Because the beats are sequenced, her onstage drummers are free to play outside of grid mode. Hear Björk and Konono No 1 live in concert, courtesy of NPR.

Björk did MTV Unplugged early in her solo career and took the opportunity to do analog remixes of her first album right down to the foundations. “Human Behavior” is just voice and harpsichord, and then “One Day” has like thirty-five percussionists. Happening!

Here are a couple of my Björk remixes. As she says in “Enjoy:” enjoy.

Human Nature And Behaviour by ethanhein

Follows a blog post about the MJ song.

Lil Wayne Is Oh So Quiet

See blog posts about Lil Wayne and Björk.

Me vs Alex Torovic vs VOCE vs the Wu-Tang Clan vs Aphex Twin vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

India

Me vs John Coltrane ft Eric Dolphy vs Aphex Twin vs Beyoncé vs Björk

mp3 download, ipod format download

Another method to get lively yet polished recordings is to use ferocious discipline to create the illusion of spontaneity. Michael Jackson was able to give his performances on Thriller so much polish by recording take after take after take, all at the same level of manic intensity, with his grunts and screams arrayed precisely and intentionally. I can admire the focus he was able to bring to bear over long hours of tedious studio labor, but the psyche that produced his work ethic isn’t something I’d wish on myself or anyone else.

The digital audio workstation offers a third way out. Compositing and splicing different performances together in Pro Tools isn’t any harder than copying and pasting paragraphs in a word processor. If you work in grid mode, you can effortlessly set a particular section to run on a loop, automatically recording each pass as a separate take. The performer can take as many tries as they want, with no need to stop and rewind in between each one. Because hard disk space is essentially free, there’s no cost barrier to running the loop endlessly, trying out different ideas until the right one pops out.

Loop recording was originally conceived as a way to help performers nail especially tricky passages. As with so much music technology, though, it’s taken on a broader creative function, in this case helping people write songs during the recording process. Hip-hop continues the jazz tradition of composing through improvisation. Where jazz musicians might write down a particularly tasty lick to turn it into a song on paper, hip-hop artists more often use the recording medium itself as the composition tool. With loop recording it becomes possible to give playfully tossed-off lines all the perfection and precision you could want. The standard hip-hop and R&B writing method is to put together a more or less complete instrumental track, and then improvise vocals on top. The best ideas get edited, looped, doubled, harmonized and layered into the finished product. As pop music gets more hip-hop oriented, more songwriting is taking the form of improvising in loop mode. The backing tracks themselves are also usually written in loop mode, though usually with sequencers rather than audio recording.

Ironically, having the freedom to effortlessly record and comp together unlimited takes can results in your not needing to. If you’re not under pressure to get things right in a certain number of takes first time, it can put you in the relaxed frame of mind that helps you get things right the first time. Cee-Lo Green’s arresting lead vocal in Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy” was famously recorded in one take.

Just for fun and visual inspiration, here are some of my Flickr images related to the concept of loop recording.

Before the explosion of cheap electronics, most people had no external way to keep time so accurately. Before the industrial revolution, there wasn’t much need to. The only reason you would have needed precise timekeeping was for music and dancing.

One school of thought in evolutionary science says that music is a byproduct of other social and cognitive abilities. Another school, the one I find more persuasive, says it’s the other way around, that music and dance are the core capacities that gave rise to language and other complex human social skills. The thinking goes that the precise and nuanced sense of time we developed for our music-making enabled us to coordinate and synchronize our other cooperative group behaviors. Steven Mithen thinks that our rhythmic sense was the precursor to our being able to walk on two feet instead of four.

Whatever the evolutionary back story is, our rhythmic capacity is species-wide and intrinsic. It requires deep focus to keep accurate time in your head, but like walking or eating with a spoon, just about any neurologically intact person can learn how to do it with practice. I know a lot of people who claim to be fundamentally unrhythmic, but that seems to me to be more about anxiety and lack of childhood encouragement than fundamental anatomy. As with language, it’s harder to learn rhythm as an adult, but not impossible.

So we have this ability to track the passage of time with varying degrees of accuracy. We’ve figured out how to assist our counting with cheap, ubiquitous electronics. What does that mean for music? There are two basic approaches to rhythm. There’s clock time and free time, or tempo rubato as the classical music people say, an Italian term that translates literally as “stolen time.”

You might naively expect that the rigid constraint of clock time would be an oppressive limitation on musical expressiveness. Beginning songwriters and arrangers love to throw a lot of tempo and rhythm changes around as a way to create “variety.” In practice, this results in irritating music that’s difficult to play. There are plenty of musical styles that use tempo shifts, from recent European classical to Balinese gamelan, but that stuff needs to be rigorously planned ahead of time and precisely conducted.

People have a finite information processing capacity. Holding the rhythm constant frees up attentional bandwidth for wilder asymmetries of pitch and timbre. All the intricate melodic and harmonic flights in Mozart and Bach go down so smoothly because their rhythms are static and predictable. By the same token, the dazzling rhythmic shifts in Ravi Shankar are manageable because there’s a droning D flat the entire time tying the pitches together.

If you want to improvise, the counterintuitive requirement is that the basic rhythmic framework be predictable. The bigger the ensemble, the more predictable the beat needs to be. The musicians can stretch or embellish the rhythm as much as they want, but without an underlying pulse you get disorganized and patternless noise, which can be exciting in short bursts but gets boring fast.

Some improvising musicians have attempted to dispense with clock time. John Coltrane did some fearless adventuring outside the rhythmic grid in his last few years. Was he successful? Compare two of his free-jazz epics. Interstellar Space is an album of duets between Coltrane and drummer Rashied Ali. The drums form a kind of ambient carpet behind long saxophone solos. While the time and key center are always shifting, Coltrane’s lines have a strong structural logic that makes them relatively easy to follow. It’s intense, but manageable. (If you’re a real Coltrane nerd, check out Lewis Porter’s book John Coltrane: His Life And Music, which includes a complete transcription of “Venus”, the most accessible of these duets.) Ascension, on the other hand, is free jazz played by a group of ten, alternating between horn solos and full-band improvising. Nobody loves Coltrane more than I do, and this album can be cathartic, but mostly all that churning chaos is an ordeal. I respect it, but I can’t say I listen to it too often. Like most people, I find a warmer connection and more of an invitation to imaginatively participate when Coltrane uses a beat.

The paradoxical freedom of clock time extends to recording media. Pro Tools has two different editing settings related to time, grid mode and slip mode. In grid mode, your edits automatically snap to the closest clock time interval, which you can measure in minutes and seconds or bars and beats, whichever is convenient. In slip mode, your edits can fall on whatever time interval you want. As with live performance, Pro Tools’ grid mode is counterintuitively liberating. It encourages experimentation, since dragging, dropping, copying and pasting almost always yield results that make some kind of musical sense. The grid helps you try out new patterns and symmetries easily, and you can keep banging out new combinations until you discover the ones you like. Lining up events in slip mode is possible, but it’s labor-intensive, and it discourages the playful state of trial and error where all the really cool ideas come from. Clock time is such a powerful method of organizing information that you can get pretty good results by banging on a MIDI keyboard more or less at random and then having the computer snap the notes to the closest beat.

I’m not trying to make a value judgment here. Tempo rubato can be beautifully intimate and personal. It’s good for solo or small group performances where the audience listens attentively. But in situations where you want group involvement, dialog and mass participation, the individuals need to deprecate their egos in favor of a shared consensus. Clock time isn’t the only way to get a consensus, but its predictability is a good starting point.

Glenn Gould wasn’t necessarily being prophetic. He was just paying attention to the long history of music before the relative eyeblink of the twentieth century. The always perspicacious Wayne Marshall says:

Only in the relatively recent past — within the last century — have songs, in the “fixed” media form of audio recordings, been so strongly regulated as pieces of property whose use by others might be strictly limited. An examination at the level of cultural practice — that is, how songs as audio recordings have been used by people — demonstrates that even in such “fixed” form, songs have continued to serve as a commonplace site of sharing and creative interaction (also known as remixing). This becomes particularly evident in the use of playback technologies such as turntables as creative instruments in their own right (aiding the emergence of hip-hop and disco in the 1970s), an approach powerfully extended by the tools of the digital age.

I’m a child of the cassette era. I loved making mix tapes in high school, for myself and whoever among my friends would listen. It was a pain, but still worth it. I still remember burning my first CD, sequencing the tracks with Toast before the half-hour long burn session during which the computer couldn’t do anything else. I’ve said farewell to albums with little sadness. It’s nice to listen to Graceland or Abbey Road in their original sequence, but for the most part, I do a better job of sequencing tracks for my own needs than anyone else can.

What’s true at the multiple-song level is even more true within a single song. Writing a song is really sequencing together a “mixtape” of licks, scale fragments, chord progressions and beats. When I learned how to play the guitar, I became free to string together whatever song fragments I could get under my fingers. It was fun being able to freely collage songs together, constructing segues and suites. All “new” compositions are really mashups you make in your head. Any creative undertaking is less like conjuring out of thin air and more like making a salad. As a sampler and remixer, my freedom of musical choice is total. Making mashups is a delightful blend of writing songs and putting together mixtapes, except that the pieces of music are shorter and layered simultaneously.

Mashup and remix culture isn’t new. Club DJs have been mashing up songs on the fly for decades, intermixing hot dance tracks with hooks and breaks from other well-known dance tracks. Girl Talk has nothing on “The Adventures Of Grandmaster Flash On The Wheels Of Steel” or Double Dee and Steinski’s “Lesson” mixes. Creating popular music is a ruthless evolutionary process. You sort through idea after idea, looking for the hooks. The best mashups take the Darwinian process to the next level, mating the hooks together into ultrahooks. My favorite mashups of the moment are the United State Of Pop mixes by DJ Earworm. He takes the top twenty-five singles from a given year and boils them down into single, devastating tracks.

United State Of Pop 2007

United State Of Pop 2008

There are plenty of other high-concept mashups like these, and some of them work as music, but a lot of them are gimmicky and annoying. In order to work, there has to be some musical resonance between the source tracks. The more unexpected the affinity, the better. My favorite Earworm mashup combines Django Reinhardt’s performance of “Brazil” with Paul Simon’s “Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes.”

Brazilian Diamonds

Who would have guessed that the bouncy rhythms of South African pop as filtered through the mind of a Jewish folksinger from Queens would mesh so well with the bouncy rhythms of samba as filtered through the mind of a Belgian gypsy jazz guitarist? This kind of discovery is only possible via a lot of trial and error. The growing ease and plummeting price of audio editing makes trial and error a lot less onerous than it used to be.

One of the great pleasures of sample-based music is encountering something familiar in a strange context. Sometimes the recontextualization can be jokey, like Ludacris’ ironically grandiose “Coming 2 America” which combines quotes from the Eddie Murphy movie with themes from both Mozartâ’s Requiem and the last movement of Dvorak’s New World symphony. Sometimes it’s playful without being jokey. Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” aria from his opera The Magic Flute shows up in “Like You” by Kelis, and it makes me wonder why every R&B song doesn’t include coloratura soprano.

The mixtape-mashup analogy isn’t perfect. Mixtapes are linear, with each song usually appearing once. If you make a mashup in this linear way, with each sample appearing only once, it will probably be annoying. Within the parameters of a song, repetition is crucial to enjoyment. This is why Girl Talk gets on my nerves. He runs a sample four or eight times and then forgets about it. His tracks are too much like watching someone else flip channels on TV for my tastes.

I’m especially interested in musicians who use samples of themselves as the basis of new works. The first Nas song I heard was his biggest hit, “Nas Is Like.” The chorus is based on samples of his earlier song “It Ain’t Hard To Tell.” When I heard the original, it sounded like it’s full of samples of “Nas Is Like.” This confusion of time sequence is one of the central pleasures of sample-based music for me. The meta-recursive hip-hop prize probably belongs to the Fugees, whose song “The Score” includes samples of every other song on the album of the same name.

The mashup doesn’t belong exclusively to music. The video mashup is coming excitingly into its own. I would have expected that combining two songs in 5/4 time might be too clever, but in this case it works:

The video mashup’s answer to DJ Earworm is Kutiman, who stitches together multiple Youtube videos. Check out “The Mother Of All Funk Chords”:

Jonathan Lethem’s essay on literary mashup culture, “The Ecstasy Of Influence,” is itself an amazing literary mashup. There are visual mashups too, I have a collection of them on Flickr. An intriguing random visual mashup maker is the Ad Generator. Its makers explain: “Words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly.” It works uncannily well.

The fan-made advertising mashup shows the potential to become an entire new artistic style unto itself. Dig this trailer for an as-yet nonexistent Green Lantern movie made entirely out of pieces of other movie trailers:

Sasha Frere-Jones says in his essay 1 + 1 + 1 = 1:

See mashups as piracy if you insist, but it is more useful, viewing them through the lens of the market, to see them as an expression of consumer dissatisfaction. Armed with free time and the right software, people are rifling through the lesser songs of pop music and, in frustration, choosing to make some of them as good as the great ones.

This very blog post is a mashup of Glenn Gould and Wayne Marshall and DJ Earworm and Grandmaster Flash and Kutiman and uncountable others. I know there are plenty of copyright holders out there that regard any kind of derivative work as stealing. I think it’s a misplaced form of anxiety. I think mashups are natural, healthy, and the best vector to get your ideas circulating through the memepool long after you’re gone. As I was writing this post, I discovered someone did a version of my Michael Jackson sample map with Michael Jackson on it, and I couldn’t be more flattered.

Long live DJ culture, across whatever media!