Piecespeak #4 - 27-04-09

This week, Pieces has been humbled by various acts of bravery and commitment. Friends have run marathons, done wonderful deeds for charity, returned from epic travels and I…well, I dug up some really huge weeds in the garden. It’s all about the little victories…

As more and more commentators raise the issue of authorities using CCTV to track ordinary citizens, and abuses of these powers are revealed, I’ve come across a consequence of the growing number of cameras in the world. More and more video-capturing devices are being produced, sold and used all over the world, which means more and more film footage is being shot. When I pick up a video camera and film myself doing something, I’d say that I was filming one of my ‘life hours’ for every hour of filming, because an hour of my life has been captured on film. Given that there doesn’t seem to be any reason for the amount of video footage being produced to drop any time soon, will there come a point where the number of hours of video produced actually overtakes the number of hours of actual life? Or, to put it another way, will more ‘life’ be recorded than actually lived?

In many ways, this state of human existence, where there is more human life contained on celluloid or digital capture than on the face of the actual earth, would be a kind of natural culmination of the drive to preserve that’s always been a hallmark of homosapien existence – from the drive to bury and commemorate the dead that is one of the earliest acknowledged behavioural patterns of civilised society to the urge to detail in writing every small progression through your day in Facebook statuses. And it’s not confined to filmed footage – that’s just the easiest to measure because of the 1:1 relationship between time recorded and time played back. Granted, it would be impossible to produce enough visual art to be able to claim that it cumulatively constituted more than the lives of those that produced it, because you can’t equate one painting to any temporal measure of human existence, only an emotional one. But there are thousands, if not millions, of hours of recorded sounds produced by all kinds of people all over the world – it could be that already we’re living on a planet where it would take so long to listen to and watch all the music and film that exists that it would take longer than the combined lifespans of every person alive today to do so.

Wow, big thoughts. Don’t let them stop you looking forward to buying the Pieces album when it comes out, though. There’s a recording that’s definitely worth spending more time on than CCTV footage of a Dagenham car park on a Thursday afternoon (at least we hope so).

What a shameless plug. Ah well.

After last week’s massively American playlist, this week’s Piecesounds is brought to you by the letters R and B, and the number 15. And it’s still pretty American. But this time with added French. And Welsh! Click the link below to hear it all for free on Spotify.

1 - Devo – Uncontrollable Urge

2 - Iggy Pop – Sister Midnight

3 - Leon Haywood – I Want’a Do Something Freaky To You – Thump Version

4 - Fever Ray – Coconut

5 - Throbbing Gristle – Walkabout

6 - The Last Poets – Jazzoetry

7 - Isaac Hayes – Something

8 - Brigitte Bardot – Mélanie

9 - The Cookies – I Want A Boy For My Birthday

10 - Harry Nilsson – You Can’t Do That

11 - The Apples In Stereo – Shine A Light

12 - Super Furry Animals – Lliwiau Llachar

13 - Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony No. I, 3^rd Movement

14 - Animal Collective – Penny Dreadfuls

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/3HrbDi2CHGa8ZdEe6xbJ4x

Enjoy. See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #3 - 20-04-09

This week, Pieces has been repeatedly dumbfounded. First came the revelation that the police can see into the future. Then Clement ‘best voice on the radio’ Freud dies. And now we wake up this morning to find that J.G. Ballard has joined him. Pretty soon it’ll be impossible to demonstrate on behalf of anything and there’ll be nothing good to demonstrate for. Great.

Anyway, something that’s particularly troubled me in this troubling week is the increasingly liberal use of really good music in advertising. Reading that back, I realise it may seem kind of counter-intuitive – surely we should be encouraging advertisers to pacify us with beautiful music rather than bludgeon us with mallets of cheese. Entire generations will never recover from the nastiness of experiencing bespoke ersatz-music nuggets like “Doublemint, refreshes your breath – Naturally!”, or “Hands that do dishes…”.

While these are decent demonstrations of the power of commercials to harm us with piercingly bad ‘music’, at least none of them actually have an effect on the way we listen to music that we would actually engage with anywhere other than a TV set. This is what’s hit me in the past week – loads of my favourite songs of the last few years have been taken behind my back and used to soundtrack products and shows that I now can’t shake off them. Granted, it means every time the irritating Lastminute advert comes on, I get to hear a blast of Can’t Stop Moving by Sonny J. But if I ever want to listen to the actual song I have to shake the image of annoying ‘ordinary’ people sticking their thumbs up at a camera (wonder what the bribe was…?) out of my brain, which is surprisingly hard. Whenever I hear Kim and Jessie by M83, I’ll be forced to picture the bunch of rotten frat girls that populate Beverly Hills 90210. And that’s just not fair; it’s a lovely song full of delicious sounds (see below). Millie’s My Boy Lollipop? Well, that tune couldn’t really get any cheesier, but it’s still a bit sad being forced to imagine techie teenagers lusting over their new phones.

“But that’s so snobbish – doesn’t it at least mean more people get to hear this good music?” Yep, it does, but isn’t it a bit crap that it’ll always have that association? Maybe I should just work harder to get rid of the images these adverts conjure.

Advertisers, please, just glue some bland music onto your commercials. At least then we can all pretend to ignore them. Or maybe I should just grow up…

On a much more fun note, this week also sees the start of Piecesounds, a weekly hour of the best music we’ve heard lately. No template, no rules, just a good ol’ dose of great music that we’ve been slowly rocking backward and forward to.

If you’re signed up to Spotify, you can click the link below to listen to all of the songs instantly J. If you’re not, you really should because it’s the best thing in the world. Nearly all the music in the universe for free. What could be better?

Anyway, here’s this week’s hour of power.

1. Four Tet/Princess Watermelon – Go Go Ninja Dinosaur
2. Herbie Hancock/Foday Musa Suso – Moon/Light
3. Erykah Badu – The Cell
4. Parliament – Rumpofsteelskin
5. Bob Dylan – I Want You
6. M83 – Kim & Jessie
7. Jackson 5 – I Found That Girl
8. School Of Seven Bells – Face To Face On High Places
9. Gil Scott Heron – When You Are Who You Are
10. Charles Mingus – Better Git It In Your Soul
11. Lyn Collins/James Brown – What My Baby Needs Now Is A Little More Lovin’
12. George Gerschwin – Sweet and Lowdown (Gerschwin Piano Roll)
13. Stan Freberg – Declaration of Independence (“A Man Can’t Be Too Careful What He Signs These Days”)

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/2XJZmqkxuNMYXAl1N7LBWX

Piecespeak #2 - 13-04-09

This week, Pieces has been considering the really big issues. The ones whose answers will affect the way every person on the planet lives their lives, that will shake the foundations of society and instil fire in the hearts of all who hear. Is a globalised capitalist economy inevitably opposed to the happiness of its citizens? Is it possible to experience the world rationally given that as humans we live by irrationality? And when was the last time Eminem actually did something good?

It’s this last question that been particularly stumping us, especially after watching the former Mr Shady’s new video (which was given its own little pocket of Channel 4 airtime as a ‘new video exclusive’, no less) and shuddering at ‘celebrity. Amy Winehouse and Blake Whatsisname? That’s so 2 or 3 years ago. And making fun of Britney Spears? That’s just so easy. Even Michael McIntyre can do that. If you’re going to use a clearly troubled single parent to make a point about celebrity, at least do what South Park did, and take it so far that it’s not about her but the forces that push her (http://allsp.com/loading2.php?url=l.php?id=e169 - definitely not for the faint-hearted).

Anyway, even Guardian columnists have been blogging about how rubbish ‘We Made You’ is. What’s interested us is just how far Eminem has sprinted past the point where he’s at all relevant, with proper running shoes on and a sweatband. 99% of musicians who have ever been worth listening to have reached this point, where they’ve decided they don’t care what anyone thinks, they’re just going to do what they feel like. Paul McCartney holds the distinction of having a whole solo career that maps out this phenomenon. Mull of Kintyre? That’s him lacing up his trainers. The Frog Chorus? That’s him poised on the starting blocks. The spoken bit on ‘The Girl is Mine’? That’s him running full pelt, red faced and gasping for breath…

This is different to jumping the shark/nuking the fridge/watching any episode of Lost, because most of the time there’s a way back. Look at Leonard Cohen’s recent deification; not long ago he was so far off any radar that he didn’t have a section in Oxford Street HMV. (That must be like not having any friends. Poor guy.) Now he’s a husky genius with a pension pot the size of Simon Cowell’s ego.

It’s very rare to find a person or band who hasn’t reached the point where critical or commercial success doesn’t matter as much as following their heart and finally realising their dream of a patriotic singalong sung by cartoon frogs (sorry, Sir Paul, you just make it so easy). You could argue that Bob Dylan’s managed to find some kind of a vaccine; who else could ramble on in song for so long about discovering God and still have people pay attention? Somehow Pink Floyd can make as many boring records as they like, with or without Roger Waters, and teenagers in curtains-drawn bedrooms will still drool over every looooong keyboard chord. And obviously there are those who didn’t make it to the point where they picked out their Adidas: it’s hard to imagine Ian Curtis or Mama Cass running anywhere, never mind past the point of musical no-return.

Maybe some day Pieces will discover a way to avoid these musical pitfalls. In the meantime, we can all play an amusing game where you imagine alternative lyrics to Eminem’s seminal paean to the female posterior, ‘Ass Like That’: imagine you’re in a chemistry lesson, and someone produces a substance consisting of free-moving particles that is unlike any similar chemical you have ever seen. What do you say? ‘I ain’t never seen a gas like that.’ And so on.

Now we’re off to put some fish sticks in our mouths (you can too by clicking here). See you next week for more.