This post was originally going to veer into a discussion of a particular group of songs that I thought were worth talking about, but ended up developing into something completely different and I think that it works better as a stand alone piece. These are some of the things that I have been thinking about lately, perhaps spurred by my frustration with music blogs in general. I have read so many negative reviews (which are pointless for all involved) as well as many very poorly written reviews and other pieces about music that attempt to cover up the author’s lack of musical knowledge through convoluted verbiage. There are specific things that I could cite, and I will do so at a later time, but for right now I think that I am just going to let this stand as is and get back to the actual music tomorrow.
There are pretty much only two ways to get my attention music-wise. Despite sounding like the completely opposing ideas of beauty and aggression, I think that the best way to wrap these things up together would be under the umbrella of “visceral.” Something that is quiet can be visceral, though it seems people typically use the word to refer to something that is unusually aggressive, or overbearing in general. But really it’s about feeling something either way.
Leave cerebral music to those that don’t know any better; leave it to those that can’t figure out how to say anything other than “look how smart we are and how complicated our songs are.” Even early Genesis, the most proggy of the prog, had some deep emotion running through a lot of their songs (though not all of them, I mean they did write an entire song about a giant hogweed after all.
But, the point is, and I do have a point, is that when I hear a song I almost instantly know whether I am going to like it or not. I’m not saying that I make snap judgements that are completely biased one way or the other, but I have listened to enough music to be able to tell when something is not going to have anything to offer me. At a certain point you just have to figure out how to do it and how to do it fast. Better that than sit through something for an hour just because you feel like you have to. A lot of times I can tell just from the ambiance around the first second or two of a song, especially if there are some drumstick clicks to count off. It’s easy to hear if something is going to be overproduced from that sound alone. If something is overproduced, and by that I mean surgically recorded, hermetically protected from any environmental sounds, then I am almost positive that I am going to have no interest in listening to it no matter how good the “song” is. Because, and bands need to figure this out, there is a lot more to writing a good song than the chord progression and the melody. As soon as you think about those things too much you are sunk.
Recording something in a deadened studio is like telling someone that you love them for the first time via text. There’s no emotion. The music needs to express something, and not through the use of overwrought bad teenage poetry. Make a connection, a real human connection. That is what music is all about.
And maybe this all sounds too heavy handed, and maybe you haven’t even read this far down, but if I get another email from another band that is trying way too hard, well, I don’t know what I am going to do. I can tell you what I am not going to do though, I am not going to pollute the rest of the internet with it. A lot of filtering happens, and I’m not ashamed of it.
There’s actually another thing that I am not going to do, and that is spend an evening writing about how much a specific album is terrible, detailing the ways in which it is. Sure, I could do that (and there are plenty of sites that do) but what would be the point? Throwing stones is easy. It’s easy because it takes very little knowledge and makes the writer sound like they know a whole lot more than they actually do. Why not just say nothing? Listen to as much of the song or album as you need to make a decision on whether or not it is worth listening to and if it is then you should happily share it with everyone. On the other hand, if you just can’t get through the song or the album, simply stop playing it and don’t listen to it anymore. That’s what everyone should do. Why waste your time and the time of others?
This one is epic. I mean, I love all the albums that came before Sister, but I feel like this is the beginning of something really great. I mean, I think you all know what is going to come after this album. Now, I know that “Evol” is really great too, and I do love “Bad Moon Rising,” and even more so “Confusion is Sex,” but “Sister” is one of the albums that has been getting constant plays on my stereo since I first heard it.
There are so many classic SY tracks on this one that’s it’s hard to know where I should begin, so I guess that I should just start at the beginning of the album and work through it from there. And this album has a great album opener with “Schizophrenia.” I specifically remember coming to “Sister” around the same time that I first picked up a guitar and started bashing away at it, trying to learn every song that I could, which usually just meant me playing every note every second and trying to listen for when they matched what was coming through the stereo and then trying to memorize what I was doing so that I could maybe, possibly, replicate that at a later point.
Well, when I tried to learn how to play “Schizophrenia” I found that my usual strategy really wasn’t going to work. I couldn’t figure out why none of open string major or minor chords that I knew weren’t fitting any of the sounds that were coming out of my stereo. I mean, I think I played every chord up there on that poster of 24 or so chords. I even tried the ones with the number 7 next to them, those are the weird jazz chords, right? At least that was what I was thinking at the time. Anyway, all that I remember from trying to figure out the song was that I thought it was in the key of B. Now that I’m much older I know that, yes, there is a B in that chord, but I would have to sit down to the piano to figure out what the other pitches are, because lo and behold, I was not aware, at the age of 12 or 13 or whatever, that one could tune the guitar to anything other than EADGBE.
Oh, Sonic Youth. You have taught me so many things. And maybe this is the point of discover, or attempted discovery that has set me on the path that I am still on today. I’m still the same person, trying to figure out what is going on in all of the things that he hears. I’m still forever sitting at a piano trying to pick apart tone clusters and writing them out.
But, “Schizophrenia” into “(I got a) Catholic Block”? Don’t even try to pretend that that isn’t one hell of a way to open an album. Things are pulled back a little for Kim’s entrance, with “Beauty Lies in the Eye,” a song that has always reminded me of Evol. It just captures a very similar atmosphere as Evol. There is something creepy about the cavernous sound of the percussion and the aimlessly strummed guitar in the background combined with Kim’s half spoken half breathily sung vocal.
Oh, but “Stereo Sanctity.” How that song will forever remain as my answer to “Oh, you’ve never heard Sonic Youth before?” It will always end up on any mixtape that I make for anyone that needs an introduction to the band. I can play this song on repeat for a day and not even get sick of it ever. The way that it opens with just a cloud of noise and then Lee coming in with his own wall of distortion a 1/2 step above Thurston and not resolving it, or even trying, and the way that you can hear Thurston laugh a little bit about it if you listen closely. The dynamic of the band is perfect throughout this song. I still can’t even describe what it is that is happening in the chorus of the song. The guitar sounds so wobbily, like it is going to fall apart at any moment. It’s as if the song is hanging on by a thread throughout, but somehow they manage to keep it together, at least until the exact midpoint of the song where everything starts to go haywire.
The classic tracks keep coming with “Tuff Gnarl.” One song after another is memorable, but “Tuff Gnarl” finally gives us a song that is immediately recognizable upon the first few notes. That one’s also got the noisy breakdown that sounds like the beginnings of what we’ll get to hear on “Eric’s Trip” or “Total Trash” coming up on “Daydream Nation.”
The constant back and forth between Thurston and Lee’s straight ahead tunes, where it sounds like they are literally fighting their guitars off their bodies, against Kim’s moodier, sometimes somber material that comes out of “Evol,” creates a good pacing throughout. But, I remember sort of skipping past those slower tunes when I was listening to the album for the first few years. I’d skip right to “Hot Wire My Hearth,” then fast-forward through “Cotton Crown” so that I could get straight to “White Cross” and “Master-Dik.”
If I was ever in doubt about how much I loved Sonic Youth when I was a kid, this was the album that solidified it. Song after song after song of just everything that Sonic Youth has to offer. As a kid I was completely unaware of the social context in which these songs were produced, or what time (I guess I had a little bit of a clue, but I don’t remember thinking of it too much) they were made. The point is, now that I think about it, this album is pretty close to timeless. There really isn’t anything about the sound of the album that screams 1987.
Next up, “Daydream Nation.” I’m going to have to prepare myself for this one. I have a feeling it will be quite long. Wouldn’t be surprised if I have to split that one into 2 posts.
Sure, I understand that if I really wanted to make the proper reference to the book I would have used Branca’s 9th symphony, but after listening to it I can honestly say that I don’t enjoy the work at all.
I don’t want to specifically talk about Branca’s symphonies exactly. I just wanted to move away from the seemingly non-stop album reviews. They are tedious to read and possibly more tedious for me to write. I’m becoming more and more selective with regard to actual album reviews. I have my favorite bands, and I get some (ie. very little) good stuff via email, but from the beginning I have mentioned that I wanted to start to write something that went deeper than just a review. I’m not comfortable with the purpose of writing if it is just to sell something. That’s what I feel like when I am writing an album review sometimes, I feel like I am just trying to sell music, and I don’t think that the main purpose (or any purpose, for that matter) of a writer, or an artist, is to sell anything.
I began to touch upon things that I have been thinking about in a few of my more recent posts, regarding abstraction in music, temporality in music in my post about Autechre, a topic so seldom discussed in music regardless of genre. There was also the Glenn Gould connection post from a few weeks ago, but there have been other things I’ve been considering.
Perhaps Branca is, in fact, a good jumping off point for a discussion of the manipulation of temporality in music. When listening to his symphonies one must, in some ways, throw away everything that they think they know about listening to a piece of music and start over. And there are a lot of pieces of music that require just that.
My next few posts are going to attempt to tackle a few interesting cases of different ways that musicians play with the listener’s perception of time. These manipulations will happen in a variety of different ways, and to different ends. Some of the songs that I am going to be discussing will be taken from things that I have already talked about a little bit on the blog, while others will be taken from familiar bands looked at in different ways.
Temporality, and its use in music, is maybe the most fascinating element of organized sound, and the hardest to describe without getting all metaphysical. I think that I have noted in a few posts about how temporality is suspended in minimalist music, where the incessant repetitions create a void of sorts for the listener, allowing them to focus in on the sound between the sound; the creation of aural illusions where the listener is hearing something that perhaps isn’t written into the score. That is what I would consider a meditative disposal of time, more like a contradiction if you think about it. Minimalism subverts time by making it the most surface level characteristic of the music. The same rhythm, repeating over and over and over and over and over again ends up not being tedious, but rather creates a new kind of silence where the mind starts to filter out what is happening on the surface. One can hear resonance, and the collection of overtones and pure timbre.
I can’t help but think back to the time that I drove up to Toronto in 2005 or so, to catch a performance by the University of Toronto percussion ensemble. There was a performance of Cage’s 4’33”, and Varese’s “Ionisation.” Those pieces, though great, didn’t leave a mark on me as profoundly as did the piece that had just started when I walked in.
As I stood there in the entranceway to the concert hall a performance of James Tenney’s “Having Never Written a Note for Percussion” had just begun. I can’t do justice to the piece by trying to describe what the experience was like, though I will try.
And that’s part of the thing, is that this is a piece that is so simple in concept that capturing it in a recording could not possibly do it justice. The listener is an integral part of the piece. Imagine the slowest, most gradual crescendo that you could ever experience being played out on a single tam-tam (if I could venture a guess, it was being performed on a 40″ instrument) from a performer that was not visible. The only thing that could be seen was the front of the instrument, while the performer must have been kneeling behind it, and with soft mallets (and therefore no sounding attack) they gently built up the amplitude.
That’s it. The piece is simply an incredibly lengthy crescendo that is followed by an equally lengthy diminuendo. But being there you feel like you are standing inside the sound. For the first second that I walked into the room I could remember the break between the “silence” that I was experiencing just outside the door to the hall and the sound that I was now in the middle of while standing at the back of that hall. As I stood there that memory of the divide slowly faded and all that my mind could focus on was what was happening right there in front of me, and all around me. Time had stopped. In that time I could focus on every single little pitch and overtone that was created. The sound enveloped everything in the room, so present as to seemingly take a physical form. Now, the sound was not loud enough to make anyone recoil in pain, it was just in the room with us, creating a presence.
The piece built up so slowly that the idea of past, present and future were irrelevant. There were no more points of reference. Time had effectively ceased to exist. And that is something that is very difficult to get through on a recording.
I think that in this way Branca’s symphony (several of them, but I’m thinking of the 3rd specifically right now) and Tenney’s piece have a lot in common. They are contradictions of simplicity and complexity, of loud and quiet, something and nothing, all at the same time. Branca’s wall of microtones, as well as Tenney’s, find similar ways to grab hold of the most illusive element of music, and that is the manipulation of temporality. They grab a hold of it and turn the entire piece into the exploration of that one impossible thing.
Enter Steve Shelley. Classic lineup now in place. Sonic Youth shows, on “Evol,” that they are interested in writing more orthodox melodies, but they are still not interested in sounding any different. That scary quality that I mentioned with “Confusion is Sex” remains on this album, and I think that it is somewhat amplified on this album.
I hate talking about or even mentioning things about music that are so subjective (re: feelings, images, other personal things that can’t be backed up with facts) but I think that is the reason that I started writing about all the Sonic Youth albums in the first place. My experience with this album was on cassette, and I remember I was in 8th grade listening to this tape on my GPX tape deck with really terrible speakers. The player was sitting on my desk and I was ostensibly “doing homework” (I still remember: it was a project for Italian) but what I was really doing was staring at the tape as it went from one side of the cassette to the other. Over and over and over again.
Opening with “Tom Violence” starts the album on a perfect note. Thurston is coming into his own as a song writer. In my mind this starts the chain of epic Sonic Youth classics that grows to include “Expressway to yr. Skull (or Madonna, Sean and Me, whatever you want to call it), “Schizophrenia,” “Teenage Riot,” “Silver Rocket,” “Dirty Boots,” and on and on. It’s not so much just T-money either, the rest of the band is starting to find their own voices as well. Lee settles into his role as the SY poet laureate with “In the Kingdom #19” with his spoken word over top of what sounds like SY’s first attempt at a film score. The instruments on that track are not just pushed back in the mix, but they seem to have a gate, or a compressor on them that prevents anything from really breaking through the surface. They are clearly background, diegesis to Lee’s non.
“Death to our Friends” brings slack stringed peculiarity back to the fore in a densely layered track that points to Daydream Nation in the way that the lines combine, and the way that the background noise takes shape. The band’s sonic palette is growing and this album finds them toying a lot more with ambience. If I’m not mistaken this was around the time that they scored the film “Made in U.S.A” a poorly received film that was produced in 1987, the year after “Evol” was released. DGC also re-released the soundtrack as a tape, which of course I heard. All that I remember about it, though, is that two of the song titles are “Mackin’ for Doober,” and “Tuck and Dar.” I don’t know why I remember some of the stuff that I do, but I just do.
For all of the ways that “Bad Moon Rising” was creepy, or unnerving, “Evol” is and more. The structures are tighter. Nothing bleeds into anything, there is no attempt to make an entire album side sound like a suite, but that doesn’t mean that the songs don’t sound like they go together. There’s a little bit more light on this album, so to speak.
For all the difficulty that I had getting into “Bad Moon Rising” I think I had a bit more of a hard time getting into “Evol.” At that time I kept comparing it to “Sister,” which I had been listening to a lot more at the same time. I think that I was focusing a little too much on things like the ending of “Madonna, Sean and Me” when the song just descends into a cloud of reverberation and feedback. What happened to the awesome song? Why did it just disappear like that? Is the chorus going to come back? These were the things that I care about around the time when I first heard “Evol.”
Thankfully I’ve grown up and learned to appreciate this album for the important step in the evolution of Sonic Youth that it is. Only 3 years after “Confusion is Sex” and they are lightyears away from that debut. Next in the series is “Sister,” placing us deep into the territory of “classic” Sonic Youth.
I figured that this would be an appropriate thing to post today. It’s one of those things that I coincidentally rediscover every year, and every year that I come back to it I love it more and more.
The story of The Shaggs is easy to find online, as are the quotes from Frank Zappa, who said they were “better than the Beatles” (he’s right) and Kurt Cobain also gave them praise in saying that “they were the real thing.” The completely unique sound of this group remains mystifying to this day.
The other reason that I find this song, and this group, particularly interesting today is because of a “discussion” in which I was involved today (bordering on heated argument), wherein people were laughing at, while at the same time not paying attention to, some music that was being played. The piece was Pierre Boulez’s “Structures I,” a notoriously difficult work from both the performer’s and listener’s standpoint. Boulez’s music is highly organized, with every element of the composition brought to fruition through a complex series of operations, and it is unlike anything else in its exploration of sound, simultaneity, timbre, and form.
Pulling off a performance of the piece requires the pianists to test the limits of their concentration. And listening to the piece requires a great deal from the audience; they must be willing to accept the sounds as they come to them, accept those sounds as music and to ask themselves what they think about the piece. They need to think about the piece, and not how the piece was conceived. If they come to the work with a closed mind, having already decided that they are not going to like the piece, or (worse yet) if they leave the piece and decide that it was “bad” without even giving it so much as a second thought, well, either one of those results from, in my opinion, a lack of willingness to understand the music, or a lack of willingness to want to come to an understanding of the music. Basically, it comes from a place of willful ignorance. Everyone is entitled to not like something, but that dislike should be based on something significant, not just that “it sounds bad.” Don’t even get me started on that one.
Now, I by no means am trying to compare the music of The Shaggs to that of Pierre Boulez. We’re talking about two completely different things there. But I think that the point stands: that some people are going to hear the idiosyncratic rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic elements of The Shaggs’ music and they are going to be immediately turned off, or (more likely) they are going to mock it for all of the elements that make the music great. Most likely the people that dismiss this music are going to then turn to someone that does accept this music with an open mind and deride them as “snobs” or “hipsters” for their apparent contrarian view.
Yes, the music of The Shaggs is unlike anything else out there, but in my mind that is something to be praised. This album just turned 44, and has outlasted so many of its contemporaries that have since faded into obscurity. Meanwhile 4 girls that were completely outside of the music industry at large made such an impact with their music that we are still talking about it, and more importantly listening to it, all these years later.
Dot Wiggin, guitarist and singer of The Shaggs, has just released (October 28th), her first solo album with the Dot Wiggin Band called “Ready! Get! Go!” You can buy the album here, and check out a new songs here.
I always thought that this album was a strange way, of sorts, to follow up something like “Confusion is Sex.” But I think where that album captured the live energy of the band, this one captures them in the studio conceiving of an actual “album” album.
The fact that all of the songs blend together the way that they do is no mistake, it was a way for the band to make smoother transitions between songs when they were performed live. This was all in a bid to do away with 5 minute tuning sessions in between songs, as they didn’t have an arsenal of guitars on hand at this point in their careers, so these transitions were created to allow Lee or Thurston a few seconds to tune for the next song. The result of this is an album that is linked, obviously, harmonically and melodically as well as in timbre and mood.
I know that it sounds cheesy or stupid or whatever to foist the extramusical jargon onto an album, but I’m going to do it anyway. This album has always felt like Autumn to me. Yes, of course the cover has a lot to do with it, but there is a coldness on this album that isn’t on their debut full-length. The songs are languid, they wander (not in a bad way, by any means), the band is not afraid to have some cleaner guitar sounds. You can definitely hear them moving towards the songs on “Evol” and “Sister” a lot, especially on a track like “I Love Her All The Time,” a song that starts off innocently enough with Thurston floating out the lyrics with some percussion and bass backdrop underneath minimal guitar sounds, strings bent and echoing off into the distance. It isn’t very long before they are off and running into a wall of noise and (I assume) drumstick-wedged-under-guitar-strings type maneuvers.
But the songs here are better shaped than the ones that appear on “Confusion is Sex.” Where they came up with one idea for each of those songs, this album finds them needing to come up with significantly more material and to find interesting ways to get into and out of those ideas. I think that this is maybe the most important album for Sonic Youth as a group of people developing a writing process. It finds a nice balance between free and fixed forms.
For me, I can’t remember when it was that I first heard this album, or where I was when I was listening to it. I think that that must mean that I came to it a bit later. I do remember, however, that upon hearing it I did not immediately get into it. I didn’t immediately “get” it. I was of the mind that “there’s nothing catchy on this one” (I’m hearing myself say that in a whiny voice. I’m sure that if I said that or though that that I would say or think it in a whiny voice). I wanted the action of “Inhuman” and the noise of “Confusion is Next.” Now that I’m (significantly) older I can truly appreciate how good this album actually is.
I think that one of the reasons that I found it difficult to get into this album initially is that I couldn’t figure out which songs were which. Because they all blended together I couldn’t figure out what part that I remembered came from what song. Obviously, that is all pretty meaningless to me now. Who cares where the songs begin and end? It’s best to listen to an album all the way through anyway.
The 2nd side of the album is broken up a little bit more and has some more experimental (that’s a relative term. So when saying that something that Sonic Youth is doing is “more experimental” is saying something). “Justice is Might” slowly comes together, pulling itself up and staggering into form, the lazy guitar and vocal pulled through time by Bob Bert’s solid, uptempo drumming. That one doesn’t hang around too long, and we still have some equally spacey tracks like “Echo Canyon” and “Satan is Boring.”
The star of the show, though, is “Death Valley ’69.” In my mind it’s their first “hit.” It’s really just a classic Sonic Youth song. Thurston and Lydia Lunch (who is from my hometown) lazily sing over top of each other while the band focuses their energy on maintaining a fantastic amount of tension for extended periods before all is lost in a scratchy howl from Lunch.
Fast-forwarding to now, 2013, I started thinking about what all of this meant from an analysis perspective, what with the linking of the songs and the guitar tunings as sort of symbolizing the modulations from track to track if we are to think of the first several songs as really parts of one larger song. I started doing some initial transcriptions of the opening, and taking a post-tonal approach to it just to see what is going on, if I can. What I am finding is that it isn’t as complex as it sounds, but it’s definitely weird. Weird is good. Weird gives me something to look into, a coil to unwind. The thing is is that I have so many things that I want to look at and that I have started or half-finished that I can’t take on any more extra projects. The sketches that I have down for this album though have all the notes that I need to pick up exactly where I left off whenever I am ready and able to pick it up again.
So, in short, this album went from being something that took me a long time to get into when I was (much) younger, to something that I still listen to today and realize that there is more to it than meets the ear. The next album, though, is when things really start to get good.
“My God! What has sound got to do with music!” – Charles Ives
If you have been reading this blog for the past couple months since I started it back up, you may have read the series of 3 posts that I did on the recent Merzbow album “Takahe Collage” (123). Those posts were a bit more analytical than they were philosophical in nature, but the two do tend to go hand in hand to a certain extent.
I’ve had some time to put together some more thoughts on the topic of music as abstraction, noise as music and how it relates to the thoughts and motivation of other artists of all types within that realm. I wrote this short paper for a presentation in a seminar on the history of 20th century music. I offer it below:
October 9, 2013
The main thing that I would like to discuss today, and I want to get a dialogue going on this, is the idea of what a group of musicians considers to be music and what they consider “noise.”
We’ve been looking at how the art world relates to the musical world, showing how the Rite of Spring’s choreography relates to cubism, and primitivism. We’ve talked about modernism and post-modernim, and I’d like to talk a little bit about abstract art, dadaism, music and noise.
First, I want to give you an idea of what I’m talking about with a painting by Jackson Pollack. We’ve probably all seen his paintings, and they have given way to many discussions of whether they are or are not art. Is something art just because the artist says it is? Or can anything be art? How about a painting or sculpture by a Dada artist that takes random materials found on the street and fastens them together with purposely no organization? Does that lack of organization become the organization? Or are we, like Taruskin says, finding organization where there isn’t any simply because we are looking for it? Is music music just because the composer says it is, or can any and all sound be music?
Jackson Pollack – “#3”
There are plenty of electronic sound collage pieces that are made from “found sound” that has been manipulated. Is that manipulation what takes something from just sound to actually being an artistic statement? And think back to the first time that you heard Schoenberg or Webern or John Cage, or put yourself in the shoes of someone that only listens to top 40 pop music hearing Webern’s Op. 20 for the first time. What do you think that person would have to say about that music? Would they say that it was just noise? Could noise be just a word that we use when we don’t understand something?
Both guitars, right? But what does the timbre of Julian Bream’s guitar have to do with that of The Telescopes? They are both the same instrument, but the sound of guitar as we know it is an abstraction of what a guitar “really” sounds like. The sound of the guitar, when used in rock music, is merely a symbol. It doesn’t sound anything like a guitar. Instead the sound that is produced stands in for the sound of the guitar. It essentially is a wall of distortion. But, we have learned to accept that particular sound over time as being “a guitar.” Imagine if you were to play that Telescopes song for Andres Segovia, or Beethoven, or Bach. They would have NO IDEA what that sound was. We recognize it as such because we can picture in our head where the sound is coming from. We understand where it is coming from and we accept it. We understand so well that we don’t even think about it anymore.
Do we consider the sound of a distorted guitar from rock music to be noise? Or just noisier than what a “guitar” “should” sound like? And what should anything sound like?
What if we got even more abstract? Now onto Merzbow.
“Is not beauty in music too often confused with something which lets the ears lie back in an easy-chair?” – Charles Ives
Merzbow is Japanese musician and writer Masami Akita. Since 1979 he’s released over 350 recordings, 6 so far this year. Included in that output is the amazing 50 CD Merzbox. This is the track “Tendeko” from the 2nd album he released this year, “Takahe Collage.”
Can we accept this as music? I would say that this is basically, to me, just another degree of abstraction. Merzbow is manipulating the sounds that he is generating, there are different timbres involved, different ideas that are brought in and then go out through the course of the piece. However, is this closer in timbre to “pure noise” for you?
And what exactly is a good definition of noise? Does it have to do with sound? There’s a book by Paul Hegarty called “Noise/Music: A History” that discusses “noise” in all of its contexts. Noise as basically any confrontation against our expectations. It could be in the form of a reaction to norms, or noise as antagonism such as with the band Throbbing Gristle, taunting and angering their audience purposely. Noise as anything added to the music or that distracts one from the music. But what happens when the noise is the music? And we still haven’t solved the problem of what is and is not considered music. If this “noise,” in whatever form that it may be coming in, is part of the performance (and is it really possible to get rid of all noise? Hello, John Cage) then is it really noise at all?
I think of it this way: John Cage’s music is the sound of philosophy. It gives us something that is challenging, it gives us something that questions what it is that we believe about something that we thought that we had such a firm grasp on. This music is something that gets us thinking and it is something that is provocative and it is daring and controversial, but it is also an outlet for something for someone that wants to create something.
Isn’t music itself an abstraction of our words and our voices? And, if so, noise music is still music in just the same way. I think that as we evolve we continually create further abstractions from where we started off, and eventually everyone catches up to that abstraction, and the definition of “noise” changes. Everything is a symbol for something else in music. Just think to the programmatic music of Strauss or Berlioz. Everything is symbol and everything is abstraction.
You wouldn’t think that the abrasive and angular music of Shellac would have much to do with Marnie Stern’s music, or that either of them could be linked to one of the most prolific, brilliant, thought provoking and curious concert pianists of the 20th century, but they are. Canadian pianist Glenn Gould has influenced generations of pianists, but I don’t think that anyone has ever discussed his influence on artists outside of the concert hall.
Gould was a Canadian pianist, born in 1932. Even those with just a passing knowledge of his work are at least somewhat familiar with at least one of his recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Those recordings work like the bookends of his recording career. When he was first given a record contract he decided that the then seldom heard, obscure Bach piece would become his debut recording. That was in 1955. Some 26 years later his re-recording of the same piece would lead to heated debates in the music community for decades. Those two recordings only give a tiny bit of insight into the way that Gould’s mind worked. He was constantly deep in thought and concerned about his role in the interpretation of the works that he performed. Without a doubt the man was a genius.
Not only was he obsessively driven toward pushing himself, he was intensely interested in pushing the bounds of how music could be realized in the age of new recording technologies. Gould would often remark that the state of recorded music (keep in mind when he was alive, from 1932 to 1982) would not only allow musicians to push the bounds of music, but that people at home would soon be able to create and modify those recordings through their own “knob twiddlings.” Of course he was talking about the way that music could be manipulated on home stereos via various volume, balance and equalizer controls.
It was his contemplations on the effect that the recording studio would have on music that drove him to be one of the first true “recording artists.” In documentaries such as The Alchemist viewers can watch as Gould endlessly annoys the recording engineer, constantly telling him where to cut the tape while referring to the score. Gould’s score had indications for not only the usual dynamics and articulations, but also indications of where the sound would be. Would part of the score sound distant and reverberant while another sounded more up front? How would those things be able to work together. Gould was truly able to use the recording studio not to simply preserve his performances, but also as an extension of his abilities as a pianist and musical mind.
Gould was not only interested in recording the works of Bach, Webern, Scriabin and others, but he was also interested in composition. His compositions came in the form of a 3 part “contrapuntal radio documentary” called the Solitude Trilogy. “The Idea of North,” “The Latecomers” and “The Quiet in the Land” explored Gould’s interest in the northernmost part of Canada, which reflected his own comfort in solitude and singularity.
Shellac. Steve Albin, Todd Trainer, Bob Weston.
When Steve Albini says that Shellac only writes songs about two things “Canada and baseball” it could very well be true, most notably in the song “The Idea of North.” This one is kind of obvious, being that the song takes its name directly from Gould’s radio documentary. Perhaps the same desolate mood of isolation and prohibitive environs that Gould explores in his documentary are interpreted by Shellac in the opening of their song. The sparse, spacious bass line invites listeners to consider the ambience that surrounds it. Perhaps Albini’s vocals that near complete obfuscation are meant to evoke the image of someone thinking outloud (barely) to themselves as a representation of the inquisitive, often self-obsessed way that Gould would.
On the other hand we have Marnie Stern, with her song “Patterns of a Diamond Ceiling,”takes the idea of Gould’s radio documentaries a bit further. In this song Marnie creates a tone poem of sorts where after narrating the actions of characters those actions are then assigned an idiosyncratic sound or motive. She begins by explaining “I will paint you a picture that’s inside my head.” Following that introduction she begins to describe that you are now standing in a room while “around you is a solitude trilogy,” and a bit later “you sit down and start to think of ideas of the North,” which is followed by it’s sound that is a chromatically ascending line. After the narration is complete and the scene has been set she begins to place the motives on top of one another, creating a contrapuntal sound collage much in the same way that Gould did with his intercut ambient sounds and multiple interviews at once. In this way Marnie is creating a bit of a miniature homage to Gould’s radio broadcasts.
We can now see how these two artists have made their influence blatant, but it still remains to be seen why they chose to do so. What is the deeper connection between Gould and his work and that of Marnie Stern and Albini and Co.?
Gould’s singular personality broke down a lot of the barriers that existed between classical music and popular music in his day. He was famously quirky and thoroughly interesting, not to mention self-aware. He knew that people were sometimes more interested in the spectacle of Glenn Gould, the character that was Glenn Gould perhaps more so than they were interested in the performances of the man himself.
Glenn Gould was punk rock before punk rock was punk rock. He did things his way and he couldn’t possibly care less what people thought of that. He knew that he was brilliant enough to do his own thing, to do things his way, and not to let anyone else dictate to him how his art should be presented. He was obsessed with his own perfection and never stopped wondering how he could better express himself. This much is clear simply by listening to (as mentioned up a few paragraphs) his two renditions of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. He didn’t just perform and record a piece to leave it behind. No, those pieces, everything that he played, stayed with him and he was constantly thinking about them and learning to think about them in new ways.
This sort of work ethic and perfection is mentioned several times by Marnie Stern across all 4 of her albums. Obsession and a focus on her passion are a consistent theme in Marnie’s lyrics. In “Grapefruit” the lyric “keep on keep at it, keep on, keep at it” is repeated like a mantra. On her most recent album “The Chronicles of Marnia” in the song “You Don’t Turn Down” she states, nearly a cappella that she’s “Got to get obsessed and stay there now.” “Keep on, keep at it, keep on, keep at it” from “Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket!!” cover these themes in both its lyric and the song’s very title.
I think that Shellac’s awareness that they are a band unlike any other band around today, and that they staunchly disassociate themselves from the music industry as much as they can, supporting Touch and Go since the begining. And I think that this anti-industry stance is pretty well known because of Steve Albini’s famous tome against the corporate music world. In addition to all of this It seems that they relate more to Gould’s overall attitude, whereas Marnie Stern relates more to his obsessive desire to improve.
I’m sure that there must be other examples of Glenn Gould’s influence, even in slightly more indirect ways, can be found throughout independent rock music. It’s clear that, as Alban Berg famously said to George Gershwin, “…music is music.” It doesn’t matter how it is classified or how it is created, and perhaps the clearly constructed borders between genres that one imagines are in fact not there at all.
///
For more information on the life of Glenn Gould, and to hear the entire Solitary Trilogy follow these links:
“The Idea of North,” “The Latecomers” and “The Quiet in the Land” can all be heard in their entirety at the CBC’s site as part of their legacy audio collection. “The Idea of the North” was commissioned by the CBC as a way of introduction for themselves and have become a large and important part of Canadian culture, just like the man himself.
There are several books on the life of Glenn Gould. The first “biography” written about him was less of a biography and more a study of what made Gould the genius that he was. His habits, his practices, how he thought about music. It’s by Geoffrey Payzant and is called “Glenn Gould: Music and Mind“
You should also check out the documentary by Bruno Monsaingeon called “The Alchemist.” He actually did a whole series of documentaries about Gould, but this one is my favorite for showing Gould at work in the studio after he had permanently left the concertizing life to focus on his recording career.
Finally, my favorite movie of all time “32 Short Films About Glenn Gould.” It mixes interviews with Gould’s contemporaries alongside vignettes depicting his life. Colm Feore does an incredible job at portraying Glenn Gould.
I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a long time. I think that periodically it will be fun to actually write about music theory stuff, considering that is what I am going to school for. I’m going to try to cover stuff that I find in rock tunes that I think is interesting, things that I would teach to my class. I’ll try to do this as clearly as possible. The main purpose, for me, is to maybe take some of the mystery out of music theory and also to help people possibly develop a little bit more of a critical ear.
The first song that I am going to use is “Arms Against Atrophy” from the first Titus Andronicus album “The Airing of Grievances” from 2009. Here’s the song:
Now, the first guitar we hear is playing two Cs an octave apart, and the 2nd guitar part comes in playing an A-flat major chord. So we can visualize it this way:
Based on the chord progression through the verse, an oscillation between A-flat major and F minor, we can say that this section of the song is pretty solidly in the key of A-flat major. Notice the key signature of 4 flats (B-flat, E-flat, A-flat and D-flat) and that neither an A-flat major chord or an F minor use any accidentals outside of that key signature, because both chords are diatonic, in other words – they belong to the key. The A-flat major chord is built on scale degree 1 while the F minor chord is built on scale degree 6, so in theory terms we would call these chords tonic and sub-mediant respectively. Basically the A-flat major chord is the most important, everything leads back to it.
Now, when I say that the chord is “built” on certain scale degrees what I mean is that the scale degree, of which there are 7, serves as the pitch that the rest of the notes in the chord are based on. Chords are formed by stacking thirds. For example the A-flat major chord would begin with A-flat and then a third above that (staying in the key) is C, and a diatonic third above that is E-flat.
A-flat major scale
Above we have the A-flat major scale. Scale degree 1 is A-flat, 2 is B-flat, 3 is C and so on all the way back up to A-flat. So if we stack thirds on top of each of these pitches we have something that looks like this:
Diatonic triads of A-flat major
From left to right we have tonic, supertonic, mediant, subdominant, dominant, submediant, and leading tone triads. The ones that we are going to focus on are the tonic and submediant. I won’t bother going into Roman Numeral analysis here to try to keep things simpler.
Looking at the diatonic triads we can see that the pitches in the A-flat major tonic triad are A-flat, C and E-flat; while the pitches in the submediant triad are F, A-flat and C. We can see that both of these chords have two pitches in common, the A-flat and the C.
Thinking back to that opening guitar line, the 1st guitar part that strums the C octaves in eighth notes. That C is a common pitch shared between both chords that appear in the verse, which allows the 1st guitar to keep those eighth notes constant throughout the verse. This is important to how the song is going to modulate.
When we say that a song modulates we are saying that the song is changing key. The most common modulation for a song that begins in a major key is to modulate to the dominant. One of the reasons that this is so common is because the keys are so close to each other, in a manner of speaking. The key signature for A-flat major, for example, is 4 flats, as we have seen above. The key signature for E-flat major (the dominant key) is 3 flats. The tonic chord of E-flat major can be taken directly from the key of A-flat major without changing anything, it remains E-flat, G, B-flat. We would say that these keys are closely related because they are next to each other on the circle of fifths.
Without going completely off course here, the circle of fifths is the way that we think of key relations. Basically this means hopping from one dominant to the next. For example A-flat, E-flat, B-flat, F, C, G, D, A, E, B, F#, C#, G#/A-flat …that is the complete circle of fifths beginning on the key that we are looking at here for this song. The further away from your home key, the more distant the relationship between the keys and the more chromatic alterations are necessary to maneuver between the two.
A modulation to a distantly related key, i.e. more than 2 steps on the circle of fifths, can be accomplished a few different ways. Again, I’m not going to go too far into it, because things get complicated pretty quick. One of the ways that you can, however, is through the use of a common pitch that exists in both of the keys. “Arms Against Atrophy” modulates to the key of C major in the bridge (2:20). Thee’s that C again.
Let’s compare the two scales, A-flat major and C major:
A-flat major scaleC major scale
Note that the C major scale is lacking flats (or sharps, for that matter) in the key signature. This is because it is 4 steps away on the circle of fifths. Tonic of C major, C, is the same pitch as the mediant of A-flat major. Remember how A-flat, C, E-flat and F, A-flat, C made up the two chords of the verse, A-flat major and F minor respectively, with that C common between the two? Well the bridge here moves to a C major tonic: C, E, G. We know that it is a modulation and not just using the mediant triad because of the chord progression that follows that establishes the pitch C as the focus, or tonal center. Think of it like the center of gravity that all the pitches are drawn to. The chord progression in the bridge moves from tonic to dominant to subdominant and back to tonic again. We say that this progression establishes the tonic because it basically (simplifying again here) moves toward the dominant and returns to what is now being called tonic.
We would say, then, that “Arms Against Atrophy” by Titus Andronicus modulates from A-flat major to the distantly related key of C major through the common pitch of C. You can even hear the shift that happens, listen to the very beginning of the song. Hear those opening Cs, and then hear how they fit into the chords that guitar 2 introduces. Now go to 2:15 and listen to those very same Cs and hear how guitar two comes in now.
As a quick conclusion, you may be asking, “well the song returns to the verse after the bridge so…how do we get back to A-flat major tonic? I don’t hear the C-octaves again.” Well, first off I would say that it is true. Hey, you can’t keep doing the same thing over and over, right? The final chord of the bridge is F-major, or the subdominant in the key of C major and is made from the pitches F, A and C. Notice that this is only one pitch away from the F minor chord (F, A-flat, C) that was 50% of the verse. The last line of the bridge “…and she’s got the nail clippers at my throat,” (3:04-3:07) is where we are preparing to move back to A-flat major. The F major chord is used underneath “…and she’s got the nail clippers at my” and then they drop the A of the F major chord down a half step to A-flat on the word “throat” to create an F minor chord. That pitch, A-flat, then rings (3:07-3:17) alone until the verse picks up again with an A-flat major chord and we are up and running again, establishing the original tonic again. To be more technical this is referred to as a chromatic mediant relationship.
I hope that you were able to follow along here and that I could help you to understand the way that this song works and how music can work in general. This is only one tiny subject of many so I expect that I’ll be doing more of this in the future. Thanks for reading.
(Originally appeared on Tympanogram.com on January 16, 2012)
of Montreal - "Paralytic Stalks"
Kevin Barnes has always been one to experiment. From album to album significant changes in of Montreal’s sound and approach are apparent, which is what makes of Montreal one of the most exciting bands creating music today. They are an incredibly prolific act, putting out albums and EPs regularly, rarely skipping a year.
One can hear significant departures in sound between 2006’s Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? and 2008’s Skeletal Lamping. The next album False Priest, from 2010, saw Barnes backing off a bit on excessive experimentation and instead hunkering down with producer Jon Brion to make a psychedelic pop-funk album that captured the bands freakier side but also brought out their fondness for catchy, radio friendly hooks.
Lyrically the albums have run the gamut from the fanciful fictional tales of the band’s earlier output to the much more introspective lyrics found on more recent work, most notably beginning with Hissing Fauna…
Referring to that album as the crux of the latter part of output goes far beyond the fact that it remains their most popular work, and the work that brought of Montreal to the attention of many of their current fans. That is well deserved praise for a phenomenal album that found its rightful place on many year-end lists after its release. Digging deeper into that album, however, one will find the cell of an idea, the beginning of a rift: musically, lyrically, personally.
It was on Hissing Fauna… that Barnes brought to life the character of Georgie Fruit, who is in many ways a latter day Ziggy Stardust. Georgie Fruit is most likely Barnes’ way of exploring his inner psychological torment and sexual curiosities. Georgie is a man that has been through multiple sex changes, and the lyrics of many of the songs that are presented via his perspective are rather lurid. Of Georgie, Kevin states “He’s been a man and a woman, and then back to a man. He’s been to prison a couple of times. In the 1970s he was in a band called Arousal, a funk rock band sort of like the Ohio Players.” Looking at the way this character comes to life shows the birth of this idea, and the first instance of the actual depiction of physical, or psychological divisions in the music of of Montreal.
Hissing Fauna…was an album of two musical characters that eventually pulls itself apart, as literally as is sonically possible. It happens during the track “The Past is a Grotesque Animal” – a nearly twelve-minute long rumination on a circular chord progression that manages to build tension through incessant repetition. The song has no true verse or chorus, and varying phrase lengths offset the importance of certain harmonies over others. When the listener comes out on the other end of that track they are greeted with songs of a completely contrasting ethos. That’s the genesis of Georgie Fruit, coming out on the other side of a song that is the representation of a complete breakdown. This is where the journey that leads us to Parlaytic Stalks really begins. In understanding where this music is coming from it needs to be placed in this perspective.
If Hissing Fauna… is an album that is divided in two halves, Skeletal Lamping is an album of fractured songs that toss and turn into other songs in the middle, sometimes returning, most times not. It’s the representation of Barnes trying to hold things together. The inner demons are starting to surface and it’s becoming increasingly difficult (for us as listeners) to parse out where reality ends and the character begins. Skeletal Lamping was an album that had great parts of songs, and Barnes’ genius lies in stringing them all together. The divisions of these songs-within-songs were sometimes more jarring than others. The rift between Barnes himself and Georgie Fruit was beginning to show itself throughout the songs rather than in between them, and the alter ego Barnes had created for himself was being used to hide from reality.
Then False Priest comes along. It’s a pop-funk album. There is no longer a division; this is 100% Georgie Fruit. Just as Barnes said, Georgie used to be in a funk band. False Priest was that funk band. It was pure theater. We were no longer listening to of Montreal: we were listening to a band within a band, a character within the man.
This becomes quite obvious when one stops to consider that the titles for False Priest and Skeletal Lamping, as well as EP thecontrollersphere, are taken directly from a lyric from “Faberge Falls for Shuggie” – a song that comes after “The Past is a Grotesque Animal,” after that first rift. thecontrollersphere, I remarked when it came out, contains bits that sound as if Kevin is physically tearing himself apart, and “Flunkt Sass vs. The Root Plume” takes its sonic cues directly from Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust. One of the more startling elements of this track is that, for the first time in the latter part of of Montreal’s catalog, Barnes is singing single tracked with little in the way of effects on his voice. He sounds as if he’s screaming for his life while re-entering the atmosphere without a suit. It’s his primal scream, something that can be heard throughout the entirety of Paralytic Stalks. The skillfully double tracked vocals that were omnipresent on earlier of Montreal recordings are now utilized sparingly, and only for special effect. More noticeable are the moments when Barnes screams out until his voice starts to break, providing this batch of songs with an emotional forthrightness and unabashed honesty. The lyrics are not simply more personal, but the songs find him connecting these ideas with the listener with no filter.
That trend of clarity and directness continues on this album, that, in typical of Montreal fashion, is obscurely named. There is no more hiding behind the irony of song structures that contradict the lyrical content, like the dance-y, upbeat “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse” from Hissing Fauna…: a song about a crippling depression and Barnes’ pleading with his own body and medications to not fail him. He sings “I’m in a crisis, I need help, come on mood shift, shift back to good again, come on be a friend. Come on, chemicals!”, underpinned all the while by some of the most cheerful music on that album. Musically, it’s saccharine sweet, rich with synth hooks and a quick tempo.
That type of contextual dissonance is no longer present on Paralytic Stalks. Not only are the lyrics in the first person, but so is the music. The lyrics here are represented in direct correlation with the music, and the music is recorded in such a way that it puts the minimum amount of distance between the song and the listener.
The piano sound in “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission,” as an example, is recorded such that we can hear the room. The listener is placed directly in the presence of Barnes as he speaks to us, giving an unprecedented amount of weight to his words. Every punch connects. By this point Barnes has managed to completely strip away any sense of pretense, and has come out from behind his curtain, which stands in opposition to the heavily effected synth tones that have been occupying many of of Montreal’s previous recordings. Instead of using the recording process as a smokescreen where everything is manipulated, synthesized and recorded directly to the board, much of this album manages instead to connect directly with the listener. Barnes obviously learned quite a bit by working with Jon Brion. The sound of timpani at the opening of “Dour Percentage” is taken directly from the False Priest sessions.
Many of the lyrics on Paralytic Stalks are more relatable than usual. The opening of “Spiteful Intervention” jumps in with raw emotion and trepidation with the line “It’s fucking sad that we need a tragedy to gain a fresh perspective on our lives.” It truly feels like Barnes is including us as listeners. He is no longer speaking from a distance about himself or another party that we are not privy to as listeners. We have been brought into the fold and welcomed.
That personal forthrightness goes even further later in the song when he states “I spent my waking hours haunting my own life / I made the one I love start crying tonight and it felt good / still there must be a more elegant solution.” Though the opening of the lyric is honestly and painfully sung in a loud, trembling yell with a tenuous grasp on pitch, there is still that sense of reaching out to do more. Barnes is realizing the consequences of his actions and his feelings. The lyric doesn’t point to his being a self-obsessed animal, but the complete thought points to his willingness to change: the theme and process behind the past few releases.
Barnes, in recent interviews about what to expect from his latest album had this to say: “I don’t want to become a caricature of Georgie Fruit…I want to keep growing as an artist.” (source) This statement signals Barnes’ intentions to change everything in his musical process from the ground up. His art is a reflection of his life. Personal problems are being faced head on; Barnes is not shielding himself. There are attempts to change things, attempts to brighten up the band’s sound and turn the darkness in on itself. Paralytic Stalks is the sound of facing the things that made him turn inward.
The pedal steel has an uncanny ability to sound like a sunrise, and when it is used in “Wintered Debts,” it has exactly that effect. Its use, combined with the shift in piano style throughout the album, is more playfully reminiscent of Tin Pan Alley song pluggers of the early 20th century. “Malefic Dowery” is made gentler with the addition of that piano, and a delicate arrangement of woodwinds.
That characteristic of change has always existed on of Montreal records. It’s an unwillingness to settle for a certain sound, or a certain instrumental configuration to define them. Paralytic Stalks features woodwinds, strings, and some auxiliary percussion, in addition to the tradition rock band set up. of Montreal has always augmented that sound with two basses, with great effect, as is the case of the intricate bass-lines in “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission.” Those bass-lines can now be seen through the lens of psych-funk, like on False Priest. of Montreal isn’t bound, musically, by any outside conventions. This is a band that seeks only to evolve from album to album, and Paralytic Stalks they prove that they do that better than any other band working today.
“Ye, Renew the Plaintiff” drops a beat around the minute mark, another instance of the track tearing itself apart. After that disorienting rhythmic shift, a pulsating, straightforward rumination on only a few chords begins, and Barnes can’t help himself from shouting “How can I defend myself against this world?” and “I’m desperate for something but there’s no human word for it / I should be happy but what I feel is corrupted, broken, impotent and insane!” From there, the confessions continue rolling out, easily, effortlessly as if the dam has finally been breached and Barnes is helpless to cease the flow of confession. “I’ve become so hateful, how am I ever going to survive this winter / I can think of nothing but getting my revenge, / make those fuckers pay / but it’s not gonna happen and it’s eating a hole in me!” With that, Barnes is screaming at the top of his lungs through an increasingly wild guitar solo.
With “Exorcismic Breeding Knife” something out of the ordinary happens. Instead of everything being pulled apart, gradually or otherwise, the song starts in utter chaos and remains there throughout the majority of its seven-plus minutes. Toward the conclusion of the song, the chaotic elements come together in a beautifully resolute major chord that emerges from a cloud, at first with a suspension, and is then resolved.
Following this track is the album closer, “Authentic Pyrrhic Remission.” It starts off as the most straightforward track on the album, let alone the past several of Montreal albums. The intricately woven, multi-tracked bass-line is present; there are sweet harmonies, a danceable beat and an ultra catchy melody. It’s not until the lyric, “every time I listen to my heart I just get hurt” where nearly every instrument drops out of the mix completely, and things begin to descend once again into utter bedlam. Both the song and album close with the gentle sound of a reverb laden piano and Kevin’s solitary voice stating the most startling confessional revelation yet: “Til this afternoon I was an exile, but now that word is obsolete. There are no nations, no concept of ego. Our illumination is complete.”
With that, Barnes manages to sum up all the concepts he’s brought up since “The Past Is A Grotesque Animal” on Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer? That closing line manages to not only find Barnes at peace with his now exorcised inner demons, but simultaneously lets the listener know that we have traveled this path with him, and we have grown together through the journey.
Paralytic Stalks is, in certain ways, similar to many other of Montreal albums. Throughout it, we can never be certain which direction we’ll be traveling next. Upon its conclusion, however, we’re left with a mixture of closure and expectation.
Beginning today Paralytic Stalks is available for streaming on Rdio and Spotify so head on over to those sites and check out the entire album and then head over to Polyvinyl and order one for yourself! There are still some of the limited edition Fuchsia 180g records left, hurry!
![of Montreal - "Paralytic Stalks"](http://quartertonality.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/of-Montreal-Paralytic-Stalks-cover-300x300.jpg "of Montreal - "Paralytic Stalks"")
