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Youth - Daughter

I never used to listen to Daughter. I knew the song. Of course I knew this song, but I didn’t recognise it right away when Youtube threw it at me a few days ago. Still, suddenly it was winter 2011/2012 again. I was drinking coffee. Watching the people passing by below the Punto Café. Hanging out with people I haven’t seen in years now.

Do I remember the song or do I remember the sound? My mind’s troubled by emptiness. This song sounds so much like 2011/2012.

I’ve been reading a lot about music and memory lately, but I don’t know how much a sonic image can influence memory. A kind of sound or a typical production quality, do they trigger memories in a similar way specific songs do. Does a cover, using exactly the same melody and exactly the same chords, but with completely different instruments, elicit the same affective response as the original?

I’ll let you know when I know more. Meanwhile I’ll discover some other songs by Daughter. It seems like I missed out on a pretty cool band. And I’ll wonder if this will happen again, with another band, another sound, another time.

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XIII au soleil

Willam Vance

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“Signal” by Woshibai

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Astronauts talking about viewing the earth from the moon, from The Overview Effect: Awe and Self-Transcendent Experience in Space Flight

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Albert Uderzo, Jean-Michel Charlier, René Goscinny

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You know John Harris for his sci-fi art. Now check out his fantasy works. 

(via @pascalblanche)

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Ray Bradbury

Corgi silver series - cover art by Bruce Pennington 

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I love that logo

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Youth - Daughter

I never used to listen to Daughter. I knew the song. Of course I knew this song, but I didn’t recognise it right away when Youtube threw it at me a few days ago. Still, suddenly it was winter 2011/2012 again. I was drinking coffee. Watching the people passing by below the Punto Café. Hanging out with people I haven’t seen in years now.

Do I remember the song or do I remember the sound? My mind’s troubled by emptiness. This song sounds so much like 2011/2012.

I’ve been reading a lot about music and memory lately, but I don’t know how much a sonic image can influence memory. A kind of sound or a typical production quality, do they trigger memories in a similar way specific songs do. Does a cover, using exactly the same melody and exactly the same chords, but with completely different instruments, elicit the same affective response as the original?

I’ll let you know when I know more. Meanwhile I’ll discover some other songs by Daughter. It seems like I missed out on a pretty cool band. And I’ll wonder if this will happen again, with another band, another sound, another time.

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1977 Electric Light Orchestra Out of the Blue Promo Commercial (via: YouTube)

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Kleurendoof

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#weer een jaar verder.

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Animated by Heinz Edelmann. From the intro to Der Phantastische Film, a 1970 German TV program featuring classic and obscure horror and sci-fi movies.

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Nights Wave & Passing and Galloping - Mice Parade

Bem-Vinda Vontade by Mice Parade

So you’re stuck in traffic in Antwerp, and you listen to the second song from the album above, and you wonder why you even try to write your own stuff at all. Why don’t you just become a Mice Parade cover band? Probably because it’s too hard, but the transition between the songs Nights Wave and Passing and Galloping is so heart-breaking, so beautiful and it gives me everything I need from music: emotion, cleverness and a sound that fills up the complete ear.

It starts wonderfully. The complex, slightly overdriven crunchy drums of Nights Wave. A groove, with an off-putting metric scheme,* combined and contrasted with the softly whispering dulcit voice of Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir. She sings something, and I don’t know what she sings, but it means a lot. It’s incomprehensible, but it’s not meaningless. It touches without words. When the song shifts in feel, she makes place for Adam Pierce, the anagramical leader of the band, who’s words are clear. He sings some very true lines, his favourite scribling in a bathroom stall.

“ You’ve seen it all Except what happens when you call The one you overlooked for a good time ”

This is a vandalism of a vandalism. He could have mixed up lots of things, to a similar effect, and it would have turned out fine, but this is simply his. The mixing of the harsh drums with the soft voices. The use of existing tropes and habits, and twisting and turning them around. The editing of a gross line on a bathroom stall wall, adding words that mean nothing on their own. Put together this forms poetry.

He does the same in the transition to Passing and Galloping. The songs do not always appear together, but the way they are placed after each other on Bem-Vinda Vontade, illustrates perfectly what I’m trying to say. Nights Wave ends in these twinkly, small, bell like arpeggios. Those chords then get repeated by a heavily overdriven guitar that sneaks into every crevice in your ear and fills the whole cochlea with sound. The drums go completely crazy. Just banging on the toms, passing and galloping from ear to ear in an awesome stereo setup.

In this way Mice Parade fulfils all my auditory needs. When I want something soft to listen to, I can listen to Mice Parade, and when I need something hard, I can listen to Mice Parade. Often even to the same song. They bring me shoegazy post-rock ish music, but throw a lovely bridge with latin rhythms in the middle. That’s all I need.

And then I wonder. Why do I even try to write my own stuff at all? Why don’t I just become a Mice Parade cover band.

*For those who care: In my view the metric scheme of the song switches between bars of 3/4, 4/4 and 5/4. The intro consists of four bars of 3/4, one of 5/4 and again four of 3/4. (See the image) So the general feel of the intro is in ¾, two extra beats in the middle. The bar in 5/4 is elongated to extend the ringing of the open hi-hat. What is expected is a return to 3/4, maybe after an upbeat, because there’s already been one in the third bar of the groove. What follows, however, is an upbeat of two beats, instead of one, and only after that the trusted 3/4 returns. (But can you still trust it.) The first upbeat is a drum fill and the other a guitar chord with a dominant function. This is what throws you off. The first upbeat would logically lead to the expected return to 3/4, as has happened before, but it gets extended. It goes on into an extra upbeat in the guitar, which also sounds like it could be the first beat of a new section. This weird quirk, just an extra beat, throws the whole groove off.

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Technically the hardest kind of rock would be diamond, but I can see why they went for “metal”. Being in a diamond band sounds like you’re playing glam rock, which isn’t even that hard. But one day somebody will create the hardest music ever, and to prove that it is the hardest music ever, they will have to call it diamond. And in that moment, I will be there to support them. For diamond is a great name for a genre, and great things must be supported.