ILM Listening Chamber 11

we all know who it IS, but who is it? too easy to say it's, um, the young man with the numbers in his name, right? yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn. maybe i'm getting old, or maybe i heard the plunderphonics record eight years ago. either way, i'm bored.

(and why was this so huge? i was expecting a twelve hour marathon la monte young kazoo drone thingee.)

I have a suspicion who it is doing this remix, and I don't think it's number boy.

Anyway it's kinda cool, but the reason why the "Straight Outta Compton" remix is a great record and this isn't, is because the "Compton" remix has *dynamics*. That one went somewhere, building in intensity as it went along, and it was structured to alternate between all-obscuring static and carefully-selected chunks of the original. That had the dual effect of making the pieces of the original sound harder than ever before, and making the pieces of static more dramatic and shocking.

*This* one just drags because it's laboring under this constant level of haze. It doesn't go anywhere. IMHO this particular rapper's voice doesn't work well with glitch either, the way Ice Cube's did, it's too trebly to mix with the higher-pitched static and the lame trip- hop keyboards.

Sorry to get your hopes up. I just thought a 7.2 MB file takes a wee while to download on a regular ol' modem. (How long does it take?)

okay, so, prompted by learning who the actual remixer was, i went back and listened to this with fresh ears. i actually like the instrumental quite a bit. (the opening 30 secs. or so, especially.) and the beat's real strong, under all the fuzz. in fact, i'd like a lot more without the rap element overtop. i think its just a bit like larding a cake which was already quite suffcient (since it doesnt really fuck with the orignal track, per se.)

so what did we learn? listening without knowing the artist can also lead to not listening carefully.

I'm not sure what I think of this. It does remind me of what I've heard of number-boy, but seems even more distorted/glitchy. I don't know if I could ever really listen to music like this for pleasure -- timbrally, it's just not what I'm into. At the same time, though, I do sense an intelligence at work here, and can't easily dismiss it. But I can't really see myself internalizing its language, neither in my own work nor in my listening habits. Still, it's weirdly unsettling music. There's something here; it's just not for me, at least not at this point.

Oh, and at 56k (48000, actually), with mild web-browsing and email-checking in the background, it took me about 25 minutes to download, give or take.

This is not nearly noisy enough.

Oooh, it gets much better at the end.

Kris is right about the last 30 seconds or so. Other than that this is feeble and Ian is right about why - "SOC" was a battle between song and treatment on multiple dimensions - vocals, beats, everything stretching distorting and compressing - it was psychedelic and it managed to restore the sense of alienation and threat which a decade had rubbed off the original. The base track here is just being smothered in glitch, and it's too recent for a recontextualisation to work. A definite miss.

The noise is fine but there is this bloody rapper in the background... Just joking. My ears prefer hip-hop on its own to this experimentally distorted shite. Sounds a little bit like someone changing the frequency constantly on a short-wave radio. John Cage was fun compared to this.

Actually number boy (or one of his label mates) HAS done a version of this. And it's miles better than this weedy "remix" effort. I thought at first that this was that other version, and was getting all smug that I knew one at last when I realised - I don't. Anyway, this version is completely pathetic - anyone could have thrown this together in 20 minutes.

But - interesting that someone had the same basic idea for the listening post as me (I submitted no.10)

I've tried to download number boy's version in the past, but all I got was a 30 second hoax, so I assumed that it didn't really exist. I thought this was it, but Jeff and Jess say otherwise, so there ya go. Anyway, on to the actual track: yeah, it ain't much. I'm with Ian and Tom on this one. Some vaguely interesting bits, but not nearly as compelling a listen as SOC. Buried in the mix there's a fragile, simple melody that is carried through most of the track, adding a little replay value. But not much. Best bits are probably the first and last 20 seconds. And even those aren't really very good. Coulda retained elements of the original to much greater effect.

this reminds me of my past as heavy metal kid way back in the 80's when we tried to out-cool the others by listening the hardest stuff available. i guess, this is either a prank or someone is trying to be a hard man in a contemporary version of the 80's metal kid attitute. pointless.

you are hurting this remixer. you are hurting him in his heart.

(and no, its not me. i'm not *that* crazy that i'd immediately post something bad about my own work. maybe.)

i'm assuming the distortion is intentional, but frequency-range wise this sounds like it was recorded across a telephone. from the other side of the earth. actually, just play the original through a digital phone, you'd probably get a similar result. it could've been encoded at 64 and it would've sounded the same.

nice, sure, but even i could play somone's half-assed idm track and an a capella eminem track through a distortion pedal.

***WARNING SPOILER ALERT***

sorry, dave. i promised myself that i'd be emotionally detached from the results of this one but it's really starting to get to me me, especially now that it's apparently become the most-hated listening chamber ever, and i want to talk about it. i decided to put up a track i had done for a number of reasons; i wanted to see how people would react to a song made by a fellow ilmer without them knowing, i wanted to put something i liked in listening chamber (again), and partly i wanted people to hear the cool sounds i had made, this being one of the most pop gimmicky things i had done and one of the newest (other remixes i've done by pulling the vocals off the cd single, dmx and anti-pop mainly, were from last october/november while this was largely done in january with a few things half- heartedly added in the months after). i was never expecting an overwhelmingly positive response, but i wasn't hardly prepared for the wave of negative reactions which i've now found are harder to detach from than i thought. usually whenever i'd get done with something like this i'd show it to my friends after school and their reaction was a positive one, not glowing praise but usually laughter and acknowledgement that i was making something half-way interesting come out of my bedroom computer speaker. maybe i was spoiled by that, i didn't and don't really have that much faith in any musical talent of mine, but it was fun to play around with songs i liked and make them weird and loud. actually the original idea was just a sorta idm-clicky-synthy remix (the 'lame triphop keyboards', as ian said) but after that was done i was bored and put in lots of static and uglier noises (the poor sound quality just comes from the fact that i have an ancient mac with an ancient sound program and a whopping twenty-four megs of ram, so i can't handle large aiffs or any kind of mp3 at all, which means this was made entirely in 11 kHz). i first got into the guy with the numbers in his name that winter as well and there was an aspect of that involved, but i had been doing this sort of thing for a while anyway (my old aspiration was to mix wu-tang with ventolin, ha ha) sorry this comes off as bitchy or thin-skinned, it's just been bothering me and honestly couldn't take many more 'fuck this' condemnations, i'm not looking to change anyone's opinions or guilt-trip, i just wanted to withdraw myself from any more emotional involvment with this. thanks for your honesty.

Blimey, Ethan. Well, sorry to have been so harsh, but I didn't like it much. I did like the last 30 seconds though. Ah well. You're right though, I would have judged it differently if I'd known it was by 'one of us', but I think ultimately that wouldn't have been a good thing because I'd have been setting lower barriers than you or the music deserved. My comments stand - I reckon doing something like this with a familiar vocal immediately means you're playing culturally with the track and you need to have an idea of what exactly you're trying to do with it - also if you don't mess the vocal around more the element of surprise is lost and the listeners' ears track the bit they know (vocal) and not the bit they don't (noise). Hope you don't feel too awful about it. :(

i think this would have been a much better experiment if i had either used something much newer or done a track especially with ilm as an intended audience.

or maybe if you had waited more than a day before blowing your lid and posting the spoiler? It was only posted on the 16th, for chrissakes. a week or two might have given more time for positive opinions to balance out the negatives.

chris.

i gave my reasons. nobody ever posts to these after the first two days anyway.

Ethan -- I listened to this knowing it was someone from ILM, but not knowing precisely whom. And I must say that, listening in that context, I was impressed with the drum programming, which -- considered by itself, in terms of a short snippet of it -- is quite good. My criticisms would be largely the same as everyone else's: (a) the lack of dynamic shifts makes it feel slight or thrown- together, (b) the use throughout of the roboticizing flange effect on the vocal (in addition to mostly just letting it run through) contributes to that lack of dynamics, (c) there's no work put into cutting up, reassembling, or shifting the melodic loop, which just loops along, and (d) the fact that the drum programming stays in the same pacing and fuzz register, never really breaking down or cohering, really contributes to that problem. But as a guy who's fiddled with this sort of thing himself, I completely understand that that's precisely the challenge to doing it, and I completely understand how easy it is to get so wrapped up in the details of the sound itself (and all the work it takes to get to that point) that not enough work gets done on the bird's-eye, big-picture view. And again, speaking as a person who's worked on this sort of thing: I'm impressed by the programming.

Two things to remember: (a) all of this Listening Chambers thus far have included a certain amount of "fuck this" -- largely from posters who just don't care for the genre to begin with. I sent in an indierock track fully aware that a certain percentage of people would say, "That's just a crappy old indierock track," and plenty did -- so keep in mind that a lot of the criticism here might not have as much to do with your workmanship as it seems. And (b), keep in mind that you sent your work into a context where people are expecting professional-grade best-of-the-best worth-considering tracks -- my guess is that if this thread had been titled "something Ethan put together," people would have been a lot more impressed and offered a lot more constructive criticism. I very nearly sent Dave something of mine to try this same experiment, but concluded in the end that I might not yet want to be judged on absolute professional would-you-buy-this standards, for basically the same reasons that have become clear in this thread.

To whoever made this track (I read your post but covered up your name, so I still don't know who you are as I type this):

Funnily enough, it suddenly struck me last night that this was probably the work of an ILMer - although my thought was that this was an elaborate practical joke, designed to sucker us all. That probably makes you feel even worse, doesn't it? although you do say you often create music to amuse your friends.

Anyway, I have listened again to the track. I stand by what I said before, but you've touched my guilt strings, so I feel I should at least now explain why. Okay, it probably took you longer than 20 minutes to make this track, but the "composition" is pretty basic isn't it? Apart from the slightly more interesting bits at the beginning and the end, the essence of it is 2 bars of programmed keyboards/beats, looped, combined with a borrowed vocal that more or less corresponds with the original). Some glitch noises are then superimposed. I just can't see much imagination at work here. I too have experimented at home with these sorts of bizarre combinations, which partly explains my "anyone could have done this" response.

Have you heard number boy's take on Eminem? I think there's more than just clever clever recontextualising going on there. And I don't believe "anyone" could have made that track. (Which is not to say everything number boy does is by definition great - he and his peers have dared to release a lot of crap too). Anyway, please don't feel discouraged by what people have said about this track. Go on making music and sharing it.

Finally, although I haven't thought this through, it seems to me the point of the Listening Chamber is that, because all the labels and (most of the) context are stripped away, one ought to be able to judge every track submitted on the same terms. So I shall continue to say something's terrible if I think it is, regardless of whether it was made by someone I know (and I hope more ILMers are as brave as you and will submit something) or by an artist with a major label record deal.