Weird Studies - Episodes Tagged with “Music”

Episode 171: The Beauty and the Horror

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Thu, 13 Jun 2024 21:00:00 -0400

This week on Weird Studies, Phil and JF explore the intersections of the beautiful and the terrible in art and literature. There is a conventional beauty that calms and placates, and there is a radical beauty which, taking horror’s pale-gloved hand, gives up all pretense to permanence and fixity and joins the danse macabre of our endless becoming. This episode is a preamble to a five-week course of lectures and discussions starting June 20th on Weirdosphere, JF and Phil’s new online learning platform. For more information and to enroll in The Beauty and the Horror, visit www.weirdosphere.org.

REFERENCES

JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the audiobook, with a new introduction written and read by Donna Tartt.
Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two
William Blake, “The Tyger”
Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows
Steven Spielberg, Raiders of the Lost Ark
Walter Pater, The Renaissance
David Lynch, Twin Peaks: The Return
Anna Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror
Donna Tartt, The Secret History
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness
Charles Baudelaire, “Le Voyage”
Franz Schubert, “Death and the Maiden” Quartet
Franz Schubert, Piano Sonata in C major, D. 840
J.R.R. Tolkein, The Hobbit

Episode 164: Towards a Weird Materialism: On Expressionism in Cinema

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Mar 2024 10:30:00 -0500

What is expressionism? A school? A movement? A philosophy? At the end of this episode, Phil and JF agree that it is, above all, a sensibility, one that surfaces periodically in history, punctuating it with occasional bursts of frenetic colour and eruptions of light and shadow. Whenever it appears, expressionism challenges our tendency to divide the world up into neat quadrants: mind and matter, subject and object lose their legitimacy as they start to bleed into one another. Prior to recording, your hosts agreed to focus on two pieces of writing: Victoria Nelson's The Secret Life of Puppets and a recent Internet post on eighties and nineties American films entitled "Neo-Expressionism: The Forgotten Studio Style." Though focused on a number of films, the conversation includes forays into the world of the visual arts, literature, and music.

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REFERENCES

comrade_yui, “neo-expressionism: the forgotten studio style”
Victoria Nelson, The Secret Life of Puppets
Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Weird Studies, Episode 161 on ‘From Hell’
Bram Stoker, Dracula
E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art
Jean-Francois Millet, “Gleaners”
Kathe Kollwitz, “Need”
Robert Weine, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
Arnold Schoneberg, Pierrot Lunaire
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1
Peter Yates (dir.), Krull
Wilhelm Worringer, German art historian
Weird Studies, Episode 136 on ‘The Evil Dead’
In Camera The Naive Visual Effects of Dracula
Kenneth Gross, Puppet: An Essay on Uncanny Life
Weird Studies, Episode 121 ‘Mandwagon’

Episode 159: Three Songs, with Meredith Michael

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 11:15:00 -0500

Every once in a while, JF and Phil like to do a “song swap.” Each picks a song, and the ensuing conversation locates linkages and correspondences where none was previously thought to exist. In this episode, they are joined by the music scholar Meredith Michael – Weird Studies assistant, and co-host of Cosmophonia, a podcast about music and outer space – to discuss songs by Lili Boulanger, Vienna Teng, and Iron & Wine. Before long, this disparate assortment personal favourites occasions a weirdly focused dialogue on time, impermanence, control, (mis)recognition, and the affinity of art and synchronicity.

Support us on Patreon.
Buy the Weird Studies sountrack, volumes 1 and 2, on Pierre-Yves Martel's Bandcamp page.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES
Iron and Wine, “Passing Afternoon”
Vienna Teng, “The Hymn of Acxiom”, (and here is the live version)
Lili Boulanger, Vieille Priére Bouddhique
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle Mozart’s Arrow
William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
Vladimir Jankelevitch, Music and the Ineffable
Hector Berlioz, Fugue on “amen” from La Damnation du Faust
Slavoj Zizek, A Pervert’s Guide to Idiology
Federico Campagna, Technic and Magic
Shepard Tone
Rudolf Steiner, The Influces of Lucifer and Ahriman Special Guest: Meredith Michael.

Episode 149: Song Swap: On Judee Sill's 'The Kiss' and Wilco's 'Jesus, Etc.'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 21 Jun 2023 12:00:00 -0400

Occasionally, JF and Phil do a song swap. Each host chooses a song he loves and shares it with the other, and then they record an episode on it. This time, JF chose to discuss "Jesus, Etc." from Wilco's 2001 album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and Phil picked Judee Sill's ethereal "The Kiss," from Heart Food (1973). It was in the zone of Time, in all its strangeness, that the two songs began to resonate with one another. Sill's song is a fated grasping at the eternal that is present even when it eludes us, and "Jesus, Etc." is a leap across time that captures, in jagged shards and signal bursts, the events of the day on which Wilco's album was scheduled to drop: September 11, 2001.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's podcast on Wagner's Ring Cycle.
Listen to Meredith Michael and Gabriel Lubell's podcast, Cosmophonia.
Download Pierre-Yves Martel's new album, Mer Bleue.
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!

REFERENCES

Judee Sill, “The Kiss”
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears
Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, “Surf’s Up”
Weird Studies, Episode 148 on “Twin Peaks”
Wilco, “Jesus Etc.”
Jeff Buckley, singer-songwriter
William Gibson, Forward to Dhalgren
L. E. J. Brouwer, Concept of “two-ity”
Dogen, Genjokoan
David Bowie, “Heroes”
Philip K. Dick, Valis
Weird Studies, Episode 147 “You Must Change Your Life”
Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory
James Longley, Iraq in Fragments
Sam Jones, I am Trying to Break your Heart
Number Stations

Episode 142: The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men"

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 10:30:00 -0400

Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of contemporary cinema's greatest score composers when he passed away in 2018 at the young age of 48. Last and First Men, his enigmatic directorial debut, was released shortly after in 2020. Based on a novel by the same name by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton, the film offers a sustained meditation on the prospect of extinction, the eventuality of humanity's disappearance from the comos. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the images and sounds of the film as they flicker and swell against the backdrop of nonbeing that envelops us all. The conversation touches on the idea of beauty, Brutalist architecture, modernism, and futurity.

Preorder Pierre-Yves Martel's album Mer bleue.

Support us on Patreon and gain access to Phil's ongoing podcast on Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

Jóhann Jóhannsson, Last and First Men
Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, SNL character
Spomeniks, Yugoslavian monuments
Olaf Stapleton, The Last and First Men
Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters
The Last of Us, television show
Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Speech
Weird Studies Episode 139 on Art Power
Numenius, Platonist philosopher
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Jia Tolentino, “The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa”
Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”
D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover

Episode 137: Brute Force: on Sunn O)))'s 'Life Metal'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 11:00:00 -0500

What Evil Dead 2 is to the Baroque, Sunn O))) is to Brutalism. Or more like: if the likening of Evil Dead 2 to the Baroque felt like a stretch in episode 136, the brutalist bona fides of Sunn O)))'s drone metal are incontestable. In this episode, their 2019 masterpiece Life Metal frames a conversation touching on 20th-century avant garde music, the tactility of sound, the metaphysics of the Kickass Riff, Aztec aesthetics, the virtues of impermanence, and of course, the sublime beauty of brutalist buildings.

Listen to volume 1 and volume 2 of the Weird Studies soundtrack by Pierre-Yves Martel
Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop

REFERENCES

Sunn O))), Life Metal
Theatre of Eternal Music, musical group
Daniel Albright, Panaesthetics
Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes
John Wray, “Heady Metal”
Nyarlathotep, Lovecraft character
Byung-Hul Chan, The Philosophy of Zen Buddhism
Fred Wilcox (dir.), Forbidden Planet
H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness
Godfrey Reggio (dir.), [Koyaanisquatsi](imdb.com/title/tt0085809/)

Episode 115: Transience & Immersion: On Brian Eno's 'Music for Airports'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0500

Soft, soothing, and understated as a rule, ambient music may seem the least weird of all musical genres. Not so, say JF and Phil, who devote this episode to Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music for Airports, the 1978 album in whose liner notes the term "ambient music" first appeared. In this conversation, your hosts explore the aesthetic, metaphysical, and political implications of a kind of music designed to interact with the listener -- and the listener's environment -- below the threshold of ordinary, directed awareness. Eno and Peter Schmidt's famous Oblique Strategies, a deck of cards designed to heighten and deepen creativity, lends divinatory support to the endeavor.

Support us on Patreon
Find us on Discord
Get the new T-shirt design from Cotton Bureau!
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

REFERENCES

Brian Eno, Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Gabriella Cardazzo, Duncan Ward, and Brian Eno, Imaginary Landscapes
Oblique Strategies Deck
Theodore Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music
Marc Auge, Non-Places
Anahid Kassabian, “Ubiquitous Music”
Sigmund Freud, “On Transience”
Weird Studies, Episode 104 on Sgt. Pepper
Joris Karl Huysmans, A Rebours
Roger Moseley, Keys to Play

Episode 110: Monks of the Cultural Apocalypse: 'The Glass Bead Game,' Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 10 Nov 2021 11:00:00 -0500

In the current "attention economy," which has resulted in plummeting literacy rates and the almost wanton neglect of various cultural practices, what significance does culture even have? Why seek to preserve something our age has decided doesn't have to exist? Perhaps Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game can be read as an answer to those questions. The order of monastic scholars in the novel exists mainly to remember what others were happy to consign to oblivion. In this episode, Phil and JF discuss Hesse's ideas on the order and its sacred game in terms of how they might help us meet the challenge facing anyone who believes the value of culture can't be expressed in dollars and cents.

REFERENCES

Herman Hesse, The Glass Bead Game
Pope Benedict XVI, former head of the Catholic church
J.S. Bach, Well Tempered Clavier, Rosalyn Tureck interpretation and Glenn Gould interpretation
Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Chauvet Cave
Peter Bebergal Strange Frequencies
Andy Goldsworthy, British artist
Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists
William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light

Episode 104: We'd Love to Turn You On: 'Sgt. Pepper' and the Beatles

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 04 Aug 2021 10:30:00 -0400

It is said that for several days after the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the spring of 1967, you could have driven from one U.S. coast to the other without ever going out of range of a local radio broadcast of the album. Sgt. Pepper was, in a sense, the first global musical event -- comparable to other sixties game-changers such as the Kennedy assassination and the moon landing. What's more, this event is as every bit as strange as the latter two; it is only custom and habit that blind us to the profound weirdness of Sgt. Pepper. In this episode, Phil and JF reimagine the Beatles' masterpiece as an egregore, a magical operation that changes future and past alike, and a spiritual machine for "turning us on" to the invisible background against which we strut and fret our hours on the stage.

Support us on Patreon:
Find us on Discord
Get your Weird Studies merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.)
Visit the Weird Studies Bookshop
Buy the Weird Studies soundtrack

REFERENCES

Weird Studies, Episode 31 on Glenn Gould’s ‘Prospects of Recording’
Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art
Brian Eno, Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy)
Weird Studies, Episode 33 On Duchamp’s Fountain
Emmanuel Carrère, La Moustache
Rob Reiner, This is Spinal Tap
Richard Lester, A Hard Day's Night
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2
James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games
Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze, What is Philosophy?
Arthur Machen, “A Fragment of Life”
David Lynch, Lost Highway
Zhuangzi (Butterfly dream)
Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head

Episode 98: Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 12 May 2021 11:00:00 -0400

Exotica is a kind of music that was popular in the 1950s, when it was simply known as "mood music." Though somewhat obscure today, the sound of exotica remains immediately recognizable to contemporary ears. Its use of "tribal" beats, ethereal voices, flutes and gongs evoke a world that is no more at home in the modern West than it is anywhere else on earth. With its shameless stereotyping of non-Western cultures and its aestheticization of the other, exotica rightly deserves the criticism it has drawn over the years. But as we shall see in this episode, if you stop there, you just might miss the thing that makes exotica so difficult to expunge from Western culture, and also what makes it a prime example of how the "trash stratum" sometimes becomes the site of strange visions that transcend culture altogether.

REFERENCES

Phil Ford, “Taboo: Time and Belief in Exotica”
Future Fossils, Episode 157
Weird Studies, Episode 21: The Trash Stratum
Weird Studies, Episode 79: Love, Death and the Dream Life
Jack Smith, “The Perfect Filmic Appositeness Maria Montez”
Yma Sumac, Peruvian singer
Les Baxter, "The Oasis of Dakhla"
Steely Dan, "I Heard the News"
Stravinsky, Rite of Spring
Les Baxter, “Hong Kong Cable Car”
Jacques Riviere, review of The Rite of Spring
Nenao Sakaki, Japanese poet
Lew Welch, American Beat poet
JF Martel, “Stay with Mystery: Hiroshima Mon Amour, Melancholia, and the truth of extinction”
Jeffrey Kripal, Mutants and Mystics
Captain Beefheart, “Orange Claw Hammer”
Martin Buber, I and Thou

Episode 79: Love, Death, and the Dream Life

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 05 Aug 2020 10:30:00 -0400

In this episode of Weird Studies, an improvised analysis of two pop songs -- Nina Simone's version of James Shelton's "Lilac Wine" and Ghostface Killah's visionary "Underwater" -- becomes the occasion for a deep dive to the weird wellspring of artistic creation. In trying to understand these songs and why they love them so much, your hosts touch on themes such as necromancy, decadence, liebestod, visionary experience, the Muslim image of paradise, the necessity of rifts, Norman Mailer's concept of "dream life," and the magical operation that is sampling.

Header image: Boris Kasimov, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

James Shelton, "Lilac Wine"
Nina Simone, "Lilac Wine" from the album WIld is the Wind (1966)
Ghostface Killah, "Underwater, from the album Fishscale (2006)
MF Doom, "Orange Blossoms," from the album Special Herbs, Volume 4, 5 & 6
Richard Strauss, [Salome](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salome(opera))_
Weird Studies, episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
C. G. Jung's practice of active imagination
JF Martel, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice
Thomas Mann, Death in Venice
Paul Horn, Visions
Alexander Mackendrick (dir.), The Sweet Smell of Success
Les Baxter, American composer
Les Baxter, "Papagayo"
Debussy, [Nocturnes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnes(Debussy))_
Rebecca Leydon, music scholar
Weird Studies episodes 73 and 74, on C. G. Jung's aesthetic vision
Alexander Courage, Theme from Star Trek ("Where No Man Has Gone Before")
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Norman Mailer, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket"
James Joyce, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake

Episode 72: Morning of the Mutants: On the Castrati

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 29 Apr 2020 13:00:00 -0400

For over two centuries in early modern Italy, boys were selected for their singing talent castrated before the onset of puberty. The goal was to preserve the qualities of their voice even as they grew into manhood. The procedure resulted in other physiological changes which, combined with an unnaturally high voice, made the castrati the most prodigious singers on the continent. As Martha Feldman shows in her book The Castrato, a masterpiece of cultural history, the castrated singer was such a singular figure that he invited comparisons with angels, animals, and kings, attracting adoration and ridicule in equal measures. The castrato was a true liminal being, and as JF and Phil discover in this episode of Weird Studies, an unlikely herald of the present age.

REFERENCES

Martha Feldman, The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds

Stanley Kubrick, American filmmaker
Alessandro Moreschi, the last castrato, singing "Ave Maria"
Baruch Spinoza, Ethics
X-Men
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings"
Thomas Ligotti, "Mrs Ligotti's Angel", read by horror writer Jon Padgett
Weird Studies, Episode 48: Thomas Ligotti's Angel
Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica
Genesis P-Orridge, American musician and occultist

Episode 60: Space is the Place: On Sun Ra, Gnosticism, and the Tarot

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 13:00:00 -0500

Somebody once said, "No prophet is welcome in his own country." Whether this was true in the case of jazz musician and composer Sun Ra depends on whom you ask. With most, the dictum probably bears out. But there are those who can make out certain patterns in Ra's life and work, patterns that place him among the true mystics and prophets. Of course, these people already believe in mysticism and prophecy, but Sun Ra's total devotion to his myth does not leave much wiggle room on this front. He is asking us to choose: believe or disbelieve. And if you go with disbelief, you'll need to explain the sustained coherence and lucidity of his message, and the transformative power of his music. In this episode, Phil and JF take a look at Sun Ra's unforgettable film Space is the Place, interpreting it as a document in the history of esotericism, using gnostic thought and the tarotology as instruments to bring some of his secrets to light.

REFERENCES

Sun Ra, Space is the Place
Sun Ra: Brother from Another Planet_
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus and [Kafka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minority(philosophy))_ (for the concept of minority)
Antoine Faivre, French historian of esotericism
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences
Eliphas Lévi, French occultist
Edward O. Bland (director) The Cry of Jazz
Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, or, Cosmos and History
Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal
Stanley Kubrick, Dr Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
Aleister Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice
Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America

Episode 54: Lobsters, Pianos, and Hidden Gods

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 28 Aug 2019 13:00:00 -0400

"All things feel," Pythagoas said. Panpsychism, the belief that consciousnes is a property of all things and not limited to the human brain, is back in vogue -- with good reason. The problem of how inert matter could give rise to subjectivity and feeling has proved insoluble under the dominant assumptions of a hard materialism. Recently, the American filmmaker Errol Morris presented his own brand of panpsychism in a long-form essay entitled, "The Pianist and the Lobster," published in the New York Times. The essay opens with an episode from the life of Sviatoslav Richter, namely a time where the famous Russian pianist couldn't perform without a plastic lobster waiting for him in the wings. In Morris's piece, the curious anecdote sounds the first note of what turns out to be a polyphony of thoughts and ideas on consciousness, agency, Nerval's image of the the "Hidden God," and the deep weirdness of music. Phil and JF use Morris's essay to create a polyphony of their own.

REFERENCES

Errol Morris, "The Pianist and the Lobster"

Sviatoslav Richter, Russian pianist
Nick Cave., Red Hand Files #53
Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Bruno Monsaingeon (dir.), Richter: The Enigma
Bon Jovi, "Livin’ on a Prayer"
Brad Warner, "The Eyes of Dogen"
Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition
Edgard Varèse, composer
Benjamin Libet, neuroscientist
Robin Hardy (dir), The Wicker Man
Frans De Waal, Mama’s Last Hug
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego
Tarot de Marseille - XVIII: The Moon
Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life
Carl Jung, "On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetry", The Red Book
Terence McKenna, Food of the Gods

Episode 42: On Pauline Oliveros, with Kerry O'Brien

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 00:00:00 -0400

In the mid-1960s, Pauline Oliveros was a composer of experimental electronic music. But at the end of the 1960s, shocked by the political violence around her, she turned away from electronic technology and towards to a different kind of experimentation, which Dr. Kerry O'Brien calls "experimentalisms of the self." The immediate result of this turn was Oliveros's Sonic Meditations, a series of instructions for group bodymind practice. This work became the seed of Deep Listening, a sort of musical yoga Oliveros developed throughout the rest of her long career. Dr. O'Brien joins JF and Phil for a conversation on practice, "gaining mind," the ritual value of art, the wisdom of the body, and whether Deep Listening is really best understood as art at all.

REFERENCES

Kerry O'Brien, "Listening as Activism: The 'Sonic Meditations' of Pauline Oliveros"
Pauline Oliveros, American composer
John Cage, 4'33"
Dead Territory performing Cage's 4'33"
Alvin Lucier, "Music for a Solo Performer"
Peter Sloterdijk, You Must Change Your Life
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Lawrence Weschler, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees Special Guest: Kerry O'Brien.

Episode 38: Style as Analysis

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 16 Jan 2019 10:30:00 -0500

Music writing has always been something of an occult practice, trying by some weird alchemy to use concepts to describe stuff that defies the basic categories of intellect. So long as we stick to classical music, we can pretend that nothing too odd is happening, since the classical tradition has been steeped in notation for centuries. But when a musicologist attempts to analyze, say, an ambient track by Brian Eno, things aren't so simple. Suddenly notation won't do, and there comes the need to make use of every tool in the poet's shed. This episode focuses on a recently published article by Phil on this question. In due course, the discussion turns to the power of good writing: its capacity not just to convey an author's subjective impressions, but to disclose new facets of the ineffable, baroque objective world.

SHOW NOTES

Phil Ford, "Style as Analysis" in The Routledge Companion to Popular Music Analysis: Expanding Approaches, edited by Ciro Scotto, Kenneth M. Smith and John Brackett
Christopher Ricks, Dylan's Vision of Sin
Ferrucio Busoni, Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey
Phil Ford, Dig: Sound and Music in Hip Culture
Jerry Hopkins, No One Here Gets Out Alive
Brian Eno, Another Green World
Mitchell Morris, The Persistence of Sentiment: Display and Feeling in Popular Music of the 1970s
William Youngren, “Balliett’s Bailiwick,” Partisan Review 32, no. 1 (Winter 1965)
Whitney Balliett, Collected Works
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory

Episode 31: Scarcely Human at All: On Glenn Gould's 'Prospects of Recording'

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 24 Oct 2018 10:00:00 -0400

Most people know Glenn Gould as a brilliant pianist who forever changed how we receive and interpret the works of Europe's great composers: Bach, Beethoven, Schoenberg... But Gould was also an aesthetic theorist who saw a new horizon for the arts in the age of recording technology. In the future, he said, the superstitious cult of history, performance, and authorship would disappear, and the arts would retrieve a "neo-medieval anonymity" that would allow us to see them for what they really are: scarcely human at all. This episode interprets Gould's prophecy with the help of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the Chinese Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou, and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, among others.

SHOW NOTES

Glenn Gould, "The Prospects of Recording"
Marshall McLuhan's Tetrad of media effects
Ludwig van Beethoven, Concerto no. 3 in C minor
Glenn Gould, "Glenn Gould Interviews Glenn Gould about Glenn Gould"
Glenn Gould and Yehudi Menuhin, dialogue on The Music of Man
Jean-Luc Godard, A Married Woman (A Married Woman)
Heidegger, Der Spiegel interview (1966)
Daoist sage Zhuang Zhou
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
Stanley Kubrick, A Clockwork Orange
Marshall McLuhan, The Playboy interview
Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Douglas Rushkoff and Michael Avon Oeming, Aleister and Adolph
Joyce Hatto
Lionel Snell, My Years of Magical Thinking
Kevin Bazzana, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work
Phil Ford, “Blogging and the Van Meegeren Syndrome”
David Thompson, Have You Seen...?: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films

Episode 28: Weird Music, Part Two

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 14:00:00 -0400

"Music is worth living for," Andrew W.K. sings in his latest rock anthem. In this second episode on the weirdness of music, JF and Phil focus on two works steeped in ambiguity and paradox: Bob Dylan's "Jokerman," from the landmark post-Christian album Infidels, and Franz Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz, No. 1: The Dance at the Village Inn," inspired by an episode in the Faust legend. If this conversation has a central theme, it may be music's power to unhinge every fixed binary, from God and the Devil to culture and nature. Music, as exemplified in these pieces, can put us in touch with the abiding mystery of the eternal in the historical, the unhuman in the human... The hills are alive!

REFERENCES

Bob Dylan, "Jokerman"
Franz Liszt, “Mephisto Waltz no. 1,” performed by Boris Berezovsky

Andrew WK, "Music is Worth Living For"
Leonard Cohen, “The Future”
C.G. Jung, Aion
Douglas Rushkoff, Testament
The Guardian, “Carthaginians sacrificed own children, archaeologists say”
Garry Wills, "Our Moloch"
Minoan snake goddess statues
Richard Wagner, Parsifal http://www.monsalvat.no/
T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
Daniel Albright, Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts
Beckett, Not I
Nikolaus Lenau, German Romantic poet
Wolgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1, translated by David Luke
Weird Studies, Episode 3: Sin: "Ecstasy, and the White People"

Episode 27: Weird Music, Part One

Phil Ford and J. F. Martel — Wed, 26 Sep 2018 13:00:00 -0400

In this first of two episodes devoted to the music of the weird, Phil and JF discuss two works that have bowled them over: the second movement of Ligeti's Musica Ricercata, used to powerful effect in Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and the opening music to Cronenberg's film Naked Lunch, composed by Howard Shore and featuring the inimitable stylings of Ornette Coleman. After teasing out the intrinsic weirdness of music in general, the dialogue soars over a strange country rife with shadows, mad geniuses, and skittering insects. And to top it all off, Phil breaks out the grand piano.

Header image by Bandan, Wikimedia Commons

REFERENCES

Ligeti, Musica Ricercata, 2nd movement
Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman, opening music for David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch

Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Viktor Shklovsky, "Art as Technique"
Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut
Hitchcock, Psycho
Vulture, "The Evolution of the Movie Trailer" by Granger Willson
Official Trailer for The Shining_vs teaser for _2012
Jan Harlan (director), Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures
David Cronenberg, Crash
William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
Gunther Schuller's interview with Ethan Iverson
Weird Studies, Episode 25: David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch
Deleuze & Guattari, Anti-Oedipus