mathy mondays vii

don't even try to clap along, it's mathy mondays!

Henry Threadgill - Little Pocket Sized Demons

The world of weird big band music is sadly under-explored. Were you to venture in with your land roving satellite, you would find that something about having to keep that many weird players in some form of coherent sound all while playing weird compositions in weird ways creates a particular tapestry of of interplay that can only ever arise under weird these weird big band conditions.

Henry Threadgill is a living master of this. From the unsettling harmonies to the unsettling melody to the unsettlingly mingled acoustic and electric textures is formed something that simultaneously grooves, swings, skronks, and rocks out. When guitarists Brandon Ross and Masujaa come in for solos, they straight up shred, weird 80's style and yet it sounds totally natural. Along with his own mad sax skills, the Threadgill shows that ultimate bandleader accomplishment: making all this shit work together while still retaining the band's overall guiding/compositional voice. What more can you ask for? 

mathy mondays vi

fuck a rock song, it's mathy mondays!

Shudder To Think - Hit Liquor

Yeah, this had a music video. The 90's were a strange time for rock. One time, I actually heard this song playing on the radio at a Guitar Center, and wondered whether I'd ended up in an alternate universe where someone had grabbed rock by it's cock and pulled it permanently inside out--like how they used to think female reproductive organs were literally just inverted male ones (people were dumb as hell back then--I would google you a link but my stomach is not up for the results "inside out victorian genitals" will bring right now)--and instead of macho, crushing riffitude our priorities became this. Really, all the good alt-rock bands had that thing they replaced their fore-overbearer's primal and oft-putrid* "maleness" with--e.g. Nirvana's nhilistic roar, My Bloody Valentine's vocal-masking washes of distortion, Garbage's, uh, sexiness--but Shudder To Think's was one of the weirdest. For once deconstruction is an actually apt term; it sounds like they disassembled a rock song into its constituent pieces, strew them across the floor, and then duct-taped them back together with no rhyme or reason into some horrific monstrosity that just barely works, Sid-style.

It is the this of rock songs

Here comes a part of a riff! Oh wait there's a downbeat! What the fuck it's a vocal! All just coming and going at wrongly timed intervals, the result of too small gears connected to too long pinions... or something. Throw in the seriously homoerotic video, and guitarist Christian Bale's** at first fairly straightforward sounding guitar solo made utterly weird by context until it evolves into a little buzzsaw of noise itself, and the next time you hear a normal song you'll wonder--just what the fuck is really going on under there anyway?

*seriously fuck that song
**2:15 in the video. AND YOU THOUGHT I WAS JOKING

mathy mondays v

playing math rock and doing math are both things that are hard to do... it's mathy mondays!

Behold... The Arctopus - Canada

Behold... a bunch of very fractured riffs, bouncing off each other over a springy Chapman Stick bassline. Which is all well and good and weird and mathy, and surprisingly fun (though hazardous) to airdrum to. But if you're not in love, just get to like the 2:10 mark, because there shit gets magical. Out of pretty much nowhere, a serious taping riff takes us away, building up a bed of emerald, videogame skies until we're comfortable--and then back come those bouldery riffs, crashing down in percussive crests, followed by a digital-sounding guitar solo I wish was about 27 times as long, but digital like how Neo is digital; the sound of chiptune having sex with Eddie Van Halen. ...uhhh yeah and then back to riffs again; but honestly I'm mostly just in it for the nigh-godly middle part. This is the soundtrack to the most epic of bossfights.

mathy mondays iv

rhythmically odd folk music, it's mathy mondays!

Nick Drake - River Man

Ok, I was going to finally break out the totally insane tech death metal shit today, but this just isn't a totally insane tech death metal kind of morning, so we are going with something a bit more relaxing. River Man is in 5/4, maybe the chillest of the non-standard odd meters, and, while it's not the mathiest thing ever, that is pretty weird for folk music right? More importantly, it is great. The strumming pattern creates kind of a stepping motion, as the song's subject, Betty, either steps through or imagines exploring the river, which then flows around her in lush string arrangements by Robert Kirby (who arranged like every frickin British prog folk album ever) and Harry Robertson. Listen to this while walking around on a foggy morning in Cambridge, where Drake probably wrote a lot of this album; or just close your eyes, and pretend you're in Narnia. Sometimes math can pop up in the strangest places.

Also: two big posts comin, and a mix (which is proving to be annoying to upload intact), so stay tuned!

mathy mondays iii

mathy mondays wasn't scared of the shogun, but the shogun was scared of them...

"Living In The World Today (GZA transcription)" - Steve Lehman Octet

Adders, subtracters, multipliers, and dividers, witness the Steve Lehman Octet, explorers of spectral harmony, which is not a thing I totally understand other than that it sounds hella cool, injecting scalene subdivisions into the dance of the Liquid Swords on their crystalline cover of the GZA's "Living In The World Today". Transmuting the RZA's weirdly truncated flute/vibes sample into actual vibraphone and this crazy hitch-of-a-beat thing that, lead on by drumming leviathan Tyshawn Sorey's 5th dimensional clock-tick hihat "timekeeping", threatens to give your neck some seriously confusing repetitive strain injuries. Replace rap with arabesque sax, stir, and run the hell away before it explodes. 

Do you want more?!!!??! Check the album. Even more? Check Fieldwork, the Cream (ie supergroup, also featuring Sorey) of modern jazz
If rappers had any balls, they would rap over the groove at the end. If you think jazz is dead, then know that at least it lives on a fucking flesh eating zombie. And not those lumbering fleshheads, but the James Gunn, 2004, Dawn of The Dead remake kind of zombie. 

The ones that can chase you until you die.

mathy mondays I

Flail your arms in crazy meters on your way to work--it's mathy monday!

How does Hella write a song? I always figured they just covered all the frets they wanted to use in honey, unleashed a swarm of bees, wound up Zach Hill, and let everything do its magic. Or maybe they just sit around the campfire, figuring out with some percussion and the trusty ol' acoustic geetar? ...I guess that's why I don't play this stuff.

(also, you gotta love that shit at :57.)