Steel Pole Bath Tub were an undeniably prolific band, releasing somewhere in the neighborhood of ten EPs and LPs between the years 1987 and 1995, as well as a heaping handful of singles. But even this level of productivity wasn’t enough for these noise-rock weirdoes, and the 90’s found the main members of SPBT participating in two fully-fledged side projects: Tumor Circus (with Jello Biafra), and Milk Cult, which was basically a pseudonym the band used when they wanted to explore their more sample-based, abstract electronic side. Some folks call it “industrial,” and as much as I’m not eager to describe this music as such (it’s not like it’s rooted in the KMFDM aesthetic) I guess that comes fairly close to hitting the mark.

I heard Milk Cult’s Burn or Bury (the band’s second release) shortly after it was released in 1994, and found myself particularly excited about it because the album featured guest spots from two members of one of my all-time favorite bands (still true): Faith No More. Billy Gould, Faith No More’s bass player, does a guest spot on guitar on a pummeling, metal-laced track called “Bow Kiness Static.” And it’s cool. But what I was really excited about was hearing the guest vocals that Mike Patton contributed to the album’s opener, “Psychoanalytwist.”

Patton’s now widely known as a highly experimental vocalist, but in ’94, he was still branching out, and a vocal turn like the one he pulls out on this song, while not completely out of left field, definitely felt like a step in a new direction. And that was exciting to me. But what was really exciting, and what kept me coming back, was the song itself. Patton’s vocals end up being only one part of what is not only an infectious and catchy tune, but also an unassumingly intricate one, which covers a lot of ground in three and a half minutes.

Milk Cult – “Psychoanalytwist”
 

The song opens with heavy breathing in the right channel, followed by a Click to read the rest…

Sometimes it can feel like the music world is just treading water between Radiohead releases. Yes, we’ll listen to tons of other bands and fully enjoy many of them, but Radiohead remains one of the only groups that can still stop everyone dead in their tracks, getting them to drop what they’re doing and run to their computers, scrambling to frantically download the band’s newest offering. Perhaps I’m exaggerating a bit here, but I’m certainly not the first person to posit that Thom Yorke and the boys really do seem to be our modern-day version of The Clash – The Only Band That Matters.

Radiohead makes it easy to be a fan of their music, because there’s so many facets to what they do: Their songs are sonically complicated, but still often melodic enough to get stuck in your head for days. Their lyrics are notoriously indecipherable, and even when revealed, seem to ask more questions than they answer. Each member of the band is highly proficient at his instrument, with madcap tinkerer Jonny Greenwood proving himself adept at gadgets a lot of us don’t even recognize. Yes, they’re the sort of band that bridges the gap between snobby musicians, music nerds, and passive fans who just like a good tune.

I was right there with all these folks in February, eagerly anticipating the release of the band’s eighth album, The King of Limbs. I’m having to restrain myself from diving into a full-on review of the record, because I could ramble on about it for a while. But I’ll keep it short, for our purposes here: at first, I wasn’t sure what to make of the LP. But after repeated listens, I’ve grown to love it. And one of my favorite tunes from the record is one of the more stark, airy compositions, and one that certainly didn’t click with me right away: “Give Up the Ghost.”

Give Up the Ghost

It was only when I watched a YouTube video of Thom Yorke performing the song solo that I put together its minimalist origins and its heavy use of looping. There’s one loop that runs throughout the entire song (the “Don’t hurt me” line), and even after I had listened to the track probably thirty times (before I had watched the vid), it never occurred to me that that part remained static throughout the course of entire five minutes. In the live version, it’s obviously tough to miss this – you can watch Yorke initializing that loop, as well as the others that chime in towards the end of the song. But on the album version, the band builds the composition so gradually and carefully that you never have a chance to get bogged down in any repetition. It’s really impressive.

The song starts with Click to read the rest…

With the explosion of audio technology, at any one moment you can listen to your favorite band on an iPod, video chat on Skype, tune out typical office buzz, watch a singing cat on YouTube, and talk with a friend on Bluetooth. With dozens of sound sources striking your ears at any one moment, how can you train your ears to listen and not just hear (and ignore) sounds? How can you filter out the unimportant noise in your life and focus on truly listening to what matters?

“We know more about hearing than listening.” – Pauline Oliveros

Legendary composer Pauline Oliveros developed the concept of Deep Listening as a unique way to develop the ear in relation to actively listening to sound and not just hearing. Deep Listening fosters creativity in the arts and technology by cultivating improvisation and an “appreciation of sounds on a heightened level.”[1]

In other words, by training your ears and mind to actively listen to sounds, instead of tuning them out, you will enjoy an increased level of audio understanding, deeper levels of creativity, and connectivity with your environment.

In between concerts Pauline Oliveros took the time to share her insight about Deep Listening with Easy Ear Training:

“Deep Listening explores the difference between hearing and listening. Though we receive sound waves through the ears these waves are transduced to electrical impulses by the mechanisms of the ear and transmitted to the brain where listening takes place. The ear does not listen – the brain listens.

Listening is a lifetime practice that depends on accumulated experiences with sound. Listening can be focused to detail or open to the entire field of sound. Listening still is a mysterious process that is not the same for everyone although we have consensual agreements on the interpretation of sound waves delivered to the brain by the ears. We know more about hearing than listening.”

- Pauline Oliveros, Deep Listening institute

Click to read the rest…