Musical Maps

Last time I mentioned a musical map, I brought up the wonderful example of Ishkur's Guide To Electronic Music, set in rings akin to those indicating the age in a tree. I was inspired by that map to get on terms with what western music has been up to for the last 100 years (not just electronic music), and truly, there was and still is SO MUCH going on. Really, it's like, if you've just been listening to what's on the radio and MTV, you're missing a whole damn universe of musical colours- and as I began mapping it out realised that with each decade, this musical explosion increases exponentially.

So I based my take on musical history on Ishkur's model, big, concentric rings that mark each decade, beginning with everything before the 40's, extending into the end of this decade. Music's a fuzzy business, you can't create clear-cut boundaries between genres and the labels given to a genre can change over the decades when people look back to older music. Also, I wanted to show music more or less like a web of influences; just like disco got it's flavours from funk, soul and apparently a bit of salsa, funk roots itself in psychedelic rock, soul (again) and jazz. I knew though that I'd have to work on the layout, otherwise it'd be so messy and hard to read that nobody would bother. It's tricky, specially when after the sixties, music exploded into a myriad of styles.

Perhaps too I should have looked at some other examples before embarking on a journey only a few nutty people embark. I looked around the web and found some pretty interesting ways other people have been doing similar things. How does one represent something fuzzy, subjective and ever-changing like music? Maybe the Information Is Beautiful blog has a few things to teach us about clearly visualising information. Here are a few maps from around the web (click on images) :

So, to begin, I found this one here focusing on the relationships between different kinds of electronic dance music. It leans heavily on the artistic side, but that's not bad at all. Sadly, it's an image I found aaages ago and kept it because I found it pretty, but I never knew out who made it or where I could find it again. But for the meantime, we can marvel at the psychedelic colour mixtures and funky lines linking each genre-bubble.

INTONE, a music-based marketing company has this particularly interesting layout, genres are like stops on the London underground system, connected to each other by colours representing a similar sound or evolution. I quite like it because of its simplicity; it's easy to read and make immediate connections, some dating to thousands of years (see ''The Drum'', the big black circle bottom-left). Definitely, a good deal of research and careful design planning went into this. It's good for those making the most evident connections, but if you're deep into music connections, it might be a bit too simplistic.

On a very similar approach, the blokes at The Guardian attempted to map out 100 years of musical evolution, again on a London-tube underground map. This one differs on its approach in that it has artist names instead of styles of music, but the different 'paths' in different colours carry different styles of music. This one focuses solely on western music, particularly Anglo-American music, so don't go looking for merengue, salsa, shibuya-kei or kwaito. Allegedly, this focus was to prevent the editor's head from exploding. Yes, it would look awful with so much. I found it linked here.

This next, the ''Tourist Map of Music'', impressed me. Unlike all the previous ones, it's actually interactive. You type the name of a band/artist, and in a minimalist blue screen the name you typed appears, and around it the names of similar artists will gravitate and organise themselves, the closer they are to the central name, the bigger the likelihood that fans of the artist/band you typed listen to that too. Pretty awesome! How do they do that?!? I think that with a bit of streamlining, this could definitely be the tool of future music consumers helping them to discover new sounds, because of its ease of use. In the words of the creator, Marek Gibney, ''Gnod'', the system on which this monster thing works, ''is my experiment in the field of artificial intelligence. Its a self-adapting system, living on this server and 'talking' to everyone who comes along. Gnods intention is to learn about the outer world and to learn 'understanding' its visitors. This enables gnod to share all its wisdom with you in an intuitive and efficient way. You might call it a search-engine to find things you don't know about.''

These following two are also interactive and actually let you listen to music in an interactive map-like way. The first one, Musicovery, is everything Yahoo! Radio wasn't. In a deceptively simple set of controls (shown to the left), you can navigate through the emotional and energetic spectrum that is music, through mood (positive to negative) and amount of energy in the music. You can also browse through decades and select genres to be more nit-picky. There are a few other features (like a search bar which doesn't actually show what you're looking for) and other things which you'll have to figure out :D. This last 'map' on the right, the SOM-enhanced JukeBox system (SOMeJB) analyses your mp3 files and interprets their sonic properties, namely dynamic range and yeah, how it sounds. Then as seen here, it plots different areas for each style, arranging them according to sound related to each other. That's why classical music and heavy metal are on opposite extremes. See how you can make playlists interactively, taking these paths through different soundscapes!

(Click for higher resolution and all that nice stuff)

Finally, I could have probably learned a few lessons from the examples above before embarking on the fuzzy history of western music and its genres, but I was trying to be a bit 'different'. Yes, lot's o' nodes and lines connecting stuff, like neurones in a brain, though both frighteningly complicated and somehow organised. Also, I marked all I saw fit into large categories into different colours. Red for rock music, green for jazz. the usual stuff. Yellow for break-beat (that kind of music that was born when hip-hop artists stringed different drum breaks from old funk records and gave birth to a billion things, and blue for 4-to-the-floor, which is simply that basic rhythm where the kick marks the 4 beats in a bar, which was popular in rock but really took off when disco music became the bomb. Also, you might be wondering why in my map, punk (in red) gave birth to this thing I call ''Oh no, you didn't!''. Yeah, I'm being biased there, but I don't think any serious person thinks great things about crunkcore and emo... I'll leave that for a future post on punk music.

''Out on the edges they're mixin' the colors some they don't like it but me, I don' t mind in every city they' re mixing the colors different shades for the whole countryside''
Mixin' The Colors - Iggy Pop

Edit:
Apparently this cool map here escaped my search: Map of Metal
A really cool flash-based map of the history of heavy metal and it's different genres, loaded with tons of music samples and descriptons. Also, it looks like jeans, leather, badass buttons and chains. What else could you ask for?

Black Metal v.s. Death Metal

When telling apart two closely-related genres of extreme music, sometimes, it's not the best thing to ask someone who is a hardcore fan. To illustrate the kind of confusing answers I got when asking the difference between black metal and death metal, I'll use the answer a close friend of mine gave me:

''Death metal has more of a 'black' influence in it, while Black metal has more of a 'death' influence''.

Uh-uh... I remember we had a fight, although not because of arguing, but because I found it so ridiculous anybody would seriously make such silly labels, and make one label the definition of the other one. If you don't know much about rock music (let alone heavy metal), it's quite likely that they will all sound the same to you. It's like me, I'm not really familiar with all the different kinds of, say, East European folk music styles, so maybe they'd all sound the same to me. Or to put it in more familiar terms to 'westerners', particularly people over 30, all electronic music (so labelled 'techno') sounds the same. (''How dare they call drum & bass something so dirty as techno or electronica!'' might be a d&b fan's reaction).

To be honest, while I have been listening to heavy metal (and playing it) since around I was 15 or maybe even before, I still can't tell black and death apart when someone plays a bunch of tracks of both genres. At face value, the word 'black' is just a metaphor for 'death' anyway. And perhaps I didn't (and still don't) care enough to really do. Oh, and I preferred progressive and experimental kinds of metal to black/death anyway.

If you read this far, chances are you probably like the music at least a teeny weeny bit. Or hate it bigtime and you're up for some trollin'. If you listen only to what's top 40, do not, I repeat, DO NOT play the following video. Not only will you find it all terrible, you will not be able to tell the difference between death metal and black metal... OK, after listening to it I too was left clueless.



So, you're not crying, your ears are not bleeding and you did not have a breakdown. Congrats. Of course I'm blowing it out of proportion anyhow. It WILL be like sandpaper to the ears of some people 'cause maybe that's the point.

After seeing several people's definitions and stuff, I think maybe I'd say that the line is blurry as hell, but when both kinds of music were born, they were a lot more different. Nowadays a lot more mixing of styles occurs anyway. So, here's the idiot's guide to sounding like you know what is the difference between Black Metal and Death Metal:

The Idiot's Guide To Sounding Like You Know What the Difference is Between Black Metal and Death Metal

Themes:
It seems to be widely accepted that a large part of what it is to be 'black metal' has to do with being anti-Christian and/or Satanic/Pagan/whatever (note the use of and/or). Black Metal is more of an ideology, just like some ridiculous punk sub-genres out there, such as Queercore, Riot Grrrl, Oi!, Nazi Punk, Christian-democrat-pro-life-Punkcore, etc.... Nihilism, depression and misanthropy also seem to be staple themes in Black Metal. Also, confusingly, they talk about death too. Huh.
Death metal, on the other hand, tends to focus more on negative emotions, sorrow, frustration, social alienation, but in a much more serious and dark way than the blues. Consequently, stuff like necrophilia, torture, rape and the suffering of the human soul are frequent subjects. Not saying that many Death Metal lyricists have ACTUALLY suffered in such ways... Also, like its name, death metal focuses on mortality and death. That's right, Death Metal is pretty much headbanging to a Memento Mori. What's more confusing is that while Death Metal frequently uses slasher movie-style violence in it's lyrics, it can also be about Satanism, anti-religious things and philosophy, just like Black Metal. Huh.

Musical style:
Alright, from the video above you might have thought: ''Yo, I can't tell them apart''. And yea, I guess you could say it doesn't really make a difference on this wide vast Earth. Unless you're a fan... Here's some interesting imagery used by a random internet user to describe what each 'sounds like':

''Death metal sounds like the reaper comming to war
Black metal sounds like a gothic castle filled with blood and the howls of suffering souls.''

Okay, that's nice, but if you're into the more musicological take on the distinction, here's the more or less controversial definition I formed after reading several people talk about it:

The vocals in Death Metal, ''death grunts'' or ''growls'', are usually deep and aggressive. I can't make out a word they say most of the time. Neither can I for Black Metal, which uses high-pitched shrieks, screams and snarls which seem to imitate, like in the clever imagery above, souls in anguish and that kind of crap. Could someone maybe pick a pitch in the middle?

Song structure and melodic/harmonic content seem to actually define both kinds of music a lot more than theme. In both kinds of music, traditional song structure is eschewed, yielding some unconventional things. More clearly said, Death Metal favours weirdass song structures with frequent tempo and key changes, while Black Metal favours unconventional songs where the verse-chorus distinction is not very clearly emphasised and long and repetitive stuff goes on. Y'know, if you had some sort of pagan ritual, you'd want to have some repetitive, jarring music that would put you in trance (or coma?). Thinking about it, Black Metal almost seems to be like funeral march music, with a languishing, militaristic and sombre feel, while Death Metal focuses more on the violence that came before said death, hence, it's more like a battlefield.

Death Metal seems to care more about the instruments and skills than Black Metal, which has more textural and atmospheric sensibilities. It's all about that dark nasty feel that gives ya chills, bro. Black Metal tends to be more melodic than Death Metal as a consequence. They revel in dark and ominous chord progressions and the use of the tritone, more aptly, Diabolus in Musica. All hail dissonance as a stylistic choice! But wait, Death Metal likes dissonance too sometimes. More like free jazz in the sense that it can be atonal (not follow any particular key or scale), or championing the use of chromatic runs. However these differences are trivial. Now there's so much Melodic Death Metal and Blackened Death Metal that these things become meaningless.

Black Metal guitars are pretty standard, just very fuzzy and lo-fi it seems. Low guitar tunings are very rare, strangely for a kind of music that wants to sound ominous. Guitars are often heavily downtuned in Death Metal, all the way down, so that the E string resonates a thick, heavy, chugging C (some bands even go as far as tuning all the way to B). Classic example of a riff where only the deep C power chord is used is Children of Bodom's 'In your face': (note that this is Melodic Death Metal, obviously, it emphasizes melodies unlike noted above)



Also, in Black Metal, technicality is frowned upon; guitarists seem to find guitar solos pointless, so go hoping you'll find many in their music. Death Metal, however, like it's grand-daddy Thrash Effin' Metal, is obsessed with solos. As I said above, it's the kind of music that emphasises prolific musicianship, you must have the chops for this kind of music (not that you can be a crappy Black Metal guitarist and get far).

Bass guitar as an aspect of heavy metal tends to be quite limited. In Black Metal, it is practically nonexistent; it plays riffs identical to the rhythm guitars most of the time and on top of that, it is buried so deep within the mix that it's inaudible. Death Metal features it a bit more, but I'm not quite sure the differences are significant... anyone know?

Other instruments such as keyboards are more prominent in Black Metal than in Death Metal (unless we include Melodic varieties where it's more common). These usually give the music an ambient feel, usually via some ethereal strings, haunting pads or whatever.

The final musicological comparison comes to the aesthetic of the music and its production in the studio; Death Metal doesn't seem to mind having polished, crisp recordings where every instrument stands out, while Black Metal is as lo-fi as you can get, most bands will at least once during their early years recorded everything in the drummer's basement, some get everything recorded into one track and don't edit it at all. This DIY aesthetic is very punk itself, it's all about getting it as raw as possible. More 'mainstream' bands like Dimmu Borgir who play Black Metal with symphonic elements in it have a higher production quality, and for that reason a few stuck-up hardcore fans of traditional Black Metal will claim they sold out and that they aren't real Black Metal. Who cares? The people who recorded stuff in their basements did it for their own pleasures anyway.

But wait! What about the drums, just as important in any kind of modern music? True, I almost forgot. Well, Death Metal drummers almost universally use a double bass pedal or will have two bass drums to create that rapid-fire pummelling kick rhythm. In addition to the double bass barrage, blastbeats are heard too. Yes, they take drums seriously. The thing here is that both Black Metal and Death Metal share a great deal in the percussion department. Any major differences, I'm not sure.

And yeah, for those not sure what a blastbeat sounds like, here's an example, the first two bars are more normal double-pedal rhythms, the third and fourth bars show the blastbeats, the repeating snare-hihat-kick beating:



I could keep going about the subject but methinks this is enough. If you want to listen to more music there's the video below, but I won't go into silly stuff such as why in Black Metal, silly costumes are more frequent, or who's blamed for church burnings (no finger pointing here), who's more often portrayed (with evidence or none) racist or anything. Black and Death bands take themselves way too seriously anyway.

Perhaps it's fascinating, dunno. I don't think it's healthy to dwell in negative crap all your life like there's nothing else left. As human beings, I think it's essential that we do something to stimulate other people's thoughts, ignite imagination, instil a culture of love unto the coming generations and to strive for peace of mind and soul. This music, in the long history of mankind, is just a phase, a counter-wave to some other thing that happened before. Put into the perspective of the thousands and thousands of years of human history, it's all contrived, silly. My advice, just listen to these kinds of music for your auditory pleasure. Beyond that, move on. Strive for your full potential.



P.S.; I'm not saying that Black/Death musicians are negative, anti-religious, resented or a combination of any of them. I know, music since time immemorial has been an outlet- consider the slave's work chants, a way to lessen the burden of working under the hot sun picking cotton. But then, I find it funny, how many metal musicians that portray such suffering in their music have had it that rough? Not generalising though, the ones who did, you guys, deserve a round of applause if you made it through.

Road Art WIP

Last time I showed the making of one of a painting I made, it was terrible. I had to redo the damn thing like three times. Here, I present you all two other digital works that I made quite a while ago now, of outdoor scenes in summer and fall respectively:


Looking Out The Door by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

And here's a little GIF file showing the step-by-step (unfortunately though I forgot a few times to save and take a snapshot, so it begins when I already laid down a bunch of stuff):



You can tell it's autumn in this one:


Roady by ~skinsvideos21 on deviantART

This one took a lot longer, and if you look closely comparing the two, at least I already had bought myself a Wacom tablet when I began painting this one. However, it still took much longer since the amount of detail was much much larger.

Venezuelan DnB makes fun of Reggaeton

Searching stuff on Youtube I stumbled across a video many many people will hate, because it fuses two genres which in my opinion, are angularly different in spirit and idea; reggaeton and drum & bass. DJ Zardonic is a drum & bass artist from Venezuela who is probably familiar enough with reggaeton to understand it and express it in the medium of d&b:

Tito El Bambino - Siente el Boom (Zardonic D&B mix)



Many D&B fans hated the idea of 'polluting' their style of music with this. Maybe it doesn't have the slow swaying thumping military quality of the original hit (which is a pretty crappy song I feel), and instead is really really upbeat, perhaps so upbeat that the idea of perreo (the doggystyle dance ubiquitous in reggaeton) would be ridiculous. Also, I noticed that the typical drum & bass rhythm actually has more affinity with reggaeton than I would have suspected at the beginning. To begin with, the tempos are so similar, that is, moderate reggaeton (100 bpm) will go along with a fast drum & bass rhythm (200 bpm), and of course, the more typical 170 bpm or d&b matches with the slower reggaeton tracks (around 85 bpm which is quite slow, only things like crunk play at slower speeds; 75 bpm).

Second, the typical reggaeton rhythmic pattern (known commonly as the Dembow) is prety much the inverse of the typical jungle rhythm! What do I mean by inverse? The fact that if one switched the bass drum with the snare drum in a reggaeton beat you could get a d&b rhythm.

Here we have the typical reggaeton rhythm, played at around 91 bpm:


Note that reggaeton, like its precursor, dancehall and all the styles of popular dance music that came after and before such as disco, house, dub and trance, it is characterised by a kick drum that marks every 4 beats in a bar (only 2 beats seen here). While in those music styles, the snare marks the offbeats usually, in reggaeton the first offbeat is slightly shifted giving the music a bouncy feel.

If we change the pattern so that the kick drum plays the pattern of the snare and vice-versa (as shown below), like magic, we get a basic drum and bass rhythm. The kick drum no longer marks every beat, but the snare marks every offbeat.


However, the beat is slightly shifted (the kick doesn't begin at the start of the bar), so if we move everything a beat and a half to the left, we truly get the backbone to most d&b out there:



While to me it seems that reggaeton has a strong emphasis on the downbeat (beats 1 & 3 in a bar), drum & bass, while complex it seems to carry an emphasis on the offbeat which it inherits from hiphop (ultimately, the rhythm is like the foundations it got from the Amen Break, as everybody knows, the most famous drumbreak in the history of drumbreaks).

Two styles of music created in very different places with quite different cultures which however share many of the same roots.

Drum & bass is a more commercial, slick, produced version of ragga jungle that appeared in the UK, making the Amen Break secondary to the beat and more like a background filling to the beat illustrated above. Ragga came from the Jamaican toasting (from where hiphop also sprung back in the early 80s), taking in reggae along with it, deep basslines and sped-up Amen breaks.

Reggaeton, well, was dancehall music from Jamaica adapted into the Spanish communities of Puerto Rico and Panama, infused with the specific style of rapping/toasting they developed. Where did the Dembow rhythm come from? Shabba Rank's song Dembow seems to have been the first to have made it famous but it probably dates waaay back into reggae music and from Afro-Latin roots.

Note that along with early Ragga music from which D&B eventually arose, early Reggaeton had a very lo-fi, raw quality, something BOTH drum & bass and reggaeton lost as they developed into popular commercial music. Maybe Jamaica's involvement in the origins of both styles of music serves as a bridge strong enough to allow DJ Zardonic's remix above and other kinds to be possible. Interesting in all of this might be how we can dig back into history and see when they were one kind of musical idea.

So, closing this rather long and unstructured post, I leave you with DJ Zardonic's main page and his other musical projects, in addition to a little musical ''sketch'' of the commonalities between both genres I made this morning rather quickly (strangely enough it was before I found out about the beat-inverting thing or Zardonic's beat juggling in the remix at the beginning of the post):



http://www.myspace.com/djzardonic (industrial drum & bass with a metal touch)
http://www.myspace.com/triangularascension (dark ambient music)
http://www.myspace.com/moreonklipp (minimal house)

The Chilean Army's Changing Outfit

I found this advert on a university magazine a while back. I thought that it was an interesting way to portray how the Chilean military (like that of any country anyway), has always been changing throughout these 200 years. Note how the original inhabitants of this land, the Mapuche, seemed to have minimalist military outfits (of course that's not true, perhaps they dressed like that all the time), and the colonials had some unwieldy outfits that probably made them really inefficient for combat. Colours fade to greys and then to the typical greens & browns of modern outfits. Seems funny, back then, was the idea that they had to look nice, or as bombastic as possible or what? ''Hey! Look at me! I'm bright blue and red! I'm very well camouflaged among... uh, my fellow soldiers!''

(click for larger view)

Information Is Beautiful

Information might seem unwieldy, ugly, sterile and unreadable if there's tons of it and we don't know how to tackle it. Data crunching is a hard, arduous task and so is data mining. While that might be true, it also might be true that they are labours that are becoming increasingly important as technology becomes more powerful and all that jingodingo. So, what can we do with cumbersome spreadsheets and gigabytes of 'raw data'? We can either sift through it and try to represent it in the old-fashioned ways or try to hook up our visual interest, making it visually understandable and therefore something we can relate to on a more primal level. We need to since there's just so much information out there and it keeps multiplying at exponential rates (for more about this, an article called Jumping Jesus sheds more light).

Here we have David McCandless (from the site Information is Beautiful), talking to us about his passion of data, and how to make it actually fun:



Another approach he hasn't touched in the video is a bit more artistic; Seed Magazine has a slideshow called ''The Age of Impossible Numbers''. Can you guess how many containers pass through American ports every 12 hours? You might be really surprised by the answer, and how it looks!

Rock Band Logos, Black Metal Band Logos

Me being interested in design (brand design, graphic design, creative stuff), I could post about the best company logos out there, though that would be a cliché (and Apple's logo would probably be on the top 5). Instead, here's an interesting facet of brand design; the design of logos that identify musical groups. Since they beat me to it, I'm not gonna reinvent the wheel here and show off the work of these two blogs.

The first one gives us a list of logos by some of the greatest rock bands out there. Did they have an influence on their career? Chances are that it's a big deal. Check the 10 Top Rock Band Logos, and their history, yo!







On the other hand, it seems that black metal acts strive for some way to be as unrecognizable as possible, disguised in a lame excuse of 'aesthetics of death'. See if you can figure out what's in each logo! Whee!

Oh No, Puns!

A while I found an article titled ''Porn actor goes on rampage at video production office, police say; 1 dead, 2 wounded''. I can't remember how the heck I stumbled across this article, but I bookmarked it because I thought that the comments were just hilarious (if not really mean).
Here's the article:

"Police say a disgruntled employee, in the process of being fired, stabbed three co-workers in Van Nuys with a Samurai-style sword."

The man believed responsible for a rampage at a Van Nuys video production facility that left one dead and two wounded is a struggling porn actor who faced the loss of his job, authorities said.

Stephen Hill, 30, allegedly used a machete-style weapon in the attack, which occurred about 10:20 p.m. at a video distribution business on Hayvenhurst Avenue and Saticoy Street.

Los Angeles Police Department Det. Joel Price said Hill was both working and living at the offices of Ultima DVD Inc.

Price said Hill did production work and acted in several porn movies. But on the night of the attack, he apparently faced the loss of his job and eviction from the office.

Hill allegedly fled after stabbing the three co-workers. The victims were rushed to a hospital, where one was pronounced dead. There were seven people in the office when the attack occurred.

The LAPD is investigating the attack as a case of workplace violence. The suspect fled in a blue Toyota RAV4 with license plate 5YTC423.

-- Andrew Blankstein

Well, it's odd and tragic itself. And probably these comments full of puns will offend quite a few:

''I'm sure being evicted was HARD ON him''

''what? he didnt shoot it with his gun?''

''I'm sure he will receive a stiff sentence.''

''I thought this was a joke ad for a lumber company or a wood worker union or some hot dog company .... and on and on ...''

''Maybe he got some bad ass... And I can't even get any.. What a dork....''

''How do one gets to be "struggling porn actor"? Either you're one or you're not. I don't think anyone "struggle" to become a porn actor. ''

''Too bad, i really enjoyed his stuff''

''The cialis side effect strikes again!!!...i can see so many innuendos with this story like "Raging porn star still at LARGE"''

''one of is co-stars kept calling him' shorty' !! almost as bad as 'speedy' !''

''A "struggling porn star"? I thought porn was what struggling real actors / actresses, who have no marketable skills, fell into while trying to "make it big"!''

''So, this guy was going to get the "shaft"?''

''Now he will go from violating hot chicks to being violated by ugly dudes. What a moron.''

''If you live by the sword, you'll die by the sword.''

''This is a bad time to lose your job, even for a porn "actor".
I'm surprised this kind of thing is not being reported every single day as more people lose their jobs.
It's tough out there people, so hold hands and share your lunch with others, just like you did in Kindergarten. :)''

This last one I agree with. The world needs more hugs. Naked hugs. (okay maybe not naked; that's situation-dependent).