Beck: Classic Or Dud

Love the idea. And yet...

The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.

...that bolded title is SO McSweeney's.

Beck makes a big assumption that most people can still read sheet music?

― Chewton Mendip (White Chocolate Cheesecake), Friday, August 10, 2012 12:29 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

p sure this isn't targeted at most people. also fwiw learning how to read sheet music when you already know how to play an instrument intuitively is like 10000000000x easier than learning how to play an unfamiliar instrument when you know how to read sheet music*. also if yr an electronic music person, then either a) being able to sight read isn't a thing, just painstakingly plot it out like u always do or b) it still isn't a thing because the way a lot music software seems to work is by mimicking the basic structure of sheet music: higher tones are higher up on the thing you're looking at, tones that come quickly one after another are closer together, or explicitly linked.

this is a cool idea, if corned up with the mcsweeney's association, but cool. i probably wont buy it but if it encourages other "popular" musicians to actually put out official sheet music/tab, then i'm down.

*nb this might just be sour grapes because i can plonk out the sequence of anything on a piano, given some sheet music, even though i haven't played regularly since i was eight---but i'll never at any point in my life be able to say "i can play the piano."

I want Orbital to put out sheet music for Wonky

I'm pretty competent with fakebook-style sheet music -- i.e., a right-hand melodic line and chord names. If it's more complicated than that, sometimes I can slowly pick it out, though at a certain point I'm simply not technically skilled to pull off moving parts with both hands.

On piano, that is.

right but you can read a fakebook

i mean the great thing about sheet music is that it makes learning/practicing go a lot more quickly. the difference between me looking at a piece of paper with instructions vs me trying to remember what i'm supposed to be doing next is getting it right the fifth time vs getting it right the 30th time

anyway figuring out sheet music is somewhere between learning how to play guitar hero and learning how to play D&D probably, harder than figuring out what to do with a checkers game, easier than emacs

my friends' band publishes the sheet music for their stuff and might very well make more money on that than on the records (but they have a big brass nerd following).

has anyone released and album only for player piano roll?

Did Conlon Nancarrow?

has anyone released and album only for player piano roll?

I think this is an April Fool's joke: http://wilcoworld.net/#!/the-whole-love-now-available-on-piano-roll/

Beck has been seriously doing work the last few years--and seemingly just for the joy of it, since it's been almost totally under the radar (with some of the best of it released for free).

Newest example, and totally incredible: a "remix" of five years of Philip Glass' oeuvre into a single 20-minute piece. Give it a shot, I doubt it's what you'd expect from either names:

http://soundcloud.com/dunvagenmusic/nyc-73-78

Follows on his Harry Partch tribute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5xhpIFxi7M

And the fantastically wonderful full-album cover of Skip Spence's 'Oar' he did with James Gadson, Wilco, Feist, and Jamie Lidell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0Ee_69wf3w&feature=bf_prev&list=PL344D578F844FB6DF

that Harry Partch track is one my favorite things Beck's ever done. I missed getting the mp3 when it was a free download, but I'd buy it given a chance. the Glass mix is great too; gives me hope someday he'll do an entire full length album that fragmented; in most people's hands, something that changes around that much would not hold my attention but he knows how to do this

Hey DJP I fuck with Guero

If retro-fetishism did not exist we would be forced to invent it (and then sell it as super-nifty xmas presents!)

"Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form — twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of-home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case, Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012 — an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together."

http://www.songreader.net/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/11/beck-a-preface-to-song-reader.html

Is there no cheaper version than the one for $50?

Also noted that Jody wrote the notes?

This is a fantastic idea.

i hope there are songs with more conceptual annotations like "5 seconds of banjo sample"

I'll just go ahead and say it, at this point I like Beck post-"success" (or at least post-making-an-album-and-touring, circa 2008) than I liked him in his supposed heyday. And I quite liked 'Mellow Gold' through 'Sea Change'. But he's doing what I think an artist should do who finds wealth: doing exactly what excites his artistic capacity, not necessarily more of what makes him money. The fact that a lot of it is given away (ie "Harry Partch" or the Record Club releases solidifies my sense he's doing what he's doing for the best reasons.

Yes, but in a shop the other day, the single "Tropicalia" came on, and it reminded me of how it was nice when he'd come up with these a-sides, and they'd get played on the radio and 'ting.

There's a non-signed version for $34. Wish there was just a PDF d/l for $10.

At it again--I'll definitely be listening:

http://www.beck.com/index.php/beck-reimagines-david-bowies-sound-and-vision

Paid for by a car company

That obviously negates the artistic effort of the 180+ musicians involved. . .

Jesus H. Christ, what a gigantic error of taste that was! To make a Big Band, Big Top, Cast-of-Millions version of a song about "drifting into my solitude over my head" shows that you may have the means, but you've completely lost the meaning.

Wearing a ten-gallon hat, Beck points at one corner of the tent and the musicians there respond! He points at another and lo, a heavenly host of evangelical singers replace Eno's synth line (a hundred times more effective on a synth)! It's like looking through a telescope the wrong way; megalomania never made everything look so small.

This PT Barnum buffoonery made the Glass Spider Tour - for which Bowie was rightly lambasted - seem like an Unplugged performance. Just a big yucky gaffe, enough in-and-of-itself to downgrade Beck from Classic to Dud status.

At least it sold some gas-guzzling Lincoln SUVs, though. I'm certainly buying one after watching.

I love 'Arabian Nights'...Alfonzo giving me a back rub...getting smacked up by unemployed hand models...hockey players passed out in government limos...

New song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTM3YPTYNo0

exciting to hear him over something that has a non-sleeping pulse again but i have no idea why this is five minutes long?

In the afternoon
Riding the scape goat
Burning equipment
Decomposing

Dud

Hate the fucker forever for his Scientology shenanigans, but totally classic obv. Odelay.

more like grodie-lay

:( You guys are such haters!

He hasn't made a great album in quite awhile but I have a soft spot for him. afaict his "Scientology shenanigans" consist of mentioning it in a single interview way back when so eh whatever

i guess he's not that bad

j/k

Most people I talk to are surprised about the Scientology thing.

I do make sure to mention it.

get crazy with the cheez whiz

afaict his "Scientology shenanigans" consist of mentioning it in a single interview way back when so eh whatever

marrying another raised-as-Scientologist semi-celebrity on COS instructions is something of a shenanigan I guess

went through a phase of firing musicians and replacing them with scienos when he first returned to the church, but the Album Clubs suggest he pulled away from that again (I stopped paying attention before Sea Change)

I gotta say ... dud. He's obviously ambitiously dud, and there is some classic mixed in there, too, but dud all the same. I even put on Odelay for the first time in eons the other day and found it more irritating than entertaining.

Lol @ sic w the inside scoop on COS instructions

That interview i ref'd was right after his marriage iirc. Def something COS-related goin on w him around then.

idk i'm at the point where his questionable commitment to the bullshit scam cult he was brainwashed into as a kid doesn't have as much weight for me as his last couple records being boring and shitty does

but i will still rep for all that stuff posted in the 2012 revive, that is some seriously good shit there

Otm

CHOKING ON THE SPLINTERS

I don't give a shit about his beliefs. I just want him to focus on his lyrics. Dudes a poet

We haven't had that spirit here since One Foot in the Grave.

no money no honey