more half baked music speculation
this whole business of the new squarepusher album playing better in alphabetical order has been making me think about the evolution of art from passive to active. like, they say videogames aren't art because they require user input, whereas movies or stories are completely passive on the user's part. but what about music? how important is the
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the thing with beck doing that is that it destroys the idea of an album as a cohesive piece of work, reducing music to single tracks. but music has existed like that previously, and the rise of the "album" as a concept sort of came out of the beatles (i think) and music getting more pretentious. but i like that.
apparently the tool album lateralus is based on the fibonacci sequence, and so you can listen to it: 1,2,3,5,8,13,4,6,7,9,10,11,12 or 6,7,5,8,4,9,3,10,2,11,1,12,13 or 6,7,5,8,4,9,13,1,12,2,11,3,10. "These arrangements are rumoured by fans to produce different storylines for the album, although the band has said nothing official on the subject." ^wikipedia. that's probably bullshit, but if it's true, does that mean that tool released three albums on one disc?
i've heard some mash-ups that are better than the original songs, but they were rap songs so maybe the nature of rap makes that possible (maybe its just called a remix when its rap? it seemed like a mash-up to me). san francisco is renouned for its mash-ups, at least by the kind of lame-os that care about that.
if the track rearranging thing works for all electronic albums, that means that no electronic artist has created a great album, only a great collection of songs, which i don't think is true. i mean no album is perfect, so theres always going to be a little bit of wiggle room with track sequencing and such....but, for example, i don't think you could randomly rearrange the tracks on the new tim hecker and end up with as good an album. do you think it is more true with electronic music than other forms, and do you think that might be because electronic music is less emotionally varied and therefore less capable of creating a cohesive storyline or emotional journey or whatever bullshit albums achieve?
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