Catch a Waveform and You're Sitting on Top of the World

There are posts that get started but that slide into a state of anomie and incompleteness.  They sit round their blogospheric waiting room, waiting, until their author stumbles upon them again, asks brusquely what exactly they think they are doing cluttering up the joint in this fashion, and tosses them unceremoniously out into the twilight. 

This is such a post. 

Most of its content was compiled almost precisely one year ago, and has been loitering about ever since, tossing the occasional recriminating glance in my direction.  I refuse to bend to the conventional wisdom and peer pressure that would impose arbitrary and outmoded notions such as "timeliness" and "relevance" and "being remotely interesting to anyone but myself" as standards, so here we go.  These are the mostly music-related items that were catching my eye this time last year:

• The Believer offers the tale of Rick Wakeman and the mighty Birotron.  (Via the inexhaustible 3quarksdaily.)  That article led me eventually to the Streetly Electronics Mellotron Tape Library, your source for all things Mellotronic.  That site features an array of playable samples of Mellotron noises, famous and infamous, including one of my longtime favorites: the horrifying massed brass sound that opens Genesis' "Watcher of the Skies" -- "one of the choice numbers with which Mellotron Bores insist on depressing their audience".

• Theremins! 

This version compares well with the original.

Lovely to discover via the plainly visible logo in that video, that quality Theremins are manufactured by MOOG, itself the great original popularizer of electronic analog synthesis.  The Moog Theremin is not to be confused with the rare and exotic Uma Theremin.

• Via Said the Gramophone, Michael Barthel's exhaustive, insightful and highly amusing analysis of Leonard Cohen's  "Hallelujah" and exactly how the song -- especially in its Jeff Buckley incarnation, which itself is really a cover version of John Cale's cover version of Cohen's original -- became such an inescapable shorthand for melancholy sincerity.  Filmmakers are in this, as in so many things, the root cause of all our sorrows:

The first significant use of the song in a soundtrack was, somewhat logically, Cale's version in Basquiat (1996), followed by, totally illogically, Cale again in Shrek (2001).  While it seems clear that the gradual revision of the song is what made it appealing as a soundtrack device, it's also possible that when directors saw that the song was so potent, it could impart gravitas on a cartoon Ogre voiced by Mike Myers, [they realized as well that] it could make even the shallowest character seem tragic.

* * *

What's fascinating about all this is not simply the song's ubiquity on TV dramas--it's that it's used in the exact same way every time.  Songs can be used sincerely, ironically, as background shading, as subtle comment, as product placement.  But "Hallelujah" always appears as people are being sad, quietly sitting and staring into space or ostentatiously crying, and always as a way of tying together the sadness of different characters in different places.  In short, it's always used as part of a "sad montage."

There are useful charts, a video demonstration of the aforementioned "sad montage," and a delightful reimagining of the song as a sort of call-and-response beach blanket rhumba.

• Oh joy!  The Oxford American's annual Music Issue is was out [this time last summer], sporting a fine spooky cover photo of fine spooky Thelonius Monk.  Among the sample articles [still] available online:

• A profile of the MP3 blog-bundling site, Hype Machine.

• Everything (and more!) that you ever wanted to know about the process of recording Blonde on Blonde.

• Oh, sure: this Idolator post by Andy Beta arrives in the guise of a serious consideration of the film music of Toru Takemitsu, but you know and I know it's really just an excuse to post clips of some of the steamy bits from Woman in the Dunes.

This concludes today's rummaging though the lumber room.  Thank you.  Drive safely.  No, wait, I nearly forgot!  This just in:

im in ur yootoob, playing ur theremin