The Signal with Pat Carrabré- Friday May 30, 2008
Be sure to have a box of tissues on hand tonight when Pat plays a heart-wrenching concert by Ms Julie Doiron woven through all three hours. Pat will also swirl the sounds of cello iconoclast Matt Haimovitz while sampling his work over the years. There will be a full hour of la musique francais and Pat will spin the sounds of Mr. Gnome, T-Bone Burnett, and Lucky Dragons.
The Signal with Pat Carrabré - Saturday, May 31, 2008
Pat puts the cinematic existential sounds of Montreal’s Bob and Bill into high rotation tonight. In concert the acclaimed violinist Rolf Schulte and pianist James Winn take on the dust and wind etched work of three prairie composers; ALLAN GORDON BELL, DIANA MCINTOSH and MICHAEL MATTHEWS. There will also be a seven-inch give away that has The Constantines and Feist reveling in Dolly Parton.
The Signal with Pat Carrabré - Sunday, June 1, 2008
Tonight join Pat at ringside when two generations of composers go head to head for avant-guard supremacy. Young classically trained whippersnappers like Alexandre Desilet and Julia Kent who crossed into pop take on the old guard like Andrew P. MacDonald and Paul Dolden who crossed over from rock and roll. Tonight’s concert features work by a heavy weight contender from the old guard: Canadian-Argentinean composer alcides lanza. He is infamous for marathon concerts and juggling electronic sounds with almost everything. Tonight’s Sunday soundtrack feature will be music from the dark Danish film- After the Wedding.
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Friday, May 23, 2008
I can’t image where the world of music would be without technology. And I don’t just mean how we listen to music. I’m thinking about how it’s made. So much of what creative musicians do these days couldn’t happen without help from technology. I read an article about Final Fantasy (Owen Pallet) in the New York Times last weekend. It describes him as he’s testing out a computer program he wrote to coordinate the sound of his violin through a group of daisy-chained amplifiers. Owen usually performs as a one-man band, using technology to create a full sound all on his own. An amazing number of musicians perform that way. This weekend we hear from Mad Eskimo, Lucky Dragons, Jay Bharadia and Culture Reject, to name just a few. We wouldn’t be able to hear any of that music if it wasn’t for these new technologies.
One of the most interesting genres of the last few years is the remix. Sampling and sequencing software make it all possible. Radiohead recently opened a site where anyone could submit their own remix of the song Nude, from their album In Rainbows. A whopping 2252 remixes were submitted. That’s a whole lot of people who were willing to pay to download the stems (individual strands of music) and tweak the sounds to come up with their own vision of the song. How much better than karaoke is that!
On Sunday night I’ll be playing a piece by Frank Zappa. He was an early adopter – someone who jumps on board at the beginning of a new technology and rides the rocky road of system crashes and programming bugs. His instrument of choice was the Synclavier. It was one of the first big jumps forward in computer-aided composition, sound sampling and FM synthesis. When I was a graduate student, I was lucky enough to work on a Synclavier II at the University of Western Ontario. It had a 20 Megabyte hard drive (my phone currently has 4 gigabytes) that wasn’t very robust. If you were in too much of a hurry and closed the door to our studio quickly, the hard drive crashed and whoever was working had to re-boot and start all over again. This was before computers could really produce graphic notation for music (something that composers take for granted these days, the same way we all use word processors). I was particularly interested in trying to use the computer to help write music. At the time, I was obsessing over a musical language that could be described with a mathematical formula. The computing power of the Synclavier could run the calculations and play a passage I had designed. That way I could try things out in the same way I would improvise at the piano, but I didn’t have to stop and calculate a bunch of numbers.
On Saturday night we’ll play some music by the Icelandic composer Kjartan Olafsson. He’s deeply involved in computer-assisted composition. He’s even written a computer program, called CALMUS, that helps solve compositional problems as they come up during the process of writing music. A lot of indie pop groups and laptop musicians are using a program called GarageBand. It can set up beats and loop patterns of notes and chords, so you can improvise over top.
It used to be that only the rich or those attached to big Universities could have access to the computing power needed to do anything useful with technology in their music. Now almost anyone can set up a home studio and let their imagination run wild. Another Icelandic musician, Mugison, was in our Studio a few weeks back and he was telling me about how he worked for almost a year on one piece – all on his home computer – only to trash what he’d done and go with a studio session of that song with his band. Computers are very useful tools, but the don’t generally save on creative time.
Saturday night we’ll also hear a track from Paul Linklater. His new double CD and bonus EP are out on the Jibcut label. The whole purpose of that project is to elevate the aesthetic of DIY music, which usually involves recording directly to a laptop.
We live in a time of extremes. On one hand there’s a group of happy DIY knob twiddlers, exerting total control over the music they make in their basements and bedrooms. On the other side we have high-end studios, where sophisticated production teams work in tandem with multiple creators with the objective being to produce something that’s more than the sum of the parts.
Either way, those of us who like our music to be unique and unexpected end up the winners.
One of the most interesting genres of the last few years is the remix. Sampling and sequencing software make it all possible. Radiohead recently opened a site where anyone could submit their own remix of the song Nude, from their album In Rainbows. A whopping 2252 remixes were submitted. That’s a whole lot of people who were willing to pay to download the stems (individual strands of music) and tweak the sounds to come up with their own vision of the song. How much better than karaoke is that!
On Sunday night I’ll be playing a piece by Frank Zappa. He was an early adopter – someone who jumps on board at the beginning of a new technology and rides the rocky road of system crashes and programming bugs. His instrument of choice was the Synclavier. It was one of the first big jumps forward in computer-aided composition, sound sampling and FM synthesis. When I was a graduate student, I was lucky enough to work on a Synclavier II at the University of Western Ontario. It had a 20 Megabyte hard drive (my phone currently has 4 gigabytes) that wasn’t very robust. If you were in too much of a hurry and closed the door to our studio quickly, the hard drive crashed and whoever was working had to re-boot and start all over again. This was before computers could really produce graphic notation for music (something that composers take for granted these days, the same way we all use word processors). I was particularly interested in trying to use the computer to help write music. At the time, I was obsessing over a musical language that could be described with a mathematical formula. The computing power of the Synclavier could run the calculations and play a passage I had designed. That way I could try things out in the same way I would improvise at the piano, but I didn’t have to stop and calculate a bunch of numbers.
On Saturday night we’ll play some music by the Icelandic composer Kjartan Olafsson. He’s deeply involved in computer-assisted composition. He’s even written a computer program, called CALMUS, that helps solve compositional problems as they come up during the process of writing music. A lot of indie pop groups and laptop musicians are using a program called GarageBand. It can set up beats and loop patterns of notes and chords, so you can improvise over top.
It used to be that only the rich or those attached to big Universities could have access to the computing power needed to do anything useful with technology in their music. Now almost anyone can set up a home studio and let their imagination run wild. Another Icelandic musician, Mugison, was in our Studio a few weeks back and he was telling me about how he worked for almost a year on one piece – all on his home computer – only to trash what he’d done and go with a studio session of that song with his band. Computers are very useful tools, but the don’t generally save on creative time.
Saturday night we’ll also hear a track from Paul Linklater. His new double CD and bonus EP are out on the Jibcut label. The whole purpose of that project is to elevate the aesthetic of DIY music, which usually involves recording directly to a laptop.
We live in a time of extremes. On one hand there’s a group of happy DIY knob twiddlers, exerting total control over the music they make in their basements and bedrooms. On the other side we have high-end studios, where sophisticated production teams work in tandem with multiple creators with the objective being to produce something that’s more than the sum of the parts.
Either way, those of us who like our music to be unique and unexpected end up the winners.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
May 23, 24, 25
The Signal with Pat Carrabré- Friday May 23, 2008
This evening sparks will fly on The Signal during a live concert recording featuring the dynamic song skills of Lily Frost. Pat dips into the dark waters of Nick Cave’s career then brightens things up with a little music by, for and about Robots. Also music by Jean Martin, aMute and E.S.L.’s take on Venus in Furs.
The Signal with Pat Carrabré - Saturday, May 24, 2008
Tonight on The Signal Pat will be playing music from Iceland featuring the premiere of an acoustic Signal session by Icelandic singer songwriter Mugison. There will also be a CD giveaway: a tribute to Montreal’s Snailhouse - you can’t win if you don’t listen. Pat also dips into multiple tracks from a new CD by Toronto’s electronic - international - folk - soul - protest music band: Lal. All that plus music by Tinariwen.
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The Signal with Pat Carrabré - Sunday, May 25, 2008
No it is not in your head- tonight on the Signal: Incessant Bells – with the Bergmann Piano Duo recorded at Calgary’s Grand Theatre, featuring a reinterpretation of that classic black-light special: Tubular Bells. The night remains prog-tacular when Pat features multiple tracks from the Rheostatics’ penned soundtrack- Whale Music. There will also be more man-boy friendly music from Brian Eno, Danny Elfman, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin and yes, Zappa. So get out your D&D dice and let 'em roll.
This evening sparks will fly on The Signal during a live concert recording featuring the dynamic song skills of Lily Frost. Pat dips into the dark waters of Nick Cave’s career then brightens things up with a little music by, for and about Robots. Also music by Jean Martin, aMute and E.S.L.’s take on Venus in Furs.
The Signal with Pat Carrabré - Saturday, May 24, 2008
Tonight on The Signal Pat will be playing music from Iceland featuring the premiere of an acoustic Signal session by Icelandic singer songwriter Mugison. There will also be a CD giveaway: a tribute to Montreal’s Snailhouse - you can’t win if you don’t listen. Pat also dips into multiple tracks from a new CD by Toronto’s electronic - international - folk - soul - protest music band: Lal. All that plus music by Tinariwen.
View Larger Map
The Signal with Pat Carrabré - Sunday, May 25, 2008
No it is not in your head- tonight on the Signal: Incessant Bells – with the Bergmann Piano Duo recorded at Calgary’s Grand Theatre, featuring a reinterpretation of that classic black-light special: Tubular Bells. The night remains prog-tacular when Pat features multiple tracks from the Rheostatics’ penned soundtrack- Whale Music. There will also be more man-boy friendly music from Brian Eno, Danny Elfman, Squarepusher, Aphex Twin and yes, Zappa. So get out your D&D dice and let 'em roll.
Friday, May 16, 2008
The Path to Creativity
A few years back I was an airport person, logging too many nights in hotels and thinking as much about management styles as I was about music. One day while I was waiting for a plane, browsing through the airport bookstore, I came across Patricia Pitcher’s Artists, Craftsman and Technocrats. In my opinion, it’s a brilliant piece of work that really puts creativity into context. Dr. Pitcher traced the life of a big company and found that the number of truly creative people – the ones who came up with the new ideas – were few and far between. She also came to the conclusion that maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing. People with that kind of creativity are unpredictable and not always good at bringing those ideas into reality. It was the “craftsman,” the ones who had worked their way up in the business, who had the practical understanding of what would work. They could take those new ideas and figure out how to make them fly. Fortunately for me, I was creative enough to be able to segue my way out of University administration and into the position of Composer-in-Residence with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. That led to one of the most creative periods in my life.
It was around that time that I was asked to be a guest speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit and my topic was supposed to be creativity. As I thought more about the whole concept, I came to the conclusion that context is everything, that the creative mind works best coming up with solutions to limitations. For an audience at a classical symphony orchestra concert, Anders Hillborg’s Rap Notes might be a stunning revelation. To a hip-hop audience, it might sound a bit cheesy, or even lame, and they might not get the reference to Mozart in the last section, which to me, is an amazing post-modern stroke of genius. On Saturday night we’ll be sampling music from an Art of Time Ensemble concert, where Artistic Director Andrew Burashko asked some of his favorite singer-songwriters to get inspired by Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. If you just heard David Wall’s piece What’s On My Plate out of the context of that concert, you would likely think the words were funny, but when you know the melody he uses from the Schumann its hilarious.
It was seeing Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9 that got me going again on this topic. Barney uses this idea of working against resistance to challenge creativity. I must admit that I went to see the movie because Bjork wrote the music and I am playing some of it on our Soundtrack Sunday feature this week. I’m not usually a huge fan of performance art and this film has to be one of the biggest scale performance pieces ever mounted. Its part of a whole series based on the idea of working against resistance, just like athletes uses resistance training to improve their performance. Looking at history, it’s hard to argue with the concept. Beethoven struggled against his deafness to create some of the most amazing music ever written. The new classical composers who came out of the repressive Soviet regime, like Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and others, overcame official restrictions to develop individual styles and establish several new artistic movements. The whole idea of indie rock is based on groups fighting to play outside the stylistic boundaries set by the recording industry. We kick Friday’s show off with No Friend Oh! from the new Xiu Xiu disc. They’ve made a career out of exploring society’s forbidden topics, like alternate sexual orientations and suicide.
Up to this point in world history, there has generally been an official artistic voice. All others have usually been silenced, sometimes forcefully. It’s only been a relatively short period of time since music by women has been openly celebrated. On Friday night we’ll spend some time sampling the musical evolution of Veda Hille. Her unique view of the world pulls in sounds and concepts that challenge us to hear and think differently.
The last few generations have pushed against Society’s restraints and that has led to an unparalleled time of creativity in contemporary music. I know a lot of people are worried about where things are going in the music and media business, afraid of total collapse. But I say bring it on. Our inherent creativity will find a solution to the limitations of the current situation. Great, interesting music is being written in all genres and there is an audience out there hoping to hear it. The problem is making the connection. This music is not always easy to find. Let me invited you to make The Signal your happy place, where you can come and test out some new artists. We are doing what we can get overcome the contextual restraints.
It was around that time that I was asked to be a guest speaker at the Canadian Arts Summit and my topic was supposed to be creativity. As I thought more about the whole concept, I came to the conclusion that context is everything, that the creative mind works best coming up with solutions to limitations. For an audience at a classical symphony orchestra concert, Anders Hillborg’s Rap Notes might be a stunning revelation. To a hip-hop audience, it might sound a bit cheesy, or even lame, and they might not get the reference to Mozart in the last section, which to me, is an amazing post-modern stroke of genius. On Saturday night we’ll be sampling music from an Art of Time Ensemble concert, where Artistic Director Andrew Burashko asked some of his favorite singer-songwriters to get inspired by Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. If you just heard David Wall’s piece What’s On My Plate out of the context of that concert, you would likely think the words were funny, but when you know the melody he uses from the Schumann its hilarious.
It was seeing Matthew Barney’s film Drawing Restraint 9 that got me going again on this topic. Barney uses this idea of working against resistance to challenge creativity. I must admit that I went to see the movie because Bjork wrote the music and I am playing some of it on our Soundtrack Sunday feature this week. I’m not usually a huge fan of performance art and this film has to be one of the biggest scale performance pieces ever mounted. Its part of a whole series based on the idea of working against resistance, just like athletes uses resistance training to improve their performance. Looking at history, it’s hard to argue with the concept. Beethoven struggled against his deafness to create some of the most amazing music ever written. The new classical composers who came out of the repressive Soviet regime, like Alfred Schnittke, Sofia Gubaidulina, Arvo Pärt and others, overcame official restrictions to develop individual styles and establish several new artistic movements. The whole idea of indie rock is based on groups fighting to play outside the stylistic boundaries set by the recording industry. We kick Friday’s show off with No Friend Oh! from the new Xiu Xiu disc. They’ve made a career out of exploring society’s forbidden topics, like alternate sexual orientations and suicide.
Up to this point in world history, there has generally been an official artistic voice. All others have usually been silenced, sometimes forcefully. It’s only been a relatively short period of time since music by women has been openly celebrated. On Friday night we’ll spend some time sampling the musical evolution of Veda Hille. Her unique view of the world pulls in sounds and concepts that challenge us to hear and think differently.
The last few generations have pushed against Society’s restraints and that has led to an unparalleled time of creativity in contemporary music. I know a lot of people are worried about where things are going in the music and media business, afraid of total collapse. But I say bring it on. Our inherent creativity will find a solution to the limitations of the current situation. Great, interesting music is being written in all genres and there is an audience out there hoping to hear it. The problem is making the connection. This music is not always easy to find. Let me invited you to make The Signal your happy place, where you can come and test out some new artists. We are doing what we can get overcome the contextual restraints.
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