What this might be to designate as a Long Beach based composer is beyond speculation. A sort of cheesy attempt to be what Brooklyn is to Manhattan? Better to stick to sincerity and simplicity and just admit that optimization for search keywords that are sticky put a Long Beach composer in a position to make some rash decisions about what words to write on an obscure blog entry. One hopes that listings develop interest but the best thing about the web is finding obscurity rather than the Lady Gaga hits.

Camille Paglia, hated by old-school feminists and women’s studies professors the world over, sums up the entire gist of this blog post when she writes about the contemporary fan based for auto-tuned, rave-derived Top 40 music:

“Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions.

Gaga’s fans are marooned in a global technocracy of fancy gadgets but emotional poverty. Borderlines have been blurred between public and private: reality TV shows multiply, cell phone conversations blare everywhere; secrets are heedlessly blabbed on Facebook and Twitter. Hence, Gaga gratuitously natters on about her vagina…”

Stravinsky replied when asked why he stuck to a sort of diatonicism instead of converting to a 12-tone method that it was better for his creativity to have a limited box of choices. He changed his mind about that later, but to bring the question into 21st century electronic, alternative and post-classical music, I suggest that it may be a matter of having run out of choices. How many good new diatonic melodies that don’t sound like a 1970’s radio hit are there? Combinatorial mathematics suggest that there is a limited amount, and statistics suggest that within that larger number of possibilities that only a subset of these would be a melody worth playing out loud in public or committing to a recording. Therefore, re-mixing, the task of a ‘DJ’ not a ‘composer’ has become the new normal. It’s also a way to use the digital recording tools almost everyone seems to have now to creative a new improvisational tradition. I can labor over individual components of a track, getting the recording, EQ, compression perfect, then fiddling with post effects via plugins – this can go on for years, sorry to report. As an alternative to this fussy game of perfectionism, I can take things other people have recorded and make a re-mix. Since I don’t have access to other musicians’ master recording to perform forensics on their tracks, I take my own. It is a kind of freedom to not take each track so seriously that it cannot become fodder for another.

Vocal and lyric by Xerom Ohm. Is it always ‘standing tall’ or really stuck in autumn’s ‘late afternoon with your shadow friends?’.