Matt Marks Music

So I’m doing a small presentation on my upcoming post-Christian nihilist pop-opera, The Little Death, at a Live Arts Collaboration Salon – this coming Monday 11/30 at 7pm. I’m excited for a few reasons: A. I get to talk about myself (and what narcissistic artist doesn’t get off on that?); B. I’m going to perform some early versions of songs from the opera for voice and piano; and C. I’m going to play a newly mastered cut or two from the album. The main theme of my little talk is going to be the process of refinement and transformation in composition. I haven’t thought too intensely about the specifics of what I’m going to say, but I know the gist:

Once I stopped trying to have amazing ideas for compositions, and focused on the work, I made music that I felt was good.

Simple enough, yes?

I spent (in a more cynical mood I might say “wasted”) many years of my life with my only musical output being attempts to find a new voice, a new sound, one that would change things, add to the historical musical discourse. I sat at the piano attempting to write more clusters than anyone else, I imagined elaborate and shocking theatrical pieces, I made forty-minute noise tracks; basically I did everything but focus on craft. I spent more time thinking about what I would write than writing.

I’m a naturally lazy person – though I might prefer the term “relaxed”. I eventually came to realize that this tendency I had towards an over-reliance on ingenuity was actually just a desire for a shortcut to artistic achievement. Find (or wait for) a cool enough idea and achieve popular and critical acclaim!

Simply ridiculous.

We are at the point in history where almost anything that can be done artistically, in terms of uniqueness and audacity of the idea, has been done. Some artists lament and fear this, but I think it’s actually pretty wonderful. Perhaps art can stop being this pissing contest of ‘who did it first?’ and ‘how can I make this more novel than anything else?’ and become about the craft, the grueling challenge to oneself to deepen and improve upon an idea.

I came upon a major turning point when one day I sat at a piano and sang John Lennon’s final words – “Oh my God I’m shot – over and over while playing the piano. I ended up with a simple, sentimental song to which I felt a strong emotional connection. I left it as that for the time and repeated the process, but with different words and music, eventually coming up with the first piece I was ever truly proud of, a collection of five songs called: Five Little Songs. These songs formed the infrastructure for a project that has consumed my life for the past two years, The Little Death.

The songs are not particularly great, not very complex, and certainly not terribly original but I love them, and that love fueled literally thousands of hours of work developing them into something certainly complex, likely quite original, and hopefully great. I look back on myself from years past, idly attempting to think of novel and ingenious ideas, without even considering the elbow-grease I employ now – the obsessive revising, the harsh criticism, the abject self-indulgence – with a mixture of shame, scorn, and regret.

It is difficult not to think of that time as wasted, yet it is also difficult not to think of it as formative. Despite the decade or so poverty of output, I developed many of my current themes and inspirations: banality, bastardization of pop music, Christian music, sampling. I also learned my audio chops, but I didn’t really have anything to show for it. Once I realized a simple equation – a bit of music/sound I love + tons of work/self-indulgence = something I tend to be proud of – I began to think of myself as a composer.

Anyway, if you’ve gotten this far, thanks for reading this little piece of self-indulgence. And if any of this interests you, come check out my presentation at the LAC Salon on November 30th, 7pm!

Here’s the info:

LAC Artists Salon – 11/30 @ 7pm

The Performance Project @ University Settlement
184 Eldridge St. @ Rivington, 2nd Floor

Featuring choreographer Julie Bour, composer Matt Marks, combined media artist, David Kagan, performance artists and visual story-tellers, Hannah Wolfe and Devin Moriarity, and singer/songwriter, Miriam Aziz.

If you are in and around New York on Saturday, Mellissa Hughes and my new variety show – The Melly and Mafoo Variety Hour – will be playing a set at The Gershwin Hotel at 8:00pm. The show – being run by our good friend and colleague, Alex Temple – is titled The Secret Life of Pop Music (sounds sexy, yes?). He’ll be presenting two of his pop-influenced pieces: Walled Room and Imogene.

We’ll being playing a set of covers, mashups, and remixes all based on very light bubble-gummy material, but set in distinctly different ways. I could try and describe to you what we’re doing, but hey, why not show you! :)

This is a mashup of the Narwhals song (the flash cartoon) with Don’t Know Much (popularized by Aaron Neville and Linda Ronstadt):

So if you likey (or are mildy intrigued) come check out our show! Here are the deetz:

The Secret Life of Pop Music

8pm @ The Gershwin Hotel

Well, it’s not exactly new.. But it will be to some of you, and there is a fantastic new music video, and a feature on todays All Things Considered on NPR! Timberbrit is a very unique opera by composer Jacob Cooper that creates a fictional tragic narrative of the lives of Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake. I first became acquainted with it when my partner in crime, Mellissa Hughes, was cast as Britney Spears herself!

TB shares a lot of similarities with my opera The Little Death: written around the same time, pop-themed, heavy use of electronics, two-character casts, our bands share members, and sexualized portrayals of female death! :) But those similarities are actually pretty superficial; Timberbrit is a piece unlike anything I could have imagined. Jacob Cooper based many of his arias on Britney and JT songs slowed and stretched beyond recognition. The result is a surreal, tense, mindfuck of aching beauty. It’s also one of the few unapologetically digital large-scale compositions I’ve know, both in content and in spirit. Literally, the piece could not have been made without digital time-stretching technology (analog time-stretching affecting pitch and yadda-yadda…), and the expression is raw but almost mathematically restrained – the vocalists, Mell and Ted Hearne, have to recreate everything in slow motion, from the original vibrato to the once-minuscule moments of bad pitch.  In my opinion, academic composers have been very slow to embrace new technologies in a manner that isn’t either purely experimental or hearkening back to the past. Timberbrit sounds and feels comfortable in its DAW home.

Listen and watch the incredible and somewhat terrifying new video for Worst Fantasy, made by Switch Pictures:

Yup, that’s Mellissa. As Britney. Brillissa? Mellitney? It gets a little confusing as to whom is whom doesn’t it? No comment on what this may be doing to my psyche…

So if you are in and around America why don’t you flick on your dial to your local NPR station, somewhere between 4 and 6pm, or whenever All Things Considered is on in your neck of the woods. I’ve heard some of the interviews and it’s good stuff.

UPDATE:

Looks like the broadcast is being rescheduled for another day. Stay tuned and check out the vid and links until then!

UPDATE 2:

Listen to the broadcast, read all about it, and check out a rad Melly-tastic slideshow HERE.

P.S. The front page of NPR.com:

I’ve added a couple of additions to the Music page. First is High Fructose, a piece I wrote for Joshua Roman’s Seattle Town Hall concert series. It’s an odd piece, very difficult (though not intentionally so!), and the quartet rocked the hell out of it. The piece is about the composition process, as I attempted to stray from my sentimental tendencies – failing miserably – and coming up with an odd hybrid of über-sentimentality, frustration, and sadism. Enjoy!

High Fructose - Performed by:

Yuki Numata – Violin

Bill Kalinkos – Clarinet

Joshua Roman – Cello

Jason Treuting – Drum Set and Glockenspiel

Next is a piece I wrote for solo horn and laptop called Tallulah. I was obsessed with music from the Alan Parker film Bugsy Malone and ended up adapting melodies from the song Tallulah for microtonal horn, creating dense textures from the looped melodic material. This is from a microtonal solo concert I played at Roulette in November of 2007.

Tallulah – Performed by:

Matt Marks – French Horn

One of the pieces I did for Alarm Will Sound’s upcoming shows at Le Poisson Rouge (6:30 and 10:30pm, next Wednesday, 7/22/09) is an arrangement of a piece by Bay Area breakcore artist Preshish Moments called whydobirds. I had been wanting to do a track of his for a while, for a variety of reasons: it’s really good music; we’ve known and worked together a long time; and I had no idea how to, and if I could, pull it off.

What makes his piece even more teh awesomest is that it’s a remix of The Carpenters’ Close to You, which is not only a sick (if totally corny) tune, but it has a personal connection (awww…) – The Carpenters are from Presh and my hometown of Downey, Ca. and went to our high school. Presh has a similarly complex emotional relationship to sappy music (though he prefers yacht rock to my contemporary christian) and it comes out in the track. It displays obvious destructive tendencies – his tunes are pretty splice-arific – but there is clear reverence to (or, should I say, near-erotic obsession with) Karen’s voice. It is without a doubt the most tonal and sentimental track on his ridiculous album, Let’s Be Friends (Listen/Buy), which is probably why it appealed to me.

Here is the track, check it out:

And here’s what I’ve done with it:

BONUS:

I’ve been wanting to blog this video for a while, so what better time than now? Here is Preshish Moments live and in action in Paris.

Kickass:

-See also: http://mattmarksmusic.com/2008/07/02/preshish-moments-album-out-now/

So I’ve moved everything from Blogger over here to my new WordPress site and set up some new stuff. The largest addition is the music page. There are a ton of new tracks and recordings up, spanning the last five years or so. If there’s anything I left out that you’d like me to put up, let me know. For the time being they aren’t downloadable, but once I find a player I’m really happy with I’ll hook that up (well, aside from too much of the Little Death stuff, for professional reasons ;) – more on that soon).
Anyway, I’m happy with it so far. It’s simple, clean – hopefully easy to navigate. I don’t really need any of that zany flash stuff going on. I’ve also been waiting for like four years to use the above picture of me at the Pennsylvania farm house (taken by James Hirschfeld). So yeah, enjoy! I’m not exactly the fierce blogger that I once was, but I’m still a Google Reader addict, which means if you’re ever strapped for reading material, hit up this page and check out the Shared Items to your right. You could waste hours, seriously. K, it’s 4am, time for bed. All done WordPressing.

Yo, check out this awesome story in the NJ Star-Ledger about badass composer, and friend, David T. Little:

“I grew up very much outside of the classical tradition, not really knowing that it existed, not knowing that composers existed or that people still wrote music,” Little reflects.

At first, classical music, particularly Mozart, felt foreign and false. “It represented this polite, neat, well-packaged culture which I didn’t really relate to. Aside from the musical theater, I was listening to death metal, which was the opposite of that. It was aggressive, messy — brutal is a term that’s used a lot in that genre. The more brutal it is, the better.”

“Classical music struck me as living in denial. You have this music that is so perfect and that’s just not true, that’s not life.”

But as Little searched websites for ways to become a film composer and feverishly tried to follow their instructions, he came across recommendations for certain classical works. He started with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” Nearly every day for months, he spent hours listening to the composition. He bought himself a score and flipped the pages while listening to his cassette — until he could follow Stravinsky’s challenging notation through the end.

“‘The Rite of Spring’ was huge,” Little remembers. “It was such a visceral piece. It was brutal in the same way that this extreme metal was — it acknowledges the sort of underbelly or the non-enlightenment period sorts of things about humanity.”

Ditto, man. The Rite was a major turning point for me too. It was also the first piece that I didn’t feel ashamed to play for my non-classical musician friends (which vastly out-numbered my classical musician friends). When in doubt I’d try and convince them of how “trippy” it was, especially when in the correct state of mind (ahem…).

What has lingered of my Rite-ophilia has been an appreciation for the effective marriage of raw, tribal emotion and extreme precision. For myself, this evolved into a love and appreciation for intense electronica – jungle/drum ‘n’ bass, hardcore, breakcore; for David it seems to have developed into a love for intricate metal – death, speed, math-metal, etc. Even attempting to integrate these styles into concert hall is a daunting task, but luckily for David, it’s less an act of integration than it is a natural fusion. A great example of this is Sweet Light Crude, a piece written for his rock ensemble, Newspeak (you can hear SLC and more here on his website).

Read the whole article, it’s good stuff. And make sure to come check out several of David’s pieces (including excerpts from his upcoming Opera, Dog Days, a collaboration with the wonderful librettist, Royce Vavrek) this coming Friday (7/17/09) at Galapagos Art Space.

I don’t know how to tell you how much I love these guys.

Hey folkies, I’ll be performing a live remix of Rhapsody in Blue tomorrow (Wednesday, July 8th – 6:30) @ The Greene Space in NYC for the 85th anniversary of WNYC. If you’re around please come check it out, tickets are FREE! :)

If for some reason you cannot make it – out of town, in hospital (really the only two acceptable reasons…) – you can listen to it live on wnyc.org. Broadcast begins at 7pm EST.

Now, if there’s one thing I hate it’s a straight-forward remix, so I’m a little notorious for making remixes that eschew the spirit and style of their source material, in favor for something completely different (quite often I’ll take something simple and naive and make it dark and twisted – not too original I know, but I loves it!). With this source material, though, I completely respect and love it. In fact, performing a solo piano version of Rhapsody in Blue as a young teen in a recital was one of my first serious musical experiences. Irony seems a little out of place.

I’ll give you a sample of what you can expect tomorrow. All of the sounds are from various recordings of the piece, with the exception of two: the Amen break, and a few 909 samples.

Enjoy:

It’ll be a great show. Also performing will be Alicia and Jason Moran, Marta Eggerth, and Dave Burrell, performing music by Puccini, Antheill, and Jelly Roll Morton.

Check it out!

Yeah, I haven’t really been blogging too much here of late. It’s for a couple of reasons: 1. I haven’t really been in the rantacular kinda place recently, where a morning’s angst is translated into an epic blogpost either pro or con something on this Earth; and 2. I’ve been doing most of my micro-blogging on Facebook, thus the drastic cutback on the quick posts (YouTube videos, funny pictures, etc.).

But every once in a while, something on the internet is so glorious that I just have to post on it. Often it’s the beginning of a wonderful new meme that will seem old, stupid, and crusty in about 3 weeks time. Well, it’s not then yet, so enjoy!

Birds with arms photoshopped on them:

Looooove it!

-Something Awful