As a side series to my currently non-existent series on explaining my methods of composition I'd like to go back and talk about old albums. You can imagine your own justification for this.
The plan for starting this tangential collection of posts was to go back to the very beginning, because duh. The Cobalt Rod was my initial foray into making music on my own and the first full length product of that ongoing experiment was Three Hits Off The Chaos Triad, an album that even the harshest of critics must agree exists. As you might expect this will make a perfect starting place.
Of course, you probably read the title and are familiar with words enough to know that that isn't what we're talking about. You can imagine your own justification for this.
The Crimson Rod, for those of you are not aware (which is all of you), was created as roughly the antithesis of The Cobalt Rod. I had been wanting to experiment with actually playing and recording solo music instead of programming all the time but The Cobalt Rod had become a very defined entity and non-programmed music simply would not fit. The Crimson Rod was born to fill this vacancy and was obviously opposite then in both instrumentation and name, but the idea rapidly grew to oppose the older child much more fully. Out of necessity from the medium The Cobalt Rod is rigidly defined, nearly every note (with rare exceptions to be discussed in other posts on methodology, perhaps) being meticulously placed by fingertip. In stark contrast, songs for The Crimson Rod are very often loose and organic, sometimes being comprised solely of off-the-cuff improvisation.
Vacant Charcoal Snowflakes was going to be a deviation of sorts from this practice. With Robber Stop I had wanted to write and perform a rigid math rock album but as will be discussed down the line this was not meant to be (instead of waiting, you could go to bandcamp right now and listen to it to see how not rigid the math rock turned out to be), so VCS would rise up to salvage the idea and claim it as its own. One thing I like to do before writing a new album is to come up with a vague genre descriptor to guide the early stages of the process and in this case the buzzword was "atmospheric math rock." Thin guitar lines arcing over angular drum patterns, all in entirely different meters and slathered in reverb. The effect would be dizzying and quite... well, atmospheric. Would be.
Oh yeah, while reading feel free to start listening to the album (y'know, after you get done with Robber Stop): http://thecrimsonrod.bandcamp.com/album/vacant-charcoal-snowflakes
So, things went awry again. Don't get me wrong, I had started to write it as it was intended to be, there were a few song notes floating around (and they are still floating around somewhere in the other room where the drum set was at the time) and I had practiced them to the extent that I could usually get through something resembling a song after a few warm up runs. By all accounts it was well on its way to going as planned, but what I hadn't counted on were the issues of actually recording it.
If I had a damn sound proof room you probably wouldn't be listening to the album that you are listening to now, assuming you are listening to this album. I can't perform with people listening, I can't even perform if I think people might be in a position to listen so all recording has to happen during those rare periods when I get the house to myself. The problem with an album in the style of where this was heading is that for someone of my skill level it would be playable only after actually practicing each part and recoding would almost certainly take several attempts. When you consider the small windows of opportunity and the need to move the entire drum set back and forth between the practice room and the recording/sleeping room the whole process starts to sound very, very tedious.
Now, I didn't give up right away. I'll admit, things didn't get off to a perfect start but the plan was to work on filling out the album with more defined tracks as it went. I believe Tar Parade was actually the first song recorded and I am certain that it was recorded at a time when I didn't realize I would be able to record and really wanted to just get anything at all finished before the opportunity elapsed. I had scribbled out a verse/chorus drum progression on a whim during my break at work that day. I hadn't practiced it and didn't even know if any of it sounded good in reality but that was the piece of paper in my hand when I realized the house was empty.
So, I quickly set up the kit and did some practice runs. It wasn't going great, as I recall. With time running out the strategy had essentially devolved into "fuck it, just play something." I hit record and improvised, kind of. The opening was actually the original intro that had been notated, just held for longer than indicated and with impromptu flourishes thrown in. The transition into the second section was pulled out of my ass when I forgot the planned fill. During earlier practice attempts there was a recurring idea that roughly resembled what ended up being the main pattern for the second section and the plan was for that to be a sort of "home base" with several unrelated improvisational passages littered throughout, so that's what happened there. The 3:4 section just happened organically, and I decided while playing it that I would like to leave a silent section for a guitar spotlight afterwards. The closing statements roughly follow from the earlier improvisations.
Well, that was kind of a clusterfuck. Is it good? Can I salvage this? Where's that guitar?
Screwed around with the tuning and settings for a bit, coming up with the riff for the gap in the process. That was the only thing I knew going into the recording, everything else was in the moment. The vocals? Improvised, along with the lyrics. I think there was a vague idea of the imagery, and the opening idea was probably hummed or something, but for the most part that was entirely in the moment as well. A little time and the addition of some effects saw the production of the first song, a bizarre freeform quasi-post-punk ramble.
Well, not the first song. The eighth song. Why are we doing this out of order? And I spent three paragraphs on that? What am I doing with my life?
Coral Citadel was actually one of the last songs to be made, I think. This seems to be a recurring theme, the opening track is so important to get right that I usually don't even try until much later into the project (unless something just happens to turn out right for the part). By this point we were way off the "rigid atmospheric math rock" rails... hmm, maybe chronological order of writing would be better.
Ok, look. The first three songs were Tar Parade, Liquid Hitting Metal and They've Moved On. None of which fit into the original formula and all of which were rocking my socks off multiple times per day. Spires came about somewhere near the end of the beginning as well, which is what really changed the game. We'll get back to this later but in essence after finishing the song I said "hmm, this is just Robber Stop in a big cave" and then it clicked. I should be making Robber Stop in a big cave! It's the obvious progression and it will sound awesome.
So, Coral Citadel. We're already making Robber Stop in a big cave, so at this point the plans boiled down to "make noise-y math rock and then throw sheets of reverb and delay everywhere." Amusingly, this is actually one of the most rigidly performed tracks on the entire album. You wouldn't think it given that it is just a single drum thumping along while guitars screech aimlessly but yeah, it totally is. I wrote out the entire floor tom part on a sheet of paper, it's still sitting next to me in this pile on the floor. I messed up one measure but other than that every single drum hit is exactly where it is supposed to be according to the notation I was reading at the time. The guitar parts are less defined but I said this was one of the most rigidly performed song on the album, not that it was rigid.
The vocals here are also a good point to talk about the vocals for the entire album. I don't really like my voice that much and definitely don't like to let other people hear me sing, but that creates a problem when you want to start making rock albums that aren't instrumental 100% of the time. The solution? Sing but hide it. Thankfully shoegaze made this fashionable so my album can still chart fairly well. Uh...
Right, so there are vocals in this song. You can even hear them clearly towards the end but they are they for almost the entire thing, it's just really hard to tell what is a mouth and what is an amplifier freaking out.
Then we get to They've Moved On, the obligatory anti-pop pop track. I remember this day pretty clearly. I had Chinese food for lunch, people left and I quickly busted this out. The riffs were roughly figured out beforehand but the leads were improvised. Also, believe it or not but it was entirely accidental that the entire song (barring certain chorus permutations) is in 11/8, I wasn't thinking about counting at all when playing (given that time was a serious factor). It's weird how that happens, especially when the three main riffs all have fairly different accent patterns. Not a huge fan of the vocals here, in hindsight I probably would have buried them even more but it is what it is.
Did you know that this is a "lead drum" album? What does that mean? Well, it means that the drum set is the lead instrument in the ensemble. That must sound pretty stupid considering that out of the first two tracks only one even had percussion and that was just a floor tom. How can we resolve this confusion for the listener? Drum solo, drum solo everywhere. Nine minute drum solo, fuck society.
Third track drum solos are also starting to become a recurring motif. Robber Stop had Howling, so Liquid Hitting Metal mirrors that. An upcoming Cobalt Rod album has a third track drum solo. I think there are more, I dunno, it's late. It'll become a trend if it isn't already, if only to prove this paragraph right.
Sunny Disposition was either the last or second to last song finished for the album, I can't remember. It and Undrown were recorded at around the exact same time and the production work on both of them was done on the same day or two so it's hard to remember which one actually finished second. The idea for this song was actually to do an absurdly overproduced "pop" track relative to the rest of the album. The pop idea was quickly shot in the head but the rest made it ashore. This song easily has more voices than any other track on the album; synth, drums, vocals, harmonica, guitar and even the sound that your amplifier apparently makes when you poke the end of the chord that is supposed to go into your guitar with your finger while it is not going into your guitar (it's that distorted thump-thump sound in the chorus). That's actually more voices than each of the adjacent songs put together.
Speaking of instrumentation, one of my greatest regrets with the album was that the two songs featuring chain are adjacent. What's that? You didn't realize I had draped a chain near my drum set and hit it like a dumbtard? Well, I did. That was actually another one of the main features of the original album, the drum set was going to include a chain as a main voice and no crash cymbals, only rides. The "static kit" notion was quickly thrown out the window, I think just about every song with drums has its own set up. However, the chain stayed, kind of.
See, it's kind of a pain to hang a heavy chain in such a way that it is available for you to comfortably hit it while not pulling everything down around it, and since I had to set up the drums from step one every time I recorded this meant that the chain didn't get nearly as much love as it should have. In Spires I just kind of suspended it between a bedpost and a cymbal stand and then here I think it was literally just sitting on the hi-hat so that when I played the hi-hat I was really just playing the chain. Anyways, these songs are next to each other so the chain is kind of relegated to this one tiny corner of the album but there just wasn't a way around that in the end.
Also, yeah, the vocals are kind of crazy. Bit of a tangent but I had actually recorded another Crimson Rod album in the middle of this one. Oh yeah, did you know that this album took over a year to record? Seriously, when I said it was a pain to find opportunities I meant it. Anyway, so there was this one night when I realized I still had an opportunity to record and was messing around with my ukulele when I stumbled upon something insane. That something turned into an album I recorded that night in essentially one sitting, falling asleep by the final track but loving every minute of it. That album is Acidic Majesty and not only are you not ready to hear but I am not ready for you to hear it. This description will need to suffice: Spastic ukulele improvisations (like Apprentice, if Apprentice hated you and your family) accompanied by equally spastic and dissonant vocals performed at the same time.
Everything had been recorded but these final two songs, Sunny Disposition and Undrown. So when I discovered a new way of singing that suited my tastes much better than anything I had been doing on the album up to that point of course those songs got that treatment. This isn't noticeable in the chorus but you might be able to tell in the verses that at some point "singing" became less of an objective than "make disruptive vocal sounds and stumble through the lyrics."
There's a funny story about the synth part too but that will fit better in another post and we've been talking about this damn song for a long time.
Spires.
Spires!
I love this song. I know, I wrote it, but I write lots of songs that I don't really care for in most circumstances. Not this song, this song is always welcome in my ears. For me it's the perfect mix of varied structure and coherency with a track length that is long enough to help it stand alone but short enough that the aforementioned coherency doesn't suffer. After I made this I listened to it almost constantly. I'd listen to it, go to work, come home and listen to it, eat dinner, listen to it again, do some stuff, listen again and possibly get a few more in before bed. There is so much going on here that it never got old.
So what is happening here?
There is a structure. This structure was written on a break, much like the proposed idea for what would become Tar Parade. Unlike Tar Parade, this structure mostly made it into the actual song. The idea was to take a verse/chorus song and tack a verse/chorus song onto it, then tack a third verse/chorus song onto that and then wrap back around to the chorus of the initial part of the song. That is exactly what happened, but the precise execution got fuzzy. See, I had vague ideas of how each section would go and I had even played through it a couple of time beforehand but the key was that it was still almost entirely improvised. I think the only parts that were really by the book were the first chorus (which ended up with random variation anyway) and the second verse (since it's a polymetric phrase of 3/4 against 7/4 it had to be somewhat rigid, but you probably can't even tell that the guitar part is in a different meter since it's so thick).
So, it's highly amorphous and yet follows a distinct and coherent structure throughout. I'll say that again because it should be sending chills down your spine: it's highly amorphous and yet follows a distinct and coherent structure throughout.
Also, it's noise-y, it's prog-y, it's math-y and it's shoegaze-y. I will definitely be exploring this further, don't you worry.
Shit, just listen to that thing again and again and again. I don't care if you find this egotistical, you will eventually love it if you have any sense about you.
Trivial Human Bullshit is also a song.
Fixated is balls awesome as well, I think. This one is definitely the most rigid track on the album in that I actually performed all of the parts as written, even the guitar parts. The genesis of this came in the shower from a fairly complex melody that I was humming. Of course, I couldn't remember that, but this tiny fragment of it remained and became the vocal part. The drumming is standard math but it's also cool math. I've toyed with the idea of doing drum youtube videos, if that ever happens I'll be sure to do a video breaking down each of these patterns.
There is some improvisation of course, because that's just how it goes. The intro, the first half of the bridge aside from the drum part, all of the second half of the bridge and then the abrupt snare outro thing which occurred as one of those "in the moment" musical tantrums. It's a drummer thing. Maybe, I don't know.
Ok, that wasn't fair to Trivial Human Bullshit. It's a good song, for what it is. A simple song, sure, but you have to admit that it does have a cool riff and the leads fit pretty well. Whatever.
We've already talked about Tar Parade, keep up.
Hit The Banister is also a song. The original reverb mix was better but the volume was too low and when I redid the track the effects weren't as great. Whoops. Would redo it but it's canon now.
A Sighting Near Elsewhere turned out really great. There was going to be more layered over the initial guitar improvisation but it was just too cool to ruin with unnecessary baggage so I did the quiet vocal part, added reverb (remember, big cave) and called it a day. It actually kind of sounds like a modernized Slint song to me, and you know how much I love Slint. Doesn't it though? Kind of Don, Aman-y? Whatever, it totes does.
That dark chord at the end is really beautiful too. One of the many joys of microtonal tunings, and it makes a perfect transition into...
Undrown! Like Spires, I've spent many, many, many minutes sitting in a chair staring off into space with this playing. It's the same thing, a long song that isn't too long and takes you on a varied yet coherent journey. Avid readers will notice that this seems to be connected to Coral Citadel lyrically. Wonder what that is all about?
I actually like the vocals on this song. Yeah, I know. I don't even like my vocals, but here it works. Something about taking that overly strained Acidic Majesty style and running it through the reverbodelay ringer just works.
Um... the opening guitar riff is entirely composed and played to the notation. The 5/4 drum part that starts the little verse/chorus-ish section was written beforehand. Everything else was improvised but improvised with a narrative arc in mind. There are still only two guitar parts during the outro.
I haven't told you anything, really. I don't like to talk about meaning in my music, only methods. We've talked about meaning, it's hidden from you. You have to supply your own. I like knowing that meaning is there in some objective sense, in contradiction to my last post it does keep me engaged with a work. However, I often don't like to actually know the meaning, y'know? If you know it's there you can spend time trying to figure it out and discover many interesting other meanings in the process. Once you've been given the answer it ruins that experience. Often the actual meaning isn't even as interesting to you anyway. So I could tell you what these songs are about but that would ruin the experience for you. Instead you've been given the gift of listening to this album over and over, lost in a land of mystery every time with the answers just out of reach. You could capitalize on this gift or you could just go back to listening to whatever you normally listen to and ignoring my musical output.
I suppose that means I could tell you without ruining the experience that you wouldn't even end up having but now I just won't tell you out of spite.
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Back, Change of Direction, Also Some Ramblings About Music
The title sums up what we're about to see here really. Let's go through those three items one at a time, yeah?
First: Well, I'm back. Not entirely sure why I left, other than the usual "work constantly on new project then burnout and fall into apathy" creative cycle. That was... a pretty short item. Moving on.
Second: Change of direction! In hindsight the old direction was really quite strange. On one hand, I'd like to think that it was a somewhat interesting way to expose people to certain forms of music and examine them at a fairly basic level. On the other hand, you could sift through wikipedia for an afternoon with a youtube tab open and glean roughly as much information, if not more. So we're probably not going to do that anymore.
What will we do? Well, you'll sit there and read this or whatever. I'll still drone on and on about mostly music, but this time I'll be talking about my own music. More specifically, I'd like to talk about how I approach music, the methods and techniques of composition that have become my bread and butter... that sort of thing. Is this narcissistic? Yeah. Is this interesting? Maybe to someone, but probably not very much so. However, it isn't something you could have googled beforehand and that is a good enough reason to convince myself to do this.
So that's the music aspect. The philosophy stuff will be the same, which is to say that it will probably be somewhat rare. The board gaming stuff... will happen. Honestly, I have some ideas for that too (Amusingly, maybe, one such idea will be a hybrid music/board gaming post. Isn't that exciting?). I'm trying not to plan too far ahead though, just to keep things feeling manageable enough to not jump ship.
Third: I'm going to ramble about music.
So, this is mostly going to be about how I approach music for the foreseeable future, right? Now it turns out that some of that might get... weird, depending on how much prior interest you've developed in theory and philosophy of music. What this means is that before anything else I should probably define what "music" actually is and what follows from that in my opinion, otherwise everything that follows will be complete gibberish.
Note from the future: These are the only two sentences I've gone back and added after finishing the rest of the post. Prepare for some stream of consciousness blather with serious structure issues.
Before I move on, I need to stress that even if you disagree on one or more points raised here, the important thing (at least in the context of this blog, obviously you can assign importance as deemed fit) is to gain an understanding of where the next few posts are coming from conceptually.
Alright.
What is music? Music is any instance of sound that someone somewhere has said, "hey, that's music" about. Let's flesh that out a bit. Music is sound, that much should be easy to agree on, but what about that second part? Someone just has to consider something music for it to be music? Isn't that a bit arbitrary?
Yes.
The classification of music is arbitrary, because music is nothing more than a concept, an idea. It isn't the sound, it's the way humans have, or at least a human has, decided to assign meaning to that sound. We will come back to that later, but it works for now. What this does mean though is that the world of music is suddenly very, very large, which is something some people may have a problem with. However, there doesn't seem to be another good way to define the art form. One decent definition clarified it as "organized sound" but that has problems with either not including things which should be included or being just as open-ended as before. For example, how "organized" does something have to be? Does jazz improvisation count? How about a guy playing around with guitar feedback? Field recordings? 4'33? Each gets progressively "less" organized yet there doesn't appear to be a clear breaking point as to where something ceases to have enough structure, at least none that would be supported by anything other than throwing your arms up in the air. So really, you might as well just go with the earlier definition since it cuts right to the point.
Music is sound that someone calls music.
That's the first of three concepts I need to get out here. I'll try to be less rambly for the next two but no promises. Anyways, what we've got is people calling music music, but why are they doing that? Where does meaning enter the picture and how does it interact with the physical aspect of sound? It is commonly held that music expresses meaning, or at least good music does. Hold that thought.
Pick a sound found in the music you listen to that you like. It could be anything, the sound of an electric guitar playing a power chord, the sound of a snare hitting on 2 and 4, the sound of a vibraslap on fire. Why do you like that sound?
See, music is all about cool sounds. Like, seriously, man. You find a sound that you think works, for whatever reason, and you go "yeah, that's in the song now." It may not be something that's necessarily new either, if you really like the sound of basic chords strummed on an acoustic guitar then there's a good chance you might work that into quite a bit of your material. Note that there's nothing inherently more "music-y" about that acoustic guitar strumming compared to throwing a hammer at a wall, it's just a cool sound that works.
So bringing meaning back into this, there is a horrible, horrible widespread misconception that "cool sound-ism" and "expressing meaning-ism" are fundamentally opposed schools of thought. If you spend too much time tweaking the effects you're slathering that cello in, you're spending too much time with a calculator working out the timing on that polytempo section, you're spending too much time throwing darts at a dictionary to come up with lyrics, you clearly aren't investing any REAL MEANING into your craft. I mean, obviously, right? Sadness can only be expressed sonically through minor triads on a piano while some dude sings about a girl that strangely seems to always be either completely anonymous or interchangeable with nearly any other girl. That's just the way it works, because music.
Or maybe, if you'd recall the paragraph before that last one in which we talked about sounds, you'll realize that those sounds don't actually have any connection to those meanings. Think about that. The sound that has made you feel a certain way your entire life is absolutely unrelated to that emotion in any objective sense. But it seems blindly obvious when you think about it, right? There's no reason that a note with another note three semitones above it and a third four semitones above that one (all assuming Western 12-tone equal temperment as the scale) should mean "sad" or "serious," that's a subjective response on your end. You felt that about the music, the music didn't put it into you.
"But wait," you object, "that musician probably did intend to express sadness with those chords that made me feel that way! Doesn't that count for anything?" No, not really. Alright, it's very, very likely that the vast majority of people pull the vast majority of their subjective response to music from their environment, so it makes perfect sense that two people from the same environment might feel roughly the same way about a certain way of organizing sound, such that if one of them writes a song intending it to express a certain meaning the other would be able to extract that meaning from the song accurately. It is very important to realize that these are two unrelated subjective experiences that just happen to coincide, the sound itself did nothing to transport it.
So if the sounds have no inherent connection to the intended meaning what's stopping someone from just using any sounds to express anything they might want? Uh, nothing. That's the whole point. The composer can decide to express any meaning through whatever variety of "cool sounds-ism" strikes their fancy that day and it will result in a meaningful song. Will you necessarily be able to accurately gauge the intended meaning? No, but isn't about you. Don't feel bad though, you get to bring your own subjective experience to the table and that has just as much weight as the composer's.
Did I say three concepts? I meant three and a half. Here's two point five.
Meaning and interesting sounds are measured on two separate axis, they need not conflict. However, that doesn't mean you necessarily need both of them either. Which is to say, you can forget meaning.
There's another horrible, horrible widespread idea that a song NEEDS TO HAVE MEANING. Why is that, exactly? Don't answer that. First of all, how would you even apply that criterion? Are you going to jump inside someone's mind to determine whether or not they actually bothered to invest any meaning into a song or if they were just paying the bills? Drawing a line between what does and does not qualify as music based on something that is absolutely impossible to judge externally is absolutely absurd and foolhardy. Don't do it.
Besides, what does meaning really bring to the table that is so special? We're already listening to and making music for the sake of cool sounds and whatever we get out of the experience is coming from our end anyways. Sure, it can be nice, but is it really all that necessary? Just enjoy the sounds and stop demanding to be force fed emotion, if you still have them it should come naturally.
As an example, feel free to listen to the As Seas Swallow album "Longing For Never." No, really, I won't stop you. I will say, however, that there are some songs on this album that are pure cool sounds-ism, some which have a concept or story behind them and some which I even wrote from the context of something personal. If you can honestly tell the difference between them and figure out which is which I'll eat a salad.
http://asseasswallow.bandcamp.com/album/longing-for-never
Third and final thing, I promise. Remember how we talked about how music is really a concept, not the sounds themselves? We're going back to that. Bear with me.
Side Note: I lied previously about the continuity, everything that follows is from about a month after I started writing this. I stopped because I wanted to think of the perfect example for this, and I did at lunch one day but then I forgot it and now I've had to think of a new one. It'll do.
Take a board game, yeah? Say, Fresco. You open the box, what's in there? A board, some cards, some tiles and some wooden cubes and other bits. Is that the game known as "Fresco"? Well, no. Those are just pieces. You have the understanding that it is a game, but only because someone has said "hey, this is a game and here's how it involves these widgets." (If you're one of the designers that someone is you, the idea doesn't change) Those pieces don't contain the concept of the game itself, they just facilitate your ability to perceive and interact with it.
Any given piece that "belongs" to a game may not even be consistently incorporated into it. For example, there are numerous cards and tiles included with Fresco that are only used if the players wish to add certain additional rules to the game. It's entirely possible to play an infinite number of games of Fresco and never use the Portrait cards, for example. In what way would they be related to the game then? If you decided to store a blank piece of paper in the box as well how would those two things be different in any functional way?
This also carries over to game components that belong to multiple games. The wooden cube is a staple of modern eurogames, much like the checker is a key component of countless abstract strategy games. Either of these things could be taken and used in an infinite number of games without ever changing itself, it's merely the application that changes. If one believes that game components somehow metaphysically contain the game they belong to this would be tricky, if one assumes they are merely a convenient representation it isn't.
Indeed, you don't even need physical components to play many games. Any perfect information game without randomization, like 1830 or Chess, would be fairly easy to play through as a conversation, or at least any difficulties would come from the inability of mere mortals to accurately remember the game state and communicate clearly with one another and not from any obstacles introduced by the game concept itself. Sure, the pieces are fantastically helpful, but they are ultimately just a way to see what is going on in our minds as the game progresses.
So music is like that.The sounds are the physical components and the music itself is just a concept. The sounds are our way of accessing that concept. Yeah, heavy.
Alright, enough of that for now. You may or may not agree with what just happened, the whole point was just for you to get a picture of where I'm coming from when I talk about music so that the following posts about my writing techniques won't be completely incomprehensible. Well, they might still be, but I tried.
First: Well, I'm back. Not entirely sure why I left, other than the usual "work constantly on new project then burnout and fall into apathy" creative cycle. That was... a pretty short item. Moving on.
Second: Change of direction! In hindsight the old direction was really quite strange. On one hand, I'd like to think that it was a somewhat interesting way to expose people to certain forms of music and examine them at a fairly basic level. On the other hand, you could sift through wikipedia for an afternoon with a youtube tab open and glean roughly as much information, if not more. So we're probably not going to do that anymore.
What will we do? Well, you'll sit there and read this or whatever. I'll still drone on and on about mostly music, but this time I'll be talking about my own music. More specifically, I'd like to talk about how I approach music, the methods and techniques of composition that have become my bread and butter... that sort of thing. Is this narcissistic? Yeah. Is this interesting? Maybe to someone, but probably not very much so. However, it isn't something you could have googled beforehand and that is a good enough reason to convince myself to do this.
So that's the music aspect. The philosophy stuff will be the same, which is to say that it will probably be somewhat rare. The board gaming stuff... will happen. Honestly, I have some ideas for that too (Amusingly, maybe, one such idea will be a hybrid music/board gaming post. Isn't that exciting?). I'm trying not to plan too far ahead though, just to keep things feeling manageable enough to not jump ship.
Third: I'm going to ramble about music.
So, this is mostly going to be about how I approach music for the foreseeable future, right? Now it turns out that some of that might get... weird, depending on how much prior interest you've developed in theory and philosophy of music. What this means is that before anything else I should probably define what "music" actually is and what follows from that in my opinion, otherwise everything that follows will be complete gibberish.
Note from the future: These are the only two sentences I've gone back and added after finishing the rest of the post. Prepare for some stream of consciousness blather with serious structure issues.
Before I move on, I need to stress that even if you disagree on one or more points raised here, the important thing (at least in the context of this blog, obviously you can assign importance as deemed fit) is to gain an understanding of where the next few posts are coming from conceptually.
Alright.
What is music? Music is any instance of sound that someone somewhere has said, "hey, that's music" about. Let's flesh that out a bit. Music is sound, that much should be easy to agree on, but what about that second part? Someone just has to consider something music for it to be music? Isn't that a bit arbitrary?
Yes.
The classification of music is arbitrary, because music is nothing more than a concept, an idea. It isn't the sound, it's the way humans have, or at least a human has, decided to assign meaning to that sound. We will come back to that later, but it works for now. What this does mean though is that the world of music is suddenly very, very large, which is something some people may have a problem with. However, there doesn't seem to be another good way to define the art form. One decent definition clarified it as "organized sound" but that has problems with either not including things which should be included or being just as open-ended as before. For example, how "organized" does something have to be? Does jazz improvisation count? How about a guy playing around with guitar feedback? Field recordings? 4'33? Each gets progressively "less" organized yet there doesn't appear to be a clear breaking point as to where something ceases to have enough structure, at least none that would be supported by anything other than throwing your arms up in the air. So really, you might as well just go with the earlier definition since it cuts right to the point.
Music is sound that someone calls music.
That's the first of three concepts I need to get out here. I'll try to be less rambly for the next two but no promises. Anyways, what we've got is people calling music music, but why are they doing that? Where does meaning enter the picture and how does it interact with the physical aspect of sound? It is commonly held that music expresses meaning, or at least good music does. Hold that thought.
Pick a sound found in the music you listen to that you like. It could be anything, the sound of an electric guitar playing a power chord, the sound of a snare hitting on 2 and 4, the sound of a vibraslap on fire. Why do you like that sound?
See, music is all about cool sounds. Like, seriously, man. You find a sound that you think works, for whatever reason, and you go "yeah, that's in the song now." It may not be something that's necessarily new either, if you really like the sound of basic chords strummed on an acoustic guitar then there's a good chance you might work that into quite a bit of your material. Note that there's nothing inherently more "music-y" about that acoustic guitar strumming compared to throwing a hammer at a wall, it's just a cool sound that works.
So bringing meaning back into this, there is a horrible, horrible widespread misconception that "cool sound-ism" and "expressing meaning-ism" are fundamentally opposed schools of thought. If you spend too much time tweaking the effects you're slathering that cello in, you're spending too much time with a calculator working out the timing on that polytempo section, you're spending too much time throwing darts at a dictionary to come up with lyrics, you clearly aren't investing any REAL MEANING into your craft. I mean, obviously, right? Sadness can only be expressed sonically through minor triads on a piano while some dude sings about a girl that strangely seems to always be either completely anonymous or interchangeable with nearly any other girl. That's just the way it works, because music.
Or maybe, if you'd recall the paragraph before that last one in which we talked about sounds, you'll realize that those sounds don't actually have any connection to those meanings. Think about that. The sound that has made you feel a certain way your entire life is absolutely unrelated to that emotion in any objective sense. But it seems blindly obvious when you think about it, right? There's no reason that a note with another note three semitones above it and a third four semitones above that one (all assuming Western 12-tone equal temperment as the scale) should mean "sad" or "serious," that's a subjective response on your end. You felt that about the music, the music didn't put it into you.
"But wait," you object, "that musician probably did intend to express sadness with those chords that made me feel that way! Doesn't that count for anything?" No, not really. Alright, it's very, very likely that the vast majority of people pull the vast majority of their subjective response to music from their environment, so it makes perfect sense that two people from the same environment might feel roughly the same way about a certain way of organizing sound, such that if one of them writes a song intending it to express a certain meaning the other would be able to extract that meaning from the song accurately. It is very important to realize that these are two unrelated subjective experiences that just happen to coincide, the sound itself did nothing to transport it.
So if the sounds have no inherent connection to the intended meaning what's stopping someone from just using any sounds to express anything they might want? Uh, nothing. That's the whole point. The composer can decide to express any meaning through whatever variety of "cool sounds-ism" strikes their fancy that day and it will result in a meaningful song. Will you necessarily be able to accurately gauge the intended meaning? No, but isn't about you. Don't feel bad though, you get to bring your own subjective experience to the table and that has just as much weight as the composer's.
Did I say three concepts? I meant three and a half. Here's two point five.
Meaning and interesting sounds are measured on two separate axis, they need not conflict. However, that doesn't mean you necessarily need both of them either. Which is to say, you can forget meaning.
There's another horrible, horrible widespread idea that a song NEEDS TO HAVE MEANING. Why is that, exactly? Don't answer that. First of all, how would you even apply that criterion? Are you going to jump inside someone's mind to determine whether or not they actually bothered to invest any meaning into a song or if they were just paying the bills? Drawing a line between what does and does not qualify as music based on something that is absolutely impossible to judge externally is absolutely absurd and foolhardy. Don't do it.
Besides, what does meaning really bring to the table that is so special? We're already listening to and making music for the sake of cool sounds and whatever we get out of the experience is coming from our end anyways. Sure, it can be nice, but is it really all that necessary? Just enjoy the sounds and stop demanding to be force fed emotion, if you still have them it should come naturally.
As an example, feel free to listen to the As Seas Swallow album "Longing For Never." No, really, I won't stop you. I will say, however, that there are some songs on this album that are pure cool sounds-ism, some which have a concept or story behind them and some which I even wrote from the context of something personal. If you can honestly tell the difference between them and figure out which is which I'll eat a salad.
http://asseasswallow.bandcamp.com/album/longing-for-never
Third and final thing, I promise. Remember how we talked about how music is really a concept, not the sounds themselves? We're going back to that. Bear with me.
Side Note: I lied previously about the continuity, everything that follows is from about a month after I started writing this. I stopped because I wanted to think of the perfect example for this, and I did at lunch one day but then I forgot it and now I've had to think of a new one. It'll do.
Take a board game, yeah? Say, Fresco. You open the box, what's in there? A board, some cards, some tiles and some wooden cubes and other bits. Is that the game known as "Fresco"? Well, no. Those are just pieces. You have the understanding that it is a game, but only because someone has said "hey, this is a game and here's how it involves these widgets." (If you're one of the designers that someone is you, the idea doesn't change) Those pieces don't contain the concept of the game itself, they just facilitate your ability to perceive and interact with it.
Any given piece that "belongs" to a game may not even be consistently incorporated into it. For example, there are numerous cards and tiles included with Fresco that are only used if the players wish to add certain additional rules to the game. It's entirely possible to play an infinite number of games of Fresco and never use the Portrait cards, for example. In what way would they be related to the game then? If you decided to store a blank piece of paper in the box as well how would those two things be different in any functional way?
This also carries over to game components that belong to multiple games. The wooden cube is a staple of modern eurogames, much like the checker is a key component of countless abstract strategy games. Either of these things could be taken and used in an infinite number of games without ever changing itself, it's merely the application that changes. If one believes that game components somehow metaphysically contain the game they belong to this would be tricky, if one assumes they are merely a convenient representation it isn't.
Indeed, you don't even need physical components to play many games. Any perfect information game without randomization, like 1830 or Chess, would be fairly easy to play through as a conversation, or at least any difficulties would come from the inability of mere mortals to accurately remember the game state and communicate clearly with one another and not from any obstacles introduced by the game concept itself. Sure, the pieces are fantastically helpful, but they are ultimately just a way to see what is going on in our minds as the game progresses.
So music is like that.The sounds are the physical components and the music itself is just a concept. The sounds are our way of accessing that concept. Yeah, heavy.
Alright, enough of that for now. You may or may not agree with what just happened, the whole point was just for you to get a picture of where I'm coming from when I talk about music so that the following posts about my writing techniques won't be completely incomprehensible. Well, they might still be, but I tried.
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Things And Stuff
Alright, so we're nearing the end of the first month and I'd have to say it went rather well, all things considered. Before November hits I want to push out three more math rock posts (One general and two more band-focus-thingies), so expect those to come very soon. I've already got a genre in mind for the next month but I think I'll try to be a lot less ambitious from now on and just do more "showing" than "telling," otherwise I'm never going to have time to talk about anything else around here.
Which leads me into my next point, where does your interest lie so far (You being the concrete audience member within the nebulous crowd, I want you specifically to tell me)? I've only done two philosophy posts so far, but I'm trying not to drown the blog in them (And I'm admittedly also waiting for a bit more participation, only one person has really taken the bait so far). I think if there is more dialogue going on then we can keep this slower pace, so that everything can work itself out organically, but if this is just going to remain a soapbox I'm fine with pushing out a higher quantity of those posts.
Boardgaming... hasn't taken off. The problem here is that while I spend more time on BGG than on facebook (And anyone who has added me on facebook knows how much time I spend there) I'm not really sure what to talk about in such a one-sided presentation. I have a couple ideas for some stand-alone posts in the nearish future (One requires a bit of a time commitment and the other requires a second set of hands, but I'll get around to them soon enough) but I'd really like for there to be a more consistent way to work it into the flow information, seeing as it's supposedly one of the "big three" themes here. Would anyone be interested in a "what looks cool" sort of thing where I just pick out a game that I think looks cool (Things I don't have yet, in other words, as with the size of my current collection this series wouldn't last long) and talk about it a bit? Maybe I could also write reviews every now and then. I don't know, maybe it'll work itself out somehow.
On a more general note, my posts are full of typos and other errors. In all fairness, that's because I almost always write these either very late at night (Or early in the morning, depending on perspective) or when I'm in some sort of rush (Even at this moment I'm expecting a call in ~3 minutes. At some point in this paragraph I'm going to stop writing for like four hours and then come back to it and you'll have absolutely no idea when it occurred in the text. Isn't that awesome?), but I'd still like to avoid it as much as possible. I'm aware of a couple of things that need to be fixed but if you see any please let me know. Those things but me.
And I guess that's more or less it, actually. Please comment if you've got any opinion on... well, any of that. Also, I'm going to look into figuring out hyperlinks so that the music threads will be more user friendly but in the meantime it's easy enough to just browse with two windows (Just paste the links into the second window, as I'm sure you already know). Apparently the comment system here is a bit wonky as well, so I'll get that figured out and do a short blurb on how it works in an upcoming post just in case anyone is having troubles (I know of at least one person that is, so this isn't purely unfounded rationalization).
Anyways, stay tuned.
Which leads me into my next point, where does your interest lie so far (You being the concrete audience member within the nebulous crowd, I want you specifically to tell me)? I've only done two philosophy posts so far, but I'm trying not to drown the blog in them (And I'm admittedly also waiting for a bit more participation, only one person has really taken the bait so far). I think if there is more dialogue going on then we can keep this slower pace, so that everything can work itself out organically, but if this is just going to remain a soapbox I'm fine with pushing out a higher quantity of those posts.
Boardgaming... hasn't taken off. The problem here is that while I spend more time on BGG than on facebook (And anyone who has added me on facebook knows how much time I spend there) I'm not really sure what to talk about in such a one-sided presentation. I have a couple ideas for some stand-alone posts in the nearish future (One requires a bit of a time commitment and the other requires a second set of hands, but I'll get around to them soon enough) but I'd really like for there to be a more consistent way to work it into the flow information, seeing as it's supposedly one of the "big three" themes here. Would anyone be interested in a "what looks cool" sort of thing where I just pick out a game that I think looks cool (Things I don't have yet, in other words, as with the size of my current collection this series wouldn't last long) and talk about it a bit? Maybe I could also write reviews every now and then. I don't know, maybe it'll work itself out somehow.
On a more general note, my posts are full of typos and other errors. In all fairness, that's because I almost always write these either very late at night (Or early in the morning, depending on perspective) or when I'm in some sort of rush (Even at this moment I'm expecting a call in ~3 minutes. At some point in this paragraph I'm going to stop writing for like four hours and then come back to it and you'll have absolutely no idea when it occurred in the text. Isn't that awesome?), but I'd still like to avoid it as much as possible. I'm aware of a couple of things that need to be fixed but if you see any please let me know. Those things but me.
And I guess that's more or less it, actually. Please comment if you've got any opinion on... well, any of that. Also, I'm going to look into figuring out hyperlinks so that the music threads will be more user friendly but in the meantime it's easy enough to just browse with two windows (Just paste the links into the second window, as I'm sure you already know). Apparently the comment system here is a bit wonky as well, so I'll get that figured out and do a short blurb on how it works in an upcoming post just in case anyone is having troubles (I know of at least one person that is, so this isn't purely unfounded rationalization).
Anyways, stay tuned.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Second math rock band - Shellac
Oh, you're in for a treat. Shellac. Is. Awesome. Last time we talked about Slint, a math rock band with heavy post-rock leanings and an acoustic, low-key aesthetic (If you missed that, do yourself a favor and backtrack a bit). Shellac is not that.
There is another subgenre of rock music, noise rock. Noise rock is something that I'm sure we'll get to in great detail some other month (How could we not?), but it's important to mention it here because noise rock and math rock often cross paths. Remember Yowie and how abrasive and angular their sound was? That's the sort of style you get when these two genres collide, although often you'll get a sound focused more on repetition and groove than spastic madness (Actually, there was a Slint song in that last blog that was a good example, "Carol," which had the kind of driving groove we're talking about... anyways, I digress).
Shellac is one of those bands that conjoin noise rock and math rock and they do it very well. As an introduction, let's just dive into one of my favorite songs of all time. This is "Squirrel Song" by Shellac:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSNDrYwptzo
Yeah, I know. Your entire world just changed a little. The first thing you'll probably notice is the choppy rhythmic structure (More specifically 3/8+6/8+3/8+5/8). The second thing you'll probably notice is the metallic tone. As for the structure, this is a common variation on the stop-start phrasing mentioned in previous posts. You take a single metric phrase and then repeat it but don't always play the whole thing. To use the riff in this song as an example, the core phrase is played in the second measure of each four measure segment (The 6/8). The first and third measures cut this phrase in half but keep everything else intact, so when they would play beat 4 of the phrase they instead play the downbeat of the next measure. Finally, the last measure of each pattern is a 5/8, only dropping the very last beat of the phrase. This isn't the only instance of this kind of composition in the genre, but it's always the one that jumps straight to mind for me.
As for the tone, a lot of that comes from Steve Albini's rather unorthodox approach to the guitar. For a clearer example of him "playing with noise" so to speak, let's look at "Copper":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H22upaG3BGs
Now, this a purely 4/4 track so it's not great for our purposes on math rock but it's a great introduction to noise rock and it should give you a better understanding of Shellac's musical direction. The last few seconds of the song are a particularly great example of what I'm talking about, it sounds less like a guitar and more like malfunctioning machinery. Which is awesome, of course.
Here's "Doris":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gW6g0jV3ZU
Not too math-y with this one, but it's got a nice groove. The main riff is in 4/4 but it's grouped in pairs and broken down as 3/4+3/4+2/4 (A very, very common rock subdivision so it's no surprise that it shows up almost constantly in this subgenre as well). The chorus takes that same idea for the first half of each phrase but then follows it up with either a measure of 6/4 or two measures of 3/4 (It feels like a six to me but the overally structure of the song implies threes), making the full progression of each phrase something like 3+3+2+3+3. At the end of the song they seem to go purely into 3/4. Also, remember polyrhythms? Note that again we have a 3-2 polyrhythm showing up in the choruses and the outro. It's a very common rhythmic motif to keep an eye (Or ear, rather) out for.
"Billiard Player Song":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-peDxKGgNbA
Another straight forward one, although notice how open and sparse the structure is (Pretty much a single riff alternated with periods of drum fills over decaying chords) and how loose they are in the beginning. It's the kind of song that you can almost tell a math rocker wrote, even though it isn't packed full of odd meters. Also, it's just a really great song in and of itself, simultaneously very bright while also melancholy.
"Ghosts":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6BTG44DWsw
Figured I'd mix things up with a live video here (Although it's such a classic tune you might as well find the album quality version as well). The meter is an alternation between 11/8 (3+3+3+2) and 13/8 (3+3+3+2+2), presented in a manner that's actually somewhat similar to the style of "Squirrel Song" above since the two patterns are the same with the exception of one being slightly longer. You could think of the 11 as a 13 that's been cut short.
"Crow": (Well, some of it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKrJhGQuBz8
Another live video. This song is entirely in 3/4 and is yet another example of the 3-2 polyrhythm. Notice also how the drummer flips the "2" at around 1:30ish, and how the whole affair is very sparse and tribal (Steve barely touches his guitar).
"Wingwalker":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pEc8o1qWkA
This song is in 6/4 (Except possibly the section of noise which is probably in free time). However, the melodic guitar leads at the beginning and end of the piece are in 4/4, which creates an interesting disconnect as the patterns fail to resolve together and the guitar seems to hang out in space for a bit. You might recall that this is called a polymeter. If you don't, now you know.
And I think that's a decent place to call it quits for now. Unlike Slint (Who unfortunately only gave us a handful of songs), Shellac has a decently sized discography so I urge you to look further into their work if any of this interests you. Most of it tends more towards grooving 4/4 pieces but there is a sizable chunk of mathiness throughout, I believe.
Hope you enjoyed it.
There is another subgenre of rock music, noise rock. Noise rock is something that I'm sure we'll get to in great detail some other month (How could we not?), but it's important to mention it here because noise rock and math rock often cross paths. Remember Yowie and how abrasive and angular their sound was? That's the sort of style you get when these two genres collide, although often you'll get a sound focused more on repetition and groove than spastic madness (Actually, there was a Slint song in that last blog that was a good example, "Carol," which had the kind of driving groove we're talking about... anyways, I digress).
Shellac is one of those bands that conjoin noise rock and math rock and they do it very well. As an introduction, let's just dive into one of my favorite songs of all time. This is "Squirrel Song" by Shellac:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CSNDrYwptzo
Yeah, I know. Your entire world just changed a little. The first thing you'll probably notice is the choppy rhythmic structure (More specifically 3/8+6/8+3/8+5/8). The second thing you'll probably notice is the metallic tone. As for the structure, this is a common variation on the stop-start phrasing mentioned in previous posts. You take a single metric phrase and then repeat it but don't always play the whole thing. To use the riff in this song as an example, the core phrase is played in the second measure of each four measure segment (The 6/8). The first and third measures cut this phrase in half but keep everything else intact, so when they would play beat 4 of the phrase they instead play the downbeat of the next measure. Finally, the last measure of each pattern is a 5/8, only dropping the very last beat of the phrase. This isn't the only instance of this kind of composition in the genre, but it's always the one that jumps straight to mind for me.
As for the tone, a lot of that comes from Steve Albini's rather unorthodox approach to the guitar. For a clearer example of him "playing with noise" so to speak, let's look at "Copper":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H22upaG3BGs
Now, this a purely 4/4 track so it's not great for our purposes on math rock but it's a great introduction to noise rock and it should give you a better understanding of Shellac's musical direction. The last few seconds of the song are a particularly great example of what I'm talking about, it sounds less like a guitar and more like malfunctioning machinery. Which is awesome, of course.
Here's "Doris":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gW6g0jV3ZU
Not too math-y with this one, but it's got a nice groove. The main riff is in 4/4 but it's grouped in pairs and broken down as 3/4+3/4+2/4 (A very, very common rock subdivision so it's no surprise that it shows up almost constantly in this subgenre as well). The chorus takes that same idea for the first half of each phrase but then follows it up with either a measure of 6/4 or two measures of 3/4 (It feels like a six to me but the overally structure of the song implies threes), making the full progression of each phrase something like 3+3+2+3+3. At the end of the song they seem to go purely into 3/4. Also, remember polyrhythms? Note that again we have a 3-2 polyrhythm showing up in the choruses and the outro. It's a very common rhythmic motif to keep an eye (Or ear, rather) out for.
"Billiard Player Song":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-peDxKGgNbA
Another straight forward one, although notice how open and sparse the structure is (Pretty much a single riff alternated with periods of drum fills over decaying chords) and how loose they are in the beginning. It's the kind of song that you can almost tell a math rocker wrote, even though it isn't packed full of odd meters. Also, it's just a really great song in and of itself, simultaneously very bright while also melancholy.
"Ghosts":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6BTG44DWsw
Figured I'd mix things up with a live video here (Although it's such a classic tune you might as well find the album quality version as well). The meter is an alternation between 11/8 (3+3+3+2) and 13/8 (3+3+3+2+2), presented in a manner that's actually somewhat similar to the style of "Squirrel Song" above since the two patterns are the same with the exception of one being slightly longer. You could think of the 11 as a 13 that's been cut short.
"Crow": (Well, some of it)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKrJhGQuBz8
Another live video. This song is entirely in 3/4 and is yet another example of the 3-2 polyrhythm. Notice also how the drummer flips the "2" at around 1:30ish, and how the whole affair is very sparse and tribal (Steve barely touches his guitar).
"Wingwalker":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pEc8o1qWkA
This song is in 6/4 (Except possibly the section of noise which is probably in free time). However, the melodic guitar leads at the beginning and end of the piece are in 4/4, which creates an interesting disconnect as the patterns fail to resolve together and the guitar seems to hang out in space for a bit. You might recall that this is called a polymeter. If you don't, now you know.
And I think that's a decent place to call it quits for now. Unlike Slint (Who unfortunately only gave us a handful of songs), Shellac has a decently sized discography so I urge you to look further into their work if any of this interests you. Most of it tends more towards grooving 4/4 pieces but there is a sizable chunk of mathiness throughout, I believe.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
The nature of self
Alright, I know I said my next philosophy post would be another one about free will but it's not going to be. It's not that I'm not going to do that, it's just that I'm not going to do that right now. The downside is you have to wait a little, the plus side is this gives you extra time to start posting comments telling me how wrong I am. Huzzah! In all seriousness though, I do recall at least one person saying they wanted to comment but I forget who it was (So I can't remind them) and I haven't seen anything so I figure I might as well give Mr. X another few days (And then however long after that until I decide I feel like finishing what I started).
Instead, we're going to talk about something that I don't actually have any concrete ideas on yet, so this will be less of a lecture and more of a rambling discussion starter about some philosophical possibilities (Lava lamps and controlled substances are optional). That said, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this topic recently and am starting to get a few ideas in place, methinks.
Alright, so let's begin with a hypothetical question-story hybrid that doesn't really have anything explicit to say about our topic. This is something that a friend posed to me about 6 months ago, and it's certainly stuck as a rather deep point of interest: Let's say you have a boat. Over the course of some period of time, you gradually replace the various parts of the boat (Maybe it's falling into disrepair, maybe you're just fickle, doesn't matter). At the end of this period, every single piece of the boat is a different one from when you originally got the boat, but they were each replaced separately (Which is to say that you didn't tear your boat apart and then go build a totally new boat). Is that the same boat?
Think about it for a few minutes, I'll wait.
Alright, so there are a couple ways to handle this problem. Really, since it's a binary question we must provide one of two answers: yes or no. If we say it's the same boat, on what grounds are we defining "same" and "boat"? If we say it isn't the same boat, at which point did the identity of the boat change?
These aren't easy questions, certainly. To consult good old Merriam-Webster as a place to start (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/same):
So that's that. Again, nothing too concrete yet (Although you can probably tell which way I'm leaning). Commentary is more than welcome, really. Perhaps I could do a post later on with responses to any discussion that forms (Hint: there needs to be a discussion first). Aside from that possibility, it would just be really nice to hear some more minds weighing in on the matter.
Instead, we're going to talk about something that I don't actually have any concrete ideas on yet, so this will be less of a lecture and more of a rambling discussion starter about some philosophical possibilities (Lava lamps and controlled substances are optional). That said, I've been doing a lot of thinking about this topic recently and am starting to get a few ideas in place, methinks.
Alright, so let's begin with a hypothetical question-story hybrid that doesn't really have anything explicit to say about our topic. This is something that a friend posed to me about 6 months ago, and it's certainly stuck as a rather deep point of interest: Let's say you have a boat. Over the course of some period of time, you gradually replace the various parts of the boat (Maybe it's falling into disrepair, maybe you're just fickle, doesn't matter). At the end of this period, every single piece of the boat is a different one from when you originally got the boat, but they were each replaced separately (Which is to say that you didn't tear your boat apart and then go build a totally new boat). Is that the same boat?
Think about it for a few minutes, I'll wait.
Alright, so there are a couple ways to handle this problem. Really, since it's a binary question we must provide one of two answers: yes or no. If we say it's the same boat, on what grounds are we defining "same" and "boat"? If we say it isn't the same boat, at which point did the identity of the boat change?
These aren't easy questions, certainly. To consult good old Merriam-Webster as a place to start (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/same):
1
a : resembling in every relevant respect b : conforming in every respect —used with as
2
a : being one without addition, change, or discontinuance : identical b : being the one under discussion or already referred to
3
: corresponding so closely as to be indistinguishable
4
: equal in size, shape, value, or importance —usually used with the or a demonstrative (as that, those) in all senses
1 is difficult to gauge without seeing the final state of the boat, but for the sake of argument let's say that the boat does appear to resemble the original in the physical sense. What of it's deeper composition? What is relevance and who is the final authority regarding it? Are we to think that the primal structure, the unique atoms and molecules, which compose the object before us are not relevant to it? That strikes me as absurd, honestly. For the moment I'm going to side with saying that our boat does not hold water with definition 1.
2 I don't think I really need to explain, but I'm just going to discard it outright. We've already rigged the question in direct contradiction to this definition.
For 3 I'm not as comfortable going either way, but it seems that a line of thought similar to that used to address definition 1 could be applied here. Indistinguishable to whom is the very first question that pops into my head. I've seen many squirrels, and I'd have to say that I'd be hard pressed to distinguish between many of them. Does that mean that some of them are the "same" squirrel even if they are separate entities? Indeed, if we could supply a doppelganger of anything, would they become the "same" or is this definition only intended to apply to appearance? If that's the case, it is of no use to us and should also be cast aside.
So now all that is left is definition 4, which is the toughest one by far to deal with (Isn't it handy how they arranged them in difficulty for us? You've got to admire an organic formulation of suspense like that). Size and shape are easy to understand, but what of value and importance? Value is subjective, so its use in a supposedly concrete label is dubious at best. Importance is tougher... importance in what regard? The flow of electricity is important to my computer being powered on right now in that it is the primary (If not sole) reason that it is in fact powered on, so we appear to have some objective basis for importance. However, to say that Jens Kidman is an important member of Meshuggah is a more subjective statement (Although he totally is) and isn't useful in the way of establishing a firm label on anything. Still the definition is a string of conjunctions (Equal in size and equal in shape and equal in value and equal in importance) so we really just need to focus on the issue of value and subjectivity in the definition. Are all subjective values equivalent in that they are all subjective or are all subjective values different in that they express individualized notions? If they are equivalent then the definition passes muster and we may be able to apply it to our boat (Concluding, at long last, that the boat is in fact the same one, by some magic of our language). However, if they are not then the entire definition breaks apart (Again, it's a four part conjunction and if even one part is false then the whole is false, it's a basic logical fact) and we are left with a boat that is not the same than the one we had before.
And what, you might be thinking, does any of that have to do with the nature of self? I'm getting there.
So as not to spend the rest of our lives watching me talk myself in circles, let's assume that "same" does not apply to the boat. We have taken boat A of component parts C1, D1, E1 and F1 and replaced the components one by one until we somehow arrive at boat B of component parts C2, D2, E2 and F2. Now, where did the change occur? At some point we have a boat (Let's use x as a generic variable) of component parts C2, D1, E1 and F1. Is this boat A or boat B? Both? Neither? Perhaps boat x will take on a different identity with each shift; so we have boat G of component parts C2, D1, E1 and F1, then boat H of component parts C2, D2, E1 and F1, then boat I of component parts C2, D2, E2 and F1, and finally boat B from above. It seems almost that any change would disqualify a boat from being taken as the "same" boat, as it is now fundamentally different in some compositional manner.
So now what? Well, for the sake of fairness, let's apply all of those concepts to you. If we take you A of component parts C1, D1, E1, F1 and G1 (Apparently you're made of more than a boat in this blog's fantasy world) could we derive you B by replacing each of those parts one at a time? Note that I'm not saying this is the case, I'm saying that if this were the case and that we could actually replace all of your components, could we arrive at a you that is no longer the same as the original you? What if we replaced one of those components? If you allowed it for the boat (Which I have no idea, yet), you must allow it for yourself.
Now let's cut to the chase: the universe is currently replacing your components at the very moment you're reading this. You're composed of particles and one thing particles do is move around, they trade places and shift and generally have quite a rowdy time. Two objects in close contact with each other trade particles and they do so frequently. So, while it is not necessarily the case that each of your components will be replaced, nor is it necessarily the case that any of your components will be replaced (Perhaps they just switch positions, although I think this is so unlikely as to be physically impossible in any practical sense), it is most certainly the case that some or all of your components are capable of being replaced. Given everything from above, does this indicate that you are no longer you A but actually something closer to you ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZC (There should be way more "Z"s, I'm just lazy)? What does that really mean?
Let's return to the boat. So maybe it isn't the same boat, but do we really perceive a difference? More importantly, what is a boat? It's made up of physical objects, right? Do those physical objects cease to be themselves and become subsumed into some nebulous concept of "boat" once we affix them to the whole? What about the particles making up those objects, do they cease to be individual particles and become subsumed into a nebulous concept of "steering wheel" at some point? What about this "universe" thing, it's made up of components too, right? Do all of those components cease to be individuals and merely part of the concept "universe" instead?
It seems to me that the issue is largely one of perception. We perceive objects and consider them to be whole unto themselves, but the reality is that they are made up of components, each of which we would also consider to be whole unto itself. Since there is a certain point at which we cannot really perceive things unaided (And even then the regression continues down to... quarks at the moment, yes?) it seems that there is nothing which we directly perceive that is a truly whole and defined entity. In other words, when you look at a rock you're look at a mass of components that you can't individually perceive and the perception of the rock itself is in a sense merely an illusion. There is no such complete, whole entity as a "rock." Or at least, that appears to be the case.
And of course, this would have to apply to humans and other animals as well. When you look at me, you're seeing an illusory figure composed of imperceptible parts, one that is constantly in a flux of gaining and losing components. And the same would be true of when I look at you. What then can we say of "self"? Are we truly reasonable in concluding that there even is such a thing?
So that's that. Again, nothing too concrete yet (Although you can probably tell which way I'm leaning). Commentary is more than welcome, really. Perhaps I could do a post later on with responses to any discussion that forms (Hint: there needs to be a discussion first). Aside from that possibility, it would just be really nice to hear some more minds weighing in on the matter.
Saturday, October 16, 2010
First math rock band - Slint
Alright, so I've totally lagged behind on my posting but that's ok, we've still got a bit of time left in the month. This post will be the first to focus on a single band, in this case Slint, and I hope to knock out a couple more before November hits us (I've already decided on the next genre and I think you'll all just love it. Or hate it. You'll have a disposition towards it, which will fall upon some sort of continuum). Also, I botched one of the links in the "assorted songs" post but I've gone back to edit it and it should be correct now, so if you were totally confused for one of the We Insist! paragraphs that might be why.
Mmkay, so Slint. Slint is... amazing. And that's a scientific fact. But, more than that Slint is a great study in early math rock, being one of the bands focused more on organic composition than worrying about making sure everything is using the right wrong numbers. In a previous post we already listened to their song "Nosferatu Man" so if you missed that, go back and un-miss it, and we'll continue by just repeating that process with a few other songs by them.
First we've got "Breadcrumb Trail," the opening track off of their ground breaking album Spiderland (Which "Nosferatu Man" is also on, as well as most songs we're about to go over):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MBGwzEhMc
Right off the bat we're given a gently phrased 7/4 guitar riff to set the stage. You can also think of it as 4/4 + 6/8, with the 6/8 phrased as 3+3, which is important as the bulk of the center of the song shifts to mostly straight 6/8 meter. More specifically, the change occurs at ~1:24 in the video. Notice also that while the section is in mostly groups four 3s (Two bars of 6/8, each 3+3 with the second group accented) there are also some five group phrases mingled in, which we could take to be a shift to 15/8 meter, a 6/8 bar followed by a 9/8 bar, two 6/8s followed by a 3/8, or perhaps most simply we could just write out the entire section in a 3/8 time signature (Although the compound lilt of the rhythm suggests otherwise, but since we haven't gotten into compound time yet let's just ignore that point of theory for the moment). All of that probably sounds a bit complex, or at least more complex than you're used to thinking in terms of musical rhythm, but instead of worrying about that just listen to it and you'll likely find that even if you have no idea what the musical theory behind the section is it still sounds quite natural and easy.
Later down the line they start to mix in brief sections of 4/4 time, where we also get another glimpse of the stop-start compositional style of math rock in play. Note how some of the "open" measures aren't the same duration of the others, without prior experience with the song it's easy to become misled about when the next downbeat is coming (Which is par for the course in this genre, something to keep in mind).
Eventually they get to a point where they are alternating the 4/4 rock measures with 3/4 "open" measures before making a return to the original 7/4 motif of 4+3. I think one of the greatest qualities of this particular song are how it manages to make a moderately intricate rhythmic structure sound perfectly "even" and I believe a lot of that has to do with how well they stay within the two basic metric ideas of 4s and 3s, rounding everything out so that it flows with the surrounding bars. The most turbulent sections of the piece are where they seem to deliberately separate the two feels, which is an interesting point to start a discussion that we may get to later on down the line (I say that a lot, I know).
Alright, moving on. Now, I'm covering Slint here as a math rock band, but that's not strictly their classification within music history. Many have made the argument that Slint is more accurately described as a post-rock band, a genre that was in formation around the same time Spiderland hit and whose modern incarnations bear a rather obvious resemblance to many of its sonic themes. Post-rock is another somewhat nebulous genre label, which boils down to "rock musicians using rock instruments to play something other than rock music, but that is still related to rock music." Now, that's a horrible definition for a label for a number of reasons but we aren't going to weigh in on that debate here. Instead we're going to listen to a few of the more ambient tracks from the album, in which the role rhythmic experimentation is diminished (And they're in 4/4 time... gasp!). So, listen to these and begin to form a vague opinion about your stance on Slint's genre classification.
"For Dinner..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bJwJaRdsDE
"Don, Aman"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-T63_DK8hc
"Washer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCaf82ZFtss
Well, what did you think? Pretty amazing stuff, eh? Certainly seems a far cry from what comes to mind when you think "math rock" (Ok, when I think math rock, at least), and it's definitely close in style to modern post-rock. We'll revisit this topic later on with examples from a different band, math rock actually has a number of bridges into other genres and the borders can be very, very fuzzy sometimes. Math rock bands are also notoriously known for not really liking or adhering to the label, so it gets even more muddied when band A makes a rhythmically spastic and deconstructive album one day and a suite of 20 minute ambient tracks the next. We're often left with partial classification at best, and the point I guess I'm making is that Slint is one of those bands that we need to accept falls both within and outside the realm of math rock depending on which song you're listening to.
Now let's take a trip back in time to Slint's first album Tweez. Here we see the band aiming for a more chaotic and loose sound than their later, acoustically focused works. To start off let's look at "Pat":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9zHVlY0tmo
That was just awesome, wasn't it? It seems to be primarily (Entirely, perhaps) in 4/4 but there is so much syncopation and loose interpretation of the meter that it's almost like the time signature is removed from the equation completely. We've also got rapid shifts between riffing themes, a strange vocal loop and later on some bluesy jazz fusion noodling. This is almost a totally different beast from what Slint would later become.
"Darlene":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9srFCiqbFRk
Another great example of loose rhythmic interpretation in play, with an eerie guitar lead that seems to dance awkwardly over the steady drum and bass groove and a lot a couple instances of stop-start phrasing and shifting tempo.
"Carol":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft12x0Ggzfs
This is wonderful because it sets us up for a later exploration of this musical line of thought in with math rock and noise rock intersect (And they do it oh so frequently). Aside from the plodding rhythms and thick distortion, notice how they play with the feel of the tempo in their transition between the two main sections. Also around 2 minutes in they switch to 3/4 time, a sign that even early on their sense of rhythm was more involved than just "play loose."
And that, in a nutshell, is a fairly decent overview of some key points in Slint's musical career. On a closing note, listen to the last track on Spiderland, "Good Morning, Captain." It's another 4/4 romp but this one emulates the insistent groove of tracks like "Carol" more than the early post-rock of something like "Washer." I hope you enjoyed the post, but let me know if you have any further inquiries. I didn't want to bury you in technical information that wasn't really needed but at the same time I'm afraid it might be a bit "light." Anyways, just listen to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoH5MPIgM7c
Mmkay, so Slint. Slint is... amazing. And that's a scientific fact. But, more than that Slint is a great study in early math rock, being one of the bands focused more on organic composition than worrying about making sure everything is using the right wrong numbers. In a previous post we already listened to their song "Nosferatu Man" so if you missed that, go back and un-miss it, and we'll continue by just repeating that process with a few other songs by them.
First we've got "Breadcrumb Trail," the opening track off of their ground breaking album Spiderland (Which "Nosferatu Man" is also on, as well as most songs we're about to go over):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29MBGwzEhMc
Right off the bat we're given a gently phrased 7/4 guitar riff to set the stage. You can also think of it as 4/4 + 6/8, with the 6/8 phrased as 3+3, which is important as the bulk of the center of the song shifts to mostly straight 6/8 meter. More specifically, the change occurs at ~1:24 in the video. Notice also that while the section is in mostly groups four 3s (Two bars of 6/8, each 3+3 with the second group accented) there are also some five group phrases mingled in, which we could take to be a shift to 15/8 meter, a 6/8 bar followed by a 9/8 bar, two 6/8s followed by a 3/8, or perhaps most simply we could just write out the entire section in a 3/8 time signature (Although the compound lilt of the rhythm suggests otherwise, but since we haven't gotten into compound time yet let's just ignore that point of theory for the moment). All of that probably sounds a bit complex, or at least more complex than you're used to thinking in terms of musical rhythm, but instead of worrying about that just listen to it and you'll likely find that even if you have no idea what the musical theory behind the section is it still sounds quite natural and easy.
Later down the line they start to mix in brief sections of 4/4 time, where we also get another glimpse of the stop-start compositional style of math rock in play. Note how some of the "open" measures aren't the same duration of the others, without prior experience with the song it's easy to become misled about when the next downbeat is coming (Which is par for the course in this genre, something to keep in mind).
Eventually they get to a point where they are alternating the 4/4 rock measures with 3/4 "open" measures before making a return to the original 7/4 motif of 4+3. I think one of the greatest qualities of this particular song are how it manages to make a moderately intricate rhythmic structure sound perfectly "even" and I believe a lot of that has to do with how well they stay within the two basic metric ideas of 4s and 3s, rounding everything out so that it flows with the surrounding bars. The most turbulent sections of the piece are where they seem to deliberately separate the two feels, which is an interesting point to start a discussion that we may get to later on down the line (I say that a lot, I know).
Alright, moving on. Now, I'm covering Slint here as a math rock band, but that's not strictly their classification within music history. Many have made the argument that Slint is more accurately described as a post-rock band, a genre that was in formation around the same time Spiderland hit and whose modern incarnations bear a rather obvious resemblance to many of its sonic themes. Post-rock is another somewhat nebulous genre label, which boils down to "rock musicians using rock instruments to play something other than rock music, but that is still related to rock music." Now, that's a horrible definition for a label for a number of reasons but we aren't going to weigh in on that debate here. Instead we're going to listen to a few of the more ambient tracks from the album, in which the role rhythmic experimentation is diminished (And they're in 4/4 time... gasp!). So, listen to these and begin to form a vague opinion about your stance on Slint's genre classification.
"For Dinner..."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bJwJaRdsDE
"Don, Aman"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-T63_DK8hc
"Washer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCaf82ZFtss
Well, what did you think? Pretty amazing stuff, eh? Certainly seems a far cry from what comes to mind when you think "math rock" (Ok, when I think math rock, at least), and it's definitely close in style to modern post-rock. We'll revisit this topic later on with examples from a different band, math rock actually has a number of bridges into other genres and the borders can be very, very fuzzy sometimes. Math rock bands are also notoriously known for not really liking or adhering to the label, so it gets even more muddied when band A makes a rhythmically spastic and deconstructive album one day and a suite of 20 minute ambient tracks the next. We're often left with partial classification at best, and the point I guess I'm making is that Slint is one of those bands that we need to accept falls both within and outside the realm of math rock depending on which song you're listening to.
Now let's take a trip back in time to Slint's first album Tweez. Here we see the band aiming for a more chaotic and loose sound than their later, acoustically focused works. To start off let's look at "Pat":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9zHVlY0tmo
That was just awesome, wasn't it? It seems to be primarily (Entirely, perhaps) in 4/4 but there is so much syncopation and loose interpretation of the meter that it's almost like the time signature is removed from the equation completely. We've also got rapid shifts between riffing themes, a strange vocal loop and later on some bluesy jazz fusion noodling. This is almost a totally different beast from what Slint would later become.
"Darlene":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9srFCiqbFRk
Another great example of loose rhythmic interpretation in play, with an eerie guitar lead that seems to dance awkwardly over the steady drum and bass groove and a lot a couple instances of stop-start phrasing and shifting tempo.
"Carol":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft12x0Ggzfs
This is wonderful because it sets us up for a later exploration of this musical line of thought in with math rock and noise rock intersect (And they do it oh so frequently). Aside from the plodding rhythms and thick distortion, notice how they play with the feel of the tempo in their transition between the two main sections. Also around 2 minutes in they switch to 3/4 time, a sign that even early on their sense of rhythm was more involved than just "play loose."
And that, in a nutshell, is a fairly decent overview of some key points in Slint's musical career. On a closing note, listen to the last track on Spiderland, "Good Morning, Captain." It's another 4/4 romp but this one emulates the insistent groove of tracks like "Carol" more than the early post-rock of something like "Washer." I hope you enjoyed the post, but let me know if you have any further inquiries. I didn't want to bury you in technical information that wasn't really needed but at the same time I'm afraid it might be a bit "light." Anyways, just listen to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoH5MPIgM7c
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Oh right, boardgames
It seems I've neglected to actually post anything about my third primary topic so far, which is a pretty glaring oversight all things considered. Unfortunately, I don't have anything specific to talk about at the moment so I'm just going to give a (Very, very) brief overview of the modern hobby and introduce the greatest directory/community for boardgames that I'm aware of; boardgamegeek.
Alright, types of boardgames. Now, you can break down and analyze each of the following groups, you can find countless examples of crossover games and traits, you can spend so much time thinking about this that the skimpy descriptions I'm about to provide will seem inadequate to the point of being useless. That's alright, because once you reach that point you won't need to be told about these particular distinctions anyways.
Family Games: A really, really broad category, one that doesn't really have a defining characteristic other than "be light and be accessible." We've all heard of Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry, etc. Those are family games, games that aren't necessarily wells of deep strategic thought but make up for it by being easy to learn and low enough in intensity that everyone at the table can join in on the fun while still carrying on off-topic conversation and knitting.
Abstract Games: Another broad category, in that all games are essentially abstractions to some extent. However, this title is generally used for games that are intended to be almost purely abstract, like Chess or Go. Lot's of strategy heavy brain-burners in this category, but the core idea behind the games is generally well understood in the public consciousness due to the extremely high profile of a select few entries. If someone sees you playing Pentago or Symbol they might not have any idea what's happening but they'll probably get the gist of it by relating it to something like Connect Four or Chess.
Ameritrash: Originally intended as a slang insult for a certain family of games, this has grown to be a badge of honor for many. Ameritrash is characterized by being very theme-heavy, having lots of rules and components (Many of which tend to be made of plastic) and having direct competition between players (Often with player elimination). Risk is probably one of the most well known titles in this genre, which most people seem to have some idea about, but this category is mostly made up of games that almost nobody who isn't already somewhat aware of the modern hobby would be aware of.
Eurogames: Generally hailing from European descent (Gee, really?), euros are almost the opposite of ameritrash. Theme often takes a backseat to mechanics ("Pasted on" themes are a common complaint used by people who dislike euros), and less action-oriented territory is usually covered like farming, buying things or buying land to farm. Player interaction is also reduced in many titles (The term "multiplayer solitaire" also gets thrown around a lot), and player elimination is extremely rare, at least to my knowledge. If any game would be the "well-known" one of this group it's probably The Settler's Of Catan, which is apparently quite a huge hit in Europe and has managed to make it into stores like Toys R Us and Target in the U.S. Still, if you ran a poll I'd be willing to guess that a great many people have never heard of that game, so the genre is a bit more alien and "hobbyistish" (Totally a word) than the others we have covered.
Wargames: Ah, wargames. Risk is an early implementation of this line of thought but it's abstract and "gamey" (Turning in sets of cards to get more armies when you need them and such) to the extent that it doesn't really resemble what some would consider more "proper" wargames. Hex-tiled maps and square counters representing units is common fare here, as are thick rulebooks and charts for events and combat. Really, wargames are more like "war simulations" than other boardgames, which is where they diverge from ameritrash takes on war-themed games. Historical accuracy and detail is the name of the game here.
Dexterity games: Pretty simple concept, these are games in which dexterity plays a large role. I think everyone has an idea of what that means, games where you flick, throw or roll components to accomplish something. Of course, there tends to be a fine line between where something is a "lesser activity" sport and where it is a boardgame of sorts. Ping Pong seems to be clearly a sport, Darts is in a gray area and Sorry Sliders is clearly a boardgame.
And that's a very simplistic picture of the modern boardgaming hobby. Like I said, there is a lot of crossover between these styles both in shared traits (Victory points are a staple of eurogames but are also found in many ameritrash games and have equivalent mechanics in some family games and wargames) and in true attempts at a stylistic merger (From what I hear, games like Cyclades and Chaos In The Old World are a perfect blend of euro and ameritrash, and we're seeing lots of dexterity mechanics showing up in dungeon crawl and empire building games like Catacombs and the soon to be released Ascending Empires). Don't take this as anything more than a very quick reference to help you get a basic idea of where things are right now. Which leads us to...
Boardgamegeek! http://boardgamegeek.com/ This website is absolutely amazing, with a great community and an extremely large database with volumes of information. If you're at all interested in boardgaming as a hobby this would be the place to start.
And that's that. Hopefully I'll have something a bit more specific come to mind in the future, if not I'll have to cobble some excuse together to keep posting arbitrary nonsense... not that I do that. If you have any questions feel free to ask me, and if you're anywhere near me (Hoover or Mobile in Alabama, depending on time of year) and would like to give a game a try I'm up for it (My collection is still small, however. The only two categories I'm really missing a strong title for are wargames and dexterity games at the moment though).
Alright, types of boardgames. Now, you can break down and analyze each of the following groups, you can find countless examples of crossover games and traits, you can spend so much time thinking about this that the skimpy descriptions I'm about to provide will seem inadequate to the point of being useless. That's alright, because once you reach that point you won't need to be told about these particular distinctions anyways.
Family Games: A really, really broad category, one that doesn't really have a defining characteristic other than "be light and be accessible." We've all heard of Monopoly, Scrabble, Sorry, etc. Those are family games, games that aren't necessarily wells of deep strategic thought but make up for it by being easy to learn and low enough in intensity that everyone at the table can join in on the fun while still carrying on off-topic conversation and knitting.
Abstract Games: Another broad category, in that all games are essentially abstractions to some extent. However, this title is generally used for games that are intended to be almost purely abstract, like Chess or Go. Lot's of strategy heavy brain-burners in this category, but the core idea behind the games is generally well understood in the public consciousness due to the extremely high profile of a select few entries. If someone sees you playing Pentago or Symbol they might not have any idea what's happening but they'll probably get the gist of it by relating it to something like Connect Four or Chess.
Ameritrash: Originally intended as a slang insult for a certain family of games, this has grown to be a badge of honor for many. Ameritrash is characterized by being very theme-heavy, having lots of rules and components (Many of which tend to be made of plastic) and having direct competition between players (Often with player elimination). Risk is probably one of the most well known titles in this genre, which most people seem to have some idea about, but this category is mostly made up of games that almost nobody who isn't already somewhat aware of the modern hobby would be aware of.
Eurogames: Generally hailing from European descent (Gee, really?), euros are almost the opposite of ameritrash. Theme often takes a backseat to mechanics ("Pasted on" themes are a common complaint used by people who dislike euros), and less action-oriented territory is usually covered like farming, buying things or buying land to farm. Player interaction is also reduced in many titles (The term "multiplayer solitaire" also gets thrown around a lot), and player elimination is extremely rare, at least to my knowledge. If any game would be the "well-known" one of this group it's probably The Settler's Of Catan, which is apparently quite a huge hit in Europe and has managed to make it into stores like Toys R Us and Target in the U.S. Still, if you ran a poll I'd be willing to guess that a great many people have never heard of that game, so the genre is a bit more alien and "hobbyistish" (Totally a word) than the others we have covered.
Wargames: Ah, wargames. Risk is an early implementation of this line of thought but it's abstract and "gamey" (Turning in sets of cards to get more armies when you need them and such) to the extent that it doesn't really resemble what some would consider more "proper" wargames. Hex-tiled maps and square counters representing units is common fare here, as are thick rulebooks and charts for events and combat. Really, wargames are more like "war simulations" than other boardgames, which is where they diverge from ameritrash takes on war-themed games. Historical accuracy and detail is the name of the game here.
Dexterity games: Pretty simple concept, these are games in which dexterity plays a large role. I think everyone has an idea of what that means, games where you flick, throw or roll components to accomplish something. Of course, there tends to be a fine line between where something is a "lesser activity" sport and where it is a boardgame of sorts. Ping Pong seems to be clearly a sport, Darts is in a gray area and Sorry Sliders is clearly a boardgame.
And that's a very simplistic picture of the modern boardgaming hobby. Like I said, there is a lot of crossover between these styles both in shared traits (Victory points are a staple of eurogames but are also found in many ameritrash games and have equivalent mechanics in some family games and wargames) and in true attempts at a stylistic merger (From what I hear, games like Cyclades and Chaos In The Old World are a perfect blend of euro and ameritrash, and we're seeing lots of dexterity mechanics showing up in dungeon crawl and empire building games like Catacombs and the soon to be released Ascending Empires). Don't take this as anything more than a very quick reference to help you get a basic idea of where things are right now. Which leads us to...
Boardgamegeek! http://boardgamegeek.com/ This website is absolutely amazing, with a great community and an extremely large database with volumes of information. If you're at all interested in boardgaming as a hobby this would be the place to start.
And that's that. Hopefully I'll have something a bit more specific come to mind in the future, if not I'll have to cobble some excuse together to keep posting arbitrary nonsense... not that I do that. If you have any questions feel free to ask me, and if you're anywhere near me (Hoover or Mobile in Alabama, depending on time of year) and would like to give a game a try I'm up for it (My collection is still small, however. The only two categories I'm really missing a strong title for are wargames and dexterity games at the moment though).
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