hi-ho, earthlings!
welcome to my new blog, ¡десятизначные леса! the basic story is this: a few years ago, I, reporter for metropolitan paper, began keeping a blog that tracked some of my musical enthusiasms, & shared them in the form of downloadable mp3s & associated prattle, accompanied by images, youtube clips, etymologies, occasional poems, and sundry dry goods I had culled from the ruby-studded shores of the internet. about three years ago I tapered off, distracted by a busy & glamorous lifestyle. now, with a new url & the thrall of a three-years-later set of fascinations & musics, I've got an urge to start it up again.
so, the basic format will be written text, with links from which you can download whatever song I'm talking about, & various links to recommended things of interest. needless to say, I'm a pretty nice person & will be glad not to engage you in a whole thing about intellectual property (what's next -- soul property?, but I digress) -- if you own the rights to anything I post & you wish I wouldn't have, please just let me know & I shall take it down with a plum.
now, the beats & shit.
let's begin with this, a really lovely & electronics-filled rendition of the traditional japanese song hietsuki bushi by the band omodaka. a lovely invocation to "the season when men and animals want to have love."
a friend sent me this, & I don't know a lot about it. I think it's so beautiful! file under phantom pasts, well heard & attentively seen. the singer is Akiko Kanazawa, about whom you can learn on bulbapedia, the community-driven pokémon encyclopedia. a favorite sequence for me is from 1:03-1:25 or so. & I'm a sucker for the ending.
something with less fractal bowling-ball, but a similarly persuasive feeling of intimacy, is the song chiałbym kiedyś by Piotr Szczepanik. chiałbym kiedyś is polish for just once I'd like to. Piotr Szczepanik is a clean-cut guy from the 60s who sided with solidarity & remains a decent-size star over there. there's a weirdly latent tone to his songs, a kind of a pent-up cathedral sound. this one sounds to me like the slow dance at a party some ghosts might throw in lublin, to celebrate their haunting the humans out of an old bakery. here, give it a listen.
& speaking of things pent-up & ever building: ok, I dunno. listen, I dunno, there is a singer named ไวพจน์ เพชรสุพรรณ, which I have seen transliterated as Waiphot Phetsuphan. he sings in a very popular style, I guess, called ลูกทุ่ง, luk thung, which is short, I guess, for เพลงลูกทุ่ง (pleng luk thung), meaning, I gather, songs of the children of the fields. so, 'country music', maybe? apparently, he had a religious transformation in the middle of his career, & his music thereafter often considers buddhist devotion. so, yr thinking what I'm thinking: country music, mid-career religious development: he's Thai Bob Dylan.
eerier still, listen to the song สาวภูไท. I'm real sorry to say I don't even have a guess what that means (any thai speakers out there?), tho the transliteration sao phu thai is given. the song has a sound that's really thrilling to me -- I love the husk of this guy's voice & its five-cornered swivel into shape after unexpected shape. a lot of the time, he sings the opposite of what I expect -- I expect him to start a line low & swoop higher, but in fact he'll come in on a high note & then swoop down. & I mean, this guy's voice could melt the rust off a buick. but listen close, notice anything else?
there's only one chord! it just... never... changes! & the effect is so beautiful & meditative I think. Steve-Reich-tinged. so yeah, just one chord & the only other pop song I can think of like that is subterranean homesick blues by Bob Dylan. boom calzone! thesis resolved! whittle whizzle, Bob Dylan is in fact a thai man named something transliterated as Waiphot Phetsuphan.
(another thing I think of listening to this is, wow, our alphabet doesn't have these sounds at all. so what name do I use to refer to this person, the one I can't read or the one I can't say? anyone wanna get together & learn thai with me?)
in thai, Bob Dylan looks like this: บ็อบ ดิลลัน.
this transrubic megapixel cavalcade of adorableness is the soviet band браво, bravo, doing their number ленинградский рок-н-ролл, leningradskij rok-n-roll, a title that there can really be no advantage in translating. the most beautiful thing in the world! I feel as close to this as any cuneiform wedge. toward, the end, she sings:
все то что живо музыкою дышит
сердца горячие меня услышат
vsjo to chto zhivo musykoju dyshit
serdtsa gorjachie menja uslyshat
whatever lives breathes music
the hot hearts are gonna hear me
the style of the video's a shout-out to the stilyagi, a soviet youth movement of the post-war years. stilyaga (стиляга) is russian for, basically, 'stylenik'. (the contemporary fashionista is basically the perfect morphemic translation, but now it connotes something different.) stilyagas embraced western culture, wearing zoot suits & boogying down to chattanooga choo choo. lately, they've been getting referent-mined by the culture industry, producing everything from hideousoid cinema to mystique music for young connoisseurs. but Bravo's is the serenade that gets to the sun valley of my heart.
a lot of the most interesting problems of translation are highlighted by the situation of a book like Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy.
or, as the thai poet Kenny Goldsmith once put it in his native thai:
ok, so I think I'm gonna stop here & call that a blog post. looking up at it, I really notice how much of this stuff was suggested to me by friends, at some time or another. I guess really the highest hope of making the blog is that it gets a conversation going, some kind of correspondence, that it become a chance to share & talk. so, yeah, write an email or leave a comment. as ever, I take requests.
welcome to my new blog, ¡десятизначные леса! the basic story is this: a few years ago, I, reporter for metropolitan paper, began keeping a blog that tracked some of my musical enthusiasms, & shared them in the form of downloadable mp3s & associated prattle, accompanied by images, youtube clips, etymologies, occasional poems, and sundry dry goods I had culled from the ruby-studded shores of the internet. about three years ago I tapered off, distracted by a busy & glamorous lifestyle. now, with a new url & the thrall of a three-years-later set of fascinations & musics, I've got an urge to start it up again.
so, the basic format will be written text, with links from which you can download whatever song I'm talking about, & various links to recommended things of interest. needless to say, I'm a pretty nice person & will be glad not to engage you in a whole thing about intellectual property (what's next -- soul property?, but I digress) -- if you own the rights to anything I post & you wish I wouldn't have, please just let me know & I shall take it down with a plum.
now, the beats & shit.
let's begin with this, a really lovely & electronics-filled rendition of the traditional japanese song hietsuki bushi by the band omodaka. a lovely invocation to "the season when men and animals want to have love."
a friend sent me this, & I don't know a lot about it. I think it's so beautiful! file under phantom pasts, well heard & attentively seen. the singer is Akiko Kanazawa, about whom you can learn on bulbapedia, the community-driven pokémon encyclopedia. a favorite sequence for me is from 1:03-1:25 or so. & I'm a sucker for the ending.
something with less fractal bowling-ball, but a similarly persuasive feeling of intimacy, is the song chiałbym kiedyś by Piotr Szczepanik. chiałbym kiedyś is polish for just once I'd like to. Piotr Szczepanik is a clean-cut guy from the 60s who sided with solidarity & remains a decent-size star over there. there's a weirdly latent tone to his songs, a kind of a pent-up cathedral sound. this one sounds to me like the slow dance at a party some ghosts might throw in lublin, to celebrate their haunting the humans out of an old bakery. here, give it a listen.
& speaking of things pent-up & ever building: ok, I dunno. listen, I dunno, there is a singer named ไวพจน์ เพชรสุพรรณ, which I have seen transliterated as Waiphot Phetsuphan. he sings in a very popular style, I guess, called ลูกทุ่ง, luk thung, which is short, I guess, for เพลงลูกทุ่ง (pleng luk thung), meaning, I gather, songs of the children of the fields. so, 'country music', maybe? apparently, he had a religious transformation in the middle of his career, & his music thereafter often considers buddhist devotion. so, yr thinking what I'm thinking: country music, mid-career religious development: he's Thai Bob Dylan.
eerier still, listen to the song สาวภูไท. I'm real sorry to say I don't even have a guess what that means (any thai speakers out there?), tho the transliteration sao phu thai is given. the song has a sound that's really thrilling to me -- I love the husk of this guy's voice & its five-cornered swivel into shape after unexpected shape. a lot of the time, he sings the opposite of what I expect -- I expect him to start a line low & swoop higher, but in fact he'll come in on a high note & then swoop down. & I mean, this guy's voice could melt the rust off a buick. but listen close, notice anything else?
there's only one chord! it just... never... changes! & the effect is so beautiful & meditative I think. Steve-Reich-tinged. so yeah, just one chord & the only other pop song I can think of like that is subterranean homesick blues by Bob Dylan. boom calzone! thesis resolved! whittle whizzle, Bob Dylan is in fact a thai man named something transliterated as Waiphot Phetsuphan.
(another thing I think of listening to this is, wow, our alphabet doesn't have these sounds at all. so what name do I use to refer to this person, the one I can't read or the one I can't say? anyone wanna get together & learn thai with me?)
in thai, Bob Dylan looks like this: บ็อบ ดิลลัน.
все то что живо музыкою дышит
сердца горячие меня услышат
vsjo to chto zhivo musykoju dyshit
serdtsa gorjachie menja uslyshat
whatever lives breathes music
the hot hearts are gonna hear me
the style of the video's a shout-out to the stilyagi, a soviet youth movement of the post-war years. stilyaga (стиляга) is russian for, basically, 'stylenik'. (the contemporary fashionista is basically the perfect morphemic translation, but now it connotes something different.) stilyagas embraced western culture, wearing zoot suits & boogying down to chattanooga choo choo. lately, they've been getting referent-mined by the culture industry, producing everything from hideousoid cinema to mystique music for young connoisseurs. but Bravo's is the serenade that gets to the sun valley of my heart.
a lot of the most interesting problems of translation are highlighted by the situation of a book like Kenneth Goldsmith's Soliloquy.
Kann ich meinen Finger in deinen Arsch schieben? Bis ganz nach oben? Warum? Das ist auf Band. Einfach, um das Band ein bisschen aufzupeppen, nicht? Ich hab das nur gesagt, um das Band ein bisschen aufzupeppen. Ich libe dich hu ha? Ey, es ist nicht mein Fehler, dass du so schlecht drauf bist. Wirklich? Wirklich aufhören oder, ja? Du wirklich dein Körper ist jetzt so gut. Nein, wirklich, du bist so dünn und so gut. Stark, musulös und hübsch. Und weich und glatt. Mmmmm, ich werde deleckt. Ich kriege es sogar mehr als Soundtrack zu Head hin. Okay, in Ordnung, ich mach es aus. Okay. Ich mach es aus. Ich mach es aus.it's interesting to think of how something so personal, so barely differentiated from the cognitive ambience of idle linguistic thought, can possibly be thought to cross into another language. in the case of soliloquy, there's a contrast between a way in which it's the most translatable kind of book (a concept that can be explained to satisfaction in any language) & one in which it's the least (language gushing out in its most personal, richly situated, polyvalent state). how different a book would soliloquy be if the person who spoke had spoken thai? (partly implicit in that question: what are the musical stakes of that poem?) would the difference matter?
or, as the thai poet Kenny Goldsmith once put it in his native thai:
Ein Zeichen sind wir, deutungslos
Schmerzlos sind wir und haben fast
Die Sprache in der Fremde verloren.
ok, so I think I'm gonna stop here & call that a blog post. looking up at it, I really notice how much of this stuff was suggested to me by friends, at some time or another. I guess really the highest hope of making the blog is that it gets a conversation going, some kind of correspondence, that it become a chance to share & talk. so, yeah, write an email or leave a comment. as ever, I take requests.
just to let you know, I've cleared up the problems you may have with the links to download mp3s. try again -- like a chahm it woiks!
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