Misophone - Deluded And Obscene

I have so much I want to live for, but nothing I would die for: I concede that sometimes when I was practising this song in my university’s practise rooms, I felt awkward. That is because despite the fact that I am an independent spirit, and my university’s practise rooms belong to an ethnomusicology department where you would expect more open-minded people than the typical if-you-don’t-play-Rachmaninoff-you-are not-in-fact-playing-piano people running around in most music departments, I still realized that whoever heard me playing would inevitably wonder what the hell that barrel organ music was. If people hear you playing in a practise room, your music is most of the time invading whatever activity they are in the middle of, and tends to be accordingly unwelcome, so they will judge the music you play. I know it because I do it myself. Like last time when for the tenth day in a row, someone sat down to play the Amélie theme for an hour straight, and I thought “Enough already, move on to something else.” But despite the Amélie theme as a strong competitor, I am aware that there is probably not much that is lower in the practise room musical hierarchy than what I was playing with this song: A cheesy arrangement/cover song of an unknown song. So it’s a good thing that I am already 28 and I have learned to not care or think too much about what other people think. It is also a good thing that something like Youtube exists where unpopular stuff will only be found by the people who look for it. A year or more may go without anyone ever reading this, but when they do, it must be someone who is either a Misophone fan, or has liked some other arrangement I did and decided to check this one as well. Which is exactly the kind of audience I am doing this for. This song is as much a 21st-century phenomenon as Misophone himself. Misophone stands for everything that is right with the music industry and what the revolution that is the internet really amounts to. Misophone, as I understand, is some random guy (or maybe two guys? Not sure) with a beard somewhere in the UK (Bristol maybe?) who writes tons of peculiar barrel organy music with loads of even stranger instruments some of which he builds himself and records all of this by himself in his presumably dimmed basement room; thanks to the internet, he has got some exposure on internet radio such as Last.fm where I first heard this song, and he has been able to get some of his music out on small labels where people such as me buy them (I have two of his albums). Although it has probably not made him rich nor will in the near future, it is much better than in the past when the chance of exposure for the music of a guy sitting in his basement would have been close to zero because live music was all the music there was (which I assume is impossible in Misophone’s case because of the many sometimes weird instruments appearing in a single song). Misophone’s music works as a whole, that is with the titles, lyrics, album artwork etc. It is conceived as the music of a past – “the music of our grandparents” – and no matter how fictitious this past may be – indeed it undermines all specificity – it makes for a really interesting experience and takes me to a place I thoroughly enjoy. Although transcribing this song took some time because of the thick texture of instruments, arranging it was rather straightforward and the arrangement isn’t too difficult. All in all I hear some percussion instrument, three violins, two guitars and a glockenspiel in this song; in my arrangement the left hand performs the task of maintaining the percussion’s triplet-feel rhythm, which is achieved by combining the long notes of the lowest violin with the chords that the acoustic guitar plays. The right hand is free to wander around and play the rest of the instruments, namely the long notes/melody in the other two violins, as well as the glockenspiel and the clean electric guitar wherever they appear. This was certainly a fun one, not least because of how much I like this song – maybe Misophone’s best among the ones I have heard.

Radiohead - Creep

whatever makes you happy: Radiohead’s distancing themselves from this song is well-known (given that they even wrote another song, “My Iron Lung”, about how much they disliked it) and understandable: As a radio-friendly guitar rock song that unfolds its whiny lyrics full of teenage obsession over a plagiarized four-chord progression, it is hardly representative of what Radiohead's sound evolved into. It follows that in Radiohead's rare later performances of the song, the alienation on Thom Yorke’s face could not be more obvious. Yet, the song has one of these glorious moments that let us catch a glimpse of later Radiohead’s trademark greatness: the bridge, a wonderful climax that integrates a meandering, fragile but powerful falsetto voice with some crisp drum fills and a contrasting melodic line in the shredding guitar style typical of Greenwood in his early days (which undoubtedly contributed to his sustained carpal tunnel problems). My interest in playing this song is owed to that bridge, to the challenge of having a shot at the falsetto and adapting the shredding guitar to the possibilities of the piano: It may sound like a made-up story, but during the days I was practicing Radiohead’s “Optimistic” with its falsetto chorus, one night I dreamed about playing this bridge, and in my dream the falsetto came out perfectly and it was all a powerful and cathartic experience. So I decided to give it a try, and eventually it turned out to be that passage that I find most enjoyable to play. There is something about singing falsetto that goes to the core; the feeling I have is of changing gear and switching to a steady pitch at full throttle. It may be similar to primal scream therapy in that there is something deeply liberating about falsetto, as opposed to chest voice which I find harder to domesticate and where I could never really go to the limit. From a songwriting perspective, this song’s strength is its structure – it is a perfectly balanced pop-rock ballad: The basic chord progression which repeats throughout the whole song (as evidenced in the bass line) provides cohesion, the outbursts of the chorus strongly contrast with the subdued verses, the bridge unleashes a furious climax, and the coda functions as a sort of resigned acoustic afterthought. In my arrangement I have decided to leave the parts as intact as possible, save for the chorus where I had to take some decisions on chord voicing while maintaining the rhythm. As with all of my arrangements this creates some rather un-piano-like moments with big arpeggios and leaps, but maintains the sound of the original. The opening remarks are not to say that this is not a good song lyric-wise; it is a perfect snapshot of a feeling that many people can relate to, of a time when you are looking for your place in the world, when you are fostering an obsessive, self-deprecating affection for someone you perceive to be perfect and above your league, and when you are pitying yourself for your misfortune. As perfectly as the song may encapsulate these feelings, there is an immaturity in all this typically associated with teenage years, and I guess this is where part of the uneasy relationship Radiohead has with this song comes from: Having outgrown their teenage anxieties they did no longer want to align themselves with and pander to the maladjustment and insecurity of younger audiences, especially when bigger issues of environment, government and society entered their radar. So while there is nothing wrong with “not belonging somewhere”, wallowing in self-pity and stylizing some girl into a sort of über-figure and savior is certainly not the way to go about it. As I sing this song, I cannot evoke the pathos I had when I was a teenager, but I try to sing it with a sincere respect for these feelings which seem a little ridiculous in retrospective, but feel very real when you are there. Today, although I still do not belong in most places, I do not give myself the benefit of blaming it on being a weirdo – even if you identify with this song, chances are you are not a weirdo either, despite what you think.

Héroes Del Silencio - La Chispa Adecuada

estás en mi lista de promesas a olvidar: On a car ride in the summer of 2013, I mentioned working on this song to my Spanish ex sister-in-law, asking her whether she knew it. She wasn’t sure about this particular song, but remembered the band as one from her teenage years, “from that age when you suffer a lot, and nobody in the world understands you”. This surprised me in two ways: First, that she knew the band but not the song, since I had always somehow assumed that it was the their greatest hit (maybe from seeing it referenced on an online Latin rock forum). Second, I was surprised about the way she situated the band: I came across this song on internet radio, never heard many of their other songs, and so I did not have any reference, other than the music itself, as to what kind of band this was. Yet after watching the music video and listening to the lyrics more closely, I do understand where she comes from. There are a handful of bands whose every song I know exactly because they were among my favorites at some point, but I also arrange and play songs by bands which I then only start to learn about as I practise: this is one of them. I cannot recall the title of a single other Héroes del Silencio track. Yet, this song popped up on the internet radio, presumably a Pandora station with a few Los Fabulosos Cadillacs tracks on the list, somehow caught my attention soon and became a favorite. It must have been the chorus that hooked me, and despite the many times I have listened to the song while transcribing it, it still is the chorus that gets me. The song starts with an acoustic riff accompanied by what seem to be a subdued tabla beat and an occasional sitar strum, possibly a guitar with a sitar effect (the complete version has a short intro with the same “sitar” sound), adding a slight “Indian” flavor; this continues the tradition of hard rock bands who with disarming ingenuity appropriated something ethnic, long before questions of authenticity came into play. (Hint: The musical traditions of India do in fact not sound much like Héroes del Silencio at all). The rest of the band enters during the first chorus, at this point still without vocals, and afterwards verse and chorus repeat until the end, interspersed with a musically different interlude and outro. After transcribing the whole song, arranging it for piano did not pose any major difficulties except for the tabla beat. Especially during the intro and the first verse, the tabla is the only addition to the musical texture besides the guitar riff. Since there is no way of playing a tabla beat on the piano, I determined that, in my impression, what the beat mainly did was add accents on every second and fourth beat, and I decided to include these accents in the form of bass notes in the first and third verse (the tabla beat seems to rest during the second verse). What is the deal with the chorus and its lyrics? The lyrics to most of the song can be said to be an effort at evocative imagery, or at least that is the way they seem to be intended. In fact, for most of the lyrics I could not say that knowing them has improved my experience of this song. While the images are evocative, they are not developed enough, but rather too disjointed and superficially dramatic to have any serious emotional impact. “In a coffin I preserve your touch, together with a crown of your shaggy hair, wanting to find an infinite rainbow” seems like gibberish somewhere at the intersection of where hippie meets goth. Although Héroes del Silencio fans won’t like me saying this, having Enrique Bunbury’s trademark but undeniably affected voice sing these particular lines does not exactly make it more convincing either. Fortunately, as the song continues, there are fragments here and there which seem much more heartfelt and authentic, first and foremost the chorus; although “I cannot distinguish between kisses and roots” seems like more of the previous hippie nonsense, the rest of the chorus comes closer to a stroke of genius: “I cannot distinguish the complicated from the simple/And now you are on my list of promises to forget/Anything bursts into flames when the proper spark is applied to it.” Now we are talking about something that speaks to the universal experience of the human condition. While a “list of promises to forget” seems pedantic, it is here used as a powerful image that gets across the intended meaning of “suffering because of the inability to forget a sentimental interest”. The connection to the following line is not entirely unambiguous, but it seems to relate to the speaker; unlikely though it may have seemed, it is him who has burst into flames, such was the nature of the spark that was applied to him. Funny as these lines might sound to some, especially when translated into English, they actually amount to a heartbreaking story as old as mankind; it is no accident that this story is sung over and over again since time immemorial. Another musical highlight of the song coincides with what appears to me as the single most irritating and vaguely disgusting line of the song; I can’t seem to think of a context in which “white sperm running down the spinal column” would not be undesirable and out of place. However, in another stroke of genius, the line coincides with a subtle change of the bass note (replacing the root note with the third) that creates a downward stepwise motion, and in this particular place has an inexplicably powerful effect. In my experience, the resulting dramatic urgency strangely redeems the oddness of the line, as if endowing it with the notion of a deeper meaning that remains inaccessible to me; a truly unique effect of the combination of words/melody with the harmonic skeleton. Ultimately, it is the video that most expressly proves correct the somewhat flippant statement from above, in that it has hippie written all over it, what with the Jim Morrison moves etc. Is that a problem? It technically isn’t, except for the fact that things hippie slightly bother me; in spite of a range of achievements and influence on the development of public thought and mores that the first hippie generation has to be given credit for, at this time and from where I stand, I have come to associate hippies with an irritating ingenuity (for their clear concept of the enemy), an amount of leisure reserved to upper class kids, and a degree of dogmatism that I am suspicious of in any context. Héroes del Silencio hardly belong to the first generation of hippie thought; still a good song.