HILLS LIKE WHITE ELEPHANTS, Soundscapes and the State of Sound

Saturday, April 2nd will mark a first at Northwestern University: An artistic adaptation festival centered around Ernest Hemingway's famous short story, "Hills Like White Elephants" (yes, the one about abortion.) If you are unfamiliar with the story, it can be found and read here.

Collaborators on this project include actors, dancers, musicians and artists of many varieties and adaptations have few constraints (barring time and assigned spaces throughout a designated building). The curators of this festival, two good friends of mine, have done a fantastic job in encouraging us to be creative and explorative. Thus, for my project, I decided to do a sound collage.

As I type this, I am listening to bits and pieces on an open Logic tab that combine spoken word, MIDI instrumentation, and various sounds to create overarching feelings and a specific point of view. The soundscape this is shaping up to be is not a traditional song, nor is it an audiobook spoken as pure story. (To digress: I've actually worked at an audiobooks company for two summers, but more on that later.) The soundscape is, instead, an all-encompassing piece that can include music and can include words or other sound but is, I believe, meant to be listened to and appreciated as sound apart from other aesthetics and elements that appeal to the senses. Some sound pieces can be appreciated apart from elements of sight in particular, allowing them to stand alone rather than recede into the background.

In experimenting with sound, I have been trying to draw a bit from the phasing traditions of Steve Reich and the minimalism of Philip Glass. I have also begun to notice how important this tradition of incorporating spoken words has become, such that it has actually been absorbed by popular culture.

A prime example is Radiohead's "Fitter Happier" off of the 1997 album OK Computer, which consists of hauntingly stoic, spoken words throughout. In particular, as of late I have been exploring music by The Books, a guitar and cello duo that explores the use of spoken words and sampled sounds within their music while maintaining a sense of tone throughout.

Thus, the music is both accessible and engaging in its innovation. Take a listen to this sound piece called "The Story of Hip Hop" off of The Book's latest album, The Way Out as a more story-oriented example.

The idea of borrowing bits of audio to construct a whole piece is also not one that is entirely foreign to us, as we hear sampling being used by everyone from The Pussycat Dolls (eg: "Beep" samples ELO's "Evil Woman") to rapper and champion of mash-up culture, Girl Talk. With the use of samples of audio to make a new piece, the question of copyright comes up. As artists, should we put our art into the public domain and "share the wealth", assuming that nothing is original anymore and everything has already "been done"? Creative commons licenses are becoming increasingly more frequent, allowing artists to "borrow" from one another for better or for worse. Is this diminishing or increasing the creative capacity of today's sound and music artists?

To put this back in context with my piece, I did not borrow any sounds, except for the few that I found as spot effects off of freesound.org, a website specifically devoted to sharing sounds. On Saturday, my piece will be listened to and experienced in a pitch dark room, dulling the sense of sight. I will also be playing along with an acoustic guitar, adding a live element to the interpretation. I hope it will excite the audience and make them think about the story in a different way, engaging the text from the inside out. However, with all of these indications of mash-up culture and borrowed sounds, can it really be said that this piece will be an original idea?

An audio posting to follow!

Peace.Love.Music

Kara Ali

SONGS FOR THE CURE '11 is OUT!

Hey Everyone!

I wanted to write about an amazing and special project that I am a part of:

Songs for the Cure '11, a series of compilation albums produced by Josh Whelchel, have just been introduced to help raise money to beat cancer. It's a terrible disease that has afflicted so many and affected loved ones everywhere.

Recently, I learned that a very close friend of mine has Leukemia. You don't know how close it is to you and how real until somebody that you know dearly is affected.

Show love and support by checking out Remedy and Esuna. A third album, Reiki will be available soon as well. The music is a great mix of Jazz, Classical, Electronic, Acoustic and more. Track 6 on Esuna is a song I wrote, called "Burn On". I'm excited and proud to be part of such a meaningful project.

Check it out at http://www.cancerdrive.org/.

Peace.Love.Music

Kara Ali

"Friday"--Rebecca Black.

So, many of you have probably seen the music video for the recently released song "Friday", by Rebecca Black, an 8th grader from Anaheim Hills, California. The song went live on iTunes a few days ago on March 14th and has since made a splash with a music video on Youtube, where many negative comments about the video and the overall integrity of the song have been made. The production was paid in full by the 13 year old's parents and produced by Clarence Jay and Patrice Wilson at ARK Music Factory. I thought I'd add my two cents on the matter:

Personally, I hadn't heard of the song until my 14 year old brother asked me, "So, have you heard that awful 'Friday' song or seen that music video that goes along with it?" I answered no, although I did recall getting some facebook invite to "Friday" with a girl's picture on it. Naturally, I was curious so I watched the music video and began to read the comments.

I must say, teen pop is not my area of expertise and it's not really an avenue of music that I've explored since I was a tween around the time of S Club 7. However, I thought that right off the bat the song's chorus bore a striking resemblance to Beiber's "Baby", which for better or worse, has been stuck in many heads at one point or another during the past months. Although many comments toward Black's video have gone so far as to call it "The Worst Pop Song Ever", it really is as if this particular production is just attempting to carbon copy most other teen pop out there today. Do I think that Justin Beiber or Miley Cirus are that much more talented or capable than Rebecca Black? No, it's really all in the promotion of these young sensations and it's hardly fair to blame Rebecca herself for this production when, really, she had little to do with its outcome overall.

To ask another question, is any press good press? Can this release be considered successful because it's getting such attention from the media, even if the song itself was not necessarily well received? Is Rebecca Black having the last laugh? If the song is for all intents and purposes a bust, can somebody like Rebecca Black, who has now won the media's eye turn it around and come out with a bona fide hit? I suppose that time will tell...

...and hopefully I won't blog about Teen Pop all too often in the future...

Peace.Love.Music

Kara Ali

New Jersey and New Music!

So, I landed back home in New Jersey last night for a good 10 days of Spring Break. When I got home, a special package awaited me! It was the 100-CDs from Discmakers that I had ordered of my latest EP. Shrink wrapped, bar coded and all--Lake Michigan's Chill physical CDs! The album has already been made available for streaming and download via my bandcamp page and it's also up on iTunes along with Time Grasp, my first EP.

They look beautiful, thanks to album art by Joe Stasio, my friend over at Soundwaves, where the tracks were recorded this past December over a delightful 4-days. Now, to start sending them out to radio stations, managers, friends, anyone who might know the best way to get my music out there!

Changes are on the horizon as I continue to write new music, especially over this spring break. I also had the pleasure of jamming with my new drummer friend, Justin Marsh, a sound engineer who previously interned at Studiomedia, and who I met at the studio as he was recording a voiceover demo. Justin is the drummer for a band called The Stoneflys based in Chicago. I had the pleasure of rehearsing with him in the Music Garage in downtown Chicago. With a location in NYC as well, the Music Garage was a state of the art rehearsal location, equipped with a repair shop, live room, and floors and floors of practice space.

I look forward to jamming there again after break with Justin's guitarist friend and my bassist, Max Brawer, if he is available. A new band is on the horizon.

Peace.Love.Music

Kara Ali

4.48 Psychosis--The Sound of Depression.

I said I'd be back soon right?

I wasn't lying.

This past weekend was a pretty busy one for me and it marked Northwestern's premier of 4.48 Psychosis, a play by the late UK playwright, Sarah Kane. The piece revolves around a woman with severe clinical depression just before she commits suicide and reads more as a poem.

My friend Ashley Albert, who I know well from the all-female a cappella group, Significant Others that we are both in, decided she wanted to put the play up with her friend and roommate, Will Kazda. The piece was co-directed by my friends Hannah Greene and Darren Barrere. In this version, female actors performed around the one actress who played the patient. These chorus members served to echo and intensify the patient's fears at points throughout the play, and also functioned as extensions of the doctor, one of two men in the cast. The chorus of women consisted of Ali White, Maria Benson, Molly Lyons, Chloe Picot, Amy Young and Anna Miles--all Northwestern students. Along with Albert and Kazda, who played the patient and doctor, respectively, a violin player, played by my friend and fellow sound designer, Alex Rehberg was also featured, playing haunting melodies as Albert portrayed a riveting descent

into deeper and deeper depression.

So how did I get involved? Well, Andrea Krushefski, the wonderful producer who had let me on board for A Streetcar Named Desire was seeking a sound designer, somewhat late in the game, for the short process that went into this valuable piece of art. I quickly agreed to help her out and met with director, Hannah Greene, who gave me specific sound ideas. The piece was to be put up in a room in Kresge, the equivalent of a classroom space, pre-equipped with two built-in presentation speakers, which would be sufficient for our use.

The soundtrack of depression: low tones, gentle ticking clocks in the doctor's office, smooth and annoying jazz in the waiting room of a doctor's office and, of course, Billie Holiday and her haunting depression-ridden tunes of the 1940's. Both What is This Thing Called Love? and I'll Be Seeing You were pieces we chose to use. In the case of 4.48, the goal of the sound design was to subtly let the audience experience the patient's anxiety without overtaking or overdramatizing an already, very serious, situation. The sound of the ticking clock, for instance, was meant to set the sterile mood of the doctor's office and to emulate the metronome that is used to keep time as the patient takes a Sanity Test at two points during the play. It's always there in the doctor scenes, but ticks softly so as not to draw attention to itself.

Low rumbles were meant to be unsettling for the characters and for the audience watching the show. They would swell and reduce at key points throughout the script to highlight the most poignant lines and to intensify emotion, hopefully without over dramatizing or "sentamentalizing" moments.

My favorite cue would have to be, I'll Be Seeing You. The directors both love Billie, as do I, and the song itself reflects her own struggles with depression throughout her life as a singer. I added a bunch of reverb to the track, which increased in the mix over time. Additionally, I creeped one of the low tones underneath the mix so that it was a bit more ominous. The tone got louder as the song faded down into almost imperceptible reverb so that the tone actually made itself apparent to the audience. This sonically symbolized depression taking over underneath the, otherwise, beautiful and longing song.

I was delighted to get such incredible guidance from the two directors, who knew what they wanted right away and made the atypical one-week process a delight!

My next sound design project, Luna, a Theater for Young Audiences piece directed by my friend Dana O'Brien, will certainly be a contrast! More on that as I start to write music and get things going. Spring has sprung and new sounds will be heard by all.

Peace.Love. Music

Kara Ali

The Down Feathers

Hey readers!

So I totally meant to blog about this earlier, but with finals as a college student at a trimester school, this past week got incredibly busy. As a result this post is later than I would have wanted it to be...but nonetheless

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of recording Chicago's own, The Down Feathers for Airplay on WNUR. I know the drummer, Ben Carver, personally as he is an employee at Studiomedia where I am an intern. I was lucky enough to set up and record the session with The Down Feathers for live broadcast and it afforded me the opportunity to listen in closely to the 4-piece band. Its blend of both male and female vocals, bluesy drum beats, light keys, and impressive guitar and bass riffs. The band, which will be performing at South By Southwest in Austin this coming weekend, presented an impressive and enjoyable set of songs, fusing folk, blues and rock with solid band dynamics.

Interestingly enough, The Down Feathers will be playing their SXSW venue with Sons of the West, another Chicago band I follow that visited WNUR.

Check The Down Feathers out on myspace or at SXSW and read more about them on chicago.com/music

More to come now that I am on break plus reflections on some musical endeavors of mine from this past quarter!

Peace.Love.Music

Kara Ali

Iron and Wine Concert at the Riviera--Friday, March 4th

This morning, I'm coming off a concert high from last night at the Riviera. We started out our evening listening to Eleventh Dream Day, a four piece band that opened for the highly anticipated sold out Iron and Wine show. To be completely honest, I was not thrilled or impressed by Eleventh Dream Day and having them open seemed a bit inappropriate to the genre that was headlining. Eleventh Dream Day was clearly a rock band, with a much harsher sound than Sam Beam and his 8 piece folk-rock band, even with Beam's new sonic sounds. The mix of sound itself was poor, with the guitar and bass over amplified and the backing vocals, done by the female drummer, not loud enough. The band, native to Chicago and on Thrill Jockey records, has been playing since 1987, and it certainly showed from their early 90'sskirting-on-punk-rock style. I wasn't the biggest fan, to be completely honest and I didn't get the impression that the rest of the crowd was really digging it either. Lyrically, from what I could hear there was not a whole lot of profound thought in the writing, but it would have helped if I could have heard the vocals. Maybe I will have to give their music a second listen to see if they sound different and my opinion changes with polished tracks here on their myspace.

When Sam Beam came out with his full band, after being prefaced by an XRT representative, the audience was incredibly pumped for the live show in store. It's pretty rare that Iron and Wine is seen live and the show was completely sold-out, love and fandom abounding. Beam started with an apology: sadly he had lost his voice recently and was going to be lacking his normal vocal ability. He playfully did a Barry White impersonation and explained after a few songs that he was having his band play songs in lower keys for the night. His voice was still captivating, despite its gravelly sadness at the top, and he was able to push through to sing falsetto on "Walking Far from Home", the opening track off his new album Kiss Each Other Clean".

I was delighted with the mix of old and new songs that Beam pulled out from his repertoire, often presenting what seemed like covers of his own older songs, retrofitted to sound amazing with an 8-piece band. Playing along with Beam were two percussionists, two backing vocalists, a keyboard, a bassist, and a saxophone (sometimes flute). "Cinders and Smoke", for example, was given a groovy, almost mambo feel that contrasted greatly from its folk sparsity on Our Endless Numbered Days. Ending the set with "Your Fake Name is Good Enough for Me", was the ultimate jam and I only wish we could have heard his full vocals along with the instrumental. Nonetheless, this new full-band format for Beam was fortunate on a night where his voice was not feeling strong. I'd say the band jammed for at least 10 minutes on the "Become the rising sun, we will become become..." section of the song to end their set to roaring applause from atop and Beneath the Balcony (yes, I just made a Sea and the Rhythm pun).

Did Beam play all of my favorites? No. Was the same folky essence from Our Endless Numbered Days still intact? No. Was I perfectly okay with it for this full-scale, sold out show? Of Course! And to live up to his magic, Beam kicked in an encore, where he played "Naked As We Came", which brought me close to tears as I reminisced about my High School years when that song first came out and chilled me to the bone.

I look forward to seeing him in concert again next time he comes around---solo or with a band, the man has a beautiful soul that makes beautiful music even with a lost voice.

Peace.Love.Music

Kara Ali

The Joys of Joni, and some long overdue updates.

Hey Everyone!!

So, as you've noticed, I haven't posted since Valentines Day! No, I didn't get sick for weeks from leftover chocolates, and no, I wasn't sobbing for lack of a Valentine to share said candies with. I was, however, on set for two student films here at NU in back to back weekends: Under Water, directed by my good friend Rosalie Sangenitto as a senior project, and The Ballad of Barbara Allen, an ingenious screenplay written by my friend Ursula Ellis and based off of the old folk song. Both were incredibly exciting to record sound for (because what else would me and my headphones be doing on a film set?) and I can't wait until the next stages of production begin.

Getting through the long film hours was made possible in part by Radiohead's new album, King of Limbs, which I gave repeated listens to since my last post and have come to appreciate for its brevity, experimentation and lulling resolve at the end of long days on set.

Despite my excitement over the new album while shooting, I have been filling my post-set recovery week with Joni--yes, Joni Mitchell, the one and only Canadian folk rock singer/songwriter that could bring my mother (and grandmother) to tears

with wonders like "The Circle Game", "River" and, of course the frequently covered "Both Sides, Now". Most everyone recognizes the iconic wash of color over Joni's face on the artwork for the 1971 album, Blue. As a young singer/songwriter of the early 2000s, Joni is still among the biggest influences in my music. The earnestness in her open tuning, airy and warm vocals and even her pale, almost spectral appearance in photos and recordings from the 1960s allow her melancholy harmonies to echo through time as I look for inspiration. I wouldn't even say that she has the best voice but the honesty and full emotion of every melancholy lyric is heard perfectly. Her lyrics are obscure and restrained, hiding their weight behind beautiful poetry so that even when she talks about dark and complex topics, she retains an incomparable innocence.

For a long while, Court and Spark has been my favorite album of hers from the days of her jazz experimentation with the title track and "Car on a Hill" among my favorite tracks. Recently, however, I listened to Clouds through from beginning to end. Clouds was Joni's 2nd studio album released in 1969. The album contains "Chelsea Morning" and "Both Sides, Now", both of which had already been covered by Judy Collins and had generated signficant buzz this way before being released by her. Listening to the album from start to finish, I can clearly see how Clouds is a stripped down precursor somewhat to Ladies of the Canyon, and very much to Blue. The Fiddle and the Drum is the rawest example of Joni's earnest songwriting with its single a cappella line of vocals, ending the album with little resolve. There is not much attention to production quality, and there might even be a plosive or two that the microphone picked up subtly. After the two harmonizing voices of Songs to Aging Children Come and luscious descending melodies, the final song is puzzling and beautiful.

I am sure there will be more on Joni to come. For now, I'm off to see Iron and Wine at the Riviera downtown--can never get enough folk.

Peace.Love.Music.

Kara Ali