The Langley Schools Music Project - "Sweet Caroline"

1. My grade seven class had a mock trial for Louis Riel in which I played the unenviable role of prosecutor. Needless to say I lost, despite my impressive rhetorical flourishes and nearly comprehensive knowledge of Canada’s early legal system. No stenographer was present, and so no record remains of what is now likely the closest thing to a realization of my mother’s dream: that I become a lawyer.

2. In the mid-seventies a young B.C. music teacher started a program where kids played pop songs en masse/in class. The teacher, Hans Fenger, did well to choose songs such as this one or the Beach Boys’ “In My Room,” whose subject matters seem more appropriate emanating from the mouths of babes than from the adults who wrote them. The songs were recorded in a gymnasium in one take each.

3. Metallophones are great. Name someone who doesn’t like metallophones and I’ll name someone who’s a phoney and liar (you!). Iannis Xenakis and Carl Orff were both huge fans of metallophones. They actually toured as a metallophone duo for a while in the fifties until petty bickering over gas money and who should get the blonde vs. brunette ended their relationship on less than good terms. All this just as Xenakis got really into set theory, and Orff turned his attention to early adolescent education. The latter preoccupation yielded the Orff metallophone, an instrument with removable bars so that kids can play them without worrying about wrong notes.

Playing music involves a constant struggle between thinking and feeling. The otherworldly quality of song that might be described as “feeling it” has great power, but can also - when focused on to the exclusion of all else - alienate the listener and obscure the interactive aspect of the artist-audience relationship. Orff metallophones can help kids (who tend toward the feeling horn of the dilemma) find a balance, or at least feel the music without losing track of its harmonic elements. Rhythm, as can be heard here, remains a problem.

The sound of the Orff metallophone ringing out in the chorus is breathtaking. Three gingerly played notes rise up above the din, fill the gymnasium, evaporate.

4. The kids play with a sort of square wave dynamics. They clearly view dynamics as a binary game, either gentle and quiet or angry and very loud. In the choruses everything goes wrong, the drummer is not close to being in time and the singing is really quite poor, but the song never falls apart completely. The kids hang on to each other and make it through together. The sheer volume of their choir, reverberating in the gym, makes them bigger than they are, which is the best thing a kid can be, and so I really do believe them when they sing that “good times have never been so good.” [Buy]

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Nedelle - "Good Grief"

I arrived at the Destroyer/Magnolia Electric Co. show at 9pm on Sunday. Accompanied by a friend (I don’t want to name drop, but it was my editor, Max Maki), we had to be early because we hadn’t bought our tickets in advance. When I asked what time the show would start, the doorman (I think it was Ernest Borgnine) said that Nedelle would go on at 9:45. Several thoughts ran through my mind:

1. Who’s Nedelle? I’ve never heard of her. I bet she’s no good.
2. That gives me 45 minutes to run down the street, purchase a piece of pecan pie and a chocolate milkshake.
3. I bet Max is going to want some of my pie or a sip of my milkshake. I wonder if there’s some way to ditch her.

I arrived back at the venue after consuming what little pie and shake Max left for me. It was 9:46. Nedelle had already played. Her set lasted under a minute. Unless Ernest Borgnine lied. I really trusted him.

Nedelle is an extraordinary singer. She sounds like Joni Mitchell singing Motown. And her songs are very strange. She has that rare gift that allows one to write piecemeal songs whose parts sound organically linked. Her songs stop and change directions, make about-faces, sonically contradict themselves, but never feel wrong or forced. Too bad I missed her.

Good thing that Destroyer was absolutely mind-blowing, despite what Dan Beirne might have you believe. [Info]