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BRAIN TUBA: Loop de Loop
by Jesse Jarnow - jesse.jarnow@oberlin.eduWatching Oteil Burbridge, bass player for the Allman Brothers Band and the perpetually-on-hiatus Aquarium Rescue Unit, sit in with the Disco Biscuits earlier this week at the Recher Theater, Oteil seemed strangely ill at ease. On one hand, that was a little odd -- Oteil is a versatile bass player, moving fluidly from one genre to another often within the space of a few bars during his early days with the A.R.U., and commonly sits in with bands he has only heard for the first time that evening to an admirable degree of musical success. On the other hand... it was completely expected.
In their jams, the Disco Biscuits deal in loops. On one level, that's interesting because it's one of the first times that I'm aware of where humans have attempted to imitate forms created by computers. On another, that's interesting because the music they manage to create is so completely compelling. Each band member plays, much of the time, in loops. He will choose a pattern - usually on the smaller side - and repeat the figure over and over again for a duration of time -- again, usually on the shorter end. Each band member, in his own way, functions like a DJ mixing records. Each band member can cue up anything within his realm of musicianship. With the Disco Biscuits, that boundary stretches pretty damn far.
On one hand, the Biscuits' jams work in a fairly traditional way. Each band member reacts accordingly to what other people are playing. The jams are also very much constructed in logical ways, often building to a big climax followed by a release. The band often plays at a breakneck pace, switching gears so relentlessly that - to continue the DJ metaphor - each band member might be seen as some sort of eight-armed Indian god. Really, there's a kind of a musical efficiency at work with the loops, though. If a band member can lock into a repeating pattern for as long as he wants, it gives him that much more time to figure out what to play next. Everything counts.
Each chunk, each "sample", contains a blueprint for the whole -- kind of like a strand of DNA. It requires a speed-of-the-moment thoughtfulness. Once Oteil began to get the hang of this, he began to blend with the band a little better. Traditionally, it is up to the soloist to present an idea and make it make sense over an extended period of time. This requires a new attitude. For one, there are few solos in the traditional sense. In the process, the progression of the music is also broken down to a certain extent. When one is listening to loops, the loops often become hypnotic. Because they build differently, one perceives the music as a whole differently.
To adopt an oft used phrase: we live in a soundbyte culture. Whether soundbytes themselves are the cause or effect of this is hotly contested -- probably, it's a lot of both. An indisputable fact, though, is that we are bombarded with stuff. Most of it is shit. Some of it is of import. And it's entirely up to the receiver to judge, consciously or unconsciously, what it is necessary to know, retain, and comprehend. This is precisely why advertisements - and, let's face it, almost everything ("reputable" news sources included) is an advertisement these days - seek to drill things into our heads through catch phrases, slogans, jingles, and other heinous tools. (This is fast turning into a pseudo-socialist pseudo-commentary and I apologize.) Things are repeated... over and over in loops. The soundbytes build on top of each other into a seething bubbling chaos.
Somehow, through all of this we, as individuals, manage to conceive some derived picture of the world. A lot has been made of so-called short attention spans in the way society seems to break everything - woes and worries to terrific triumphs - into manageable chunks. Nonetheless, full pictures are created out of smaller ones -- similar in the way that the human eye naturally resolves an impressionist painting or a pixelated image on a television. A more modern example would be one of those increasingly popular new fangled posters, photo mosaics, which creates an image of, say, Darth Vader out of hundreds of tiny stills from the Star Wars trilogy. In terms of pure storytelling, each bit of the trilogy contributes in some way to who Darth Vader - in the present tense of the specific movies - is, was, or will become. Each bit contains a tiny part of the full story.
This maps back, of course, to the Disco Biscuits. Their jams are nothing if not pure sensory overload. Loops are hypnotic and dizzying -- a complaint I've often heard people (myself very much included, at times) make about techno. If they stay at the same level of intensity or volume, they can often be simply droning. If something more is done with them, things begin to get a little more complicated. A loop might lock someone's brain into a similar state, expecting it to continue in its course. When it doesn't, in the case of many Biscuits' jams, and builds on top of itself, the brain has to kick back into gear in order to simply understand what is going on. By that point, there might be too much going on. When things are moving too fast for my brain to perceive... that's when things start breaking down. That's when a certain kind of ecstasy occurs.
In the end, one almost has to use the same process to understand what has happened in a Biscuits jam as one does to conceive a picture of the world out of soundbytes. There is a definite cause and effect... it's just a matter of picking out individual strands. Of course, it's also completely unconscious. When one watches the news, his or her brain automatically sifts through it and organizes in such a way that it makes sense. There are times though - if one tries to follow the twisted occurrences of Congress, a soap opera, or professional wrestling (for example) - when the stories are so interconnected and incestuous that it's no use in trying to unravel it. The only way to deal with it successfully is after the fact.
In other words, while it's happening, logic seems to break down... folds itself into a blackhole. It doesn't, of course -- it just gives the illusion of doing so. This, I think, is why Oteil had trouble. He tried to pick out individual strands; to follow the bassline of the song to figure out where it was going, or to pick out the changes from the guitar part. Only by listening to the whole thing could he figure out what was happening and how he could contribute to it. In the end, he did contribute... if somewhat tentatively. It wasn't a surprise then, that when the band crashed into the ending of Helicopters after a long and winding jam through Morph Dusseldorf that Oteil kicked into one of his trademark solos. The ending to Helicopters is pretty easy to decipher with all the instruments except for the guitar dropping out. It was the only place that Oteil saw where a traditional solo made sense... and, even there, it didn't.
Jesse Jarnow says "olaffub, olaffub, olaffub, olaffub.
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