grapes from the estate

The craziest thing I ever heard about Oren Ambarchi is that apparently someone from the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a big fan of this dude, and that apparently he jammed with them during an encore of theirs in New Zealand, and it bummed out an stadium full of their fans. That sounds like internet apocrypha, but I believe it anyway.

I think Grapes from the Estate is probably the most perfect record I have ever heard. It is mostly sparsely arranged tones and sine waves and such. But at times it gets impossibly complicated even if it still sounds sparse to someone who isn’t paying any attention. It all comes together for me on “Girl With the Silver Eyes”, which is the second track, but I have the double LP with one track per side, so I have maximum flexibility with my listening experience of this album, and I usually let that track serve as a conclusion.

You can’t really listen to this album on a computer; there is nothing to hear on a computer speaker. I heard an anecdote once that the key to selling expensive cars was a great stereo system. So how come no one tries the same thing with computers? Or homes? You could plug your computer or record player directly into your house, and the walls would be speakers. Or why even plug anything in? We have wireless internet connections, and wireless guitars, how come nothing like that for our audio sources? Everyone I talk to seems to agree that you can’t make money anymore from music. There was never much money to be made in the first place, and now there isn’t anything really. They are probably right, but it could also be that people are just waiting for a new way of experiencing music to buy into. I see lots of arguments about the ethics of downloading music. I won’t get into that because I don’t find it that interesting. I like talking economics – like in the Wire, the forces beyond any one actor’s control. The economics are that music is a surplus commodity, and that the fiction of intellectual property that made it profitable has become impossible to rigorously enforce. Ultimately I think people are going to need not new things to listen to, but new ways to listen to music if anyone is going to make money again.

Tags: avant-garde, guitars, markets, science fiction

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