Music Hat

0:00Hey, I'm Lulu Miller. So Radiolab, you know, we're a science show. Tell science-y stories, are stories that don't seem sciency at first, but then have a scientific question at their heart. But there's another element at the core of Radiolab, which is music. The creator of this whole operation and original host, Jad Abumrad, was a musician before he was a journalist. And he took music and brought it into the DNA of the show. And that's still how we do it today. So this week, we're going to listen back to two pieces that Jad made about musicians. musicians he loves and uses on the show. These are both stories he made years ago, and what I really love about them is that they start deep in the music, purely about the music, but then each one unfurls into something more philosophical about our relationships with technology, our relationships to ourselves.

0:52So here they are in an episode we are calling Music Hat. Hope you enjoy. Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radiolab. Radiolab. From WNYC.

1:14Rewind. Okay, so I'm going to put on my music hat for a couple of minutes. Okay. And then in two weeks we can put our other hats back on, whatever they're called. Science, humanism, whatever. Philosophy, whatever. Look, we are many people. We are many people. I am a musician as well as a storyteller. You are a Broadway show tune singer as well as a radio raconteur. I would like to have been a Broadway show. No one has ever invited me to do that. Well, I'm going to invite you at least to listen to my version of that for just a few minutes. I'm going to tell you about a band that I just discovered.

1:50This may be the coolest thing I've heard in years. Actually, you know this band. I mean, maybe you don't know that you know them, but we've used them in a few shows. Remember the piece we did in the Bliss show about the perfect snowflake? Yes. We used them there. Oh. Remember the story about the artist who weaponized his own blood? Yes, Barton Benish. We used him there too. So in a subtle way, I have already been exposed to them. That's what I'm saying. Although I am quite certain you will hate their music. I could be wrong about that. Well, I will be as generous as I know possibly how to be. The band is called Dawn of MIDI.

2:18Dawn of what? Of MIDI. M-I-D-I? Do you know what MIDI is? No. It's sort of like a computer language for music. Like in my studio at home, I have a bunch of synthesizers and various things. They all talk to each other using MIDI. Oh, the dawn of MIDI. Dawn of MIDI. It's one of those half and halves. Like, dawn suggests something pleasant, beautiful, and sort of movie-like. MIDI, technological, card, cold. Yeah, that's actually not a bad place to start. Okay, so the band is three guys. Akash is Ronnie. He plays the bass. Amino Belliani plays the piano. Kasim Nakfi plays the drums. They met in college at CalArts.

2:56Initially, though, their partnership was not about music. It was about tennis. began on the tennis courts. On the tennis courts. Yeah, it was funny actually because we would play like late at night. That's Akash, the bass player? Kasem had like stolen the key and kept it or something. And one night we were there at like 3 a.m. and I think we were really drunk and security showed up and he saw us. They were pounding the ball back and forth, yelling. And when he saw the intensity with which we were involved in this match, he was like, you know, you guys should continue, like carry on. And he left.

3:26And that intensity sort of translated into the music that they started to play. Maybe not the competitive part, but they would take it really seriously. What they would do is they'd get together. We'd go into these classrooms that had no windows and turn out all the lights. And they would play these long, crazy sets in pitch-black darkness. It was completely, totally improvised. Before they started, they would have no idea what key they were going to play in. No. No idea of what tempo. No. Or how long they were going to go. No. Would you at least figure out who was going to play first? No. I mean, they just start cold?

3:59Cold. But it would end up sort of like that 3 a.m. tennis match. Really intense, rolling, rollicking improvisations. Kind of atonal. Atonal, oh boy. Yeah, I know, I know. We're just trying not to use that word. Okay. But it's really, I like it. It's really interesting stuff. And like I said, we use it in the Snowflake story. But that style of music is not actually what I'm going to present to you now. Okay. It's what they do next that I find totally fascinating. To set that up, as they're out on tour, doing this free improvisational thing, they were also listening to different kinds of music. Like, they were listening to electronic music as well.

4:42Stuff like Aphex Twin. Also, one of them gets really deep into trance music. Not techno trance, but... A lot of music from Africa.

4:53West African music as well as music from Morocco. And these are musical traditions that have a totally different approach to rhythm, which we can talk about in a second. But they're listening to all this stuff. And it begins to somehow seep in. They begin to gradually put a little bit of it into their sets. And to make a long story short, over the course of two years, it was a very incremental and slow process. They piece together this style of music that is 180 degrees from what they were just doing, and unlike anything I've ever heard. And the only way I can describe it is it's sort of like ancient folk music filtered through highly obsessive computers that actually aren't computers but people.

5:35What does that mean? Here, I'm going to play you some, okay? Okay. All right, hold that on. No, not that. Let's put this on. Let's just wait. Let's just mute this. All right. Here it comes. Now keep an open mind. Okay. So this is how it starts with just a bass line.

6:09Is it going to develop or are we going to just hear this? No, it is. It is, but just slowly. Just wait. Wait. Hear that? Do, do. Right. This is the pianist. He's playing it with his left hand on the string, so he's kind of muting it to create a harmonic.

6:30I know a pod of whales who would go crazy for this. Just look, okay, you hear the drums are coming. You hear that? Yes.

6:44Now, I don't know about you. Actually, maybe I do know about you. but for me right about now I'm getting into a deep trance let's just don't say anything for a minute and let's see what happens alright

7:27So

7:46Listen to that. They're not playing a machine. They're playing traditional instruments. No, this is all live. They're playing real instruments. It's all performed. It's acoustic. That doesn't sound acoustic. Yeah, it doesn't. I am so addicted to this. Just listen some more.

8:33See, it just starts to slowly evolve. A little bit. Bit by bit. And it just keeps doing that for 45 minutes. I mean, it's broken into tracks, but it's really just one long thing. I think that in seismic laboratories all over the world, where geologists gather, people who have to listen to impending earthquakes, this is going to be, like, enormous. In the Coral Witch household, too, I imagine. Because it's small, small shifts. tiny, tiny shifts.

9:10Come on, you don't find that groovy at all? Yeah, no, I do. Actually, I do. So these guys basically went from, like, free improv, no rules, to becoming like human machines. It's sort of like wishing to be an element in a very finely made Swiss watch. Except now remove the watch. I think that something is going on in the world right now. It's Akash again. The last 10 to 15 years, you see in a lot of fields right now, people doing things, quote unquote, in an analog way that 10 years ago would have been assumed were absolutely impossible without the aid of technology. You see it from big wave surfers who found out they could ride huge waves if they have jet skis to pull them into these waves, to now saying, hey, wait a minute, we can catch these with our arms again.

9:56but the jet ski needed to be there to show them that this was even possible. And you see it with this French beatboxer video online.

10:11He's doing something that just sounds impossible. It's unbelievable. And it's like something that, the kind of stuff that Apex was programming for his music, but this guy's doing it with his mouth. And it's like the computer showed us a world of possibility And now we're sort of almost realizing that that world was inherent to us, not the machine. Huh. So you're talking about like a reclaiming. Yeah, absolutely. And it was like almost like we didn't know how far the biotech of our minds could go until the machine sort of showed us that, hey, wait a minute, like this is coming from you guys.

10:53you know what it is is if if you just let it do what it's doing

11:09and have no known of the usual expectations of resolution or or like that usual arc. It's not going to tell you a story. It's just going to keep you company. That's what's happening here. Yeah, I mean, I think what it's trying to do is to get you into a different state of mind, like a different state of time. That experience of time that is non-narrative. Where you're sort of existing in time, not in a sort of regular story way where everything leads to the next thing, beginning, middle, and end. Something else. What Amino and I often talk about is the idea of quantum states of time. And I think what he means, what I take it to mean, is something very ancient in a way.

11:45Like, you know how I mentioned that they were listening to West African and Moroccan trance music? What you have in a lot of that music are these vertical stacks of rhythms, like almost multiple time flows existing simultaneously in the same moment. And if you listen into this music that we're hearing right now, and you try and pick out, okay, what's the bass doing? What's the drums doing? What's the piano doing? You will hear that they're actually almost not fitting together. Like, they're playing different beats. pulling at each other in some sense. If I listen in and try and pick out all the lines, I get lost in the intricacies of their rhythms.

12:21If I listen out, I can just nod my head to it for 45 minutes. But if I listen in, I'm like, Jesus, God, what is that bass player doing? I have no idea what beat he's on. That's cool. And that's just interesting to me, the way that the patterns on the interior just kind of mess with your ear because they all seem to be on their own cycle, falling in and out of phase. But then when you pull out and just listen to the whole thing together, you're like, oh yeah, I can nod my head to this. I can nod to this. This reminds me actually, I don't know if you are familiar with Mark Rothko's paintings, those sort of squares of color that sit one on top of the other sometimes.

12:56I have the same, I'll go, there's a Rothko chapel in Houston. Yeah, one of the most amazing places. Because he would often take a sponge and then dip it in the color and then very lightly dab. Like over and over and over. So it's very, very layered. And when I look closely, I see patterns within patterns within patterns within patterns. And I get feelings from the patterns. I find myself sort of telling stories about the feelings that I'm having. Then I'll pull myself out and I'll see three rather richly tonal blocks of color. Big picture, then little picture again. Yeah, totally. And it's the same thing you're describing.

13:37Yeah, I like that phrase, feelings from the patterns. That makes sense to me. and these patterns to me they feel kind of ancient and new at the same time super mechanical and yet deeply human at the same time it never quite resolves for me somehow

14:07you can find out more about Don of Mitty on their website DonnaMitty.com. After the break, we have one more exploration of music. Stay with us.

14:28Hey, I'm Chad Abumrad. I'm busy listening to this. Who is this? I'm Robert Krolowicz. This is Radio Lab, the podcast.

14:41So this person that you're hearing right now, testing, testing, she's one of my favorite, favorite musicians. Can you introduce yourself? My name is, I am, my name's Juana Molina. I'm Juana Molina and I am a musician. I hope you enjoy what I do. Okay, so you know how sometimes on this podcast, instead of the science and the big ideas and the whatever, we present musicians? Yeah. Well, that's what I want to do for the next 10 or so minutes. mostly because I think she's amazing but also because when we used her music in the sperm show I used it for some of the breaks this song right here in fact we got a flood of email people asking about it I wonder what she thought about being the breaks in the sperm show she doesn't know so this podcast is for the bunch and bunch and bunch of people who wrote in asking about Juana Molina and also for the rest of you who maybe don't know her yet but will hear her now and maybe I hope fall in love with her music as I have

15:42So let me make space here. Okay, so I spoke with her recently as she was in town to play a gig at this club called Le Poisson Rouge. Le Poisson Rouge, the red fish. Yep. And she told me her backstory. It's kind of interesting. She started out as a musician, taking piano lessons and guitar lessons, trying to be a performer. It wasn't really working out at that point. So she needed a job and she wasn't really sure what to do, but she knew she was always good at impressions. It's something I could always do and it was easy for me just to impersonate characters and then... People that you knew or just...

16:18People like stereotypes or... I don't know if it's stereotypes or archetypes. Both. I mean... Oh, that's an interesting sound. Yeah. And then one day I was desperate, looking for a job that gave me enough money to play music, and I thought TV was the best option. You went to TV to help pay for music? Mm-hmm. What she did was she went over to the local TV station, somehow convinced them to give her a job reporting fake news, sort of like The Daily Show. And eventually she got her own show called Juana y Sus Hermanas. Hermanas! Si presente. Which means Juana and her sisters. It was sort of a comedy show.

17:03It was just sketches. How long did that go for? Three years. At the beginning, it worked very well because I had money and I could pay my rent and my guitar lessons. But then I got big. She became a huge hit. Was it the kind of situation where you'd walk down the street and be recognized? Yeah. Much to her dismay, oddly. Suddenly she was an actress, not a musician. And as she puts it, her life kind of got out of hand. Well, I... But then she got pregnant. I got pregnant and I needed to stay in bed. And so I had time to think about my life and then realize that I had totally missed my goal. It was just that I didn't want to miss it.

17:43I didn't want to die. I'm not having done what I wanted to do. So at the height of her popularity as an actress, she drops out. Yeah. That's not what I wanted. I just wanted to be a musician. So she starts playing in these little clubs, just her and her guitar. How do people respond? Badly. Didn't go so well. It was hell for several years. She said she had terrible stage fright. If you're an actress, wouldn't you be fine to be on stage? It's not the same. You're acting. It's not you. I suppose that's true, but I mean, you're used to having... No, you don't suppose you know. What I was doing is to impersonate people, and I was making fun of people.

18:24It was never myself. And it was horror because it was, I don't know, I was just very scared. So what she ended up doing was kind of going solo. You know, like she tried to play with musicians. And I didn't like anyone. And they didn't like what I was offering them either. So essentially what she does now is she creates entire symphonies of just her. Just her, her guitar, some electronics, and this looping box. She'll play a line, and then it'll loop, and loop, and loop. And then another line, and then a loop, and loop, and they'll both be going. And then she'll add a third, and a fourth, and a fifth.

19:09And some are all in the way, and this is what I love. As you're listening, you slip into this universe of one.

19:23The thing by being on your own is that you can go deeper and deeper and deeper in your own universe and go further and further away or deeper deeper deeper inside.

19:51Now do you, when you loop yourself and you're in the middle of love, like let's say an avalanche of guanamalinas are singing and harmonizing, are they the same person? I usually feel that the sounds tell me what to do with them.

20:13Every sound has its own behavior, at least for me. I'm just feeling like a driver of a sound.

20:28It's so interesting, it feels like she's taking a bath in herself. Little by little, my ridiculously small universe, it becomes huge.

20:48Anything that has a note or a rhythm, you can make music with. I mean, are you inspired more by a thought, like I want to say something? No. Never. There's absolutely nothing that I really want to say. Really? Really. I mean, you have lyrics sometimes. Most of the times. So when the song pops into your head and you develop it, you're not thinking of a story, per se. No. Never. But you put the story on afterwards. Why? In order to be able to sing. One day, one day, one day, one day, one day. Un dia, the song. How did that happen? I was warming up for a show. and I started, I got bored and I started to play And it sounded like one day, I wasn't saying one day, but it sounded like You didn't even have the words just yet No, but then when I was singing