On Challenging Reality: An Uphill Battle

The Role of Psychedelic Imagery in Music

Do you think it's a universal correlation that music goes hand in hand with trippy visuals? Do you think Mozart envisioned the exhibition of his symphonies alongside something akin to a laser show or the last 30 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Do you think we've collectively changed as artists?

Kid Cudi - Pursuit of Happiness (Universal Motown Records)

Videos like this one used to freak me out. Halfway through, I actually had to turn this one off the first time I watched it.

Phenomenology of the Beat: Neuroscience of Music

Fascinating article by Virginia Hughes at NGO's Phenomena details the research gathered by Dartmouth student Beau Sievers for his Master's thesis in Electroacoustic Music regarding the curious fact that the same regions of the brain activate while perceiving motion and perceiving music.

Sievers' thesis, which is available on his portfolio website, sourced its fundamental data from a program Sievers coded which would procedurally generate 16 seconds of musical tones or video of bouncing, shivering egg given certain adjustable parameters: tempo of tones or the egg's motion (beats per minute), variance from the set tempo (jitter), dissonance of scale or shivery wrinkling of the egg's skin (consonance), the harmonic distance from the current tone to the next tone or height of the egg's bounces (big/small interval probability), and the probability that the next tone will be higher or lower than the current, expressed by the egg as a lean forward or backward (up/down probability).

Tonträger: 60's Rock and Roll goes Krautward

The Berlin Wall performed more than just the geographical slicing of Berlin, it also neatly divided two distinct cultures, philosophies, and political ideologies for almost 30 years. During the Soviet stranglehold of the East, counter-cultural punk and rock bands rose, influenced by their Western counterparts, whom they viewed illicitly on banned radio and TV stations - and with more to fight against, namely the systematic pulverization of privacy by the government, they were arguably more authentic. After the Wall fell, the cultural vacuum kicked in. German punk became so ubiquitous it is now a tired cultural cliché.

America's powerful cultural influence on Germany continues to this day, but with Tonträger, a Berlin-based indie classic rock 'n' roll band, that inspiration reaches way back to rock's roots:

Oh Land: White Nights

It's been around for a bit but the music video for Oh Land's "White Nights" is a really well put together example of some of the new trends in art direction in the indie scene. Companies are getting comfortable sinking more of their money into outlandish projects and production costs are dropping: we're bound to see a lot more of this kind of richly art directed content.