Christopher Borrelli, “The trouble with the cloud,” in the Chicago Tribune.

Mom clipped this for me, and Borrelli asks a good quesion; how are iTunes, iPods, and now iCloud and Amazon’s and Google’s cloud-based music lockers changing how we value music?

Borrelli’s concerned that we value digital files less than physical albums. “Each [new digital technology] has undermined how much I actually care about watching, listening and reading … Lately, though I am no less interested in music, excited by movies or anxious to read books, I don’t know what that enthusiasm means when I can access all of those things on a few digital files: Do I appreciate my music, movies and books less when the format is digital? When there’s nothing more concrete than a binary code? If I’ve opted for convenience over shelf space, why don’t I listen to music more often, watch more movies?”

Only Borrelli can answer why he listens to less music than he used to. I listen to much more, and a wider variety, of music since I went fully to iTunes and my iPod. I love using iTunes DJ, making playlists, and running across old favorites, all things I didn’t do with CDs. I also get a huge kick out of digitizing my vinyl LPs, taking that great sound with me on my iPod, crackles and all.

“Ephemeral, that’s how I feel about the media I download … The ease of that download generally lessens its impact and makes it more disposable … ‘Something about the unavailability of stuff, music, art, books, makes me value it more’ [quoting Theaster Gates].” Quoting Gates again, “It’s just fraudulent for people to suggest that … any digital vehicles contain as much historical value or memory or meaning as my things, my books my music, whatever. It’s wrong to say my stuff is being replaced by a things I can’t touch. It isn’t being replaced, because it isn’t the same stuff anymore.”

Gates doesn’t offer a name of anyone who has suggested that digital files have the same historical value and meaning as his own physical books and albums. Perhaps they are in his imagination; it’s a pretty extreme position. It’s not a matter of intrinsically meaningful physical albums being replaced by evil, empty downloads; the questions are what are the tradeoffs between physical and digital music*, and how do we feel about what’s happening and the choices we’ve made? The burden of proof is on Borrelli to explain why so many people have made the choice to go digital that he’s concerned with.

In order to understand Borrelli, I think we should separate how we value objects from how we value music. Mom’s “Meet the Beatles” record means more to me, as a physical object, than someone else’s copy of the record would, but I value the music on the record, as music, the same no matter what source it’s played from. You could replace my “Meet the Beatles” mp3s with identitical copies from someone else’s hard drive, and the music wouldn’t mean any less to me next time I listen to it.

“My long-term fear, I suppose, is that my tastes become nothing more than a clickable line on a file; or as the novelist Zadie Smith wrote in a recent essay, about the way that Facebook undermines, ‘To (Mark) Zuckerberg, sharing your choices with everybody is being somebody.’”

Borrelli takes it as self-evident that his current tastes are something more valuable than a “clickable line on a file” (are they?) (and what kind of file is he grouching about, anyway?), and, I think, implies that sharing choices on Facebook is worthless. Sharing choices on facebook is generally less meaningful than loaning someone a physical copy of an album, but I think it’s worth *something.*

Maybe his fear is that, when everyone’s a critic, his tastes will have to compete on a more level playing field with others’ for attention, which might put him out of a job. In my view, good critics are more important now than ever before, to help us sort through the mountain of media available online. The trick is, having a column at the Tribune doesn’t automatically make someone an attention-worthy critic anymore (as it did before the web made self-publishing so easy); widely-read critics must earn their reputation for finding good media and adding to our understanding of it with their commentary, and they might come from anywhere, including Facebook. (Reputation development and management is an area where I’d like to see huge improvement on the web, but I think it’s coming. Amazon’s Real Name feature is an example of a first step in that direction.)

“The more availability there is, he said, the harder it is to find anything, digital or not, “which leads to the real problem with the Cloud, that there is a threshold to comprehension and you can only have a personal relationship with a certain number of your things anyway … To borrow from Susan Sontag’s 1977 book, ‘On Photography,’ and its prescient essay on collecting, we live in a world ‘on its way to becoming one vast quarry.’ And yet what is the value of a quarry with no bottom, inexhaustible and plundered without much effort and available for mining every day, at all hours?

“There was a time when Laurie Anderson … lamented not having recordings of her early shows … ‘Now I think I’m happy to be the medium myself, that people watch me doing whatever I do and it goes into their memories, and maybe gets lost in there.”

The meaning of physical objects is, in large part, based on scarcity. We like rare, hard-to-find, and one-of-a-kind things. There’s only one “Meet the Beatles” that was my mom’s, so it’s my favorite, but there are an unlimited number of copies available online. I love my copy of Elvis Presley’s self-titled record, because in all of my record hunting it’s the only one I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. Yet, apart from these kinds of heirlooms and boutique items, music is a microcosm of what may be coming for all physical objects, leading our way into a post-scarcity society, which will require a radical re-thinking of how we construct meaning.

Meaning will change, but i don’t think it will be lost. To use Borrelli’s metaphor, the value of an inexhaustible quarry seems obvious in musical terms; we can build anything we want, enjoy any kind of structure, experiment and play and push the boundaries of the art of sound. The value of any given stone is no longer much in its existence as a stone, but has become in what we’ve made with it, what we do there, and how we remember and continue to experience the place. The dimension of meaning that is reduced or lost in the transition to a post-scarcity context is real, but is worth trading for the new possibilities offered by digital music.

* Digital music is, of course, also physical – it’s not immaterial! – but I think you know what I mean.

…it begins. This morning, feeling inspired, I recorded new demos of all the songs for Ventura.  These are the scratch tracks I’ll start building the final recordings on, starting with drums.  So, six years later… we’re underway.  It will be a better record than I could have made six years ago, though; hard as it’s been not to have it out, I can see how it could be for the best, as the songs have continued to evolve.  -h

Over the past few weeks I’ve started a massive demo project, the Shaker Demos.  Basically caught up on Mars Lights and Sleepover stuff, I’ve been digging through my entire file of song ideas, deciding whether there’s enough there (or that I can re-figure from my old notes) to demo, and doing super-rough cuts into GarageBand with a backing shaker loop (which has a surprisingly good groove, after editing it to accent the off-beat!).

Some songs are finished (including “Lost” and “Cooky” from Furious Instance), others are just a couple of instrumental ideas strung together.  There’s stuff I’ve put down this summer, all the way back to ideas from ’02-’03-’04 and everything in between.  I think there will be about 40 pieces, total, all different kinds of things: rock songs, folky stuff, bass riffs, weirdo blues.

One thing I didn’t expect is that I’m re-writing some of the old ideas pretty significantly.  Many of the things in the song file are there, and not finished, because there was both something that worked and something that didn’t about the original idea.  I’ve re-visited some ideas several times, without getting a breakthrough, but this time I’m getting them.  The reason, I think, is experience gained working on Mars Lights stuff with Drew; I’m learning to hold those original ideas a little more loosely, play around with them, try more variations, or try cutting a bar or extending a chord to make a phrase both more interesting and more organic.  The result is a sound that sort of puts things I’ve done before (particular types of chord voicings or changes) with what I’m doing now; mixing them without necessarily blending them, if that makes sense.  They exist together in the song, but are still identifiable, at least to my ear.

Come to think of it, I wonder if Mom planted the idea to do this in my head; a couple weeks ago she asked what I’d been writing, and I answered “A little of this and that, some Mars Lights stuff.  I’ve been writing a bit more since I finished school.”  Maybe that question kind of worked in my subconscious, until I decided to find out, concretely.

I’m not sure exactly what will happen with the demos.  I’ll organize them somehow, group songs together, and finish them, I suppose.  I may send some ideas off for collaboration.  There might be albums, or EPs, or both, and I don’t know if I’ll end up grouping similar-sounding stuff together, or mixing it up.

Jill, perfectly, asked the natural question; what happens to Ventura?  I still think Ventura will get done before any of this stuff is finished.  I’ll probably update my Ventura demos now, too, and then tackle those first.  Arrangements and tempos have changed over the years (!) for them, and one song (“Green Christine”) hasn’t been demo’d at all.

• The last time I saw TV on the Radio, Dave Sitek was in a full-body gingerbread man costume.  Just saying.
• Can’t say enough nice things about the venue, Crossroads KC; it was a beautiful night to be outside, their sound was stellar once again, good beer selection for $5, and it was full but not overcrowded.  It seems to draw an intergenerational crowd, too, which I like.
• !!! (Chk-chk-chk) opened with a forty-minute dance party, elevated by band MVP Tyler Pope on bass, whose riffy, propulsive lines played well against the straight disco beats to give the rhythm section some soul and edge.
• TVotR’s set was an even blend of songs from all their records.  I was surprised, expecting to hear most of Nine Types of Light; I was even more surprised that Kyp announced after “Second Song” that it had been the live debut of that tune, one of the standouts from the new album.
• The band transformed from their typical (if you can call it that!) noise-punk soul band to a fantastic rock band for a blistering “Repetition” (better than the studio version!) and “Wolf Like Me” to close the main set.  It’s very cool, and very humbling, to hear the group shift gears like that and show that, in addition to everything else they do, they can out-rock almost anyone, just because they could.
• It might have just been me, but the memory of Gerard Smith hovered over the night, though he wasn’t mentioned out loud.
• Cory, you’ll never guess who uses a Blues Jr. as his main amp (Kyp!).
• Drew, Dave rocks an Orange cab, too, with some obscure amp I couldn’t identify.
• Here’s what the KC Star thought.