Category: music

Musical Memory

I have an excellent musical memory. I forget everything else, but music stays. Music plays in my head 24/7, and has my whole life. I can remember entire symphonies my sister would spin on our record player, although I have no idea what their names are, or the names of their composers, let alone conductors or orchestras. Names are the weakest part or my memory by far. Music is the strongest.

Musical memory evolved to preserve epic poetry and precious human culture, to bind the tribe and pass on important wisdom to future generations. Yet mine is full of commercial jingles from the 1970’s onward, and crappy Christmas music I never wanted to hear in the first place, and musical “product” engineered for popularity and sales by copyright industries. And now it’s hooked on AI-generated songs, not even human voices or instruments. My amazing musical memory, the strongest part of my crumbling mind, designed for binding humans together: occupied by venal, commercial, exploitative, and now not-even-human patterns, forever. God must be rolling in His grave.

I feel grateful nonetheless, not least because most of those AI songs in my head were generated at the behest of my friend Cori, so I associate them with our friendship. Cori even generated (directed? prompted? pushed a button requesting?) a commercial for “Nina’s Art Gloves” which he inserted into the latest episode of our Heterodorx podcast. It is hilarious. 

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Apocalypse Animated video

I made this little “trailer” video for ApocalypseAnimated.com . It’s only 3 minutes long, while there are almost 12 minutes of animation (without even looping!) in the project, so this is but a mere sample of the wonders to find at the website. But this has music so people are likelier to share and attend to it.

There are some technical looping flaws that bother me. Apparently when I export HD video from Moho, it omits the last frame of the loop, causing a jerk in the seams. This doesn’t happen when I export gifs. To make my hi-res video archive perfect, I will have to go back and add one frame and re-render every. single. file. This took 4 boring tedious days last time, and I’m not looking forward to doing it again. But such are the responsibilities of an Apocalypse animator.

Choosing the song was not straightforward. I was really smitten by Fuck Everything by Euringer (aka Jimmy Urine). It would have supplied nice ironic tension because it’s not intentionally about the Apocalypse, and it’s from the point-of-view of two bratty entitled lovers, which is an interesting lens through which to view John of Patmos and his God. But Fuck Everything already has a perfect video, and who knows what kind of headaches it would cause me; even if Jimmy isn’t a copyright maximalist, his songs are distributed in a  system that doesn’t recognize Fair Use, and YouTube’s ContentID would surely block even its first upload. I did start making an edit with it, but got frustrated (as one does) and that anxiety contributed to my consideration of an alternative song.

Fortunately I’d already compiled a list of old gospel songs that might work, and the top entry proved a good fit. I found it on the wonderful archive.org, where I always go a-hunting in my research phases. I worried that straight-up gospel wouldn’t be ironic enough with the animation, but When The Fire Comes Down had its own irony, contrasting a cheerful jaunty melody with horrific subject matter. Everything fit right away and I banged out this edit in a single day. Thank you, Internet Archive!

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