[Local] Noon EP by The Sun Kite

Back in July, I was enamored with The Sun Kite's Morning EP, a project by musician and songwriter, Michael Frommack. As part of a three-release conceptual project, spanning all phases of the day, I couldn't wait to hear what would be in store for Noon and Night. Morning had soft songs, provoking inner-peace, that I couldn't help but to play some mornings, just upon waking. Before dressing in business casual, before the stressful commute, before that first sip of coffee, the four-track EP was short enough to meditate to before the hectic days begun.

Noon and Night were released back in early February, one week apart. In continuing with and playing into the theme, I first streamed Noon during a quiet afternoon where I was working from home. The opening track, Light Motes, immediately feels warmer. The lyrics evoke picturesque scenes of the light coming from the sun and interacting with those on earth. The motes seem to dance while the trees grow, people sing and children love. It's truly beautiful.

In Pebble, the sun is more antagonistic, beating down upon those on earth. We're introduced to the characters acting, "hard and dry like the pebble". This notion of staying hard and dry, embodying the spirit of a rock, becomes necessary. It's not just the sun who is causing problems. The moon appears next and takes an indirect approach with scorn: he is reflective, hard, cold and contemplative. While generally hidden behind the "gatekeeper" clouds, the stars shine and taunt. Despite these threats, the celestial beings do not successfully crack or deteriorate the characters into rubble.

The Flora & Fauna are bigger than the credit they're given. At the end of the day, they're part of "a bigger picture, a bigger setting, a bigger story, a longer telling of our lives and our thriving". In the same vein, "we're all just mirrors, reflections of a greater light". I'm construing these thoughts to mean the flora and the fauna grow and ever persist, while we're just the end creations of a higher being. Like the previous two tracks on this EP, the attention is drawn to the nature and the universe.

By the end of the EP, I can't figure out if the world Frommack has presented is a reflection of the past or a window to the future. In this modern day and age, these observations and appreciations of nature and life simply do not exist. I can imagine the past, with no technology, more community and less structure. However, if society had to rebuild in the future, Noon would be predictive of some of the challenges and interactions nature would pose to humanity.

Frommack continues to astound me with his lyrics and unique take on quiet folk. I am looking forward to critically listening to Night and discovering its subtleties and metaphors. You can listen to and purchase Noon on bandcamp.

[Guest Post] Authenticity of Modern Pop Music - Words by Issac Purton of EmpireXL

I know things have been quiet lately. I'm currently in Colombia taking a much needed trip away from DC life. As much as I love this city, the pressure to escape has been escalating. Because I'll be gone for a week and work has kept me extra busy, I've reached out to a few friends to see if they'd like to guest post here. 

My undergrad friend and former roommate, Issac Purton, was happy to oblige. His blog, EmpireXL, is an exploration of music and creativity. His guest post is a critical and clever reflection of the authenticity of modern pop and the implications on music now and in the future. Enjoy! 

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If there’s a problem with modern pop (and that’s a big if, mind you) it’s not that no one writes their own songs anymore. The idea of authenticity, and the lack thereof, gets batted around by people in thick-framed eyeglasses as the determinant of what makes a song great. One’s experiences, the theory goes, fuels one’s writing, and makes the final product superior by virtue of it being ‘real’. This is why people dismissed Lana Del Rey when they found out her name was Elizabeth Grant, and why people, faces hazed by smoke, still listen to Robert Johnson’s 31 songs on vinyl. This ignores, of course, the fact that Ms. Grant probably wrote more of her material than Mr. Johnson did.

Authenticity is an artifact of delivery, not origin. Presidents aren’t hailed as great orators because of how well they write their speeches; I don’t think a single President in the last half-century has written a single word they’ve spoken in front of an audience. Similarly, the singers we respect most, Elvis & Sinatra, for example, never wrote a word or note of their own material. Hell, Paul Anka, of all people, is the one who wrote “My Way”, a song that people seem to hold as Sinatra’s spoken motto.

Most pop songs are written with the universal in mind. This is why so many of them revolve around love, be it young, puppy, or on sight: it’s a fair bet that everyone has been in love at least once, and that’s exactly who the target audience of pop music is: everyone. Pop music, in the corporate sense, is designed to appeal to the broadest group of people possible, which is why artifacts of music that organically (more-or-less) gained popularity get assimilated into it. It’s important to remember that Auto-Tune, as an audible effect, only got popular because an engineer screwed up the effects on a Cher song.

The thing about music being written about universals like love (or death/murder (country), heartbreak (blues, jazz), depression (blues), etc, etc) is that you don’t need to have written it to relate to and express it. Frank Sinatra didn’t need to write a whole album’s worth of songs about being miserable: instead, he could draw from a whole catalog of standards to construct the definitive heartbreak album, In The Wee Small Hours (an album beloved by Tom Waits, a hipster idol if there ever was one). The question of who wrote a song like “What Is This Thing Called Love?” is an issue for trivia enthusiasts and accountants only; it has no relevance whatsoever on the quality of the piece itself.

This applies to music in a broader sense as well. If a song is truly well written and able to communicate its emotion or sensation of choice, it follows that someone else can pick it up and make it their own. The content of the song can trump the performer (as is often the case with “Hallelujah”, which sounds beautiful in almost any context) or the performer can change a song completely, and bring something new out of it. A performer can elevate a song, and a song can elevate the performer. This doesn’t have anything to do with authenticity: it has to do with what’s written and who’s speaking.

My go to for this point is to look at the music of The Band. I can’t stand most of their performances (due mainly to the obnoxious production), but performances like this one prove that there’s something there, beyond the production and, maybe, even the performance itself. A song can have a life of its own, and in that context it doesn’t matter what its origin was, or whether the original writer was heartbroken, half-in-the-bag, bleeding out from the chest, or whatever. What matters is what’s written.

In the consideration of modern pop, the problem is not that modern stars aren’t writing their own material, or even that they aren’t making it their own. Quite simply, it’s that the singers aren’t really the focus any more. They’re the performers, sure, but the publicity that surrounds them is usually more significant than their concerts. The real stars these days are the producers. They’re the core musicians, and they’re the source of the main divide between singer and audience in modern pop: Auto-Tune.

Auto-Tune was the unstated dream of every producer, manager, and engineer in the world before its invention, and now that it exists you’ll never hear a truly human voice in the Pop Top 10 ever again. The brilliant producers labels have at their disposal have achieved the dream of turning even the human voice into a synthesizable instrument, something that doesn’t rely on the caprice of a performer and whether they’re on the right combination of uppers and downers for the day. It’s a fantasy world where the singer only has to be in the studio for half-an-hour, at most, before the work of finalizing one’s masterpiece can begin. If vocoders weren’t so comical I’m sure labels would have washed their hands of pop stars decades ago (Casablanca probably tried).

A lack of authenticity, of a certain tragic origin story, isn’t the problem with modern pop. That’s been the state of affairs since pop music got its start in the 1950s and things were doing just fine. The problem we’re facing now is a lack of humanity, where the worst part of electronica (the vocals) got mixed with hip-hop’s emphasis on the producer/DJ as a major part of a performance.

This is not to say that Auto-Tune can’t be used well; it can, and can even, like a guitar pedal, express emotion in a way that’s unfamiliar and exciting. As an audible effect it’s no more horrific than something like ADT. The problem is when it’s used to smooth a vocal performance into an uncanny territory that’s almost, but not quite, entirely inhuman. The problem is when it gets used in country music, basically.

This is, of course, assuming there’s a problem with modern pop music at all. It’s not like previous decades of music didn’t see plenty of chaff rise into the Top 10 of the charts. The difference between then and now, quite possibly, is simple perspective. The bad music was forgotten, and the good lived forever. The same will likely be true 20 years from now, with the mediocre being cast into the margins of history and the brilliant living on in our classic rock radio stations (or Spotify playlists, whatever).

Or maybe the next wave of music will be so bizarrely alien to us that we’ll rush to Miley Cyrus’s side, apology in hand and tears in our eyes. If you thought Imagine Dragons was irritating, imagine what your children will be showing you.