song_exploder

M.C. Schmidt posed an important question last Sunday during a live Song Exploder event at the fourth annual Megapolis Audio Festival. Schmidt, one half of formerly-local-now-Baltimore-based experimental music duo Matmos, effectivelyย summed up the value of Song Exploder for its host Hrishikesh Hirway by reiterating a thought coming from his days at the San Francisco Art Institute: โ€œIs [an art piece] still gonna tell the same story without the little plaque?โ€

Schmidt surmises that in the realm of audio, this featย is significantly harder. Musicians need to somehow capture their audience with far fewer chances for explanation, really having only a press release to work with. Enter Song Exploder, an idea so brilliantly simple the music industry did a double take when it was introduced last year. Anchored by LAโ€™s Hirway, the podcast โ€œexplodesโ€ a pre-determined song into its individual parts and allows its creator to explain, or essentially โ€œplaque,โ€ each stem.

For Matmos, this was overrย 100 components to the song โ€œVery Large Green Trianglesโ€ from their most recent album, The Marriage of True Minds (2014).

At Omni Commons, the show sold more tickets than there were chairs; many of the attendees lay down on the floor in what seemed to be optimal podcast listening position as Schmidt and his partner, Drew Daniel, carried most of the presentation. This fit Hirwayโ€™s purposeโ€”he explained to us at the start of the show that the conversation would run about an hour but eventually be condensed to 15, 20 minutes after editing, and that his questions would be entirely omitted.

The finished podcast from Sunday hasnโ€™t been released yet, but itโ€™ll be interesting to see what Hirway keptโ€”Matmos, as part-time academics and a full-time couple, were dynamic and entertaining guests who required minimal guidance from their host.

Between individual stem playbacks, the duo dissected Danielโ€™s telepathy-based creative process, told the story of how Schmidt purchased a used piano with a warped pinblock from a โ€œweirdo,โ€ and commented on the ubiquity of Baltimore club at its characteristic โ€œrecord-skippingโ€ tempo of 133BPM.

live podcast taping w/ matmos at #megapolisfest2015 #verylargegreentriangles

A photo posted by Joanna Jiang (@thevibegirl) on


 
As revelatory as the session was (Hirway played โ€œVery Large Green Trianglesโ€ again after the conversation to prove his point), Song Exploder doesnโ€™t entirely solve the plaque problem. The podcast is still a Google searchโ€™s time and effort away from immediate access, about the same distance as any other explanatory material; however, it allows both listener and artist to geek out. For conceptual artists like Matmos, it’s a moment for them to shine.

Song Exploder could potentially serve as a highly educational music discovery toolโ€”a digital and admission-free sound museum of sorts; otherwise, it is most useful if your taste happens to align with Hirwayโ€™s mostly indie rock / electronic guests (though he is trying to branch out). He publishes on a biweekly basis; guests featured on theย 39 episodes thus farย include The Postal Service, Baths, Alexandre Desplat, and Toro Y Moi.

As a podcast, Song Exploder appears to be the only one of its type for music, an observation made by Roman Mars, who featured Hirwayโ€™s program in his own 99% Invisible. Sunday, Mars served as the introduction to the podcast taping, reprising 99%โ€™s Episode 65, a 2012 show about disruptive camouflage titled โ€œRazzle Dazzle.โ€

Article by Joanna Jiang

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