Author: Elliott

Centuries

Posted on by Elliott

It has haunted me— so every few years I make another attempt to find out what the lyrics are to Centuries, from the Orb album Cydonia. In 2004 I even wrote to Aki Omori through the Freaky Realistic website but never got a response. Last night I tried again and actually found one discussion with a very good attempts at decipherment… and a review with what could be the correct lyrics which I should have found so many years ago. I cannot believe how much time has passed.

Re: Music: Cutting Edge and What You Are Listening To?

THIS WEEK’s CHALLENGE… what are the correct lyrics????

Quote Originally Posted by CoffeeCup

I would like to share a fantastic piece of art with all of you. This is the song where the singers voice is a sort of a musical instrument. The voice and the music are so adjusted as the listener while following the singer is picked up by the instrumental flow and washed away to the sea of emotional music.
“Centuries” by “The orb” from the “Cydonia” album of 2001. The brilliant vocal is by Aki Omori.

I was surfing the web for the lyrics but have not found it. I can clearly hear the word “centuries” but all the others are the mystery. If somebody can, please post the lyrics!

I realize we NEVER got back to this mystery of the lyrics for this song! Shame on us!!! I surfed the Web and could not locate them even on the band’s Web site. So, I started to listen to the song carefully and realized, CoffeeCup is correct, saying the Diva is difficult to understand is an understatement

I have uploaded a clean copy of the song for anyone who wants to take a stab at this or thinks the version out on YouTube is not clear enough.

Here are the lyrics as I have been able to get them:
Line

1 So, if (long ago and??)…somewhere
2 Every moment we shake as we (can/kiss?)
3 …for a century my memory should be
4 Moments created un…
5 As … my eyes can…you
6 Then forever I shall live
7 In a memories old friends
8 For it’s only a century away
9 If my life turns a pass (path) of pain
10 Then my love may cry out loud
11 so to take a (chance?)…in blood
12 shows life has just begun
13 For it’s only a century away
14 So, if (long ago and??)…somewhere
15 Every moment we shake as we (can/kiss?)
16 …for a century my memory should be
17 For it’s only a century away
18 For it’s only a century away
19 We interrupt this program to bring you a bulletin from the Mutual news room
20 According to an announcement from Moscow Radio
21 John Dennison of 643 Water Street had his house made upside down.

From https://home.comcast.net/~star6n789/orb_cyd.html

The following Centuries is the first of five new tracks in a row that were specifically written for the final release of Cydonia, i.e. the version I am reviewing. Aki Omori goes back to the studio with The Orb and delivers a Björk-like performance on a gorgeous pop song. I’m not kidding, the song is hugely positive and the lyrics about the possibility of deleting horrific memories in the near future and the bonds of friendship are quite deep. A sample of a hectically ticking clock is repeated endlessly, and the warm synth pads and gleaming mellifluence of the backing bits point to the clear trademark sound of Thomas Fehlmann.

Centuries (Lyrics: Paterson/Omori)

So if nowhere was somewhere
And every moment we share 'cos we care
Then and only for a century
My memories shall be
Moments create and undo
As our minds can renew
Then forever I shall live
In the memories of friends

For it's only a century away---

If my mind turns a path of pain
Then my love may cry and die
So to take a chance in love
Shows life has just begun.

For it's only a century away--

Statement of Purpose

Posted on by Elliott

We live in a wish-fulfillment society and are all drowning in beauty, yet generally we are all possibly more demoralized than ever. Beauty, and pleasure, at least as we now understand them, are clearly not ultimately satisfying. Art, therefore, should be edifying. If it isn’t, then it only attends to the current sensibilities of the audience and is proportionally only craft. The criteria for success with craft is well understood, but there seems little point in making Art which the viewer already fully accepts. The more artistic a work, the more inscrutable, and the more an education it can be. Beauty is being studied scientifically, and will also soon be well understood, and beautiful things are at all times being created almost totally programmatically through technique alone, which is to say, as a craft. We’re extremely susceptible to beautiful forms of any kind, but it begins to feel vacuous and predictable, as just another pretty face or pretty painting. Then some artists try to ugly things up to relieve the boredom; and surrealism depends on the viewer having a rather normal, sane view of reality to scandalize— but it’s rather unambitious, seeking merely to scandalize normal, sane people. For now I’ve settled on making art that is beautiful, crafty, or good enough for our purposes, preferring to establish instead a technique of thinking and of living life, portraits of ideas of how to Be.

Who are the intellectuals?

Posted on by Elliott

[Noam Chomsky, from Understanding Power]

WOMAN: Noam, I’ve noticed that in general there’s a strong strain of anti- intellectualism in American society.

When you say there’s “anti-intellectualism,” what exactly does that mean? Does it mean people think Henry Kissinger shouldn’t be allowed to be National Security Advisor?

WOMAN: Well, I feel there’s a sense in which you’re looked down on if you deal with ideas. Like, I’ll go back and tell the people I work with that I spent the whole weekend listening to someone talk about foreign policy, and they won’t look at that in a positive way.

Yeah, because you should have been out making money, or watching sports or something. But see, I don’t call that “anti-intellectual,” that’s just being de-politicized— what’s especially “intellectual” about being concerned with the world? If we had functioning labor unions, the working class would be concerned with the world. In fact, they are in many places— Salvadoran peasants are concerned with the world, they’re not “intellectuals.”

These are funny words, actually. I mean, the way it’s used, being an “intellectual” has virtually nothing to do with working with your mind: those are two different things. My suspicion is that plenty of people in the crafts, auto mechanics and so on, probably do as much or more intellectual work as plenty of people in universities. There are big areas in academia where what’s called “scholarly” work is just clerical work, and I don’t think clerical work’s more challenging mentally than fixing an automobile engine— in fact, I think the opposite: I can do clerical work, I can never figure out how to fix an automobile engine.

So if by “intellectual” you mean people who are using their minds, then it’s all over the society. If by “intellectual” you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that’s different. Those people are called “intellectuals”— but they’re really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that’s a healthy reaction.

(Continue reading…) “Who are the intellectuals?”

Unfortunately I still have no idea what this actually is

Posted on by Elliott

こんにちは。ビデオの音楽のように、この画像と曲の音でしょうか？ありがとう、あなたは天才です！

(Hi Shinsuke. Will this image and song sound like the music in the video? Thank you, you are a genius!)

Kris Weston asked me to design some vinyl art for a very interesting record etching process he wanted to use for some fund-raising dub plates, as outlined in these links (1, 2, 3). I some some old, amazing christian eschatological insanity I found while cleaning up my Grandmother’s attic early last year, then Kris sent off some music files and the visual design to Shinsuke and Koji, who then etched some records and sent them to me. So I suppose these are one-of-a-kind “Thrash” demo LPs (milled into some heavy, very thick material that I don’t think is vinyl), one side of which plays music, the other plays intermittent sine wave beeps and glitches, as informed by the etched artwork.

The question remains: does the etching process allow for the music to be encoded in the grooves or not? Because after many, many language translation and email correspondence travails, Shinsuke himself said that the art side will sound like beeps when played, even though the articles made it seem that the etching is a non destructive process, i.e., that the result is playable art. Shinsuke wrote:

絵つまり濃淡が音の強弱です。
強弱がなければ絵は描けません。
複雑な絵であればあるほど音はより変化します。
絵が描かれるための音の変化は音楽としての変化にくらべより大きな変化です。スクラッチの時のフェーダーの激しい動き以 上の音のオンオフが必要です。
それがピーピー音になります。
絵を描くこととあらかじめ作られた音楽を一つの溝で再現することは物理的に矛盾しています。
音楽を音楽として再生させるためには
従来の音楽のトラックをカットする必要があります。
サンプルで作った二枚は
片面に絵をもう片面に音をいれました。
透明のレコードであれば裏側から絵を浮かび上がらせることができます。
このレコードは再生する事もできるがあくまで観賞用の作品です。
もちろん音のトラックはしっかり再生できますが。

 

However! After running the app, I feel like there is still some misunderstanding… there is clearly an option to use an audio file instead of a sine wave, and the app asks to save a file when it has been run… AND the audio file is slightly corrupted from the version that was input, meaning that at least something is happening  (Unfortunately, even if this redeeming fact turned out to be true, any audible corruption is a deal killer for Kris). So which is it… can the artwork side of the vinyl play music or not? We may not ever find out, because Shinsuke has already been so extremely generous with his time and resources, and since we got to be cringing every time we had another untranslatable question for him… we just don’t want to bother him anymore about it.