Ugo
Group: Members
Posts: 5495
Joined: April 2000 |
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Posted: Aug. 30 2010, 18:02 |
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We,, of course I may be reading too much into it - this is what you may expect from an Amarok addict.  But I always felt that there are very strong relations between the music and the story (which, IIRC, was written after the music), so I think that there is very little in Amarok which was done just for the hell of it, as Nightspore says, or as pure fun. Even the Mandolin bit, which sounds just like pure fun the first time it comes around, gets meticulously de-constructed (and re-constructed) in the section I mentioned above, so it's clear that the actual music, some of which was born out of pure fun, is really treated very seriously by Mike all the way through Amarok. Maybe the only thing that's done for fun and nothing else in the whole work is the "'appy?" sample - as someone said in another thread, samplers were a new toy at the time and Mike just had some fun with it. But I think all the rest is absolutely not haphazard - it's cleverly constructed to look like chaos. And it's not true, I think, that there are no rules and there is no structure within Amarok - the very fact that some sections are repeated (and some of them aren't simply repeated, but they're repeated with variations!) to me is an indication that Mike had a clear construction of the whole thing in his mind from the outset, and he built it like a jigsaw puzzle, i.e. one piece here, one piece there, and at the end you get a full picture including various pieces that look similar to one another, yet they are different, and like in a real jigsaw puzzle every piece fits exactly where it is supposed to fit, and it can't fit anywhere else. Also, Amarok is not intellectual - I didn't say it is. But I don't think you can argue that there is total absence of construction and structure and planning and thinking in it, because all of those things are definitely there. As Shakespeare would have said, there is method in that madness.
@ Milamber: it's not the bashing itself that I find enigmatic, but the fact that it comes a very spooky atonal section. It sounds like the protagonist (whoever it is) is trapped somewhere and he can't find a way out, so he bashes his way out and he finally manages to escape that realm of atonality into the very tuneful "Boat" section. At least this is the way I interpret that bit. By the way, I received 5 replies and no one attempted to reply to my original question. Am I the only one, in the whole board, who cares? 
@ nightspore: that's not supposed to be a cat's meow. That's supposed to be a starting signal, something like "let's get ready, now go!". Even if it's a descending tone (some have hypotized it's the guitar tuner) I have always perceived it that way.
@ wiga: if Mike was actually on a roll, as you say, he wouldn't have included within Amarok some pieces of music he originally recorded back in 1968, during the Sallyangie sessions, and which are reproduced almost verbatim. When you are on a roll, maybe you can remember a tune you wrote yesterday, but you definitely don't stop to think about a piece of music you composed and recorded 22 years ago, and, mostly, you don't take the trouble to re-play it almost exactly as you played it 22 years ago. Doing this is something that, at least IMHO, has to be planned. You cannot do it spontaneously.
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Ugo C. - a devoted Amarokian
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That's him - my hero !!