Idle Chatter about Notjustmoreidlechatter

I've been flipping through my iTunes because I'm working on a mix for somebody I love, and I rediscovered my deep love of Paul Lansky's Notjustmoreidlechatter (all one word).

The piece is so fragmented-and could easily easily be duplicated in this modern computer age. But he composed the piece by fragmenting voice samples and re-arranging them on cassette in 1988. It sounds so modern, like it was composed this year. It impresses me because it sounds so soothing, and yet it's a collection of chaotic clips.

It seems an appropriate aural description of the modern era. Information flies at us so quickly we may not even have time to process the flow of ideas. Our generation is one raised on instant gratification. We are the generation that saw video games become a multibillion dollar industry. We saw the advent of social networking and as youngsters conversed with our school friends through AIM instead of a phone call. Our vocabularies consist of words like "multi-task."We grew up with pop music where the intonation could be fixed with the touch of a button, where a voice could be created almost entirely in a studio. We watched MTV, we used search engines, and we watched as Amazon and Ebay proved that just about anything can and will sell through the internet. We tweet, we text, we friend and un-friend, we announce to the world that "it's complicated" or that we are engaged.

With a click of a mouse, I can download custom content for my Sims game while I listen to Cambodian rock music on my iTunes and I check the temperature in my city and look up the song lyrics to a Björk song and make a grocery list on an iPod touch with recipes gleaned from Epicurious.com. I can look up the name to that Billy Collins poem I kept thinking about by typing the line I had stuck in my head. I can find my apartment building on Google maps and read the menu to a new restaurant to decide if I want to eat there. I can find a toy I used to play with as a child by searching for it under vintage (ouch) items on Ebay or Etsy.

I mean, good god. Have you ever stopped and thought about how many things you can do? I've been researching video game music for a paper (the paper topic was sort of a present to myself, I know), and when I look at system capabilities from only 15 years ago, I'm astounded at how quickly it improved and how seamlessly it all integrated into our lives. I think about when I was in elementary school and the classroom computer was used only to play Oregon Trail and Number Munchers (does anybody else remember that game?). Now you can pull up a youtube video of a symphony orchestra performance in a general music class, and even write directly on the screen of a Smartboard. You can surf the internet on a fiber optic network and buy external hard drives that store TERABYTES of data.

When you think about how quickly you learn how to adapt and integrate, it's sort of shocking and amazing.

I strayed quite far from the musical content...Paul Lansky's piece to me, is the perfect commentary on all of these things I have been talking about. The sampling of human voices so that they sound computerized, or lost in the shuffle of information exchange. The voices are unintelligible and numerous. They make me think of the millions of people who are able to connect through the internet, talk, share, fight, romance, comment...there's a din of human communication through completely non-sentient means. Does it matter that we can't discern a "text?" I don't think so. I think the fragmentation is familiar, it's comfortable. We're used to living lives completely enveloped in technology, the way the sound of this piece envelopes us in its eclectic musical line.