Silver Sea Song

Even more music, but from a couple of years later; I wrote the song in the previous post in the very early 2000s, but it went through several iterations. The current subject is a piece of music I recorded several times with very different arrangements; this is the softest.

At the time I had fallen in love with GForce's M-Tron, a VST simulation of the classic Mellotron tape-replay machine from the 1960s. It has a very modest role in the track above, but appears throughout this pocket symphony:

The Mellotron was essentially a set of tape loops slaved to a keyboard, except that they weren't really loops, they simply played through once and stopped. This was a major limitation at the time and was never really overcome, although there were several attempts to market Mellotron-esque keyboards that could play indefinitely. Popol Voh and Kraftwerk used a mysterious "choir organ", apparently some kind of custom build, and Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman poured a substantial part of his personal fortune into the Birotron, which appeared on a handful of records but never took off.

On a technical level, the Mellotron is a fascinating example of how the primitive screwheads from the past did things before digital computers were invented. Nowadays astronauts are trained in a computer simulator with lots of coffee and some NASA nappies. They are forced to dock and undock and dock and undock for six months until they can do it. But in the 1960s, astronauts were trained by making them wheel a ladder towards a model of the moon. Despite being one-hundred as intelligent as modern men, the men of the 1960s performed some impressive feats.

Back in the 1960s the company that built the Mellotron recorded a bunch of session violinists, flautists, choirs etc playing individual notes for eight seconds or so, in a three-octave range, and those sounds were transferred to the Mellotron's tape banks so that if you played F (for example) you started up a tape of Mr Violinist playing F. As if you had a violinist with you all the time.

The Mellotron appealed to musicians who wanted a portable orchestra, but it had a distinctive sound of its own, that I associate with cheesy Hammer Horror / Amicus films from the post-hippy 1970s. The musicians who appear on the Mellotron's tapes are probably long-dead by now. The Mellotron fell out of fashion in the late 1970s, although Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark were big fans. OMD had a wistful retro-futuristic thing going on, and the Mellotron fit their ethos. In theory the instrument was made thoroughly obsolete by digital samplers, but the sheer volume of sound data would have been very expensive right until the late 1990s. Thirty-five eight-second mono samples at 44khz is roughly 24mb, which would not have left much space in a fully-expanded Akai S1100.

Although the Melltron had a tiny keyboard, the tapes were recorded in the appropriate ranges, with the famously gothic cello pitched lower than the oboes (for example). There were also controls for tone and volume. Tangerine Dream discovered that the Melltron sounded awesome when fed through a wah-wah pedal or LFO-controlled resonant filter plus an echo machine, which is something I have tried to evoke with this solo Melltron piece:

As a VST emulation project the Mellotron was conceptually simple - just sample the tapes - but logistically difficult, because there were several different Mellotron tape banks and they were forty years old by the dawn of the VST era. M-Tron was by all accounts a triumph, and was keenly priced, at £40 way back in 2000. It remains one of the few pieces of musical software I actually (cough) paid money for. Irritatingly the upgrade to M-Tron Pro is more expensive than the original product.

And so in the 2000s it came to pass that the Mellotron had a new lease of life, as a 2.5gb sample bank with a VST front end. Most of the sounds are pretty naff, and a few are marred by noise that was present on the original tapes (the clarinet in particular). The piano and guitar are absolutely awful, and after playing with it for a while I settled on a mixture of violins 1, flute, cello, children's voices, french horn. The flute in particular reminds me of Britt Ekland's bottom in The Wicker Man, although surprisingly the instrument didn't feature at all on the soundtrack. Still, whoever played the Mellotron's flute sample, you had a good pair of lips and big strong lungs, you did well. The flutes, violin, and cello work as lead instruments and as a subtle, organic background wash.

Come to think of it, Britt Ekland's bottom didn't feature in The Wicker Man. The director used a body double's bottom, because Britt wasn't too enamoured of her own. Bear in mind that in the 1970s people didn't find bottoms sexy, they were just there.

Does anybody remember Britt Ekland nowadays? She was one of those people from the 1970s who was in lots of films that were on the television when you were young, and presumably she was in the papers all the time, but time has moved on. For people of my generation she was the Bond girl who wore a bikini but did not smuggle a data tape in it (that was Jill St John, as Tiffany Case, in Diamonds are Forever).

You know, if George Lazenby had continued as Bond, his next film would have been Diamonds are Forever. So it's lucky that he jumped before he was pushed, because Diamonds was a terrible film. The plot makes no sense, there's very little action, and it just has a dismally low-budget fin de siecle feel to it, as if Robert Altman had been asked to direct a variation of The Long Goodbye but with James Bond instead of Philip Marlowe.

Herculaneum

Off to Herculaneum, which is essentially Pompeii for hipsters. It's conceptually similar but less famous and thus more fashionable. Which is why I went there, instead of Pompeii. Fewer tourists; fewer me.

Herculaneum was buried in 79AD by the same eruption that engulfed Pompeii. Back in the superbad seventies the Roman Empire reigned supreme; Emperor Titus came to power, and he finished up the Colosseum, which I remember from this MST3K skit:

Writing in 1884, W Cope Devereux mentions the place only in passing. Literally so - he bypasses it on the way to Pompeii, because there wasn't much to see. The buried town had been rediscovered in the 1700s and had been excavated sporadically until 1875, but in Devereux's time it was overshadowed by Pompeii. Herculaneum was harder to excavate, which will become apparent six paragraphs from now, after I have finished writing about Spider-Man and the limits of human knowledge.

Work at Herculaneum restarted in 1927. The dig was one of Mussolini's prestige projects, and was intended to make Italy great again. The excavations have continued at a measured pace ever since.

I think it's a reference to SSC Napoli, which was founded in August 1926.

The ancient Romans weren't particularly fussed about resettling Herculaneum. The new town that slowly emerged was called Resina, but just like Spider-Man's black suit the name failed to catch on, and so in 1969 the residents voted to revert back to Herculaneum. Which is Ercolano in Italian.

Vesuvius is still an active volcano, which raises the possibility that the modern Herculaneum might one day be buried in ash. Archaeologists of the future will no doubt think that we all drove Fiats, and that our favourite film was "Banco di Credito Popolare".

Wonky education, or a fiendishly clever code? You decide.

If you think about it, the black costume makes sense, because spiders are black, aren't they? They're black and covered in fur. Why shouldn't Spider-Man be black... and covered in fur?

The black suit was introduced in the mid-1980s, as part of a general wave of "darker and edgier" makeovers that were fashionable at the time. It's often assumed that Frank Miller's Dark Knight Returns (1986) was the spark that lit the fire - it had the word dark in the title - but although Knight was very influential it was really the culmination of a general trend rather than its genesis. Miller's story postdated Alan Moore's dystopian V for Vendetta, and Moore's work on Swamp Thing and Captain Britain, for example. The brutally unsentimental Punisher dated from the 1970s, at which point it reflected the generally downbeat, anti-heroic tone of films such as Dirty Harry and Death Wish (in the UK, Judge Dredd had been directly inspired by the Eastwood film).

Batman himself had adopted a more gothic tone in the 1970s, and the big multi-comic Crisis on Infinite Earths continuity reboot was published while Miller was still working on his epic. Nowadays The Dark Knight is almost universally praised, but the "darker and edgier" trend it amplified is not remembered fondly. In the cinema dark-and-edgy became hip in the late 1980s but fizzled out in the 1990s; modern superhero blockbusters generally take place in a world where there are a few good men, if only a few.

Does this mean that modern superhero films and thus modern society in general have become trivialised and incapable of critical thought? My impression is that the dark tone of 1970s Hollywood grew naturally from the themes and stories that contemporary filmmakers wanted to explore, whereas the cynicism of (say) Predator 2 or Last Action Hero was essentially an affectation, an optional component akin to the cosmetic spoilers on a car. But it is impossible to write about films without considering the society that produces them. During the years in which R-rated action films were replaced with PG-rated action films there were several bloody wars; and when I think of the supposedly pussified modern world I think of fat Toronto Mayor Rob Ford sitting on the face of a prostitute, farting into her mouth, while she is being filmed for sex tape that will be leaked to the press in order to publicise her reality TV show, for which she will be paid seventeen million dollars. I think of that all the time. Rob Ford is us; we are Rob Ford.

Ultimately I believe that it is not possible to draw a picture of society from its media; that once you dig far enough, there's nothing there; and that instead of actual history, we remember a construction. The traditional view of history as a set of dates and names is oftentimes mocked for its simplicity, but what is the alternative? Human society is an enormously complicated system that moves through time, and we are unable to view it objectively because we are part of it, and a static slice would be as dead and cold as a slice of a human brain. By the time we have passed through history the details are forgotten, and there were so many things we reacted to unconsciously that even a mass of research - as in David Kynaston's Austerity Britain, for example - cannot fill the gaps. Over time, humanity has learned that there is more to the universe than can fit into a single human mind. How can we advance human knowledge in a universe that exhausts the limits of human understanding? Not just the understanding of one intelligent human being, but that of the entire collective intelligence of the human race. Before we can solve the problem of total understanding we need to build a machine which will surpass ourselves... and at this point have I just spewed out the plot of Douglas Adams' Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy? Adams' book is a mass of clever wordplay, but at its core is a profound philosophical concept; how can we understand a concept that simply cannot be translated into a form small enough for the human mind to grasp?

This was the last that roll of Fuji Acros; I put in some colour film and shot the image a few paragraphs up a few seconds later.

At its worst darker-and-edgier was cowardly, easy. Nihilism requires no effort or critical thought. Reading through it again, it strikes me that Dark Knight Returns is remarkably nuanced; it isn't a bludgeoning overdose of brutal violence and defeatism, it has a human core and ends on a hopeful note. The (spoilers) deaths of the chief villains are treated as a tragic waste and an empty hollow void respectively. The world of Dark Knight is bleak but capable of goodness, and its society's major deficit is a lack of empathy. The problem with "darker and edgier" is that, once it is escalated to a point where all of society and all the people and everybody and everything is darkly cynical, what next? There can be no tragedy in a world of tragedy. With no contrast, the backdrop simply becomes a bland wash. Real life is complex, evil is almost always undramatic, and quite often it exists only in the eye of the beholder.

But Herculaneum, eh? It's on the regional line from Naples, a short walk downhill from the train station. There's a taxi firm just outside the station that will take you up to Vesuvius, which was cloudy when I went, so I didn't go. I would have ended up with a lot of photographs of mist and rocks.

Herculaneum was originally by the sea; the eruption moved the coast, and in the following image you can see how deeply it was buried:

In theory you could walk quickly around the location in half an hour or so, and it's possible to do a whistle-stop tour of Pompeii and Herculaneum if you rush, although you'd find it difficult to squeeze Vesuvius into the itinerary. One of the advantages of living in Britain is that Continental Europe is only a short, cheap plane ride away, rather than eight hours and eight hundred dollars. But the ruins have survived for almost two thousand years, they will be there next year and the year after that.