Jorge Arango

Update 2010-08-16: Deutsche Grammophon changed their online store infrastructure earlier this year. As part of the change, they limited the amount of countries they are selling to online. I am once again unable to purchase DG music from Panama. I wrote to the email address provided in their website inquiring about the situation, and their response was that they had made the change “for security reasons”. I have no idea what this means. So much for giving credit where credit is due.

File this one in the “giving credit where it’s due” dept… A few weeks ago I complained about the brain-dead policy of media companies that limit their online sales of digital media to a few “first world” countries (the US, UK, etc.) Now a major label—Deutsche Grammophon—has opened up its online store to 195 countries, including Panama. Last week I purchased a recording of two Bach cantatas, and while the site’s usability leaves a lot to be desired, I’m a very happy camper.

DG is owned by an even larger label (Universal), so there is hope for the broader industry still. (I suspect that the fact that DG focuses on classical music makes them less jittery about expanding the scope of their market; classical is less likely to be passed around than pop or rock, and probably less susceptible to long tail effects. An experiment, perhaps?)

Quality classical recordings are almost impossible to come by in Panama, and this has been an endless source of frustration to me since I moved back here in 2003. I plan to spend a lot of money in the DG store over the next few years.

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The Criterion Collection —the preeminent distributor of classic films on DVD—launched a beautiful new website recently. Among its many features, it allows you to watch films online for $5… but only if you live in North America. This is incredibly frustrating! All these amazing movies, available instantly… not!

If you live in or near a major metropolitan area (or near a university) in the US or Canada, you probably already have some way to watch Au Revoir Les Enfants or The Thief of Baghdad. Those of us living in cultural backwaters can’t enjoy such luxuries. The Panama City metro area (where I am) has more than a million inhabitants, but our sole access to decent cinema consists of a single Blockbuster store with a few shelves of the usual suspects: a bit of Fellini, some Kurosawa, some Hitchcock, etc. We have no art house theaters, only mall cineplexes blasting the latest superhero fluff. And as poor as our movie selection is, it’s still much broader than the music available: basically if you don’t like merengue, plena, or 1980s discount-rack soft rock you’re shit out of luck.

Why is Criterion shutting me out? For that matter, why can’t I legally buy MP3s or movies from Amazon’s online store, when I can order from them a slab of plastic containing the same bits and have it shipped to me, using up resources and crapping on the environment? Perhaps the argument is that not many people here are interested in this stuff. True enough, but so what? How much more can it cost these companies to open these digital distribution channels? Is it more than it costs to install and maintain the filters that keep people like me from becoming customers?

The internet was supposed to level the playing field for those of us that live in culturally isolated regions. But now that technology has matured to the point where cultural artifacts—music, movies, TV shows, and books—can be purchased, distributed, and experienced online, companies are doing their damnedest to maintain the old structures intact. The net result: global access to culture is constrained to a bizarro long tail, a ghetto defined by corporate lawyers and accountants.

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Interruptions kill my flow states, so I try to minimize them as much as possible. Music is a great way to do this, especially in a busy office: plug an iPod into your brain via in-ear headphones (Sennheiser CX300 ? highly recommended) and you can forget about the world outside to focus on the task at hand. Some music works better in this role than others…

*Ambient 1 / Music for Airports*, recorded by Brian Eno in 1978, is the ideal “working” album. The music is soft, ethereal, homogeneous, repetitive, and mostly instrumental ? the perfect ingredients to help establish and sustain flow. However, it isn’t elevator music: there is an alien, melancholy feeling to MfA that gives it depth.

Concept / background

Inspired by the beauty of Cologne airport, Eno set about to design a music that would be fitting for a public space of that type. He started with the following conditions:

It mustn’t interfere with human communication, so it has to be either higher or lower than voice sounds. It should last a very long time, because you don’t want changes all the time. It should be possible to be interrupted by announcements, and so on, without suffering…

In opposition to the muzak commonly used at that time, it made no effort to trivialize the fear of dying that many people feel in airports:

I wanted to create a different feeling: that you were sort of suspended in the universe, and your life or death wasn’t so important.

Perhaps this is why it’s so perfect for long sessions of focused thinking: it’s designed from scratch to be background music, and to take both the musician’s and the listener’s egos out of the equation.

What it sounds like

Eno recorded the four tracks on the album using tape loops of himself and a few other musicians playing a variety of instruments and singing (no words ? only “oohs” and “aahs”.) The loops are individually recognizable, yet intentionally de-synchronized. The result is a tapestry of sound patterns, a sonic kaleidoscope.

Highlights

• 1/1 is haunting and weightless. It features a drifting piano loop played by Robert Wyatt, and alone is worth the price of the album. (This track sees heavy rotation in my iTunes.)

• 2/1 has piano and vocal loops. For some reason it makes me think of a still black pond covered with leaves.

  Where to get it

• Amazon

• iTunes Music Store

  Technorati Tags: eno, flow

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There have been murmurs in the blogosphere of late regarding the imminent demise of DRM. Apparently record labels are almost ready to concede that it’s in their best interest to abandon business strategies that hobble most of their customers in order to avoid wrongdoing by a select few.

These rumblings have been given added credibility by a post published today on apple.com by Steve Jobs himself, outlining the possibilities for the sale of music online in the future. Mr. Jobs seems to clearly favor selling non-DRM music. I hope this means the record labels are ready to acquiesce on this matter.

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“I am in a prison. One wall is the avant-garde, the other is the past. I want to
escape.”