A musical eulogy for the tangible world
A couple years before I’d heard of something called an Amazon Kindle or an iPhone, I had the thought…
(though not a very singular one, as plenty of folks had pondered the same thing, at least since the days when computers were as large as Monster Trucks)…
…that sometime soon, paper would go extinct.
I was thrilled and troubled. Less trees turned to pulp! Less waste and environmental impact (because it takes a lot of energy to manufacture, distribute, sell, buy, and destroy a physical book)! Limitless online selection and quick deliverability! Check, check, check.
But on the other hand, what about the tactile stuff we’ve come to associate with reading? The texture, the sound of fingers flipping pages, the smell of a book? Oh, sweet nostalgia.
All of these things have been talked to death since the internet revolution began, but years ago they seemed worthy of some late-night consideration. I decided I’d write a song called “The Late, Great Age of Paper” — a musical elegy for the printed book.
I say song, but the only words are, repeatedly:
“The great age of paper”
The accidentally circuit-bent Thrift-store keyboard
A few days before that, I’d bought a crappy, broken, no-brand keyboard for $3.99 from the Goodwill — “broken,” because the whole thing’s intonation was out of whack —a few micro-tones north of standard 440 Hz tuning.
For you non-musicians, this basically just means that all the notes on this keyboard were slightly higher than a normal keyboard or piano. But the gritty bass sound on the keyboard intrigued me enough to buy the thing.
That sound was the basis for “The Late, Great Age of Paper.” I used a distorted Casio SK-1 for the drum beat, and then layered a bunch of parts with the no-name crap-tone keyboard.
But the real pain in the ass was tracking acoustic, electric, and bass guitar — because I had to tune them all “sharp” (meaning: higher than they normally would be) to match the rest of the tune.
Rob Stroup — who was also the engineer/producer for the track — and John Stewart recorded some percussion; I put on a choirboy voice for the end section; and the sole lyric — “the great age of paper” — was sampled on the SK-1 and played back at various speeds and pitches.
The album that “Paper” appears on, Movie Theatre Haiku, was split into two sections — half the songs recorded on 16-track analog tape and half in ProTools (digital recording software). Maybe it’s not so strange that “The Late, Great Age of Paper” was recorded in 0’s and 1’s.
Mr. Printer Paper goes to the Mirror
A couple years before the song was even released, my ex and I made a fun little music video for this track. Filmed and directed by Kristiana Weseloh.
We uploaded this in the early days of YouTube, back when the quality for videos was nowhere near HD, let alone 4k.
So I hope you’ll enjoy Mr. Printer Paper’s stop-motion morning adventure in all its nostalgic low fidelity:
Musical haiku
5/7/5 = A.B.A. The form of the song (roughly-speaking) is A.B.A. — a palindrome: the same form I’d used for the song “My Life in Film Festivals (Haiku #1),” because that song’s lyrics got their initial start as a haiku, the popular Japanese poetic form whose American equivalent requires 3 lines: a 5-sylabble line, a 7-sylabble line, and another 5-syllable line.
So both “My Life in Film Festivals” and “The Late, Great Age of Paper” have shorter A sections (repeated twice) that sandwich longer B sections.
The B-section sandwich. Musical haiku: bam!
The “Joe Rogan” of medieval Europe?
Books!
Yeah, I know the question is a bit clickbait-y.
But hear me out:
The Late, Great Age of Manmade Videos
Lots of years after the song was originally released, I was given a few free credits to test out a service called Rotor, an automated online music-video creation tool.
I clicked a dozen or so checkboxes in their dashboard and behold: this is the music video AI hath made — pairing my musical eulogy for the tangible world with footage of circuitboard autopsies, temperature-controlled server rooms, and a ticking digital clock:
Credits
Chris Robley - Keyboards, drums, bass, guitars, vocals
Rob Stroup - Percussion, drums
John Stewart - Drums
Engineered by Rob Stroup at 8 Ball Studios (Portland, Oregon)
Mixed by Jeff Stuart Saltzman at Mysterious Beard (Portland, Oregon)