Top 10 Vampire Musicians

1. David Bowie
2. Paul McCartney
3. Frank Black
4. Iggy Pop (sired by 1)
5. Kim Deal (sired by 3)
6. Ringo Starr (sired by 2)
7. Lou Reed
8. Brian Eno
9. Jack White (sired by 4)
10. Meg White (also sired by 4, which explains the whole "brother/sister" thing)

At the Sonic Zoo

Much electronic music aims to create a sense of navigable sonic space, but that's not the only sort of world-creation available to laptop deities. I'm particularly fond of works that create musical ecosystems populated with alien creatures. Three come to mind in particular. Most recently, there's "Creatures" from Black Dice's "Creature Comforts." But then in the Mesozoic era of electronic music we have the "Forbidden Planet Soundtrack" by Louis and Bebe Barron, and Iannis Xenakis's Gendy compositions. The Barrons' (analog!) work provides both background music and sound effects for the movie -- titles like "Battle with Invisible Monster" and "Nothing Like This Claw Found in Nature" say it all. Xenakis's "Gendy3" is algorithmically generated, so you could argue that it creates a kind of musical artificial life. The timbres themselves are generated on the fly, resulting in a biodiversity that is occasonally painful but always interesting.

Get Your Bleep On

If you enjoy the work of Black Dice, autechre, Phoenecia, Eno, or others who build sound waves from scratch with electronic tools, here's a recommendation you aren't likely to get from Pandora or last.fm: pick up a copy of The Csound Book, just for the accompanying CD-ROM. Csound is a standard tool for digital synthesis--essentially a programming language for sound processing--and the book provides an excellent introduction to it. But if you just want to consume sound, not produce it, ignore the book. For a mere $60 you get almost 8 hours of mp3 music from masters of academic computer music and their students. Even if you find only 6 hours to be listenable (not everyone can appreciate pure sine waves), it's a bargain. If you've ever struggled to find computer-generated blurbles that are unpolluted by techno beats but still spicier than new-age ambient, this will be your mother lode. And who knows: if you find Csound itself intriguing and decide to start doing a little experimentation, you may even turn into one of those "laptop musicians" that the real musicians love to hate.

Bob Dylan as American Liar

In his essay "The Right to Lie" Thomas Disch asserts that a national admiration for liars (Tom Sawyer, Oliver North, etc.) has made it easy for Americans to "pretend to believe." This willed credulity has in turn paved the way for UFO abduction stories and Dianetics (and has, according to Disch, given science fiction "a special claim to be our national literature"). But what Disch calls an unfortunate blurring of the line between truth and fiction, Keats called negative capability : the ability to be "in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

From his self-portrait in "Chronicles: Volume One," we can see that Bob Dylan is an admirable liar, an embodiment of Keats's ideal, and, as a result of these qualities, a fantasist. He happily confesses to some whoppers: pretending to rediscover Judaism, fabricating a biographical blurb for his first album to pump up his folk cred, and others. But he never comes across as a con man. Rather, he seems to regard surface truth as trivial compared to deeper emotional truths and purposes. And this same approach to outer truth has endowed him with a powerful credulity when it comes to the mythology of folk music:

Folk music was a reality of a more brilliant dimension. It exceeded all human understanding, and if it called out to you, you could disappear and be sucked into it. I felt right at home in this mythical realm made up not with individuals so much as archetypes, vividly drawn archetypes of humanity, metaphysical in shape, each rugged soul filled with natural knowing and inner wisdom (236).

Similarly, when he tells us with a straight face that Johnny Cash "killed a man in Reno just to watch him die," Dylan is pretending to believe order in order to illustrate how a culture possessed him. With respect to "Chronicles" itself, this ability to channel myths yields an additional benefit. Young Dylan is a sponge who absorbs vivid details of the characters and places of the folk scene so that old Dylan can echo them back to us. It's worth suspending your disbelief long enough to absorb some of these vividly drawn archetypes of humanity.

The Bear

I had this thing about Strange and Norrell all worked up, but then I picked up Rafi Zabor's The Bear Comes Home and reread a few pages. So this week's recommendation is The Bear. I suspect that you don't have to be into jazz to like this novel about a bear who plays saxophone, although I can't verify that from personal experience. In any case, it's about the nature of improvisation and nature as improvisation. It's on my lifetime list, right up there with The Lord of the Rings (not that it's fantasy). Try it.