Radiolab - Dawn of Midi

Episode Date: August 29, 2013

In this short, Jad puts on his music hat and shares his love of Dawn of Midi, a band that he recently started using on the show.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts. From.

W. N. Y. C. C. C? Yes. And NPR. Okay. So I'm going to put on my music hat for a couple of minutes.

Okay. And then in two weeks we can put our other hats back on whatever they're called. Sliang, humanism. Philosophy, whatever. Look, we are many people. many people. I am a musician as well as a storyteller. You are a Broadway showtune singer, as well as a radio rock-on tour. I would like to have been a Broadway show. No one has ever invited me to do that. Well, I'm going to invite you at least to listen to my version of that

for just a few minutes. I'm going to tell you about a band that I just discovered. This may be the coolest thing I've heard in years. Actually, you know this band. I mean, maybe you don't know that you know them, but we've used them in a few shows. Remember the piece we did in the Bliss show about the perfect snowflake? Yes. We use them there. Oh. Remember the story about the artist who weaponized his own blood? Yes, Bart and Benish.

We used them there, too. So in a subtle way, I have already been exposed to them. That's what I'm saying. Although I am quite certain you will hate their music. I could be wrong about that. Well, I will be as generous as I know possibly how to be. The band is called Don of Midi. Dawn of what?

Of Midi. M-I-D-I. Do you know what Midi is? No. It's sort of like a computer language for music. Like in my studio at home, I have a bunch of synthesizers and various things. they all talk to each other using MIDI. Oh, the Dawn of Midi.

Dawn of Midi. It's one of those half and halves. Like, Dawn suggests something pleasant, beautiful, and sort of movie-like. Midi, technological, card, cold. Yeah, that's actually not a bad place to start. Okay, so the band is three guys. Akash is Ronnie.

He plays the bass. Amino Belliani plays the piano of Kassim Nockvi, plays the drums. They met in college at Cal Arts. Initially, though, their partnership was not about music. It was about tennis. began on the tennis courts. On the tennis court.

Yeah, it was funny, actually, because we would play late at night. That's Akash, the bass player? Kossam had, like, stolen the key and kept it or something. And one night we were there at, like, 3 a.m. And I think we were really drunk, and security showed up. And he saw us. They were pounding the ball back and forth, yelling. And when he saw the intensity with which we were involved in this match,

he was like, you know, you guys should continue. Like, carry on. And he left. And that intensity sort of translated into the music that they, They started to play. Maybe not the competitive part, but they would take it really seriously. Like, what they would do is they'd get together. We'd go into these classrooms that had no windows and turn out all the lights.

And they would play these long, crazy sets in pitch black darkness. It was completely, totally improvised. Like, before they started, they would have no idea what key they were going to play in. No. No idea of what tempo? No. Or how long they were going to go? No.

Would you at least figure out who was going to play first? No. I mean, they just start cold. Cold? But it would end up sort of like that 3 a.m. tennis match. Really intense, rolling, rollicking, improvisations. Kind of atonal. A tonal. Oh, boy.

Yeah, I know. I know. We're just trying not to use that word. It's really, I like it. It's really interesting stuff. And like I said, we use it in the Snowflake story. But that style of music is not actually what I'm going to present to you now. It's what they do next that I find totally fascinating. To set that up, as they're out on tour, doing this free improvisational thing, they were also listening to different kinds of music.

Like they were listening to electronic music as well. Stuff like Apex Twin. Also, one of them gets really deep into trance music, not techno-trans, but. A lot of music from Africa. West African music as well as music from Morocco. And these are musical traditions that have a totally different approach to rhythm, which we can talk about in a second. But they're listening to all this stuff. And it begins to somehow seep in.

They begin to gradually put a little bit of it into their sets and to make a long story short over the course of two years. It was a very incremental and slow process. They pieced together this style of music that is 180 degrees from what they were just doing. And unlike anything I've ever heard. And the only way I can describe it is it's sort of like ancient folk music filtered through highly obsessive computers that actually aren't computers but people. What does that mean? Here, I'm going to play you some, okay? Okay.

Let's put this on. No, not that. Let's just mute this. All right. Here it comes. Now, keep an open mind. Okay. So this is how it starts with just a baseline. Is it going to develop or are we going to just? No, it is. It is. But just slowly. Just wait, wait. Hear that?

Doo, do. Right. This is a pianist. He's playing it with his left hand on the string, so he's kind of muting it to create a harmonic. I know a pot of whales who would go crazy for this. Just look, okay, you hear the drums are coming. Do you hear that?

Yes. I don't know about you. Actually, maybe I do know about you. But for me, right about now, I'm getting into a deep trance. All right, let's just don't say anything for a minute, and let's see what happened. Okay.

Listen to that. They're not playing a machine. They're playing traditional instruments. No, this is all live. They're playing real instruments. It's all performed. It's acoustic. Although it doesn't sound acoustic.

Yeah, it doesn't. I'm so dick into this. Just listen to more. See, just starts to slowly evolve. A little bit by bit. And it just keeps doing that for 45 minutes. I mean, it's broken into tracks, but it's really just one long thing. I think that in seismic,

laboratories all over the world where geologists gather. People have to listen to impending earthquakes. This is going to be like enormous. In the Crowell Witch household too, I imagine. Because it's small, small shifts. Tiny, tiny shift. Come on, you don't find that groovy at all? Yeah, no, I do. Actually, I do. So these guys basically went from like free improv, no rules to becoming like human machines. It's sort of like wishing to be an element in a very finely made Swiss wards. Except now remove the watch. I think that something is going on in the world right now.

That's Akash again? The last 10 to 15 years, you see in a lot of fields right now, people doing things, quote unquote, in an analog way that 10 years ago would have been assumed were absolutely, like, impossible without the aid of technology. You see it from big wave surfers who found out they could ride huge waves if they have jet skis to pull them into these waves, to now saying, hey, wait a minute, we can catch these with. their arms again, but the jet ski needed to be there to show them that this was even possible.

And you see it with this French beatboxer video online. He's doing something that just sounds impossible. It's unbelievable. And it's like something that, the kind of stuff that Apex was programming for his music, but this guy's doing it with his mouth. And it's like the computers showed us a world of possibility. And now we're sort of almost realizing that that world was inherent to us, not the machine. Huh. So you're talking about like a reclaiming? Yeah, absolutely.

And it was almost like we didn't know how far the biotech of our minds could go until the machine sort of showed us that, hey, wait a minute, like, this is coming from you guys. You know what it is, is if you just let it do what it's doing and have no known of the usual expectations of resolution or... Or like that usual arc. going to tell you a story. It's just going to keep you company. That's what's happening here. Yeah. I mean, I think what it's trying to do is to get you into a different state of mind. Like a different state of time. That experience of time that is non-narrative.

Where you're sort of existing in time, not in a sort of regular story way, where everything leads to the next thing, beginning, middle and end. Something else. What Amino and I often talk about is the idea of quantum states of time. And I think what he means, what I take it to mean is something very ancient in a way. Like, you know how I mentioned that they were listening to West African and Moroccan trance music? What you have, and a lot of that music, are these vertical stacks of rhythms, like almost multiple time flows existing simultaneously in the same moment. And if you listen into this music that we're hearing right now, you try and pick out, okay, what's the bass doing? What's the drums doing? What's the piano doing?

You will hear that they're actually almost not fitting together. Like, they're playing different beats, pulling at each other. in some sense. If I listen in and try and pick out all the lines, I get lost in the intricacies of their rhythms. If I listen out, I can just nod my head to it for 45 minutes. But if I listen in, I'm like, Jesus, God, what does that bass player doing? I have no idea what beat he's on. And that's just interesting to me the way that the patterns on the interior are just kind of mess with your ear because they all seem to be on their own cycle, falling in and out a phase. But then when you pull out and just listen to the whole thing together, you're like, oh yeah,

I can nod my head to this. I can nod to this. I don't know if you are familiar with Mark Rothko's painting. So like sort of squares of color that sit one on top of the other sometimes. I have the same. I'll go, there's a Rothko Chapel in Houston. Yeah, one of the most amazing places. Because he would often take a sponge and then dip it in the color and then very lightly

dad. Like over and over and over. So it's very, very layered. And when I look closely, I see patterns within patterns, within patterns, within patterns, and I get feelings from the patterns. Yeah. I find myself sort of telling stories about the feelings that I'm having. Then I'll pull myself out and I'll see three rather richly tonal blocks of color.

Big picture. Then little picture again. Yeah, totally. And it's the same thing you're describing. Yeah, I like that phrase, feelings from the patterns. That makes sense to me. And these patterns, to me, they feel kind of ancient and new at the same time. Super mechanical and yet deeply human at the same time.

It never quite resolves for me somehow. In any case, not much more to say. You can find out more about Don of Middy on our website, RadioLab.org. Their album's called Dysnomia. It's definitely my favorite thing in years. And they'll be performing next week at La Poisson Rouge. That's September 3rd.

I will be there. And Robert and I will be back in two weeks with a full hour. Hi, I'm Ross Frou from Glasgow. Radio Lab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.