The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
Arts
Tuesday, November 6, 2018 — 5A
By Joe Deeney
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
11/06/18
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
11/06/18
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Tuesday, November 6, 2018
ACROSS
1 “__ Buddies”:
’80s sitcom
6 Words on a
check
11 Asian noodle
soup
14 Lavender is
similar to it
15 Hon
16 Toondom’s Olive
17 Frank McCourt
memoir
19 “XING” one
20 Postcard view of
a city
21 Hold the deed to
22 Sandy slope
23 Salacious
24 J.M. Barrie play
26 Sharp turns
29 Many, many
years
31 Deli subs
32 Game with Wild
Draw Four cards
33 Of an arm bone
35 Response to bad
service
38 Shakespeare
comedy
42 Wombs
43 Mar. parade
honoree
44 Genetic
messenger
45 Starr knighted in
2018
48 Nine-digit ID
49 Antiprohibitionists
50 Gillian Flynn
novel
53 “In that case ... ”
55 Discovery cries
56 Blossom buzzer
57 What discreet
acts are done on,
with “the”
61 Big Apple paper,
for short
62 Portmanteau
for a collection
containing 17-,
24-, 38- and
50-Across?
64 Sticky stuff
65 Joe of “Casino”
66 “__ to
suggestions”
67 California’s
Big __
68 Second-string
squad
69 Fork points
DOWN
1 Camp bed
2 Wild party
3 Wizards’
castings
4 Skateboard leap
5 Have good
intentions
6 Smartphone
predecessor, for
short
7 Greek storyteller
8 God, in Judaism
9 Jacque’s “thirty”
10 Cries of worry
11 Temporary retail
space
12 “Laughing”
scavenger
13 From days past
14 Faux __: social
goof
18 Arizona resort
22 Crave, with
“over”
25 Dadaism
pioneer
26 Z, in a pilot’s
alphabet
27 Playing an extra
NBA period
28 Ahnold’s political
nickname
30 Captures
33 Employing
34 Decays
36 “Money __
everything”
37 School orgs.
39 Great Lakes
natives
40 Silver lining
41 Fled
46 Thanksgiving
gravy ingredient
47 Ultimatum
words
49 Chinese
dumpling
50 __ up on: unites
against
51 “What a kidder!”
52 High-end
German camera
54 Hindu guru
58 Rapper __ Fiasco
59 Mining hauls
60 Benign cyst
62 BOLO kin
63 Apple CEO Cook
CONCERT REVIEW
The music industry is and
always has been inherently
jaded. It seems that most
audiences
need
something
either wildly out of the norm or
blatantly terrible to jostle them
out of their typical listening
cycles. And then, there are acts
like Tomberlin. These artists
and bands serve as fascinating
bright spots on the face of new
music, using existing genre
norms
to
form
something
pure,
intense
and
brutally
honest that cuts to the core.
Though unassuming at face
value, these acts hold a veiled
power that comes through in
every song. At Ann Arbor’s
own Blind Pig on Sunday night,
Tomberlin stunned the crowd
with this very candor, seizing
their attention completely for a
fleeting hour.
Tomberlin, the moniker of
lead singer and writer Sarah
Beth
Tomberlin,
performs
with only a guitarist and
keyboardist — a spare ensemble
that works to enhance the pure
emotion of her music. Sunday’s
performance was a date on
her
first
tour
supporting
alternative rocker Mirah.
“I am so excited to be
touring for the first time,”
she giggled at the beginning
of her set. While Tomberlin
may be green, her intensity is
old, evident in songs from her
debut album At Weddings that
have been percolating since her
high school years. Raised in
southern Illinois by a minister
father and homeschooled until
the age of 16, the religious
influences in her music are
clear but not contrite — the
only
obvious
similarities
to
hymns
are
Tomberlin’s
piercing clarity and smooth
choir-girl voice, which serve
to carry emotionally-complex
lyrics in a peaceful haze.
Tomberlin took the stage
in black jeans, an oversized
grey sweatshirt and her long
blonde-brown
hair
pulled
back in a large scrunchie,
standing at the mic with the
same calm I imagine she would
have standing in line at the
post office. She is obviously
a natural performer, and it’s
not because of any crazy stage
antics — her presence speaks
for itself, devoid of any glitter.
Her
gravitas
silenced
the
sparse crowd at The Blind Pig
on Sunday, while they settled
into their seats anticipating
the headliner. As soon as
Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s mouth
opened, everyone else’s closed.
There’s a special kind of magic
in
her
intonation:
While
her songs are beautiful and
emotionally
poignant,
they
cover bases that have been run
a million times before — love,
loss, tears, family struggle,
confusion, life struggle. What
makes
Tomberlin’s
music
stand out is that incredible
voice, and everything that
seems to hide behind it. It
seemed as if she was able to
project every emotion at once
through that club microphone,
enhanced by the atmospheric
guitar and synth of her modern
arrangements.
Tomberlin
effortlessly
played through the entirety of
At Weddings throughout her
hour at The Blind Pig, leaving
the audience slack-jawed with
her quiet power. On songs like
“Tornado” and “Any Other
Way,” the songwriter’s voice
soared
and
dropped
with
equal
measure,
all
within
the net of her beautifully
plain presentation. She is an
example of what pure talent
can really do in a space where
it is allowed to run free: In that
sparsely populated club, under
a slowly turning disco ball,
Tomberlin was the brightest
spark there.
Tomberlin’s new talent
shines at The Blind Pig
CLARA SCOTT
Daily Arts Writer
Courtesy of Tomberlin
MUSIC NOTEBOOK
“Ambient” is an adjective
increasingly used to describe
music of all kinds, and the
boundaries of the genre the
word
used
to
signify
are
becoming more porous all the
time. The primary criterion
for “ambient” music is that it
doesn’t go anywhere, and in its
immobility it becomes akin to
an object or a presence. Most
non-musical sound is like this:
Sounds indicate some kind of
activity outside of the frame,
giving subliminal information
about the environment. Ambient
music zeroes in on these small,
typically ignored sounds and
takes them as a compositional
model, using musical techniques
to create the sensation of an
enveloping background, a stand-
in for organic acoustic ecologies.
It’s an interesting approach,
and
more
than
a
little
paradoxical. By its very nature,
we generally don’t pay much
attention to the “background,”
or whatever borders the frame
of
human
sonic
perception,
so making music that focuses
intently on sound-as-landscape
is almost contradictory in and of
itself. Ambient music is the art
of the afterthought, or else an
invitation to pay a deep attention
to the edges of perception. This
leads to a certain confusion about
the function and intentions of
ambient music — is it music
that’s intended to be put on in
the background, for blending
with the sounds of a situation,
or is it music that creates the
sensation of a new background?
Can it be a little bit of both?
The composer and producer
Brian Eno once described the
difference between conventional
and ambient music like the
difference between architecture
and
gardening.
His
music
exemplifies this sonic garden,
and in many ways he has led the
development of the form from
the ’70s onward. He wrote in
The paradoxical nature
& way of ambient music
EMILY YANG
Daily Arts Writer
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
the liner notes to his 1982 album
On Land that, “what qualified a
piece for inclusion on the record
was that it took me somewhere,”
and he means that both literally
and
specifically.
Titles
are
references to real or abstracted
places where the listener can
imagine the sounds living in
— for example, “Lizard Point,”
“Lantern Marsh,” “A Clearing.”
The music in On Land doesn’t
really go anywhere — tracks
simply fade in, camp out for nine
or so minutes and then fade out.
The liner notes for On Land
are interesting to compare to
the notes for the earlier Ambient
1: Music For Airports, where
he alludes to the idea of sonic
landscape but seems to suggest
that the intention of Airports is to
live alongside spaces: “Whereas
conventional background music
is produced by stripping away all
sense of doubt and uncertainty
(and thus all genuine interest)
from the music, ambient music
retains
these
qualities.”
In
1978, Eno was still conceiving
his music as essentially living
in the background, but later
moved to music that supplants
environmental
sound
(and
therefore a sense of place)
altogether. The notes for On
Land conclude that, “as the
listener, I wanted to be situated
inside a large field of loosely-knit
sound, rather than placed before
a tightly organised monolith.”
Airports “retains” its context,
On Land “takes” the listener to a
new place via sound. The space
between Eno’s approach in 1978
and 1982 is encapsulated in the
difference between “for” and
“on.”
And indeed, the sound-world
of Music For Airports is much
more conventional than On
Land, with its foregrounded
piano lines and gently sweeping
cadential gestures. There is
little noise, whereas On Land
is full of field recordings and
various
non-pitched
burbles,
often deeply submerging any
recognizably “musical” material.
Music For Airports, its materials
basically
being
tones
and
silence, seems to suggest that
the surroundings will provide
plenty of site-specific noise. On
Land provides all the noise you
would need for a soundscape,
and is thus more a stand-in or
proxy for the background and all
its environmental noise.
The kind of ambient music in
On Land seems to have caught
on. It’s rare to find an album of
slow, filmic, largely empty music
like Airports in the 2000s and
2010s, but it’s much easier to find
the enveloping omnipresence
pioneered in On Land. The
work of William Basinski, for
example, is generally as close
to the Airports model as 2000s
ambience gets, and he much
more often suggests deep, thick
soundscapes. 2007’s Shortwave
Music uses a kind of Lynchian
mode, with vaguely orchestral
tones
submerged
under
crackling, hissing and humming.
The work of Sarah Davachi
is less noisy than Basinski’s,
but her approach is similarly
immersive. She conjures slowly
moving textures out of long,
overlapping tones, and the sort
of microscopic details she uses
require a lot of focused attention
for the music to pay off. The
tracks on the recently-released
Gave In Rest have the quality of
a world made of tones. Davachi’s
conventional ensemble (strings,
a monophonic synthesizer and
occasionally a piano) is placed
inside the “field of loosely-knit
sound”
Eno
describes,
like
people milling about in a room
together,
sometimes
having
conversations but usually just
thinking out loud.
It’s unsurprising that ambient
music evolved from a genre of
music that stands behind an
environment to a genre that
supplants
an
environment,
because the form Eno had in
mind for Airports and the earlier
Discreet
Music
is
unstable.
It’s ambient music’s refusal to
go anywhere, to simply make
statements, that makes it so
unsuitable as actual music to
put on in the background of a
business or a social situation.
Music invites attention, and
music that has a low level of
activity or progression invites
a deeper, almost meditative
engagement,
the
kind
best
done alone. In my experience,
putting on an album of recent
ambient music in a room will
make
conversation
peter
out pretty quickly, but most
anything else, from Mozart
to Young Thug (depending on
context), is paradoxically easier
to ignore. Ultimately, I think
ambient music doesn’t work in
its professed role, because by its
very nature it overreaches.
What is the appeal of music
like this? It seems to make sense
that in a moment of accelerated
technological advancement and
media saturation, contemplative,
immobile
music
is
an
appropriate response, a place
one can go to retreat. However,
music is also never entirely
effective at putting up a front to
society, always bringing pieces
of the past and present with it.
The writer Meghan O’Gieblyn
argues
that
meditation
and
contemplative practice — what
she calls the “Eternal Now” —
represents a continuation of
the logic of the internet rather
than a repudiation of it: “In
lieu of context, in lieu of vista,
one is forced to find meaning in
the microscopic details which
must eventually come to seem
intricate and endless … To exist
within that room of perpetual
updates and endless opinions
is to believe that history can
be divided not by centuries
but by seconds, that every idea
must lead to finer sub-points
and infinite distinctions that
eventually
contradict
one
another.”
Ambient
music
is
perhaps sort of a record of
cultural exhaustion, of being
caught in situations that seem to
demand a collapse of context. It
seems to say — if we have found
our present cultural landscape
unlivable, the best we can do
is create miniatures of it for
ourselves.
Her gravitas
silenced the
sparse crowd at
The Blind Pig on
Sunday
Ambient music
is the art of the
afterthought, or
else an invitation
to pay a deep
attention to
the edges of
perception