Category: Music

January 3, 2025: Early Lessons – “Neither Barc Nor Bacharolle”

Music

January 2nd brought a terrible track, so let’s quickly forget about that. It’s published on YouTube, as per the definition of the task – look it up on your own risk.

Today’s selection has more going for it, but this little chamber piece has some issues as well. If there’s anything to take away from the Ted Mountainé 2025 Challenge at this early stage, it’s that these sketches need more clarity. When there’s no deadline involved, we can chip away at details for weeks on end to carve out the essence of a track.

And, indeed, that’s often the way it’s done around here:

  1. Throw everything into the pot in a confusing hodgepodge of crossing wires and heavily stacked loose ends – nothing’s too complicated, nothing’s too silly, and, most importantly, nothing’s too much.
  2. Go treasure hunting for golden nuggets in these overloaded tracks.

A track a day requires a different strategy. The original idea needs to be solid and clear. The Jan 2 track was a mess because there was no scope, no recognizable form, arrangement, melody… or much of anything else for that matter.

The Jan 3 track has more form (the sonata), a framework (an expanded string quartet), and some recognizable stylistic elements. But it’s still too messy and complicated, with individual lines getting in the way of each other. And there’s harmonic exploration that was fun to play around with at the time, but it doesn’t have the support needed to make sense within the musical context – especially during the middle part.

So an important reminder for the future is to build a better foundation to support the load of the choices we make. Keep it simple from the start – no ornaments or spiral staircases until the load-bearing walls and floors are in place.

But it’s the weekend, so, to stay with the architectural vernacular, we’ll probably stick to building blocks for a few days, with focus on synth patches, sampling and rhythm beds. Results will be posted. Ted Mountainé out!

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The Ted Mountainé 2025 Challenge

Music

Ted Mountainé starts off the new year with a brand new project: The plan is to publish a piece of music every day of the year, at least until general fatigue sets in. For a time traveller this makes absolutely no sense at all, but that’s what Ted Mountainé is all about!

We start off with a mood piece in a style reminiscent of the intro to Vangelis’ The City, or, indeed, Blade Runner – a trick Ted often reverts to when he needs an “ouverture” to capture the feel of a new project. It’s probably a bit more romantic and optimistic in tone than Vangelis’ more dystopian sounds in these examples. And it might be too optimistic considering that the year we are now entering, 2025, could be a turbulent ride. But let’s hope Ted proves us wrong.

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April, 1988: Victor Herbert Goes Rogue

Entertainment, Music, Time Travel
LeRoy and Schiing testing fake Remo conga skins at our facility in the Dolomite Mountains

The inventor Paul LeRoy (28 at this time and, therefore, currently unaware of his own death), met up with our percussionist Schiing the other day. They discussed, amongst other things, the incident that shook the time-travelling community last month (or, last month thirty-five years ago, to be precise), when a young and out-of-time Victor Herbert somehow managed to delay David Mamet’s play Speed-the-Plow.

It was rescheduled from April 13 to May 3, 1988, and it caused all kinds of havoc in the time-space continuum. Safe to say, Herbert is not a popular man at this particular moment in time. Everyone involved in the business knows that if you reschedule a Mamet play by a certain amount of days, all his other plays will be rescheduled accordingly. This interferes with the actors’ schedules, and, because these are often big names involved in a variety of projects, important movies and plays will be moved or cancelled.

Indeed, Mamet wrote Our American Cousin under his Tom Taylor pseudonym in 1857, and as a consequence this episode reintroduced the 1865 Abraham Lincoln assassination to history. This hasn’t occurred since the George VI tea incident.

One can only speculate what was on Herbert’s mind, but it is well known that since learning about his fate and reputation post-Eileen (1917) when he was forced to compose in a simpler style in a misguided attempt to pander to newer musical sensibilities, he has become a bitter man, and many believe that he was also responsible for the recent HarperCollins Bridgerton misprint scandal.

LeRoy and Schiing also discussed the impact of fake Remo conga skins in the broader context of pop and easy listening, and how this might have affected the popularity of Peter Allen’s classic live version of I Go to Rio across the different time rifts.

We hope to bring you a YouTube video of the entire discussion soon.

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Robots in Suits and the Mercedes-Benz 123 Series

Entertainment, Music

Back in ’76, at the Frankfurt Motor Show, Ted Mountainé discovered the Mercedes-Benz 123 series for the first time, which marked the beginning of a long-lasting love affair.

Unlike his band leader peers, who often went for flashy luxury cars, Mountainé appreciated the solid and unassuming aura of a car that looked more like a car than any other car he had ever seen, the new Mercedes 200.

And in many ways this mobile entity, practically lifted directly from Plato’s aspatial, atemporal Forms into the physical world by pure German industrial strength, became a symbol of the no-nonsense, utilitarian easy listening landscape that shaped a certain part (elevators, mostly) of the following decades with Ted Mountainé behind the steering wheel.

Unfortunately, due to the temporal whims of the space-time continuum, most people reading these words will not be aware of Mountainé’s moderate reputation in some of our parallel worlds.

But we are lucky enough to be able to present a few of his sound recordings here, to showcase the subliminal audial presence he commanded in some other – choice, naturally – worlds. Here is Robots in Suits, a musical taster from another 1983.

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Floating in Space (Cocktails) ’90

Music

Ted Mountainé says: “Hey, put on your retro sports jacket and get in my spaceship for a bit of action before we watch another episode of “30something”!”

We’ll bring you three drinks and the tab in the spacebar. Not because we’re cheap, but because we’re in constant search of a joke that’ll make your toes curl.

This is a massive undertaking – an intergalactic smooth jazz ride with too many references to mention. Sadly, it was recorded before we famously reevaluated and fine-tuned our mixing philosophy (essentially: “learned to mix”), so even though we stand by the music 100%, mistakes were made in the sound engineering department. This causes a certain lack of overall energy during the proceedings, and some rather embarrassing balancing issues. But we hope it’s still an enjoyable ride.

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Waiting for Summer

Entertainment, Music

Ted Mountainé is, as we know, currently busy in his role as a spokesperson for the International Association of Introverted Jet-Setters Travelling in the Past (IAoIJSTitP). The micro-organizational aspects of this engagement are profound in their minimality, simply due to the nature of the (incredibly annoying) people occupied with these matters.

It has tested the patience of many a regular jet-setter who has accidentally wound up on this particular yacht, as it were. We won’t easily forget the year when Leonard Bernstein unwittingly found himself as the Jet Set Miniature Assembly Kit Ceremony Master, haha.

Regardless, a couple of years ago, Ted took some time off to create this exciting montage consisting of scenery from his beautiful life and music. He didn’t really know where to stop, though (a common affliction for time travelers), so the video and the tune goes on for far too long – which we suppose only proves what we suspected long ago: You can get too much of a good thing.

But Ted stands rigorously by his work: “If every man and woman stepped out of their sepia-toned lives and took a break from their generally depressing world views, and picked up some cues from the happy distortion of cardboard people in escapist entertainment and advertisement settings instead, I honestly think we would all be better off for it,” he claims.

So, until we meet again, please enjoy this little bundle of overbaked joy from the Ted Mountainé Orchestra, for as long as you can take it.

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Shaoncé vs. Foucault: The Use of Pleasure

Music, Philosophy

Pop darling Shaoncé has revealed details about her new album scheduled for release in early 2012. After the tremendous success of her previous album, Shock, people are curious to see if she can live up to the hype — but judging by yesterday’s press conference in Paris there is no need for concern. Sporting an outfit that would make Lady Gaga proud, the young singer won the world press over with her sharp wit and acute observations. Her warm, conversational style created a unique and friendly atmosphere, and even old codgers like myself had to let down our professional guard a bit to enjoy the exhilarating intelligence and humanity of the encounter.

Produced by the people behind the hit tv series Glee soundtrack, the title of her new album is The Use of Pleasure. It’s primarily based on original texts by the French philosopher Michel Foucault, translated into English by acclaimed American songwriter Diane Warren, occasionally assisted by ms. Shaoncé herself.

On her new album, Shaoncé is particularly preoccupied with Foucault’s disassociation from the structuralist movement and how it has affected what she perceives as impotent principles of application in computational semiotics. This is underscored by the extensive use of FM synthesis and autotuning. “I would never use autotune under normal circumstances,” she says. “But for this album we really had no choice — there is no better way to represent the concepts of artificial intelligence, computer-human interaction — all that stuff that we’re dealing with on the album. So you may say that autotune is the recurring theme here, a kind of non-musical leitmotif.”

I asked her if this meta-perspective might not get lost on her audience in a musical landscape where autotune is, per se, the default. “But, you see, what you’re saying, that is the beauty of it. No one knows for certain whether it’s one thing or the other. That’s my point — our ears are so accustomed to autotune that we don’t question it anymore. It’s the same with semiotics. We are so entrenched in one way of thinking — the wrong way, I’d say — that we can’t really see what’s right anymore.”

The Use of Pleasure will be released on EMI in 2012.

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