A Singular Christmas (2004) writeup
I had written a lengthy backgrounder for A Singular Christmas, and like most things I do, around revision 150 of the ASC website I deleted it from the page, leaving only the suspicious two liner at the top.
Jason Freeman asked if he could put it in some kiosk for an art show he curated, so yeh, I found the original description and added some more methodology info. See here for the official primer on ASC, why I did it, what it does. The show looks great, it’s up until October 14th.
Holiday music is the first broadcast of the season. Much like the sudden alert of spring birds, the forces that schedule, produce and filter Christmas hymns from back catalogues and metal shelves in storage lockers out to 8 inch mono white grilled speakers beamformed onto precisely calculated endcaps are a fantastic mystery that is never asked to reveal itself. The truth is surely offensive, some pressed shirt with a copy of SPSS pastes the predicted launch dates and harmonies into a memo and forwards it to General Marketing. I’ve seen their mood circumplex for every chromatic jingle plotted over revenue– it’s in a Microsoft Office 95 file, the fonts look awful and only prints on legal paper. Rest assured that they’ve ran the numbers– they have the data. It’s the only genre that lets musicologists and A&R guys sit in the same room.