The Origins of the Death Growl in Metal Music

in Music | October 11th, 2018

When Arab-Span­ish Sephar­di Jew­ish mer­chant Abra­ham ben Jacob first encoun­tered the Vikings in Den­mark, he had this to say:

“Nev­er before I have heard ugli­er songs than those of the Vikings in Slesvig. The growl­ing sound com­ing from their throats reminds me of dogs howl­ing, only more untamed.”

Now what Mr. ben Jacob actu­al­ly heard we will nev­er know, but the descrip­tion does sound a lot like the “Death Growl” famil­iar to fans of death met­al. (The appear­ance of Vikings and the pre­pon­der­ance of Scan­di­na­vians with­in the genre cer­tain­ly make this tale sound true.)

Cheek­i­ly referred to by non-met­al fans as the “Cook­ie Mon­ster Voice,” this par­tic­u­lar style has evolved over time as met­al changed in the 1980s, from the pierc­ing screams of Dio and Iron Maid­en to the growl of Sepul­tura and Can­ni­bal Corpse. And that’s matched by the demon­ic and doom-laden sound of the music and the Grand Guig­nol hor­ror of the lyrics, which delight fans with its deprav­i­ty and dis­gust, the gross­er the bet­ter.

Whether it’s your cup of tea or not, you have to admit that the ‘80s and ‘90s saw the growth of a brand new vocal style that seemed to come out of nowhere.


YouTu­ber Poly­phon­ic tries to unrav­el its ori­gins in the video above, which, we have to admit, fol­lows the Wikipedia arti­cle on the Death Growl point by point. But that’s okay–imagine if all Wikipedia arti­cles had their own videos…would that be a bad thing?

On the oth­er hand, Polyphonic’s video does leave out some antecedents to this style, all of who get named checked by var­i­ous folks in the com­ments. (Yes, YouTube com­ments that are worth read­ing!)

In par­tic­u­lar, there’s no men­tion of African-Amer­i­can artists like Howl­in’ Wolf, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, or Clarence Frog­man Hen­ry. Wolf in par­tic­u­lar became a huge influ­ence on anoth­er incred­i­bly gruff and gut­tur­al singer, Tom Waits, who often sings like the Dev­il has his lar­ynx.
And do the dis­tort­ed vocals on Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” or on King Crimson’s “21st Cen­tu­ry Schizoid Man” real­ly count? Or the var­i­ous screams on Pink Floyd songs?

When Poly­phon­ic returns to the 1980s, he’s on firmer ground. Lem­my from Motör­head makes more sense as an influ­ence, and by the time we get to Ven­om, then Death, then Man­tas, it is eas­i­er to see where the Death Growl came from. (But come on, no men­tion of Napalm Death? They were the first growl­ing band I ever heard, and hats off to BBC DJ John Peel for not only play­ing them when the debuted, but he had them in ses­sion.)

If inter­est­ed, I would rec­om­mend explor­ing the YouTube com­ments fur­ther and make up your own mind. And if you are inter­est­ed in learn­ing this tech­nique, there are folks who will teach you.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bat­tle-Scarred Heavy Met­al Musi­cians Play Rock ‘n’ Roll Clas­sics on Hel­lo Kit­ty Instru­ments

96-Year-Old Holo­caust Sur­vivor Fronts a Death Met­al Band

1980s Met­al­head Kids Are All Right: New Study Sug­gests They Became Well-Adjust­ed Adults

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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The Cornell Note-Taking System: Learn the Method Students Have Used to Enhance Their Learning Since the 1940s

in Education | October 10th, 2018

How should you take notes in class? Like so many stu­dents who came before me and would come after, I had lit­tle idea in col­lege and even less in high school. The inher­ent­ly ambigu­ous nature of the note-tak­ing task has inspired a vari­ety of meth­ods and sys­tems, few of them as respect­ed as Cor­nell Notes. Invent­ed in the 1940s by Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion pro­fes­sor Wal­ter Pauk, author of How to Study in Col­lege, Cor­nell Notes involves divid­ing each page up into three sec­tions: one to para­phrase the lec­ture’s main ideas, one to sum­ma­rize those ideas, and one to write ques­tions. After writ­ing down those main ideas dur­ing class, imme­di­ate­ly sum­ma­rize and add ques­tions about the con­tent. Then, while study­ing lat­er, try to answer those ques­tions with­out look­ing at the main body of notes.

You’ll find a com­plete and con­cise expla­na­tion of how to take Cor­nell Notes at Cor­nel­l’s web site, which includes infor­ma­tion on the “Reflect” stage (in which you ask your­self broad­er ques­tions like “What’s the sig­nif­i­cance of these facts?” and “What prin­ci­ple are they based on?”) and the “Review” stage (in which you “spend at least ten min­utes every week review­ing all your pre­vi­ous notes” to aid reten­tion).

For a more detailed visu­al expla­na­tion, have a look at teacher Jen­nifer DesRochers’ instruc­tions for how to take Cor­nell Notes in the video above, which now approach­es one mil­lion views on Youtube. Her own ver­sion encour­ages tak­ing down main-idea sum­maries in draw­ings as well as text, and includ­ing things like “key points” and “impor­tant peo­ple or ideas” in the ques­tion col­umn.

That DesRochers’ video now approach­es one mil­lion views sug­gests stu­dents still find the Cor­nell Notes sys­tem effec­tive, as much as or even more so than they did when Pauk first pub­lished it. Over time, of course, its users have also aug­ment­ed it: take Doug Neil­l’s video “Improv­ing Cor­nell Notes With Sketch­not­ing Tech­niques” above, which com­bines stan­dard Cor­nell Notes with his sys­tem of “sketch­not­ing,” also known as “visu­al note-tak­ing and graph­ic record­ing.”

He pro­vides exam­ples of what such Cor­nell-for­mat­ted sketch­not­ing might look like, explain­ing that “hav­ing the option of doing some­thing more visu­al in your mind trig­gers a dif­fer­ent type of pro­cess­ing pow­er, so that you’re more active in the way that you’re respond­ing to the ideas. You’re not just pas­sive­ly tak­ing in infor­ma­tion.” The nature of school, as stu­dents in every era have known, can often induce a state of pas­siv­i­ty; sys­tems like Cor­nell Notes and its many vari­a­tions remind us of how much more we can learn if we have a way to break out of it.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,300 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Richard Feynman’s “Note­book Tech­nique” Will Help You Learn Any Subject–at School, at Work, or in Life

Wyn­ton Marsalis Gives 12 Tips on How to Prac­tice: For Musi­cians, Ath­letes, or Any­one Who Wants to Learn Some­thing New

Carl Sagan’s Syl­labus & Final Exam for His Course on Crit­i­cal Think­ing (Cor­nell, 1986)

What’s a Sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-Proven Way to Improve Your Abil­i­ty to Learn? Get Out and Exer­cise

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The History of Philosophy Visualized in an Interactive Timeline

in Design, Philosophy | October 10th, 2018

The con­nec­tions we make between var­i­ous philoso­phers and philo­soph­i­cal schools are often con­nec­tions that have already been made for us by teach­ers and schol­ars on our paths through high­er edu­ca­tion. Many of us who have tak­en a phi­los­o­phy class or two leave it at that, con­tent we’ve got the gist of things and that spe­cial­ists can parse the details per­fect­ly well with­out us. But there are those curi­ous peo­ple who con­tin­ue to read abstruse and dif­fi­cult phi­los­o­phy after their intro class­es are over, for the sheer, per­verse joy of it, or from a burn­ing desire to under­stand truth, beau­ty, jus­tice, or what­ev­er.

And then there are those who embark on a thor­ough self-guid­ed tour of West­ern philo­soph­i­cal his­to­ry, attempt­ing, with­out the aid of uni­ver­si­ty depart­ments and fad­dish inter­pre­tive schemes, to weave the dis­parate strains of thought togeth­er. One such auto­di­dact and aca­d­e­m­ic out­sider, design­er Deniz Cem Önduygu of Istan­bul, has com­bined an ency­clo­pe­dic mind with a tal­ent for rig­or­ous out­line orga­ni­za­tion to pro­duce an inter­ac­tive time­line of the his­to­ry of philo­soph­i­cal ideas. It is “a pure­ly per­son­al project,” he writes, “that I’m doing in my own time, with my lim­it­ed knowl­edge, for myself.”

Önduygu shares the project not to show off his learn­ing but, more humbly, to “get feed­back and to make it acces­si­ble to those who are inter­est­ed.” It may be pre­cious few peo­ple who have both the time and incli­na­tion to teach them­selves the his­to­ry of phi­los­o­phy, but if you are one of them, this incred­i­bly dense info­graph­ic is as good a place to start as any, and while it may appear intim­i­dat­ing at first glance, its menu in the upper right cor­ner allows users to zero in on spe­cif­ic thinkers and schools, and to con­fine them­selves to small­er, more man­age­able areas of the whole.

As for the time­line itself, “view­ers can zoom in and out,” notes Dai­ly Nous, “and see philoso­phers list­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, with ideas they’re asso­ci­at­ed with list­ed beneath them. These ideas, in turn, are con­nect­ed by green lines to sim­i­lar or sup­port­ing ideas else­where on the time­line, and con­nect­ed by red lines to oppos­ing or refut­ing ideas else­where on the time­line. If you hov­er your mouse cur­sor over a sin­gle idea, all but it and its con­nect­ed ideas fade. You can then click on the idea to bring those con­nect­ed ideas clos­er for ease of view­ing.”

The design­er admits this is a “nev­er-end­ing work in progress” and main­ly a source for remind­ing him­self of the main argu­ments of the philoso­phers he’s sur­veyed. The major sources for his time­line are “Bryan Magee’s The Sto­ry of Phi­los­o­phy and Thomas Baldwin’s Con­tem­po­rary Phi­los­o­phy, along with oth­er works for spe­cif­ic philoso­phers and ideas.” But many of the con­nec­tions Önduygu draws in this exten­sive web of green and red are his own.

He explains his ratio­nale here, not­ing, “The lines here do not always depict a direct trans­fer between two peo­ple; I think of them as trac­ing the devel­op­ment of an idea through­out time with­in our col­lec­tive con­cep­tion.” Spend some more time with this impres­sive project at the His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Sum­ma­rized & Visu­al­ized (the site works best in Chrome), and feel free to get in touch with its cre­ator with con­struc­tive crit­i­cism. He wel­comes feed­back and is open to oppos­ing ideas, as every life­long learn­er should be.

via Dai­ly Nous

Relat­ed Con­tent:

150+ Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

A His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy in 81 Video Lec­tures: From Ancient Greece to Mod­ern Times 

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy … With­out Any Gaps

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Museum Discovers Math Notebook of an 18th-Century English Farm Boy, Adorned with Doodles of Chickens Wearing Pants

in History | October 10th, 2018

We are trained by tra­di­tion to think of his­to­ry as a series of great men’s (and some women’s) lives, of great wars and roy­al suc­ces­sions, con­quests and trag­ic defeats, rev­o­lu­tions and world-chang­ing dis­cov­er­ies. The ordi­nary, every­day lives of ordi­nary, every­day peo­ple seem tedious and unre­mark­able by com­par­i­son. But archivists know bet­ter. Their jobs are not glam­orous, but what they lack in fame or aca­d­e­m­ic sinecures, they make up for with chance dis­cov­er­ies of the kind that we see here—doodles in the 1784 math note­book of one Richard Beale, a 13-year-old farm boy from rur­al Kent, Eng­land.

The archivists at the Muse­um of Eng­lish Rur­al Life (MERL) were so excit­ed about this find they made a Twit­ter thread about it, explain­ing its prove­nance in a bun­dle of eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry farm diaries, which “are a lot like nor­mal diaries but with more cows.”

The museum’s pro­gram man­ag­er, Adam Koszary, has a good ear for the medi­um, tweet­ing out oth­er wit­ti­cisms about Richard’s adven­tures in tak­ing notes: “But, like every teenag­er, math­e­mat­ics couldn’t fill the void of Richard’s heart. Richard doo­dled.” He drew pic­tures of his dog, incor­po­rat­ed draw­ings of ships into his equa­tions, and impec­ca­bly illus­trat­ed his word prob­lems.

One can almost imag­ine the lis­ti­cle: “Rur­al 18th-Cen­tu­ry Eng­lish Folk: They’re Just Like Us!” They think about their pets a lot. They draw when they get bored. They doo­dle tiny sketch­es of chick­ens in pants…Wait what? Yes, a chick­en in trousers appears among Richard’s doo­dles, one of the many charm­ing fea­tures that land­ed MERL’s sto­ry in The Guardian and gar­nered famous fans like JK Rowl­ing. Like seem­ing­ly every­thing on the inter­net, the chick­en in pants has sparked con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, such as “Why do the trousers appear to be sol­id like Wallace’s in The Wrong Trousers?” and “Was Richard Beale acquaint­ed with the town of Hens­broek in the Nether­lands?”

These ques­tions, writes Guy Bax­ter, asso­ciate direc­tor of archive ser­vices at MERL, are only part­ly tongue-in-cheek. The Dutch town of Hens­broek, does indeed have a coat of arms fea­tur­ing a chick­en in pants that bears a very close resem­blance to Richard’s draw­ing, though it is entire­ly unlike­ly that Richard ever trav­eled to the Nether­lands. The arms of Hens­broek “are a famous exam­ple of ‘cant­i­ng’, which uses a pun on a name to inspire the design,” notes Bax­ter. (Hens­broek lit­er­al­ly means “hens pants.”) The ori­gin of Richard’s design is more mys­te­ri­ous. “It is pos­si­ble that he knew about cant­i­ng arms,” Bax­ter admits. “Or maybe he just had a vivid imag­i­na­tion.”

The lit­tle sto­ry of Richard Beale and his math home­work doo­dles shows us some­thing about our frac­tured, frag­ment­ed world and the anx­ious, divid­ed lives we seem to lead online, says Ollie Dou­glas, cura­tor of MERL’s object col­lec­tions: “Social media is awash with high­ly per­son­al­ized engage­ments and com­men­taries on the world…. You only need to look through the respons­es to this sin­gle Twit­ter thread (and that fact that a ready­made chick­en-in-trousers gif was avail­able for us to shame­less­ly retweet) to see that the messy com­plex­i­ty of our world is still being shared and that we are all still doo­dlers at heart.”

Fol­low the Muse­um of Eng­lish Rur­al Life for updates to this sto­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Math Doo­dling

Fyo­dor Dos­to­evsky Draws Elab­o­rate Doo­dles In His Man­u­scripts

The Doo­dles in Leonar­do da Vinci’s Man­u­scripts Con­tain His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries on the Laws of Fric­tion, Sci­en­tists Dis­cov­er

Woody Guthrie Cre­ates a Doo­dle-Filled List of 33 New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions (1943): Beat Fas­cism, Write a Song a Day, and Keep the Hop­ing Machine Run­ning

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Wendy Carlos’ Switched on Bach Turns 50 This Month: Learn How the Classical Synth Record Introduced the World to the Moog

in Music | October 9th, 2018

When the Moog syn­the­siz­er appeared in the late 60s, musi­cians didn’t know what it was for, so they found some very cre­ative uses for it, includ­ing mak­ing nov­el­ty tracks like “Pop Corn,” a huge hit for Ger­shom Kings­ley from the 1969 album Music to Moog By. But the Moog was more than a quirky new toy. It was a rev­e­la­tion for what syn­the­sized sound could do, of a tech­nol­o­gy that seemed like it might have unlim­it­ed pos­si­bil­i­ty if har­nessed by the right hands. The Moog showed up in 1967 on albums by the Doors, the Mon­kees, the Byrds—psychedelic bands who under­stood its futur­is­tic promise.

Yet it also entered the homes of mil­lions of lis­ten­ers through a clas­si­cal album. In 1968, the Moog fea­tured solo on the high­est-sell­ing clas­si­cal album of all time, Switched on Bach, by elec­tron­ic com­pos­er and pianist Wendy Car­los, known for her work with Stan­ley Kubrick on the scores of films like Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing. Car­los met Moog in 1964 at a con­fer­ence for the Audio Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety and had the chance to inves­ti­gate one of his ear­ly mod­u­lar synths. “It was a per­fect fit,” she says, “he was a cre­ative engi­neer who spoke music: I was a musi­cian who spoke sci­ence. It felt like a meet­ing of sim­pati­co minds.”

Car­los helped Moog devel­op his designs, he helped her find her voice, the fuzzy, buzzing, dron­ing, hum­ming sound of an ana­log synth, which some­how made a per­fect fit for selec­tions from Bach’s Well-Tem­pered Clavier and Two-Part Inven­tions. When Car­los released Switched on Bach, her first stu­dio album, it was “an imme­di­ate suc­cess,” as Moog him­self said. “We wit­nessed the birth of a new genre of music”—fully syn­the­sized key­board music, with­out any acoustic instru­ments involved what­so­ev­er. The Moog proved itself, and Car­los impressed both pop fans and the clas­si­cal com­mu­ni­ty, many of whom ful­ly embraced the phe­nom­e­non.

A record­ing of Switched on Bach pre­miered at Carnegie Hall, Leonard Bern­stein pre­sent­ed an arrange­ment of Bach’s “Lit­tle” Fugue in G minor arranged for Moog, organ, and orches­tra at one of his Young People’s Con­certs, and no less a Bach author­i­ty than Glenn Gould praised the album, not­ing that it had “made elec­tron­ic music main­stream” even as it intro­duced entire new audi­ences to Bach. Car­los has since pre­served her mys­tique through intense per­son­al pri­va­cy and strict con­trol of her copy­right. You’ll find pre­cious lit­tle of her music on the inter­net: a snip­pet here and there, but no Switched on Bach stream­ing online.

It is well worth pay­ing for the plea­sure (I’d rec­om­mend doing so by track­ing down an orig­i­nal vinyl press­ing.) Car­los released a fol­low-up the next year, The Well-Tem­pered Syn­the­siz­er, then anoth­er inter­pre­ta­tion of Switched on Bach for the album’s 25th anniver­sary. This year it turns 50. You can cel­e­brate not only by lis­ten­ing to the orig­i­nal, but check­ing out its equal­ly majes­tic fol­low-up albums, the Spe­cial Edi­tion Box Set, and a recent “spir­i­tu­al suc­ces­sor” to Car­los’ orig­i­nal, Craig Leon’s 2015 Bach to Moog, a re-inter­pre­ta­tion of Bach using the very same syn­the­siz­er Car­los did those many years ago. Almost.

The Sys­tem 55, the col­lec­tion of large, clunky banks of patch bays, oscil­la­tors, fil­ters, envelopes, etc. that Car­los used, was reis­sued three years ago. In the short doc­u­men­tary above, you can see pro­duc­er and com­pos­er Leon talk about Car­los’ con­tri­bu­tions to mod­ern, and clas­si­cal, music and his own hybrid use of the ear­ly syn­the­siz­er with midi and a string sec­tion. He demon­strates how rad­i­cal­ly the dis­tinc­tive Moog sound can be shaped by its wonky dials and switch­es, but also how it can sub­tly col­or the sound of oth­er instru­ments with­out impos­ing itself. Such a rev­o­lu­tion­ary instru­ment required a tru­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary album to announce it to the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Scores That Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer Wendy Car­los Com­posed for Stan­ley Kubrick’s A Clock­work Orange and The Shin­ing

Hear Sev­en Hours of Women Mak­ing Elec­tron­ic Music (1938- 2014)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Radical Map Puts the Oceans–Not Land–at the Center of Planet Earth (1942)

in Maps | October 9th, 2018

We all learn the names, loca­tions, and even char­ac­ter­is­tics of the oceans in school. But unless we go into oceanog­ra­phy or some oth­er body-of-water-cen­tric pro­fes­sion, few of us keep them at our com­mand. Maybe the loss of that knowl­edge has to do with our land-cen­tric­i­ty as a species: not only do we live on the stuff, we also put it before water intel­lec­tu­al­ly. You can see how by tak­ing a glance at the design of most any world map, whose fram­ing, details, and col­or scheme all work togeth­er to high­light the land, not the water. Only the map above, the “Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion,” dares to reverse that scheme, putting Earth­’s water at the cen­ter and turn­ing it from neg­a­tive space into pos­i­tive.

Named for its cre­ator, the South African-born oceanog­ra­ph­er, geo­physi­cist, inven­tor, urban design­er (hav­ing come up with Min­neapo­lis Sky­way Sys­tem), and com­ic artist Athel­stan Spilhaus, the Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion “revers­es the land-based bias of tra­di­tion­al car­to­graph­ic pro­jec­tions,” writes Big Think’s Frank Jacobs, plac­ing “the poles of the map in South Amer­i­ca and Chi­na, rip­ping up con­ti­nents to show the high seas as one inter­rupt­ed whole.” The result­ing “earth-sea” is “per­fo­rat­ed by Antarc­ti­ca and Aus­tralia, and fringed by the oth­er land mass­es.” If you look close­ly at the top and low­er right of the map, you’ll find tri­an­gu­lar sym­bols indi­cat­ing the Bering Strait, per­haps the best land­mark to ori­ent your per­cep­tion of this rad­i­cal­ly new view of plan­et Earth.

But the view pro­vid­ed by the Spilhaus Pro­jec­tion (ren­dered here by graph­ic design­er Clara Deal­ber­to for Libéra­tion) isn’t as new as it may look. Spilhaus designed it back in 1942, as a side project while work­ing on the inven­tion for which he is per­haps most remem­bered: the bathyther­mo­graph, a device for mea­sur­ing ocean depths and tem­per­a­tures from mov­ing ves­sels like boats and sub­marines. But Jacobs cred­its it with a new rel­e­vance today: “Our oceans pro­duce between 50% and 85% of the world’s oxy­gen and are a major source of food for human­i­ty. But they are in mor­tal dan­ger, from over­fish­ing, acid­i­fi­ca­tion, plas­tic pol­lu­tion and cli­mate change. Mar­itime ‘dead zones’ – with zero oxy­gen and zero marine life – have quadru­pled since the 1950s.”

In oth­er words, our world and the oceans that cov­er more than 70 per­cent of its sur­face already look quite a bit dif­fer­ent than they did when Spilhaus designed this re-pri­or­i­tized way of visu­al­iz­ing them. Spilhaus lived until 1998, long enough to see the emer­gence of cur­rent ideas about cli­mate change, but one does won­der whether we in the 21st cen­tu­ry have devel­oped the kind of ocean-con­scious­ness for which he must have hoped. Per­haps our times call for even more dras­tic map­ping action, not just show­ing the cen­tral­i­ty of the oceans but, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, show­ing what might hap­pen if they change much more.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

A Cen­tu­ry of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in a 35 Sec­ond Video

Coun­tries and Coast­lines: A Dra­mat­ic View of Earth from Out­er Space

Japan­ese Design­ers May Have Cre­at­ed the Most Accu­rate Map of Our World: See the Autha­Graph

The His­to­ry of Car­tog­ra­phy, “the Most Ambi­tious Overview of Map Mak­ing Ever Under­tak­en,” Is Free Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Aphex Twin’s Massive Catalog, Including Rare Unreleased Tracks, Is Now Free to Stream Online

in Music | October 9th, 2018

Few things con­nect the elec­tron­ic music of the 90s to that of today like Aphex Twin. The long career of Richard D. James—he of the sin­is­ter grin­ning face plas­tered on bux­om mod­els and a gang of vio­lent chil­dren in his ear­ly NSFW videos—anticipated and in some ways invent­ed the glitchy, clat­ter­ing, squelch­ing, cacoph­o­nous, alien sound of the dig­i­tal 21st cen­tu­ry. The release of his entire cat­a­log, includ­ing sev­er­al unre­leased tracks, on his web­site to buy or stream for free shows his clear aware­ness of how sem­i­nal his music has been for over three decades.

James became a crossover super­star in the late 90s, grew irri­tat­ed with imi­ta­tors, got lumped in with so-called IDM (“intel­li­gent dance music”), and threat­ened retire­ment many times. Then he did retire the Aphex Twin name in 2001 after releas­ing Drukqs and mak­ing music for the next few years under oth­er monikers. He also claimed he’d nev­er release his most inno­v­a­tive music “because I don’t want peo­ple rip­ping me off.”

In the mean­while, a cou­ple or so major glob­al eco­nom­ic changes came about, new younger fans came of age, and bed­room pro­duc­ers armed with lap­tops instead of the bat­tery of syn­the­siz­ers James com­mand­ed sprang up around the world. It might have seemed—as it did for a num­ber of peo­ple who grew up mak­ing, buy­ing, and danc­ing to elec­tron­ic music at the end of the 20th century—that it was time to pass the baton to anoth­er rave gen­er­a­tion.

Instead, James returned in 2014—after his infa­mous logo popped up on NYC sidewalks—with a new album, Syro, a huge suite of songs that won Aphex Twin near-unan­i­mous crit­i­cal ado­ra­tion and a Gram­my. The her­met­ic musi­cian had pre­vi­ous­ly summed up his rela­tion­ship with his audi­ence by telling an inter­view­er he hat­ed them. He appeared to hate the press even more. Return­ing thir­teen years lat­er as a 43-year-old father seemed to have mel­lowed him.

James is pos­i­tive­ly chat­ty in a lengthy Pitch­fork inter­view. He begins by explain­ing the ori­gin of the word “syro.” It came from his son, who “doesn’t know what it means, either. But it means some­thing. And it sounds cool.” He might have been talk­ing about the titles of near­ly every track on the album, his lat­est EP, or his retire­ment album, Druqks.

For James, a blan­ket con­tempt for the sta­tus quo man­i­fests in scram­blings of sense and sound.  Syro’s only deci­pher­able title, “minipops 67 [120.2] [source field mix],” may or may not refer to the 1983 British children’s show fea­tur­ing pre­teens singing con­tem­po­rary pop songs while dressed up like the orig­i­nal per­form­ers. Could be a pis­stak­ing nod to his gen­er­a­tion or an earnest vis­it to child­hood mem­o­ries through the por­tal of his own kids’ non­sense word, or both.

The Aphex Twin come­back saw James open­ing up about his process in inter­views and releas­ing a list of synth instru­ments used on Syro in the form of a dense info­graph­ic, above. (The dots in con­cen­tric cir­cles “line up with the track list,” notes Syn­th­topia, “so they graph­i­cal­ly indi­cate the gear that was used on each track.”). These ges­tures to his fans pre­saged the release of his entire cat­a­log for stream­ing on his site, “a near-com­plete col­lec­tion of James record­ing out­put since 1991,” as Ars Tech­ni­ca writes, includ­ing “hours of pre­vi­ous­ly unre­leased mate­r­i­al from pret­ty much every phase of his career.”

Check out the site here to stream Aphex Twin’s record­ed out­put in chrono­log­i­cal or ran­dom order, buy each track in a num­ber of for­mats, includ­ing the unre­leased rar­i­ties, and read the exten­sive Aphex Twin inter­view at Pitch­fork, a con­ver­sa­tion that sees him mus­ing on aban­don­ing all pre­vi­ous human influ­ences and mak­ing music from out­er space.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

Free, Open Source Mod­u­lar Synth Soft­ware Lets You Cre­ate 70s & 80s Elec­tron­ic Music—Without Hav­ing to Pay Thou­sands for a Real-World Syn­the­siz­er

The 50 Best Ambi­ent Albums of All Time: A Playlist Curat­ed by Pitch­fork

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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How the Ancient Mayans Used Chocolate as Money

in Economics, Food & Drink, History | October 8th, 2018

We’ve had hun­dreds and hun­dreds of years to get used to mon­ey in the form of coins and bills, though exact­ly how long we’ve used them varies quite a bit from region to region. Of course, some spots on the globe have yet to adopt them at all, as any­one who’s heard the much-told sto­ry of the Yap islanders and their huge lime­stone discs knows. But the his­to­ry of mon­ey is, in essence, the his­to­ry of bar­ter­ing — trad­ing some­thing you have for some­thing you want — becom­ing more and more abstract; now, with dig­i­tal cryp­to-cur­ren­cies like Bit­coin, it looks like mon­ey will ascend one lev­el of abstrac­tion high­er. But to imag­ine what a tru­ly non-abstract cur­ren­cy looks like, just look at the ancient Mayan civ­i­liza­tion, the mem­bers of which paid their debts with choco­late.

“The ancient Maya nev­er used coins as mon­ey,” writes Sci­ence’s Joshua Rapp Learn. “Instead, like many ear­ly civ­i­liza­tions, they were thought to most­ly barter, trad­ing items such as tobac­co, maize, and cloth­ing.” Thanks to the work of archae­ol­o­gist Joanne Baron, a schol­ar of murals, ceram­ic paint­ings, carv­ings and oth­er objects depict­ing life in the Clas­sic Maya peri­od which ran from around 250 BC to 900 AD, we’ve now begun to learn how choco­late took on a major, mon­ey-like role in the Maya’s econ­o­my.

Some images depict cups of choco­late itself, which the Mayans usu­al­ly enjoyed in the form of a hot drink, being accept­ed as pay­ment, and oth­ers show choco­late trad­ed in the coin-like form of “fer­ment­ed and dried cacao beans.” In many scenes, Maya lead­ers receive their trib­utes (or tax­es) most often in the form of “pieces of woven cloth and bags labeled with the quan­ti­ty of dried cacao beans they con­tain.”

Cacao beans even­tu­al­ly became such a valu­able cur­ren­cy “that it was evi­dent­ly worth the trou­ble to coun­ter­feit them,” writes Smith­son­ian’s Josie Garth­waite in an arti­cle about the ear­ly his­to­ry of choco­late (a sub­ject about which you can learn more in the TED-ed video above). “At mul­ti­ple archae­o­log­i­cal sites in Mex­i­co and Guatemala,” she quotes anthro­pol­o­gist Joel Pal­ka as say­ing, “researchers have come across remark­ably well-pre­served ‘cacao beans’ ” that turn out to be made of clay. “Some schol­ars believe drought led to the down­fall of the Clas­sic Maya civ­i­liza­tion,” Learn notes, and accord­ing to Baron, “the dis­rup­tion of the cacao sup­ply which fueled polit­i­cal pow­er may have led to an eco­nom­ic break­down in some cas­es.” That may sound strange­ly famil­iar to those of us who — even here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, among the many who have gone near­ly cash­less and may soon not even need a cred­it card — have break­downs of our own when we can’t get our choco­late.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mar­velous Health Ben­e­fits of Choco­late: A Curi­ous Med­ical Essay from 1631

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

The Ups & Downs of Ancient Rome’s Economy–All 1,900 Years of It–Get Doc­u­ment­ed by Pol­lu­tion Traces Found in Greenland’s Ice

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Bit­coin, the New Decen­tral­ized Dig­i­tal Cur­ren­cy, Demys­ti­fied in a Three Minute Video

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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