One would never have guessed that a melody played on a traditional eastern instrument would strike the ear as a great metal riff. But that's exactly what happened when I pulled up the Gold Oud loops on Garageband.
As I pulled the pieces of the song together, doing my best to recreate what I was hearing in my head layered above these delectable little musical phrases, I thought about how the incredible progression of technology has birthed the genre of folk metal. It combines the industrial with the acoustic, the new with the old, drawing back on the material passed through generations of musicians and ordinary people, and a new tradition that I have discovered through the passport of the internet. And here I am, a 19 year old, white, female college student from Chicago who can't play guitar to save her life pulling together sound samples to write her own metal song. Our age is an age of "living simultaneously in all cultural modes," as McLuhan describes of the writer James Joyce (120). In today's day and age, it's possible to dive into every corner of every house you never knew existed, finding obscurity that feels like it's yours, and using it to inform your heart's song with barely a wave of your hand, or, in this case, the click of a keypad.
Link below: (dark text, invisible)
https://soundcloud.com/isabella-andries/gold-oud-groove-metal
While not of middle eastern origin, Viking metal band Arkona, who uses flute, accordion, and bagpipes in their music, has been a major inspiration of mine.
I decided to take this opportunity to show how I tend to see the world through the lens of a major band nerd.
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As someone who listens to hours of music every single day and wants to start a band in the future, it would seem plausible that sometimes a phrase I find floating around in the world catches my eye. When I noticed that my popcorn bottle said "Ways to Pop" on the back, I thought it sounded catchy. I then made it my mission to find band titles and song names wherever I went. I perused books and billboards, scoured the labels of household items, and kept my eye open for anything that seemed appealing.
If the music lovers of Generation X use the new media of the smartphone and internet to explore Spotify to both find new sounds and appreciate the old, then it is just as McLuhan says: the new media is "their door to all past achievement if studied as an active (and not necessarily benign) force" (100). This project would not have come to be had it not been for the hours I spend with my headphones in, exploring rateyourmusic.com for the recommendations of others who decide to spend their short little lives appreciating art. It is another kind of education, the education of the future.
