The Ear: Favors no Point of View

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.