Episode 031: Woman with a Birdcage
In which we discuss car alarms, hot mics, and collective nouns
So there is a mockingbird that has been singing outside my bedroom window. You know the bird: it sounds like nature’s car alarm. Cycles through a dozen or more different sounds. Toads, frogs. Other birds. Doors creaking. Kitty-cats.
Cute, right?
Well…this particular mockingbird has somehow gotten turned upside down. It has been doing its surprisingly accurate impersonations in the dead of night. I haven’t slept very well, as you could imagine.
One night, I simply could not handle it anymore, and there I was, hanging out of my bedroom window at 3 a.m. yelling at the bird to be quiet.
You’ll be surprised to learn that didn’t work.
I soon began throwing things in the general direction of the tree I thought the bird was in. These projectiles included—but were not limited to—a slipper, a small flashlight, a handful of pennies, a rolled-up pair of socks, and a Disney water-bottle. Nothing to injure the little birdie, just to encourage a swift relo to some unsuspecting neighbor’s tree.
No luck.
I haven’t slept for a week.
Anyway, I had to write a beat about birds. Or, I couldn’t sleep and I wrote something about birds: one or the other. I remembered being enamored with József Rippl-Rónai’s Woman with a Birdcage at one time in my life, so here we go…
No promises here, as I wrote and recorded this in a frightfully sleep-deprived state. Maybe that’s why it is the shortest of these beats, clocking in at just under a minute and a quarter.
I envision the woman dancing around her living room holding the birdcage. The chopped-up sample I used for the main rhythm part has a relaxed, lilting vibe and its own catchy melody—with a little flowing, dancing kind of rhythm to it. Made me think of her pirouetting around her apartment.
For the bird singing, I didn't want to use a whistle, or a piccolo, or something very high-pitched, or try to imitate a bird.
Cheep tricks, all [sorry, tired].
Instead, I opted for a delicate horn. Horns are notoriously difficult to artificially reproduce in a small studio. Fortunately, this haunting set of samples made it pretty easy to perform a convincing melody.
A trumpet player friend of mine heard this piece and asked me who I got to play the part. Hah!
Fun fact: I always have an open mic running while I'm recording, just in case I say or sing something useful while I'm working on a beat. Just before the second drop, if you listen carefully you can hear me counting myself back in. I don't believe I purposefully left it in, but after I mixed it I heard it and decided to leave it.
This painting came out of Rippl-Rónai’s black period. All the colors here are said to come from the black, especially the woman’s outline. Of that period, he said:
"I wanted to paint things emerging from blackness. I was very attracted by black and gray and I was interested in the question regarding what one could solve artistically with these two colors."
While everything in the painting is dark and subdued, I think these colors are luscious, and I actually find the painting happy—joyful even. It’s said that the painting has an inherent, muted sadness, but I don’t feel that at all. Except for the bird in the cage, perhaps.
It was difficult to pick only five colors for my reduction, I really wanted her hair and her hat represented in there too, but at the end of the day, I needed to pick the five colors that best represented the original. I even left out the bird, only the cage made it!
Birds have, by far, the best collective nouns:
A peep of chickens
A piteousness of doves
A trembling of finches
An exaltation of larks
A parliament of owls
A pandemonium of parrots
An ostentation of peacocks
I will stop now.
An unkindness of ravens [so much better than a murder of crows, although that’s pretty great too]
Ok, I’ll really stop now.
A pitying of turtle doves
Have I mentioned I haven’t slept in a week?
An echo of mockingbirds
An echo of mockingbirds
An echo of mockingbirds
Goodnight.
Until next week, thanks for reading Polyester City. If you have any thoughts, please leave a comment by clicking the link above. If you know anyone who likes Music and Art and Stories [and insomnia], which is pretty much everyone, please consider sharing by clicking the link below.
I would be without sleep as well 😏
I have serious problems sleeping in a different places because of noise
I wake up to the sound of the refrigerator motor running if the kitchen door is open for exemplo
but I use earplugs when I need to
helps
I would love to hear those ones here bigger , longer ? I would dance
Fantastic as usual! Sleep deprivation has its uses for tearing the veil a little and can serve as a good test. You're a pro, obviously. That trumpet! Bedside reading: To Kill a Mockingbird.