☃️A Celebration of Axial Tilt ☃️ (Updated)

Can I interest you in some holiday synthesizer music?

Updated December 23, 2022. Scroll to the bottom if you are interested in some free music!

With particular pleasure, I then listened to our contemporary music. (It was demonstrated at the end for the sake of contrast.) Crystal chronometric degrees converging and diverging in infinite sequences and the summarizing chords of Taylor and Macluarin formulae with a gate like Pythagorean pant-legs, so whole-toned and quadrilateral-heavy; the melancholy melodies of diminishing oscillations; pauses producing bright rhythms according to Frauenhofer lines, the spectral analysis of planets… What magnificence! What unwavering predictability! And how pitiful that whimsical music of the Ancients, delimited by nothing except wild fantasy…

-Yevgeny Zamyatin, WE (translation by Natasha Randall)

Fa la la la la la la la la!

-Traditional

First of all, let me take the opportunity to thank anyone who is reading this. If this is your first visit, I should say this will be a very non-representative post in many ways. Although listening to, making, and thinking about music is a huge part of my life, this newsletter is usually about education policy, experiences around teaching and advocacy, and educational politics. If you’d like to see more posts like this, let me know! If you’ve been here before, thank you for coming back! Special thanks to everyone who has subscribed, shared these posts, and reached out with feedback. The primary goal of this newsletter is to inform the public, and that only works if people know it exists.

Secondly, let me say that I hope that whoever and wherever you are, you’re doing okay. This is a tough time of year for many people, and it has certainly been a tough time for me during many years. While in America the winter solstice season is often a time of holiday parties, gift exchanges, and vacations, its also a time that is literally quite dark, and if you’re like me that short days and long nights can be a challenge. (And if you’re even more like me, and you’re quarantining right now, just know there are others in the same boat. I’m thinking about you.) If you celebrate differently than others in your community, or don’t celebrate, I know it can feel isolating. If you’re missing someone, it can be more acute. I wish you a safe, healthy, happy holiday season, whatever that looks like for you. Happy Hanukah! Merry Christmas! Happy New Year! Happy Kwanzaa! Or, if it’s not a happy or merry time for you, I hope that you can see that things can get better and the sun will come back.

Try to take care of yourself.

Now for those who are interested, I’m going to talk about some weird holiday music.

In 2017, I had gotten sick of Christmas music, so I decided to make an album of Christmas music.

My late mother was a big fan of specific Christmas music. She would play Nat King Cole’s music over and over again and the combined warmth of the arrangements, the recordings, and of course that voice, are, for me, very wrapped up in my memories of the season.

And my long-time musical project Quark Lepton (mainly a solo singer-songwriter project, but sometimes a full band and sometimes an outlet for imaginary film scores) essentially began with a holiday song. In 2010, my friend Zach was involved in an indie music collective that was creating a holiday compilation album. After he told me about the compilation— and in particular described a song by the great Columbia songwriter Joe Roberts— at the late, legendary Whig, I went home. On the way, after hearing some old time Christmas music on a late night NPR show, I wrote the song “Christmas in Space” and recorded it that night (if my memory is accurate) for the compilation. The obvious influence is Johnny Cash’s version of the great Kris Kristofferson song “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” maybe one of the most successful songs ever at capturing the feeling of hungover loneliness and regret.

I think that song captures the way I felt about the holidays for a very long time: bittersweet, a little nostalgic, a little sad, a little lonely. Over the years, I’ve learned that these feelings are pretty common this time of year. Celebrating warmth, joy, and togetherness can be painful when something or someone is missing.

My wife really likes the holidays. She likes to decorate, likes to put up a tree, loves to see her family. I think part of my motivation behind making these synth versions of holiday songs was— probably unconsciously— to find my own weird way to get back in touch with some of the more positive, fun, and less heavy aspects of the season. To find a way not to be irritated by music that is such a part of my own life, and of the American zeitgeist, that I rarely had to listen to other versions of the songs or find transcriptions of the music in order to plonk out a basic version of the melody and chord progression on the synth.

So, more directly inspired by seeing a busker in Charleston singing along to a battered keyboard with a preset rhythm track, I thought it might be fun and ridiculous to record an entire album of holiday songs using a Korg Minilogue synthesizer that I was still trying to learn how to operate at the time. I had been trying to record an album that would end up being The Double (an attempt at some kind of blend of synth pop, dream pop, and ‘80s goth that ended up sounding much more like a country album thanks to the very talented musicians who played on it) and had gotten frustrated. Here was an opportunity to do something that was just for fun.

I had been listening to Iggy Pop’s David Bowie-produced album The Idiot, which was a gateway to the music that inspired it, like German electronic music pioneers Kraftwerk. What if Kraftwerk made a holiday album?

I decided to use public domain songs to avoid copyright issues, and so I ended up with a disproportionate number of circa 1800s holiday drinking songs and some versions of traditional hymns. What better music for the synthesizer, the mid-century modern instrument of the future?

A Moog analog synth and a 1990s-era MicroKorg digital synth/ vocoder in the fireplace of my old house, circa 2019.

I tend to take on musical projects when school is out. It’s a (mostly) constructive way to work through seasonal depression, and to address a feeling which will probably be familiar to many teachers and school staff— that feeling of intense exertion and activity leading up to a break, followed by a complete loss of routine that feels something like falling off of a cliff.

So for the past several years, I’ve made increasingly elaborate fake cop show soundtracks in the summertime, and I’ve added more and more songs to the holiday synthesizer album. The influences have grown to include

• the Moog synthesizer pioneer Wendy Carlos (one year I received two copies of her album Switched on Bach on vinyl, from different friends, on the same Christmas; I treasure them both, and my wife and I included her version of “Air on the G String” in our wedding)

• John Carpenter’s synth scores

• disco producer and film composer Giorgio Moroder

• Vangelis’ Bladerunner soundtrack

• Mark Mothersbaugh’s Life Aquatic Soundtrack (probably the first music that made want to own primitive analogue instruments)

• Run-DMC.’s “Christmas in Hollis”

• Lots of great, weird ‘80s synth pop, like Trio’s “Da Da Da,” which features one of my favorite-ever synths (one that appears in a lot of my holiday music), the Casio VL-1, a weird little calculator/ synth hybrid with a built-in rhythm machine that only has two tones, a harsh, noisy “snare” and a weird high-pitched beep.

• The satisfyingly ridiculous arrangements of Trans-Siberian Orchestra

• Carter Burwell, whose film soundtracks often include melodies from traditional and folk music (for example: his Raising Arizona score, which quotes the melody of the Appalachian murder ballad “Rose Connelly (Down by the Willow Garden”).

• my friend Tim, who writes and performs as TC Costello. His song “Christmas at the Southern Belle” is one of several songs we each wrote in an apparent effort at making the most hilariously depressing Christmas music. Tim’s song includes the line “the only reason for the season is axial tilt,” which inspired the name of my album)

• My friend Drew Baron’s great sample-based musical collaborations, like the project Power Options with multimedia artist Dalvin Spann

• Lots of other great synth, disco, and electronic music I’m forgetting right now.

In the process, I’ve learned to enjoy holiday music again, even if I still find the way it becomes ubiquitous roughly the day after Halloween to be a little much.

We are living in heavy times, so here’s some silly, hopefully mood-enhancing, music. If you are a paid subscriber, please keep scrolling down to find a link to download the album for free. If you would like to support this newsletter and aren’t ready to subscribe, buying some music is another great way to help with this work. (It’s also free to stream on Bandcamp, and will be on other streaming services soon.)

And while I’ve started to tentatively paywall some of the older essays, I sincerely hope anyone who needs access and can’t afford to be a paid subscriber will reach out and let me know. I’d be happy to give anyone— and especially teachers, journalists, and researchers— free access to the archive.

In any case, if you are reading this, and if you have read any of the previous pieces, thank you so much for being part of a labor of love that has, like the musical projects, become a great— if sometimes challenging— outlet for me.

Happy holidays!

Paid subscribers, please treat yourself to a free copy of the album using the link below in the subscriber section, or email me/ fill out this form if you’d prefer a physical copy of the album instead, or a non-holiday album. You can also try out a paid subscription for 7 days and still get the album for free!