[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Okay, so I'm gonna put on my music hat for a couple minutes.

ROBERT KRULWICH: Okay.

JAD: And then in two weeks we can put our other hats back on, whatever they're called.

ROBERT: Science-humanism whatever.

JAD: Philosophy, whatever. But look, we are many people.

ROBERT: We are many people.

JAD: I am a musician as well as a storyteller. You are a Broadway show tunes singer.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: As well as a radio raconteur.

ROBERT: I would like to have been a Broadway show tune—no one has ever invited me to do that.

JAD: Well, I'm gonna invite you at least to listen to my version of that.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: For just a few minutes. I'm gonna tell you about a band that I just discovered. This may be the coolest thing I've heard in years. Actually, you know this band. I mean, maybe you don't know that you know them, but we've used them in a few shows. Remember the piece that we did in the "Bliss" show about the perfect snowflake?

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: We used them there.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: Remember the story about the artist who weaponized his own blood?

ROBERT: Yes, Barton Benes.

JAD: We used them there, too.

ROBERT: So in a subtle way, I have already been exposed to them.

JAD: That's what I'm saying. Although I am quite certain you will hate their music.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: I could be wrong about that.

ROBERT: I will be as generous as I possibly know how to be.

JAD: The band is called Dawn of Midi.

ROBERT: Dawn of what?

JAD: Of Midi.

ROBERT: M-I-D-I?

JAD: Mm-hmm. Do you know what a Midi is?

ROBERT: No.

JAD: It's a—sort of like a computer language for music. Like in my studio at home, I have a bunch of synthesizers and various things, they all talk to each other using Midi.

ROBERT: Oh, the Dawn of Midi.

JAD: Dawn of Midi.

ROBERT: It's one of those half and halfs. Like dawn suggests something pleasant, beautiful, and sort of movie-like.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Midi, technological, hard, cold.

JAD: Yeah, that's actually not a bad place to start.

JAD: Okay, so the band is three guys. Aakaash Israni, he plays bass. Amino Belyamani plays the piano. Qasim Naqvi plays the drums. They met at college at CalArts. Initially, though, their partnership was not about music, it was about tennis, began on the tennis courts.

ROBERT: On the tennis courts.

AAKAASH ISRANI: Yeah, it was funny, actually, because we would play, like, late at night.

JAD: That's Aakaash, the bass player.

AAKAASH ISRANI: Qasim had, like, stolen the key and kept it or something, and one night we were there at like 3:00 am, and I think we were really drunk, and security showed up, and he saw us ...

JAD: They were pounding the ball back and forth, yelling.

AAKAASH ISRANI: And when he saw the intensity with which we were involved in this match, he was like, "You know, you guys should continue. Like, carry on." And he left!

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: And uh, that intensity sort of translated into the music that they started to play. They would take it really seriously. Like what they would do is they'd get together ...

AAKAASH ISRANI: We'd go into these classrooms that had no windows and turn out all the lights.

JAD: And they would play these long crazy sets.

AAKAASH ISRANI: In pitch black darkness.

JAD: That was completely, totally, improvised. Like before they started, they would have no idea what key they were gonna play in.

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

JAD: No idea of what tempo.

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

JAD: Or how long they were gonna go.

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

JAD: Would you at least figure out who was gonna play first?

AAKAASH ISRANI: No.

ROBERT: You mean, they'd just start cold?

JAD: Cold. But it would end up sort of like that 3:00 am tennis match. Really intense, rolling, rollicking, improvisations. Kind of atonal.

ROBERT: Atonal, oh boy.

JAD: I—yeah, I know. I know. I was just trying not to use that word.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: Uh [laughs]. It's really—I like it, it's really interesting stuff. And like I said, we used it in the snowflake story. But that's not—that style of music is not actually what I'm gonna present to you now.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: It's what they do next that I find totally fascinating. To set that up, as they're out on tour doing this free improvisational thing, they were also listening to different kinds of music. Like they were listening to electronic music, as well. Stuff like Aphex Twin. Also, one of them gets really deep into trance music, not techno trance, but ...

AAKAASH ISRANI: A lot of music from Africa. West African music, as well as music from Morocco.

JAD: And these are musical traditions that have a totally different approach to rhythm, which we can talk about in a second, but they're listening to all this stuff, and it begins to somehow seep in. They begin to gradually put a little bit of it into their sets, and to make a long story short, over the course of two years ...

AAKAASH ISRANI: It was a very incremental and slow process.

JAD: ... they piece together this style of music that is 180 degrees from what they were just doing, and unlike anything I've ever heard. And the only way I can describe it is that it's sort of like ancient folk music filtered through highly obsessive computers that actually aren't computers, but people.

ROBERT: What does that mean?

JAD: Here, I'm gonna play you some, okay?

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: No, not that. Let's put this on. Let's just—wait, let's just mute this, and all right. Here it comes. Now keep an open mind.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: So this is how it starts with just a bassline.

ROBERT: Is it gonna develop? Or are we gonna just ...

JAD: No, it is, it is, but just slowly. Just wait, wait!

JAD: Hear that? Do, do ...

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: That's the pianist, he's playing it with his left hand on the strings, so he's kind of muting it to create a harmonic.

ROBERT: I know a pod of whales who would go crazy for this.

JAD: [laughs] The—just let—okay, you hear the drums are coming. Hear that?

ROBERT: Yes.

JAD: I don't know about you, actually maybe I do know about you.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: But for me, right about now, I'm getting into a deep trance.

ROBERT: I—let's—let's—don't say anything for a minute and let's see what happens.

JAD: All right.

[rhythmic music]

JAD: Listen to that.

ROBERT: They're not playing a machine, they're playing traditional instruments.

JAD: No, this is all live. They're playing real instruments.

ROBERT: This is all performed.

JAD: It's acoustic. Although it doesn't sound acoustic.

ROBERT: Yeah, it doesn't.

JAD: I am so addicted to this.

ROBERT: [laughs]

JAD: Just listen some more.

JAD: See, it just starts to just slowly evolve.

ROBERT: A little bit.

JAD: Bit by bit. And it just keeps doing that for 45 minutes. I mean, it has—it's broken into tracks, but it's really just one really long thing.

ROBERT: I think that in seismic laboratories all over the world, where geologists gather ...

JAD: [laughs]

ROBERT: People who have to listen to impending earthquakes, this is gonna be, like, enormous.

JAD: In the Krulwich household too, I imagine.

ROBERT: Because it's small, small shifts.

JAD: Tiny, tiny shifts. Come on, you don't find that groovy at all?

ROBERT: No I do, actually I do.

JAD: So these guys basically went from like free improv, no rules, to becoming like human machines.

ROBERT: It's sort of like wishing to be an element of a very finely made Swiss watch.

JAD: Except now remove the watch.

ROBERT: Huh.

AAKAASH ISRANI: I think that something is going on in the world right now.

JAD: That's Aakaash again.

AAKAASH ISRANI: The last 10 to 15 years, you see it in a lot of fields right now. People doing things, quote-unquote, "In an analog way," that, 10 years ago, would have been assumed were absolutely impossible without the aid of technology. You see it from big wave surfers who have found out that they could ride huge waves if they have jet skis to pull them into these waves.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

AAKAASH ISRANI: To now they're saying, "Hey wait a minute, we can catch these with our arms again." But the jet ski needed to be there to show them that this was even possible. And you see it with this—this French beatboxer video online.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, beatbox video]

AAKAASH ISRANI: He's doing his own thing that just sounds impossible. He's—it's unbelievable.

JAD: Hmm.

AAKAASH ISRANI: And it's something that like, the kind of stuff that Aphex was programming for his music. But this guy's doing it with his mouth. And it's like, the computer showed us a world of possibility and now we're sort of almost realizing that that world was inherent to us and not the machine.

JAD: Huh. So you're talking about like a reclaiming.

AAKAASH ISRANI: Yeah, absolutely. And it was like almost like we didn't know how far the biotech of our minds could go until the machines sort of showed us that, "Hey, wait a minute, like, this is—this is coming from you guys."

ROBERT: You know what it is? If—if you just let it do what it's doing, and have none of the usual expectations of resolution, or ...

JAD: Or like that usual arc.

ROBERT: It's not gonna tell you a story, it's just gonna keep you company. That's what's happening here.

JAD: Yeah, I mean, I think what it's trying to do is to get you into a different state of mind. Like a different state of time.

AAKAASH ISRANI: That experience of time that is non-narrative.

JAD: Where you're sort of existing in time, not in a sort of regular story way, where everything leads to the next thing, beginning, middle, and end.

AAKAASH ISRANI: What Amino and I often talk about is the idea of quantum states of time.

JAD: And I think what he means, what I take it to mean, is something very ancient, in a way. Like, yeah, I mentioned that they were listening to West African and Moroccan trance music.

ROBERT: Mm-hmm.

JAD: What you have in a lot of that music are these vertical stacks of rhythms. Like almost multiple time flows existing simultaneously in the same moment. And if you're listening to this music that we're hearing right now.

ROBERT: Yes

JAD: And you're trying to pick out, "Okay, what's the bass doing, what's the drums doing, what's the piano doing?" You will hear that they're actually almost not fitting together. Like they're—they're playing different beats.

ROBERT: Huh.

JAD: Pulling at each other.

ROBERT: Hmm.

JAD: In some sense. If I listen in and try and pick out all the lines, I get lost in the intricacies of their rhythms. If I listen out, I can just numb my head to it for 45 minutes. But if I listen in, I'm like, "Jesus, god, what is the bass player doing? I have no idea what beat he's on."

ROBERT: That is cool.

JAD: And that's just interesting to me, the way that the patterns on the interior are just kinda mess with your ear, ‘cause they all seem to be on their own cycle, falling in and out of phase. But when you pull out and just listen to the whole thing together, you're like, "Oh, yeah! I can nod my head to this. I can nod to this."

ROBERT: So actually—I don't know if you're familiar with Mark Rothko's paintings.

JAD: Mm-hmm.

ROBERT: Those like sort of squares of color that sit one on top of the other

JAD: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

ROBERT: I have the same—I'll go—there's a Rothko chapel in Houston.

JAD: Yeah, one of the most amazing places.

ROBERT: Yeah. Because he would often take a sponge and then dip it in the color and then, very lightly, dab.

JAD: Like over and over and over.

ROBERT: So it's very, very layered. And when I look closely, I see patterns, within patterns, within patterns, within patterns. And I get feelings from the patterns.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: And I find myself sort of telling stories about the feelings that I'm having. And then I'll pull myself out and I'll see three rather richly tonal blocks of color. Big picture. Then the little picture.

JAD: Yeah, totally.

ROBERT: And it's the same thing you're describing.

JAD: Yeah, I like that phrase. "Feelings from the patterns." That makes sense to me.

JAD: And these patterns, to me they feel kind of ancient and new at the same time. Super mechanical, and yet, deeply human at the same time. It never quite resolves for me somehow.

JAD: In any case, not much more to say. You can find out more about Dawn of Midi on our website, Radiolab.org. Their album's called "Dysnomia." It's definitely my favorite thing in years. And they'll be performing next week at Le Poisson Rouge. That's September 3. I will be there. And Robert and I will be back in two weeks with a full hour.

[LISTENER: Hi. I’m Ross from Glasgow. Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Thanks.]

 

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