Headline, August11, 2013

''' !! A-LIST CREATIVES !! '''

The Work and Sound of the Best and Brightest: 

His studio is a former vaudeville and silent-movie theater on New York's Lowe East Side. It's lit by candles and surrounding a burbling nineteenth-century iron-pedestal fish tank and mini spotlights focused on gilded cherubs thirty feet up. 

To one side is Duke Ellington's Piano, and to the other, a celesta, which sounds like a toy piano tuned to your nightmares; vintage guitar amps flank a five-foot gong. It's the Playboy mansion of music gear.

It's here that the thirty-five odd year old seduces disparate odd sounds into odd couplings. For a VW add called  ''Squares''  -square objects -toast, a Dumpster, a stack of newspapers  - flash by until the New Beetle appears to make a circle.

J.Ralph makes the world sound different. He scores commercials  -Nike, De Beers, Porsche, Volvo, the Volkswagen wedding spot that ran for three years  -with sonic collages of classical instruments, random noises, and other sounds that bunch the fabric of space and time.

His stuff is most beautifully weird than just about any other music broadcast, and since his ads are often better than the programming they interrupt, he's also one of the   ''most heard artist on the planet.''

If you're an A-List ad creative, you can call up J.Ralph  -who answers the phone as Josh and describe the feeling you want.......

''Some kind of existential, crazy, almost Stockhausen weird representation of the bitter, freezing cold''   -for Carnival cruise lines for example-  and he'll have the music for your commercial the next day. ''I make music every day,'' he explains in his hepcat rasp. 

''I'll either be working on my own music or somebody will call me up and say, ''Yo, do you want to finish something today? I'll pay you. I really get off on the fact that the music I do for commercials is instant ideas disseminated to millions of people immediately.''

J. Ralph plucked notes on a guitar and then put them through various vintage devices until the result made the viewer's TV set sound like it was on the fritz.  ''One Million Miles Away,'' the song in the ''Big Day'' wedding VW ad, lays a music-box keyboard melody under field recordings of a church bell and operatic vocals by ''a friend in knew from the neighborhood.'' 

Ralph has no formal musical training outside of guitar lesson, and he admits to not-working in the traditional ways of most composers. Yet members of the Czech and New York Philharmonics have collaborated with him. And some of the ads he's scored have even been put in the.......  permanent collection : New York's Museum of Modern Art.

He then went on to score the soundtrack to Lucky Number Slevin starring Morgan Freeman and Ben Kingsley. Not that Ralph particularly caught up in success. 

''It is,'' he says, ''all about sounds. That's all I really care about, you know?'' 

One dedication, To celebrate the imagination and determination of the last many years  ''Best and Brightest Students'' : Malala, Rabo, Dee, Halema, Saima, Paras, Sorat,  Zeba, Areesha Ahmed, Hussain, Ali, Haider, Rauf Liaquat, Mudassar, Shazaib Khan, Salar Khan, Maham, Mamona.

Great Dedication to the ''Great Path and Honor They Have Chosen to Serve Their Higher Ideals and The Power of Their Examples!''

The lesson is that  there is Art in every undertaking. The work of these Students is indelible and greater than the collective honor of their country: Pakistan. I hope to cover that in a Headline Post.

Good Night & God Bless!

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless