SOUNDTRACK: ÓLAFUR ARNALDS-Tiny Desk (Home) Concert #177 (March 4, 2021).
Ólafur Arnalds is an Icelandic composer who creates (mostly) beautiful soothing songs.
I really enjoyed his previous Tiny Desk Concert where he displayed his high tech player piano gadget (used in one of these songs although it’s hard to tell).
He and his accompanying quartet (Geirþrúður Ása Guðjónsdóttir, Sigrún Harðardóttir and Karl James Pestka on violins; Unnur Jónsdóttir on cello) play four tracks.
The pensive set opens with an older tune, “Happiness Does Not Wait,” with Ólafur Arnalds seated at a short upright piano known as a Danish ‘pianette.’
“Happiness Does Not Wait” opens the set with a beautiful looping melody on the piano and gentle strings added on top. Then the strings take over playing the piano melody and the backing melodies as Arnalds preps his next song.
The remaining three songs are form 2020’s, some kind of peace.
For “Woven Song” he winds up an Edison “Fireside” cylinder phonograph which plays a haunting melody–a traditional Amazonian healing song sung by the late shaman Herlinda Agustin Fernandez. He plays a complex piano melody on top of the song. Then strings layer on top and then once again take over the melody as he stops playing and heads to his other piano.
He explains that in the tribe where Fernandez sings, they weave their melodies into cloth to write them down.
Then moving from the wax cylinder to his high tech Stratus music software.
Look closely at the piano toward the back of the studio during the tune “Spiral,” and you’ll see a piano playing seemingly without a performer. That piano is reacting to Ólafur Arnald’s real-time performance using algorithms he and his coder friend, Halldór Eldjárn, developed.
The song opens with the violin and then the rest of the strings flesh the song out while he begins the piano. Then the instruments fall back leaving just one violin along with the piano for the end.
For the final song, he moves back to the first pianette to play “We Contain Multitudes” which has an otherworldly echoing quality to it.
It’s a lovely calming session.
[READ: March 21, 2021] Klawde: Evil Alien Cat 2
Book 2 picks up soon after the events of Book 1. In other words, summer is over and it’s time for Raj to go to his new school. The good news is that the friends he made at camp–Cedar and Steve–will be there. The bad news is so will his enemies Scorpion and Newt.
In the introduction, Klawde explains that his name is not Klawde, it is Lord High Emperor Wyss-Kuzz, the Magnificent. He says he hated the planet Earth when he was exiled here and he hates it even more now.
Raj is freaking out about school, but Klawde is not interested in his pathetic classes. Where is Battle Tactics? The Art of Slash-and-Claw? The Art of Ambush? And that made Klawde think–he will start his own school–a school for warriors.
Marciano wrote this book in 2019 but how crazily prescient was this. Raj goes into his classroom but there is no teacher. Instead a voice came from speakers
Now, y’all may think it’s weird to have a teacher on a screen, but it’s part of a new wave in education… remote instruction! [And] no you cannot do whatever you want… I may be sitting down here in Alabama, but … I have a split screen monitor right here with every student’s face on it.
Spooky!
Raj has a bad day. He’s late for classes which means he can’t sit with his friends. In one class there aren’t even enough seats–he needs to stand. Even when he gets to lunch, he is so late that the only empty seat is at the cool kids table. The kids look at him and ask if he’s from Upper Elba. He says no, he’s from Brooklyn.
The kids are excited by this and they ask him a million questions. When they ask if he knows anyone famous, he tells them he knows the woman who writes Americaman. And ho-lee-cow they are so thrilled–Americaman is everyone’s favorite comic book. They’re even more excited when he reveals that he is in one of the books–he is saved by Americanman’s sidekick Starsey Stripes. It turns out that the boy who is the modal for Starsey Stripes is Raj’s former best friend, Cameron.
The day only gets better when Raj learns that last period–the mysterious RBX–stands for Robotics, his favorite past time. The teacher Miss Natasha is awesome and he gets to be with Cedar and Steve and their assignment is to create a robot that will help the school in some way. The winner will demonstrate their creation at the Harvest Festival.
Klawde’s school is not going quite as well. All of the grown up cats are too stupid and lazy to be able to do anything. But when Raj says that there are free kittens up for adoptions pretty much all over the place, well, Klawde thinks that an un tapped mind is just what he needs.
The kittens prove to have open minds as he hoped they would. There are three. Two gray boy kittens and a calico girl kitten. The boys were a little slow, but the calico was sharp and fierce–ready to fight anyone who tried her.
Things are even better for Raj because–what–kittens in his house! Awww!
Raj’s group makes an Aquabot–a robot that will wander arounds school and provide water to anyone who needs it. The teacher is thrilled. Scorpion and Newt however, use a drone that they says is going to help pull up boys’ baggy pants. They call it the Butt-bot. Miss Natasha is not happy about that.
Things seem to be going amazingly for all parties until the enemies show up.
First Cameron appears in Raj’s school–his mom invited Cameron’s dad to work with her, so Cameron’s family moved from Brooklyn. We learn that Raj and Cameron had a huge fight because Cameron was getting bigheaded about Americaman and he thought Raj was jealous.
As for Klwade, training was going well until he received a call from Lyttyrboks (his home planet) telling him that Klawde’s bitter nemesis Ffangg was being exiled to Earth as well.
Ffangg lashes out at Klawde immediately–calling him flabby and slow and telling him that basically he will have to succumb to Ffangg’s leadership from now on.
This means war. And there are some pretty intense fights between the two of them–one of which involves one cat losing all of the fur on his tail. And of course the winner of these fights will take over the new kitten recruits.
Back in school things aren’t going very well with Cameron either. Why would the cool kids need Raj when they have Starsey Stripes right in their school? They forget who Raj is pretty quickly.
It also turns out that Cameron is a pretty great robotics guy. He is assigned to work with Scorpion and Newt and he quickly makes their drone an excellent project (with an equally bad name Ro-butt).
But Miss Natasha still like Raj’s team’s idea better and it looks like Aqua-Bot is off to win handily.
Until there’s some sabotage. Obviously it was Cameron. And so Raj does something he never thought he’d do–he takes Klawde’s advice and gets revenge.
The end of the book shows two reconciliations, but also a betrayal (or two or three)–which bodes poorly for book three!
And be sure to read the author and artist bios!
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