academic work
Took a quick elective about nihilism and it forced me to question my whole worldview. Here’s the term paper for that, discussing the narrative video game What Remains of Edith Finch.
Since taking an interest in the particulars of heavy metal music, much musicological attention has been paid to the social makeup of listeners, associations with subculture, fringe politics and stylistic hallmarks. This is the first section of a two-part term paper about Meshuggah’s obZen album.
Futurism, as a category of contemporary art music, seeks to blur the boundary between which sounds were classified as music and which were classified as noise. Luigi Russolo in particular posited noise-sound as the ideal vocabulary of the modernist composer, who ought to imitate everyday sounds with instruments of their own invention. This paper explores the futurist aesthetics of the album October Rust by Type O Negative.
La Campanella is a traditional Italian folk song, adapted by Nicolo Paganini for his Violin Concerto No. 2 in B Minor. It is also the main theme of Grandes Études de Paganini S. 141, No. 3 by Franz Liszt. In this paper I assert that La Campanella ought to be seen as a cryptosubject: an organic entity, with a life of its own, whose historical context is just as significant to true understanding as its harmonies, and where each part, if analyzed in isolation, is missing some essential detail.
The Romantic era Meyer describes in Style and Music—repudiation of convention, the egalitarianism of genius, and reverence for nature—are present in the lyrical content and imagery of the “True Norwegian” black metal scene. By examining the rejection of tradition, the longing for a mythical pre-Christian past, Satanic imagery, low-fi ‘artless’ spectacle as well as commentary from band members, iconography, and contemporary media criticism, we can better define the specific ideological motivations behind black metal’s aesthetic dimensions.
I also wrote about the quirks of Japanese card game localization here.