Tom Sachs Explains Frank Ocean’s Endless “Stairway to Heaven”

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http://pitchfork.com/news/67699-tom-sachs-explains-frank-oceans-endless-stairway-to-heaven/

Great piece here. Some tidbits:

Well, that's a question I had for you, was what is the symbolism of this staircase?

When he's building, you see him literally building every component of this complex structure. Each stair is a plywood box. And you see the plywood end grain. You see each stair being stacked on top of each other onto a central steel column that's welded and bolted to the ground. So there's a transparency to the building that is the same as the transparency in the music.

Frank's music is simultaneously complex and simple. But no matter how you slice it you can hear what's going on. And there are sounds that are not musical sounds that are used musically to convey a mood. And all of that stuff is transparent and helps communicate how the music was made.

And also, that is one of the foundations of hip-hop and soul music—the transparency. Versus classical music where the orchestra of many, many people work together to create one sound, or with Phil Spector's Wall of Sound. There's always been an attempt to make something where you can understand without thinking, to feel. There's always been this transparency in hip-hop for lots of reasons. Even if you go back to the vinyl record, you can hear the flaws and the skips and the errors, and those are kind of the foundation of the sample.

@r-and-b-genius

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