lonelyhorizons

Woke up, got out of bed...

2004-11-24T10:48:00.000-08:00

Euphoria - Sweet Rain -- There's not a lot to say about this song since it doesn't have any lyrics. It's sort of in the same vein as that David Holmes song I posted a little while back, btu while it's less atmospheric, it kicks just as much ass. It's really, really good.

Electric Light Orchestra - Mr. Blue Sky -- This song makes me laugh for the first couple of minutes. It's clearly meant to be a take on the Beatles' "Day in the Life," and it uses all the same phrasing, but at the same time, it's a totally, completely different song. You really have to listen to it to understand how well it's pulled off.

Sorry.

2004-11-23T22:21:00.000-08:00

For no posts. (I say this with all my heart... to all five of you reading this.) I've been working on a project that's literally taking all my time. I haven't stopped working since... hmm... Thursday, I think. When I decide to take a break, I'll get back to you.

The Clothes Don't Make the Man

2004-11-20T16:29:00.000-08:00

The theory behind vintage clothing stores is not that there are these great lost pieces of clothing hiding away, waiting to be discovered, like pirate treasure, although some people certainly think of them that way. The way a vintage clothing store works is that there are all kinds of pieces of clothing that, if the right person were to wear them in the right way, would really become something special.

Clothing, like music, is all about context. It's not what you wear that creates your own personal style. It's how you wear it. The main difference is that no one's going to sue the bejeezus out of you for wearing vintage clothing.

Back when I had some better software and a lot more time on my hands, I used to put together songs from samples out of my music library and bits and pieces of stuff I found on the internet. Does this count as composition? I'd submit that it does. If you've listened to DJ Danger Mouse's The Grey Album -- and if you haven't, go get it -- then I think you'll agree with me music isn't always a process of creation, at least not today. Really interesting music today, I think, is largely a process of contextualization.

Amniotics -- This is a song that I put together about two years ago. The artist field is "Manifold of Wires" because I was getting killed by a physics class and not getting a lot of sleep in those days -- so ignore that. This song was a sort of thought experiment -- I asked myself what the best song I could make using only public samples on the Acid Planet website would sound like. (ACID is the program that I used to make most of my stuff -- it was a great piece of software, but unfortunately a bit dated now, and they don't make it for OS X anyway.)

So this is a good song to make my point with, because you can still find some of these samples on the website. Here and here, for example, are two of the three acoustic guitar samples. They're pretty easy to pick out in the song.

And if you listen to the song, right after the first big break you'll hear a sliding electric guitar-ish sound (it somes in at about 1:32). It's actually an electric dulcimer, and you can find the original sample here. The original only about 4 seconds long. It drops out of the song pretty quickly after it comes in, but it crops up a few more times. It's used most effectively at about 2:56 in, which is when I got a little bit more creative with it.

My point is that there are between 30 and 40 discrete samples used in the song, but most of their usefulness is in how they're recombined or chopped up. You can get a lot of fascinating sounds out of even four measures of drum track, or just a simple guitar lick. Add in effects, transposition, mixing, and other tools, and even four seconds of sound can be turned into all kinds of cool stuff.

My point is this: Danger Mouse has taken a lot of shit from major labels for The Grey Album, and a lot of other artists have suffered the same. If you've listened to that album you know what a joke that is. That article I just linked suggests some sort of sub-licensing system to maintain artistic rights. I say: fuck that. Is the dulcimer sample above a song? Does it make the song that I posted? No. It's a part of the song and I made a conscious choice about how to use it in the song. The Grey Album is an individual artistic statement that exists as a creative work because of DJ Danger Mouse, not because of Jay-Z or the Beatles. The article above does have this good money line: "Imagine if John Lennon was in the studio and someone told him, 'You're not allowed to play that chord. Chuck Berry owns it already.'". Where would The White Album be then?

90% of modern music isn't a process of creation. (Go look at any recent music review and watch the wank-off music reviewer name-drop all the artists's "influences.") I'm not saying that there's nothing new under the sun, but let's be honest -- there's not a lot.

Most of what modern music is about is recontextualization. Sampling. Taking an old piece of clothing and making it into something completely different by wearing it in a new way. Same clothes. Different outfit.

OK, I lied.

2004-11-13T15:57:00.000-08:00

I got a little bit of space left, so I'll leave you with a little bonus. I was going to save this for another time, but what the hell.

Sonia Dada - Lay My Body Down -- Good rockin' gospel music is just about as awesome as it gets. Sonia Dada get this. The band is five dorky white guys playing some good solid rock (but doing a good job of mixing it up genre-wise) fronted four black gospel singers are fucking awesome. The result pure badass.

My only problem with posting Sonia Dada is choosing which songs I want to expose you to. Normally I want to restrict myself to one or two songs from a band (because you should really be buying these albums and exploring for yourselves!), but the problem with Sonia Dada is that they really do run the musical gamut, and wherever they go, they kick some ass. I chose this song pretty much at random, so I think I'll have to post some more later just so you can see what I'm talking about.

No matter what song you listen to, though, I think you'll agree that these guys fucking rock.

Call it a tactical loss

2004-11-13T15:20:00.000-08:00

Man, this is just about the boringest Saturday ever. Wrote some emails. Surfed the internets for forever.

Kind of out of it.

In an effort to kick up some adrenaline, I've been looking for the bounciest songs that I can find and then making a playlist out of them. Acquisition can't seem to find Clinic's "Welcome," so, so much for posting that. I'm not really sure that counts as "bouncy" anyway.

Jet vs. Girls Aloud - Are You Gonna Be My Love Machine? -- Just thinking about this song makes me smile. I mean, take the two most vapid, ubiquitous pop songs that you can, one from the dance side of the spectrum, the other from rock, lay the guitar lines over the dance lyrics and drums, and BAM! It's quite possibly the stupidest thing ever put to tape, but then, it's not like most music that I listen to from day to day is John Coltrane and Bob Dylan.

Rogers Sisters - Freight Elevator -- I'm not sure what to think of this song. On some level, it works really well. But at the same time, it's absolutely bizarre. The music itself is pretty coherent, but still a bit all over the map. The lyrics make so little sense that I get a headache just thinking about them. Still a great song, though.

I think the moral of today's post is that lyrics are, for the most part, just total crap. I mean, there are a few notable exceptions, but for the most part, not so much. If I were to comb through my iTunes library for even the best lyrics, they probably wouldn't pass muster as an even halfway decent poetry collection. I think we should maybe all just accept that and concentrate on lyrics as just another form of instrumentation. I'll post some Prefuse 73 next time and discuss this a little further.

Medicated nation? What are you talking about?

2004-11-10T19:56:00.000-08:00

Man, Ritalin will do some screwed-up stuff to you, I tell you what. I can't see any possible justification whatsoever for prescribing this stuff to kids. That's utterly unbelievable. I mean, I've been diagnosed now (take that for what you will -- all that really means is that I've taken a bunch of tests and they show that I can't concentrate on a damn thing unless I'm medicated), and I should not have been given this stuff before college. I'm not all that sure I should have been given it now. (It's basically speed, and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is lying. I do think it's arguable that, like morphine, it has therapeutic value, but it should be taken much more seriously than it is.)

Drugs help. This particular bit of Ritalin-fueled drivel is a good example. Normally I'd have been off to CNN.com before getting through the first paragraph of this post. Whether the post was really worth all that extra concentration I'll leave up to my readers.

A lot of people, myself included, are concerned about the over-prescription of Ritalin and the over-diagnosis of ADHD, and rightly so -- like I said, it's serious stuff. But really, I do buy the argument (which is discussed in the literature) that more of us just are ADHD nowadays, and that the world we live in is causing us to be like this.

Anecdotal info: my ADHD got worse as I started reading less and started watching TV more. (Thanks, Dad.) TV is like beating your brain with a stick. It really is. TV and our marketing culture aren't "evil" per se, we're just well past our advertising saturation point. There's a guy named Seth Godin who's written a really amazing book about this.

Part of what Godin says is: Because there's so much advertising out there, advertisers are being forced to use more and more radical techniques to get and keep our attention. The tragedy of marketing isn't that there are all these corporate types out there trying to corrupt us (though there are a lot of shitheads in advertising, based on my experience), it's that our marketing is in a fast and accelerating race to the bottom. So stuff gets flashier and brighter and most of all, faster.

Try this: No, seriously, you need to try this: next time you're watching commercials, say "cut" out loud every time there's a scene change or a cut of some kind. I used to force myself to do this, and it really gets disturbing after a while. (I just looked for some stats on this and couldn't find any -- if someone can point me to a few, let me know.)

My point is that nowadays, we're bombarded from absolutely every corner by input, input, input. TV especially, but also billboards, popup ads, advertising campaigns -- and it's not just marketing, it's everything. I'm quite confident that my brain acclimated itself to having multiple streams of really, really fast input coming in. So when I had to go sit down at work and do one thing for five minutes straight, my mind would start going into input withdrawl and I'd want to go read the news or something.

It's going to take me a long time to break myself of this habit. I think that maybe there was something clinically "wrong" with my brain to begin with, but I don't think it would have been nearly so bad without the cultural bludgeoning my senses have taken.

Anyway, the point of this blog is music. (I'll force a segue in here somehow.)

Dirty Three - Indian Love Song --One thing that helps me out, ADHDwise, is music that I can let either fade into the background or really concentrate on and enjoy. I can shut stuff out and work, but then indulge my hyperactive brain if it becomes necessary. It's one of the reasons I'm so obsessed with Amon Tobin. Classical music would probably be good for this, too, but just doesn't do it for me. Dirty Three is just a violin, guitar, and drums, but they coax a lot of sound out of those three instruments. No lyrics -- just ambient, sort of orchestral sound, and a little bit of pop-rock and psychedelia sprinkled on top. It all adds up to a distinctly dreamlike quality. This is one of their more active songs, but it's also my favorite by far.

Omar Faruk - Shashkin (Hefner Remix) -- I was going to post an Olivia Tremor Control song for no reason whatsoever, but then iTunes ran across this, and I just had to run with it, because it really runs well with the Dirty Three song. It's Omar Faruk (all of a sudden I'm thinking of the guy in High Fidelity who was always listening to "whatever kind of world beat music was popular that week") -- but that's not what this is. Who "Hefner" is, I have no idea, but it's definitely... different. This is one of those forgotten songs -- it came out on some obscure collection quite some time ago that I randomly read a review for, and somehow I managed to dredge it up on Audiogalaxy (ahhhh, those were the days, weren't they?). And I've kept it in my collection for years, transferring it from computer to computer. For some reason, it reminds me of that David Holmes song from the other day -- the same sort of sweeping feeling to it that makes you feel as if you're in a very particular kind of space, only instead of New York, it's New Delhi. Regardless, it's a really cool song, and there's little chance you'll find it elsewhere, so check it out while you can.

Okay...

2004-11-08T18:00:00.000-08:00

I'm really not in the mood to write anything right now, but I'm going to post anyway, since I haven't in a while. This is what I've been listening to this morning:

Nickel Creek - The Lighthouse's Tale -- Rarely does a song tell a poetic story well. This one does.

Jackpot - Windshield Wipers -- I'm not really sure what the lyrics to this song are. It just keeps drifting into the background when I listen to it. Not because it's bad, just because I'm a little unfocused at the moment.

Penguin Cafe Orchestra - Perpetuum Mobile -- Variations on a theme. One simple tune, played in a hundred different ways. This is a good example of what I mean when I say that I like texture in music.

I know none of those are ringing endorsements. Just trust me that it's all interesting stuff, and give it a listen. I'm just not in the mood to write at the moment. It's been a trying day, and it's not even half over. Just to let you know that I care, here's one more song, which is sort of the story of the weekend and of my life:

Paul Simon - Graceland -- This is, of course, the title track to an album that I think speaks more to our modern state than most anything else that's come out in the last twenty years. Despite appearing in the mid-80s, it doesn't sound dated to me at all. More poignant, if anything. "Boy in the Bubble" is one of those songs that was so ahead of it's time that it's almost kind of unnerving.

The most salient feature of the album -- the one that appears in most of the reviews of it -- is Paul Simon's discovery of African music. I love the music most of the time (not all the time), but I sort of feel that it's an inadequate vehicle for the lyrics and the singing. I have this feeling that someday, someone will cover these songs and do them properly. Not all the songs are overwhelming, but most have at least one or two verses that really stand out. But "Graceland" and "Boy in the Bubble" are really exceptional.

For some reason "Graceland" makes me think of the beginning of Gravity's Rainbow, and all the gray people riding the bus down into a the tangled, black world of WW2 London. Of course, it's a lot more upbeat than that, but that's the image I get from the lyrics. Traveling somewhere in a tranquil and solitary state, silently with a group of strangers who somehow all have the same destination.

The other thing that the album, and especially this song, makes me think of is a Borges story, for some weird reason. I think it's that there are so many little comments that speak to a world that's much bigger than the story that's being told. It's like you're getting a glimpse into a tangible reality that's somehow more poetic and beautiful than our own.

Off-topic, but...

2004-11-06T19:55:00.000-08:00

What do you tell a football team at halftime to make them come back out and do this?

For those who don't click the link, a quick recap: Texas down to OSU 35-7, bring it to 35-14 by halftime, but just barely. The Longhorns follow up in the second half with the biggest comeback in school history with an additional 21 points tacked on top just to make it look easy, bringing the final score to 56-35.

Damn. I'm not much for school spirit, or any kind of spirit for that matter, but I do have a thing for Texas football. And that just rules. Hook 'em.

Hooray for Hell if it's on the way

2004-11-05T09:43:00.000-08:00

Note to any Administration or Justice Department officials: the comments of November 1st do not necessarily reflect those of the writer of this blog, nor its supporters and sponsors, nor anyone, really. It was in fact composed by monkeys banging away on typewriters in a dungeon in Borneo. Being supervised by Michael Moore.

P.S. Please don't send me to Guantanamo.

ArmsBendBack - Countdown to the End of the World -- Well, so, as long as we're here, we might as well just get along with things. And there's no better way to start the day than with a little bit of hardcore. Well, emo-core. Something. It's good. And the lyrics, as per the usual, sort of voice how I feel about the current political situation.

Faith No More - Ashes to Ashes -- This is just... appropriate. And I haven't listened to it in a while. You probably haven't either. Do so.

No Commentary

2004-11-03T16:37:00.000-08:00

Just lyrics.

Calexico - Black Heart:

spring is frozen now I'm stuck in low
wrapped with wire, tapped to the heart
can't find no poison, now I've got no cure
the fangs are stuck inside my skin

payne county line
watching unjust claims
one man's righteousness is another man's
long hard sentence carried out
long haul, counting the miles
to the four corners of the world

spring is rusted shut, faith's coiled and cracked
apparitions worth their weight in gold
scratched in metal, name erodes away
hands are scarred, heart is charred
burnt though, and ashen

trip on fence post line
sifting through the remains
one man's close pursuit is another man's
last chance, make it through the divide
last chance, suffer the weight or get buried by this
black heart, sweeping over the land
black heart, crawling its way
to the four corners of the world

Well then.

2004-11-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

I don't know whether to laugh, or cry, or... what. This is the worst day of my life. No music yet, just that.

Keep the Faith

2004-11-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

Wilco & Billy Bragg - All You Fascists

This Is For The Last Four Years

2004-11-01T11:20:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow is it. Tomorrow is our last chance to kick that evil little monkey and all his little friends out of the most hallowed office of our nation and to begin to set things right.

If there is anything right and good left in this country, then it will happen. And hopefully we can put a nail in the coffin of all this Reagan Revival bullshit and start to put things back on the path to where they ought to be.

So fuck you, George W. Bush. Fuck you for stealing the election, for corrupting the good name of our Supreme Court, for treating the Presidency like a prize that you deserved. The Presidency is given, not taken, and we're taking it back.

Fuck you for clearing brush in Crawford when you should have been reading memos on Osama bin Laden. Fuck you for lying to Congress about the cost of your Medicare bill. Fuck you for playing politics with steel tariffs, and fuck you double for playing politics with gay rights. Fuck you for lying about Iraq. Fuck you for trading on the deaths of brave soldiers while never attending a funeral. Fuck you for your so-called tax cuts. Fuck you for everyone who's lost their job under your administration because you were too busy lining your friends' pockets. Fuck you for all the children who've fallen into poverty on your watch. Fuck you for the Iraqis who will die tonight, and the next day, and the day after, and the day after, because you wanted to be a hero. Fuck you for the arsenic regulations, for the inheritance tax, for the ICC, for NMD, for ANWR, for the whole alphabet soup of things you did and didn't do and for being on the wrong side of every single one.

You stole what should never, ever, be stolen: the highest and most hallowed office in the greatest country ever, and you have been the greatest disaster ever to befall it. You've turned a land and a government and people who should've been a beacon of hope into a bastion of worthlessness. May you and your whole cabal be sent home and never, ever, ever come back. Fuck you.

Ministry - Thieves

Bow Down to the Exit Sign

2004-10-31T19:17:00.000-08:00

Early today I was watching Ocean's 11 to try and pull myself out of a funk. Despite being a popcorn flick, it really is a great movie in most every respect -- the production values, the actors, the directing, and especially the soundtrack.

The soundtrack for that movie was done by David Holmes, who's done a number of other movies, and is apparently a favorite of Steven Soderbergh's. But he's put out a number of albums as well, and produced some interesting groups.

I started listening to him a few years before he started soundtracking movies, and was honestly a little disappointed when he started going the Hollywood route, but he's really so good at it that I can't fault him for it.

David Holmes - Don't Die Just Yet -- For some reason I think of this song as a paean to New York. Or at least to cities in general. It would have a been a great song for the driving scenes in Lost in Translation -- just nameless neon lights drifting by, the synths suggesting a sweeping majesticism counterposed against the hard dirtiness of the guitars. Like any really good electronic song, this song achieves a sort of organic naturalness in its composition that you don't often find. It's the perfect song for a lonely Sunday night, or really, a lonely anytime.

Vocoder Love

2004-10-30T01:17:00.000-07:00

So, before I go to bed, here's the Saturday fix.

Macha - Smash & Grab - Here's the anthem for this Tuesday. I can't tell you how bad I feel about not voting -- hopefully I can work out my residency and tax stuff on Monday and maybe vote absentee in Oregon, or at least here in Texas. Regardless, if you're able to vote, vote on Tuesday. It doesn't matter who you are or how you vote, just VOTE. I'm feeling sort of despondent about the state of politics right now. I've been following all things political since college, almost to the point of obsession, and it's just... it's just really depressing. This song has the sort of hollow sound that I feel right now.

Mouse on Mars - Mine is in Yours - And this song is the exact opposite. It's one of only two songs off the new Mouse on Mars album that I really, really like, but it's really good. It's got an awesome breakdown and the singing, with just a little bit of the vocoder tinge, is exactly right to dance around the house to. Why can't I ever hear stuff like this when I go out to dance?

All right. Back to reading Transmetropolitan and hoping that I don't have to become an expat.

Thanks, Boston! You guys ROCK!

2004-10-25T19:31:00.000-07:00

Man, I try so hard not to be a snob when I'm at a coffeeshop and I'm looking through other people's iTunes collections, but sometimes -- I mean, for real, 4 or 5 pages of nothing but Rush? Oooooboy. And Boston! Whenever I see Boston in anyone's playlist I think of the Space Ghost episode where Zorak is claiming that Boston picked him up in their spaceship and they rocked the entire galaxy.

Everyone here today has a lot of albums in their playlist. Like, album after album after album. I don't have a lot of albums in mine. In fact, my library probably looks very, um, suspicious. I wonder if the RIAA has iTunes?

Anyway, here's something to counteract all the Rush.

Kid Serious - Armageddon Girls -- This is one of those cool musical treasures that just gives me joy. I ran across this on a music blog a few months ago, and I can't for the life of me find anything else by this guy. Apparently he was some artist who was on mp3.com back in its heyday. It's surprisingly good -- the lyrics are not horrible, and the guy's a dead ringer for Bob Dylan. I actually fooled a few people into thinking it was Bob Dylan, actually. I'm a bad person.

Speaking of bad music: So the last song they played at Halcyon was the Eve6 song from way back in high school. You know, something something heart in a blender blah blah nonsensical lyrics blah blah ROCK! Only not in a good way. Oh, and before that, that annoying Cranberries song. Zommmbay ay ay ay oh oh oh OH MY GOD I NEED TO GO OUTSIDE.

Like Embers on the Fallen Snow

2004-10-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

It's Monday, I've been tired all day, and this song just cheered me up. There are times when I feel so shitty that nothing could make me happy per se, but there is a sort of cheering-up that makes me feel like everything will be ok, even if they're not right now.

Holopaw - Igloo Glass -- This is one of the songs that cheers me up like that. It's got so much folk-happy guitar-pickin' goodness in it that it's about to explode, and the lyrics are almost tearfully beautiful. This is coming from someone who doesn't normally get all that excited about lyrics.

Sorry

2004-10-24T14:55:00.000-07:00

Normally I'm quiet and don't eavesdrop/bother random people, but sometimes I have to make exceptions. The reason I started a music blog was so that my friends and I could share music that we found interesting or cool. This...

The Beastie Boys vs. The Beatles - Pass the Word

...Is really, really, really funny. But totally awesome at the same time. At any rate, I think it meets the criteria for cool.

Also, something else for people out there with good headphones:

Amon Tobin - Deo

This song was in a Coke commercial, but you shouldn't hold that against it. For my entire rant on Amon Tobin and how amazing he is, see here.

It's raining outside. I know that you all know how happy that makes me. I certainly didn't have a great weekend, but I don't mind so much now, somehow.

My Recipe is Jack Daniels

2004-10-22T19:01:00.000-07:00

A little something for all you people before you go out this weekend.

Groove Armada - Purple Haze -- There's not much to say about this song except that it's fun to dance to.

DJ Zebra - Killing Boombastic -- Very infrequently do I hear songs that just make me laugh out loud. This is one such song -- it's sheer genius. I found this over at Boom Selection the other day, and the author over there really says it best: "If you haven't already heard this, hear it now. Right now. Shaggy is involved, but i won't spoil the surprise of what comes next. Seriously, get this now. No excuses."

UPDATE: On second thought, this Groove Armada song is much more fun to dance to: Groove Armada - If Everybody Looked the Same

Need to Calm Down

2004-10-21T11:03:00.000-07:00

Man, I'm jumpy today. I did what Brendan would call a "metric assload" of work last night, and today I have to gear up for some other random task. Designing websites is one of those jobs that's fun and tedious at the same time. Much like coding.

This glass desk sucks. My monitors bounce when I type.

Anyway. Today it's time for badass female singers and twangy guitars.

Nickel Creek - Reasons Why -- Another band that I have this feeling like maybe everyone reading this has already heard of them except for me. Partially because everyone should have heard of them. Partly because they've won some awards and stuff and etc. Partially because this album is two years old and maybe I missed the boat, as I have with most music, and they're "done" already. Well, fuck that. This is a good song, and if you've heard it before, hear it again. If not, you missed the boat like me, and you need to catch the hell up, so listen to it now, and I promise I won't tell anyone.

Rilo Kiley - Wires and Waves -- Nick mentioned Rilo Kiley a little while back (that answer to your question, Nick is that it's the band name, not the singer). They're apparently getting a little bit of buzz now. (I say "apparently" about things like this because I have no clue). I really didn't like the new album all that much. This is from Take Offs & Landings. and it's great. The little shriek-trill that Jenny Lewis manages to do with her voice is unreal cool.

Rock Your Face Off

2004-10-19T22:30:00.000-07:00

I remember listening to Green Day's "Dookie" when it first came out and just loving it. Every second was just pure fun. Not a great artistic statement, and certainly not a harbinger of things to come (no one can convince me that the new album is worth my time), but just fun. "Longview" was the song I would listen to for years to pump myself up for debate rounds. So, with that in mind, today is all about fun music with loud guitars.

Discount - Clap and Cough -- This everything a good, fun pop-punk song should be. It's fast, it's loud, it has a hot-sounding female singer, and it clocks in at under two minutes. Solid.

The Hong Kong - Mazerati -- Yet another one of those New York bands that keep popping up out of nowhere. I don't have much to say about this song. Just listen to it.

This is just about the last of my summer music. It got warm again, so I'm getting a little bit more of it out of my system. I'm sure that I'll shortly move on to things more dark and brooding as the weather changes, so get it while it's hot, kids.

I Wish it Would Rain

2004-10-17T15:47:00.000-07:00

This is one of those slow Sundays. I wish that I could say that I've been productive this weekend, but for the most part I've just sat and played video games and thought about my life. I'm starting to feel really listless again. Hopefully by tomorrow I can pull it together a bit and start doing what I need to do. Mostly, I think that I'm just exhausted with the efforts and deadlines of last week and that now I'm just in release mode. At least, I hope that's the case and that I can pull up soon.

Migala - Arde -- This song will forever be associated with the day that I picked Marika up from the airport after she last came back from Oregon. It was an overcast day, grey as grey can get, and it felt like nothing was moving. This song was playing on the way back, and although she and I had been fighting at the time, and things in general weren't going all that well, that drive was just a microcosm of peace. The scratchy vocal loop played over and over again, and it felt like we were in a different place for a while. This post is dedicated to peaceful isolation.

Don't Eat This

2004-10-15T14:52:00.000-07:00

Blogger ate my last two posts and then I got frustrated and just left, which is why I've been absent. Sorry about that. (Update -- I just magically recovered one of my posts.) Anyway, it's Friday, and you get to listen to some poppy dance music.

This will be brief. Girls Aloud is essentially Spice Girls v2.0 -- five hot girls who sing and dance and look hot. And did I mention they're hot? At any rate, I understand that they won some sort of UK version of American Idol against an all-male group. Or something like that. Whatever, they're hot.

The interesting thing is that none of them seems exceptionally talented, but whoever their producer is knows his/her stuff. Their songs are really, really well-written, and the production is fantastic.

Girls Aloud - Jump

Girls Aloud - Love Machine

Does This Count?

2004-10-14T08:17:00.000-07:00

It's a sign of how much electronic music I've listened to, I think, that I'm starting to have trouble with the distinction with what is "electronic" and what isn't. Compounding this problem is the fact that in the ProTools era, all music is electronic in some fashion or another. And I'm not just talking about the fact that it's recorded and mastered digitally, etc. The production process for modern albums involves so much production -- often, overproduction -- that they really do in some sense qualify as electronic, I think.

Manitoba is perhaps some of the strangest music out there -- essentially it's the distilled essence of psychedelic music, just weird flutes and drums and spaced-out vocals. It shares something in common with Amon Tobin in that it seems to be composed largely of reprocessed "real" sounds, but it comes at things from exactly the opposite angle. Where Amon Tobin is dark and atmospheric, Manitoba manages to be light and expansive. Again, a sort of reinvention of the art.

At any rate, here you go: Sergeant Pepper for the digital age.

Manitoba - Kid You'll Move Mountains

Manitoba - I've Lived on a Dirt Road All My Life

All These Inside Fires Have Burned Up These Outside Things

2004-10-11T17:09:00.000-07:00

"I was told when I grew up I could be anything I wanted: a fireman, a policeman, a doctor - even President, it seemed. And for the first time in the history of mankind, something new, called an astronaut. But like so many kids brought up on a steady diet of Westerns, I always wanted to be the avenging cowboy hero - that lone voice in the wilderness, fighting corruption and evil wherever I found it, and standing for freedom, truth and justice. And in my heart of hearts I still track the remnants of that dream wherever I go, in my endless ride into the setting sun." --Bill Hicks, Revelations

Bottle Rockets - Lonely Cowboy

M Ward - It Won't Happen Twice

A Little Present...

2004-10-10T15:57:00.000-07:00

It's a slow weekend, so here's just one song...

Spoon - Tear Me Down -- Finding this song was a nice surprise. It was hiding on the Hedwig and the Angry Inch soundtrack. I figure it's a good Spoon song to put up here, since listeners new to Spoon will probably enjoy it and get a good sample of what the band's about, and old Spoon devotees might not have heard it before. It's a great song, seriously. Here's to Austin bands! Oh, and OU sucks.

(For the record, "Fitted Shirt" is my favorite Spoon song ever.)

My Backpack's Got Jets

2004-10-08T13:52:00.000-07:00

Dance music is just always stupid. Let's get that out of the way. If it were meant to be listened to, it wouldn't be dance music. It'd be IDM, or something of that nature, and it would be no fun to dance to (with a few notable exceptions).

So, that said, don't expect any Bach on Fridays. I figure that everyone's about to go out and hit the clubs or the bars or (in my case) play video games, and you should all have something to jump around to a bit before you leave. Nevertheless, this week I'm going to keep it a bit light-hearted.

MC Chris - Fett's Vette (Badd Spellah Mix) -- So I'm a Star Wars geek. Sue me. This song bumps, seriously. I never thought that it would be possible to dance to MC Chris' squeaky-ass voice (Aqua Teen Hunger Force fans, MC Chris = MC Pee Pants, et. al.) (Sealab 2021 fans, MC Chris = the DJ that the crew runs off with when Captain Murphy is trapped under the soda machine) (Everyone else, you have no idea what any of that meant). Anyway, this song is told from the perspective of Boba Fett, and it's about how much ass he kicks. And boy, it's dumb -- but it's damn awesome, too. Knowing my friends, you'll all like it. Or think I'm an idiot.

Lo Fidelity All Stars - Feel What I Feel -- I mentioned earlier that I'm not exactly a fan of all things retro, and I am emphatically not a fan of the 80s, but there are exceptions to every rule. This song is one of them. It has a great soul-singer vocal track, cool funky synths, and enough of the 70s for me to cut it a little slack. That, and it grooves. Have fun.

UPDATE: LFA link fixed, I think.

To Begin...

2004-10-07T13:17:00.000-07:00

If I'm going to post electronic music, there is no where else to start but Amon Tobin. In fact, I think that I will end up posting a lot of Amon Tobin, because as far as a electronic music goes, there's a lot of bad stuff out there and very little good. This is true of most genres, but especially true here, I think. And this is coming from someone who really likes electronic music. At any rate, Amon Tobin is definitely some of the good.

So, the song is Amon Tobin - Searchers. This is off his latest album, Out From Out Where, which is definitely his weirdest, but I figure I might as well throw you in at the deep end. If you can't stand this, work your way back to Supermodified, which is a little less dark and a little less chaotic. If you still can't handle it, try Permutation, which is very jazz-influenced and, I think, quite listenable.

But if you like this song, or if you want to try to like this song, bear with me for a bit. The first thing that I would suggest is: headphones. Preferably good ones. It's not possible to appreciate this song without them. No stereo system will do it justice, period. Second suggestion is: listen to it multiple times. Leave and come back to it. You will not hear everything this song has to offer in the first sitting.

That said, there are two main things that I really appreciate about all Amon Tobin songs; they may give you a starting point, at least:

1. Drums, drums, drums. Not just drums, percussion -- there's so much texture there that just the percussion could be a song in itself. Notice that every measure and beat is different, either in how he holds up certain sounds or drops some in, a slight delay, a different fill, something going on in this ear, something in that one... The melody and bass usually just provide texture. Whereas in most songs you hear on the radio, you listen to the lyrics, because that's where all the melody and variation is, here you should start by listening to the drums.

2. All the sounds effects. The sonic texture that really makes the songs worthy of being called "soundscapes." The little accents are mostly unobtrusive, and they just fit so well that sometimes I barely notice them, but they provide an unbelievable amount of depth and they're almost never repeated. That, and they often don't sound like anything earthly, so it's amazing that they fit so well. Today I heard an organ in one song, hiding somewhere panned off far to the left, that I'd never noticed before -- but it added a crucial element to the music. I was surprised I hadn't heard it the other hundred or so times I'd listened to the song.

But what makes these songs really great is how everything just works together. The really amazing thing, I think, is the degree to which all the elements in each song blend with one another. Every part is aware of what every other part is doing, and although there are sometimes four or five normal songs' worth of sound going on at once, they're all playing nicely together, and complementing each other. Much like a good orchestral piece.

That said, the reason that I really, really like Amon Tobin's music is precisely that -- it's orchestral, like a really good classical sympthony, in the sense of hundreds of independent elements working together to form a cohesive whole. And in some sense I'd argue that it even transcends regular classical music in a way, since the sonic palette is so much wider.

To me, this stuff is really sort of the promise of electronic music, and it's only because it (Amon Tobin's music) is so far ahead of its time that it sounds like it comes from a different planet sometimes. If you look at reviews of Amon Tobin's music on Amazon, you find a lot of people asking "why didn't I find this before?" and things of that nature. It just works, and for some of us, I think, it really strikes a deep personal chord -- something we were looking for, even though we weren't aware of it.

Most electronic music is really bad, because it allows people to make noises and music who otherwise wouldn't be making music otherwise. It's also a medium that people haven't sufficiently learned how to work in yet. How many years have we had to learn and perfect most of the instruments used by your average band? Electronic music is a medium that hasn't even had its surface scratched yet. Other "genres" borrow sounds that are electronic and use electronic instruments, but only at the level of sound effects, for the most part. Electronics is used to supplement live music and live performances (that's all that DJs do, for the most part).

And there's also a lot of experimental, pure electronic music that doesn't measure up in other ways. Some of it is just noise, as far as I'm concerned -- interesting, but not really intersecting with "music" in any meaningful way (Aphex Twin, Autechre, etc.). There's more electronic music that's electronic just for the sake of being electronic, that revels in bleep-noise (Boards of Canada, Squarepusher) -- I find that stuff totally uninteresting. Electronic music is interesting because it lets you make a new, different kind of music. The synth stuff is like doing my Photoshop work on my old Pentium in 8-bit color. Sure, it might work, but I wouldn't be exercising it to its fullest capability. There's a reason my Mac Plus is sitting at the bottom of a landfill somewhere.

I think that electronic music, while it can be called a "genre" (note the scare quotes again) as long as it plays into pop music tropes, doesn't have to be a "genre" at all. It could be an entirely different type of music, a whole new field and way of thinking about music. Long way off as of yet, but I think that Amon Tobin is one of the few artists that really shows the road from here to there.

That said, I also recognize that a lot of people find this sort of music weird and annoying. I'm most concerned with hearing what those people think about it. I'm not sure how I first started listening to and liking electronic music, but I do know that it was a long journey that probably began with bad big beat dance music, because that had the most in common with the big beat rock music I liked. But just like I still don't really care for classical music, despite appreciating it on a theoretical level, I can understand how a lot of people wouldn't like this.

So, please, for me -- listen to this song, maybe go on iTunes or to a CD store or wherever you get your music and listen to more, then come back and tell me what you think: love or hate, good or bad, and why.

UPDATE: Song link was broken. I fixed it.

I Hope This Letter Finds You Well

2004-10-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

The Jayhawks - Come To The River -- So this song could pretty clearly be called either "rock" or "americana," but as far as I'm concerned, the lyrics are so vapid and the music so damn happy that it would be wrong to call it anything but good solid pop music. This song is dedicated to Kai, and sitting around on the concrete in our empty living room with the fan on and the stereo cranked up to drown out the construction noise outside. Most of all, this is a summer song, since summer's not really even over yet and I'm already starting to miss it.

The Go! Team - The Power Is On! -- This song will be familiar to anyone who's hung out with me in the last few months, but for the benefit of those of you who haven't heard it, here you go. Fluxblog, the greatest music blog on the planet, posted this song a few months ago and called it "The Hello Kitty Death March." I can't think of a more apt description. This is the anthem for Lord of the Flies.

Tomorrow, new and different stuff. I'll get through my old staples soon enough. Promise.

We Want the Death of Rock 'n' Roll

2004-10-05T09:34:00.000-07:00

OK, time for some rock. Keep in mind, kids, that these songs will be disappearing as soon as I run out of space so that I can make room for new ones.

The Constantines - Arizona -- I posted this song over at my old blog (it was the only song I posted there), but I'm going to start things off here with it, since it's basically my anthem for rock in general. There's so much awesome in this song it's all hard to get it all at once, but I'll cover a few key points: the badass Boss vocals; the interplay of the guitars; the kickass breakdown in the middle; the lyrics, which are the greatest call-to-action for rocking like a motherfucker ever written.

The photos on the Constantines' website are pretty funny. They're pretty much the dorkiest-looking band ever, but you can tell they put on a totally crazy show. I'd recommend listening to the music first, then looking at the pictures. The contrast is great.

Cap'n Jazz - We Are Scientists -- Kriston first introduced me to Cap'n Jazz a few years ago, and I could never get into them. I still can't. Their music is weird, and not the kind of bleepy Mouse on Mars weird that I can tolerate. But I do like that their singer sounds like a cracked-out Perry Farrell (and that's saying something), and I do find this song fun in a barely-contained-chaos sort of way.

And He Built A Machine...

2004-10-04T22:40:00.000-07:00

There's no other way to start this off than with some good old-fashioned Americana. I've developed a thing for the whole alt-country folk vein of music, ever since I heard Calexico's "Service and Repair." I'll have a lot more to say on this in the future, but for now I'll just post the music and let it speak for itself.

Calexico - Sunken Waltz -- This song is everything that Tool was shooting for with Aenema, as far as I'm concerned. It's just so despondent; everything about it speaks of a longing for frontiers that have disappeared into a morass of cities and business and smiley gladhands... It's at the same time the most ironic and most appropriate music for the times we're living in right now.

Neko Case - Things That Scare Me -- Something in the same vein, I suppose. This is my favorite Neko Case song, and that's saying a lot. The guitar and the shaker in the beginning are just ghostly. Both of these songs feel like autumn to me -- which is appropriate in a number of ways, not least of which the time of year. I'll admit that I have a thing for summer music, but there's something to be said for autumn, too -- the time when everything is winding down and getting cold and preparing to freeze or die. And a better metaphor for the state of nation you couldn't find.

Incidentally, the guitarist and drummer from Calexico played on Neko Case's Blacklisted, which is where this song is from. She also sings for the New Pornographers, but I'm not crazy about them.

That's all for tonight. Back to happier things tomorrow.

This is only a test.

2004-10-04T22:06:00.000-07:00

This is my new music blog. Seeing as I already spend half my time on the internet looking for new music, and the other half trying to convince my friends to listen to what I've found, I figure that I can just kill two birds with one stone by posting all my new music here. Songs will remain for as long as I have room on the magical internet.

Standard disclaimers apply. If you like the song, pay for it. Stream, don't download. If you see a song that you would like taken down, let me know by writing empyreal at gmail dot com. Most of all, enjoy the music, LEAVE COMMENTS, and have fun.