May 2012
87 posts
How fast can you read?
I took the test and apparently my reading speed is 462% better than the national average ( I assume that’s the USA but I could be wrong)
Listen
Afternoon: When The Fields Were On Fire Virginia Astley (from From Gardens Where We Feel Secure, 1983)
The theme is… the elements.
beautifully languorous - the sound of the English summer
Play
Tiger Feet
Mud
Artist: Mud
Track: Tiger Feet
Album: Mud Rock
Year: 1974Theme: Body Parts
well that’s neat
#musicdiaryproject - Day 7
Early in the morning I watched the final episode of the current series of Fringe on my laptop, listening on headphones
I prepared lunch - fennel risotto - and put on the One from the Heart soundtrack by Tom Waits with Crystal Gayle on the CD player as I worked. I loved the film when it came out and think the music is some of Waits’ best. He writes surprisingly well for a woman’s voice and Crystal Gayle sings with conviction.
We then went off to another tango class where we danced to several unidentified pieces of Argentine music.
Back home my wife put on her Young, Gifted and Black CD of ska and reggae, while she made the evening meal.
I went to bed early and put my iPod on as I drifted off, listening to the last three tracks from The Harrow and the Harvest by Gillian Welch. This was my top album of 2011 and I was delighted to see her and Dave Rawlings play in the Autumn of last year.
This year’s music diary project has been a (minor) revelation for me. Last year I was still suffering from depression, spending most of my days on the couch, listening to music on my laptop through earphones. I would obsessively monitor my music consumption for the project.
This year the majority of music I’ve listened to has been in social situations - at home on the CD player, at work, at tango classes, in the pub - and I haven’t worried obsessively about what tracks I’ve listened to. It’s a reflection of the improvement in my mental health and therefore an encouragement.
Who knows, maybe next year I’ll be playing in a band
On Green Dolphin Street
The Red Garland Trio
The Red Garland Trio: On Green Dolphin Street - from Bright And Breezy, 1961
Personnel: Red Garland - piano; Sam Jones - bass; Charlie Persip - drums
(via johnnykskim)
I love this tune
#musicdiaryproject - Day 6
I really haven’t been paying as much attention to my music consumption this year compared to last year.
Around midday I listened to Zuma by Neil Young and Crazy Horse for the first time in ages. I’m pretty sure that this is the first NY album I bought, way back in the 70s. Along with On the Beach it remains my favourite music by him. Back in the late 1970s I sang with two friends who played guitars and we played a lot of CSNY stuff. They both veered towards the CSN side of things while I latched on to Neil Young. I even wrote a song called Suburbia Calling in a Neil Young style that we used to perform. I think I respond to the balance between control and chaos in his music although for a while I lost interest in him.
Today I was struck by Danger Bird from the album in particular, and made it my new choice over at Thisismyjam. As I commented there, it sounds a lot like a post-punk record - with booming bass, discordant guitar and wayward vocals.
In the afternoon we went to visit a pub/restaurant attached to an architectural salvage yard just outside of Oxford. The food was great and they had an iPod on shuffle which played an eclectic selection of tracks. I recognised:
Remember (Walking in the sand) - Shangri-Las
Homosapiens - Pete Shelley
Heywèté - Tesfa Maryam Kidané (from The Very Best Of Éthiopiques album)
On the way home I put the radio on and caught a couple of tunes
I’ve Gotta Woman by Freddie KIng
Fat Bottomed Girls by Queen
Back home we watched the Danish/Swedish cop show The Bridge which features as its theme tune a ballad called Hollow Talk - sung in English by a Danish band called Choir of Young Believers - and that was it for the day.
IF YOU TAKE MY ADVICE - I'D REPRESS THEM →
bbc.co.uk
Bahrain, along with Syria, has become a symbol of the failure of the Arab Spring to deliver real democracy and freedom across the Arab world. The media in Britain portray a rigid, oppressive almost feudal elite who are stubbornly holding out against the inevitable wave of modern freedoms and political justice.
But what is hardly ever mentioned in the press and TV reports is that this very system of oppression, the rock against which the dreams of democracy are being dashed, was largely created by the British. That, throughout most of the twentieth century, British advisers to the Bahraini royal family, backed up by British military might, were central figures in the creation of a ruthless system that imprisoned and sometimes tortured any Bahraini citizen who even dared to suggest the idea of democracy.
Adam Curtis digs around the archives to tell another miserable tale of British meddling in the Middle East.
#musicdiaryproject - Day 5
posting this next day due to a busy evening
No music that I can remember during the day
I put on the CD of Kirsty McColl’s Kites while eating our evening meal but my wife found some of the lyrics too depressing so that came off after two tracks.
Instead I put on A tribute to Jack Johnson by Miles Davis - no offensive lyrics but not bland either. The two tracks are wonderfully urgent and kinetic.
We went off to our Friday night Tango class where we seemed to listen to two pieces of music over and over as we learnt a new routine.
Afterwards we went to the pub with some of our fellow dancers. There was music playing but I couldn’t hear much above the noise apart from Lets go Crazy by Prince and the Revolution. That was the first Prince recording I owned, bought as a single in 1985, and I’m always glad to hear it.
Back home I watched Community on my laptop and caught the theme tune for that on my headphones.
#musicdiaryproject - Day 4
random snatches of music today:
Around 7am I listened to a Youtube clip of Pure Space by Unicorn Kid that was posted on Tumblr. A strange haunted video of 21st century Dickensian hipsters tripping through what looked like an East European city.
Listened to the radio in the car on the way to the cinema in the evening - Sweet Dreams by the Eurythmics.
Watched Avengers at the cinema which featured various bits of music ‘by Alan Sivestri’ apparently. I enjoyed the film although not quite as much as the hype suggested I might.
Later I went to pick up my wife from the station and listened to the radio again ‘Cuz I luv you’ by Slade - sounding fantastic. Caught the start of another track by Fossil Collective? before switching it off.
“
The annual Sunday Times Rich List yields four very important conclusions for the governance of Britain (Report, Weekend, 28 April). It shows that the richest 1,000 persons, just 0.003% of the adult population, increased their wealth over the last three years by £155bn. That is enough for themselves alone to pay off the entire current UK budget deficit and still leave them with £30bn to spare.
Second, this mega-rich elite, containing many of the bankers and hedge fund and private equity operators who caused the financial crash in the first place, have not been made subject to any tax payback whatever commensurate to their gains. Some 77% of the budget deficit is being recouped by public expenditure cuts and benefit cuts, and only 23% is being repaid by tax increases. More than half of the tax increases is accounted for by the VAT rise which hits the poorest hardest. None of the tax increases is specifically aimed at the super-rich.
Third, despite the biggest slump for nearly a century, these 1,000 richest are now sitting on wealth greater even than at the height of the boom just before the crash. Their wealth now amounts to £414bn, equivalent to more than a third of Britain’s entire GDP. They include 77 billionaires and 23 others, each possessing more than £750m.
The increase in wealth of this richest 1,000 has been £315bn over the last 15 years. If they were charged capital gains tax on this at the current 28% rate, it would yield £88bn, enough to pay off 70% of the entire deficit. It seems however that Osborne takes the notorious view of the New York heiress, Leonora Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”
Michael Meacher MP
Labour, Oldham West and Royton
Letters: The scourge of our wealth divide | Business | The Guardian (via toffeemilkshake)
>:-(
Rockets & Rayguns: MBV’s Kevin Shields, from todays’ excellent Quietus interview: Because... →
rocketsandrayguns.tumblr.com
MBV’s Kevin Shields, from todays’ excellent Quietus interview:
Because tapes, cassettes, were such a big part of music when I was young, and whenever you’d hear music slow down and bend, it was like “oh shit” and you’d have to stop it and fish the tape out of the machine… But I had a…
I had Loveless on casette as well, and had the same experience
#musicdiaryproject - Day 3
It took me a long time to listen to music today.
I listened to the radio in the car at around 4.45pm - Steve Wright was the DJ on Radio 2 and he played two female singers in a row: Emili Sandé singing Next to me and Paloma Faith with Picking up the Pieces. Both sounded a bit meh if truth be told.
When I got home my wife put on the Young Gifted & Black compilation CD of ska and reggae while she made the evening meal.
After the meal I put on Revolver by The Beatles. I’d wanted to hear it again after it featured on Mad Men.
Then my wife put on Young Gifted & Black again
..and that is all
#musicdiaryproject - Day 2
I didn’t listen to much music today - again reflecting a generally positive change in my lifestyle compared to last year
I heard no music until around 4.15pm when I could hear the sound of the Big Band rehearsing at the school where I am currently working. I can’t remember what they played but they sounded fantastic - with drums, electric bass, piano and brass working together. They’ve won national competitions in the past so it was a treat to hear them.
When I got home I eventually checked into Tumblr. I played a Youtube clip of ‘I love it’ by Icona Pop and liked it so much I played it a couple of times more. I like this kind of bass heavy dance music with snarky female singers. I made it my new Jam over at Thisismyjam. Listened on headphones.
Later I downloaded ANOTHER Grateful Dead track from a link on my Dashboard - this time ‘Dark Star’ from 1982 and listened to that. It’s OK but, again, not as good as versions from the late 60s and 70s. I started listening to the Dead as a teenager and then lost interest in my 20s. I got a CD by them in the 90s and now I’m taking advantage of the many audience recordings available online to dabble in their music again. I tend to like the spacier end of their repertoire. Also listened to this on headphones.
My wife put on the Tango CD again while we ate our evening meal. I listened a bit more carefully than last night but still can’t tell you what was what.
And that was that.
To Here Knows When (OOPS mix)
My Bloody Valentine
Whatever arguments rise from the new My Bloody Valentine reissues—and POIT is right, the DAT time-code squelch in “What You Want” is a terrible oversight—the bottom line is that the early EPs and Isn’t Anything were in desperate need of sonic adjustment. Kevin Shields has done a fantastic job with them, and for anyone wondering, yes, the leaked “analog” Loveless and Isn’t Anything remasters from 2008 were real; these are the same recordings.
Loveless is an island unto itself. Until the Glider EP (specifically “Soon”), My Bloody Valentine were very much an outgrowth of the C86/American indie/Jesus and Mary Chain fuzz guitar scene, with the exception of “No More Sorry” and “All I Need”, which work as a central interlude for Isn’t Anything, as drone exercises presaging “To Here Knows When”.
With these new releases, we now have five or six official mixes of “To Here Knows When”, which I have listened to more than any other song. It remains my favorite piece of recorded music twenty years later, the most psychedelic, visually suggestive noise the world has yet known. It is the sound of a grandfather clock chiming in a wrecked galleon on the ocean floor, as recorded from the eye of a hurricane.
(It’s My Bloody Valentine—I get one).
Across today’s long-coming reissues, you get three versions of “To Here Knows When”, and they’re actually wildly different. My go-to was always the brighter mix on Tremolo, an “extended EP” of four songs strung together by unfinished riff studies and variously complete fragments. Among them is my favorite My Bloody Valentine song. “To Here Knows When” is the most important song ever recorded, but it’s not my favorite My Bloody Valentine song; these are two different things.
The ninety-seven second coda faded in at the tail end of “Honey Power” (from Tremolo) sounds very much like a hushed turn on “I Believe”, from their 1988 single “Feed Me With Your Kiss”. “Feed Me” is where My Bloody Valentine breaks from the naff paisley jangle of their first few EPs (Geek, Strawberry Wine, and Ecstasy) to arrive at the woozy, throbbing chaos they’re now famous for. “I Believe” was the standout for me, a song that nearly falls apart three times in three minutes and shows a deft understanding of the power of lazy phrasing. Slightly late vocals are critical to druggy, mopey pop; this is lost on many musicians but was as important to My Bloody Valentine’s sound as the Alesis Midiverb II, or the whammy bar.
Even after you learn to replicate the basic core of Kevin Shields’ endlessly-finessed guitar effects, you have a ways to go to unravel all the tricks in his kit. For starters, you need the aforementioned Alesis box for the “Bloom” effect on Isn’t Anything-era material (patches 47 and 49), and then any number of early-’90s Yamaha units can get you the underbelly of Loveless, the “reverse reverb” (actually “reverse gate”) that produces Shields’ signature whale yawn. This patch appears on everything from the SPX-90 to the GEP-50 and even REX-50, but throughout the 2000s people were paying ungodly money on eBay for SPX boxes, thinking it was the holy grail. These days, every vanity pedal outfit sells some variation on the circuit. In the past I’d kind of nod in appreciation and enjoy bands like the Fleeting Joys, who were able to suss out the bulk of Shields’ tricks, but today it’s so easy, I wince whenever anyone goes there. It’s one of the most beautiful sounds you can make with a guitar, but unfortunately for future shoegazers, it is also an unmistakable creative trademark. Unless it was sampled from It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, but nobody’s thought to ask Kevin, and so the similarity remains a wasted opportunity for a good interview question.
The track I’ve posted here is an OOPS of the Tremolo mix of “To Here Knows When” that’s been floating around the internet for a few years. OOPS mixes unmask phase tricks that isolate and “push” particular tracks away from each other, usually further out in stereo space. Against “To Here Knows When” and indeed most of Loveless, OOPS reveals that Shields phase-shifted his most melodic drone guitars, and in the case of “To Here Knows When”, also hid a very late, reversed tambourine loop. Which is one of the secret reasons the chorus sounds so disorienting: the tempo is constantly falling off a cliff.
Back to the coda from “Honey Power” (which itself is massively improved—the drums come alive, stereo space is doubled). This is my favorite My Bloody Valentine song, because it is redolent of my favorite My Bloody Valentine song, which is “I Believe”. The coda also sounds, inexplicably, like a particular shot of the ocean from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws. Now that I think about it, the cover of Loveless does somewhat invoke the sinking, exploded carcass of that great white, but the shot this coda reminds me of occurs roughly one hour and four minutes into the film (just after the shark bites a man’s leg off), and is assuredly some kind of film student secret handshake.
After attending to his dazed, terrified family, Chief Brody (Roy Scheider) looks out at the ocean as a wavering string drone lilts on. The perspective is disorienting, queered to the point where, as the lens zooms and opens, it stretches into a surreal, sea-green blear. In that moment, Jaws briefly ceases to be a movie, and becomes a captured documentary of time and space. More than an image or a series of images or a plot device, it is a tunnel into a memory of my youth, of a trip to Nantucket, during which I nearly drowned in a riptide. Which I can tell you is experientially indistinguishable from listening to Loveless for the first time.
Knowing that so many millions of people have yet to experience this album—that it waits for them, an awesome great white silently patrolling the musical sea—is the closest thing to broad human optimism I can hold onto. Which for me makes Loveless an object of faith.
I guess that’s two.
wonderful analysis of some of MBVs signature sounds and songs
Play
“
“Once, a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children’s letters — sometimes very hastily — but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, “Dear Jim: I loved your card.” Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, “Jim loved your card so much he ate it.” That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”
— Maurice Sendak
:/ He will truly be missed. My childhood wouldn’t be the same without him :’(
(via shalita101)
genius
#musicdiaryproject Day 1
Monday 7th May
I’ve listened to less music than I thought I might, given that today was a holiday:
I began by listening to ”Better than you” by Rye Rye ft. M.I.A. on my earphones connected to my laptop. Jonathan Bogart had posted the track to his Tumblr and I respect his taste enormously. I like the song for its cartoon like energy.
Next was the theme from Mad Men and a significant 60s song which I won’t name to avoid spoilers, but will say that the juxtaposition of music and imagery brought a tear to my eye. I watched an online stream of the latest episode with my wife.
Later in the afternoon I downloaded and listened to a live recording of the Grateful Dead playing China Cat Sunflower > I Know You Rider from a 1982 concert. I love the harmonies on these songs, although I prefer the 70s versions. Earphones/laptop again.
Later on my wife played an assorted selection of Ska and Reggae on the CD player in the room next door followed by a CD of Argentine Tango tunes which we bought yesterday from a 70+ year old Argentine Tango teacher who led a Tango class that we go to. It was refreshing to hear some unfamiliar music, selected by someone else - and not have to pay too much attention to artist and title.
…and that’s it.
So far I’ve listened to less music this year compared to last. I’ve listened to more music in the company of others rather than on my own - and I’ve not been so OCD about recording what I’ve listened to
#musicdiaryproject
This week, along with many others, I’m going to be taking part in Nick Southall’s Music Diary Project
As with last year, you write down what you listen to from now until Sunday.
Last year I enjoyed reflecting on what I listened to and in what circumstances - mostly on my headphones. It prompted me to listen to music more socially and to listen to more new music.
