Feel crumpled-up today.
- 2007
- 2007
- 2003
- 1999
- ?
- 2004
- 1988
- 1979
- 2001
- 2004
- 2007
Tuesday 30 September 2008
Sunday 28 September 2008
Wednesday 24 September 2008
Saturday 20 September 2008
21.09.08
borrowed & blue 21.09.08The problem about most people who grow up really, really loving music is that they mostly only listen to one type of music, so by the time they hit their late twenties they are bored, they feel like they've heard anything, and that no one is doing anything new anymore - just repeating sounds they suckled on in their youth. There's always a pain barrier in listening to kinds of music that it would never normally occur to you to try out, but once you break through it, it can be as rewarding as listening to ten potential futures of music at once.
- 2007
- 2007
- 2006
- 1976
- 1972
- 2005
- 2006
- 1997
- 1988
- 2003
- 1967
Friday 19 September 2008
20.09.08
Progressive metal is a genre so completely singular that neither of the component genres in its title really accurately describes the music that is tagged under it. Although you would assume it to be musically quite tricky to get your head around, it's actually one of the most staid and stubbornly oblivious musical strains in metal. It's entirely encased in a bubble of its own magnificence, where trends and fads stream past the domed atmosphere, and inside its all perfect key changes and pitch-perfect emoting. What IS tricky for the listener is the use of emotion in these songs. The genre perhaps to a lot of people would mostly sound like MIT-graduate power ballads. The tunes definitely weight themselves around a very overbearing type of emotional delivery, but what is weird is just how completely glassy and emotion-free the actual sound is. Everything sounds so flattened-out and cold and perfect, it almost creates an entirely new emotion altogether, and i think it's THIS emotion that the fantastically-ignored perennial musicians of progressive metal are truly in love with. They feel like they have to shore their autistic absence of human emotion up with lyrical cliches about self-discovery, redemption, a completely hollow kind of love. But in the glassy tinkling of their MIDI-keyboards (actual honest-to-god pianos seem unequivocably absent, instead its always the 'piano' setting of an expensive keyboard, one in a rack of many), you hear a real peace. A kind of joy at finding solace in a space where nothing ever changes, where no juddering dynamics scare or change you, where words and notes are perfect and profound and everything is about shape and form, not texture or meaning. Perfect sound forever.
- 2004
- 2004
- 2006
- 2005
- 1964
- 1970
- 1969
- 1992
- 2008
- 2007
19.09.08
The image to today's post arrived in the mail, suspiciously, without warning or explanation.
- 1987
- 1973
- 1994
- 1988
- 1941
- 1989
- 1974
- 1981
- 1978
- 1998
- 2006
Wednesday 17 September 2008
17.09.08
One rewarding aspect of this almost wilfully naive approach to listening, where eras are puree-ed into sonic paste, is how the actual tunes become freed from context. An also ran new romantic song, for example, released way after the genre itself hurtled over the shark, would in its time sound cliched, cynical and desperate. When you don't know how you would have felt when that song was released first time round, what was the context of its release, what the sound of that year was (this is something i want to come back to in later posts, how a year not only can, but in fact always does have a sound strung through it, that i think only certain people can hear - and i'm not talking about 'tastemakers' here), then all you can hear is the tune. Do you like it? Then that's ok.
- 1992
- 2007
- 1991
- 2005
- 1988
- 2006
- 1992
- 2008
- 2005
- 2004
Tuesday 16 September 2008
16.09.08
I'm still tinkering with the mix process, it isn't completely random but it isn't meant to work as, for instance, a DJ set or something. I think of it more as being like a disembodied radio station, the kind you would fall asleep to late at night when you were a kid, the songs almost psychedically vivid in the state between sleep and awake, but the voices of the presenters blissfully distorted and intangible, all detail obscured.
- 1978
- 2007
- 2007
- 1977
- 1992
- 2007
- 2007
- 1995
Sunday 14 September 2008
14.09.08
Part of the point with the posts was that with each one, I would incrementally give a bit more detail about what I'm doing with the mixes, or at least clues for why I'm doing it. Today, however, I am hungover. Was at a wedding yesterday. So all I will say is that it's kind of interesting to me how despite originally setting out with the intention of creating mixes drawing from all genres and all histories of music, that overwhelmingly the bias is for tunes written and released within my own lifetime (i was born in 1980). Because I wasn't really aware of music much before about 1991, there's a lot of obvious exploration of the decade so ultimately reviled by Prolapse ("The Eighties were CRAP!!! The hairstyles were CRAP!!! The music was CRAP!!!" etc.), but I think on some level I must be clinging to this era because I do only feel like I can properly understand things that occurred in my own lifetime.
Recently I've been working on a collaborative project with a friend, which was originally mooted as being set in a fictional, faraway history, with mangled signifiers running from the 1800s to the 1950s. I found it physically impossible to write in a voice affecting to be that of someone living in the olden days. Instead I've dodged the issue, by writing as much as I can in a voice that sounds like it's something I would say, or one of my friends would say, but obfuscating as much time-sensitive detail as possible. It's going to be a good project. Maybe it's a sign of my limitations as a writer that I can't write in a voice that I don't think in, but also I've never understood why people in their twenties want to pretend they're living in a decade that their parents probably weren't even born in, and in another country. The town I live in is a rockabilly necrophiliarapefest. There's something about contrivance that I just find squeamishly embarrassing.
I'm going to try listening to more old music though.
Recently I've been working on a collaborative project with a friend, which was originally mooted as being set in a fictional, faraway history, with mangled signifiers running from the 1800s to the 1950s. I found it physically impossible to write in a voice affecting to be that of someone living in the olden days. Instead I've dodged the issue, by writing as much as I can in a voice that sounds like it's something I would say, or one of my friends would say, but obfuscating as much time-sensitive detail as possible. It's going to be a good project. Maybe it's a sign of my limitations as a writer that I can't write in a voice that I don't think in, but also I've never understood why people in their twenties want to pretend they're living in a decade that their parents probably weren't even born in, and in another country. The town I live in is a rockabilly necrophiliarapefest. There's something about contrivance that I just find squeamishly embarrassing.
I'm going to try listening to more old music though.
- 1969
- 2006
- 1972
- 1980
- 2007
- 1984
- 1989
- 1984
- 1981
- ?
- 1985
- 1987
- ?
- 2003
Saturday 13 September 2008
Wednesday 10 September 2008
11.09.08
borrowed & blue 11.09.08- Human error means, that, instead of an obscure album track from an eighties pop goddess, we get one of the most overplayed singles of late eighties shoulder pad FM pop. OH WELL. Also: a track from possibly the most reviled album from a rock canon sacred cow. I doubt most people who slate it have actually listened to it... I kind of enjoy how... incorrect... it sounds.
- 2003
- 1995
- 2008
- 2005
- 1983
- 1984
- 1985
- 1966
- 1986
- 1989
- ?
- 2002
- 1978
- 1977
- 1978
Monday 8 September 2008
10.09.08
- 2005
- 2005
- ?
- ?
- ?
- ?
- 2004
- 2004
- 1974
- 1973
- 1973
Sunday 7 September 2008
08.09.08
borrowed & blue 08.09.08There's an absurd lapse into post-Britpop somewhere in the middle of this tape, out of curiosity. It recovers.
- 1996
- 1982
- 1992
- 1977
- 1977
- 2002
- 1997
- 1996
- 2002
- 2005
- 2006
- 2005
- 1956
- 1974
- 1972
Saturday 6 September 2008
06.09.08
borrowed & blue 06.09.08
Having just returned from a 3-day noiseimprovfest, the one parallel i can draw between that and this is how hard it is to second-guess whats coming in the mixes, because there's many of them, because there's so much information.
- 1956
- 2007
- 1982
- ?
- 2008
- 1971
- 1968
- 2008
- 2002
Monday 1 September 2008
02.08.09
These mixes are great for morning journeys. Just about the right length so that you don't get so bored of music that you can't be bothered listening to the rest of it. I don't eat in the mornings, but I think of music as being a bit like food. It's what I use to start the day, and like any food, you don't want to gorge too much on one flavour least you become sick of it, or it makes you sick. borrowed & blue for a healthy, balanced diet.
- 1971
- 2005
- 2002
- 1999
- 2007
- 1976
- 2002
- 1996
- 1969
- 1982
- 1983
- 1997
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