This one practically assembled itself, folks. Let’s see: It’s the 4th of July, and I happen to have a song which includes the lyrics, “I just flipped off President George.” Never mind that the song is from 1992 and is about George The First, Dada’s “Dizz Knee Land” fits the modern time very well, thank you.
Let’s go back to the early ’90s for a moment, though. If it wasn’t for the format switch at KGON then I might not be a Dada fan at all today. When Loren Steveson and I threw out all of the “non-classic” discs during the great purge, I snagged a copy Dada’s Puzzle album on general principle (I liked the single well enough but wasn’t sure if the band had blown their creativity on the one track), took it home, and fell in like. No, it wasn’t love, but there’s something about their jangly, trippy California rock sound that works for me when I’m in the right mood.
Picking from the other two Dada albums in my collection, American Highway Flower and their self-titled 1998 release, I follow up their original big hit with “All I Am” and “Spinning My Wheels.”
Enjoy, and we’ll meet again in a week for something a bit more… foreign.
I only ask fifteen minutes of your time, this go-around. The music is modern, innovative and toe-tappingly good. As a bonus, there’s a whole lot less of my aimless yammering to suffer through. What more could you ask?
By next week I’ll probably have the A/C unit in the window. That’s probably going to put a halt to the voice work for the duration of the project, I’m afraid. I had a hard enough time eliminating the outside noise with all of my windows shut, and the air conditioner is altogether too good at letting the outside world into my bedroom. How’s that for planning, eh?
That’s okay, though. I spent half of my time tonight just trying to hunt down the worst of the clicks and pops. Future weeks will be orders of magnitude easier to assemble if all I have to do is mix tracks and write up some color commentary…
I’ll warn you right from the get-go: This one’s a bit wordy, in part because of some introductory material that won’t need repeating. Future installments should feature roughly half the amount of jabberjaw on my part. With that out of the way… let the festivities commence!
Believe it or not, I had this thing done four days in advance. My plan is to have two more in the can by next Friday and maintain an at-least-one-week buffer through the course of the season so I’m not doing last-minute panicky stupid things or (worse) dropping weeks. Anything’s possible, they tell me…
I have no idea whatsoever how this is going to sound on different speakers or headphones from mine, and that scares me because I know how lousy the headset microphone I’m using really is. What might kill this whole project faster than anything is that I might just not be able to stand the lousy production quality anymore.
Oh well. Worse come to worst, you’ll get music mixes with written commentary. That counts for something, I hope.
I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to the way I sound when recorded.
The original plan was to use parts of three different tracks for the music bed so that this would be a proper preview of the Summer Project. Alas, I couldn’t bear to cut away from Yuki Kajiura’s “Melody (Salva Nos version)” and so you get the whole thing. Shucky darn, eh?
Mind you, I also didn’t realize until I’d performed the final mixdown that I completely failed to refer to the music in any way… which is sort of the point of the project in the first place! It just figures.
Enough of playing coy, here’s the deal: I want to highlight fourteen musical artists every Friday from the start of summer until the beginning of autumn. Part of the plan is to record introductory and interstitial material for three songs per week, but I could scrap the voice thing and rely on the written word instead. Hence this test.
So, give it to me straight. Should I do it? Could you stand to listen to my voice once per week for fourteen weeks?
Apparently half of the pranks on the Internet this year involve something called “rickrolling,” and I guess there’s some 80’s pop star involved. Apparently you’re not one of the cool kids until you’ve “rickrolled” somebody.
Fine. I can do that. Here you go. I’m getting it over with. This is a one-time opportunity, so enjoy it while you can.
“Now, my friends, without further ado and to permit those holding their breaths to breathe…” — Masterharper Robinton, from Anne McCaffrey’s “Dragonsinger”
Here, then, is the back half of the crazy project of the week.
Nobody who knows me at all will be surprised to learn that I used to make mix tapes, the real thing, back in the 80s and early 90s. One of my favorite tricks was to use one set of artists or title elements or what-have-you in one sequence for side ‘A’ of the 90-minute cassette and then reverse the sequence for the ‘B’ side. The effect, especially in the popular players of the day which would play both sides of the tape over and over until someone pressed the Stop button (or until the tape jammed or broke), was that of a musical journey, bouncing back and forth along some theme or another.
I moved on to burning CDs when technology left cassettes behind for good, but it’s just not the same. CDs will cheerfully repeat their lone sequence and that’s all they can do. I can’t play the same thematic tricks in a simple circular form that I could with two “sides” of tape. Complexity is limited by the seventy-or-so minutes you have to work with. The one new feature, that of shuffle play, is nearly useless for my purposes.
I must admit, of course, that this little project doesn’t fit the mold of the classic mixtape either. It’s two gigantic MP3 files separated by journal post numbers, launched by two different player widgets, and so forth. All this will really do is give you an idea of the kind of things I like to do, namely playing around with themes and patterns. Oh, and many of these are among my favorite songs, so there’s that benefit as well… dubious as it may be for someone who doesn’t share my particular tastes. (That would be 99.99% of humanity.)
I tried to use one “current” and one “older” song from each artist as well as differing the tone between directions of travel. Duran Duran’s upbeat “Nice” is balanced by the somber “Winter Marches On,” while the Pet Shop Boys’ dystopian “Integral” and exuberant “Metamorphosis” neatly showcase the dark and light sides of their musical output. The plan didn’t always work, and in crafting the two mixes I ended up with imperfect pacing both directions due to the multiple restrictions and challenges I’d faced coupled with my lack of recent practice. I was also forced to cheat a little bit on one of the artist selections, as Kevin Gilbert’s limited musical output didn’t give me any choice if I wanted to keep him in.
Yet, I’m generally happy with how it turned out… all things considered.
Part One:
Toy Matinee - Last Plane Out
BT - Circles
Depeche Mode - Suffer Well
Duran Duran - Nice
Pet Shop Boys - Integral
VAST - Touched
Kotoko - Iruka
Dada - Surround
Genesis - Feeding The Fire
Yoko Kanno - The Egg and I
Midnight Oil - Return To Sender
Robert Plant - Down To The Sea
Peter Gabriel - Growing Up
Part Two:
Peter Gabriel - That Voice Again
Robert Plant - Little By Little
Midnight Oil - No Man’s Land
Yoko Kanno - Call Me Call Me
Genesis - Not About Us
Dada - Spinning My Wheels
Kotoko - Re-sublimity
VAST - I Can’t Say No (To You)
Pet Shop Boys - Metamorphosis
Duran Duran - Winter Marches On
Depeche Mode - Halo (live)
BT - Satellite
Kevin Gilbert - All Fall Down
I hope you enjoyed this little trip into both my psyche and my music library.
As promised, here’s the first installment of my brilliant idea. It’s a there-and-back-again music set using the same artists on the way back as on the way out, in suitably reversed order. I cheated in one particular case, but it was a case of “close enough” as well as “look, he just didn’t put out that many albums, okay?”
So. Enjoy, if you’re so inclined.
If the gods are kind, I’ll have the second half posted tomorrow night…
The guy who draws Dork Tower posted a silly meme a few days ago, and I decided to hop on board. (Hey, I haven’t done one of these in a while. I think I’m allowed.) Mind you, I don’t use iTunes (no Ogg Vorbis support) so all I can do is make Winamp jump through the hoops. Luckily I’m already in the habit of using the Media Library…
So here goes:
How many songs total: 5,028
How many hours or days of music: 15 days, 2 hours, 37 minutes
Most recently played: Dodo/Lurker by Genesis
Most played: Integral by Pet Shop Boys (10 times) *
Most recently added: “Version 2.0″ (album) by Garbage **
Sort by song title:
First Song: #1 Crush by Garbage
Last Song: Zoot Suit Riot by Cherry Poppin’ Daddies
Sort by time:
Shortest Song: Vitamin C by Yoko Kanno (Cowboy Bebop OST #2 “No Disk,” 0:06) ***
Longest Song: Sasha’s Voyage of Ima by BT (”Ima” CD#2, 42:45) ****
Sort by album:
First album: “10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1″ by Midnight Oil
Last album: “Zone Of The Enders OST” *****
First song that comes up on Shuffle: I’m With Stupid by Pet Shop Boys
Search the following and state how many songs come up: ******
Death - 9
Life - 71
Love - 190
Hate - 31
You - 377
Sex - 9
Most Represented Artist: Genesis (233 tracks) *******
Footnotes:
* I’ve only recently gotten into the habit of using the Media Library. Otherwise there’d be songs with much higher play counts.
** I had to find this the old-fashioned way: Doing a date search in the file directory. Winamp seems not to track my “recently added” very well for some reason.
*** I’d have found the shortest “proper” song in the list, but I ran out of time this morning. The first dozen entries were “non-songs” of one sort or another. So I gave up.
**** Which beat out Genesis’ “Supper’s Ready,” the previous (three) contender(s) (original and two live renditions), by almost twenty minutes!
***** Last studio album, not a single, by a proper band: Worldillia by Porno Graffitti
****** In Winamp, file path and album are included in all searches. These numbers are therefore inflated a little bit. Yes, this annoys me but there seems to be no way to search only in the title of a song. (Argh.)
******* By no means is all of my Genesis music ripped to MP3 or Ogg. The same is true for most of my other favorite artists, actually. That first number (~5000 tracks) would be much, much higher if I really wanted to go crazy with the digital music library…
I’ve not yet left the United States to see foreign parts, but my music collection has gone far and wide. In a bit less than an hour you can visit the Congo, Amlapura, Kashmir, Beirut, London, Leipzig, Moscow, Bangkok, swing through California (domestic and yet alien), and end up in a couple of very cold places like the mountain K2 and the continent of Antarctica.
Have you packed your bags, or at least your headphones? Okay then, enjoy your trip!
This post is part challenge, part present to you, my faithful readers. (The rest of you schmucks are just getting lucky. Hah!)
Several times during the last few weeks I’ve answered the question, “What kind of music do you like?” Rattling off a list of musical artists provides a clue, perhaps, but I think the only way to make sense out of the mish-mash of names is to hear what kind of sound puts a tap in my foot and a smile on my face. And so, I’ve carefully assembled what amounts to a broadcast hour of solid music. No commercials, no chatter, just tunes I love by some of my favorite musicians.
It’s up to you to a) see if you can stand listening to every song and b) try to discern who, if not what, you’re hearing. Ready? Steady? Go!
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