Category: Music

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week Three

    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.

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week Two

    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…

  • Summer Music Project 2008: Week One

    Welcome to summer, friends.

    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.

  • Summer Project 2008: Mic Test & Preview

    I don’t know if I’m ever going to get used to the way I sound when recorded.

    [audio:Summer08/00-PreviewMix.mp3]

    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?

  • You want a rickroll? I’ll give you a rickroll.

    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.

    [audio:Rick-DanceThisWorldAway.mp3]

    I feel dirty now.

  • Part Two: Project Mix Mirror Pretentious

    “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.

    [audio:PMMP-2.mp3]

    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:

    1. Toy Matinee – Last Plane Out
    2. BT – Circles
    3. Depeche Mode – Suffer Well
    4. Duran Duran – Nice
    5. Pet Shop Boys – Integral
    6. VAST – Touched
    7. Kotoko – Iruka
    8. Dada – Surround
    9. Genesis – Feeding The Fire
    10. Yoko Kanno – The Egg and I
    11. Midnight Oil – Return To Sender
    12. Robert Plant – Down To The Sea
    13. Peter Gabriel – Growing Up

    Part Two:

    1. Peter Gabriel – That Voice Again
    2. Robert Plant – Little By Little
    3. Midnight Oil – No Man’s Land
    4. Yoko Kanno – Call Me Call Me
    5. Genesis – Not About Us
    6. Dada – Spinning My Wheels
    7. Kotoko – Re-sublimity
    8. VAST – I Can’t Say No (To You)
    9. Pet Shop Boys – Metamorphosis
    10. Duran Duran – Winter Marches On
    11. Depeche Mode – Halo (live)
    12. BT – Satellite
    13. Kevin Gilbert – All Fall Down

    I hope you enjoyed this little trip into both my psyche and my music library.