Tag Archives: music - Page 4

Another Brick In The Closet

Posted by on September 6, 2018 1 comment

Last year, before the holidays, I found a nice, massive keyboard sitting unloved at a thrift store.  I assume it was still sitting there because anyone that tested it would have found it to be broken.  I, however, am foolish enough to buy things without any consideration of functionality.  So I brought this keyboard home, discovered it was broken, and proceeded to fix it up enough to make it work.  And it’s been sitting in my closet ever since, waiting for its moment of glory.

On this most recent holiday, I saw something else at a thrift shop – a nice, tiny keyboard.  The price was right, so I bought it – untested as is my way.  As soon as I got the device to the car, I realized it was broken.  One of the controller knobs was completely snapped off.  Oh well.  The price was right.  Let’s get it home and see if it even powers up and makes noise.

I got it home and it powered up and made no sound.  Well, it made a buzzing sound, sometimes.  I started doing some online research and learned that this particular synth has a well known issue with that control knob failing (not sure if being broken off is considered “failing”).  So replacements are generally easy to get.  At this point, I don’t even know if that’s the actual problem.  But let’s take a step back and look at this thing.

This little bugger is the Alesis Micron, which is an analog modeling synthesizer.  It originally sold for $400 back in 2004.  It still sells for about $200 on the used market.  I got it for $7.50, half-off the original $15 price.  So you see, it was worth the gamble.  I’ve spent far more on far less (which should be my life’s motto).

When I saw “analog modeling synthesizer” on it, I got really excited.  The only synth of that type I’d really known about before dropping out of the music scene was the Nord Modular, which I remember being a 4-figure keyboard.  These types of keyboards emulate the older synths of the 70s and 80s. and they typically do it very well.  They also have a lot of the features of older synths like arpeggiators (for playing Who Are You) and vocoders (for playing Mr. Blue Sky).  There is a video on Youtube of someone playing Mr. Mister’s Kyrie live and solo on the Micron. But before I can have that kind of fun, this device needs repair.

I have a couple of options.  I can just replace the knob (a potentiometer, if you want to sound cool), which requires some soldering work.  The part costs less than $2 (plus shipping), and of course, I’ll need a new knob button to cap it off.  Yeah, that’s one option, or I can buy a whole new control board with knob for $40.  That’s the plug and play option and the one I opted for.  That and the cap were about $50, so if this works out, I will have a really neat new synth for a little under $60.  And then, it can sit in my closet, too.  How stupid.

It is dumb, but I have a lot of fun rescuing junk and making it (or trying to make it) usable.  I should consider myself fortunate this desire is just for musical equipment and not, say, cats.

The parts are currently being shipped and I should have them next week.  Let’s hope I have as much success with this little Alesis as I did with the huge Alesis.

You Shall Be Known By Your Stars

Posted by on August 28, 2018 No comments

A while ago, I had read a post online by a music collector where he had just completed a goal of listening to and rating every song in his library.  It only took him five years to do it.  Bravo for that level of effort.  The consideration of doing something similar for myself led me to attempt to define what a rating system would look like for me.

The “for me” thing is the most important part.  Ratings are entirely subjective, and still at the same time, they must be well-defined and rigid.  That feels weird to me, “this is precisely how it must be… for me.”  But weird or not, in order to begin rating my albums (and/or songs), I need to have a stick to measure with.

In my consideration of rating my music, I determined that there’s two levels of ratings, at the song level and at the higher album level.  These two ratings more or less correspond with the way I would listen to the music, either absorbing an entire album at a time, for example, playing a CD while driving, or, listening to a playlist while sitting at a computer or through the Plex server.  So, having the two different types of ratings is moderately important.

A 5-star rating applied to a song is pretty straightforward.  How much do I like the song?  That’s an important question because the question is not, how good is the song? That open-ended question carries with it every sub-question imaginable, summed up as, how good is it by what metric?  So, every song would start at 3 stars, being neutral, and the likelihood I’d want to hear it again adds or subtracts one or two stars.  But, I don’t plan on rating every one of my songs in any near future, so I don’t feel concerned with this scheme.

Albums, though, would get rated on a totally different scale and I thought hard on this.  The answer lies in the composition of the songs on the album.  My scale is as such:

5 – A top-notch album.  Any song could be played individually in a playlist and the album would be enjoyed played beginning to end.

4 – An excellent album. Most songs could be included in playlists, but the album is stronger than the individual tracks.

3 – A good album.  Some songs could be included in playlists, and the album could be played beginning to end without feeling the need to skip any tracks.

2 – An album with some good songs.  A few songs could be included in playlists and some songs would be skipped when playing as an album.

1 – Few to no good songs.  Very unlikely the album would be played except to hear the good songs (if any).  It might be a curiosity or kept for completist reasons.

Here’s the problem with rating things.  People want to love things more than they really do.  They tend to ignore the flaws and focus on the good.  That’s great in the world of human relations (although it’s just as unsustainable as in any other application).  So, in rating my music, it was important to have a clearly-defined way to avoid excessive 5-star ratings.  Once it was absolutely clear that 5 stars was highly-rarified territory, and that it wasn’t through any fault of the artist, the pressure of saying an album is “the best of the best” subsides.

To explain, consider an album that has some segue between songs, presented as another track.  It’s unlikely you would include the short 30 second clip in a playlist, thus – excluded.  4-star max.  Or you have an album like Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, which has two 20-some minute tracks.  It’s not likely you want your playlist to be stalled for 20 minutes.  Same for Rush’s 2112.  Alternately, maybe a long song is chopped up into multiple tracks.  The song would make no sense played on shuffle in a playlist.  These examples explain the emphasis on “album” for the 4-star rating.  The album is designed as a linear experience, and there should be no shame that it is capped at 4 stars.

The interesting aspect about that rating system is that mediocre albums can be 5-star.  If there’s an album – I can think of a couple of jazzy instrumental albums – where every song stands on its own and could be played individually, but it’s not an album that particularly excites me.  So all the songs would be rated as 3 stars, but the album itself would be 5 stars.  These would be cases where I would add an entire album to a playlist instead of individual songs.

Along with the stress of wanting to rate albums higher than they belong is the admission that an album is not strong as you want it to be.  Tastes change, so that shouldn’t be an issue, but you know, I used to play that album all the time!  I am curious to see how many low-rated albums I really have.  I would guess it’s probably higher than I would expect, because I have been branching out into lots of different artists simply because it’s so cheap to buy CDs.

But the bottom line is, the baseline rating is 3 stars.  Would I put the CD in the car and listen to it all the way through?  If I would skip tracks, it drops to 2 stars.  I probably wouldn’t even take a 1-star album in the car. *cough* Spin Doctors *cough*

Migrating Music

Posted by on August 1, 2018 No comments

I had mentioned in my last post that I was testing out the possibilities of streaming my music collection throughout my house and elsewhere.  The experiment has been pretty successful and I believe the cat is all the happier for it.  Some of the “phase 2” features I’ve been digging into haven’t been as easy to implement as I would have hoped, but there’s no rush on any of those.  But in the process of learning and applying, I made what could be considered a radical change to my music collection.

In long-ago posts, I’d talked about ripping my CDs to MP3, then re-ripping them in WMA Lossless only to delete it all and keep my MP3s.  Then the light bulb came on and I re-ripped them again to WMA Lossless and have kept that library for years now.  It’s grown to nearly 450GB and has served me well all this time.

Why WMA Lossless?  Well, I was in the Zune ecosystem all that time.  The Zune software was compatible with WMA and it was the only way to get lossless files onto the players.  For many years the open source crows have been squawking, “FLAC! FLAC, FLAC!” and I have been ignoring them.  Because of Zune, of course, but also, all the available FLAC music players sucked.

But finally, Microsoft caved to the pressure and built FLAC support into Windows 10, and the Groove player also now supports FLAC.  I still had my WMA library and was fine with it.  But in reality, I didn’t really use the Zune software much anymore, I just used VLC (which supports FLAC) instead. 

During my experimentation with Plex, I enjoyed a neat little feature that lets you see the current server activity.  That means I can watch the living room TV’s stream and see what song my cat is currently listening to.  Something that caught my attention on that screen was a status that said “Transcoding WMALOSSLESS to AAC”.  This was mildly concerning.  It meant that my media server was spending extra CPU converting my media files to a format the Roku on the TV could handle.  My server is pretty beefy, so like I say, it was only mildly concerning.  However, when I streamed my library to the GF’s Roku on her TV, I experienced some slight dropouts or other minor disruptions in the audio.  I wasn’t sure if this was a bandwidth problem or a conversion problem.  I read up a little on FLAC and it seemed FLAC might be a better choice for efficient decoding and possibly for streaming.

I gave this a little consideration.  If I converted my entire library to FLAC, it’s likely I wouldn’t need to do any transcoding anymore.  I could still play my files with VLC or Groove or Plex – no more Zune devices.  Is there really any downside anymore?  And so, I downloaded a program to batch convert my entire collection to FLAC.  It was about 4 hours of processing time, which actually isn’t too bad.  All the metadata was preserved (and some bad data was exposed along the way).  And I saved about 50GB of drive space, too.  I deleted my old WMA files and replaced them all with FLAC.

Because my collection was all new files, I had to refresh the Plex database, which probably means I’ll have to clean up the artwork again, but that’s fine.  I also need to rebuild the playlists I’d been curating, which is more of a bummer, but hopefully it’s a chance to do it better this time.  I quickly recreated the cat’s playlist and when I streamed it to the TV this morning, the activity monitor in Plex stated “Direct Play”.  No more transcoding – success!

Because I’m generally a contrarian, it hurts just a tiny bit to fall in with the FLAC crowd, because they’ve always been a bit pompous, like “if you’re not using FLAC, you’re an idiot” in the same way Linux people tout the wonders of their chosen OS.  But, the solution is working and I can’t complain about that.  So, now I have an Android phone and a music collection in FLAC.  I suppose the next thing I need to do is start coding in PHP and Angular.JS.

KATT Radio – Late Night Jazz

Posted by on July 24, 2018 No comments

My CD collection is pretty large right now.  I’ve surpassed 1200 albums and I’m not sure there’s ever going to be an end to the growth.  Sometimes, the realization of this prompts some soul-searching and the question comes up, “why?”  Yes, why do I do this?  What is the actual goal?  There is no real goal, it’s just an ongoing feeling of happiness, tending my collection like a garden.  But sometimes, the thought sneaks in, “That’s a lot of stuff to have.  You can only listen to one CD at a time.”

That’s right.  It is a lot of stuff for such a limited use.  It’s too bad I couldn’t share the awesomeness of it all with people.  And that thought led me down a path that ended up with me considering another potentially obsessive hobby – running a radio station!  You can get low-power AM radio station licenses pretty cheaply.  I started thinking up radio programs and what kind of expenses would come along with such an idea.  Everyone knows there’s no live radio now and all DJs pre-program their sets in advance.  I could easily do that, right?  No one really wants to hear my voice, so it wouldn’t be a banter kind of station, just music.  Hell, anyone can create a playlist, right?  That’s all a radio station is anymore.

But that idea faded as I thought about the reality of trying to make enough music shows (I mean playlists) to keep the station interesting (as I daydream about upending my local radio stations… ha).  So I considered an easier route:  An Internet radio station.  And I researched that and found I could get licensing for about $60/mo, and the licensing software would integrate with some common radio software.  I looked in the radio DJ software and immediately felt less enthusiastic.  It’s like my dilemma when I want to do music.  You have to master this software before you can actually start a project.  And by the time you understand how, you don’t care anymore.

At the same time I was kicking around this idea of broadcasting in my mind, I was pursuing another thought.  The idea that I had all this music doing nothing was nagging at me a little.  I do rip all of my CDs to my home computer (sitting at about 430GB right now) for playback at my desk.  And the idea that I could only really play it at my desk was a slight annoyance.  That’s a lot of music to sit there and do nothing.  So I gave consideration to how to broadcast it.  It would be a nice start to have devices throughout my home that could play my ripped music.  It would be even cooler if I could play it from my phone, anywhere.

As it turns out, there is such a way to do it.  Actually there’s plenty of ways to do it.  And the idea wasn’t all that new to me.  Back in my Zune days, there was a way to have Zune broadcast your music and videos to an XBox.  And I was actually sort of on board with that.  But since I never actually went through with buying an XBox and pursuing the “media center” dream, I had to reconsider my options.  As it turns out, the old XBox software grew up and broke its dependency on XBox.  That software is now called Plex.  And this software will broadcast to all kinds of devices, near and far.  Lots of people use Plex to share their music and videos with their friends.  That’s pretty cool, whether legal or not.

So I installed Plex on my home computer and had it go to town on my music library.  It grabbed a ton of info on my albums and artists from last.fm and it was flexible enough to let me edit anything left over on my own.  I went out to my living room and installed the Plex client on my Samsung TV.  It worked, which was impressive.  What wasn’t impressive was my TV’s sound quality.  So, I wrote the experiment off as useless.

Fast forward to today, I was dealing with cat issues.  My new cat has millennial-grade anxiety about everything.  Every sound freaks him out.  He hid under a bed for days, leading me to think he was dying.  But in the short time I’ve had him, I’ve discovered he likes music – a lot.  He likes a lot of the new age, smooth jazz instrumental music I like.  So I thought I would start playing it while I was out of the house, maybe to keep him chilled out.  I was getting ready to grab a Sansa Clip MP3 player and was sort of dreading all the work that would go along with that.  The player needs charged, I have to choose the music to play, the music has to be transcoded to fit onto the Clip, there won’t be a lot of music on there.  This was going to suck.  But wait, I have my entire music library available to stream to my TV.  And I doubt the cat is going to be overly picky about the sound quality…

So I popped back on the living room TV and this time installed the Plex client for the Roku.  It installed quickly and I was off and browsing my collection.  I chose Acoustic Alchemy, which was the music he had heard on his transport to my house.  I played all tracks from all albums on shuffle.  And it just worked.  My TV has a video mode where you can turn the screen off and just use the audio, so I didn’t have to worry about screen burn-in.  I think I have a solution here.

I came back from dinner and the cat was not hiding under a bed, so I consider the music plan a success.  I will try again tomorrow while I’m at work and see how well that works.  And in time, I can build a huge playlist of instrumental songs for him – his own radio station.

Things I Can Do Without

Posted by on June 29, 2018 2 comments

Whether my newest CD finds are 80’s pop (Phil Collins) or 80’s metal (Mercyful Fate), I am constantly irritated by shitty lyrics.  It could explain my preference for instrumental music.  The two previously mentioned examples have shitty lyrics for completely different reasons, but most of my gripes are with pop music.  Last night was Loverboy and I think I pulled a muscle rolling my eyes so much.

At the top of my hate list for shitty lyrics is rhyming girl with world.  I’m not a huge fan of near rhymes anyways, but this combo just really grates on me.  It’s not like there aren’t other options, even if they are somewhat weird.  “Curls” and “pearl” (both Rick Springfield) or “unfurl” (XTC) are somewhat daring choices to rhyme with “girl”, but whenever I hear “girl” in a song, I will sing along and try my damnedest to fit in the most superior rhyme: squirrel.  You should try it too.

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She was… an American squirrel.

This has to be a well-known substitution, but anyway… It’s shitty that so many songs want to talk about love, but the options for rhyming with love are terrible.  You know them all: shove, dove, above.  There you go.  Instead, just start changing the word love to drug or drugs (drug if using love as a verb, drugs if noun).  It is a universal replacement.

Another sore point for me is how songwriters completely do not get the concept of “forever”.  Forever is a long time, and even if the song says that line specifically, it’s still not accurate.  Forever is forever, long after everything in the universe has died.  And you want tonight to last that long?  You’re insane, buddy. You’re going to wait that long?  It’s impossible.

Along with forever is the reference to eyes.  Oooh, eyes are the window to the soul.  So expressive!  So vulnerable!  Yeah, well, notice how often songwriters will use 3 beats when talking about eyes: “in your eyes”, “in my eyes”, “sultry eyes”, back door eyes”, “(dun) (dun)… eyes”.  Here’s a game changer for you.  Next time in your car playing secret karaoke with the lame pop music blaring, substitute any of these three-beat phrases with “penis size” and see how often it fits.  Try it now.

It took so long to realize/I see you now through your lies/There’s got to be more to love than…

The 80’s Synth Invasion

Posted by on April 18, 2018 No comments

As my music collection grows exponentially, I find it doesn’t grow in any sort of order.  It grows opportunistically.  For example, I don’t particularly buy what I want, I buy what’s available.  And that’s fine, because my tastes are broad enough (and always growing) that there’s always something I’m willing to buy.

It was a little while ago that I picked up my first album by Survivor.  You know, Eye Of The Tiger and all that.  Actually, that was the album I got.  When you’re familiar with a band’s hits and you want to become invested in them, you can take the easy route and buy the greatest hits album, or you can be a man and just buy an album.  At thrift store CD prices, being a man doesn’t cost a whole lot, so that’s where I went.  And I liked it.  They had a good sound and I put Survivor on the list for future album purchases.

That day came a bit later when I picked up another of their albums.  It was my morning commute CD today.  And my experience with the album really led me to thinking deeper about music in the 80s.  Eye of the Tiger was released in 1982 and the album I was listening to came out in 1986.  My thoughts led me to create a shitastic “comic” to express my thoughts.

the80sinstruments

The initial point I was trying to make is that the ‘86 album had 10 songs, and 9 of those songs were all keyboard, with the guitar relegated to chunking out 8th notes for rhythm.  The closing track was guitar-driven and really felt out of place with the rest of the album.

Something clicked with me when I listened to each song as it started out with synthesizer chords.  I felt really sorry for the guitar player – well, main guitar player.  The keyboardist also played some guitar.  I suddenly understood the huge pushback against synths from rock acts, which, being a keyboard player myself, I never really appreciated.

Survivor isn’t the only recent instance I noticed this, although it was the most visceral.  I had recently picked up Europe’s album Wings of Tomorrow.  Everyone knows The Final Countdown, sure.  And if you heard the rest of The Final Countdown album, it is also very synth heavy, but it is also well-balanced with guitar work.  But on Wings of Tomorrow, which is the album just before The Final Countdown, there are hardly any synths at all.  The change is remarkable.  Also from the 80’s is the band GTR, a band that was formed by two guitarists who wanted a guitar-driven album.  That’s how bad it was back then.  I didn’t grasp how much of a statement they were making.

Then the Linn drum machine came along and it started to put the pressure on drummers.  Now they could be replaced with rock-solid precision that could be edited at will.  Gina Schock had to fight with the producer to play on The Go-Go’s Talk Show album.  And Mutt Lange, I love his sound, but his reliance on drum machines really grates on me.  I still remember when my innocence was broken when I realized the ZZ Top album I loved so much had no real drums on it.  And then it began a real-or-not hunt on every album I had, which is not how music is supposed to be.

But there is an infinite palette of music out there for consumption.  I can lament Survivor softening up into a synth ballad band or I can just put on any hair metal from the same era and hear guitar.  There is always something on offer from some band, even if it’s not the band you want to hear it from.  Guitar songs never really went away, they just spread out.  And with my ever-expanding collection, I still find them.

Light Music, Heavy Music, Light Words, Heavy Words

Posted by on April 13, 2018 2 comments

With 1,200 CDs in my collection, it’s probably an understatement to say I have a broad taste in music.  Yes, I do have concentrations of genres and time periods, but I can wander pretty far away from center.  And because of that, I feel sorry for people who are stuck on the same band or the same type of music, or who only know things that are on the radio.

Some music is challenging to me, that which I call avant-garde.  The Residents fall into this group, because I typically hear their music as a bunch of noise, or as music constructed so simplistically I can’t take it seriously.  And because of that difficultly to connect with the music, I consider that music to be heavy – even if they’re playing three notes over and over on a toy piano.  I say it’s heavy because it takes effort to listen to it. 

I also have a liking for death metal.  but not all death metal.  Death is one of my favorites because I find the whole thing hilarious.  Like there’s no way you can take the idea of someone vomiting up their own internal organs seriously.  It’s the audio equivalent of watching a horror movie.  But then there’s Sepultura, which is a Brazilian death metal band.  English isn’t their primary language, but they try.  And when I hear the broken English about the topics they write about, I just get the feeling they mean it a little more, because after all, they did try and translate it.  And that bugs me.

But then on the other end of the scale, I do like Indigo Girls.  But Indigo Girls, to me, is heavy, too.  I suppose you’re probably thinking: your evaluation of music is so fucked up.  But hear me out.  Indigo Girls isn’t heavy music, it’s heavy lyrics.  And I don’t mean heavy as in they make you go, “Whoa, man, that’s deep.” (Yes will do that well enough, thank you.)  I mean that their lyrics are SO weighted with metaphor it becomes unbearable to listen to for a long time.  I mean, I can handle a few metaphors in a song, but when you have to squeeze one in every verse, or god forbid, every stanza, well, it’s gonna wear me down.

Indigo Girls is nothing like Sammy Hagar, who I don’t think would ever get kudos for being a deep lyricist.  That’s not entirely fair, because there’s some of Hagar’s stuff that actually has some potential emotion in it.  But I consider his lyrics to be light and breezy.  Don’t think about them too much and just go with the vibe – usually partying and sex.  It doesn’t take a large vocabulary to express that stuff.

I was once talking with a woman about music and she told me that words were everything to her.  Well, that was kind of a problem because I really like instrumental music.  She was really, really into 38 Special, which isn’t bad, but it’s pretty light on both music and lyrics.  And there’s definitely a place for it.  I like 38 Special when driving because I don’t have to think much about it.

But my point was going to be that words themselves aren’t “everything” to me.  A lot of times, I can listen to a song for years and never know the lyrics.  I’ll know the important ones, but I may miss out on whole concepts in the verses.  I recall one time, I looked up the lyrics for a song I loved and the story wasn’t anything like I thought it was.  It ruined the song for me.

Because of my non-reliance on the lyrics, I shouldn’t really have a problem with foreign music, and in many cases I don’t.  I have some German punk rock and you can probably guess, you don’t need to know what they’re saying.  It’s just aggression from start to end.  And that works for the song.

I suspect for some people, the thresholds of light and heavy, whether musically or lyrically are much lower, so their breadth of music consumption is more limited.  On rare occasions, I daydream about being a teacher in school teaching Music Appreciation.  My experience in high school for Music Appreciation class was kind of a joke.  It was people bringing in tapes of songs they like, we all listen to it, then the teacher makes some commentary on it.  One time, we were listening to Bon Jovi’s “Livin’ On A Prayer”.  We all knew the song well enough since it was playing everywhere at the time, and just when the chorus changed key, the teacher jumped up and stopped the tape.  “You hear that!  That’s a key modulation and it’s used to generate more excitement in the song.”  Yeah thanks, you just killed the excitement we all just got from the key modulation.  Me, being one of the few musicians in the class, did the outrageous.  I brought in Rush’s La Villa Strangiato and drew out all the themes on the blackboard and pointed out how the themes entered and reprised throughout the nine minute song.

My approach to music appreciation would literally be a class on how to listen to music.  Start with rhythm – learn how to count a beat, learn odd time signatures. Learn how songs are structured, so you can say things like, intro, verse, chorus, bridge, and coda with confidence.  Learn about instrumentation, so you understand the application of sparse arrangement and dense arrangement.  Probably some other stuff as well (like minor/major keys), but after the foundations are laid, then start with genres, and break the songs down based on past lessons.  That’s how music appreciation should be, teaching you how to appreciate a wide variety of music.

So, Are YOU A Collector? Clearly Not.

Posted by on April 12, 2018 No comments

As I posted recently, I went on a CD safari and ended returning with 20 CDs.  15 of those were purchased from two flea market vendors, both of whom said they were collectors.

In the first booth I went to, I felt I was in a hurry for time, so I scanned the discs very quickly, looking for smooth cases.  However, I saw one CD that I had scored on my last flea market trip that was a valuable find.  The CD wasn’t in a a smooth case (actually a shitty, flimsy case), so I was curious what a normal edition of that album looked like.  When I opened the case, I was surprised.  Similar to my previous reaction to finding gold, I said, “Oh, it’s a red-faced Polydor.  Nice.”

Only a real geek would say “a red-faced Polydor”, right?  That’s a statement that would come out of the mouth of an orthinologist.  Like, you should log that in a bird-watching book along with the time and location.  But, I didn’t log it, I bought it.  WHY?  I already had one and it was a valuable one at that!  Sometimes, you can’t explain these things to collectors.  Different is good.

When I got home and cleaned the CDs all up, I researched what I had purchased.  Now you may recall the post about my $300 find for $3.  Well, this time, I paid $5, and wouldn’t you know it?  Someone has paid over $500 for this CD.

image

I now have both of these CDs.  What’s the difference?  100% appearance.  These are the two CDs.  They have the same music.

image1 image2

And when I say they have the same music, I checked.  They DO.  I posted this on Relative Waves.  It’s the same.

That’s two waveforms overlaid on each other.  There’s no green or white peeking out anywhere.  That means no differences. SAME SAME SAME.

Anyway.  So now I have a new most valuable CD.  Again, by a large margin.  In fact, my collection value went up by over $1000 from this last trip.  After all, I did find a bunch of other rarities.

Music Transcends Spirituality, Or Does It?

Posted by on April 11, 2018 2 comments

On my recent mega-thrift run, I picked up a particular CD from a thrift shop.  The thrift shop had one of those CD sections where everything was religious music.  The CD caught my eye because the title was “Portraits in Synthesis” and the cover was very new-agey, although the back design was a little chaotic.  The CD seemed like it would be a nice new-age synthesizer instrumental album, so I spent a couple bucks and got it.

When I got home, with my 19 other CDs, I took a better look at the back and saw the tracks were named all… uncomfortable names.  Things like, “Fairest Lord Jesus”, and “Lord Be Glorified / Spirit Song”, and the rest were similar.  Of course my reaction was, “Goddamn it.  This is a religious album.”  And I left it on the kitchen table while I cleaned up and cataloged my other finds.

The next day, I saw the disc sitting on the counter and picked up it again.  I read more of the back and realized, yes, it was a synth album.  It just had weird song titles.  I looked inside the booklet and there were no lyrics, so, yes, it’s instrumental.  What’s the deal with these titles?

I researched the label the album was published under and learned that it was a subsidiary of a religious music label.  This new child label was made to take advantage of the growing “new age” music popularity of the 80’s.  How weird.  When I think new-age, I actually think of “anti-religion”, not in any evil way, but you know, new-age spirituality. 

Think of the issues that come up when Christian music lovers can’t listen to new-age music because it conflicts with their personal beliefs.  “I can’t listen to this because it’s new-age, and that involves crystals and tantra and whatever a chakra is!”  Well, music finds a way, right?  We’ll publish the same kind of music, but we’ll use religious titles that invoke the names Lord and Jesus and then there’s no moral conflict!  What a genius idea!  It’s genius, but it’s sad, too.  Music doesn’t have any religious affiliation.  It’s agnostic.  And the sad part is that agnosticism isn’t good enough for devout believers.  If it doesn’t fully walk the walk and talk the talk, it’s evil.

I was testing out my car stereo after doing some work on it and the only radio station I could pick up was the local religious station.  Go figure, huh?  And some woman had called in to talk to the radio host and explain how she loved the station and how it gave her whole house a worshipping feel all the time.  That’s what you want your whole life to be?  Like you’re in church all day?

But I try to keep in mind the lyrics from NOFX’s Happy Guy, from Punk In Drublic (Something the devout would never hear anyway):

Don’t try to judge him, his theologian ideal
His hopes may be false but his happiness is real
Don’t try to judge him, he’s just a man

Listen To This Story

Posted by on March 26, 2018 1 comment

amin_bhatia_the_interstellar_suiteOn a regular CD shopping run last week, I picked up a random album.  I didn’t know the artist, much less the album, but the name was intriguing: The Interstellar Suite By Amin Bhatia.  Peeking inside the case, the liner notes stated: “The orchestral textures on this recording are a complex blend of synthesizers.”  Well, consider me sold.

The tracks of the album were named very specifically and initially it somewhat bothered me.  Songs named explicitly like, LAUNCH: Mission Control and Liftoff/Jumping to the Speed of Light. Another one was: BATTLE: Planning the Attack/Return Fire/The Last Missile.  I wasn’t entirely keen on being told what I should be thinking about as the songs are playing.  Despite that, I did review the track names as each song came on.

So let me say first off that this is an amazing album for many reasons.  The music is exquisitely composed and performed.  It is extremely orchestral and melodic and that’s made even more impressive because it’s done on a collection of synthesizers circa 1987.  The first track reminds me strongly of ELP’s Pirates and has a lot of John Williams influence, which isn’t a bad thing.  The thing that makes this album stand out from a Star Wars soundtrack, is the addition of sound effects, including some minor character dialog and atmospheric sounds.  And maybe it’s just the geek in me, but space ship launches and flybys and missiles and lasers and explosions, all rendered by 80’s synthesizers… consider me a fan.

I have probably played this a dozen times on repeat; it does not get old for me.  And that part is what is most interesting to me.  This particular album is what is termed “program music”, which I had not been exposed to before.  With program music, the songs are meant to conjure up specific imagery in your mind as you listen to them.  And this album does that amazingly well.  To carry the example of Star Wars, when you hear the Star Wars themes, you can visualize the scenes in your head, you’ve seen this before.  But there’s no movie with this album, all you have are the song titles, which I originally thought were too much.

Something about me is that I don’t re-read books.  I also don’t re-watch movies (except concert videos).  So, I find it peculiar that this album is very much like a movie or a book in that it tells a story, but unlike books and movies, I can leave it on repeat.  In fact, I’m playing it right now.  It’s a soundtrack for a movie that was never made or a book that was never written.  It’s also theme park music.  If you’ve gone to any Disney or Universal park, there is atmospheric music playing all the time that keeps you in the theme of the sub-park you are currently walking though.  This music would not be out of place in the slightest.

Hearing this music has made me think of a couple things.  I have a project limping slowly forward that involves a musical soundtrack.  Hearing this suite of music has given me serious reservations of calling my music a soundtrack.  Despite that feeling, I also realize that I have done something similar to this before, although nowhere near as grand.  It was a short-lived time where I wrote two multi-track songs I called Spy Song and Airlock.  The first was a short little song that could be considered intro/chase scene/romance scene/intro reprise.  And Airlock was just a short scene of someone trapped in a space ship and eventually ejected into space.  Neither of these little songs would be useable for any projects just because they’re too short – a couple minutes or so.

So I now have a whole other genre of music to explore now.  I used to buy random CDs at pawn shops when I felt my listening habits were getting stale, but I haven’t done anything like that for a long time.  And sometimes you get really lucky when you do that.