What do you get the guy who is going nuts trying to fill in missing metadata in his iTunes database? The Sun Records Discography is a good start, searchable by title or artist name, and yielding song title… and year.
Yeah. That’s a start.
Category: Music
New Mission of Burma, lots of 12″ vinyl
All you Mission of Burma fans and radio folks might want to check out the discussion about the forthcoming Mission of Burma album, The Obliterati, at Pitchfork. Clint Conley says that the band is rolling out a “singles club” in which 8 of the 14 album tracks will be released on 12″ vinyl—and as CD singles. The subscription club has unfortunately sold out—but I got mine, heh heh heh. If the demand for these singles is any indication, it will be Mission of Burma’s second post-reunion album that will be the real story of their career.
Friday Random 10: classical and s/t edition
It’s that time: yes, the posting well has run dry. What comes up on the ol’ iPod?
- “Waitin’ for a Superman,” Flaming Lips
- “Allegro impetuoso“ (Górecki’s Kleines Requiem für eine Polka), London Sinfonietta
- “Sunway,” Rob Wasserman
- Gloria (Ludwig Senfl’s Missa L’homme Armé), the Suspicious Cheese Lords
- “Missing,” Everything But The Girl
- “17,” Smashing Pumpkins
- “Olive Pressing Song,” Unidentified Italian male chorus (field recording)
- “Laura,” Scissor Sisters
- “M.I.A.,” M.I.A.
- “Minor Threat,” Minor Threat
Background and instructions for this meme in my inaugural Random 10 post.
The eighties never die
New at Art of the Mix: your scary 80s 5 and your scary 80s 6. As I write on the site, odd-numbered volumes in this series contain songs that I’m ashamed to remember (e.g. “I Can’t Wait” by Nu Shooz), and even volumes contain songs I wish I had listened to at the time.
Copies will be on the way shortly to the usual suspects; if you’d like to be a usual suspect, let me know.
I’ve been trying to make these for several months, but it took a long time to put them together. Sometimes making these themed mixes feels like I’m clearing my throat… it’s necessary but there’s something else I have to say. Not sure what that is yet.
Ensemble Robot!!!!!
Very cool. One of my favorite former wine store clerks and MIT grads, Christine Southworth, is branching out from her gamelan-inspired composition to writing new works for new instruments. Specifically, she has an upcoming concert with a new group, Ensemble Robot, at the Museum of Science on Wednesday. Featuring “an 8-foot tall double-helix-shaped xylophone played by electromagnetic hammers,” “a flower-like instrument that opens and closes, with small, motor-powered fans to pluck strings,” and “a large tetrahedron of air pistons, controlled by compressed air“ that plays organ pipes as it opens and closes. Rawk!!
Friday Random 10
Thanks to Zalm for cluing me into the existence of this meme. Normally I avoid memes but this one fits my blog nicely. (Instructions; speculation on the origin of the meme.)
- “Banana Co,” Radiohead
- “The Last of the Famous International Playboys,” Morrissey
- “Mr. Grieves,” Pixies
- “Billy Boy,” Miles Davis
- Cardoso: Requiem, 2. Kyrie, The Tallis Scholars
- “It Happened in Monterey,” Frank Sinatra
- “Sprout and the Bean,” Joanna Newsom
- “Vacation,” the Go Gos
- “Breathless,” Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds
- “Five String Serenade,” Mazzy Star
Not too bad. With all the 80s crap music I’m listening to right now for my Scary 80s mix (volumes 5 and 6, forthcoming), I could have gotten far worse tracks than “Vacation” showing up.
New (old) mix: the unapologetic liberal psychosis blues
A new mix minifeature kicks off today, inspired by the recent loss of my iTunes library. I was able to rebuild some mixes from Art of the Mix, but had to go back to j-cards from the original tapes for many of my playlists. At that point I decided that it was time to stop being embarrassed about my old mixes and just go ahead and post them, if for no other reason than so that I would have a back-up record of them later—but also so that I could transcribe some of my memories about what was going on at the time.
I started with my first self-consciously titled mix: the unapologetic liberal psychosis blues. The mix dates from my second year in college—in fact, if my rare handwritten date on the j-card is to be trusted, from right after Thanksgiving break, November 25, 1991. I was, if the playlist is any indication, knee deep in my contemporaneous love affair with the Pixies, just discovering Bauhaus and Joy Division, and working out from under the influence of U2’s Achtung Baby. I was still buying discs from the music services, including the Bob Dylan Bootleg set and the Jesus and Mary Chain. I was also digesting a stack of CDs that I had bought during the summer from the independent music shop in Patrick Henry Mall in Newport News, including a two-disc Hendrix compilation and a House of Love rarities disc.
In fact, for all its aggression and noise, this disc has my hometown written all over it. In addition to the stuff from the mall, I had been turned onto Nine Inch Nails and the Jesus and Mary Chain by a kid a year younger than me who used to go to my high school. I was trading tapes with friends, and my sister’s friends, and getting feedback about the Pixies from people who had seen U2’s show at the Hampton Coliseum where the Pixies opened for them.
But the tone of this mix was so much darker than anything I had made before. What brought that darkness? Maybe it was the second year of college. In fact, almost certainly it was—I was taking a more than full course load, 20 hours compared to the original 15, and I was freaking out. I was also, I feared, in danger of failing my first math course—I was in a math for physics majors course with third years and in way over my head. I was also being distracted by things that were much more interesting—literature, music, philosophy—and didn’t know what was going on. Didn’t I want to be a physicist?
I’m just now, 14 years later, realizing how confused I was and how much anger I had stirring in me as a result of what I was fearing was a waste of time, years spent as a science student, years not spent learning how to be a kid. I feel like I’ve been playing catch-up, in a way, ever since.
But none of that changes the fact that this is damned good music. It’s funny how the distance from those events actually makes the music that much better.
New music: The Black Angels
Listening to the KEXP podcast today (thanks to Cheryl Waters for bringing me the feeling that I was listening to my favorite radio station in my car from 3000 miles away), I found a new band. Of course KEXP found them first… They’re called The Black Angels (after the Velvet Underground song, not the George Crumb string quartet), and like their antecedent they bring heavy guitars over psychedelic droning rhythms. It’s the sort of sound that keeps getting rediscovered—think the Paisley Underground bands, Mazzy Star, or even Mogwai with vocals—but these young Texans do it really, really well, blending twists of sixties garage rock with their drones and heavy drum beats.
The band has made the KEXP Top 90.3 for 2005 on the strength of its eponymous debut EP. You can check out a full-length MP3 download and some samples on their site, and some live in studio recordings from KVRX (Austin, Texas).
Can you get to that?
Funkadelic is in the iTunes Music Store. Holy hell. I can’t believe I’ve gone so long in my life without hearing “Maggot Brain.” In fact, I distinctly remember being a snotnosed 21 or 22 year old at the (apparently late lamented) Olsson’s Records in Georgetown, checking out the Funkadelic section on the strength of the George Clinton connection (I was a mighty Parliament fan), seeing the cover of Maggot Brain, shuddering and passing by. More fool, I. The title track really is one of the greatest guitar tracks of all time. And it doesn’t stop there.
Aside: I don’t know if there is a band that had a better gift for album titles. On the strength of Free Your Mind…And Your Ass Will Follow and Standing on the Verge of Getting It On, Funkadelic should have won some sort of lifetime achievement award.
Project update: somewhat stalled
It had to come. My initial prediction, which said that 275 GB would be enough for my collection, was just a little too smug.
As of today, tracks from The Project, my endeavor to losslessly rip all my CDs to a hard drive, comprise 7746 songs from 569 albums, lasting 24:17:58:02, at a total disk cost of 166.57 GB. Unfortunately, the other tracks in my library—those purchased from eMusic or the iTunes Music Store, or ripped from CDs I no longer possess, or downloaded from other sources—also take up space on the drive. So, at the start of digitizing the other half of my collection, my rock and pop CDs, I only have 70 GB free on the drive—about half what I need.
What went wrong? Well, for one thing, I think I underestimated the number of albums I owned by about 100. (Oops.) For another, I underestimated the number of classical discs that I owned that were actually 2 CDs in length. Each album weighs in, on average, at 0.2927 GB—somewhat fewer than my anticipated 0.297 GB per album. So the biggest contributor to “scope creep” appears to be undercounting the discs I own.
What to do about it? Well, “purchase more space” is certainly an answer, but not the one I want right now. Should have gone RAID to begin with, I’m afraid. So for right now, my answer has been to halt the digitization until I can figure out the best solution to add the additional disc space I need. The other option—to use lossy ripping for the rest of the collection—is one I’m not comfortable with.
What to do with the old hard copies of your music library
Seen on Boing Boing: Trade your used CDs for a new iPod. Anyone want to bet these guys get completely flooded? By the time the Project is over, I’ll have enough CDs to trade in to get five 60 GB iPods.
New mix: “steal the crumbs”
My latest mix, Steal the crumbs, has been posted at Art of the Mix. I may post it to the iTunes Music Store but will need to spend time finding a bunch of the tracks, since only about half of them showed up when I posted it earlier.
The mix is a response to Fury’s food mix of several months ago, More Spice Than the Frugal Gourmet. Esta has indicated that she’ll be making a food mix as well. Maybe we should make a chain and see how many different CD-length food mixes we can make without repeating a song.
Holiday music roundup
Two years ago, I put out a series of reviews of Christmas CDs, one a day for about a week, focusing on CDs that weren’t the usual Jingle Bells/White Christmas fare. While I’m not in a position time- or inclination-wise to repeat that feat this year, I thought I’d throw out a couple of pointers to some interesting holiday tunes I’ve found this year.
First, thanks go to Hooblogger and friend Zalm, who has been doing some really intense Christmas music posts this year: a series of posts on songs of hope, peace, and joy, with love yet to come, and a pair of iTunes mixes for the season. Thanks to his posts, I was encouraged to go back and revisit the Christmas album that the Blind Boys of Alabama put out a few years ago, which has some extremely cool moments.
Second, as I noted earlier, there is some humor in having a holiday that is protean enough to embrace the concepts of peace, redemption, hope… and “Santa Claus Wants Some Lovin’.” Holiday collections that reflect the latter side of Christmas include the Alligator Records Christmas Collection, with some really great blues, Cajun, and R&B tracks; the killer Stax/Volt compilation It’s Christmas Time Again, with contributions from the Staple Singers, the Emotions, and the inimitable Isaac Hayes; and even Yule Be Miserable, a Verve compilation that features Ella Fitzgerald’s sassy “Santa Claus Got Stuck (In My Chimney).”
For slightly classier Santa-flavored music, there’s the album that Phil Spector masterminded, A Christmas Gift to You From Phil Spector. Featuring the debut of the classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)” (later memorably covered by U2 on the first Very Special Christmas compilation), this is a spectacular slice of the 1960s sound in the service of the season, featuring the signature Phil Spector girl groups and Wall of Sound. Too bad about that trial, which compels me to note that the spoken word outro from Phil at the end over “Silent Night” now sounds far creepier than originally intended.
And if, like me, your Christmas isn’t complete without a big slice of early music, you could do far worse than to seek out A Medieval Christmas, a slightly obscure but highly worthwhile album by the New York Ensemble for Early Music under the direction of Frederick Renz. A heady brew of chant, early polyphony, and instrumental tunes, the album brings some medieval boisterousness as well as meditative grace to the season.
WCRB on the block
Courtesy The Universal Hub, the news arrives that one of the radio stations in Boston that plays classical is entering negotiations to be sold to a local broadcasting corporation that likely only wants it for its spectrum and transmitters. Now, yes, those of you who aren’t in the Boston media market are right now sputtering, “One of the radio stations??? How dare you complain if your market has more than one station that you’re losing one of them?”
For one thing, WCRB is that rarity, a non-public-radio station that plays classical music 24 hours a day, rather than breaking it into chunks of NPR news and other musical ghettos underserved formats. For another, it plays concerts from Tanglewood (might as well get that bit of self-interest out of the way).
But the comments thread on the Universal Hub piece raises another problem: what if your classical station only plays Classical’s Greatest Hits? Eeka put it most succinctly: “They should replace it with actual classical music that classical music enthusiasts would like to listen to.” I rambled in response:
If you want to understand the devolution of classical radio in this country, look no further than the same programming malady that has swept the rest of the radio industry.
I can’t help but think that programming outside the 18th-19th century box—early music, Shostakovich, Ives, any living composer—during prime listening hours could only broaden the audience. Hell, look at the surprise classical bestsellers of the last decade or so: Chant, Górecki’s Third Symphony with Dawn Upshaw, Arvo Pärt’s Te Deum. All outside the mainstream (yes, of course, because they’re surprises they are outside the mainstream by definition. Work with me).
Great editorial on this topic, Drawing the Classical Line, that I can’t recommend highly enough.
I’m reminded of Peter Schickele’s fictitious WTWP (Wall-To-Wall Pachelbel), whose station slogan was “We play the music you don’t mind hearing”: “Nothing written after 1912,” “Nothing longer than eleven and a half minutes,” “All music must be in a major key until after 11 PM,” and “No vocal music during office hours.”
Don’t celebrate the end of DRM?
Interesting post on the faculty blog of the University of Chicago Law School, by professor Doug Lichtman, that argues that the end of DRM would be disastrous for the music industry and music lovers. He suggests that without DRM, the industry will have no incentive to invest in music or will develop some other draconian response to piracy, such as streaming music to proprietary players. He also argues that improvements in labeling law or changes to the law to prevent the use of DRM as draconian as Sony’s would backfire, as this would lead to legislating over what types of DRM are permissible.
It’s good to see someone even try to argue the value of DRM after the whole Sony rootkit fiasco, but in this case Professor Lichtman has it wrong.
First, as Doug Lay points out in the comments, imagining the major labels moving to supporting only a single proprietary player leads to some interesting speculative schadenfreude. Certainly it’s easy to imagine the major labels continuing their downward spirals by fragmenting the playback market and alienating their channel. But just because the solution to come might be further detrimental to the labels’ interests is no reason to keep an antipiracy solution that has been proven harmful.
Second, Professor Lichtman suggests that the law needs not only to require better labeling for DRM but also to identify what is and is not allowed:
DRM of the sort adopted by SonyBMG might similarly be so bad as to beimpermissible. But then we need to say more about what forms of DRMwould be permissible, just as we similarly today allow shopkeepers toput locks on their doors, call the police in the event of a burglary,and so on.
If I’m not mistaken, there are a few lawsuits out there that point out ways in which Sony BMG’s DRM is in violation of existing laws against spyware, computer fraud, false or misleading statements, trespass, false advertising, unauthorized computer tampering, and other generally consumer hostile acts. I think this point of Professor Lichtman’s is a red herring. As Doug Lay points out, we don’t need new laws, we need Sony to be punished for violating the laws they’ve already done. In fact, I’m not sure I’d say that legislation against DRM is needed at this point even after this case, and perhaps on this point I do agree with Professor Lichtman, though for different reasons. I think we still need to see what the market, competitive pressures, and general customer awareness will do to address the labeling problem, and in the meantime the fallout from lawsuits will hopefully force Sony BMG and other labels to reconsider their choices.
Finally, Professor Lichtman assumes that the major labels’ investment in music somehow creates value for the musician and the customer. I’m not going to comment except to point out that the list of XCP infected discs contained albums by Celine Dion and Our Lady Peace. And I’m not sure how anyone could construe putting XCP on discs of reissued material by Dexter Gordon, Louis Armstrong, Art Blakey, Shel Silverstein, Horace Silver, Gerry Mulligan, or Dion, all on the XCP list, as constituting protecting an ongoing investment in music.
(Originally posted on the Sony Boycott blog. I don’t normally crosspost material like this except for my music reviews, but thought there might be some readers here who aren’t following the Boycott blog who might find this discussion interesting.)