Play My Cards Right

EMI is dropping DRM.  It is now only a matter of time before the rest of the music industry follows suit.  Hopefully Apple’s deal with them will also allow indies to sell their content without DRM.

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So my Shuffle broke again this morning and I was forced to walk to the gym without the luxury of information flowing into my brain.  I’ve become so accustomed to jumping out of bed and walking up to the gym with the headphones on full blast that walking around my neighborhood without them at 6:45AM became an almost surreal experience.  I suddenly remember so much more of the walk, for one thing.  Without the headphones I observed so much more than I usually do.  The sounds of people unloading bakery supplies, the pollutive city buses.  The surprising number of people out and about.

Working out became a far different experience as well, as suddenly I was forced to hear the dance-pop on the gym stereo but also the assorted grunts and other sounds made by the other weightlifters.  All typically events really, but again I’ve been so accustomed to my own internal soundtrack it was absolutely alien.

Is it a good idea to constantly stream information into my head?  At high volumes?  All these times when I’m exercising or walking to work I could be thinking, instead of consuming.  It seems I consume so much information I may not have time to process it.  And of course there’s the issue of my hearing loss, which Dawn will tell you is very real indeed.

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Sometimes my iTunes looks like this:

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I am extremely pleased with the new episode of Luke and His Dad.  It is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend listening.

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As I was jamming to the new Shins’ album this morning, I reminisced about hearing certain albums for the first time.  When I was in high school and consuming as much music as possible, I remember picking up Slanted and Enchanted, Vampire on Titus, watching a Sebadoh song (off of Bakesale) on 120 Minutes and borrowing the first Velvet Underground album from a friend.  Why do I remember them so distinctly?  Because with each one, the first time I heard these albums they seemed incredibly weird, and actually kind of bad, to me.  S&E     had a tinniness to it that drove me away.  VoT was (it is still in many ways far from my favorite GBV).  Skull too seemed too scrappy, like a half a song.  I simply could not process the VU.  The relatively low fidelity, the viola, Nico.  It was another world. Why did the Shins bring this up in me? They seemed utterly underwhelming to me until I really *listened* to them.

Coming from a background of hip-hop, relatively well known thrash metal and…Rush, it took me quite some time to finally understand these records.  How did I acclimate?  Repeated listening?  Why did I listen to these things that didn’t sound good to me?  Because I’d read they were good?  They were so odd that I stayed intrigued?  I think in some ways tuning into the indie rock of that era was harder for me than picking up on jazz and experimental music, because at least with those I was able to place myself into a context where I had no preconceived notions of what they should sound like, whereas with indie rock, I was still expecting…rock.  And of course in some cases context is literally all you can bring to a music.  Not that that makes it good music, or that it is a good way to evaluate music.

Now there are some records where the listening evolution simply does not occur. Ear candy as it were. Frequently these are albums that lean heavily on pop structure and melody, though there are also types of music that at this point, seem to be “mine”- music that defined my interest for so long and so strongly I automatically gravitate towards it. Ear candy could include anything from the new Deerhoof to practically anything that drones (or whooshes).

I guess the bottom line is that you can like music for a variety of reasons, and hear it for a variety of ways. Any larger conclusion? Not yet.

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I generally consider myself pretty well informed when it comes to local music- I don’t really go to local shows any more, but I try to stay on top of the bands, their records and of course I mainline message boards all day long. The myopia induced by not looking outside of the axis upon which the nevertellmetheodds board sits revealed itself to me in the existence of Pittsburgh’s own Black Moth Super Rainbow. These folks have been around for a few years, and it could very well be that like many artists who don’t revolve around a somewhat rockist, sloppy and aggressive aesthetic that tends to dominate Pittsburgh independent and experimental music, BMRC simply sought recognition elsewhere.

They’re playing tomorrow night in the city and I’m going to try and catch them if possible.

Apparently they play all of the music live, which is surprising because although people have compared them to Spacemen 3 (I would say Spectrum) I see a lot of Boards of Canada and some of the Ghost Box material in there. From their bio:

Their sophomore record, “Start A People” (2004) was about recreating the sounds of childhood public broadcast televison and applying them to the Black Moth Super Rainbow formula.

Now if that doesn’t reek of BoC than I don’t know what does. What makes them special though is that they do this kind of music (which they refer to as psychedelic pop) very well and that they’re doing this out of Western Pennsylvania- a place not often known for melodic, electronic pop. The music itself is comprised of lots of fat synths and off-kilter melodies that conjure up a warm, hazy vibe.

Hear for yourself:
Spiracle
Lollipopsichord

Or stream their whole new frickin album (a collaboration with Austin’s Octopus Project) here:
Full Album Stream

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So I’ve decided to try and train my ear to recognize different pitches.  I’m not entirely certain why I’m doing this but mostly it is because I continue to live by the strange notion that I play music.

Training consists of the following:

• Record each note individually using my keyboard (5 octaves only) at about 3 second intervals.
• Record me singing the name of the note after each is played.  
• Split the wav into individual tracks- each representing a single note.
• Convert split wavs into MP3.
• Dump into itunes
• Create playlist.
• Copy playlist to iPod. 
• Shuffle Playlist.
• Listen to shuffled pitch files when walking around and at work.

The question now is “Will this work?”  We shall see.

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NYT Link Here

I am trying to find the specifics of this agreement between Universal and Microsoft, which includes a royalty to Universal on every Zune player sold.  They are basically trying to recover royalties they would have received had the AHRA applied to hard drive based music players.  Does this mean I can listen to any music on Universal-owned labels, regardless of how I acquired it?

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wpts.org

1. Mew - The Zookeeper’s Boy (4:43)
2. Rundgren, Todd - Just One Victory (4:58)
3. Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti - The Drummer (4:56)
4. Arthur Russell - The Platform On The Ocean (8:04)
5. Bark Psychosis - A Street Scene (5:35)
6. Fallen Angels - A Horn Playing On My Thin Wall (4:22)
7. Harper, Roy - She’s the One (6:57)
8. Helium - Baby Vampire Made Me (5:50)
9. Hukkelberg, Hanne - cast anchor (4:15)
10. Jack Rose - 2 º Cross The North Fork (7:26)
11. Kraftwerk - Tour De France 03 - Etape 1 (4:27)
12. Nels Cline Trio - Pants (for Polly Jean) (6:17)
13. Relay - Safe (2:53)
14. Scatter - smokinEdit / smokinEdit (5:35)
15. Seam - Sweet Pea (3:33)
16. Six Organs Of Admittance - Bless Your Blood (5:57)
17. Thompson, Mayo - Horses (3:14)
18. TV on the Radio - Staring at the Sun (4:01)
19. United States of America - Love Song for a Dead Che (3:27)
20. Zombi - Sessuale (3:39)
21. Vincent Gallo - Her smell theme (Reprise) (2:21)
22. Vashti Bunyan - Here Before (2:05)
23. My Bloody Valentine - To Here Knows When (5:31)

Imix

SendSpace 

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• Archer Prewitt Way of the Sun Wilderness 
• The Gentle Waves Hangman in the Shadow The Green Fields of Foreverland 
• Peter Jefferies Scattered Logic electricity
• Alastair Galbraith Bone Idle Morse 
• The Foundry Field Recordings Assembled Hazardly prompts/miscues 
• Mastadon The Wolf is Loose Radio Sampler 
• Guvner Almond Roca Hard for Measy for You
• The 3ds Philadelphia Rising The Venus Trail
• The Bats Halfway to Nowhere Silverbeet
• The Dead C Head Tusk
• Bailter Space EIP Robot World
• Jesu star silver   
• The Killers When You Were Young When You Were Young   
• Thee Speaking Canaries Any Three Days Songs for the Terrestrially Challenged  
• Burning Star Core Nylarthotep The Very Heart of the World    
• The Sea Like Lead interlude 1/last vestiges of rust s/t  
• Sufjan Stevens The Henny Buggy Band The Avalanche    
• The Clean Tally Ho! Compilation   
• Mew The Zookeper’s Boy And the Glass Handed Kites    
• TRS-80 The Lights Are On Mystery Crash    
• Go Betweens The Wrong Road Bellavista Terrace    
• Small Factory A Suggestion The Industrial Evolution    
• The Cakekitchen Prophet of the Underground The Devil & The Deep Blue Sea
• kaki king jessica  …until we felt red
• bonnie “prince” billy cursed sleep cursed sleep

Nothing to point you to this week, unfortunately.

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