Music by Who?

Posted on June 18, 2007 by LtL

At the risk of bragging, I do take pride with the wide variety of music I have collected over the years. I know that there are people out there who greatly surpass me both in quantity and variety, but still, I like to think that I do pretty well in finding some nicely obscure bands and performers who should be far better known than they are. So, tonight, I wanted to share a few of my favorite songs by artists who probably never heard of.

Disclaimer: These songs are up for listening purposes only for a short time. If you’re an artist or label who wants the song taken down, please contact me.

“Let the Wretched Come Home” (Mark Curry)

I don’t remember when I picked this album up, but it was most probably used and I liked the cover so I took a chance. One of those albums that I don’t listen to very often, but every time I do, I enjoy it. Very much a rock & roll album, with flavors of americana, it has some great songs. My favorite:

Cigarette Burns

“Angel Food for Thought” (Meryn Cadell)

You may, if you are of a certain age, remember this song by Meryn Cadell:

The Sweater.

As far as I know, that’s the only song that got any airplay in America, but her music is delightful, fun and ironic without being arch or cruel, and she writes with a poetry of the everyday that astounds. A particularly good example of that is her song

The Wait. “Bombazine” (Meryn Cadell) But she doesn’t write only fun, quirky songs and I have always found this one to be quite beautiful

Georgia Bay, 24 & Evermore

“Lost and Safe” (The Books)

I’m not sure where I got the following song from, it may have been a mix-cd someone made for me. It’s a disturbing and scary song, and I really need to get off my ass and get the album . . . ok, so I’m downloading from iTunes as I finish writing this.

It Never Changes to Stop

And finally, a New England Band that should have gotten much more attention than they have, especially in the wake of the whole Wilco, Son Volt, Whiskeytown Americana-Roots thing that was big several years ago. This is a twisted little song about an ex that I think we can all relate to:

“Massachusetts” (Scud Mountain Boys)

Grudge ****

Well, there you have it, I hope you enjoy these and, if you do, that you will go support the bands by buying albums and seeing live shows!!

Technorati Tags: music

Random 10 Tracks

Posted on June 15, 2007 by LtL

I just finished posting on Pandagon’s Friday Random Ten and didn’t want to stop the random merriment, so for my second random ten tracks:

“Kiss of Life” – Peter Gabriel
“The Sweater” – Meryn Cadell
“The Friend Catcher” – The Birthday Party
“Steam Engine” – My Morning Jacket
“Above You, Below Me” – Badly Drawn Boy (live version)
“The Mincer” – King Crimson
“Forest Power” – Deep Forest
“See Emily Play” – Pickin’ on Pink Floyd (a mediocre album of Pink Floyd covers done as bluegrass instrumentals)
“Allegro in C Minor” – Handel, performed by Egarr Manze
“Human Behavior” – Bjork

So, there you go – if you want to join in the fun, set your music to random and leave a list in the comments.

On Hold – Just for a Couple of Days

Posted on June 14, 2007 by LtL

Normal (well, recently established at least) scheduling is on hold as I finish work on an academic review of The Living Theatre’s production of The Brig for the journal PAJ.

In the meantime . . .

Pretty. (Make sure you scroll to the bottom for the finished product.)

Various & Sundry

Posted on June 12, 2007 by LtL

Willy Porter – Jesus On The Grille

Just downloaded a sweet sound cue program call Qlab, and the basic version is free and allows you to build sound cues and execute them with all sort of fades, levels and precision. You can even set hotkeys for various cues. I would have loved to have given a program like that to my sound board operator for Little Murders and had her keystroke gunfire at random times to keep the actors off balance. This will definitely make running shows easier . . . of course it all depends on there being a Mac in the house. I could definitely use it for rehearsals, though, and it would let me take all my cues and play around with them live for the director. I’m not being terribly articulate here, but needless to say, if you or someone you know does sound design for live events, and are a Mac user, they should check this out.

Muddy Waters – Howling Wolf

I just installed Opera on my new Macbook Pro and have to say, I missed it. I have been doing the using-only-native-mac-programs thing for a while and using Safari as my primary browser. It was . . . ok. I got used to it and didn’t hate it. But returning to Opera, I am reminded why I have used that as my primary browser for, well, for as long as it’s been free. Sandro was actually the first person to tell me about Opera, way back when we were living together and I was years from becoming a Mac user. At that point, it cost money and while I tried the trial version and liked it, I wasn’t going to pay for a browser.

Patty Larkin – The Book I`m Not Reading

I know that Opera may not benchmark as the fastest of the browsers, but it feels sprightly to me, and I just like how everything is laid out. I particularly enjoy the built in mouse gestures, although those will take some getting used to working with the trackpad. All things said and done, I think I’m fairly committed to Opera as my browser of choice, although I do miss StumbleUpon, but that appears to work–at least as a toolbar–in IE or Firefox.

Ween – Flutes of The Chi

I just turned on Photo Booth to try to get a pic of the Cat. Realized how much weight I’ve gained over the past year or so. Bleh.

Hoodoo Gurus – Tojo

I Monster – Heaven U2 – Salomé

So I’ve been on YouTube just looking for some decent UFO Footage to post. Ever since the recent Loch Ness Monster footage showed up, I’ve been thinking about just how much I was into Nessie, Bigfoot, Ufos, and the Bermuda Triangle when I was young. Well, youngish, I have to admit that I did take a trip out to Area 51 when I lived in Berkeley, back in the mid-90s.Depeche Mode – It`s No Good

Anyway, there are lots of crappy UFO videos, but most are not even close to compelling. So I didn’t post any.

Zero 7 – Crosses

Ever feel like you are floating, untethered, yet strangely heavy, laden down with expectations and the past? Hmm, maybe it’s just me.

Technorati Tags: fat, opera, qlab, ufo, youtube

Free and New Music, the Undiscovered

Posted on June 11, 2007 by LtL

This is a quick entry, but I wanted to point you toward two sites that offer a really great way to find new music.

iCompositions

This is a site that caters to home-recording artists and while it’s specifically supposed to hook into Garageband users, you’ll find a lot of compositions created with other music programs. From their description:

iCompositions.com is an internet community for aspiring musicians with a focus on Mac-using artists and, even more specifically, users of Apple’s GarageBand. Artists can upload an unlimited number of songs to be played and critiqued by other members of the community. We strive to facilitate the exchange of constructive criticism to give each artist the opportunity to improve and enjoy their musical adventures.

The quality ranges widely, but some of the songs are really good. You can browse by genre, most recent, top songs, or songs without any playback. While you do have to create an account to listen to the music, there is good reason: the site operates as a community, a place to seek and offer constructive feedback to the compositions that are uploaded. If you make your own music, iCompositions is definitely a site you should check out.

Jamendo

The artists here are more professional, the music free and downloadable, and all of it falls under creative commons license. You won’t find anyone famous here, but you will find bands from all over the world who have uploaded their albums. You can create playlists using the built in Jamendo player, or you can listen to albums, even download them using Bittorrent or eMule. As with iCompositions, there is a huge range in quality, but a lot of the albums are polished and professional. As I mentioned, the flavor here is truly international and you can find speed-metal bands from Belgium or chantreuse-y pop from France or Brit-pop. You browse by tags, and can get fairly refined searches. Overall, I think this site deserves some serious browsing time and you could find some really fun music here.

Technorati Tags: creative commons, indie, music, uploads

Thistledown Thursdays

Posted on June 7, 2007 by LtL

Thursdays are going to be an experiment in storytelling – where I’ll attempt to write a story or a novel or a series of interconnected stories that all take place in a town called Thistledown. Where is Thistledown? I’m not sure. I know that it is near a river, and not far from the ocean. The geography will be more New England than anywhere else, since I know New England best of all the regions I have lived. There will be magic . . . of some sorts. Like what I was saying on Tuesday about how some of my favorite shows are our world, but slightly not. I may even ask for other people to pitch in and help create the world, but for now I just wanted to lay the groundwork and let you know what will be coming. Some of it will be good, some of it will be crap, but you will get to see the creation of a world and a story happen each week. I will not be editing much, so everything will be a raw and unfocused, I may even contradict myself, but I hope to have fun with the experiment as well as entertain and make it fun for you as well.

So stayed tuned.

80s Music – “Whole of the Moon”

Posted on June 7, 2007 by LtL

Was listening to Radio Paradise and they played “Strange Boat” by the Waterboys – who never quite got the attention, at least in the US, that I think they deserved. Couldn’t find “Strange Boat,” but came across one of their few hit singles on YouTube. You know, there was a time when I actually liked some of the music that was considered “top 40.”

But that was a long, long time ago. Anyway, yeah, this song is a bit earnest, not nearly ironic enough compared to contemporary standards, but I like it a lot. Enjoy.

Since it’s His Day Anyway

Posted on June 6, 2007 by LtL

I kind of pulled this weekly topic out of my ass because I wasn’t happy with any of my alliteration choices, but reading even the surface info on Wikipedia’s description of Odin makes me feel pretty good about my choice. First, I love some of the art associated with him:

Second, here is a god who gave up his eye in the pursuit of wisdom . . . I like that, a god pursuing wisdom seems like a healthy symbol. Third, being as this is a liminal space, and as such, ambivalence/contradiction/in-betweenness are all totally in line with my general take on things (occasionally to J’s chagrin), I love the fact that:

His name is related to óðr, meaning “mind”, “excitation,” “fury” or “poetry,” and his role, like many of the Norse pantheon, is complex: he is a god of wisdom, war, battle and death. He is also attested as being a god of magic, poetry, prophecy, victory and the hunt. (Wikipedia “Odin”)

I don’t quite know how I’m going to structure my Wednesday entries exactly, but I’m playing with the idea of reading up on the guy, re-familiarizing myself with Norse Mythology and looking to those stories as a jumping off point for issues of leadership, sacrifice, contemporary politics, perhaps even my own life. Do we as a culture value the pursuit of wisdom? Considering that four of our days of the week are named for German gods, maybe we should know a bit more about that history, those stories. So I’ll be looking into Woden’s Day every Wednesday, trying to make connections, little leaps of narrative faith that stitch our time with a time long ago. Who knows, maybe a time yet to come as well.

Did that sound incredibly pretentious? Hmm, well we all have our weaknesses.

Technorati Tags: gods, mythology, norse, odin, wednesday, woden

Tangent(s) Tuesday

Posted on June 5, 2007 by LtL

I’ve been watching the first season of Dead Like Me over the past 4-5 days and am really digging the writing and the performances. It reminds me a bit of Buffy, not because of the young woman as protagonist trying to work through life while being supernatural, but because the show creates a world for itself that is not ours, not quite, but near enough in all the important bits that when you watch it, you find yourself written into the dialogue, into the actions and the tears and the laughter, seeing yourself reflected in a gesture, a glance. While I may be stating the obvious, whether the show is Twin Peaks, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, or Doctor Who, the trick isn’t that they create fantastic worlds, but that our own world is fantastic, if only we stop and recognize it as such.

Dude, the new Macbook Pros are out and LtL is a happy camper. After switching over this past fall with a 17″ iMac, I have decided to sell that, my Thinkpad R31, the attempted reconstruction of the Thinkpad 560x as well as a few pints of blood plasma and just a fourteenth of my soul and get me a nice, new, shiny laptop. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoy my iMac, but have grown tired of stwiching platforms when I go back and forth between the desktop for my main work and my Thinkpad for mobility. Also, my impetus to have a desktop stemmed a lot from the amount of academic writing that I was doing while a Ph.D. student, writing that I tended to do best at home surrounding by my books and journals that served as sources. Now that I’m doing less of the academic writing–although I am still doing some–I find that having the mobility is important. Plus, I want to start developing some Podcasts with a few people and want to have a portable recording studio. My Thinkpad can handle some of that, but is slow and I’m getting more and more used to working with programs that are specific to the Mac. MacMall offers a $150 rebate from the Apple price, so I’ll probably order from them, although I may stop in at the Apple store tomorrow and just see if I can wrangle some sort of deal. Regardless, I should get it by the start of next week. Sweet! Reading Proust’s Swann’s Way, I keep thinking that he was writing a hypertext novel, only he was bound within a form of linear narrative so that the hypertext doesn’t occur by drilling down or by actual links, but through the sentences themselves. Once you sort of let go and let each clause and sub-clause and sub-sub-clause work as links instead of straightforward narrative, the reading process goes much easier, you can sort of drift along, realizing that it’s ok if you’ve lost the link you started from because eventually all the links will rejoin sometime down the page–or, more likely, several pages later.

I’m thinking of finding a theme for Wednesdays that has something to do with Odin/Wotan/Woden. Not sure what aspect of his myth that I’ll focus on, but perhaps each Wednesday I’ll find something to connect his exploits or attributes with either my life or the world around me.

Check this stuff out (and if you want to buy if from Amazon, it would be fabulous if you link through my site!):