Dear god, a club-oriented album from daft punk. Either the punks were indulging some secret fantasies on this monstrosity or they were playing a big practical joke on everyone, ’cause I can’t believe they would have released Discovery with a straight face.
what a day! 91 songs played and 5+ hours of listening. that’s what i need to be doing everyday. it’s not likely to happen, but it is something to strive for.
also, it seems that this tunequest page has managed to obtain a google pagerank of 4 in just over a month. from what i understand, that’s pretty good, so huzzah for tunequest!
i’ve mentioned before about the randomness of the ipod and, despite allegations that the device isn’t very random in the first place, one shouldn’t read too much into supposed patterns of play.
nevertheless, it is disconcerting that my ipod chose to play not only danny elfman’s batman and batman returns, but a performance of the adam west batman theme by the royal scottish national orchestra. the ipod even tried to play batman again after i was forced to stop and restart at one point. it’s all randomly possible, i know, but is still wiggy. not that it matters, elfman’s batmans are classics and his theme is, of course, instantly recognizable. recommended all around. •
speaking of scores, i had pegged bride of frankenstein as one destined for my dust bin. after a careful listen though, i must say that i am fascinated by it. it was composed in 1935 and sounds much more like an orchestral suite or ballet than a film score. it turned out to be quite the highlight of the day. •
also some good trip hop by the likes of massive attack and some excellent spanish-influenced melodic downtempo by savath + savalas (aka prefuse 73 amongst other things). •
and a final note about blind melon, a group whose music it seems i should have outgrown by now. i’ve had the album for 13 years now, and it is inseparably linked to and trapped in time with the alternative explosion of the early 1990s. sometimes i think it’s time has just come and gone, but fads aside, it features song really decent songwriting with catchy hooks and impressive guitar noodling. blind melon’s debut is more mellow, groovy and musically complex than many of its contemporaries. though i feel like i should let it go, but just can’t seem to make myself do it. •
out with the old, in with the new. tunequest is now powered by one of those new-fangled intel-powered imacs. getting it set up and customized took a good portion of my weekend, but my first impressions are quite positive. the thing is remarkably fast. it’s not perfect, but is a large improvement over the previous g4. for one thing, iTunes isn’t nearly as sluggish, and that can mean only good things for the tunequest.
despite the new hardware, not all is well in tunequest world. i’ve got two months of tunequesting under my belt and the numbers aren’t looking good for achieving my goal. in short, i need to be listening to more music. when i started, i had to listen to 44 songs per day; i haven’t been meetings that goal, so it’s now 46. likewise, i’ve got to listen to 318 songs per week, a number i’ve only achieved once in the eight weeks i’ve been doing this.
so i must redouble my efforts. it’s no easy task, since i want to actually listen to each song, not just play them.
onward to lackluster tunequest:
companion to holst’s suite no.1 is suite no.2, which is also quite brilliant, particularly the second movement: ‘song without words.’ go listen to it. go now.
today’s powerhouse album however is das boot. klaus doldinger puts out some epic, pulsing, tension-building music. this was the first time i actually seriously paid attention to the score in the 4 years i’ve owned it and must say i regret not listening to it sooner. it’s too bad i won’t be able to listen to it again for a while because of tunequest’s ‘no repeat’ rule. •
the big loser this tunequest is the charlie hayden & pat metheny album. i kind of feel bad about it, because it was given to me by a friend who has since passed away from cancer, but i’ve never been able to get into it. i respect the album, but just have never been able to listen to it. it’s jazzy, but for the most part slow and has a hard time holding my attention. so i ended up removing most of it from my library. •
Back in the day, Roni Size’s / Reprazant’s Brown Paper Bag and the accompanying video on MTV’s AMP remember AMP? were just the mind-blowing thing a musically-experimental shiftless college student needed to expand his horizons. I credit both Brown Paper Bag and The Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole with diverting my attention away from rock and focusing it toward the burgeoning electronic scene.
Considering the state of rock throughout 1997 and 1998 and where it has gone since, those acts may have saved me from much musical mediocrity, for which i am eternally grateful.
To this day, the sweet wobbly guitar riff that drives Brown Paper Bag, as well as the pulsing beats and the interjection of some subtly smooth rap continue to make this song compelling, even as my interest in straight-ahead drum and bass is on the decline.
From the album New Forms. Hear the song for yourself and enjoy the awesome video:
if you’re into pictures and charts (and who isn’t?), i’ve posted some graphs of my progress.
switching gears now, i first heard of the faint when a friend convinced me to go to a show in fort walton beach, fl in the summer of 2001. tucked into the corner of a otherwise-empty, impossible-to-find hole-in-the-wall bar with about 20 other kids, the faint’s brand of synth-rock-with-so-much-pop-flavor-you-must-dance completely blew my mind. the group’s performance was amazing, with apocalyptic smoke and lights which gave an edge most sinister to a group whose make-up was pale and dress was black.
after the show, i briefly talked with the frontman. i forget what we spoke about, idle chit chat probably, but i found the experience a bit surreal. he was still all dolled up in his goth-stylings, but he was just sitting there, chatting it up, arms folded, like a regualr-joe from omaha. i bought blank-wave arcade from him. •
quick notes:
holst’s suite no.1 is a good work, especially the third movement. but as i’ve mentioned before, i’m a sucker for a good march. mercury rev’s deserter’s songs is majestic and symphonic; it is the group’s finest recording. my youthful devotion to r.e.m. disappeared rather rapidly around the time new adventures hi-fi came out, but i still consider automatic for the people a classic.
my string of lackluster weekends continues. sigh. though to be honest i was a bit distracted by massive data loss brought on by severe incompetence.
yes, i accidentally erased my imac’s hard drive while attempting to install tiger on my old g3 powerbook. i was going to wipe the drive in a week anyway, after my new intel imac arrived and i’d copied my files to it. i guess i was just a little to eager. enthusiasm never hurts, right?
but it figures; it seems like every year, like clockwork, i suffer some kind of glitch or error that results in the vaporization of billions of my bits.
so i’ve learned the hard way to backup backup backup. there’s not much lost that is not, in some way, recoverable and i’m thankful for that. as far as tunequest is concerned, all the music files already reside on an external drive unaffected by this incident and the iTunes library file itself has already been recovered from my .mac backup, so, the journey continues:
the music of cowboy bebop has been in my regular rotation for nearly 6 years now. it’s such a wide range and diverse collection of influences and styles that it’s hard not to admire it just for its ambition. it works great on the series, but it’s even better by itself. for the past 6 years, i’ve been fascinated by how western the music sounds, even though the composer and most of the performers are japanese. especially the jazz. i’m sure i’ll continue to be fascinated for at least another 6 years. •
notable removals today: sigur ros‘ agætis byrjun and the score to being john malkovich, which is actually pretty good artistically, it just failed to make that click with me that would make me want to listen to it more. as for sigur ros, i just couldn’t get into that one, even after 3 years of trying.