Author: tunequest

second coming of pearl jam

pearl jam 2006

so all the pearl jam i’ve been listening to lately is leading to a kind of renaissance for the group as far as i’m concerned.

my fandom was huge in high school, basically through the release of no code. i was involved with some tape trading over the internet and regularly participated on an early mailing list dedicated to the band (which i had to telnet to tallahassee freenet in order to receive). i was a member of the ten club for a couple years and soaked up as much information about the band as i could get my hands on, keeping track of such minutia as who the current drummer was. i even managed to go to a concert once.

but as time went on, life found ways of distracting me. i kept up with the band less and less. no code didn’t capture my attention for very long and didn’t get much play. and while i’ve come to consider yield to be their best album (well-written, expertly executed and compellingly packaged), at the time of its release, i was well into diversifying my musical interests and there was much competition for my considerations.

after that, it was sheer momentum. i picked up a couple of the official bootlegs but barely listened to them. binaural and riot act barely made a blip on my radar, each receiving only cursory listens.

in retrospect, that’s most unfortunate. how i could have gone all these years without fully appreciating ‘god’s dice,’ i’m sure is a musical tragedy on my part. but if there’s one thing the tunequest is teaching me, it’s that this personal "second age of pearl jam" (defined as everything since 2000) is awesome.

my renewed interest inspired me to pick up the band’s latest, their eponymous albumpearl jam. i added it to my iTunes library last night, and "surprisingly," my ipod *randomly* chose to play it this afternoon, which i think settles the notion that it has its own favorites. (quick aside: my previous ipod committed suicide rather than play one more song by jet and all these years later, i don’t begrudge it one bit.)

anyway, this thing rocks! no gimmicks. no fluff. just straight-ahead sound. ‘world wide suicide’ earned a 5-star rating by the end of the first minute. and once more, here’s yet another record that i can’t wait to hear again. after the tunequest has finished.

Another day of seemingly non-random iPod

As if to prove my previous post for me, the tunequest-pod offered me these selections today (in order):

pearl jam-live at the fox theatre in atlanta (which i skipped because i had just heard a live show yesterday)
vince guaraldi’s oh good grief (a decent jazz album)
sonic youth experimental jet set trash and no star (my first sonic youth record and, for lack of a better word the group’s most "quirky." to this day, ‘self-obsessed and sexxee’ remains one of my favorite songs.)
tchaikovsky’s symphony 4 (ooo, the lush strings of its marvelous second movement)
spiritual vibes’ newly (more work from the ever-fascinating nobukazu takemura. before tunequest began, i would have named his songs as top candidates for removal from the library, but now i’ve a much renewed and invigorated appreciation for his musical talents.)
john williams’ score for the 70s disaster film earthquake (skipped because i wanted to pay extra attention to it and couldn’t at the time)
a pearl jam single (hail hail, b/w black red and yellow. that one’s a good b-side)
two beck singles, then a beck album (mutations. all of which were skipped because i wasn’t in a beck mood)
two more symphonies i didn’t feeling hearing at the time
finally, the 1992 re-recording of maurice jarre’s lawrence of arabia. (fine stuff there)

So despite the fact that albums by Beck, Pearl Jam and Sonic Youth have only a roughly 10% chance, combined, of being the next one played, we see here that, in fact, said artists account for 6 of 11 “randomly selected” albums for the day, or 55%. My iPod choose them at 5 times the rate I would have expected.

I’m not railing against it, since it doesn’t really bother mean though; just pointing it out.

putting mothballs in the beef stew

my ipod loves it some sonic youth. and beck. and pearl jam.

one of the recurring subplots here at tunequest has been the tracking the seemingly non-randomness of the selections my ipod chooses to play and lately it’s starting to draw my aggravation. you see, part of my goals for tunequest is to get to know some of the vast swaths of under-appreciated tunes resting in my library. so i made it a policy that my most listened to artists wouldn’t be eligible for play.

it’s july; there are six months left in the year. filtering my top five artists, in terms of total playcount, should help ensure that those lonely souls get the attention they deserve. this is a recent change however. for a while, i just excluding the blanket top 10 from my profile at last.fm.

But I eventually realized that i’d eventually get to the point where i’d have left nothing but those top artists and i’m pretty sure that i’d get sick of listening to the same things for a couple weeks toward the end of the year. so i adopted a new method. using both last.fm and super analyzer (at least until the iTunesregistry is functional once again), i’ve put stitched together a new list of exclusions. the result being that a lot of formerly mothballed titles were now available for play, including a bunch from sonic youth, beck and pearl jam. (radiohead was available, but quickly earned its way back into the exclusion list).

and this turn of events apparently pleased my ipod to no end, because all of the sudden, it’s been one those three bands played every other album, usually as the first or second random selection. i’m not really complaining about it. i do, of course, enjoy the music. it’s just that i’d rather not have it all crammed together.

at any time, the tunequest pod holds about 300 separately tagged albums. in aggregate, including singles,
live shows, albums proper, etc, those 3 have had about a 10% chance of being randomly selected as the next album played and i’m telling you it certainly feels like they’ve been getting more they’re 10% lately.

of course, each time one of those heavy-hitter does get played, their chances for future play drops.

here’s to a more diverse listening experience.

Lalo Schifrin, Portishead and downtempo music

mission impossible and dummy

In retrospect, I probably should have saved Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Anthology for the last album on the tunequest. It would seem fitting that my last song played should be the last song on this album: Mission Accomplished.

Alas, it is not to be; I finished listening to that album just moments ago. However, there are other suitable songs for that distinction. At the moment, it’s reserved for The Smashing Pumpkins’ The Last Song. That’s assuming of course, that I’m actually going to succeed at this project. Increasingly, however, it seems as though the official tunequest theme song should be we’re not going to make it by the presidents of the united states of america.

But I digress; I mean to be discussing Lalo.

I can’t stress how much I enjoy this soundtrack. Schifrin is a wonderful composer whose credits include, in addition to the mission: impossible theme, Enter the Dragon, Bullit and the Dirty Harry movies among many many others. I was first introduced to him by name in 1999 by the cable tv channel Bravo. One random afternoon, it was broadcasting a live performance of the Marseille Philharmonic performing famous film and television music, conducted of course by Mr. Schifrin.

The show was quite excellent and, acting quickly, I managed to get most of it on video tape (which was later converted to mp3). Even after all these years, I still find that this recording showcases some of the best renditions of classic film standards I’ve ever heard, including The Good the Bad and the Ugly, the james bond theme and the M:I theme.

I was particularly struck by all the jazz Schifrin infused into the music of this performance. Jazz has always been his specialty, but it’s fascinating to hear how he works with music that was composed for a symphonic orchestra.

That same kind of smooth, laid-back, jazzy composing style is what continues to attract me to his work. in fact, and please follow me down the tangent, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my interest in jazz music was an outgrowth of my increased attention to electronic music in the late 90s, particularly the downtempo genre. I could make the argument, now that I think about it, that Lalo Schifrin is a singular great influence on the emergence of the downtempo as a musical style.

The two styles seem to share an ethos for swanky grooves and, off the top of my head, I can reference two direct descendants of schifrin’s music in the downtempo field. firstly, UK production outfit The Black Dog remixed Schifrin’s Bullit themes at some point in the late 90s. Though the mix is closer to big beat than downtempo, it does point towards the existence of attention toward Schifrin outside of jazz circles and film buffs.

Secondly, and this one was a recent revelation to me, is Portishead, whose album Dummy coincidentally appeared on the tunequest today as well. I must admit that I was late to the trip hop party. I didn’t pick up this record until 2000, five years after the group introduced the world to trip hop with their hit song, Sour Times. It had been quite a while since I listened to the M:I anthology and maybe that’s why I hadn’t picked up on this, but the central rhythm of sour times is a direct sample of Schifrin’s song Danube Incident from the soundtrack.

On one hand, I lose a little respect just a little for Portishead. Sour times is a great song and I guess I just feel a little deceived that the work is not entirely theirs. On the other hand, the song they created from it is incredible and through its success, they brought a large spotlight to a field of music that flourished in the decade that followed.

i’m dr. cheeks, and i’m a little behind

dr.cheeks

this is the most definitive progress report i’ve been able to give to date, and it’s rather grim. july 22 will mark the halfway point, chronologically speaking, of the tunequest. it makes sense that i should have listened to 50% of my songs by then to be on track to listen to every song in my library by the end of the year.

well some quick math shatters that hope. using the current play numbers at the top of the page, we see a difference of 1955 songs before i reach 50% played. to do that by july 22, i’ll have to listen to 122 songs per day. at an average of 4 minutes per song, that’s more than 8 hours per day.

so two words: not likely.

but all these number do, really, is confirm what the projection graph has been telling me, that i’m going to fall short by about 1500-2000 songs by the end of the year if i don’t pick up the pace somehow.

Nobukazu Takemura – For Tomorrow: Downtempo Premonition

For Tomorrow

Bouncing off my recent Mudhoney post, I’d like to bring up Nobukazu Takemura once again. I was recently given the pleasure of listening to his For Tomorrow disc, which like My Brother the Cow, was released in 1995, and is the accompanying single to the album Child’s View. It strikes me that, even though the two records were released around the same time, Takemura’s offering appears to have aged much more respectably in terms of cultural influence.

It’s probably due to the fact that the Mudhoney record represents a waning of a particular style of music, a lingering breath of the fading grunge movement, which despite it’s continued popularity in some circles, can be easily dismissed as fad.

For Tomorrow however, is an early example of a style that’s grown and flourished since its release: future-jazz, which blends elements of american jazz with downtempo electronic music to create a relaxing environment.

Like most people who could be classified as ‘musical geniuses,’ Takemura appears to enjoy working in as many genres as possible; no two projects sound quite the same. For Tomorrow is barely recognizable as the work of the same artist compared to the glitch-inspired material of his later career. This record is both smooth and quite listenable. The female vocalist sings off-key on the title track, yet the backing music manages to compensate to the point where it sounds both disorienting and perfect at the same time.

The sounds and styles employed on this record would be echoed throughout the late 90s and into the 21st century as downtempo music increased in popularity, from the elaborate compositions of Tortoise to the seamless beats of Fila Brazillia, and that puts this record ahead of its time.

medulla

I could probably be accused of not "getting it," but i’m really disappointed with Bjork’s Medulla. that’s not a pun. In the past, I’ve been appreciative of her ability to push boundaries and experiment while making those experiments listenable and appealing, but after multiple false starts, I just can’t get into this album. Though, it doesn’t lessen my respect for her as an artist, I will have to say that it’s likely that this album will be leaving my collection.

Hopefully, her next album will be more palatable to my tastes.