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I have been doing some long overdue organizing of the 300+ files in my downloaded folder. I have a habit of downloading stuff there and not moving it on to a final location or not deleting it. Today was the day I tackled it.

In there, I found two mp3s I have zero recollection of: Can I Sit Next to You by Spoon and how do you sleep? by LCD Soundsystem. A look at my order history shows I bought these in March 2021.

...why?

Normally I would think I heard them in a cab or in a show or something, but March 2021 I wasn't going f'ing anywhere. Google does not link these songs (as in, in a movie soundtrack) other than that they were both released in 2017.

Anybody have any idea why I would have heard these songs? I mean, I like them. But I usually immediately put purchased music into a playlist. It is weird to have two random mp3s I don't remember buying hanging out in the downloaded folder. Like the time I was downloading music from Napster and ended up with the song Darkness Darkness by Screaming Trees because someone had mislabeled a file.
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For an icebreaker at work, we were asked to choose a 20-30 second clip of music that would be our "walk up to bat" music, and then we are going to play these clips and guess whose they are. (For context, my team is about a dozen people, and as we are located all over the country, we do ice breakers of some sort every other week or so, to make sure we're forming social bonds.)

I spent much of the weekend agonizing over this. Most of the music I listen does not fit any kind of genre that would be appropriate for that. I eventually landed on "Mein Herz Brennt" by Rammstein. 1) Because it is awesome. 2) Because when I was in high school, we actually did roll down our windows and blast Rammstein while arriving as returning champions to a Quizbowl tournament. No one was in the parking lot to hear, but still. (Also, it was from Herzeleid because Mutter was released when I was in college but, whatever, Mein Herz Brennt is an excellent song.)

This then led to me trying to find a work appropriate youtube link (let's just say the official music video is...not). Which led to me discovering that after a decade drought, Rammstein has released two new albums. One of them, Zeit, is a "surprise pandemic album."

Like a lot of artists, lockdown forced them to stop their almost continuous touring. (As an aside, the band has had the same six people for its entire thirty year history. In interviews, they say it's because they respect each others' needs for time away. Which sounds so simple, but looking to the history of acrimonously broken up popular bands, clearly is not.) Per some interviews I found, lockdown led to them having an unexpected bout of creativity and writing a bunch of new songs.

And the new song that autoplays on their youtube channel? Is "Dicke Titten." Which means, roughly, "Big Titties."

The song is catchy as hell. I'm not linking it because, though I love Rammstein, there are always things I don't want to imply I'm cosigning. But. It's almost quaint in its objectification? The video is a lot of big breasted women in dirndls milking cows.

And I just kind of love the idea of these almost sixty-year-old grandfathers in lockdown going, you know what would make me happy? Performing with my band again. And singing about big titties. Till Lindemann, are you doing okay?
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This weekend there was a Record Riot in Jersey City. Working from home and the general *waves* means I have not been to my favorite local purveyor of used CDs--Iris Records--in a while.

I have a method when I go through used CDs. I focus on World, and I pick up anything from the Record Labels Real World and Luaka Bop, and any Rough Guides, as I've found those to be consistently high quality. (Yes, I realize this method of acquiring new music limits me to pre-2005ish but LET ME HAVE MY OLD WAYS.)

So I picked up a record from Luaka Bop, and I start it, and it's a little unusual, but I'm digging it. Then I look in the booklet for the translation and HOLY SHIT it is HATEFUL. It is in a language I do not speak, and the lyrical content of the entire album is violent misogyny and homophobia (like, literally, women are evil). I look up the artist, and he describes himself as a masculinist. So. We're done here.

If I stopped listening to Eve by Alan Parsons Project, a formative album for me, because I couldn't deal with the sexism anymore, I'm definitely not making an exception for this random album.
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Another thing about working from home is that I'm listening to my music on my Homepod, rather than shitty $10 headphones. (I intentionally use shitty headphones because I need to be able to hear if anyone's trying to get my attention. They are also weirdly the most comfortable to wear for 12+ hours--with the exception of noise-cancelling cans, which I don't use for see above.)

This means I have discovered that a lot of my classical recordings are GARBAGE. This is a collection I built out of bargain bins at Circuit City before I knew anything about specific orchestras, conductors, and record labels in the classical sphere. My Durufle Requiem has such audible compression artefacts it's practically unlistenable.

The question now is how much I care about actually rebuilding this with better quality recordings. Because I honestly listen to Peer Gynt or A Little Night Music once every decade or two. The classical pieces I love I've already sought out better recordings.

(I have to highly recommend "The Insider's Guide to Classical Recordings" by Jim Svejda for this. He has absolutely spot on recommendations, and he usually has two or three per piece, with explanations of the different flavors of the different recordings. Which is why I have three recordings of the Rite of Spring.)

((Also also, this is why I will never go to streaming as my music consumption model, because the digital ecosphere has proven itself to be shite at the entire genre of classical music.))
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Last night, my choir (the Dessoff Choirs) performed with Roomful of Teeth (a Grammy-Award winning chamber vocal ensemble) at the Appel Room at Jazz at Lincoln Center. I don't know if you've ever been there, but it is on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center, and behind the stage is a wall of glass that looks out over Columbus Circle. We were singing with them in one song in their concert, so before we went out, we were lined up in the wings. I was the first one to go out, so that meant I spent fifteen minutes standing in the wings, looking out at the lights of the traffic in Columbus Circle and the reflections of the performers in the glass, listening to this. I don't know if you've ever heard something and thought I must own a recording of this. And trust me that, even with the quality of the recording, it is not the same as hearing it live.

Sometimes it's not just getting to collaborate with professional musicians in performances that's special, it's the moments in rehearsal or backstage that feel like a peak into a private world--who gets the chance to stand behind a Grammy- and Pulitzer-Prize winner and watch her draw abstract art on her sheet music? Years ago, the first time I did a gig with the New York Philharmonic, I saw a group of people enter the top balcony tier during our rehearsal and realized I'm part of their behind the scenes tour. We did a performance of Beethoven's 9th once seated directly in front of the violins with our backs to the audience until we stood at our first entrance, which meant I spent three movements watching the concert master play from a foot away.

And the performance went excellently last night as well--one of those rare occasions where you can feel that's you're nailing it in the moment. Most of the time, the focus is too much on getting every detail correct. It's rare to be able to enjoy the experience while performing.

In any case, I signed up for their mailing list as soon as I left the theater, and downloaded all of their albums when I got home.
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Apple is closing iTunes and I'm immensely upset. I feel like Polaroid users must have--and like this is going to keep happening to me, as my preferred technology for music becomes more and more out of sync with the market.

It's not the iTunes program itself I'm going to miss, per se. It's kind of janky, and has a bunch of idiosyncratic things it does when I sync with my devices that I've never been able to fix. For example--I have a number of tracks that aren't on Apple's music servers, and every now and then, iTunes will remove these from my playlists. Not my library--just the playlists.

Apple will be developing a new program to manage music and devices, which I can hope will work better. And I can save my playlists in a number of formats, including text. So worse comes to worse, I spend a day or two manually reconstructing them in a new format (I've done it before, I can do it again).

I also find myself weirdly glad that I've already gone through the grief of losing the iPod Classic, as losing iTunes would brick it.

The thing that worries me is the more generally trend--I like to own my music. CD sales have fallen 80% in the last decade, and downloads have fallen 56%. iTunes closing reflects that. I never bought from iTunes, as (at least back in the day--haven't checked in a long time) iTunes purchases came with DRM, and I like my music without little handcuffs on it. I buy my downloads from Amazon, but now I feel like I'm one bad day for Jeff Bezos from losing that as well.

The reason I want to own my music instead of rent it is twofold:
1) I don't want to listen to random music. I hate randomize. I've spent twenty years constructing playlists, and when I want to listen to a playlist, I want to listen to *that* playlist. I know the streaming services allow you to construct playlists, but I want complete control, which leads my second, bigger point:
2) Streaming is always subject to the whims of the legal system and the owners of the rights. I like a lot of music that has fallen through the cracks. I love a couple of tracks by the Tarney Spencer Band, a group that had one record in Australia in 1980 and was never digitized. I bought the LP on eBay and digitized it myself. Streaming does not have this.

The idea of losing forever access to music that is important to me is horrifying. I do not want media corporations to have the power to make my access to music temporary, or to be able to erase parts of our culture.

I have been fighting this trend since it started--when people digitized music and ditched their CDs, I kept all of mine. When people uploaded their personal collections to the cloud, I did not. Which meant that when all the major services discontinued their cloud hosting of personal collections, I lost nothing. So now, as anxious as I am about my future ability to acquire new music and continue to play what I have, I'm trying to reassure myself that I still own all the music that I own.

In a few years when they stop making CDs, I'm going to be the person who buys five CD drives and keeps them in bubble wrap.

I literally couldn't sleep last night, thinking about how there will come a time where I can't control my music the way I want to. Just another reminder that being part of a global system that only delivers goods and services as long as there is enough market demand sucks sometimes.
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I have another music recommendation: Tanya Tagaq. Tagaq is an Inuk throat singer. If you've heard Tuvan throat singing, this is--not the same thing. Her music is very visceral. I would recommend listening to Aorta from her latest album. If you like that, you'll probably like other of her stuff. If you hate that, well. At least you'll have been exposed to something novel.
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This time of year is kind of like New Year's for auditors. I've actually been talking about my new year's resolutions at work, even though it's March. Um...happy Nowruz?

One of them is to actually post. I still write LJ posts, just...in my head. And never get around to actually typing them. I also want to put more of my photo albums into photo books, and I love adding email and lj posts for flavor, so I'm falling down a nostalgia hole that's reminding me that I do enjoy reading my own posts, at least, even if no one else does. So!

Two random things make a post.

1) Saw Logan. A++. spoilers )

2) I am continuously on a new music discovery voyage, and man, I found something incredible. Maxida Marak and the Downhill Bluegrass Band. Marak is a Sami singer (the indigenous people of northern Sweden). The collaboration with the bluegrass band seems to be a one-off, which is a shame, because the album "Mountain Songs and Other Stories" is flawless. It includes fantistic covers of "Darling Corey" and "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive," as well as traditional Sami songs with bluegrass arrangements. If you are a fan of bluegrass at all, check it out.

Hamilton

Sep. 4th, 2016 01:16 pm
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On Tuesday, I saw Hamilton.

It felt like I spent the evening on a different planet. I bought the ticket a year ago, because I realized if I wanted to see it, I should buy the ticket before the Tony nominations, and I refused to pay more than $100. This meant clicking through every single performance till I found the first one with a single ticket for $100. Since I bought the ticket so long ago, I've had several dreams about seeing it, and I was incredibly anxious I'd forget the date or the time or lose the ticket or they wouldn't let me in or something. Even when I was waiting in line, I didn't believe it until they actually scanned my ticket and let me into the theater.

There was also the anxiety of, I was pretty sure this was my only chance to see the show. Since I'm an accountant, to put it an accountant way, the book value of my ticket, that is the historical cost, was $100. But the replacement value was $400 or $600. So I kept thinking, what if I get a headache? What if I have to pee? What if the people sitting next to me are jerks?

What I'm saying is, I see a lot of live theater, and the little imperfections are just part of it and usually don't bother me much, but because this was HAMILTON, and because I had to wait so long, OMG WHAT IF IT ISN'T PERFECT.

Then I got into theater, and holy crap, I've never seen merch move like this. I mean, it makes sense. If you spend $80 on a theater ticket, no, you're not going to spend another $40 on a sweatshirt. But if you spent $2,000 to take your family to see it? Then hell yes, you're going to buy a $35 T-shirt. At least then you'll have something tangible for what you just spent.

All this meant that people clogged up the lobby; you could barely move. The restrooms were also in the basement. I was sitting in the rear mezzanine, which was three flights up. I ran up and down those stairs three times--twice before the show, because I am an anxious dooby, and once at intermission. The bathroom line for intermission wrapped all the way into the orchestra section and down the aisle. I booked it from my seat as soon as the lights came up and still only made it back just before the second act started.

Then the seats themselves, which were just the minimum size I could wedge myself into. My thigh bone was too long for the distance between the rows, which meant it was one of those where you have to twist your feet to the sides and angle your legs and that's the one position you can sit in. For the next three hours.

The atmosphere was also something else. It was like a rock concert or opening night of a Marvel movie. The lights went down and everyone was like WOOOOOO! Every time a new person came on stage WOOOOO! And I was in the nosebleeds, which is where the true fans are, the ones who are just grateful to be in the theater. It was electric. In all my performances, there have only been one or two times when I could tell the audience was on board like that, and there was energy between them and the stage. And Hamilton gets that electricity every night?

The show then has so many words, you have to watch it with laser-like focus, attention unwavering or you'll miss something. All of this to say, I entered into an alternate physical reality that ran by its own rules.

Then the show itself.

I managed to avoid listening to the score at all (except for snatches of three songs) before watching the show, and that was the right choice for me to experience. Odd to talk about spoilers when it's based on historical fact, but a) I knew the broad strokes of the history, that doesn't mean I knew the granular details, and b) even if I had known all of that, the choices made in presenting the story are their own kind of spoiler.

So the rest of this is going under a spoiler cut )

I realize I am late to the party on this one. It's so weird to suddenly be a newbie in a fandom that I've strenuously avoided so far. So I know it's been discussed to death by everybody already. I'm just going to enjoy getting to know the soundtrack recording, and finally getting to dive into this really awesome thing.

Real World

Sep. 3rd, 2016 12:25 pm
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Back in July, I picked up a bunch of used CDs from the Princeton Record Exchange (still my favorite music store--seriously, if you're ever in Princeton, check it out) and have been slowly working my way through the stack.

So far the real gem was Afro Celt Sound System. I looked into it a little bit, and discovered they're released by Real World Records, a label founded by Peter Gabriel that focuses on world music (and that means the whole world, including Europe and North America). Based on that, the next time the local used record store set up a stand at Grove St, I scanned the boxes for Real World releases (they have a distinct color band on the spine, so are easy to id) and picked up a few more.

So far, everything has been excellent (Jocelyn Pook, Geoffrey Oryema). I've never been a fan of a record label before, but I'm thinking I will repeat this plan in the future, and focus on picking up Real World records whenever I'm buying used CDs. I'm sure there are some stinkers in the over 200 albums they've released, but whoever gives the musical direction to the label seems to have tastes very close to mine.
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The concert season is over for my choir, and so I've been feeling a little wistful and listening to recordings of old Dessoff concerts. I keep the recordings of everything we do--in fact, I have recordings all the way back to high school, though those are still on tape. As I've been in Dessoff for more than a decade, we are talking several days worth of music. And that's not even including the recordings of my a cappella group.

This spring, we sang Rossini's "Petite Messe Solonelle," which I sang in high school and haven't sung since. It's been more than fifteen years since I sang it, and well over a decade since I listened to it. But when we sat down to our first rehearsal, I could sing the fugue at full speed and full volume with almost no errors--I remembered it completely. There's something about the things you learn in high school--both the incredible number of repetitions as compared to what I do now (which is sometimes run it once then go) and the plasticity of the teenage brain. Those pieces are lodged in there. I can remember a snatch of music I heard at a concert when I was sixteen and have never been able to find since. I can sing the entirety of a song about fog I sang in middle school and haven't heard since.

But these concerts over the last decade? Some of the pieces I remember all the way through. Some I remember the conductor talking to us about the piece, but I don't remember the music. Some I only remember one eight bar section--the tricky part we rehearsed over and over--and the rest is a blank.

And then there's an entire concert I don't remember at all. If you played it for me, I'd tell you I'd never heard those pieces before, let alone performed them. Yet I'm sure if I looked for it, I'd find both the program to that concert and the music with my markings in it. Maybe it's just cause that concert is Monteverdi and Gabrieli, and if there's a period of music that speaks to me less than Italian Renaissance, I haven't found it. Or maybe I'm just getting old.
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Because studying for the CPA is so intensely boring, I've been acquiring new music at a prodigious rate. This is not helped by either a) being about two blocks from a good music store and b) mp3 downloads.

Mostly I've acquired a lot of Philip Glass. Wow, that guy is prolific. And a lot of his stuff sounds substantially similar. The stand out has been "Facades."

Since the guy at the check out asked me, when I walked up with a handful of Glass CDs if "that was the guy with the train stuff," I went home and looked up who the guy with the "train stuff" was, which turns out to be Steve Reich. So I finally acquired "Music for 18 Musicians," which had been on my list, and have ordered "Different Trains." So far, really enjoying "Music for 18 Musicians."

I also picked up another Olafur Arnalds album, "For Now I Am Winter" (already had "Dyad 1909," which is great). "For Now I Am Winter is good, except for the stuff with lyrics which I can't study against.

Now I'm eyeing other Max Richter albums...somebody stop me, this is getting ridiculous.
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I have acquired a new album of Bulgarian choral music (that is not as random as it seems--Bulgarian singing is AMAZING), and was listening through it, and came to this. Have a listen. Sound familiar?

That's because James Horner completely stole it for the main theme of the Willow soundtrack.

Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares was kind of a craze in the eighties. (You know the Xena main theme? Bulgarian.) I will bet you anything you want that I know what cassette was in Horner's tape deck sometime around 1988.
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I am listening to Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" as I do CPA questions, an album that is half awesome and half terrible.

- The best part of "Black or White" is the sound of Macauley Culkin changing the cassette in his tape deck. Man, I miss that sound.

- I still cannot understand like half the lyrics. "Cause the will has brought no--" Frictions? Functions? What?

- There is a song called "In the Closet" that is explicitly heterosexual. It's so explicitly about a WOMAN and a MAN, that it feels like it's overcompensating for something. Like, really, what could a song called "In the Closet" be about?
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I have another case do, so you're getting a post on not that!

Watched 20 Feet from Stardom last night. It is fantastic. It gives a history of pop music over the last 60 years, highlighting the exploitation of black female voices. I mean, that's not the only thread going on, but one of the singers said, of British rock and rollers, "They wanted to sound black. So they had us." It also points out the disconnect between talent and success, talking about the failed solo careers of many of the singers. But they also talk about a woman, my new idol, Lisa Fischer, who put out a solo album--and won a Grammy for it--but didn't really want to do that. She really enjoys singing backup, so that's what she does. She doesn't want to be out front. Several people talked about the power of voices in harmony, and how some singers just prefer that to singing solo. That's certainly something that resonates with me (and my small talent). I get a lot more out of being part of the group than I do out of being out front.

What I found most interesting was to realize that the backup singers on like 90% of everything you've ever listened to are the same dozen or so people. It is a small world, session backup singers, and as each artist strives to capture the sound of other artists, they use the same backup groups. Makes me wish they were more frequently credited so that I could more easily track their careers. I mean, I'd like just to have a playlist of all the things I already own with these singers on them.

It was also heartening to see that, when I plugged 20 Feet from Stardom into amazon, looking for the soundtrack, it brought up all of the failed solo albums of the featured singers as things I might like. I bet this doc has actually done a fair bit of sales for them. I hope they get some of the residuals.

In conclusion, a great documentary that looked at a lot of different issues, not just failed ambition, and features amazing music. It's streaming on netflix--check it out.
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When I'm listening through my (extensive) music collection, I create playlists where I pull out the tracks that I like so I don't lose track of them. I then usually put these tracks into some sort of sensible order.

Right now I'm listening to one of these dumping ground playlists that I never got around to organizing. Which means I just listened to the Flower Duet, followed by "Adagio" by Albinoni, "Bolero," "The Musical Typewriter," and then "Night on Bald Mountain." This is...weird.
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I am listening to a radio documentary on John Cage's "Four minutes thirty-three seconds." Does it ever get performed any more? I've never seen it programed. I mean, it is fundamentally changed if the audience knows what it is, and it's so famous now that most classical audiences would know it. So can it even be performed anymore?

I think it's one of the most important modern classical music compositions, but I've never heard it in concert, and a recording would be pointless. And maybe a performance would be pointless now, too. Maybe it's just important that it happened.
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It is old home week on my iPod. I've been listening to stuff I haven't really listened to since high school.

Riverdance by Bill Whelan - I know, I know, Riverdance all became something of a joke, but the CD still holds up. I have to be all hipster about this album, too, and say I bought it back when it was a $17 import, before the show had come over here. (I bought it from Borders, too. All the money from my first job went to the music section in the Borders at the Atrium Mall. Before amazon, Borders was the only place with any decent selection, where you had even a hope of getting good classical or international music.)

When I listen to Celtic music now, I tend to listen to stuff that hues a little more closely to traditional--LĂșnasa or Navan. Riverdance is definitely fusion with a pop sensibility, and consequently sounds very nineties. I would say Riverdance can be credited with bringing traditional Irish music into popularity, but Irish music never really went away in the US. But it certainly worked as a bridge for me to get into Celtic music. And I still like it.

Yes, I did see the show, but years later. And mostly what I remember is that the lead dancer fell over.

Ray of Light by Madonna - This is, by any objective measure, a terrible, terrible album. It's all crap techno. I can listen to it and think about how awful it is and yet still enjoy it. This came out when I was a Junior in high school, and there was a time where if you went into the hallway of my dorm, you'd hear either this album or the Titanic soundtrack coming out of every room.

I bought my copy bootleg in Turkey, I'm afraid to say. I did buy a legal copy later, though it was used, so no royalties to Madonna either way. But buying the Turkish version, I got a bonus European release only track.

I think if I listened to this for the first time now, I wouldn't get through the first track before turning it off. But back before Napster, I had much more of a tendency to doggedly listen through the whole album every time, instead of just picking my favorite tracks and skipping the others. I'd say it was a consequence of owning less music, but I had more than 200 CDs at the time. But it does mean, though I bought the album just for "Frozen," I kind of like the whole thing, through sheer repetition.
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I am doing some packing, which means I'm finally ripping some CDs my mom picked up in a bargain bin and thought I might like and--what the hell is coming out of my speakers? The CD jacket showed an Indian dancer, so my mom assumed it was Indian dance music, and it is a twee little folk song about Italian coffee shop workers.

...
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I do not normally do pimping posts, but a former coworker of mine, one who sang in my choir for a while, just released an album: The Never Content

She's been promising an album for years. In fact, I first asked her when her album would be out six years ago (I just looked that up--jeez, that's a long time) when I went to her band's show in one of the most ill-advised excursions of my life. It started with seeing X-Men 3, and then going to this show, which didn't end its sound check until midnight, and I had a bad stomach bug, so getting home on the subway at three AM was possibly the worst I've felt in my life, but ANYWAY. It is a good band.

The album sounds most like Emiliana Torrini's first album Love in the Time of Science. It's in that electronica, Massive Attack type of style. (Amazon calls it dance pop, but...not really?) You can hear extended clips on iTunes, but if you like that type of music at all, this is really good. I've been listening to it almost continuously since I downloaded it.

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