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Archive for June, 2006

my date with density

Thursday, June 29, 2006
I'm a big fan of text clouds, where a list of topics, keywords, tags, etc are displayed at various sizes based on how popular those words are. the artist cloud is one example. it shows how often a particular artist has been mentioned during the course of the tunequest. Well, the other day, i was playing with some of these search engine optimization tools, one of which ...

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james bond, meet john mcclane

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
michael kamen's score to licence to kill is very reminiscent of his score for die hard. it has a very 80s sound to it, with the familiar james bond motifs grafted onto it. it makes sense; the two films are only a year apart. the results aren't too bad, though i didn't particularly care for his die hard music, or kamen's style in general. however, he does ...

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sonic youth doth mine ears please

Wednesday, June 28, 2006
After dancing with the mainstream on dirty and (to a lesser extent) washing machine, sonic youth delivered more musically-complex album with a thousand leaves, which contains two of the great songs in the group's repetoire: 'sunday' and 'hits of sunshine' (one of their most quintessential jams). in my mind, this album marks the mellowing of the band, but it's a mellowing that comes from the confidence that ...

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The seemingly non-random preferences of my iPod

Tuesday, June 27, 2006
I've talked about this before, but it keeps happening and I need to remind myself that nothing nefarious is going on. For the fourth time since I started the tunequest, I've had to question the randomness of my ipod. first, there's cex's being ridden and being ridden instrumentals, which were played pretty much back to back. Then there was Danny Elfman's Batman scores. more recently, the device ...

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Where are the Dust Bros?

Monday, June 26, 2006
Wouldn't you know? as soon as I bring up my film score classification difficulties, I am presented with yet another challenge. Fight Club. Both the film and the soundtrack by The Dust Brothers are, I do say, fantastic. but I am torn between keeping the score with my other filmtracks or moving it closer to its musical brethren. In either case, the fact remains that this ...

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K-pax: Electronic, Score, or Electronic Score?

Saturday, June 24, 2006
If I didn't already know differently, I would never have guessed that the soundtrack to K-pax was from a movie. indeed, it plays more like a backroom-in-the-club chill-laced downtempo record than a film score. This is the only record by Edward Shearmur that I have, so I don't know whether this is out of the ordinary for him, but I must say that I thoroughly enjoyed it ...

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Genre tags are a messy business

Saturday, June 24, 2006
I think I may have decided to start adopting parts of the genre labeling system that's in use at discogs.com. I say this half-heartedly because I don't relish the idea of re-tagging all 14,000+ songs in the library and I'm not sure it would be an improvement. But at the same time, I must acknowledge that my existing scheme is arbitrary and borderline fubar. Part of the ...

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elfman bats .500 this week

Saturday, June 24, 2006
in baseball that's great. on the tunequest, not so much. two danny elfman scores from 1996 made their way through my ears to my brain this week: mission: impossible and mars attacks! and while i enjoyed both films more than the general public seemed to, i had a mixed response to their scores. this week marked the first in the 4 years i've owned those scores that ...

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Tchaikovsky’s No. 5: Magnificent!

Friday, June 23, 2006
It's official: Tchaikovsky's No 5 is now my favorite symphonies of his. It had been running neck and neck with No 6 for a very long time, but a recent Berlin Philharmonic listening has pushed it to the head of the pack. In addition to those melodies that you just can't get out of your head, there's this one passage about 8.5 minutes into the fourth movement ...

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