tunequest

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 were the structure of the piece begins to crumble. But before the piece descends into chasom the timpani roars to life and the woodwinds come flying to the rescue.

Magnificent!

in 2001, suburban shakedown was a band of teenagers who had a band, the way a lot of teenagers do. unlike a lot of teenage bands (mine included), they didn’t suck too much. and rather than follow the conventional rock/country/hip-hop mode of amateur musicianship that is prevalent in the ambitious teenage set, this band of minstrels went for something more unusual. no, not techno or anything involving a computer. and no, nothing classical or in any way avant garde.

no, this group was a jam band, a kind of phish-lite.

i saw these guys a couple times in pensacola throughout 2001 and they were enjoyable. not great, but enjoyable. their album from the time, measuring peace, is the same way: competent grooves and pleasant riffs that are clean cut and inoffensive, but it takes an especially audacious form of young ruffian to write and perform songs about weed at all-ages shows where other teenagers and their parents are sure show up.

on a personal note, the members of suburban shakedown, at the time, were attending the same international baccalaureate program I had attended a few years before. i didn’t know any of the guys, but it was simply amazing how every one of them was a slightly younger and slightly distorted version of someone i had known.

My lowly 15gb iPod, maxed to its capacity, can only store about 2000 songs at a time. At the moment, it houses albums ranging from 0-N (not including albums that begin with ‘the’). Thus, I have not had any Ratatat grace my eardrums in quite some time. And man, i have been jonesin’ for it, with no relief in sight.

But in this junkie’s darkest hour, I stumbled upon a ray of light called CBC radio 3, with its vending machine of archived performances available for all kinds of streaming pleasure. God bless those Canadians; they had a 2004 performance by those electro-synth-rockers queued up and waiting, just for me.

Now I can slip on my headphones and have a prolonged and gentle heroin shot of that driving melodious Ratatat sound and wait in anticipation of their album’s arrival on the tunequest.

Addendum (9:58pm): just discovered that the iTunes music store has a heretofore unknown (to me) Ratatat b-side: "Noose." Yeah, I had a couple free downloads; yeah, this was one of them; yeah, it’s good, very good.

The note at the top of the page says that the site layout is currently broken in firefox. It turns out that I royally screwed something up while trying to "Improve" Things around here. As a result, I’ll have to recode the site structure and css from scratch. Until then, sorry firefox users. I commend you for your independent spirit, but for now you’ll have to scroll to the bottom of the page to see the sidebars.

However, that’s not the only type of glitch in these parts lately. I ran across Nobukazu Takemura’s hoshi no koe the other day. Takemura is a guy I was first introduced to in new orleans 5 years ago in june 2001. He was opening for Tortoise and Mouse on Mars at the howlin’ wolf. (by the way, best concert ever. it’s not often you get to see a band at the height of your fandom for them.)

It was my first exposure to both the glitch genre of music and the concept of a ‘laptop performance.’ For 30+ minutes this Japanese guy with a long pony tail sat calmly behind a table, meticulously twisting dials, pushing buttons and manipulating his powerbook, creating a perfect, swirling mess of sounds… And I was mesmerized by it. By the time he was half way through Sign and those dueling artificial voices had finished their seemingly-never-ending chant, I was hooked.

I bought Hoshi no Koe that night after the show and quickly launched an effort to acquire as much Takemura as I could. It was a foolish endeavor; The dude is as prolific as he is obscure (not to mention foreign) and I had a hard enough time tracking down a full discography, let alone much of his music.

Eventually, I gave up on that particular tunequest as it proved nearly impossible. Besides, the thing I came to slowly realize about Takemura’s music is that it’s very dichotomic. It’s either so brilliantly clever that you want to shout "Oh my god, that’s awesome!" Or it’s completely and totally unlistenably abstract, the type of compositions that certain people who want to prove their intellectual mettle listen to. A similar phenomenon occurs throughout the genre. However, lesser composers than Takemura lean distinctively toward the latter opinion.

In the end, despite the short burst of passion, my affair with glitch was short-lived. As I’ve mellowed with age, I’m not as likely to indulge in the less listenable as I find that my musical tastes are for my own enjoyment and not to impress the kids with some kind of street cred.

But Takemura, the man is still fascinating.

every time i run across spiritualized, i enjoy it that much more. and the funny thing is, i’ve never really sat down and given the group the attention it deserves. like passing acquaintances from a bar scene, i’ve only bumped into the band’s music a handful of times, despite having it in my library for nigh on five years now.

it’s a real shame too, because i should have been a better friend to the group. i got let it come down and ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in space in quick succession during the great music dump of 2001, an event that i’m still dealing with in terms of listenage. it was a year of seismic change in my musical listening patterns and spiritualized got lost in all the, well, noise (that’s a pun, if you aren’t familiar with the band’s music.)

but that goes back to one of the reasons why i am undergoing this tunequest: to unearth my lost musical treasures.

oh, this music will pin you to your chair there’s so much sound.

I haven’t run across much radiohead on the tunequest. top 10 artists are currently excluded so that i appreciate the middle and lower rungs of my collection.

And don’t worry, there’s plenty.

Anyways, here’s an amusing post from Thom himself. The incident is ironic, considering radiohead’s last album was called hail to the thief.

I’m sure it’s safe to say that’s it’s probably been 9 years since I last listened to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Murder Ballads, and man, I had forgotten just how morbid that thing is.

And graphic too. Each song on the album tells a distinct story, exploring the very dark aspects of violent death, from both the perpetrator’s perspective and that of the the victim.

In no way is this album easy listening and making it through all 59 minutes requires a fair amount of fortitude. In fact, it’s only made palatable by some smooth songwriting, such as the jazzy, downtempo groove on O’Malley’s Bar that lulls you into complacent head-bobbing while listening to descriptions of the most atrocious acts.

great film. great soundtrack (particularly the overture).

reason number 32 why bears are the number 1 menace to the nation: i was late to work because of one. you see, this particular bear decided that this morning was a good time to go on a shopping spree.  as a result, traffic on my interstate route backed up about 12 miles. well, it’s always backed up, but this morning was far more dense, thanks to the closing of a lane and exit so that bear apprehension tactics could be performed.

on the plus side, i got to listen to alice in chains acoustic ep, jar of flies. i was into the chains pretty heavy in high school, enjoying their grunge-soaked, pop-friendly version of metal music. over the years though, i had grown tired of the group’s abrasiveness and by the end of the 90s, i had cleared out most albums, except for that 1993 out-of-character ep.

jar of flies is a fantastic collection of somber, meditative music that avoids indulging itself in balladry. the 30 minute record is only seven songs long (yet two singles were released, which makes it more of a mini-album), and i think it shows that, under the hardened metal exterior, alice in chains could actually put together some very good songs.