Category: Music
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Dinner Music
We have a five-disc changer in our living room, where we expect most of our neighbors to congregate during the cocktail hour. Because I don’t have the time to program a mix of music, I’m just going to drop five CDs in the player and hit “Random.”
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iMix Nostalgia
I remember sitting in my 9th grade art class with some guys who, during the previous summer, had apparently decided that they would become “skaters” and listen to The Dead Milkmen, Fishbone, and Suicidal Tendencies. I’d listen to ‘HFS every afternoon and try to keep up.
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Silence (and a New Mix)
I had two main goals with this mix. First, I decided to divide it evenly between older and newer music. There’s always a jump of at least 15 years from tune to tune. But I also wanted the mix to be coherent, so I was looking for a tone that could maybe be described as “Songs that might actually sound better if they were played on an old, hissing record player.”
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A Few Words on . . .
Week in Review: Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, John Vanderslice, DeLillo, Hornby, Jarmusch, and The Battle of Algiers
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Everything is Copasetic, Now
At Girish’s request, I’ve pasted together a mix of music that features the Fender Rhodes.
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Also Sprach Zarathustra
I only know of Deodato because of Being There (1979). Hal Ashby drops his needle on “Zarathustra” during the long sequence near the beginning of the film when Chance leaves his now-dead employer’s estate and wanders, umbrella and suitcase in hand, through the streets of Washington, D.C.
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A Good Man is Hard to Find
Sufjan Stevens’ recent performance on Morning Becomes Eclectic is now available in streaming video. It’s a fantastic set.
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Goodnight for Real
In a relatively short time Beauty Pill has gone through a few members, and with a couple singers and songwriters in the band there is a surprising amount of variety on display. The Song of the Moment, “Goodnight For Real” is representative only in that it features clever lyrics, solid playing (including some fun synth parts), and a really catchy chorus.
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Ten Years Gone (and other things)
I’m afraid that Long Pauses is fast becoming an outlet for end-of-the-week rambles, written while I drink away a Friday afternoon. The following is an incomplete list of topics I would cover at much greater length and with much greater insight given the time, energy, and inclination.
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Safeway Cart
The new Song of the Moment, Neil Young’s “Safeway Cart,” scores a scene in which the Legionnaires march through a rocky desert, one of their many meaningless exercises in the film. It plays like a dirge and is one of Beau Travail’s few explicit references to the Christian allegory at play.
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Missing
“Missing” won Song of the Moment honors in a close race with “Black Tambourine” and “Hell Yes,” both of which, it must be said, are even more ass-shaking than “Missing” but not quite as perfect. All three sound even better in multi-channel.
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Watching Music
We seem to be marching at a dizzying clip toward the fusion of media, and discs like Play and Guero offer us a taste of the media-gumbo that is likely to emerge. It’s fun to imagine what effect this might have on our visual literacy. Peter Gabriel brings artists like Robert LePage into our homes, and D-Fuse gives us art house abstraction.
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Evening on the Ground
Joanna and I just made what we hope will be the last of many recent trips to southern Alabama. It was another rough one — the type of experience that is supposed to give us “closure.” Everytime someone says that to me (and always with the best intentions, I know), I think of Philip Roth’s […]
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Riff Raff
The Song of the Moment was supposed to be Mark Kozelek’s version of “Riff Raff” from What’s Next to the Moon, his album of Bon Scott-era AC/DC covers. Something in that combination of Kozelek’s voice and his tasteful acoustic guitar arrangements unearths the roots in AC/DC’s rock. That album is borderline bluegrass–not the arrangements or […]
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Strange Waters
I asked Bruce about “Strange Waters” yesterday, and his answer was a tense, beautiful sermon.
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Musical Interludes
Last night I discovered that, by borrowing the chord progression from Henry Mancini’s theme from The Pink Panther — E minor 9, C9, and F9 — you can knock out a swingin’ version of Pink Floyd’s “Welcome to the Machine.”
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Multi-Channel Goodness
As Rubinson mentions often in his “Music in the Round” column, the explosion of home theater has been good and bad for audiophiles. The rapid developments in hardware technology and sound processing algorithms has put mid-fi sound well within reach of most budgets. But as TV monitors and projection screens — the new focal point of most systems — have grown and grown, our front speakers have moved further and further apart. And that does bad things to the fidelity of good two-channel music.
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God Rest His Soul
iTunes just landed on “God Rest His Soul” by The 31st of February, which was a happy coincidence given the content of yesterday’s post. Recorded in 1968, it’s a beautiful prayer for Martin Luther King, Jr., sung by Greg Allman of all people.
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Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
Yeah, I know. There’s nothing less hip than Elton John, but while walking through Toronto last month, my iPod randomly landed on “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy,” and it was, at that moment, the single greatest song I had ever heard.
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Shut Up and Listen
So, imagine that Ira Kaplan invites you over to his apartment one night for some music and political debate.
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La Villa Strangiato
“Listen to this song,” he told us. “It’s the coolest.” Robbie was something of an authority on such things, and so I listened. Intently. Sitting stone upright on Dave’s bed. And Robbie was right. It was most definitely the coolest. This wicked keyboard sound introduced a simple, shuffling drumline.
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The Shadowlands
I would like to play piano/keyboards in a rock band, and I would like that band to sound as much as possible like Ryan Adams’ “The Shadowlands.” I would also be perfectly content if it sounded like “Political Scientist” or “English Girls Approximately” or almost any other track from Love is Hell.
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Fun with Hipsters
I invented a new game last night. It’s called, “Buy the only used copy of Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation at your local indie record shop, then watch all hell break loose when you lay it down on the checkout counter.”
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Snow
Since watching Caveh Zahedi’s In the Bathtub of the World on Sunday, I have probably listened to The Innocence Mission’s “Snow” thirty times. Hopefully I’ll find time to write about Bathtub in the next day or two. It’s been a long time since I was so moved by a film.
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Fingertips
Dubbing itself “An intelligent guide to free and legal music on the web,” Fingertips provides links to and short commentaries on the week’s best downloads.
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Tombigbee
If you’re too hip to like Tori, do me a favor and tell me what you think of this song. It’s a nice change of pace for her. No acoustic piano. A bit of distortion. Borderline lo-fi.
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Iron & Wine & Tarkovsky
How strange. I just discovered that Sam Beam, of Iron and Wine, graduated from Florida State’s film school. As an alumnus of that program, my wife receives a monthly email notice, The Warren Report, that offers brief updates on the lives and careers of FSU filmmakers.
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Bartok’s Fifth String Quarter
Several years ago, in a seminar on modern and postmodern lit, I wrote a fun paper on Ezra Pound’s music criticism. In particular, I was interested in Pound’s admiration for Bartok’s String Quartet #5.
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In the Strangest of Places
What a pleasant surprise to stumble into some nice bits of writing in, of all places, Stereophile magazine.
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Holland
It’s a heckuva song from Greetings from Michigan. I’ve added it and Stevens’ latest, Seven Swans, to my Amazon Wish List. Can anyone make a strong case for one album being better than the other? Any other Sufjan fans?