At the moment, I’m in the middle of another shift in my listening habits, a fairly sizable one. For years I’ve been neck deep in Electronic and Hip Hop with occasional forays into Jazz and even rarer ones into the Rock, Country, and Folk diaspora. Something about synthetic beats with warm and sticky rhythms and mechanical melodies grabbed me. I hungered for dystopian tracks that spoke of a near future urban sprawl but something has been shifting in me and I’m finding my fingers crawling out in search of something more organic, something human.
Looking over the past three months of purchases sees this trend growing:
- The Hold Steady - Boys and Girls in America
- Katharine Whalen - Dirty Little Secret
- Jas. Mathus - Old School Hot Wings
- The Blue Van - Dear Independence
- Horses Brawl - Horses Brawl
- Thievery Corporation - Versions
- Luke Vibert - Lover’s Acid
- Luomo - Paper Tigers
- Ad Astra Per Aspera - Catapult Calypso
- John Coltrane - Fearless Leader
- Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus
- Radio Citizen - Berlin Serengeti
- Paris Combo - Motifs
- Willowtree - What a Way to Go!
- The Black Neon - Arts & Crafts
- Ratatat - Classics
- Monsieur Leroc - I’m Not Young But I Need The Money
- The Contingencies - Viva Ole
- Bobby Hughes Combination - Nhu Golden Era
- Marc Mac pres. Visioneers - Dirty Old Hip Hop
- Wale Oyejide - Africa Hot! The Afrofuture Sessions
- Nomo - New Tones
- The Format - Dog Problems
- Quantic - An Announcement to Answer
- Thomas Mapfumo - Spirits To Bite Our Ears : The Singles Collection 1977-1986
Out of twenty-five albums, fifteen are unrelated to Electronic or Hip Hop and a handful that I did not highlight sort of occupy a space that isn’t quite really Electronic nor quite the organic feel of Rock or Jazz. This, so far, has seen me snap up five albums completely out of my normal element. So what’s with the shift?
Nostalgia. Well, that’s the lame ass theory I’m running with anyways. Looking back over my review for The Contingencies where I raved about a sound that leans way back but charges forward fueled by straight ahead guitar arrangements. After having snapped up that album along with Willowtree my ears felt thirsty for shorter, tighter, more aggressive arrangements. Not necessarily Punk or Thrash but sounds that left me warm all over reminiscing about practicing all weekend in the drummer’s half-heated garage, fingers stiff from the cold and swollen from pounding out song after song, never getting motivated enough to get a gig even at the local dives because really all we wanted to do was play.
Seems odd to think that after dropping out from the Daddy’s Junky Music and Sam Ash groupie scene that I would throw myself at music on the opposite spectrum but for a good eight years close to 80% of what I’ve been listening to could be classified as MPC/Pro-Tools music which is a far cry from the gritty Rock and Punk fueled Blues arrangements I cut my teeth on back in high school and my first tour of duty through college.
Recapturing lost youth on the eve of my first child? Yeah, that is the most likely answer here that and an astounding sense of ennui with what I have been listening to over the past year or so; that crushing feeling of “meh” has been heavy as of late and these last couple of selections have gotten me feeling a little more fired up about music. If anything, my restless tastes result in a wide and varied selection and I can hope that our daughter, as she gets older, might find herself pawing through it on late nights like I did as a kid with my parents collection.
This morning I was all fired up to bang out a post about how the supposed repudiation of the Republican led House and Bush Administration policies. I also had a deep itch to blast the public for sticking behind a career politician like Lieberman who has sold DNC planks to make RNC oars. You know what? Fuck it. I voted yesterday and as far as I’m concerned that is more than enough for me.
I am sick of politics. I am sick of a short-sighted US populace than cannot see beyond their own paranoid and callow self-absorption. I am sick of the shit-stain brown shirt Republicans and urine soaked yellow panted Democrats and that either is indistinguishable from the other. Sick of the fact that our electoral system is rigged for moneyed interests. Disgusted with the simple fact that the only motivators for my fellow citizens to blindly react are hate, intolerance, xenophobia, and fear. Fuck it. All of it.
Instead of thinking about all of this I’m going to do the rational thing. Ignore it and go read a book that has jack shit to do with real world events. That and listen to some new music.
Ever since the overpriced and flawed iRiver Mobile Transmitter crapped the bed (no right channel) we have been forced back into the neo-Luddite nightmare of burning CD to listen in the car. Sure we could drag ourselves out to to store to pick up another transmitter and, yes, we have had close to a year to do just that but what would I have to write about if we did? Anyways, the trouble is with our voracious appetite for new music means that in a given week some twenty or so new discs will find themselves floating about in the car. Floating right next to the nice Case Logic 400 disc wallet.
The problem is that we have no method for filing in the wallet. We’ve tried it by genre, artist, and owner and the complaint is always the same, “Where the hell is that album?!” On top of that is the overwhelming feeling of “meh” that overtakes us seeing all the music lined up next to each other and the pressure is on to find just the right music for that particular mood before it shifts. Sort of like skeet shooting, blindfolded and drunk with a rubber band gun in high wind. Missing is all too familiar. Yet for some reason when our music is snuggly tucked into our players finding and listening to music is easy and not fraught with near panicked episodes of ennui.
This morning I just went through the ritual of gathering up all the errant discs, flipped through the book pulling the ones we haven’t listened to in a while, and filed the rest with no rhyme or reason. All the while I dreamed of after market stereos with an auxiliary jack on the face plate like the fairly El Cheapo Sony CDX-GT310. Maybe I might just surprise Management with a gift that we both would enjoy–the best kind, I say. The installation is the cost of another transmitter and it might just save our collective sanities from the blizzard of CDRs that often coats the back of the car.
Published by james on November 6, 2006
in Site.
Well, my own version of it, anyways. Spent the weekend learning Inkscape and generating several banners before setting on this one which blends several colors from Gabriella’s room (painting on the mind) and makes use of a re-mixed assassin. Quite pleased with everything, if I don’t say. 
Published by james on November 3, 2006
in Site.
Kind of bored with my theme. With it having been in service for nearly a year I’m feeling like it is time for something different but what. I would like to clean things up a little bit and have the extraneous content a little more focused and reflective of what I’m up to these days: last.fm, flickr, Candied Pop. This is where I scratch my head.
I’m a big fan of K2 and am a little loathe to leave it behind but I suppose I could hack it up to get something different. Maybe three column (Bharath Kumar has a nice one) or a layout focused on the first post with a handful of others appearing in preview and the extraneous stuff crammed into the footer.
Stuff to chew on.
…because very likely it has already been lost.
Either from ineptitude and ignorance,
No business in America would put someone with no computer expertise in charge of a multimillion dollar information technology (IT) purchase. However, this is precisely what we’ve done with our election officials. Good, well-meaning but technically naive bureaucrats all over the country have been sold huge, complex, untested computer systems that masquerade as simple “voting machines.” These officials have been put in charge of a massive IT procurement project, and they simply are not qualified.
Or plain old malfeasance,
I will be voting but with little faith that my vote cast will have any weight, meaning, or purpose. Rather, my vote will be like that futile attempt to change the traffic light cycle by franticly pressing the crosswalk button. It will amount to nothing.
