You hear that, Mr Andersen?

Music, Strom Thurmond, Nobilis

One of the great things about the mighty interweb is that there are very few ideas so odd that no-one will put up a website dedicated to them. I thinkCrying While Eating is probably a case in point. Just... huh.

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This revelation just in from the musos in the room - midi files are almost all white. There is apparently some sort of unfunkifier built into the file-format, which removes all trace of soul or natural rhythm.

This discussion was prompted by this story about PJ buying a robot band. (It's fairly obvious from the video that he saw it quite some time ago, since it's him pre-slim&trim phase.) Anyway, the rendition of "A Day in the Life" might have been more impressive in person, but via video it appears to be even more lifeless than the typical waiting-in-the-lift composition.

And while we're talking about music - after going through a brief girl-punk phase (Elastica, The Coolies, Foamy Ed... I'm pretty sure Le Tigre doesn't count, though they were in there), I'm listening to Minuit - the Guns EP at the moment, but I've also got the Luck EP and Eighty-Eight. Crank it up just a little on my headphones, and I can drown out the room quite effectively - the only downside is my tendency to bop along to the music a bit.

Huh - I had a quick look at Real Groovy and SmokeCDs to point at some samples of the two NZ bands I mentioned, and it looks like you can't get the Foamy Ed or The Coolies EPs anymore... it seems weird that recorded music can just, like, become unavailable. I mean, I'm still annoyed that I haven't managed to locate Cloudboy's first EP, or anything by Mink other than For My Mink, and I remember finding an album by Rude Bones (a Japanese ska band) in Germany that I didn't buy, and have regretted not buying ever since... and there was the second Republica album that I bought while waiting in a train station in Norway, which I hadn't heard of before or seen since. Admittedly, I'm also super-reluctant to pay "import" prices for music - $25/album that I'm fairly sure I'll like I can make my peace with, but $40 just seems too much.

Okay, so it's not like the situation sixty years ago, when you couldn't get the original recordings, and had to make do with a local artist's interpretation of, say, "Rock Around the Clock" rather than Bill Hayley's version, unless you had a specialty order from overseas. But now that you can have books printed on demand for pretty much the same price as a mass-produced one, it seems like there's no good reason for anyone not to get a physical CD of anything they want.

(I'm not that keen on mp3-only purchases - I like having physical evidence of my support for artists, and having the whole liner-notes thing tied to the music. And I've not been particularly keen on any of the DRM schemes I've seen.)

Yep, I definitely have something that I'm meant to be doing that I'm avoiding - I can tell by how much I'm writing. ;)

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I can see how you might not find Strom Thurmond and his Feathered Friends funny, but it appeals to me, and that's what's important.

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One of the frustrating things about Nobilis is that there are awesome fragments of writing scattered throughout, pretending to be extracts of larger works - but there is no larger work to read! And I really want to read them! For example:

"Okay, here's what I'm thinking," he said. "None of us individually is strong enough to take that monster. What we're going to need to do is pool our powers -- coordinate our abilities to take the thing down together. If we all work together, after all, there's nothing that can stop us."

"First," I said, "it's fairly obvious that all of us working together means bugger all when it comes to fighting dragons. Second, and I realize this is a subtle point, everyone else is dead. Third, and most cogently of all, I hate your guts."

"But otherwise?"

"An admirable plan."
-- from "The Dog Princes" by Janet Cable

But there is no book called "The Dog Princes"! Wah!!

Posted by svend at June 8, 2005 4:22 PM