A new mix, sequel to Shiver 2, sequel to Shiver. I hope you like it…

Every year the Albums Of The Year lists seem more and more removed from my experience. (Most of the time I haven’t heard a single album on the list.) Worse, we’re now getting into the Of The Decade lists, making me realize how long this has been going on*. If you ask me the top albums of the ‘80s or ‘90s, I don’t have too much trouble rattling off a bunch of names. But this decade? I get confused and have to start thinking hard and looking through the back covers of my mix CDs. Why is that? [Ed.: it’s because you’re getting old. Duh.]

Let me start with this year, 2009. What was good? Hm; my prosthetic brain units at iTunes and last.fm tell me that it’s:

• Dysrhythmia, "Psychic Maps" [jaw-dropping instrumental math-metal, will have you banging your head in 7/13 time.]

• Isis, "Wavering Radiant" [post-metal? huge lowercase-’p’ progressive epics. so good I’m willing to overlook the cookie-monster vocals.]

• Pelican, "Ephemeral" EP [is it post-rock with big riffs? or restrained brainy instrumental metal?]

• Apricot Rail, "Apricot Rail" [ok, this is instrumental-post-rock for sure, but atypically cheerful, kind of like Do Make Say Think. they’ve even got oboes omg!]

• The Happy Hollows, "Spells" [this is the token recognizably-indie-rock album on the list. are they secretly Deerhoof covering the Pixies? Or Lush covering Interpol? also, they are hella cute and I can’t wait to see them live]

• Dirty Projectors, "Bitte Orca" [I still can’t figure this out, with its Afrobeat guitar lines, intricate interlocking vocals, weird rhythms and weirder lyrics. ok, that description makes it sound like "Remain In Light", which it isn’t at all like, but maybe is somehow.]

• Elisa Luu, "Chromatic Sigh" [can I say "eclectic" with a straight face? really interesting electronic music, clearly song-like, ranging between poles of rock and ambient.]

• Anduin + Jasper TX, "The Bending Of Light" [guitar-based drone. majestic.]

• Brock van Wey, "White Clouds Drift On And On" [exactly what it sounds like. it comes with or without beats, your choice.]

• Eluder, "Drift" [exactly what it sounds like, too. careful with this one, some people have had trouble returning to earth afterwards.]

• Jónsi & Alex, "Riceboy Sleeps" [Sigur Rós guitarist and his boyfriend do Stars Of The Lid. delicious in small doses.]

• Victoire, "A Door Into The Dark" EP [a string ensemble that embraces electronics as a natural part of their sound]

• Sub, "Id" EP [nothing new, but basically the best Photek tracks I’ve heard in ten years.]

PS: there might be some last minute additions to this list if Kate Simko’s "Sounds Of The Atom Smashers" and Concern’s "Truth And Distance" live up to their potential.
PPS: ZOMG I forgot Sunn O)))’s stark and forbidding "Monoliths And Dimensions", whose final track "Alice" is deserving of a space up there.
PPPS: Yes, a mix of this stuff is forthcoming…

* It’s not like I’ve been having trouble finding great new music, or that I resent other people for all picking different music than me; but it’s a little sad to not be part of the zeitgeist. Long ago it was really important to me whether punk and new wave would break dinosaur rock’s lock on the mainstream, or whether little-known underground bands like the Cure or the Pixies would get the recognition they deserved. I think the peak of my with-it-ness was circa 1990-91 when I could rattle off the name of every shoegazer band that mattered and I treated every issue of Melody Maker as a shopping list to take with me to the import bin at Tower to find the next Cranes or Chapterhouse.

AppleInsider reports on the iTunes 9 rumors:

“The social networking integration that we reported iTunes 9 would have seems to be part of a bigger social networking push by Apple,” the report states. “We’ve been informed that Apple has plans to tie iTunes 9 into a “Social” application that they plan to release in the future.”

This sounds like the kind of app (though separate from iTunes) that Jessica Kahn and I kept trying in vain to get Apple to build, circa 2003-2005. Maybe they’ll get some use out of our abandoned prototypes.

The report goes on to say that the new application would allow users to share their listening habits with friends [and] send music to friends”

Mike Estee and I had actually prototyped this in iChat in 2003, but the feature never got approved since there were so many more important things to add, like 3-way video conferencing. (Plus the fact that Apple execs turned white as a sheet if you said the words “send music” near them.)

Anyway, personal bitterness aside, I think it’s really amusing that Apple keeps shoving the kitchen sink into iTunes, since that has to be the single nastiest, hardest-to-extend codebase they have — it’s their last remaining Carbon app, with a foundation that dates back to Casady & Greene’s SoundJam, circa 1998.

New happy fun summer mix!

The feelings created by music are so strong, for me, but so ineffable. The problem of perception is usually described using color — how can we know if the visual sensation I call “red” is anything like the one you call “red”? — but only gets worse as you ascend to higher order perceptions, where even names become harder to apply. What do you call the feeling incited by “Guernica”, and even if you find the same words I would, is it the same feeling? And yet vision is our strongest, highest-bandwidth, most describable sense. We struggle to describe sound without using the technical terms of musicians, or vague metaphors.

It doesn’t help that so much of the music I like is so inward-focused: the guitarist gazing (not at shoes) at effect pedals, the producer sliding waveforms around a timeline, the listener bracketed in headphones like my picture above.

Everyone wants their experience of music to be shared. To play an instrument or sing for others, to blast the song from car speakers. To identify with music meant to shock, and use it to shock others. To attend a concert and know that those around you are hearing and feeling the same thing you are, right then: sitting following the intricacies of Bach, or exploding in a mosh pit. Drugs of many kinds help to collapse this emotional waveform, unite a group into a Bose-ian condensate, whether it’s alcohol to bring out desire and anger, or Ecstasy to turn arpeggios and filter sweeps into spinal shivers and universal love.

Nowadays I experience music by myself, mostly on headphones, like right now on the bus to work. Little circuits inside them are actively removing the signs of the outside world, leaving a weird sibilant hush that I fill with the noise I choose. My eyes are on a screen where I sort my music into playlists, or read what other people say about the music they love, and sometimes reach out and listen to their music myself.

I take little piles of songs and chain them together, finding the little hooks at the ends where they fit, making daisy chains to share with people. Is this creation? I didn’t create the songs, but joining them can make something new, like a work of collage. I would love to use the songs as words given to me, and string them together to tell a story. In some of the mixes I’ve made I can hear some of that: abstract arcs of emotion flying across 80 minutes, or juxtapositions that change the sounds on either side into something new that reflects the other.

The worst part about creation is finishing, and throwing the end product out the door into the sunlight where it blows away in sheets. Diana tells me the abalone are dying out because they reproduce by scattering their seed into the ocean and hoping the eggs and sperm will meet; and as their numbers decrease, so does the likelihood of this success. In some ways the progression of my musical tastes has been like that. The Internet has been a tremendous boon, but the distance involved always makes me doubt, as the notes and bytes fly away out of sight, that they’ll ever find a mate, or if they do, whether I’ll even know.

Speaking of my projects, here’s a different one that’s actually finished: a new mix entitled The Fall Of The Towers.

I finished it four days ago and I’m still very pleased with it. Several of the overlays and transitions feel like they’ve become more than the sum of their parts—that’s what I aim for, but don’t always attain.

CUPERTINO, California—February 26, 2008—Apple® today announced that iTunes® (www.itunes.com) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, …

I really hope they thought ahead and used a 64-bit int for the number_of_songs_sold variable, otherwise some Bad Stuff might happen in the next few months.

(We already know they used an unsigned int, otherwise there would have been a crazy press release a few years ago like “Apple announces iTunes has sold over -2,147,483,648 songs”.)

I’ve just finished a new mix CD. As the name “Shiver 2” implies, it’s a sort-of sequel to my 2003 mix Shiver, with more plucked guitars, tremolo, and glitchy electronics … but where the first was a summer mix, this is music for winter, when no matter how many logs crackle on the fire, rain and wind wait patiently outside.

(And once again, the beautiful cover is by my daughter Naomi.)

Official web page

Download: Shiver2.mp3 (91MB)

Preview: [audio:http://mooseyard.com/recordings/mub51/Shiver2.mp3]

This is a mix of post-punk (old and new). I made it about a month and a half ago, but hadn’t put together a cover until today. Now it’s ready…

[web page] [MP3] [more mixes]

The problem with writing about something I dislike is that, after the momentary pleasure of getting it off your chest, there’s not a lot of motivation to read people’s responses (especially the argumentative ones.) Better to pick as a topic something that I do like very much … such as music.

I can’t claim to be an expert on music: I can only barely play an instrument, my dj skills are wack, the theory hurts my brain, and my knowledge is encyclopedic only in a few micro-genres. But I’m rabidly enthusiastic about it; and fortunately, music nowadays is tightly entangled with computer technology, which (like any engineer) I can easily sound like an expert on.

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