Thought Palace

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…

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

This is one of my favorite interviews ever, and it reminds me of a long-gone era when the Cocteau Twins mattered, mattered really deeply, and were making music I could barely believe possible. Music I was not the only one to find wholly impossible to describe…