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.

“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.

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.

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.

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”.)

(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]

[web page] [MP3] [more mixes]

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.

And fortuitously, this month is open season on “open letters” on digital music. I thought SJ’s was pretty damn good really, probably better than I could manage; but fortunately many of the answer letters have set the bar so low that I think I can hold my own even though I’m neither a half-literate sports team owner nor a PR duckspeak generation algorithm.

First some ground rules.

1. I don’t speak for my employer. I don’t work on or cruise-direct anything directly music-related, and I’m not palzy-walzy with anyone who does. This is my blog on my domain, and I’m writing this on my computer on my patio on my weekend off. “I am not a number — I am a free man!” †
2. I don’t have answers. Questions and doubts are more interesting and useful at this stage. “If a man … be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.” †
3. I am not trying to sound cooler-than-thou (q.v.)

My background.

As disclaimed above, I don’t have serious Musical Skills. But I can listen to it real good! I love playing music, and the ancillary activities like discovering new artists, hunting down obscure albums, poring over liner notes and biographies, making mixtapes, and babbling to my friends about how they have to listen to this awesome new album I just found.

I’ve been in this state since about age eight(?) when I discovered my parents’ copy of the Beatles’ 1962-1966, the “Red Album”. After playing that to death and nearly going blind reading the black-on-red lyric sheets, I started buying their other albums. I was pretty monotheistic (quadratarian?) about the Beatles for a few years, but in high school I got into first jazz, then Classic Rock (which wasn’t that classic yet), then prog-rock, then New Wave and punk. Since then I’ve mostly listened to various flavors of indie-rock, post-rock, electronic-music-with-beats, and ambient music; with forays into New Music (aka minimalism or “that deedly-deedly stuff”), experimental noise, Balkan folk, big-band / swing, Baroque, instrumental surf, and so forth.

I’m aware that, in the grand scheme of history and the globe, that’s spanning the gamut of genres from A to B, but at least I know what I like. And I’m always willing to try new things — Renaissance polyphony, death-metal, 1930s country music, rai, Justin Timberlake — if, like Linus’s pumpkin, they’re sincere.

By the way, this is not meant to put down anyone else’s musical taste, or point out how cool I am. I could (and have) walk into any college radio station and get that attitude aimed at me by some DJ with a crate of out-of-print Lithuanian ska-tech remix 12”s. That’s no fun! If you want to club people with ‘tude, explain to them why their favorite API sucks. You talk about music to share it, make friends, and find more of it, not to alienate people.

—skritchy turntable backspin SFX—

“…You talk about music to share it, make friends, and find more of it…”

Oops, there’s that loaded word “share”. Where’d that come from?

• Who told me I had a right to “share” music?
• What do “friends” have to do with what is, after all, a commercial transaction?
• Where did I “find more of it”, hmm? At an officially-sanctioned retailer of shrink-wrapped CDs or DRM-wrapped files? Or maybe … on the interwebs???

Boy, those are some swell questions. Too bad I’m out of time for now. I gotta go.