Wednesday, November 14

I may need to re-name this blog to "Adventures in Sonic Exploration".

What I'm pursuing now:

(1) Minimalists - Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass... the "big three" of minimalism, so to speak. I have very little exposure to the first and last of these, and have only begun my listening of Reich. I'm thinking that the best approach I can take to "classical" music is to start from the modern era and work backwards.

(2) Ambient House - Or "ambient electronic" or "ambient techno" if you prefer. Global Communication rocked my world, and now I need more. Currently listening to Electric Skychurch's Knowoness, which is nice but has vocals that I would remove from the album in a heartbeat.

In other news...

I was at a small '50s theme resteraunt this afternoon... just wanted a good chocolate shake. When I got there, the music playing on the PA system was the Angels' song "My Boyfriend's Back". Which, OK, is definitely a good time-piece tune, even though it wasn't actually released until 1963 (it seems to be a '50s music staple regardless of that fact). So, that one was fine. But the next song was the Village People's "YMCA". Wha? Now we're not even close. We're talkin' being off the mark by a full generation (25 years). "YMCA" wasn't released until 1978 - we're talkin' LATE '70s here.

Oh well. I can't say that I'm much of a fan for the early rock-and-roll of the 1950's, so I'm not exactly complaining. Still, if your resteraunt is ostensibly '50s, I would expect the music to be at least within a deviation of +/- 5 years. (Well, since they're not likely to be digging up any late '40s music, let's add the -5 to the front end, and just say to "keep it before 1970").

I listened to some Yanni today at Borders. It was actually kinda good at first. Then, I realized that the nice sounds weren't just an intro or an interlude, but rather that the entire thing sounds like that. Yanni seems to milk a basic sound to such an extent that the whole affair becomes muzak. Even in ambient/environmental stuff, the music needs to change, to deviate, to branch out... to breathe. Yanni seems to stick with "sounding pretty". Whatever. The same complaint can be raised of techno music. Some techno is nothing but a single driving beat, repeated ad nauseum. While most electronic music (at least, in my experience) is reliant on loops, there is a need to do something with the repetition.

One of these days, I will buy that Stravinsky 3CD set. The one that's conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. The one that won a Grammy award (and, at least in that area, the Grammies still hold at least some clout). The thing is advertised as 3CDs for the price of 2, but it's really not. Well, maybe in the "two separate CDs" sense, but it's more expensive than 2CD sets. In fact, it's more expensive than the 3CD Heavy ConstruKction set of King Crimson's. If it was actually the price of a regular 2CD set, I would own it by now. I'll probably throw it on a Christmas list.

Tuesday, November 13

It's been about half a month since I last wrote something here. Hmmph.

What's happened in the meantime? Well, I am diving head-first into the realm of electronic music. I picked up what is apparently an "ambient house" classic, Global Communication's 76:14. This sucker's great. It finds a middle ground between Steve Roach-style ambience and modern electronica (not unlike the middle ground post-rock (at least the "drone-rock" contingent) often establishes between ambient and rock). I do enjoy Steve Roach, but ambient with a stronger rhythmic presence tends to have a stronger effect on me.

It's starting to seem that space/ambient music has the potential to be even more near and dear to me than more "busy" styles of music like jazz or prog-rock. I guess it shouldn't be surprising, given that the space rock bits in Pink Floyd are my favorite moments from that band's canon of music.

This new direction will eventually push me to the borders of both techno and New Age. At some point, I expect to eventually encounter stuff in those realms that repulses me - thus establishing the borders of where my tastes in this field run. What remains to be seen is whether these borders exist on the outskirts of these genres, or whether they're well into the heart of the genres (or perhaps the borders don't exist at all - in which case, Present and YETI can expect to be joined by Prodigy and Yanni in my CD case soon).

Oh, and the new Mogwai EP is good. Not quite Rock Action good or EP+2 good, but it's Young Team good.