26 posts tagged “mp3”

The last few weeks have seen me on a major iTunes-reorganizing kick, segregating and categorizing and shuffling files around for hours at a time.  I’ve now got playlists buried down even to a fourth level of folders and thank god at least I know where they are because once finished they’d never see the light of day otherwise.  My total iTunes library is something like 54 gigs and 9000 songs – there should be more songs at that gig count, but I have a thing for really long trance-like dance and groove world pieces (see: Transglobal Underground, Nation Records, DJ Cheb I Sabbah etc.) – which is why I’m nowhere near the end of the project after several weeks.  It beats looking for a new job, I’ll say that much.

Putting music into categories helps me realize how deficient my collection is in most areas that aren’t world-groove, classic punk or modern indie pop.  To that end I’m currently ransacking the Austin Public Library for the folk-rock or just plain radio-rock I grew up with.  Already I’ve added Simon & Garfunkel’s Sounds of Silence and Bridge Over Troubled Waters, Joni Mitchell’s Hissing of Summer Lawns and Hejira, Steely Dan’s Countdown to Ecstasy, the Zep's Physical Graffiti (which I somehow got to 48 without once hearing all the way through), Tull's Stand Up and Benefit, Warren Zevon’s Excitable Boy, the Floyd's Wish You Were Here, and Elton John’s Honky Chateau and Tumbleweed Connection, with more to come as I can find 'em and get the holds available.  The APL only lets you put 10 items at a time on hold – can you believe it?

Also: the Ramones’ first album.  Because I can’t believe I ever let that bugger go.

Yet there are still glaring omissions, big honking gaps you can drive a flower-painted microbus through.  I’m not sure how it happened that my collection includes absolutely no:

• Hendrix
• Dylan
• Moody Blues (staple of my middle-school years)
  
• Allman Brothers (ditto)
  
• Grateful Dead (OK, I've got a few select tracks from Deadicated, and the Dead generally made shitty studio albums anyway, but still.  I thought enough of them to see them play live something like five times, y'know)
• Clapton (although: fuck Cream [except Disraeli Gears and maybe Goodbye], fuck Blind Faith, fuck Derek and the Dominoes [yes, I know that includes Duane Allman], and fuck Clapton's whole spineless mumbling solo career.  The guy is massively overrated)
• Tom Petty

just to name a few.  Give it time and the grace of the APL, I guess.

Slightly more bothersome are all the bands that had one or three moderate-size hits on Philadelphia radio in the years right before New Wave that nobody but me and the DJ will remember.  Detective, featuring Michael Des Barres and Tony Kaye (“Grim Reaper,” “Recognition”).  Charlie (“No Second Chance,” “Watching TV,” “Johnny Hold Back” – from England, weren’t they?).  Racing Cars (“Downtown Tonight”), Skyhooks (“Crazy Heart”), Sad Café (“Run Home Girl”), Metro (“Black Laced Shoulder”), Backstreet Crawler ("Stone Cold Sober").  Bands that barely had a chance on the radio then but would have none at all in this ultra-tight formatted era. 

Except maybe Detective, since Jimmy Page produced both their albums.  They always got a little extra push on the Philly 'waves.  One long-ago day I remember a WMMR jock concluding a spin of “Grim Reaper” in all its slashing-opener-riff glory with, “Man.  That just sounded so good… the only thing to do here is play it again.”  And he did.  Right then.  When was the last time you heard a DJ who wasn’t left of the dial abuse his/her privilege like that?

I wouldn’t know how to go about locating all those songs.  Not sure I want to, since some of them were as much out-and-out shite as, say, Rock of the Westies.  But just like everything from that album, it would be good to get them out of my head where they’ve been stuck since 1977.  Believe it.

I’m back in the mix-making business, finally.  I love putting mix CDs together but haven’t done much since the series I made as a wedding present for Melissa and Luke and how long ago was that?  Their son is now more than two years old and Mel wasn’t visible with him yet at the wedding.  Been just a little too long this particular talent has gone fallow, friends.

So when a pal at work asked me to make her one I panicked a little, not sure I still knew how.  Uh… right.  That didn’t last long.  Here’s what she got yesterday.  She says she loves it.  The bar may be low – after all, free music, what’s not to love? – but still I get a glow when I finish a good mix.

1. Cleopatra in New York (Karuan remix) - Nickodemus
2. Kanzaman Breaks - Kaya Project
3. Yellow and Black Taxi Cab - Transglobal Underground
4. The Same Blood - Tony Allen
5. Bandilera Era (Reggaeton remix) - Los Mocosos
6. Manteca (Funky Lowlives remix) - Dizzy Gillespie
7. The Bottle - Gil Scott-Heron
8. Oh My God - Michael Franti and Spearhead
9. Notabossa – Funky Lowlives*
10. Get Carter Theme - Bombay Dub Orchestra
11. River Pulse - Nitin Sawhney
12. Sabura (Desert Delight remix) - Ekova
13. Never Enough - 8MM
14. Satta - Boozoo Bajou

Download each song individually, or the whole thing as a zip file (110M).  Or sample before you download, with the Dizzy Gillespie track from the Verve Remixed 2 album.  The standup bass line on this one is addictive as hell.

The mix is titled “Got the Wiretaps and the Birdshot Ready,” because I made it over the long 4^th weekend around the same time Elaine sent me an e-card reading Let’s celebrate the last Independence Day under Bush/Cheney by listening to strangers’ phone calls and shooting friends in the face.

Write me for your own mix.  It might take awhile but I’ll get it to you, promised.

BTW, at the risk of repeating this too often: all but three or four of these tracks come off eMusic so if you like them if you haven't tried it yet yourself it just might be time.

*Bonus track from the original draft that wouldn’t fit on the disk.  Total running time including this is 79 min 53 sec.

You gotta love a workweek that’s only two days long.  Back in the office after 12 days off, a university-wide holiday that doesn’t come out of regular PTO.  I knew there was a reason I fled the corporate sector.

As usual, I stayed in Austin and made a dedicated attempt to not observe the holidays.  What I did instead:

• Read a lot of books, some worthy and some not so: Dennis Lehane’s Prayers for Rain, Elmore Leonard’s Up In Honey’s Room, John Sandford’s Invisible Prey and Dark of the Moon, Jonathan Lethem’s You Don’t Love Me Yet, Ann Packer’s Songs Without Words.  And finished Jami’s The Kept Man.  No, I’m not going to tell you which was which.
• Watched The Shield on DVD until I could no longer stand it – second episode of the second season, to be precise, and I’m amazed I lasted that long.  That is one ugly show.
• Toured remote branches of the Austin Public Library looking for interesting CDs.  Good results, from Temple of Sound to Mission of Burma to Sleater-Kinney.
• Hit up a couple of Indian buffets (Shalimar, Indian Palace) and a couple of Asian (actually just Joy East, twice – oog).
• Cleaned the refrigerator (first time in two years) and reorganized the recycling collection system.  I knew I’d been piling up the plastic bags but it’s intimidating to see how many I’ve actually saved.
• Leafed through 11 years of accumulated writing and notes trying to weed out the best stuff for the website I’m planning.  Realized I’ve got a fuck of a lot of transcribing to do.
• Found MP3s by two of my favorite mid-late 80s San Francisco indie bands, Flying Color and the Cat Heads, posted free on the web.  Bonanza!  Samples below.
  
• Went to Quacks in the morning and wrote an entry in my other blog more or less ten days running.
• Got some much-needed experience moderating the Austin Freecycle list.

There were a number of other projects too that I put aside – property inventory, Photoshopping hundreds of old photos I scanned before the holiday, making CD labels – but I can pick those up anytime.  The important thing was to get things done while enjoying myself, and mission bloody well accomplished there.

Oh, and Happy New Year by the way.

Because I’m often a little bit behind the curve on music, a high percentage of the following weren't released in 2007.  All a song requires to make it onto this list was to have been added to my iTunes sometime during the year.  If I limited it to new releases this would probably look like every other year-end “10 Best” because, hello, where do you think I look to find new stuff?

In no particular order:

Bloc Party – “I Still Remember”.  I’m still pretty iffy about Weekend in the City as a whole but damned if it doesn’t have its genius moments.  And I’m always a sucker for a good anthemic closer like this.  (Love the video too.)

Art Brut – “Modern Art”.   This band is really dumb, really fun, and crazy, and I guess dumb crazy fun still sells because otherwise there wouldn’t be so many people wearing those goddam first-generation ripoff Ramones tees.

 

Cansei de ser Sexy – “Off The Hook”.  More silly fun.  The song might not be much on its own and I’d have probably ignored it if I hadn’t seen the video first, one of those low-fi efforts that singlehandedly pushes a song several notches up to greatness.

8MM – “Quicksand”.  Ooo, moody triphop-based rock.  I’m in love.  I would have never ever come across this band on my own so thank you Steph.

Cold War Kids – “Saint John”.  A 2006 album that I didn’t wake up to the power of until seeing the band live at the ACL fest this year.  When the crescendo of “St. John” had come and gone all I could do was echo the sentiments of everyone around me standing slack-jawed in amazement: Dayy-am.

Black Francis – “Threshold Apprehension”.  You’ve been saying for years that you want a new Pixies album?  Careful what you ask for.

Dresden Dolls – “Shores of California."  The first time I heard the DDs I thought Oh god no, schtick.  And didn’t Ben Folds already kill piano-based rock as dead as Elton John’s cred?  But never you mind, because that obviously wasn’t this song.  This song is rock and fucking roll, as direct and stirring as it gets.  With one of the best videos I’ve ever seen, period, by anyone, to match.

Arcade Fire – “Keep the Car Running”.  I'd managed to largely overlook Neon Bible in spite of all the hype.  Then one night I tuned into Austin City Limits and holy shit  it was probably the most excited I've gotten in front of the TV in decades.  I was weeping with joy well before the hour ended and since then I've watched that performance of "Car" thirty times or more to recapture that feeling.  It works every time, too.  [Ed.: this post originally included said ACL video but it's apparently since been pulled by YouTube and Vox as well.  As of 1/5/08 you can still find it here, though.]

Wilco – “Handshake Drugs” (live version).  Another ACL revelation.  While the song is three years old and this particular version is from 2005's Kicking Television, I hadn't much paid attention to new Wilco material since Being There.  It was total kismet I turned on the tube at all the night this was first broadcast, right at the beginning of this number, and afterwards I was searching the nets frantically to find the name of the song that had something about chewing gum in it.  I just love the way this builds, how you start to get a feeling of what you're in for with Cline's first solo (at app. 1:26 on both the audio and the broadcast's slightly different version) that rips off both Television guitarists simultaneously without breaking a sweat and with total, complete reverence.  When Tweedy gets into the act towards the end it's sheer guitar-army heaven.  I gotta be more careful about dismissing bands so easily in the future.

Spoon – “Don’t You Evah”. Yeah, OK, Gimme Fiction was a better overall effort.  And this, the best off Ga5, isn't even their song.  Not to mention that they're no longer an Austin band.  Do you think any of this matters one bit when something's this catchy?

I hardly need to add that all but two or three of the above are available for download at eMusic.  You should make joining eMusic one of your resolutions for 2008.

Released in 2007 but will probably make the 2008 list: Band of Horses, Josh Ritter, New Pornographers, Okkervil River, Lloyd Cole.  What can I say, I've got a backlog.

Even now, almost thirty years after the fact, the world is still dividable into two distinct camps:  those who love "My Sharona," and those who can't stand it.  I'm in the former.  I love the song not because I'm male and its basic rhythm is instantly identifiable to every XY as one DNA-encoded to demand you grab an imaginary pair of hips in front of you and start pumping your own pelvis back and forth, the very gesture made by Brad Pitt to Geena Davis's cuckolded husband in Thelma and Louise and one generally limited in public to adolescents and frat boys but very satisfying to males regardless of age. 

That rhythm helps account for the song's widespread popularity (or despisal), but for me it's only gravy on the mashed potatoes.  I love "My Sharona" because the guitar solo goes on for too long.  You think it will end after four bars, then surely after eight, and at twelve would be a good time too, and at sixteen he’s doing the deedley-deedley-deedley which we recognize as the universal signal for climax of wankery, but it goes on to a full fucking twenty-four bars before the actual money shot.  (I’m no musician so my bar-count may be off.  Let’s just say it starts at 2:46 and ends at 4:16 for that moment’s pause before returning to that gawdawful Brad Pitt rhythm.  What did we do before iTunes?)

And the solo sucks, let's not dissemble.  It sucks so badly it's outrageous that it's allowed to go on so long, which in such a major-size hit automatically makes it great.  It's the sound of the guitarist (Berton Averre, and it's scary that the only reason I needed to look that up was to confirm the spelling) reaching for epic but not having the chops to come even close, and he knows it, and he doesn't care if you know it too, and that makes the solo and thus the song a great big fuck-you to the record-buying public and the music industry of 1979 and every year since in general.  And I'm all for great big fuck-yous to such targets, whether they directly say Fuck You (a la the album version of Rage Against the Microwave's "Killing In the Name Of") or not. 

Especially because in this case I'm not a member of the record-buying public.  I love "My Sharona," but damned if I'm ever going to help The Knack make any money off it.

More ADD (commensurate with the madness attending school's beginning), more bits 'n pieces:

• Cap Metro proposes to raise its fare to $1.  That’s not raising, that’s doubling.  They’re even having community forums so people can tell The Man what they think about this plan.  What the fuck do you think they’re going to think?  I don’t care much myself because I ride free as long as I work at UT, but shit.  That’s going to hurt some folks, bad.  OTOH, a bus ride that still costs 50 cents in 2007?  What kind of neverland have we been living in?  Even at a buck it’s still cheap compared to every-damn-other city I’ve been to.
• If I can’t see Karl Rove made to do the perp walk for his misbehavior, I’ll happily take Alberto “Toady” Gonzales instead.  But given that there’s a fat fucking chance of that either, I’ll settle for him resigning in some semblance of disgrace.  Yesterday was a good day.
• Latest eMusic goodies: Josh Ritter, Hello Starling; Okkervil River, The Stage Names; Imperial Teen, On.  Next up: Imperial Teen, The Hair, the TV, the Baby and the Band; Art Brut, It’s A Bit Complicated; New Pornographers, Challengers (whenever eMusic decides to make it available).
• Sitting in Meeting for Worship Sunday I realized I had specks of glitter all over me.  This included my face, someone later told me.  On my pack too, even.  It came from a pile of loose glitter in the lobby that I offered to help clean up and damn, that stuff gets everywhere.  But considering last time I wore it was in my burner days, this week is an appropriate time to revisit the look.
• Recent non-Sopranos discs: Happy Endings (fun even if perhaps a little too self-conscious but my god do I love to look at M. Gyllenhaal) and music docs The Fearless Freaks (Flaming Lips) and We Jam Econo (Minutemen).  Never listened a lot to either band but now Soft Bulletin is on order from the library and Double Nickels on the Dime is in the eMusic queue.  Even on the small screen the performances pack a punch.  
• One of the Minutemen performances was filmed at Bard in ’85.  They were still using the south end of Kline Commons dining hall for shows then, apparently.  Totally weird to see the place where I took almost all my meals for four years, and in specific the corner where the miscreants gathered, in such an unexpected context.
• One frequent visitor to the miscreant’s corner was my band’s bass player’s girlfriend, a dancer.  Her last name was Gyllenhaal.  Back then I couldn’t believe that was anyone’s real name.
• I signed up to volunteer again at this year’s ACL fest.  I’m a sucker.

Some of the things making me go smiley-smile lately:

• Girl Talk’s Night Ripper.  I know I’m a bit late to this particular party but 2006 evidently wasn’t The Year of the MP3 Blog for me.  This album is just plain fun, silly without feeling gratuitously frivolous.  I’m a lot quicker to recognize the classic rock samples (Boston… Kansas… Pilot!) than the hip-hop, because in fact I’ve never heard any of the latter before.  That doesn’t keep me from knowing that the “we want some pussy!” underneath the “I… love… you…” refrain from “Silly Love Songs” belongs to 2 Live Crew.  (Some things you just know if you were reading the papers in 1991.)  Mashing those two songs together works, hideously well.  Same thing goes for the whole album.  Greg Gillis patched a winner this time.

• The lawn next door.  Over the weekend landscaping came in and laid down a whole lot of sod over the stubbly weeds and bare earth masquerading as a yard.  The green won’t last long – sod never does in this town unless you’re willing to get all Stepford-meticulous in its care – but maybe it’ll help deter the next batch of tenants from taking out the posts and using it as an extended driveway like the last did.

• Knowing it’s another two weeks and more to wear shorts at work before the students return and I have to sort-of dress like an adult again.

• Under Siege 2, which I found for $5 last night on a trip to Half-Price to get Grapes of Wrath for next week’s book group.  Last time I checked this wasn’t even on DVD.  Admittedly this is a bad, bad movie, with next to no believability (Die Hards one and two mashed together, substituting a train through the Rockies for skyscraper and airport?) and one of Seagal’s woodenest performances ever.  And check out that long long list of continuity errors!  But a very young Katherine Heigl shows the beginnings of some considerable acting chops that you can now see fully developed on both big and small screens, and Bogosian is delightfully over-the-top batshit crazy – a performance to equal Fishburne’s Jimmy Jump in King of New York.  Plus some excellent chop-sockey, lots of flurries of gunfire and unnecessary blood-smears, and as many bodies falling from high trestles as you could want.  This one’s in the Mindless Action Top 10, easy.

• Recent reading: Mystic River by Dennis Lehane and Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte.  Both are excellent but going to need bumping until Grapes is done so I hope it's worth it (my only Steinbeck experience to date is The Pearl).  The garbage book is particularly interesting because I, like pretty much every other American, have no idea where stuff goes when I throw it away as well as no comprehension of the amount of crap 300 million citizens of the world's richest country create for disposal.  That, and I knew Liz when we went to Bard.   She was a little bit nuts and I'm guessing still is but her work is every bit as thorough, cogent and well-written as I expected.

• Retaining money in savings rather than shoveling it into the maw of CCCS.

• News that my neighbors downstairs are leaving next week for 9 days of vacation.  Ah, blessed quiet.

• The new iMacs.  Not that I’m going to buy one of those either.  But I can’t wait to see Apple’s sales figures for Q4 of this year.  (Also, 10x the .mac space?  Time to finally sign up for one of those, eh.)

Bonus: “Smash Your Head” from Night Ripper.  Never thought I’d love hearing Elton John sped up to chipmunk-speed, let alone used as a counterpoint to Biggie Smalls.  These are some pretty mind-messing times to live through, no lie.

I know, I know, at this rate it’s more like Download of the Quarter.  Shut up.

Speaking of quarters, how about them Apple earnings for 2Q07?  Up 73% from this time last year.  And 60% of that came from Macs.  Not iPods.  Not iPhones (of course).  Com-pyoo-ters, people.  I poot in the general direction of all over the years who’ve told me they wouldn’t buy a Mac because the company is going to vanish and leave them with no support.

Anyway.  "Peter Gunn."  A golden oldie.  I think every halfwit band has covered this, including mine in college.  It was great.  It was easy.  All I had to do was wail on the ride cymbal the whole time and throw in a fill every now and then.  It was easy enough that for at least one song we could forget our rhythm guitarist couldn’t play to save her hide.

A few years later I got addicted to the video game Spy Hunter – for months I’d venture north of Geary solely to play the one in Japantown Bowl lobby arcade – and this was the background music for all those car-bumpings and helicopter-explodings.  So I know this song a little bit, you might say.

But until I heard this version never once did I think it might have lyrics.  Not very interesting ones, true, something about blowing off a friend who’s been a bozo, even if the line about “splittin’ for Britain or Norway” is oh-so-swinging-60s, but lyrics nonetheless.  I don’t think they go with the original Mancini version; they sound more like something thrown together to give a vocalist like Vaughan the chance to hop on the Goldfinger bandwagon.

OK, Goldfinger was a few years later.  Never mind.  But everyone wanted to be in on the spy thing back in those days.

This version is from the 3rd Verve Remixed compilation.  I don’t know the original Vaughan so I can’t gauge how much Sedgely played with it, but it doesn’t sound like much.  Which in a way IMO is exactly what a simple song like this deserves.

The download link is only good for a week courtesy of yousendit while I find a new file-hosting service; just discovered the old one disappeared.  (Which is why none of the previously-posted downloads work any longer.)  Shows what happens when you neglect your practice for two months.

Free download: Sarah Vaughn, "Peter Gunn (Max Sedgely Remix)" (5:08)
Buy Verve Remixed 3 here.

Just a few little thingies to catch up.

• Currently partway through four tomes - Mona Simmons, The Lost Father; Don DeLillo, Falling Man; Ursula LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven; Ann Fadiman, Ex Libris – and they’re all very good books but I haven’t picked even one up in days because they’re not mindless and junk-food enough for my recent mood.  Have to get cracking on the LeGuin soon though as it’s being discussed at next week’s book group.
• Started taking Lexapro yesterday, my first try at antidepressants in years.  I messed up on the starting dose and took too much, although I’m not sure that’s why I came wide awake at 3AM and stayed that way until about 20 minutes before the alarm went off.
• Saw the new Die Hard movie last week.  It was way too fun and outdid its predecessors in every form of excess, from automatic-weapons fire to preposterousness of premise.  It was nice to see what Timothy Olyphant looks like without his Deadwood mustache too, even if he’s just as scary.
• Finished Me and You and Everyone We Know over the weekend.  I started it a few weeks ago and stopped halfway through because a) it was annoying as hell and b) it was still too sweet and heart-melting to rush through.  In the end b) won out and now it's on my Buy Later list.  (Even if I've decided I like John Hawkes better in his garb in Deadwood.)
  
• Watched the first 25 minutes of When The Levees Broke last night.  This is going to be rough going; must be why the Netflix disc has already sat on my desk for a month.
• Fucking Bush.
• Spoon’s new album, or Ga5 as I’m going to call it, is available on eMusic and I can’t wait to download it.  Gimme Fiction was a left-field surprise that I'm still savoring two years later.
• The thoughtful folks at work bought a wireless keyboard and mouse for my desktop.  All nice and pretty white, just like the iMac itself.  I've finally entered the Era of Bluetooth.  Now I suppose I'll have to get the same for home as well...
• (OK, it wasn't so much they were being thoughtful as they had to spend down their group account before the new fiscal year begins.  I like it anyway.)
  
• It now hasn’t rained for 3 whole days.  Must be some kind of record.

I’ve got a glut of media, mostly entertainment-oriented, demanding my attention around the house, and if there’s something stressing me out it’s that.  Which is exactly the opposite of what entertainment’s supposed to do last time I checked.  Last week I wasn’t even finished with the last The Wire season three disc when I was off to the library to pick up The Sopranos first season set.  Today that set is two days overdue and I’m still not finished.  I liked the show better when it wasn’t a race to get to the end.

The books pile up: How To Kill A Rock Star, on recommendation from a friend.  Which Brings Me To You, recommended to the same friend but I’ve already forgotten what I liked about it so much so it needs a re-read.  Red Harvest for next week’s book group.  Mona Simpson’s The Lost Father, taken out of the library on a whim and I suspect due to be returned uncracked.

The month's magazines join them: Rolling Stone, MacWorld, Wired, Friends Journal (actually backed up to March on that one), and the New York Times glossy of which I have a five-month unread backlog and that’s often the best stuff in the Sunday Times.

DVDs?  The latest Netflix sitting unopened for more than a week: Me and You and Everyone We Know and the first installment of Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Plus the copy of Waking Life from Half-Price for suspiciously cheap which I need to view to make sure it’s OK.  And last, staring me down are the first three seasons of Homicide I bought while in Boston.  I don’t know what their deal is, they aren’t going anywhere any more than the Memento disc bought last year which I still haven’t seen.  Shit, add that one to the list as well.

Two MP3 CDs arrived in the mail, their contents now added to iTunes but barely touched otherwise.  Last month’s eMusic downloads likewise, and this month’s still to be grabbed.  The pressure builds.

Plus I’ve just discovered Smith’s Memoirville, and Amanda Palmer’s blog with its voluminous archives and I do just love the way she writes.  On top of that one of my projects for the month is to find a half-dozen blogs written by Quakers and start reading them.  If my job were busier I’d have to be making some hard choices here.

I love the media/digital age, I do.  I love choice and the freedom inherent, and vis-a-vis entertainment I'll almost always opt for more than less.  But too many choices can really mess with your head.  I was reading a book about just that at BookPeople last week.

Oh.  I suppose I’ll have to add that one too.