Category: Music

Back in the 1980s* there was an electronic composer called Larry Fast who performed under the name Synergy. Since few record labels were interested, he started his own, Audion. I bought a number of Audion recordings (on cassette), including some by Synergy and a couple by an English keyboard/programming wizard called Garry Hughes. The latter’s work really grabbed me; it reminded my of one of my favorite American synth instrumentalists, David Van Tieghem (who was on Private Music).

Time passed, and Audion failed, as most independent labels are destined to do. In the late 1990s I looked around to see if Gary Hughes’ and David Van Tieghem’s work was still available. David showed up at MP3.COM (remember them?), and I bought all of his CDs. Garry Hughes… nothing. A few comments on music discussion lists about “whatever happened to…”, but the trail was cold.

Last weekend I was going through a massive “media reorganization” at home: disposing of tons of books, moving CDs from racks to storage chests**, and so forth. At the bottom of a pile of forgotten stuff, I came across the Garry Hughes cassettes. I put them aside with the intention of eventually ripping them into iTunes, and that evening I decided to do a serious web search to find out what had happened to him. Fortunately the spelling of Garry with two r‘s is relatively rare, and I started to come across references to a producer by that name. Further searching revealed that he’d produced a group called Euphoria in 1999, and it then turned out that he was also a member of the group. Was it the same guy? According to Amazon.com, “Euphoria make slide-groove “guitronica,” blending spacey beats with looping spoken word, breathy vocals, multilayered guitar wash, and intense yet playful drum and keyboard programming.” A possible confirmation: one of my favorite Garry Hughes tracks was a piece called Inkstick, which features a sample of a woman saying, breathily, “I quite like that sound”, over and over.

It turned out that the first, eponymous album by Euphoria was available through iTunes. One short sample was promising, so I plonked down my electronic dosh and bought the whole album.*** It’s wonderful, with contributions from some of my favorite musicians and composers (Anne Dudley from Art of Noise, pedal steel wizard B. J. Cole, and Roy Babbington from Soft Machine). The basic sound comes from the interplay between Ken Ramm’s slide guitar and Garry Hughes’ programming. (And if it’s not the same Garry Hughes, the coincidence is remarkable.) Highly recommended. In fact I think I’ll just download their second album, Beautiful My Child….

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* I may have got some of the history wrong; I haven’t researched it recently. Corrections are welcomed.
** If the music is all on computer and iPod, may as well store the original CDs out of the way.
*** Some time I must write about how iTunes has finally killed the idea of deferred gratification.

This weekend I’m going to set work aside and immerse myself in Boulder. Tonight I met some old friends for dinner and a stroll along the Pearl Street Mall. Tomorrow evening I’m going to a concert by the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Leslie Dunner:

• Sibelius Andante Festivo
• Brahms Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D major, Op.77 (Corey Cerovsek, violin)
• Nielsen Symphony No. 4, Op. 29, ‘The Inextinguishable’

7:30pm at the Macky Auditorium. As for Sunday… well, we’ll just have to see.

Over on the Al Stewart mailing list, there’s been a discussion of the forthcoming boxed set by EMI. Many of the list members already own everything in the set, including the “unreleased” and “alternate” versions, so the obvious question is, do you buy it, and if so why? My comment:

I used to be a completist – everything by Al, everything by the Legendary Pink Dots, everything by the Pet Shop Boys, everything by Faithless…. But as John Cleese put it in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, “I got better.” I think what did it was the torrent of “Dick’s Picks…” live recordings of the Grateful Dead; I realized that I didn’t need eight different versions of “Franklin’s Tower”. From there it was a short step to giving up my ambition of collecting every single different remix of “West End Girls”. Subsequent recovery was uneventful.

Besides, I couldn’t bear to think of myself as the kind of anorak whose Last Will and Testament proudly bequeathes: “my entire collection of Freddie and the Dreamers records to my dearly beloved grand-nephew Cyril, knowing that he will treasure them as I have”.

(You may recognize the subject line as the title of a CD by Underworld. I own this CD; in fact I think I have everything that they’ve released. Oh, well.)

I’ve started using an interesting web service called Audioscrobbler to publish information on the music I’m listening to. It works like this. You install a software agent (plugin) that knows how to interrogate your preferred digital music player to find out what’s playing. In my case, that means running the plugin for iTunes on Mac OSX, but most popular software is supported. Periodically the plugin uploads the list of tracks you’ve played to the audioscrobbler server, which builds a page for each user (here’s mine) showing what they’ve listened to recently, plus a bunch of statistics. (If you’re off the net, the plugin caches the information until you reconnect.) The server also calculates affinity groups, and shows you recommendations based on what other people who like the same music you do are listening to.

But this is a security risk, isn’t it? After all, who knows what information the plugin might be sucking off your system? Well, actually, I know! All of the plugins are open source, and I was able to read through the source code for the plugin to verify its behaviour before I installed it. And although this isn’t proof of good intentions, the raw data is available under a Creative Commons license. In fact a colleague of mine is using the data in a research project.

So now you can see what I’m listening to, on my Mac or on my iPod. One warning: I’m having iTunes play through some of my favourite material each night, just to load a statistically meaningful dataset. So if it looks as if I’m listening to stuff when I ought to be sleeping, relax. Anyway, right now it’s working through my Captain Beefheart collection: it’s up to “Safe As Milk” on Strictly Personal. An awesome track….

From Friday’s Guardian Review, “Tom Reynolds, author of I Hate Myself and Want to Die: The 52 Most Depressing Songs You’ve Ever Heard… offers his top 25 miserable tracks.” A classic list, including such ghastly dirges as Tell Laura I Love Her and Seasons in the Sun, as well as Bobby Goldsboro’s excruciating Honey:

The world’s wordiest dead wife song, Honey is jammed full of blooming flowers, puffy clouds, singing robins, planted trees, and a puppy, all of which just make you want to swallow a hand grenade. The narrator mourns Honey, his deceased spouse, while condescendingly describing her as kinda dumb and kinda smart. If you feel inclined to listen to Honey, please drink heavily and then bale out after Honey dents the car. Otherwise, you’ll get hit with angels carrying Honey away and clouds crying on flower beds. You won’t make it out with your senses intact. It is that bad.

(Via When Last We Left Our Intrepid Heroine… in Iraq.)

A good show by Porcupine Tree. The band was really tight, though Steven Wilson’s voice was a bit weak at times, as if he was getting over a cold. Fortunately John Wesley’s harmonies filled out the vocals nicely. They did a number of songs from the new album “Deadwing”, of course, but mixed in plenty of older stuff. Last time I saw them (at the Berklee in Boston) the best number of the evening – most energy, most inventive solos – was “Russia on Ice”. This time it was “Hate Song”: absolutely stunning. Both of those are from the “Lightbulb Sun” album, which is one of their strongest collections. And I was delighted by another oldie: a lovely performance of “Even Less”, which is a personal favourite.
[UPDATE] The opening act was Tunnels, English, electronic vibes/bass/drums, fusion instrumentals, vaguely Soft Machine-ish. Not bad, not where my head was at. The PT setlist was: Deadwing // Sound of Muzak // Lazurus // Shallow // A Smart kid // Hatesong // Arriving somewhere but not here // Fadeaway // Halo // The start of something beautiful // Blackest Eyes // Even Less // ENCORE: Shesmovedon // Trains

Continue reading “at porcupine tree”

Just listening to tracks from the new Al Stewart album, “Beach Full of Shells” on a great Internet radio station: Radio Frontiers. A nice mix of old and new Al music, and a nice crowd on the IRC chat. The DJ, Peter, is repeating it on Saturday; I’ll find out the exact schedule and update this. (UPDATE: 1pm EST.) No special software needed, really: I’m using iTunes. (Oskar reports that WinAMP with the MP3Pro plugin is crisper.)

So I’ve got one free iTunes song from Apple. What should I get?

Discovered in Provincetown last weekend: Hang on Little Tomato by Pink Martini. As an Amazon reviewer put it, “Somewhere between a 1930s Cuban dance orchestra, a classical chamber music ensemble, a Brazilian marching street band and Japanese film noir is the 12-piece Pink Martini.” The title track from Pink Martini’s last album, Sympathique, also shows up on another CD that I bought at the same time: Hotel Costes: Best of Costes, selected and mixed by Stéphane Pompougnac.

[However those who think I may be getting too deep into this “lounge” stuff can relax: the new albums by Porcupine Tree and Al Stewart are on the way….]