Posted by Andrew
Thu, 13 Nov 2008 14:09:49 GMT
I know I’m a bit of a music snob. I’m willing to say that. I’m a fairly open minded snob, as far as snobs go, at least that’s what I’d like to think. I like listening to music that not that many people listen to, to be on the cutting edge and all that rubbish. If you’re easily offended by elitism, cease reading here and assume the rest of the post just says that everyone is wonderful and all music is wonderful.
For those of you who have stayed, I retract the above statement.
A couple of experiences over the last week or so have inspired me to write on this. The first one of those was in the car with my mum the other day. In the car, since I’m the one who really cares about music (mum’s tone deaf), I control the radio in the car. I flicked to one of the more “alternative” radio stations and listened for a while to a song and started singing harmonies or something to it. Mum commented that the music was “unconventional” or “unusual” or something like that. That of course got me going. I asked what use it was if we were to only listen to “conventional” or “normal” music?
I riffed for a little on that. What if Bach’s sons hadn’t moved on from their father’s work? We wouldn’t have seen the same progression from the baroque to classical periods. What if the Beach Boys had made Pet Sounds more conventional? More than likely that band across the pond wouldn’t have been pushed to create Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Unconventional music is a necessary force against the boundaries of music so that music does not become stagnant. I like that. In the unusual, we find thing which are unusually beautiful, where the usual has become dull.
The whole genre of “Alternative” is a total misnomer. How can you group people like Radiohead with the likes of Joanna Newsom? What makes something “Alternative”? Does it just not fit the mainstream? The thing about the alternative, that quite often things that were once alternative become mainstream. Snow Patrol, Josh Pyke, Angus & Julia stone are all examples of artists who were once considered “alternative” and are now mainstream. Quite apart from their respective genres, all of these artists have pulled the mainstream a little, and have been pulled a little bit the mainstream. This is healthy.
Now the second experience I had was this week’s Australian free single on iTunes. It’s Lykke Li’s Dance Dance Dance. I quite like it, it’s quirky, laid back and not badly done. Some of the iTunes reviews were hilarious though. Here are some select reviews to remind you how well educated Australia’s listening public is:
Wrong Section by DeathEdge:
This song I would say that little kids and queer men would listen to(no offence, just pointing out my opinion)
WEIRD!!!! by MUSIC MASTER(i know best for music):
VERY WERID (sic) AND NOT MY KIND OF MUSIC.
AAH! by Music_Lover_82:
Sounds like the song is being sang (sic) by a 2 year old… I HATE IT!!!
Firstly, I’d like to think that in high school we were all taught to write a review. I also hope we were taught the difference between a “review” and a “comment”. Perhaps on the internet any text field is just an opportunity to voice one’s opinion with no mind to what anyone else may think (before you comment, this text field is just such an opportunity for me). Some sort of perspective is required.
Now in all fairness, I’m pretty harsh on pop music (although I’m making some of my own at the moment and I still hate it) and have already admitted to being a snob, correct me if I’m wrong but I feel like I’m not that bad when it comes to commenting on music. I have my opinions, and I’ll happily share them, but at least they have some critical basis rather than just “IT’S NOT WHAT I’M USED TO, WAAAAAAAAAAA!”.
Anyhow, I just wanted to get that off my chest. If you’re Australian and have an iTunes account, check out the track. I think it’s pretty cool.
Tags alternative, idiots, music | 3 comments
Posted by Andrew
Sun, 05 Oct 2008 15:15:20 GMT
I’ve had a bit of time to trawl the internet this last couple of weeks, which is a significant change the last couple of months of my life. One thing that I’ve missed has been picking up new, obscure music. Not sure how obscure this one is, but it was kind of interesting to listen to. Brooke Waggoner was one such discovery for me. She’s been getting smatterings of press with the release of her new album. Now I haven’t yet reached home, or earned any money with which to purchase this album, but she released an EP, Fresh Pair of Eyes for free download.
It’s an intriguing collection of songs really. I was trying to put it somewhere in the musical genre spectrum, I suppose she’d fit somewhere between pop, folk, roots and something else. She describes herself as indie/pop on her myspace, but I’d guess she’d be as stumped as to where to put herself as well.
Read more...
Tags brookewaggoner, links, music, recommendations | no comments
Posted by Andrew
Thu, 02 Oct 2008 12:52:00 GMT
Here’s something for you to check out: Harrison. It’s a musical collaboration between two of my very good friends. I love the track they’ve posted there, but even more I like the website that they put together for it. It’s a nice little javascript side-scroller, which really tickles me. I hope you like it too.
Tags links, music, recommendations, websites | no comments
Posted by Andrew
Fri, 04 May 2007 13:16:00 GMT
That’s right, it’s gigging time! This time I’m playing, with my good friend
Ty. We’ll be playing from 7:30 tonight at Pablo & Rusty’s in Gordon. They’re on the corner of St John’s Ave, I think maybe number 1… Whatever. It’s right opposite Gordon Station. Get there early, apparently seats will go fast.
If you can’t get there tonight, pop in some other time. Really good coffee, really nice people, just a good place all-round. Besides, there’s a high chance you’ll see me there :P
Tags gigs, music | 1 comment
Posted by Andrew
Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:42:00 GMT
I’ve been recently looking at the way I listen to music, and the way I manage my playlists in iTunes and how that effects what I listen to. A while ago, I set up smart playlists to replace the hodge-podge On-The-Go Playlist arrangement I had with my iPod (this was some time after my iPod died a horrible watery death) with a semi-elegant system of smart playlists and such like.
I started by trying a system where I had a smart playlist which was made up of only songs rated four or more stars, but I found that didn’t work, I had songs which I knew deserved 4 or 5 stars, but that I had overplayed, and just didn’t want to listen to at the time, and at the same time a lot of songs which weren’t deserving of 4 or 5 stars, but I wanted to listen to for a week or so, then not hear again for a couple of months.
For a while I just listened to everything, but that lead to me listening to tracks which were in my iTunes, but weren’t listening tracks (like pieces I was studying for music, podcasts and music from CDs accompanying textbooks). This lead me to produce a system of two smart playlists: a Listening playlist, and a Unchecked playlist. It was called unchecked, because I originally attempted to execute this solution using the “checked” property, but for some reason or other, couldn’t make it work. The listening playlist was (and still is) made up of songs which meet the following conditions: podcast is false and playlist is not Unchecked.
This worked for a while, but meant that it would take a long time for songs I wanted to listen to come up by chance, and that I had to queue them in my party shuffle. This was no good, so I made a new playlist, almost reminiscent of the On-The-Go playlists of my iPod days, which gradually snowballed into massive 250 track monsters which grew as I bought new CDs and ended up with tracks from those albums that I didn’t really like, but stayed there because I was too lazy to remove them all.
This playlist was called the Awesome Playlist of Awesome. It wasn’t really a step forward, but it worked for a coupled of weeks, until it too became unruly and massive. I realised that when I bought new CDs, I wanted to listen to all the tracks as part of my main rotation, until I got a feel for the tracks I liked which I could then add to the main playlist. Thus I added a counterpart to the Recently Added playlist, which I kept because it served a different role, called New Music. New Music contained all the music added in the last 10 days.
With New Music set up, I made a new smart playlist, dubbed Awesome. Awesome contained any songs which either were part of the Awesome Playlist of Awesome or New Music. This meant I had a playlist of songs which I liked at the time, as well as new music, which I wanted to get acquainted with. To this I also added music from a Feature Album, so that I could return to older albums and see if any of the tracks from them deserved to be added to the Awesome Playlist of Awesome.
This has done me well, but I’ve found again that songs start to get stale, especially those which have the highest playcount. It made sense then, to make a playlist which contained songs which were part of the Awesome playlist, but that weren’t part of the Top 25 Played playlist. This has worked great, and was simply done by making a new playlist and having the properties Match all of: Playlist is Awesome, Playlist is not Top 25 Most Played.
Today, I’ve further refined this system. I’ve done two things. I made a new playlist: Recently Played in Awesome. This may seem a silly playlist because I could just use the default Recently Played playlist, but it has a special property. It is set up like this:
This means that any song in the High Rotation playlist won’t be in the Awesome Not Over Playlist, when I add the condition Playlist is not Recently Played in Awesome. So basically, the idea is, I have a set of songs which get repeated airplay, and the rest of the songs are on a less regular rotation (because all this is piped through party shuffle, which has a only 10 upcoming songs).
This is all very convoluted, but I hope you get some of it. I could probably manage it with less playlists if Apple would write some proper boolean logic into smart playlists (ie. The ability to group sets of AND/OR conditions, so I could go (playlist is no X AND playlist is Y) OR playlist is Z.) I hope you get the general gist of what I’m doing and can use it to either work out your own playlist arrangement, or at least understand the things you can do with smart playlists.
I’m sure someone will show me that I’m doing something wrong, or that you can do this better, but this is all I’ve got for now.
PS. I actually learned a lot while writing up this post. I’ll post a followup tomorrow, showing a couple of things I found, including a use for Automator. The reason you’re not seeing photos from recent gigs is because both my Aperture and Lightroom trials have expired, and the reason you’re not seeing more online footprint posts is I’m lazy.
Tags itunes, listening patterns, music, playlists, smart playlists | 2 comments
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