A couple of songs

(Click on the links to play. Blogger doesn't host MP3s so I'm using box.net).

I'm rather proud of these pieces, even if they are one-off doodles.

No Expectations (aka "wheat")

In this piece I was playing with a few melody ideas, and one new left-hand idea: a quick 3-chord descending progression that I never used before. My right hand got inspired by the newness of what the left was doing, and this is the result.

A Mood

This piece is a lot more intense, and far more textured. Might make good background in an intense movie scene. I don't think I could do this on an acoustic piano because I'm holding the sustanuto pedal down the whole time, relying on the piano's polyphany limits to reduce the mushiness. I was intentionally trying to be repetative, at least in the beginning, but I hear a lot of nice variation anyway. The variation is more rhythmic than tonal, although there is some interesting melody/harmony stuff after the mid-track dynamic shift.

I'm proud of both pieces, and this is the first time I've publically posted anything to the internet. Anyone who's heard me play knows that this is basically what I do: I compose on-the-fly.

A great album - Kate Bush: Hounds of Love

The Hounds of Love, Kate Bush's 1985 tour de force, has been a favorite album of mine for many years. It is still as good today as it was in 1994 or so when I first heard it. The second side (titled "The Ninth Wave") is by far my favorite part of the album, and contains two of my most played tracks: The Morning Fog and Watching you Without Me.

Kate is known as a meticulous producer, and it shows. Every second of this album is impeccably produced, and the sound quality is amazing. Normally I would scoff at good production as being rather pointless - the music is what matters, after all. But Kate's music is so intricate that it requires this kind of careful treatment to be heard. Indeed, I can imagine that Bjørk would really benefit from production like this. (Actually, so would Sigur Rós, where bad production actually ruined Ágætis byrjun for me after I started catching all the artifacts on relistens.)

Do yourself a favor and buy this album today. It's amazing.

When hot girls sing.

When you like someone you put up with a lot. If your girl likes to sing, and she's bad at it, you let the girl sing anyway. No harm. But for some reason, Barnes & Nobles believes that Him & Her needs to be played while I shop. This is odd because I'm pretty sure is dating Zoey Daschenal (lead singer of Him & Her) neither Barnes nor Noble, or the awkward young man in the music section, so it's not clear why they are doing this.

(Perhaps to avoid having to play Vampire Weekend? That I understand.)

A pretty sweet band: Lowen and Navarro

This band was introduced to my by a neighbor - who is the niece of Navarro. They have a mature, soulful vibe with some pretty tight song writing ability. They sound like they'd be a good live show.

Flavors of Entanglement Review

Alanis Morissette
Release: June 10, 2008

Alanis and I go way back, and I was very curious about her latest when I heard that she was going to try more electronic arrangements. She's never been afraid of technology - word was that she recorded "Jagged Little Pill" on home-studio ADAT recorders, state-of-the art for the time. Regardless, it was a revelation to the music world - here was a singer/songwriter who was bold, sexual, and angry. Her second album, "Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie" filled with interesting music and the insightful, if self-absorbed, lyrics of a young woman finding herself through repeated glotteral stops. My respect for her only went up when she released a hilarious Fergie/Humps parody, and when she revealed in an interview a fondness for Triumph motorcycles. Alanis' music is often about herself, or close observations of others, but is a record of her growing up.

"Flavors of Entanglement" is the 3rd album of hers that I own - it's the first album I've ever pre-ordered off of the iTunes store. I got a few bonus track and a special pre-order track (and those tracks are very important, as they eclipse the quality of the rest of the album!). But I also only get 128kb tracks, and no art. Not too sure about this iTunes business yet.

The first two tracks, "Citizen of the Planet" and "Underneath", are forgettable. They simply did not hold my interest. The third tack, Straitjacket, made me raise my eyebrows. A dance track? Dropping the f-bomb? The instrumentation is all saw-lead synthesizer, run through a limiter. The vocal track is heavily harmonized. Very strange. "Versions of Violence" is more of the same, although less dancable.

"Not as we", the 5th track, is more Alanis back in the "Joni Mitchell" confessional mode.

"In Praise of the Vulnerable Man" is Alanis back in "singing a letter" mode, similar to "Unsent" or "Head over Feet". But then a minute into it a saccharin backing synth that puts it more into Donna Lewis territory. I couldn't finish listening to this one.

"Moratorium" has the lyric which contains the albums name, and is a kind of eerie-sounding self-excoriation. Not bad. "I declare a moratorium on things relationship. I declare a respite from the toils of liaison." I know the feeling!

(OK, honestly I'm listening to this album as I write the review, and I'm on "Torch" and growing impatient. "Torch" is a down-tempo melancoly break-up song. I find myself wishing she would stop moaning about "missing his warmth" and start taunting him about whether or not she'd go down on him in a theater.)

"Giggling again for no reason" is a song about getting away from your life, driving down PCH without telling anyone where you're going, or even that you've gone. The content resonates with me deeply, but the music is not engaging. It's a great subject for a song, though.

I quickly skipped to the "Bonus Tracks". I'm glad I did! The 5 tracks here are uniformly better than the rest of the album. I was concerned for a bit that I'd wasted my money, but these tracks save the day! I really like "Orchid", "Madness", and "Limb No More". I could do without "On the Tequila" but it's a fun song!

Because I pre-ordered, I got a "Bonus Bonus Track", called "It's a Bitch to Grow Up". Musically, it's a good track, and the lyrics particularly resonate with me, so I'll wrap up this review with some of those lyrics:

...
It's been 33 years of restraining,
of trying to control this tumult.
...

[chorus]
I feel done.
I feel raked over coals.
All that remains is the case: that it's a bitch to grow up.

I've repeated this dance
There's still something to learn that I've not
I'm told to see that this is divine perfection
But my bones don't feel this perfection

...
I've known through the kicking and screaming
that there was no other direction to go
[chorus]

Pandora: For music geeks

I stumbled on Pandora thanks to a friend at work, and have been enjoying it. Surprisingly, it's also a great source for musician/musicology information! There's a blog which takes a detailed look at song construction.

I'm subscribed!

The beatles: what joy!

"Hello, hello! I don't know why you say goodbye I say hello!"

Genius.

Idea: Sennhieser iPhone headphones; universal USB recorder; legit keylogging uses for authors

To maximize PC performance, I listen to the music played by my iPhone snuggled in it's cradle next to my PC rather than iTunes. This is a nice arrangement, except I can't use last.fm, and more importantly when a phone call comes in I have to quickly unplug my headphones because they won't work with phone services (even though they work fine with iPod services). My Sennheiser HD560 headphones do not have a microphone, or an iPhone compatible jack. But they have a detachable cable at the headphone-end, and it would be a simple matter to manufacture a replacement cable with the appropriate plug and microphone. This would rock. I imagine this would be something of a niche market, but if you could build such a cable in China for $1 and sell for $30 over the internet, it might be worth doing. :) I wonder how many other headphones have removable cables?

The other idea came to me while playing piano: I want to jam on my keyboard and then sift through the MIDI results later, and I don't have a good way to do it right now. My keyboard does not have a built-in sequencer, and I would like to record my jams. It has a USB MIDI port though, and I was thinking it would be nice to attach a thumb drive, and transfer the data later to my computer with Ableton (this way I don't have to boot up into my computer to just jam and make ideas). But then I got to thinking, why not make it a universal recorder that just records whatever USB voltage wiggles it senses? You could use it as a keylogger, or a voice recorder, or whatever.

Speaking of keyloggers, here's a novel, legitimate use for them: let's say you're an author and you're going on a long trip and don't want to write in longhand (it's too slow, too illegible, etc), but don't want to bring a computer either. So you bring your favorite normal PC keyboard, and type blind into a special thumb drive. The thumb drive would need to be powered, but it would be a pretty darn efficient way to type simple journal-style content. Of course, higher end versions might have a tiny LCD display on the top so that you could catch your obvious mistakes as you type them, similar to what old Brother style hybrid typewriters used to give you. If you are a travel writer, you could slip the thumbdrive into an internet cafe, and dump the text into a web-based client software that would help you organize and edit what is bound to be a pretty messy text stream.


(Unfortunately this device would not be suitable for digicam backup because AFAIK cameras don't PUSH their data down USB, the data is PULLED by requesting client software. I'm not sure there are standards on requesting data. However, maybe the "direct print" interface present on some cameras) could be pressed into service for this purpose.)

Review: Kate Bush holds up well. Very well.

Kate Bush wrote and recorded Hounds of Love in 1985, and there is not a bad track, and several magical ones - including "Under Ice", "The Morning Fog", and "Waking the Witch". Some of the instrumentation sounds a little dated, but it's not distracting at all. Highly recommended.

(I should re-rip this in lossless format.)