Hello, again.
Well, here I am, back again. I took some time off from acquiring new tunes last summer when the power pack on the old iMac gave out. I never did figure out how to transfer all the iTunes music stats over to the mac mini, so I had well over 43,000 songs that weren't rated or listened to on the mini. I just couldn't bring myself to download anything else till I put a dent into that number and with just one computer in the house it's not been easy (Darn those Sims). It doesn't appear it will get much easier once my wife gets a hold of the new Simcity 5 for Mac. At any rate, as of today I only have another 39,195 tracks that haven't been been played yet.
I'm sorry to say that I have purposely avoided checking in here and at emusic to see what folks are up to. A quick glance here shows I've got some reading to catch up on and it appears nothing's changed over at emusic (SSDD). I plan to start another garden experiment, so I'll probably sign up again because it's still the only place in Canada where I can find some tunes for $.49/track.
-Howard
I'm sorry to say that I have purposely avoided checking in here and at emusic to see what folks are up to. A quick glance here shows I've got some reading to catch up on and it appears nothing's changed over at emusic (SSDD). I plan to start another garden experiment, so I'll probably sign up again because it's still the only place in Canada where I can find some tunes for $.49/track.
-Howard
Comments
- Just a suggestion as a starting point, the last entry on the New & Notable Classical thread:
- "Composer Nick Brookes sweeping and epic Border Towns exists at its own kind of border: a place where chance meets meaning, where the detritus of popular culture meets the compositional process, where a chorus of seven voices meets chunks and fragments of familiar music, in the process becoming strange and revelatory. Border Towns is an encyclopedic mash-up of Americana, a collision of recordings from the geographical and psychological edges. Yodels, anthems, ambient sounds & fringe broadcasts are layered in perfect lockstep with singers, who meld their voices with a sampled collage of sound effects, songs, and musical ephemera.
Brookes suite (originally performed live as a stage version at HERE in New York) was inspired by the border blasters of the 1950s: giant radio transmitters placed just over the border in Mexico, beyond U.S. jurisdiction, with the intention of blasting culture directly into American homes. Far more powerful than U.S. stations, they often overwhelmed local stations as far north as Minnesota and New York City.
As the New York Times observed, [Brooke] intricately mashes up a dense collection of familiar and obscure musical quotations along with commonplace noises to make a fascinating score. Intertwined with a chorus of seven singers, the work moves in fits and starts in places before rising to towering crescendo then crashing into silence again. Each piece may be a fragment, but the whole is something altogether different, at once familiar and alien, and an intriguing exploration of musical Americana from the 1940s to the present."
Innova Recordings - Soundcloud - Soundcloud 2 - http://www.nbrooke.com/
- "Border Towns began as an encyclopedic mash-up of musical Americana. I was intrigued by
those people who were chosen, willingly or not, to map America: Copland, Dylan, Robeson,
Springsteen, Montana, Anderson, Foster, yet whose song meanings had been bent to new ends
in the popular ear. I started with the question what is listened to here? In every town, that
question gets answered differently, depending on whether you are scanning the airwaves, at a
school, or visiting a historical society. More often than not, whats offered up as local are
representations: Gene Autry is sold in one town; mariachi, now silent in some ways, becomes
a borderlands icon.
Musical locality could have vanished long before the internet or MP3 in the age of the border
blaster; those 100+kW transmitters, placed just over the border in Mexico, that were designed
to be heard as far as Minnesota and New York. They beamed country and R & B in the 50s and
60s, songs sometimes rarely heard on U.S. airwaves. Some singers such as Patsy Montana had
a second career, just over the border, on these X-stations.
Border Towns began with a collection of musical samples and physical gestures, collected on
visits to 11 towns at the literal fringes of the U.S. Interviews, radio station monitoring,
historical society visits, sound walks, and statistical research all contributed to this
collection. Im not interested in portraying any border towns, but instead in creating an
alternate musical universe that reinvents Americana, and that questions how we hear and see
location in music. Turning documentarians such as Lomax on their heads, Ive gone out,
collected recordings that were presented to me as local, and reassembled them into
traditions of my own making."
- Nick Brooke from the linernotes.
Let's start all over again!!!
I've been holding off on getting much music, too. One part budgetary, but just as much realizing (and still realizing) that I have large amounts of music I rarely listen to.