Good that he only stayed with organ (or at least the keyboard version of "organ"). Right now, I'm listening to the "Ausweidungs - und Körperaktionen" ("evisceration and body actions") segments of the 6-day event, but I don't have to see it and I can bask in the audio and visualize my own choreography of events.
Legend. Fancy you knowing her - though I gather she was very well connected. Still recall hearing the Kiss song for the first time as a teen and later finding out that this was an actual person.
I'd been expecting this for a long time - especially after he said he wasn't touring anymore. Only saw him perform once - and it was a double bill with Tangerine Dream. Just yesterday morning I was watching a segment from a live show he did where he set the sequencers going and left the stage (probably to go pee) and come back to extoll the beauty of sequencers to his audience who were entranced during those few minutes he was off-stage. Haven't always gone along with his sometimes unnecessarily abrasive attitudes about music or his 80's output that really sounds dated these days (at least, to me), but for over 50 years, he's always been a strong presence in my musical listening - from bedroom listening during my (pre)teen years to the time a couple of decades ago when I bought a 400-disc player for the house and filled it with just his music and let it play for months - to my current anticipation of his new work that extends his fascination with Dune.
I am feeling very sad now, not to say I loved all KS work, but the ones I did are amongst my very favourites of the electronic / kraut whatever area. 45 years of listening. Should have kept off the tabs because he wasn't that old.
Yeah, it’s been a kind of melancholic week with Cynthia dying and now to read about this. It’s strange too that this past week I’ve been spending extra time with the 70’s version of Tangerine Dream and Edgar Froese solo discs because of an article I’d been reading in The Wire magazine about their history. Anyway, I’m now listening to one of the 80’s LPs, I’m OK with - “Audentity” - while listening to one of the albums he did with Lisa Gerrard called “Come Quietly” earlier today.
Worsening health made him stop touring. I’m going back to a recent interview where he mentioned that it was a renal disease that’s treated with dialysis, but there are unpredictable results that left him housebound these last half-dozen years.
The first two I bought by KS. Arthur Brown receiting poetry on the second side of Dune (Shadows of Ignorance) always a favourite despite, well the Sixth Form nature of the poetry. The live double was microgrooved as it was very nearly two hours long, so not a dynamic pressing. Obviously KS being KS he greatly extended the later re-issue. Just to tie things up I bought my copies of the Historic Edition sets from the Freeman Brothers at Ultima Thule on a visit to Leicester.
Another musician we've lost to kidney disease in the past couple of weeks. Absolutely amazing performer and one of my very favorite musicians who I've been lucky to see a number of times - at least twice with Hariprasad Chaurasia with one of those times accompanied by Alla Rakha and another by Zakir Hussain. Incredible highlights of my life. Didn't realize he was 84. Great life in music.
Not that I've owned one, but a lot of people have.
Wow. I guess it's not a big deal now because I have 128 GB of storage on my phone, but I still remember how revolutionary the original iPod was. In high school, I snuck my first-generation Walkman into study hall to listen to C90 cassettes with an album on each side. Twenty years later, I could load dozens (eventually hundreds or thousands) of albums on a device that was smaller than a cassette. I owned at least 5 or 6 iPods over the years before the iPhone took its place, always opting for the largest capacity hard drive that was available to cram more music in. There have been many more important technological advances during the past few decades, obviously, but all of us on this board spend a LOT of time listening to music, and the iPod fundamentally changed the way I do that.
In October, I bought another Touch to replace the ancient one I have. I have a 160 GB “Classic” and a really ancient iPod from nearly 20 years ago. The newest Touch is what gets used in the car these days - and very regularly. Since everyone seems to have a phone these days with proper car connections, I can somewhat understand the idea to stop making them, but I’m in the minority when it comes to this kind of thing because I don’t own a cell phone or a car that’s less than 20 years old, so there’s that.
Must admit I don't use my "Classic" iPods much anymore, but only since last year, when I bought a home amp with streaming capability. I do use the phone for music in the car. I absolutely still use my Shuffles, and have 2 backups in case the first one gets lost or broken! I consider them indispensable for running/workouts
Very nearly shed a tear for the iPod. I still travel w/ my 2007 classic w/ 80gb & my much smaller nano from 2010 or so, but I only use them occasionally when the electricity goes out here in Sri Lanka. That's to say, although the electricity gets cut every day (times are tough here), I usually just use the laptop battery rather than testing how much juice is left in the old iPods.
I have often wondered why no one has jumped into the gap with a simple, dedicated media player with 1 or 2 TB of storage. Basically a big flash drive with audio outputs, some kind of screen, and probably wireless. (I guess that's what the most recent iPods were, though without the storage size I would want.) As those of us with big music collections know, current streaming setups have trouble handling large libraries, even on a home network. Specialized market, I guess...Even I don't feel the need to carry all my music around with me, all the time.
I still use my daughters 2007 iPod nano for trips, etc. It only has 2GB, but that forces me to swap out stuff frequently which is generally a good idea for me.
I find that using Spotify downloads on my 256GB Touch instead of personal downloads actually sound a bit better along with the fact that Spotify allows segues between songs, so those are pluses for me. I use an online source that lets me transfer playlists of all kinds to other platforms, so what I will sometimes do is have iTunes create a large random playlist then have that playlist converted to a Spotify playlist and then just listen to that Spotify list on shuffle. I can do the same thing with all kinds of other playlists - such as "most recent iTunes listening" or "just new releases" and so on. and they'll all be created as new Spotify playlists. I don't need more space, because I'll have as much as 3 or 4 months of music on this Touch - and I'm changing it out in a simple way every month or so anyway.
A kind of weird "thrill" for me is really treating the Touch like a personal radio station. I turn it on in the car while I have it hidden away and it doesn't stop when I shut the car off and go inside somewhere to run an errand and when I get back and start the car, it sounds just like if you had just left your car radio on (and tuned to a "cool" station ha!) and it joins whatever is playing on the Touch. I thought that it would use up a lot of battery power, but I can start at 100% charge, run hours of errands throughout the day, and it'll show "94%" when I get home.
The early iPods are already great collector's items and worth quite a bit of money. I was trying to buy a replacement iPod Shuffle and the cheapest price I could find was over $200!
Amazon UK are currently offering a 7th Gen iPod Classic 160gb that has been refurbed and is now 256gb. I seem to recall "overclocking" iPods was quite a thing back in the day. About £300 mind for which you could buy something half way decent instead.
"A thousand songs in your pocket"! And me with me 1TB music player dream. Reminds me of when people were concerned that those white earplug cables would be an invitation to muggers.
As someone who works in an advertising-adjacent field, it is interesting that they chose to show him in his apartment, just heading down to the street. They may have felt they had to show how it all worked, to an audience not yet familiar with digitized music
For 2001, it was the ease of moving it off your laptop to your iPod and then taking it with you - which was pretty awesome in those days. I also remember "Love Shack" being one of the tunes already pre-loaded onto this new thing called "iTunes."
Comments
Right now, I'm listening to the "Ausweidungs - und Körperaktionen" ("evisceration and body actions")
segments of the 6-day event, but I don't have to see it and I can bask in the audio and visualize my own choreography of events.
Cynthia “Plaster Caster” Albritton
Legend. Fancy you knowing her - though I gather she was very well connected. Still recall hearing the Kiss song for the first time as a teen and later finding out that this was an actual person.
Klaus Schulze
Yeah, it’s been a kind of melancholic week with Cynthia dying and now to read about this. It’s strange too that this past week I’ve been spending extra time with the 70’s version of Tangerine Dream and Edgar Froese solo discs because of an article I’d been reading in The Wire magazine about their history. Anyway, I’m now listening to one of the 80’s LPs, I’m OK with - “Audentity” - while listening to one of the albums he did with Lisa Gerrard called “Come Quietly” earlier today.
Another musician we've lost to kidney disease in the past couple of weeks.
Absolutely amazing performer and one of my very favorite musicians who
I've been lucky to see a number of times - at least twice with Hariprasad Chaurasia
with one of those times accompanied by Alla Rakha and another by Zakir Hussain.
Incredible highlights of my life. Didn't realize he was 84. Great life in music.
Wow. I guess it's not a big deal now because I have 128 GB of storage on my phone, but I still remember how revolutionary the original iPod was. In high school, I snuck my first-generation Walkman into study hall to listen to C90 cassettes with an album on each side. Twenty years later, I could load dozens (eventually hundreds or thousands) of albums on a device that was smaller than a cassette. I owned at least 5 or 6 iPods over the years before the iPhone took its place, always opting for the largest capacity hard drive that was available to cram more music in. There have been many more important technological advances during the past few decades, obviously, but all of us on this board spend a LOT of time listening to music, and the iPod fundamentally changed the way I do that.
I have a 160 GB “Classic” and a really ancient iPod from nearly 20 years ago.
The newest Touch is what gets used in the car these days - and very regularly.
Since everyone seems to have a phone these days with proper car connections,
I can somewhat understand the idea to stop making them, but I’m in the minority
when it comes to this kind of thing because I don’t own a cell phone or a car that’s
less than 20 years old, so there’s that.
I’m with this guy - not so much that we need more iPods,
but things that do one thing well.
I use an online source that lets me transfer playlists of all kinds to other platforms, so what I will sometimes do is have iTunes create a large random playlist then have that playlist converted to a Spotify playlist and then just listen to that Spotify list on shuffle. I can do the same thing with all kinds of other playlists - such as "most recent iTunes listening" or "just new releases" and so on. and they'll all be created as new Spotify playlists. I don't need more space, because I'll have as much as 3 or 4 months of music on this Touch - and I'm changing it out in a simple way every month or so anyway.
A kind of weird "thrill" for me is really treating the Touch like a personal radio station. I turn it on in the car while I have it hidden away and it doesn't stop when I shut the car off and go inside somewhere to run an errand and when I get back and start the car, it sounds just like if you had just left your car radio on (and tuned to a "cool" station ha!) and it joins whatever is playing on the Touch. I thought that it would use up a lot of battery power, but I can start at 100% charge, run hours of errands throughout the day, and it'll show "94%" when I get home.
Here’s your 1TB dream fulfilled … but at a cost of $1300.
This awesome hi-res audio player shows why the iPod had to die.