Category: la musica

Do what you need to make you feel better

It was 1976 – the Bicentennial, which was a rather big deal: flags, parades, celebrations, fireworks*, limited edition coins. I was twelve and had just discovered marijuana and was listening to a local radio station on my clock radio and on comes “The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether.”

“Do what you need to make you feel better, do what you need to make you feel!” 

 I loved it! Had to have it! 

So I waited for the break after the songs to hear the deejay say who it was and he didn’t! I was so pissed off. But I finally heard it again, got the name, went out to Hot Licks music store and head shop, bought it and I now owned The Alan Parsons Project  “Tales of Mystery and Imagination – Edgar Allen Poe”. It’s a great album. Somehow they always came off to me like a more family-friendly progressive rock band. Emerson Lake and Palmer made some great music but it’s not for kids. It’ll fuck with their minds. 

Just kidding. The Alan Parsons Project seemed to be making music for the smart kids (to wit: they do an amazing job of incorporating Poe’s poetry into this album), unlike say, Aerosmith. It’s all very theatrical with operatic and classical flourishes all around and side two is mostly a little rock opera. Big emotions and a little trippy. Maybe that’s why I associated the band with the theater kids in school. 

It was always a bit of a mystery to me who Alan Parsons was. The band seemed to consciously and purposefully not showcase Alan Parsons, who was one of two main members – hence the “project”.  Parsons was an engineer on Abbey Road, Let it Be and The Dark Side of the Moon, among many other great albums. The other guy, Eric Woolfson, was a songwriter and composer, according to Wikipedia, where I got all this information. This was their first album, which I did not know until today, and most of the musicians were from Pilot (Oh, ho ho, it’s Magic!) and Ambrosia (Baby, Come back). 

Sierra Exif JPEG

Tales of mystery and imagination. Makes sense.

*Back in those days we saw fireworks maybe twice a year if we were lucky and somehow geographically near where they were being blown off. I’ll be honest, I never have to see another firework in my life. Redundant redundant redundant. They also fuck with my mental health. But have you seen those huge drone shows all lit up and transmogrifying all over the sky? Totally cool!

News Letter 020925

Just to note

I found this in the paper today. A coach’s description of a new player in perfect sportsese. “He has the ability to make plays,” __ said. “He’s got good hands and can shoot the puck.”
Nice. 

February 28, 2025

Good people gotta get together. One great thing we can do that I’ve heard about is getting off social media and any media and spending no money anywhere on February 28, 2025. Especially online or large retailers. Money is one of the psychopaths’ two languages; this would send a very strong message that we are the ones with the real… Power is the other language they understand. Neanderthals.  
Let’s take it away for just one day.
To start.

From Harper’s Index

Estimated amount of energy, in kilowatt-hours, that was used to discover a new prime number last year: 3,100,000

Estimated number of U.S. households this amount of energy could power for a year: 287,000.

The world is full of these things that just slip by.

I love this

From: “The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art” by Dean Kissick in Harper’s December 2024. I love Harper’s. Can you tell?

SCIENCE!!

“In his 2022 book The Mind of a Bee, behavioral ecologist Lars Chittka chronicles his decades of work with honey bees, showing that bees can use sign language, recognize individual human faces, and remember and convey locations of far-flung flowers. They have good moods and bad, and they can be traumatized by near-death experiences such as being grabbed be an animatronic spider hidden in a flower. (Who wouldn’t be?)”

From “Minds Everywhere” by Rowan Jacobsen, in Scientific American February 2024; Illustrations by Natalya Balnova 

(Do I need to cite an artist when I’m just pulling a quote?)


Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

The Super Bowl Halftime Show is an extravaganza of outrageousness. But it can be really cool. I just watched Kendrick Lamar – I have one of his albums – “To Pimp a Butterfly” – and I dig it and see his genius throughout his career and know how talented he is. But the extravaganza of outrageousness calls for a can-be-somewhat outrageous artist, an artist that can match that huge stage, in the middle of a boring (or exciting) football game, like Prince. Prince owned that huge stage.  And I think that is partly because the tempo of his music changed.  He could start slow and build up for the audience and then blow the doors off the place. Which he did. Rap songs mostly stay with one tempo which makes it harder for the artist to do what a Prince or Bruno Mars or Madonna can do. That is my theory of Kendrick Lamar and the Super Bowl Halftime Show

Luke Digs Deep to Discover How Tempo Affects Mostly Wealthy Listeners Clutching 24 Ounce 75 Dollar Beers in a Dark Stadium During the Halftime Break of an Athletic Contest

Ambient Sunday: 4

Here’s a relatively new release for your listening enjoyment. This is Ian Hawgood’s Mysterious Shapes and Remembered Rivers, which makes one think of China Crisis’s Difficult Shapes and Passive Rhythms. It came out in 2022. He does a song with Stijn Huwels, with whom he’s done a lot of great music, and Friends We Found, who I know nothing about, but will. It’s just great ambient music. That’s all.

Ambient Sunday: Thursday or Friday edition, depending on where you are right now

Being that we’ve veered a bit from Sunday, let’s veer a bit from traditional Ambient. Susumu Yokota‘s “sakura“. It’s an amazing record by a young man that I came across in 2014 and started following him and he died suddenly in 2015. It was a really strange feeling. I had the same experience with Mitch Hedberg. But this record is just a stellar example of what this man created. Check him out! If you’re into that sort of thing.

Ambient Sunday: 3

Biosphere is the nom de plume of Geir Jenssen, a Norwegian electronic musician and composer. He lives in a place called, Tromsø, which is within the Arctic Circle; in other words, way the fuck up there. You can see how someone living in such a achingly dark and cold place could create the sort of Ambient music he does. (Of course, they do have some long, long summer days.)

Substrata is his masterpiece. As I’ve mentioned before, talking about Ambient music isn’t easy, so it’s hard to even tell you why I believe this is so. It’s haunting, has lots of overdubbed old recordings of voices and even singers, chilly effects, and yet remains (often) really quite upbeat. So, there you go; A masterpiece.

There are more than one Biosphere-named artists out there – just an FYI. I will definitely be sharing more of his work as I go through my favorite Ambient albums.

Ambient Sunday: 2

Rest in peace, Mr. Sakamoto. So my ambient Sunday 2 will step back to what I consider the first, and maybe still best, Ambient album ever. Brian Eno’s Ambient One Music for Airports. I bought it after having bought Here Come the Warm Jets and Taking Tiger Mountain and Before and After Science, and I honestly thought there was something wrong with my turntable. I fucked around with it a little bit and it slowly dawned on me that this was exactly what it was supposed to be. I learned just how brilliant Brian Eno is. 1/1 is sublime.

Ambient Sunday: 1

Ryuichi Sakamoto “async”

I’ve always wanted to share some of my favorite ambient albums, but it’s such an odd thing to share, right? It’s really hard to talk about – Ambient music is, one tends to lots of new age sounding adjectives, and so I will mostly just post the album and encourage anyone who wants to search it out and listen to it.

I learned today that Ryuichi Sakamoto died. He’s one of my top four, for sure, musical artists. He’s on constant rotation for me, partly because he has dozens and dozens of great albums – from early Yellow Magic Orchestra, his poppier solo work, and his own Ambient, soundtracks and piano albums, to his many, many albums created with other artists. It breaks my heart to know he’s no longer with us, but he definitely left us with lots of amazing music with which to remember him.

Note that sometimes albums I call Ambient are called electronic or some other genre elsewhere. It’s a hard one to nail down, for me they range from classic Ambient, such as Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (which I always assumed would be my first Ambient post), to more experimental Ambient music that moves beyond the soft mellow chill of classic Ambient. This one shows up as electronic on my Apple Music, I would call it experimental Ambient. I just happened to be listening to it yesterday when he passed. I love this record.

It’s called “async”, by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

What the Hell is Going on with Harry Nilsson?

I’m a big Harry Nilsson fan! Love the guy! Great songwriter with one of the great voices of the era. I’ve been a fan since the 1970s (pre internet but post dinosaurs) and when the Internet came around, of course, googled him and listened to anything I’d not seen. Pandora, Spotify, internet itself.

Okay, so how on earth did I just come across two Nilsson albums I HAVE NEVER SEEN? One of them, Knillson, is possibly his greatest album ever. Schmilsson is genius, but this one… Where the hell has that been?! Or, how can a guy who’d spend many afternoons flipping through albums in record stores never, ever come across either album?

Look we got a pandemic, fires, hurricanes, Trump, death, destruction, republicans, and so this doesn’t really float to the top of important topics, but I can’t understand how I missed two albums from one of my musical heroes. Help?

The other is Pandemonium Shadow Show. Also a blast, but not quite Knnillssonnn or Schmillsson.

The Dubstep Show

Okay, so the dubstep show. That was trippy. And I wasn’t even tripping. I had no idea that happened. Picture these young folk with an array of colorful, brightly lit baubles and bangles, hula hoops and hats, glowballs and whatnot, much of which they swung around in slow sometimes erratic orbits in an otherwise mostly dark room.

They wore big furry bear hats, and sometimes that was about it. They wore footy pajamas with hoods. They even wore beaded masks. I’m not sure what that was all about but it was rather disconcerting mostly because it must be complicated to breathe, let alone drink. And they had gloves with lighted fingertips that they wiggled around in front of other dubsteppers faces like some crazed magician.

The deejays pounded out music with their fists in the air. I couldn’t tell exactly what else they were doing up there. A lot of dancing and then stopping to work on something on a table in front of them. But the music pounded the people and the people jumped up and down ecstatically. The ones toward the back, the really trippy ones, mostly just spun around in circles – often well-lit as well.

But it was cool! Kind of Build-A-Bear meets Cabaret Voltaire cool, but cool like that! I wanna go again – and be almost the oldest guy there. There was an elderly gentleman in a straw hat with a handful of glow stick bracelets on each wrist. He rocked back and forth in the middle of the crowd. I was proud.