Music

Music is a big part of me: Over the years, I’ve sung in choirs, played the violin (never terribly well) and can plunk tunes out on most other instruments, DJ’d alternative/goth/industrial/ebm/electronica clubs, and collected a whole lot of music.

Bumbershoot ’01 – Friday, Aug. 31st

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I took off from work and walked up to the Seattle Center and made it into Bumbershoot at about 5:30pm. Spent most of my first day just wandering around and getting the feel of the place — the only band I caught any of was The Dusty 45’s, a decent blues/rock-n-roll band.

I did run into my friend Adri there, which blew my mind for a couple reasons. First off, just running into her was surprise enough. Secondly, she was there on her honeymoon! Apparently she and her boyfriend Jory (I have no clue if I’m spelling that correctly or not) had just gotten married the week before. Completely caught me off guard — was not something I was expecting to hear — but hey, congratulations to the both of them.

After a while I decided I wanted to head home, change out of my work clothes, and head back, but I never made it back. While I was at home, Chad and Kim stopped by to kidnap me, and we all ended up heading out to The Vogue, a goth/industrial bar just a couple blocks up the street from my house. Ended up being a very cool night — ran into two more friends that I hadn’t seen in a while, Nate (who I’d last seen not long before I left Anchorage, he just moved down here a couple weeks ago), and Alex (who I haven’t seen in years, and is planning on heading back to Anchorage soon). This world just gets smaller and smaller all the time….

After we all finally decided we were done, we hit IHOP for some grub, went to our respective homes, and crashed.

Pie, ghosties, scots, and naked girls (kinda)

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Sunday rolls around, and another week has done and gone. Been a good week, though.

The work week was pretty uneventful, for the most part. It seems that the opinion is that I’m catching on to things rather quickly there, however. John (the person I’m replacing) has decided that this week he’ll only be working half-days, and will make this Friday his last day…then I’ll have the shop to myself. Pretty cool. I also talked with Shelley (my boss within Xerox), and the impression I got is that while I’m not using my DocuTech training at this position, there are good possibilities for that in the future. This was great to hear, as it makes it sound even more possible that I will be getting hired on by Xerox on a permanent basis at some point in the future. It may be a while before that happens — as I understand it, they’re currently in the midst of a hiring freeze right now — but with any luck, I might be officially part of Xerox sometime after the first of the year.

Earlier this week I went out to see American Pie 2. I’m not entirely sure why that ended up being my choice, as I am no great fan of the first one, but that was where I ended up. Pleasantly enough, it wasn’t that bad. I wouldn’t label it a classic by any stretch, nor will it be a ‘keeper’ for me when it comes out on DVD, however it was surprisingly funny in spots, and I ended up enjoying it much more than I did the first installment. Much of it was a rehash of the original, but it felt to me like it held together better this time around…more of a real story connecting the characters, rather than merely placing a bunch of misfits in screwball (and often disgusting) circumstances one after the other. And, I gotta say, Alyson Hannigan (as Michelle, the ‘band geek girl’), was great — stealing the film, in my eyes, at least. So, all in all, not as bad a film as I thought it might be.

I also went out Friday night for the midnight show of Poltergeist. Very cool…it had been years since I’d seen this film, and along with many other horror films that were beat to death with sequels, it’s always pleasant to revisit the original and see just how good it actually is. Probably very much due to the production (and uncredited co-direction) of Steven Spielberg, the film is much more along the lines of what I like to see in a horror film — a slow build that allows you to make some connection with the characters before things start getting freaky, followed by truly innovative ideas as these unexeplained events start affecting the family. Quite nice.

I’ll try and get around to at least moving these mini-reviews into the Movies section of my messageboard soon…kind of tired now, as I’ll explain in the moment, so didn’t do that part yet.

Saturday, I headed out with a full crew of people (Casey, Dez, Chad, Don, Karl, Tim, Jenny, and Wendy) to go see the Barenaked Ladies in concert out at the Gorge (a gorgeous [no pun intended] outdoor amphitheater by George, Washington). Casey had bought me the ticket before I had even made it down to Seattle as a ‘welcome to Washington’ present, which I thought was all sorts of cool. We all loaded into three cars Saturday afternoon, and undertook the roughly 3-hour drive to the Gorge. We eventually made it out to the campsite at Potholes State Park — apparently, it was the closest one available, even though it took us another 45 minutes or so after passing the Gorge to get to it — and set up camp there. Admittedly, it was a very pretty little campground.

After getting everything set up at the campsite, we packed ourselves into two cars, and headed down a quicker route back to the Gorge for the show. The way there was fascinating — currently, huge amounts of the state of Washington are on fire, and there were amazing clouds of smoke from the fires just 40 miles away or so in the sky. The smoke turned an otherwise clear night to a completely opaque murk. Just fascinating to see — and the smell of burning pine in the air was an added reminder that all this stuff wasn’t that far away.

Wildfire smoke, Barenaked Ladies trip, WA

We got to the Gorge during the first opening act (who, unfortunately, I can’t remember the name of), found a spot and got settled during her last couple songs. The second opening spot was The Proclaimers! All sorts of cool…though I’ve only ever picked up one of their albums (Sunshine on Leith), I’ve enjoyed their music since I first heard “1000 Miles” in the movie Benny & Joon. They played a short (or so it seemed to me) but very clean set, with a nice mix of songs, some that I recognized, and some that I didn’t. After a short break while the stage was slightly rearranged, BNL came on.

This show was great. While I’ve never known much of BNL before this (most of my exposure has been their radio tracks — ‘If I Had A Million Dollars’, ‘One Week’, and ‘Pinch Me’, all of which I’ve liked), so didn’t know many of the songs, these guys put on an incredible show. They obviously have a lot of fun with their music and their concerts, and spent a good amount of time between songs joking around and generally having a lot of fun (from the lead singer while relating a story: “We were celebrating Christmas. Sure, I’m Jewish, but we’re big fans of presents…we’re not big fans of a kind, benevolent God. We like the Old Testaments wrathful, vengeful God. So now we celebrate Easter, too.”) Bouncing back and forth between their songs, with frequent jaunts into random snippets of other music, plus three encores, the show was an absolute blast.

After the show ended at about 11:30pm, we all went back to the campsite, and ended up sitting up and talking until sometime after 2 in the morning. We started out just sitting and talking, still pretty jazzed from the show, then Karl, Casey, Tim and I got into a discussion covering everything from Economics to Politics to whether or not the human race is breeding itself into extinction, and didn’t realize how long we talked until someone actually thought to look at a watch. The night was absolutely beautiful, too — I don’t think I’ve ever seen the Milky Way as visible as it was last night.

This morning we all got up, slowly got ourselves ready to go, packed up, and headed back into town. Now I’m back at Casey’s just long enough to put this post up, then it’ll be time for me to head back to my apartment and crash out before it’s time for me to work tomorrow morning. Very good weekend, though…was a whole lot of fun, and a nice change from kicking around my apartment. So, this is it for now…until later….

Sister Machine Gun ‘This Metal Sky’

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You sit collapsed as an empty mind, last bytes dissolved into your last breath and the droning sound of hollow places pulse with ache. It is lonely here, living in the hazy moment between the alarm and the awakening where the dream precipitates madness as its encore. You are only half here, the other half erased to be brushed from the paper by the same hand that fingers your ache like a fresh scab until you bleed a river of ridiculous.

I see now it’s not the vision that’s attraction, you peddle your pieces to a man called Compromise for a place in the greater scheme until the only thing left standing is the place where you once stood. You have just reduced yourself from static to dead air droning.

Or it could be the other way — take the wire to the other side of this metal sky and you will see these stars are just projections. This is not real, which means their thunder is merely a threat.

Do you want to know the truth? They need you. They are mechanical, maniacal, derived, you couldn’t drown in their gene pool if you tried, but they’re all made up in brilliant disguise selling the very thing they most want but cannot possess — you. And magic is the key to their success as simple slight of hand steals your autonomy leaving you believing you are in control.

Tell me, do you trust your judgement? My friend, your id’s been tricked.

Welcome…

…to Metropolis.

— Sister Machine Gun, ‘This Metal Sky’

‘toons and Tunes

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Happy May Day! Only two more days ’till I turn 28…not that I’m keeping track of this for any real reason or anything. Just thought I’d mention it.

My friend Kirsten introduced me to some web-based comic strips I hadn’t found yet, and I’ve added links to them under the “Places to go…” heading over in the right column. They’re both wonderfully twisted stuff — Drinky Drink and The Parking Lot is Full. Just a quick warning — the Parking Lot comic, while I find it funny, has a tendency to be one of the more bizarrely offensive strips I’ve found yet…be warned! And lastly, though I’m probably not going to add this as a permanent link, you really should go check out MC Hawking’s Crib and download the .mp3 file for “Entropy”. Just trust me. You should.

By the way…

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…when did “Arrow” 102.1 switch over to 102.1 “The Buzz”? I just noticed this while riding around with Erica the other night in her new car, and was really surprised. Hadn’t tuned into 102.1 for ages — it, along with 100.5 the Fox, was one of the two bastions of old buttrock in Alaska — so I’m pretty clueless as to when the did the switchover.

What I really don’t get about it is why they did what they did, format wise. They went from being one of two “classic rock” (old buttrock) stations in town (Arrow 102.1 and 100.5 the Fox) to being one of three “modern rock” (new buttrock) stations in town (87.7 the End, 102.1 the Buzz, and 106.5 K-Whale) — basically traded in their old library of tunes that have been overplayed for 30 years for a new library of tunes that are just starting to get overplayed, and from competing with one other station to competing with two. I don’t get it.

But then, this is Alaska, and the music scene up here is really easy to compartmentalize. For grins and giggles, I’ll do just that — the following does not take into account people (like myself) who constantly bounce from station to station, and therefore don’t fit a definite demographic. Nor does it take into account the two underground scenes in Anchorage at the moment — the punk and the rave crowds — neither of which have a station focused on them, and have to grab the occasional show on 88.1 KRUA or pirate station to hear what they want on the radio.

Just hazarding a rough guess, I’d put Alaska’s listeners between 20 and 40 years old (at least in the roughly Anchorage/Valley area) at about 45% buttrock (87.7, 100.5, 102.1, 106.5), 30% country (104.1, 107.5), and the last 25% a blend of what’s left (87.7, 92.9, 96.3, 101.3, 103.1).

Under 20, things shift a bit…I’d put it at around 60% hip-hop/pop (92.9, 101.3), 20% new-buttrock (87.7, 102.1), with the remaining 20% everything else (87.7, 96.3, 100.5, 103.1, 104.1, 107.5).

Them’s my guesses, at least.

So, I’m curious…

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What’s up with all these DJ-friendly themed songs hitting the radio lately? By ‘DJ-friendly’ I don’t mean they’ve all got 32-beat drum-based intros, or anything like that (though they might, I haven’t listened quite that closely) — just that, well, they’re all thematically very similar.

  • Madonna’s “Music” — “Hey Mr. DJ, put a record on…”
  • Black Eyed Peas feat. Macy Gray’s “Request Line” — “Hey DJ…hey DJ…just one desire from a hip-hop fan…”
  • Jennifer Lopez’ “Play” — I just heard this one on the radio today, so I don’t have lyrics running through my head, but it’s along the same theme.

I know songs like this have come out from time to time in the past, it just struck me as I was listening to J-Lo’s song how closely these three came out to each other.

It’s a conspiracy, I tell you! ;)

Good tunes

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While I grew up listening to an incredibly wide range of music thanks to my parents, I’ve never really been much into country. My tastes always ran to the alternative, industrial, and for the past few years I’ve focused mainly on electronica, from deep trance and house to dance remixes of more poppy stuff, as long as it’s fun to dance to and well constructed.

However, over the past few years, I’ve been spending much of my time around women who listened to a fair amount of country…and I suppose that can only last so long before it really starts to sink in. It helps that much of what I grew up with was the music that today’s country grew out of — rock and roll, blues, r&b (back when r&b actually meant rhythm and blues) — all that good old stuff. So, more and more lately, I find myself keeping the car radio more on 104.1 and 107.5, the two country stations in town. Thanks to them, I’ve just stumbled upon an absolutely incredible band — Trick Pony.

Trick Pony’s currently got a single called ‘Pour Me’ that, in my mind, at least, absolutely demands to be cranked up to the threshold of pain every time it comes on the radio. Well, their album just hit the stores this week, I’m listening to it now — and for the first time in my life, I really wish this band was coming to Anchorage soon so I could see their show. Just a great album, pretty much solidly upbeat all the way through so far, and from what I’ve read on the ‘net, these three put on an absolutely incredible live show.

So, if you’re into country at all, or even just into really damn good music, pick this one up. Well worth it.

I’m heading out tonight (hence why Ben-Hur isn’t going in the DVD player right now). The reason my residency at Studio 99 doesn’t officially kick in until next week is because they already had tonight rented out — but it sounds like it should be a fun deal to go to, so I’m going to stop by that for a while.

Polar Productions in association with Dance Nation (Tuesdays on KRUA 88.1FM from 10pm-1am) presents an all-ages dance event: R E V E R B. DJ Panda, Michael Kalman, DJ Jasper, Planet Lush, Scott Lappi and a special guest DJ will be spinning at Studio 99 from 8pm-3am tonight. $10 at the door, $8 with a canned food donation — all cans to benefit the Food Bank of Alaska.

The Scotsman

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Well a Scotsman clad in kilt left a bar one evening fair,
and one could tell by how he walked that he’d drunk more than his share.
He fumbled round until he could no longer keep his feet,
then he stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street.
Ring ding diddle diddle eye dee oh, ring di diddly eye oh,
he stumbled off into the grass to sleep beside the street.

About that time two young and lovely girls just happened by,
and one says to the other with a twinkle in her eye,
“See yon sleeping Scotsman, so strong and handsome built?
I wonder if it’s true what they don’t wear beneath their kilt!”
Ring ding diddle diddle eye dee oh, ring di diddly eye oh,
“I wonder if it’s true what they don’t wear beneath the kilt!”

They crept up on that sleeping Scotsman quiet as could be.
Lifted up his kilt about an inch so they could see.
And there behold, for them to view, beneath his Scottish skirt,
was nothing more than God had graced him with upon his birth.
Ring ding diddle diddle eye dee oh, ring di diddly eye oh,
was nothing more than God had graced him with upon his birth.

They marveled for a moment, then one said, “We must be gone,
let’s leave a present for our friend, before we move along.”
As a gift they left a blue silk ribbon, tied into a bow,
around the bonnie star the Scots’ kilt did lift and show.
Ring ding diddle diddle eye dee oh, ring di diddly eye oh,
around the bonnie star the Scots kilt did lift and show.

Now the Scotsman woke to nature’s call and stumbled towards a tree.
Behind a bush, he lift his kilt and gawks at what he sees!
And in a startled voice he says to what’s before his eyes,
“O, lad I don’t know where you been, but I see you won first prize!”
Ring ding diddle diddle eye dee oh, ring di diddly eye oh,
“O, lad I don’t know where you been, but I see you won first prize!”

— Bryan Bowers “The Scotsman”

Great Napster discussions

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I just had to get something up on this — there’s an absolutely great discussion of the seemingly never-ending Napster controversy going on over at the Home Theater Forum right now.

I understood Metallica’s plight at first. There music was being hijacked, goddamn it! But their waning CD sales weren’t from Napster, but from the fact that they were like a tough version of Poison; they should have become extinct when the meteor of alternative hit.

— Ike

Who didn’t cringe at Xzibit preforming Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” in a F*** Napster shirt? (I didn’t censor that, his actual shirt was censored.) Here was an artist who was as carefully managed and kept as any of the boy bands preforming one of the greatest songs ever, in a shirt that went against what Chuck D was wanting? Would the “power” not be those that want to close down a forum like Napster? (His friend on stage was wearing a “I Voted For Gore” shirt. How radical you are!)

— Ike

When a music journalist on VH1 said that the superstar would be lessened down because we would have a choice. Amen! Who cares that Limp Bizkit’s “My Generation” is in the top 50? You can get the best song titled “My Generation:” The Who’s. The ideas presented in The Who’s “My Generation” overshadows every baiting anti-gay, drug supporting lyric that today’s group can muster. The Who didn’t care if you understood what they said. They’d rather die before they got like you. The end, an explosion of feedback still hits hard today.

— Ike

Can anyone remember Garth Brooks’ whining about used CD sales? Does it strike anyone else as vomitious that a multi-million dollar recording artist, who stood to lose practically nothing from used CD sales, was trotted out as a poster child representing the unfairness of it all, while struggling musicians would give major organs if someone would just consider buying their CD?

— Buzz Vinard

A tribute album worth listening to

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Tribute albums have a tendency to be one of the most overdone and under-worthy genres in the music business. Take a bunch of songs by a worthy artist, farm them out to a bunch of bands that aren’t nearly as well known, and issue a ‘tribute’ album that usually tends to be an excercise in mediocrity — there will usually be one, maybe two tracks that shine through, while the rest range from ‘listenable’ to ‘why bother?’

However, while going through my CD collection, I’ve found something of a rare gem: We Will Follow: A Tribute to U2 (this tends to happen when you’ve got 1000+ CD’s, by the way…it’s way too easy to lose track of music for a while). While this album does have a couple duds on it, the overall collection is definitely quite a few steps above the average tribute album — I’ve had it going on random for the past couple days without going absolutely buggy, which can be quite the rare thing. The majority of the tracks range from listenable to good, with probably between 3 and 5 real gems on here. If you’re at all into U2 and/or synth-pop/electronica, I can acually recommend picking this one up.

Here’s a quick track listing: Heaven 17 With or Without You / Information Society One / Front Line Assembly with Tiffany New Year’s Day / Razed in Black Pride / Dead or Alive Even Better Than the Real Thing / Spahn Ranch We Will Follow / Mission UK All I Want Is You / Electric Hellfire Club Sunday Bloody Sunday / Rosetta Stone October / Die Krupps Numb / Silverbeam with Ann Louise Where the Streets Have No Name / Bang Tango Even Better Than the Real Thing (Julian Beeston Mix) / The Polecats Desire / Intra-Venus Discotheque (Suspira Mix)