Music Question Challenge 2025

Another blog meme! This one I found through Elena’s post, and honestly, I debated diving into this one, as it’s primarily made up of questions that I really don’t like — not because of anything wrong with the questions themselves, but because they’re so difficult for me to answer. :) But what the heck, let’s give this a shot.

One major disclaimer, though: Most of these answers could change at any moment depending on any number of reasons. This is a snapshot of a very brief moment in time.

What are 5 of your favourite albums?

Props to the original author for making this “five of your favorite”, and not “your five favorite”. That makes it easier (though not easy) to answer.

What are five of your favourite songs?

Albums was bad enough, but songs? This is where things really get difficult. Again, I appreciate that this isn’t supposed to be my five favorite songs, just five of my favorites.

Favourite instrument(s)

Cello, probably. I played violin (never terribly well) as a kid, and I’ve long wondered if I’d stuck with it more if I’d picked cello. As it was, my brother, who started with cello, went on to bass (both standup bass and electric bass guitar, depending on whether he was playing in an orchestra, a bluegrass band, or a punk band, any of which have been and still might be possibilities), while I started with violin and went on to DJing.

What song or album are you currently listening to?

Right at this moment, nothing. This week, it’s mostly been the six-disc 40th anniversary re-release of Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up last week.

Do you listen to the radio? If so, how often?

Not unless I happen to be somewhere where someone else has it on. What with the annoyance of commercials, the lack of stations that reliably play what I want to hear, and my extensive music collection, there’s just no reason to bother.

How often do you listen to music?

As often as possible. I used to have a near constant soundtrack going, but these days it’s primarily when I’m working or puttering around on my own.

How often and how do you discover music?

“How often” is a hard one to answer, as it just kind of happens when it happens. As far as “how” goes, sometimes it’s hearing something good when I’m out clubbing, sometimes friends introduce me to new stuff, and sometimes some other way.

I’m a big fan of compilation albums, and have a few labels on Bandcamp that I’ll regularly pick up annual or themed compilations when they appear. These days, those labels are Re:Mission Entertainment, Alfa Matrix, Artoffact Records, Infacted Recordings, and Sideline Magazine.

I also enjoy a lot of mashups and get a lot of those from Bootie Mashup. Since I don’t listen to the radio or much pop, mashups have introduced me to a lot of pop that I’d otherwise not have heard (and I’m often amused when I hear a song that I recognize but it sounds weird, and realize that I’m hearing the original when I’d only heard bits and pieces as used in mashups).

What’s a song or album that you enjoy that you wish had more recognition?

Many years ago, when I visited Germany in 1990 or ’91 (I can’t remember which trip this was), I discovered the band Poems for Laila and picked up their first two albums, Another Poem for the 20th Century and La Fillette Triste (which doesn’t appear to be available as a YouTube playlist). I think both are extremely good, and have often recommended them to people, as they never got much play here in the United States (I’ve rarely found anyone else who’d heard of them).

What’s your favourite song of all time?

There is absolutely no possible way to answer this question. Too many possibilities, too many variables.

Has your taste in music evolved over the years?

Oh, absolutely.

Growing up, dad contributed a lot of rock, folk, and classic country, and mom contributed a lot of classical. Our family was very involved with the music in our churches. I spent many years in a local children’s choir (first the Anchorage Boys Choir, then the Anchorage Girls and Boys Choir when the two choirs (run by the same people) merged, and then as they changed their name to the Alaska Children’s Choir), which exposed me to a wide range of choral music.

As I grew, while I was certainly exposed to a lot of pop, I soon found myself being drawn to what was then termed “alternative” music. I started going to my high school dances, and though I was at first a definite wallflower, with regular “they’ll all laugh at me” thoughts keeping me off the dance floor, eventually I started heading out to the floor, and discovered a love for dancing.

High school dances encouraged my appreciation for pop, and after high school, I started exploring the local all-ages club, eventually finding Sharkey’s, which had pop upstairs and alternative down in the basement. Sharkey’s and the DJs there exposed me to both dance/electronica and goth/industrial, and I found my home.

Since then, I’ve mostly considered the goth/industrial and electronica/techno/dance genres to be my favorites, though I still have a love for, well, just about everything. While I used to profess a disdain for hip-hop and rap, there were always “acceptable” groups, and I’ve come to realize that there was a lot of unconscious and unexplored systemic racism and classism wrapped up in that, and I’ve been gaining more of an appreciation for both classic and modern rap and hip hop.

Eventually I found my way into DJing, and spent about ten years spinning at all-ages clubs in Anchorage as my alter-ego DJ Wüdi. Finding music for the clubs and picking up songs from requests exposed me to a lot more stuff I might not have found otherwise.

Basically, while there are certainly bad songs (though even many of those can be enjoyable at the right place and time), and lots of quite unfortunate artists (even when they produce tracks I like), there’s no such thing as universally bad genres.

Except for smooth jazz. The exception that proves the rule, right? ;)

Tag, you’re it

I’m not one for tagging people in these sorts of things, but if you come across this and want to play along, jump in!

Weekly Notes: Feb 10-16, 2025

  • 🤬 Facebook is in one of its occasional moods where it decides that as a 51 year old white male, I should be served ads for guns, holsters, body armor, ultra-right-wing religious clothing, and erectile dysfunction pills. I hide ’em all, and they’ll cycle out eventually (at least, they always have in the past), but it’s always annoying when this happens. (No unsolicited advice about how to “fix” this, please. I’ve heard it all.)

  • 🥶 So tired of the cold and snow. I do have to say, what I originally thought was just a silly joke a few weeks ago got us thinking, and y’know…hot water bottles come in really handy in weather like this! Thankfully, it looks like we’ll be warming up enough to get rain for the next week. I’ll take it!

  • 🇺🇸 I’m not going to get too much into it, but I continue to be amazed at how quickly and thoroughly our government is being dismantled. As I grumbled elsewhere, if I’m going to be forced to live in a world with a megalomaniacal tech billionaire doing everything he can to tear down the world’s superpowers for his own benefit, can I at least get James Bond to swoop in and save the day, please?

📸 Photos

Framed by silhouetted tres, the full moon sets in a sky shading from light blue to pink over the pink-tinted snowcapped Olympic mountains across the water of the Puget sound.

The moon setting over the Olympic mountains one morning before work.

A wooden bench in front of some winter vegetation. Graffiti sprayed on the backrest of the bench says 'me' on the left side and 'you' on the right side.

Amusing (Valentine’s Day inspired, perhaps?) graffiti seen this morning on a bench along the Soos Creek trail.

📚 Reading

Finished the last of this year’s Philip K. Dick Award nominated works, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Alien Clay.

📺 Watching

Wrapped up season 16 of Drag Race (my favorite didn’t win, but I’m fine with the winner), and decided to take a slight break from Evil to get caught up with Law & Order and Law & Order: SVU. While season five of Scrubs still lands pretty solidly mostly in the “pleasantly distracting amusement” category, their homage to The Wizard of Oz is still a standout episode.

🎧 Listening

  • A few weeks ago I picked up the Resurgence compilation from Spleen+, and it’s really strong. I’m a big fan of compilations, but they’re often very hit-and-miss; while that’s certainly true for this one as well, the ratio of hit to miss is really good here.

    Embark on a sonic journey with “Resurgence”, the latest conceptual release from Brussels-based Spleen+ (a division of Alfa Matrix). This deluxe collector’s edition brings together 133 active bands from across the globe, spanning the diverse sub-genres born from post-punk’s iconic roots. Spread over an impressive 7-CD collection, this box set captures the essence of a movement that has influenced generations of music, art, and culture.

  • Soft Cell will be touring through Seattle in May (along with Simple Minds and Modern English), and while that’s a really good and very tempting lineup, I decided to go to Underworld (also in May) instead. However, that did lead me to digging through Soft Cell’s website, where I found that they’d recently released a very nice six-disc box set reissue of Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret that I picked up. It arrived this week, and so for the past few days, that’s about all I’ve been listening to.

🔗 Linking

  1. Marcin Wichary: The hardest working font in Manhattan

    A lot of typography has roots in calligraphy – someone holding a brush in their hand and making natural but delicate movements that result in nuanced curves filled with thoughtful interchanges between thin and thick. Most of the fonts you ever saw follow those rules; even the most “mechanical” fonts have surprising humanistic touches if you inspect them close enough.

    But not Gorton. Every stroke of Gorton is exactly the same thickness (typographers would call such fonts “monoline”). Every one of its endings is exactly the same rounded point. The italic is merely an oblique, slanted without any extra consideration, and while the condensed version has some changes compared to the regular width, those changes feel almost perfunctory.

    Monoline fonts are not respected highly, because every type designer will tell you: This is not how you design a font.

  2. Ex Urbe: History’s Largest & Most Famous Disability Access Ramp

    Time for the largest, most famous disability access ramp in the world, paired with a twist about how our feelings about a piece of history can reverse completely based, not just on the historian’s point of view, but what questions we start with.

  3. The Braille Institute has updated their excellent Atkinson Hyperlegible font to add two more versions.

  4. Washington state Republicans have introduced a bill to get rid of voting by mail (bill info, current bill text (PDF)). This would have no substantive effect on safety or security, but would disenfranchise many voters and would make voting much more difficult for many more. Please voice your opposition to this bill and help protect voting by mail.

  5. Seventeen states (and no surprises as to which: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, and West Virginia) are suing to get rid of Section 504, which would remove all protections for disabled people. The link has more information on the case and pointers for how people in those states can contact their state Attorneys General to urge them to drop out of the case.

  6. A few software things that I’d like to see if I can find time to play with at some point:

    1. FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS aggregator that can serve as a backend to NetNewsWire.

    2. linkding is a self-hosted bookmark service like the old del.icio.us.

    3. Both are supported by PikaPods, which looks to be a reasonably priced way to bridge the gap between where I am (I understand what the above software packages do and would like to use them) and what’s necessary to use them (self-hosting has moved on from LAMP setups and now tends to require Docker setups, which I vaguely understand but don’t know how to use and which aren’t supported by my Dreamhost account anyway).

    4. And if I could get linkding up and running, I’d love to figure out how to hack into the old Postalicious WordPress plugin so that I could get it working with modern WordPress and linkding and finally satisfy my long-dormant urge to get my old linkblog posts up and running again. Realistically, I probably don’t have the PHP/programming knowledge/time to manage it, but a guy can dream, right?

Difficult Listening Hour 2020.06.13: NSFQ (Not Safe for Quarantine) Edition

Moving into our fourth month of COVID-19 induced restrictions and “shelter in place” recommendations, I think a lot of people are getting a little frisky. So here’s two hours of tunes that could be considered either entirely appropriate or entirely inappropriate for the situation, depending on your point of view.

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Difficult Listening Hour 2020.05.02: Birthday Edition

A rare pre-planned set; I selected this set of tracks just because tomorrow’s my birthday and these are some long-time favorites that I wanted to play. Back to the usual unplanned randomness next week!

  1. Shakespear’s Sister, Stay
  2. Peter Murphy, I’ll Fall With Your Knife
  3. Soft Cell, Seedy Films
  4. The Normal, Warm Leatherette
  5. Renegade Soundwave, Renegade Soundwave (Leftfield)
  6. Lo-Fidelity Allstars feat. Pigeonhed, Battle Flag (Radio Edit)
  7. The Cardigans, Erase/Rewind
  8. Thompson Twins, You Take Me Up (12)”
  9. The Art of Noise feat. Tom Jones, Kiss (Art of Noise)
  10. Figures on a Beach, Accidentally 4th Street (Gloria) (Remix)
  11. LaTour, Allen’s Got A New Hi-Fi
  12. Eurythmics, Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (Extended)
  13. DJ Tripp, Express This Way
  14. The Azoic feat. Seabound, Obsession
  15. Sunscreem, Love U More (A Version)
  16. Pet Shop Boys, It’s a Sin
  17. DJ Wüdi, Just Can’t Get Flexible in 1999
  18. Information Society, Going, Going, Gone (Razed in Black)
  19. Psychic TV, I.C. Water
  20. Diane Birch, This Corrosion
  21. Marilyn Monroe, Happy Birthday to JFK

Difficult Listening Hour 2020.02.20

Week five of my unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants goofing around. As a way of getting back into practice and doing something regularly, I’ve started doing regular Twitch broadcasts on Thursday nights. These are the results. Anything goes.

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 11

Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the eleventh (and, at this point, last) in the series!

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 09

Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the ninth in the series!

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 05

Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the fifth of quite a few to come!

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 04

Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the fourth of quite a few to come!

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Thor’s Day Night Dance

This past weekend, I was the DJ for the Thursday Night Dance (which we named the Thor’s Day Night Dance) at a local convention.

We call it Thursday night, but we used to know it as Thor’s Day…and you can kick off your weekend of saving the world with a celebration worthy of Asgard itself! Join DJ Wüdi for an evening of tunes new and old for gods and mortals alike. Come dressed as your godlike representation or as your mortal alter-ego. Requests are not just welcome, but encouraged!

Here’s my full DJ set from the night, recorded live as the night went on! The full track is huge (4 hours, 23 minutes, 296.6 MB), so I’ve also split the night into four sections of roughly an hour each for easier downloading. In all the tracklists, tracks marked with “•” were requests.

Enjoy!

The full mix:

(See below for track listing.)

Download Thor’s Day Night (full) (4h 23m 21s, 296.6MB .mp3)

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