I'll leave it to someone else to write about this in terms of the record industry, business models, how musicians make a living, etc. I feel it's worth my saying something about this topic because a lot of people, a lot of the time, are getting their recorded music only via digital files—and I think this is limiting our experience of music in a negative way. So, I think it might be useful if musicians say more about this—and I'll try to kick it off here.
The big deal about recorded music is that it's a constant invitation to deeply experience and explore a world beyond your immediate locale. Traditional music—which existed purely in "live" performances, was always immediately local. A lot of people heard the same music a lot of the time—the music of their own people and their place and their time.
Throughout history—actually, from prehistory, there were nevertheless amazing experiences people had, beyond what they knew locally, through the surprising performances of traveling musicians who carried with them old traditions as well as new tunes learned on the road.
(here's a clip from Tony Gatlif's amazing movie, Latcho Drom — this is such a great music film and expresses a lot about musical roads that connect across people, places and times:)
Through recordings, we have access to so much music from so many times and places. And, as much as the primary experience of music is always visceral and emotional, we almost always have access to text and information of all kinds (including film footage, as above), about the recorded music we hear—importantly, this often helps us hear more music / hear more in the music.
A "music library" is just one basic way to describe the music in our lives in terms of this world of information we have around what we hear. Our lives as music lovers are spent in the music libraries that we inherit from our families and teachers, that we share with our friends and lovers, and that we craft ourselves in and around our other daily activities.
One way to talk about record labels, record stores, radio stations, streaming music services, digital download sites, etc., is that each is itself a music library. Even as recording artists, we implicitly create libraries of our own music that tend to known as our "catalogs" of recordings.
Prior to the digital distribution of music, all of these different library creators / curators used various physical and/or analog broadcast media to share their libraries with others. And, the record album or radio show were important not simply as bags of random music tracks, but as collections where the collection itself had some kind of meaning.
If you collect LPs still, or regularly listen to radio shows still (I do both), you probably have a good sense that you get something else, beyond just listening to music, through these experiences. I think it's handy then to talk about that larger experience as "the medium." In this sense, LPs are a medium not because individual LPs hold audio tracks, but because they are part of how one creates a music library made up of audio, liner notes, the way you order your records on the shelf, what records you share with whom, how you know you want to listen to Elvis Presley's greatest hits on a sunny Saturday morning, etc.
So, what's going on with our shift to digital music libraries is not a matter of the audio on vinyl vs mp3s or other digital formats. What's going on is that the format of the library is no longer your record shelf, but it's the user interface of iTunes and the iPod. That is the big change that totally changes how people relate to music—specifically, how people hear music (the thing I am more concerned about) and how people buy music / pay musicians (which is also relevant, but a topic I am leaving for someone else to write about).
Put bluntly: the user interface for iTunes and the iPod—that is, how you interact with music through those interfaces, is optimized for mostly a superficial and disjointed experience of music. That's fine in the sense that it's perfectly fine to sometimes listen to music in a superficial or disjoint fashion. And, it's also fine in the sense that one can, with not much effort, be a bit better librarian than iTunes expects—it doesn't punish you much for trying.
But, given how readily we can create digital interfaces (e.g., web pages), it's stupid sad that we don't have digital music libraries that really blow our minds in terms of how deeply and widely they invite us to explore music.
In an ideal scenario, there would be digital music libraries / players / devices that provide an interface to music not just as a list of media files, but as webs of information, including videos, photos, art graphics, visualizations, info graphics, games, social network info, educational / informative text, creative writing, lyrics, alternate takes, live versions, cover versions, etc.
Every track itself shown as a cool interface to a lot of good stuff, not just a file!
In this kind-of scenario, imagining someone wants to share Come Together with me: they may send me a media file, or they may send me just a link into to the web of that song. But, with either, the library / player / device itself would give me not only audio, but also a window into a lot of other, related / extra stuff I could access. Some it, I would already have. Some of it, my friends would have. Some of it I could get for free. Some for one-off purchase. Some as part of a subscription, etc.
Ongoing, the library / player / device would always keep a view of that extra stuff very handy for me—even advertising it to me in some contexts. This kind-of library / player / device could, by design, highlight the compelling-ness of lots of stuff beyond the audio.
Who wants to make me a better digital music library? I think that's the question we music lovers should ask more vocally. And, I think we music producers should keep pushing for people to build music library interfaces that support the works we want to release—that combine audio and video and images and text and, most importantly, links and collections and musical relationships.
There are both business and artistic potentials around the design of better music libraries. As I've said before, at some point, we musicians won't just need to release mp3s instead of CDs, we'll need to release our own players / libraries / devices.
]]>I remember how, about 10 years back, I was doing the math to figure out how large a hard drive I would need to rip my entire CD collection. I don't recall the exact number, but let's approximate things and say it was something like this: 1,000 CDs turns into at 640 GB of .wav (or.aiff) files (that's 1000 CDs X 640 MB per CD).
At that time, 640 GB was seriously expensive and required multiple physical discs. But, today, one can buy a single 640 GB drive for only about $60. And, it's an even better deal (cost per GB) to get the now more common sizes in the 1+ TB range.
So, practically, a few years ago, we saw how quickly drive sizes were growing vs cost, and switched from ripping mp3s to ripping Apple Lossless (ALAC is the common acronym, with m4a being the common file extension). ALAC cuts the file size almost 50%, so the above equation ends up being more like 1,000 CDs turns into about 350 GB of m4a files.
The main point I want to get to is this: if you are ripping music from CDs, you should consider switching to a lossless format now—there's almost no reason why you'd want mp3s instead of a lossless format. If you already use iTunes and have a lot of drive space (or can afford larger drives), you can just flip a switch in iTunes, and all new CDs you rip will be ripped as lossless.
(In iTunes, it's Preferences / General / Import Settings and then switch to using Apple Lossless Encoder. That's it.)
And, one other point: if you buy digital files from online stores, please join me in pestering these stores to offer lossless versions, rather than mp3s, which are, in several ways, an inferior format, as I'll describe below.
Now, in case you're unfamiliar with the file formats and lossy vs lossless, let me explain a bit more:
CDs store sound as digital information—when we want to get at that information on a computer, we see digital files that usually appear as wav or aiff format files. Basically, you can think of each track on a CD as being a wav file. And the large size of the wav files corresponds to the high quality of sound on a CD—they are big files (a 5 minute song is about 50 MB) because CD audio is pretty high quality audio. Generally, in this context, higher quality = more information = bigger file sizes.
When you get an mp3 file, you're getting a file where the sound quality has been reduced to make the file smaller (a 5 minute song can end-up around 6 MB—a lot smaller size!). High quality mp3s actually do a good job at sounding similar to the original sound by removing just the parts of the sound that humans tend not to notice. But, this kind of translation between CD and mp3 is called "lossy" because sound / information is always removed to make the file smaller.
Note that some lower-quality mp3s sound obviously lower quality. But, even with very high-quality mp3s, some people can hear the difference on some songs between an mp3 and an original CD. With the Ear Reverends, I've actually had several people tell me that the Err or Man CD sounds noticeably better than the mp3s, and I certainly hear differences that make me prefer the CD quality version over the mp3s.
With a "lossless" format like m4a, no sound or information is removed. Instead the file is made smaller only by using the file space more efficiently (to put it really simply). This is very similar to how ZIP files work, if you're familiar with those. Instead of removing parts of the sound, a lossless file removes only internal parts of the file that in no way alters the sound. The original 5 minute song / 50 MB wav file gets shrunk, with all of the audio fidelity preserved, to a m4a file that's about 25 MB.
My original plan has been to use the "more open" Free Lossless Audio Codec / FLAC format. I like FLAC in every way, but, at this point, with much of my music listening happening via the iTunes / Airport Express / iPod universe, ALAC was just way more convenient to use.
Note that mp3 is also not a free format. But, both mp3 and m4a are widely used and are available at no cost to us, the so-called "consumers." However, if you are committed to using open / free formats for any reason, e.g., you already use ogg instead of mp3, then you should look to FLAC, rather than ALAC. Again, I think FLAC is awesome and I can totally recommend it. And I certainly will look to converting all my m4a to flac in the future of my dreams where there are many better music player / libraries than iTunes, that nevertheless support iPods, etc.
The hard drive I just filled is 250 GB (we bought it many years ago). I also backup that drive onto a couple other drives, one of which is always kept "offsite." You don't want to have to re-rip 1,000 CDs just because a hard drive crashes (which it will). So, keep a complete backup of all of your music files. For a couple hundred dollars, you can get two 1 TB drives, which would be enough for a 2,500+ CD collection and a complete backup.
Finally, it's worth mentioning that most of the music recorded today, when it's digitally processed, is done at a higher quality than CD audio. Technically, CD audio is 44k / 16 bit, and many people work at 96k / 24 bit (what I use), or higher.
This higher quality difference is most important during the digital tracking / mixing / multitrack summing / mastering portions of the recording process. It's not a difference that's easy to hear on a final stereo recording, like we find on a CD. For this reason, when we want to listen to music, it's not super important that we strive to replace our CDs with higher quality audio.
That said, higher quality audio is and will be an option for much of the music produced today and into the future. And, if you are interested in getting more fidelity out of the recorded music you listen to, at some point, you may want to get higher than CD audio quality files. Why not, right? Some artists and labels are already offering this—I / HereJam would certainly do so if there more demand for it.
While this is a step beyond just moving from mp3 to m4a, it's actually a step that can happen with the same m4a (or flac) format: these lossless formats can support much higher quality audio. And, as with the changes in hard drive prices over the past 10 years, you can expect that you'll have more and more space to store higher quality audio. (As an example, the wav file version of Err or Man, which is about 70 minutes in length, is about 700 MB of files at CD audio quality, and about 2.2 GB at 96k / 24 bit. The m4a version would be about half those sizes: 350 MB / 1.1 GB.)
So, I hope, if you haven't already switched to using a lossless format, that you will make the change now. The time has come. I've realized, in talking with friends, that not enough people know that they can make the change so easily in iTunes. So, I thought I'd write about it here—please pass it along to others.
Also, again, please help me pester stores who sell mp3s, like Amazon and eMusic, to offer lossless files as well. And, while you're at it, ask them to make PDFs of the liner notes available with every album! (Yeah, that's a whole other post…)
***
Have you switched to lossless yet? Are you ready to switch now? If you aren't going to switch now, why not?
]]>CHAPTER 1
"Dick was the hardest!" Ron got it out in his exhale, so it had a gasp, a cough-hack-hickup-burp and the first hiss of his own laughter substituting for some or all of the words (depending on whether you were there or watching the video), which came out louder, one-by-one, as they expanded through the room with the smoke. The others in the room allowed the words to quickly curl through their ears and ollie straight into their brains. They always regretted when they missed Ron's jokes, so they all momentarily stared into the haze to picture his words, made of giant neon letters—and blinking, brighter and brighter.
Like the split second before the explosion, the void, a flash and then roar—they were now a room of animated insects bouncing off walls and each other with laughter and periodic bodily flailing:
Sam was hitting a pillow against his head, yelling: Dude! Dude! Dude!
Chris had grabbed his side as his laughter progressed from the ha-ha-has to something more like Alvin and the Chipmunks (all of them at once)—and his nose started running fulltime. And, then he quickly slid off his chair—almost completing a backflip, while reaching for his sweatshirt (or, as he often refers to it: his reusable organic hemp napkin dispenser).
Diana and Lisa were alternating rolling into each others laps and standing up and falling to the floor. Then they started flipping their long hairs over their faces (their own and each others). Diana started trying to pull her hair back to wipe away tears, when Lisa grabbed her hands and made them clap and started them both bouncing on their bench.
And the others, each in their own way, shouted their excitement in between laughing and finding ways to combine their bodies, extra clothes, furniture and the lefover bit of food into a big tie dye of jubilation.
Thomas gained enough composure to announce: "Ron, your's was waaay the best! No one can top that one!" And the game, that had emerged just a few minutes before, and lasted only a couple turns, was both officially and ceremoniously over.
Espin started doing his "tsha, tsha" thing, sounding like a bird call if used as a lullaby, though there was a kind-of Bushman's click in there as well—when he did it long enough, it ran like a broken record. But, he was just en route to the corner, where he had his didge. And, he was now fully devoted to getting into its sonic pocket.
Thomas grabbed his didge and joined in. And, Diane packed another bowl on the bong, and handed it to Ron.
They all knew the countdown had started, but their passengers were finally all on-board (as they called it, in their code-worded plans), and even as they could imagine all of the people who would be looking for them—and what might happen when they were caught, they were all about the trip—and all about it being their trip.
]]>
From the world that once (and still!) could be sometimes, brought to you by Andy Kaufman (video):
]]>Of course, if you have LPs, you do still have a record collection. But, then you probably also have CDs, which is like another record collection.
Maybe, if you just have LPs and CDs (and the few odd cassettes), you can think of it all as your "record collection," and that's all nice and good.
But, you're probably like me, where you've also got iTunes filled with lots of music files. They call it a "music library," but having been a librarian for a collection of recorded music, I can tell you that that's pretty much like calling the boxes of books you moved 12 times after college, but only unpacked when it was time to repack them for another move, and then finally took them all to Goodwill in the middle of the night (still packed in boxes), a "book library."
So, there's a general lack of cohesion to our music collections divided between the antediluvian physical formats and the invisible boxes of invisible files on our opaque computers.
Then, there's that other digital music. Can we stake a viable claim of "ours" to any of the music we have, that lives in the "cloud" of web services? If you know you can click this little link to hear my "Break in the jam," how do you translate that knowledge into something like "I have this song in my record collection?"
When I was a kid and first began buying cassettes and LPs, there was a pretty direct line from the cash I earned doing yard work to the expansion of my music collection. That line went: a couple bucks in my pocket, bus fare, Rhino Records in Westwood, bus fare to get back home with a stack of beautiful, slightly used, vinyl. And, then on the turntable they went round and round as I stared at LP covers, read liner notes, and began traveling to South Saturn with Jimi Hendrix.
And, it wasn't like I had to choose between different versions / remasters / reissues / formats of Marquee Moon: I could only get it as an LP, so that's what I wanted, and that's was the only interface I had when I wanted to play that album over 100 times a day. If the record ended and I was on the bed, I had to get up and realize that I now too seemed to remember how the darkness doubled, and recall how lightning struck itself. I had been listening to the record, but I was hearing something else.
I was thinking about Betty Davis and found out that Light in the Attic has released her other two albums (I already have the first two). eMusic has 3 out of 4 Betty Davis albums, so I just bought one from eMusic. But, ugh, I forgot: you get no liner notes with your eMusic purchase. These Light in the Attic releases have great liner notes with the CD.
So, now what? Maybe I'll buy the CD? Maybe I'll try to forget about Betty Davis . . . yeah, like that's ever going to happen.
Oh, did I mention the Internet. It tells me things I used to only dream of knowing about Mott the Hoople and all of their recordings that I now can wonder whether I should try to own someday.
Then there's that "me" that seems to make an appearance in every scene of this story. I can't afford to buy all the music I want, but I can afford a lot more of it than when I was 13 years old. Plus, some of what I got when I was 13, I still have. And, when I was 14, and 22, and 33 1/3 and last week. Next week, maybe more: I know there's stuff calling my name at Sonic Boom.
And, there's that impostor music library I can monitor on my computer, that has 45 days of music waiting for me, of which I seem to listen to an inordinate amount of Al Green—who gets my lizard brain (PUSH PLAY! HEAR MUSIC! LOVE IT! NOW!) at "Let's Stay Together" before I can scroll even to Albert Ayler—my apologies then are so many, from Ali Akbar Khan all the way to Zubi Zuva, all of whom I keep wanting to, but have not quite been getting around to, listen to, as much as I'd like.
So, am I a victim or somehow a co-creator of this weird paradox between the potentials of listening to so much music and the difficulty in finding again that gorgeous thing in my life that, when I was 15, I thought would just always be there for me: my record collection?
Did I make it go away with my casual embrace of digital music and the iPods and computers and Airfoil and all those websites, night after night, a different one almost every time—god, so many, I can't remember their names, but just that cheap thrill of a new partner who offers to fulfill my lust, but, next thing I know, it's like there's nothing to listen to, like I've woke up and found myself inside a tunnel out on the highway, with only an AM radio, and nothing but static interrupted by the occasional tantalization—a half of phrase lick right into my ear from The Everly Brothers' "Bye Bye Love," and I so know what that feels like, again.
In the moment, I always dream I can go home and find my record collection. And, I've got a record of hits from 1957—I think it was my Dad's—has a red cover. And I know that a "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On" is going to make me love music so much, and I'll go buy more records with my allowance next week, because I think I've saved enough for Los Angeles, and "The Unheard Music" is ahead of me.
]]>Oh well.
Oooh, here's a video of a cat playing a theremin!
(via Laughing Squid)
]]>In my previous post on music appreciation, I expressed some concerns about my writing about music—about using words to express why I love specific pieces of music. I'd rather create more music to express that love for other music.
But, as I mentioned, I seem to have some things to say. And, with the specific pieces of music I want to write about in future posts, I realize that the lyrics—the words are such an important part of that music.
So, I wanted to say a bit about words as music. And, first, to take a step back, I should say that I think almost all words, spoken or written, are "backed" by the same source as non-verbal musical expression: emotion.
This is actually a similar concept to body language. What I am saying is that the human voice—even translated into words typed on a computer, start out as non-verbal communications—and that source carries through to some extent in the final medium. When we read written / typed words, this is part of what we might be able to "read between the lines" on some occasions.
So, imagine that before someone speaks a word to you, what's starting inside them is much more like singing. Then, through social conventions, self-conciousness, verbosity, etc., that would-be song comes out as only a speaking voice saying words.
(Of course, in some cultures / languages, the natural speaking voice is more unabashedly musical! However, some of us just walk around speaking like unenthusiastic robotic honkies.)
In moments when one's guard is down, or moments of unbridled joy, or of terrible pain, or of drunkenness, or of passion, we sometimes let loose and say things that sound more like singing. And, what's so wonderfully musical about good lyrics is how they use words (e.g., syntactically / semantically) to free the voice to sing rather than speak.
Lyrics use rhythm, rhyme, cadence, phrasing and more to enable melody and singing. And the meaning of the words can push the shape of the music. (And word meanings and word sounds are themselves intertwined in a way that I think only musicality may unravel.)
And, likewise, melody and singing enable lyrics to mean what words really say, but don't (always) express when spoken or written.
I have a favorite way to get into the lyrics of the music I enjoy. First, I don't read the lyrics right away. I just listen to the music and listen for what's being sung as my ear is drawn to it.
At some point, I start to hear what's being said. (Let's assume this is a great song I love—needless to say, in other cases, hearing that what's being said is something lame is an awful disappointment.)
Then I start to really hear the whole of the lyrics. And really feel what's being said in each phrase. I might sing along or say the words—I hear the words as if I am singing them (e.g., about myself, about someone I know, etc.).
At this point, there may some lines I am not sure about. And, this is where I love to finally read the lyrics. I usally read them first, separate from listening to the song. Then I listen to the song again without reading along. And, finally, I may listen and read along at the same time.
Sometimes, if I don't have access to the printed lyrics, I'll listen to the song bit by bit and try to write the words down myself.
Finally, hearing what the words really say often means experiencing something that changes with each listen. The meaning is profound—whatever puzzle you may have solved getting to the point of really hearing the words, you now hear into a more unlimited mystery of experience and possibility being expressed.
To get into the words even more, I might play the song on guitar or keyboard, and sing along. And, even more, I'll start to change the musical arrangement, etc., to hear what the words say in different voicing / voices.
We talk about a lot of stuff in our world, and a lot of that talk is supposed to be objective or informational or useful. At present, we spend a lot of time seeing people talking on TV or on the web, and, the way our visual sense can dominate our focus, we're drawn into how the speakers / words look (people talking on a screen, words written on a page).
But, if we listen, we can get into what's going on, deeper than what it all looks like. We can hear what's really being said. And, what's really being said is a kind of music. Sadly, much of it is like the song of desperation—how else to describe the thing that can drive us to such maniacal verbiage?
But, people can be beautiful music. And, even some of the most potentially dry and boring stuff, through the voice of someone filled with a joy and energy for life, can express great musicality.
As a closing example, I thought the subject of particle physics might be a good test case. Science is a subject we've all heard delivered in a dead and deadening way, and so I though this clip of Richard Feynman talking about rubber bands would be a good example of how enjoyment (to the point of almost singing) can be infused into a topic not known for sing-a-longs!
]]>The more you love music, the more you want to actively make it heard—heard by yourself and by potentially others and everyone.
A quick aside: let us briefly note that this is the essence of any "music business"—give people a way to participate in making music they love, that is so great / convenient / novel / special / sharable / fun / etc., that they will pay for the opportunity. . .
So, we push the play button or hire a musician to play a party or are musicians ourselves. Even most passively (we enter a room where someone else has put on music, or we walk past a musician on the street, etc.), when we notice and respond to the sound, we become co-creators of the music. If we like it, our ears perk up, and we may clap along, nod our heads to the rhythm, dance, sing our favorite phrase, or get others to hear it as well—we are playing a part in the music too.
As a musician, when I hear music I love, I not only want to play it on the stereo or join with it in concert, but I also want to play music on musical instruments. Sometimes that means playing the same music I've heard—for example, hearing a song and then learning to play it on guitar. But, more typically, I want to create new music, influenced by what I've heard.
So, given all of this, I always have a question about how much to talk or write about the music I love. I always want other people to know that music too, but talking and writing about music, in words, feels so inadequate compared with what I want to say in music. I generally find it pretty frustrating to talk or write about music.
But, I think I am going to write about the music I love a bit more here on Wrong Notes, because I see a need to get the word out. I wish I were productive musically in a way that I could quickly and fully say what I want about other's music through my own music. My ideal would be to be like Jimi Hendrix performing "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" on June 4th, 1967—only three days after the Beatles' album came out.
(Here's a video of Hendrix playing the song a bit later that year, in December '67:)
What I hope to write will not be music criticism, but will be music appreciation.
I sometimes enjoy music criticism, but I basically find its goals to be, very frequently, largely un-musical! In the larger scheme of things, that's OK in that music criticism can be great writing and one can enjoy it as such. But, at its musical-worst, music criticism is writing that convinces you to not play music. At its worst, it suggests that thinking and talking and writing about music are more important and/or better than playing music.
And, I don't have any interest in producing music criticism in that sense.
As an example of writing about music I find encouraging, I can point to Tom Moon's 1,000 Recordings to Hear Before You Die. You can enjoy his writing as writing, but Tom's writing constantly makes me want to stop reading and start playing!
So, as I write more about music, I'll point back to here as my footnote about why I'm not reviewing or critiquing the music I am writing about. For me, the goal of the writing is music appreciation—play music now!
]]>Beyond all of the voice greetings and messages recorded by actual human people, I also hear a lot of messages recorded by robots / voice synthesizers.
I am generally interested in all of these as part of the sound of our time. Something we hear a lot. And, I can't help but wonder how much of it, if any, will be captured in art that future peoples might use to better understand us.
I also can't help myself, when I have to recorded something like a phone greeting, from wanting to use it as a creative opening—if not something strictly musical, at least something akin to a musical performance—or maybe something like performance art.
And, a bit of a tangent: oh, I so much wish I had a copy of this one voice greeting I recorded in the mid-1990s . . .
I recorded a message for my at-the-time office phone. It was an early digital phone / PBX system (Rolm, I recall) that allowed you to re-record just the tail end of your message. In other words, you didn't have to re-record the whole thing—I think the idea was that people would flub their phone numbers or sign-offs at the end, and this feature helped you correct just that bit. Maybe it was so you could have a changing ending that was easy to change?
That feature allowed me to essentially cut and paste together a message out of fragments of my speech, such that my somewhat normally spoken sentences became reset with unusual timing / transitions between words. Many aspect of the rhythm and cadence of the speech were altered, and the final "piece," by the time it was done, left you with an eerie / haunting feeling—even though what I said would look perfectly normal and acceptable were it just written out on paper .
Argh. It's almost pointless to describe it like this (I can't believe I even tried)—you had to hear it.
At the time, I had to delete and change my message, or I was going to get fired. It was like "delete it NOW, or else." So many people at the office—even people I hardly ever talked to, went out of their way to tell me how pissed off they were about that message—so I relented and changed the message. Of course, many of my friends—even people I hardly ever talked to, went out of their way to tell me how much they had loved it.
Had I thought about it more at the time, I would have at least saved a copy for myself, for later (like, now!). But, anyway, that's a whole other story. And, maybe it's even better as a legend than something we could re-examine now.
Now, back to today's (shorter!) story—with sound!:
Today, I got a robot to record a new greeting for my mobile phone. And, I thought it'd be fun to post it here (since so few people call my mobile anyway), so at least a few more people might hear it.
Enjoy!
]]>
Music has been like a constant in my life, but I sometimes have to ask "why" about it, given the gap between what I feel about music and (the lack of) what I actually do on some days.
But, I noticed something the other day—that I hadn't really noticed before: I wake up every morning completely excited about music.
I can't figure out what more to say about it without sounding totally corny. But, literally, every morning, I wake up excited about music.
For me, at least, it sort-of explains some things, just recognizing that "event" and its frequency.
And, it doesn't answer any "why" for me, but it maybe gives me less reason to even ask. Or, if I ask:
Q: Why?
A: Because it's there.
I am excited aboard, about, above, across, after, along, alongside, amid, amidst, among, amongst, around, as, aside, astride, at, athwart, atop, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, between, beyond, by, circa, concerning, during, following, for, from, given, in, inside, into, like, near, next, of, off, on, onto, over, pace, past, per, plus, regarding, round, save, since, through, throughout, till, times, to, toward, towards, under, underneath, upon, via, with, within, according to, ahead of, as regards, as per, because of, close to, due to, in to, inside of, near to, next to, on to, owing to, prior to, pursuant to, subsequent to, that of, as far as, by means of, in accordance with, in case of, in front of, on account of, on behalf of, on top of, with regard to, with respect to, anent, behither, betwixt, cum, ere, fornenst, fornent, pro, qua, re, vis-á-vis music.
]]>So, if you're here because you've gotten an answer wrong at Mike Gordon's Andelmans' Yardsale, and you're reading this (I can picture your mouse ascending to that great back button in the sky), hello, sit down, stay awhile—had I'd known you were going to be here I would have made some tea, but I hope this will do.
Click through to a few pages and check out some of the Ear Reverends' music: Entaruption, Plastic Toys, Wing Drops, Riddle. There's more—feel free to snag any mp3s you find—they're just lying around all over the site and looking for good homes.
Thanks kindly Mike!
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This is an extended comment where I elaborate on why Lucas's new Wax MP3 Player is exciting to me—how it seems to match-up with something I've been thinking about and working on (e.g., for Err or Man in the recent past, and for new stuff for the future). It seemed like a good topic to post about here on Wrong Notes:
As I've started developing HereJam, I've been thinking about the new role of the record label, in relationship to releases: the new release is (going to be) all about how the music appears on / across the web.
The files and discs are almost irrelevant—definitely secondary. They do need to exist, but, really, once they are published, anyone can get them anywhere. But, the player / interface is primary, because it's actually about that "content" that is the music—about getting into that music.
So, I see the record label as having the role of providing musicians with new web players—i.e., the new formula is:
musician's new music + record label's new player = a new release
This kind of relationship between the label and the artist is easily non-exclusive (though it can work as exclusive one, as well): one new kind of "remix" will be in the multiple different web players created for the same music. The players can be made of all kinds of things that complement the music: visual art, photographs, videos, interactive games, factual information, lyrics, fiction, poetry, nonsense, etc.
Put another way: the player itself is the new format for music. And, rather than it being a single / fixed format, it is instead of the web (e.g., like a website—it is a web page or website). Each player can be distinctive in design, but all players will have at least a few common, idiomatic, elements that make it similar to other players. They marry idioms of the web with idioms of the music player—both provide nearly unlimited opportunities for design—for being turned into products.
You'll know it's a music player when you see it (e.g., maybe it has something to click to make it play), but the player format can be totally free to be any kind of web page(s), which can have original and distinctive shapes, structures, semantics, contexts, interactions, looks, feels, etc. The web page is the new shiny disc.
So, I think Lucas is really on to that!
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