¤ jetless heights

makin’ tea in your underwear

+ Mon, December 20

Zilch

You know the season has changed in Michigan when you can think back two weeks to 50° weather and yet your current conditions can be represented by the weighty number of nada:

0°

An Update, A Day Later

Heat wave

A Second Update, 24 Hours More

Predictions perfectly realized, inch per hour, white out.  Full frontal blizzard.

Blizzard

2:20 AM  ×  9 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Tue, December 14

RIAA Is Love

I download music.

The RIAA would have my face on a million ads in every newspaper in the country with a fearful warning about how much money they sucked out of me.  There’s something more though.  There’s a deep, dark secret they don’t want you to know about.  They like to keep the people telling this secret quiet, hidden and without public voice.

Fuck ‘em.  I’m squealing.

I download music because it helps me purchase way more music than I otherwise could.  I download an album and then buy it.  And then I buy the entire back catalog of that artist.  And then I go to their concerts and then I buy their shirts and posters.  And then I write about how great that show was and then I encourage you to buy their music.  I download music and then I pump money into the music industry.  Most of my spending money, in fact.

The RIAA doesn’t want me saying this because it’s everything they deny.  All music downloaders are money-grubbing thieves if you ask them.  I am the vocal antithesis to everything they want a fearful public to believe.

Last spring, my good buddy said, “Hey, you need to hear this CD.”  It was Interpol’s “Turn On The Bright Lights”.  He sent me a digital copy and I madly fell in love with it.  He doesn’t listen to it much anymore, but I can’t go more than a few days without hearing that particular album.  Which is to say nothing at all about how often I listen to their other album and the numerous singles and EP’s of theirs I’ve bought.  You might even remember that I wrote about the incredible concert of theirs that I attended or the other general praise I’ve written for them along with song recommendations.

Today, at a historic record store here in downtown Ann Arbor, I found Interpol’s rare, import-only Black EP.  Very happy with this find, I immediately bought it and couldn’t wait to get home to hear it.

pop!  hiss!  pop!

“What the hell?  Why is this CD popping?”  Dumb question.  Copy-protected.  Those clever guys developed a way to physically write the disc in such a way that your burner won’t read it but your regular CD player will.  Or at least, your regular CD play will be able to try.

pop.

I returned that $14, 6 song CD immediately.  For a group interested in selling CD’s, the RIAA certainly has a knack for making the people most likely to buy CD’s do the exact opposite.

I encourage you to read about the campaign running at Downhill Battle for further information about ending the RIAA’s draconian practices and making music fair and free as we all know it should be.

6:35 PM  ×  6 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

Your Library, Google

In case you were still unsure, the revolution won’t be televised.  It’ll be Googlized.  As if 8 billion webpages aren’t enough, they announced today that they’ll be digitizing and indexing the full contents of some of the world’s largest libraries.

The news broke for me by the Michigan Daily headline from the newspaper stack atop the drop-off box in Michigan’s Graduate Library lobby.  Fitting, I guess.  Walking through the stacks on my way to class after that, you go through countless rows, stretching away on your sides farther than you can see.  Floor to ceiling, leather-bound books with fading text.  To think that these 7 million books with who knows how many billions of pages are all going to be available in the public domain, for free forever – there’s a certain beauty in that.

I read it when it came out and you can still read an older opinion on Google’s role as the digitized deity of this day at CNN. It’s an interesting point, made all the more strong with Google SMS, this effort to digitize such a weighty chunk of our academic knowledge, the white pages, the maps, the calculator, the whole weight of their 8,000,000,000 page index.

If there was one company I’d want orchestrating this massive collection of our history and knowledge, it’d be the good guys of Google.

1:28 PM  ×  1 Comment  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Mon, December 13

Mates Of State

At the time, I was without voice online.  Last May, of course, when I saw The Strokes.  A helluva show, complete with the requisite Bad Opener.  That pleasant spring night brought Mates Of State into my life.  At the time I wanted to say that they were like a pure dose of annoyance, marred only by an occasional speck of melody.  But then again, I had no online venue to speak from and with time the relevancy of the subject passed.

Three independent nudges of “Hey Phil, have you heard of this band?” later, the subject becomes relevant again.  Dan Cederholm links to their videos and quips, “Prediction: this band will be big in 2005.”

I have to admit, yes, I agree.  I would add though, “Followup Prediction: this band will be completely forgotten in 2006,” and ask you to watch the video for “Ha Ha” as our grounds for explanation.

There’s this uniqueness to their sound that I feel they adapt well to video.  “Spastic” is a good word for it.  The tempo swings wildly.  The synthesizer loops through one melody for extended periods and then abruptly changes.  The drumming makes Meg White look exceptionally talented.  Melodies are stumbled upon suddenly only to be even more immediately abandoned.

This is what makes their sound unique and through it all, it’s damn catchy.  Dan may very well be right - though I wouldn’t write it off as certainty yet - but supposing he his, I’ll bet that my prediction will follow shortly.

10:09 PM  ×  5 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks

+ Wed, December  1

The Art Of The Mix

I don’t know how many years ago it was now, but way back in the day, I considered writing a series of articles on what’s involved in the process of making a great mix.  Think of those 30 seconds of High Fidelity expanded into pages and paragraphs.  Never happened though.  Never got off the Follow Up On These Things list.  Until today, that is.

Two things happened.  In the last year I’ve made exactly 1 mix for someone.  Back in high school I was doing 6 or 7 in that timeframe.  Downtime happens periodically and that’s about the best reason I can give for this disparity in output.  In any event, I’m making a few for friends at the moment and that’s got the wheels turning – thinking through the logistics of what makes a mix enjoyable to someone unfamiliar with this thing you’ve made.  It’s complex, it’s emotional, it’s an important statement you’ve promised to make and that takes time to ponder over.

The other thing that happened is that The Michigan Daily is doing a Top 50 Of The Half Decade right now.  Alongside yesterday’s installment was this op/ed piece on what it is to be a music geek.  Nothing new on the subject is said, but what is said is said well.  I balk at the idea of “perfectionism”, but by and large, yes:

What instills music elitists with such a sense of social duty, of perfectionism, even in others, isn’t economics, it isn’t convenience and it sure as hell isn’t some sense of social Samaritanism. It’s the slight delay on the organ on “Like a Rolling Stone,” or the whistling coda on “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay.” It’s the throaty howl of “Disorder,” the perfect, fleeting romanticism of “Summer Babe,” the playful gush of “Gigantic,” the sailor’s rant of “Louie Louie” and a billion other microcosms of girls, God and growing up.

The Michigan Daily
November 30, 2004

3:04 PM  ×  2 Comments  ×  0 Trackbacks