Yesterday's megamix:

Faust, Faust / So Far. Magnetic Fields, The Charm of the Highway Strip. Magnetic Fields, Holiday. Arab Strap, The Red Thread. Mogwai, Come On Die Young.

I thought having the Magnetic Fields discs in there would pick things up a bit. But they didn't seem to work at all. Until "Maybe I Was Born on a Train" or whatever came on, working better, they just seemed to be too dirgey or just... stick the sound somehow, in a big morass. Merritt would be pleased that when something from Holiday came on it sounded unbelievably skronky and mangled and the beginning.

Faust sounded a little dinky. I don't like their guitar sound. Plus I kept getting long songs and not "It's a Rainy Day, Sunshine Girl".

I thought also that this would be a nice chance to hear some of The Red Thread again, but it only came on twice before I stopped listening to the stereo. First, the long song (track 8?) with the sighing string sample and the booming drums. Whenever I hear that song, at first I'm a bit let down by how it doesn't seem to do something enough, I'm not sure what - maybe it doesn't sigh enough, or maybe the beat isn't tight enough. But by the end, everything has become chaotic and I'm happy. I'm reminded of a baloon that has trouble ascending, then finally flies away. The second song was the one where he reads his girlfriend's diary. It was pleasing too. Nice spy beat.

This review of Jay-Z's Unplugged appearance is about the lamest review I've read in a long time. I'm not sure I want to play with the reviewer's "interesting" / "novelty" / "essential" distinctions, so let's just say that I think these are some reasons to value the record:

• Even though lots of Jay's songs take good advantage of samples, they don't need them in the sense that if the exact sound is gone, the song fails: see here how the Roots band replicates the musical matter of all the studio versions, including beats, bass, synths, and samples (hear the band member doing Morrison's beery howl at the beginning of the Doors 'sample' - I can't tell, but it seems to me like he even makes it deliberately garbled, to sound more like the way it sounds in the sample). I think this says something about how vital a compositional tool sampling is. We can hear that the music on the disc is obviously related to other music, in places, but it's also obviously not 'sampling' in the sense of being done with a sampler, replaying verbatim.
• Audience participation! Walking home listening the first time, I laughed out loud when the audience did "vamoose/son of a bitch" in the first song, "Izzo". It made me feel like I was part of something.
• The band is live. This is hip-hop. Yes, that's been done before, plenty, and it's not as if there's not even a mixture of live and non-live music on most hip-hop CDs anyway. But it still gives us all kinds of fascinating things to think about. Here's one: could a new live-playing movement in hip-hop complement its current way of doing things, instead of replacing it (which might be the kneejerk thing to hope for if you like live hip-hop)? Could it provide a way of returning black instrumentalists to the spotlight, as stars in their own right? (I thought of that because of an ILM question.)
• Here's another: how does this live playing reconnect (or at least pass by in the night at a close distance) hip-hop to its antecedents in soul, R+B, and other black music? (Cf. in particular "Heart of the City (Ain't No Love)".) How much does it help that the songs on The Blueprint are built often from old soul samples, and are structurally a lot like old soul? Listen to the flute! Isn't there anything interesting to think about here? Fuck! Can't you hear it?

I've heard Mark's story here before, from exchanging mail with him, and from the tape of the broadcast he was kind enough to send me. I like the way he tells it here. What I'd really like to see is a return, after the end, to talking about how the music affects him. I know I don't ask for much, ha.

An interview with Misha Mengelberg.

I have started the long and eventually painful (right now it's fun) project of typing in the names, artists, and release years of every CD I own. I have an old list like this that would save me a lot of work if I only added the CDs I've bought in the past couple years since I stopped adding new purchases, but I've also sold some and it would be more annoying to have to go through every (unsorted) disc I have hunting for the ones I think I sold in order to know that I can delete them from my list. So, I'm starting from scratch.

This may seem kind of pointless, but trust me - it's a very helpful tool for listening to everything I have, with as many CDs as I have. It keeps me aware of even owning some things.

I think (it's early, only my second listening, so...) the Dungeon Family album might be more profitably thought of as a chance for its creators to experiment, especially the producers. 'Experiment' not in the sense of 'try something new and daring', but 'move some shit around and try a couple of things in different ways to see what happens'. Benefit to be seen, of course, on the 'proper' albums to come.

Could also apply this to the new stuff on the Outkast best-of.

(Because it seems to have the same lazy-let's-see attitude.)

!

This was one of my favorite single reviews of the past year.

I wish philosophers would write more about their secret motivations for arguing things.

This goes for music critics and reviews too.