Grading, ugh.

If Mogwai's new single/EP "My Father, My King" is to be taken as programmatic (because of the prayer inside), to what extent should that suggest that we start to take their other music as more programmatic in the relevant senses?

Dave Douglas' Tiny Bell Trio seems to slowly be shifting from sometimes annoyingly thin and angular to "differently melodic".

Other things I've listened to in the past few days: the new Spiritualized, the new Mogwai, and the Kompakt label comp Total 3. Both that I am endorsing the purchase and close attention to some of these things, and that I am endorsing the purchase and close attention to some of these things, may be of interest to you. (Reasons: semi-widespread panning of Spz record, semi-widespread personal avoidance of house music. Actually, no reason to be surprised by Mogwai endorsement.) More to come.

(I picked up the Kompakt comp on a whim inspired by Andy and Tim.)

Sometime in the past year I've more and more often been having the experience of whole large parts of songs popping into my head unbidden. Not only did this not often happen in the past, at least as far as I can remember, but I've always had trouble sort of mentally letting a song run along like that. So it's not even just the fact that it's happening at all, but the fact that it happened to me this morning in the shower with a number of songs from Change, which I've only had a few days, that pleases me so much.

I wonder where my Songs About Fucking is. Are?

Aside from what comes from starting at the beginning and not getting to the end, my gaining familiarity with smaller parts of the album more than the whole thing has started - since I want to hear 8-11 before I go to bed.

(Cf. walks home from Carver Hall and Emergency & I, say, somewhere in the archives.

(And I have to only hear these because if I keep playing the whole thing again I won't be able to get up tomorrow.)

Part of the way they get stretched out is, to be precise, not stretching at all but three notes from speaker to speaker in sequence, overlapping, that sort of maintain the same presence of sound despite being different sound events.

"it coulda been off the hook now" - more hip-hop appropriation to enrage Fred (cf. "put your hands in the air and wave 'em like you just don't care"). No sign of "bling-bling" though.

A number of the songs on Change seem to flow into each other, literally, as sounds on the tracks, though they are not all apparently played in this way live-to-tape. Album-structuring device that I think is taken good advantage of.