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.

Listening to Stuart Dempster. The way the long decay times in the cistern really make the fades seem like fades - like when the players momentarily stop, and the sounds gradually cease as the cistern catches up with what they've done - really really made me want to use the word 'drift' just now, despite the fact that it immediately seemed inappropriate.

It felt like a 'drift', except that the music is so slowly changing, from the appropriate distance, that it seemed silly to use a word that made it sound like it was moving. ('Appropriate distance' because, as I have said before, there's really a lot going on here.)

'drift' is a powerful word, though, because besides just some music that it more arguably applies to, it has a way of turning things from describing the music onto describing the listener - so, maybe, what the music seems like to the listener, or does to the listener.

I wish Andy had written more in his year-end roundup about Arab Strap that didn't require me to know about Steely Dan (which I don't), since I bought The Red Thread and just wasn't in the right frame of mind to hear it at all and have barely heard it since then. But (caveat: at least, when I was in the right frame of mind, you guess what that is, and bought all their earlier records in short of a short span of time) I like their earlier records a lot (well not the first one, oh well). And I want to give this one another shot eventually.