"scooby doos shoes" has got to be my number one all-time search referral, I take it solely because of the one time I mentioned it when writing about Jay-Z's "Excuse Me Miss". It pleases me that so many people are apparently curious about this. And to think that I'm curious too (oh really, Jay, shoes, huh, why is that), yet I have never ever myself googled the phrase.

On a related note, I wonder where my fucking PIL album is.

Fucking, fucking, fucking. Some days you have to swear a little extra. Oh and fuck Wiliam Gass (hello Mr. Gass).

I am aware of the potential folly in testing out my new wicked spiff headphones with a Magnetic Fields record.

Also, will I ever start liking sides three and four of Songs in the Key of Life as much as sides one and two?

Pursuant (!) to my comment yesterday about the Oreos and my "experimental" (hah) writing method: these new headphones come with a certain little touch of oh yes hello PARANOIA for a person like me, so easily worried about whether or not I in fact have known someething or noticed something or heard something before or if this is the first time and thus an important revelation to take note of because when it's good it feels like a revelation, so much, at least it did before I started having to listen on shitty $20 headphones all the time. So now every "new" detail, it's "did I ever notice that before huh?" Not just the noticing but the doubt sends shivers down my spine. (!)

"Tessio" is not, I have found over time, a song that gets lots better when it gets louder. This disappoints me a bit. I still have yet to hear it in my room over the speakers (old and decrepit but still bigger-sounding than Murph's speakers, in the living room), though, so I hold out hope.

Compare to MRI, where more loud = more sense of being enveloped.

There could be some kind of IDM thing lurking in the background here. I thought about IDM a lot more often when I first started playing Vocalcity, than I do now. But just compare the record to even some other microhouse records (thus supposedly also relatively more chairbound, brainbound) - it feels inert, edging sometimes toward a kind of up-all-night burnt-out monotony. Yes I do want to mean that in a nice way.

In fact I think I remember at some point listening to the third or second track, the one with the unending tinny guitar funk-twang part, after I had been up all night, and riding the bus in to work. I wanted to change it but kind of couldn't. It didn't quite make me want to sleep, though, either.

Also, I've been jumping back and forth between the new ones and my $20 Sorny ones. Suddenly during Bar Kokhba, at a volume I don't think I would have noticed it at before, I caught the bass making a little buzz in the headphone, because I surely blew it out a little bit long ago in the headphones' still short lifetime. I could only tell because the sound had been so clean on the Sennheisers. Likewise, little things like the drawing back of a bow, or just Cohen's attack on the bass strings, caught my attention more on the cheap headphones after hearing them on the new headphones because I expected them more.

(Every sentence I write, I still think, sigh but no giant teenager sullen fuck bass you eh oh well maybe I should have two new pairs of headphones.)

So far they seem to be much more impressive with tiny details than (sigh) giant sneering teenager fuck you bass. List of records which I have listened to music from, tonight, on my new headphones:

Digital Disco
Dexy's Midnight Runners, Don't Stand Me Down
De La Soul, Art Official Intelligence: Mosaic Thump
The Notorious BIG, Ready to Die
Jay-Z, The Blueprint 2
Missy Elliott, Da Real World
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman
Quartetto Italiano, Beethoven, String Quartet Op. 132 in A minor, mvt. 3
Hilliard Ensemble with Christoph Poppen, J.S. Bach, Morimur
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
John Zorn and Masada Chamber Ensembles, Bar Kokhba
Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, Panaiotis, Deep Listening
John Zorn, Masada Tet
John Fahey, Red Cross
Stereolab, Dots and Loops
Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life
Luomo, Vocalcity
The Dismemberment Plan, Emergency & I
The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs Vol. 1
Herbert, Bodily Functions

It's wonderful and slightly suspicious (as I do not trust audiophiles) how much more pleasure I've gotten from listening to music tonight than in many of the past months. Particularly on the more "realistically" produced records (uh oh).

I got new headphones tonight, Sennheiser PXC 250's. They don't have big giant sneering teenager fuck you bass (which I slightly regret), but they do have tiny little microphones embedded in the earpieces for the super high tech audiophile fuck you space age noise cancellation that takes the ambient noise from the microphones and phase-cancels it! Happily making the bass boom boom boom more too. Principle of wave superposition, actually making a difference in my life, how about that. I look forward to riding the bus tomorrow so that I can cancel noise with the switch on the goofy looking stick annoyingly stuck in the middle of my headphone cord. I also look forward to my next airplane trip. I can never hear a fucking thing on those.