Music For Your Tape Recorder

In light of my underwhelming tenth year on Blogspot, I thought the least I could do might be to upload my 2015 playlist on time. Well here it is, the ninth in the series. A little short as with last year because for whatever reason once I hit August I don't seem to hear anything new that catches my ear until December. That's likely because I hold off on buying any CDs so there's something to put on the wishlist for my birthday - critically needed because I really don't want much these days. If anything I need more shelves to store all the physical media I prefer to have and to hold.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

I know. You don't need to tell me. Suffice to say I've not been motivated to write much this year and when it came to putting my playlist together it's apparent I haven't listened to that much music either. You can imagine I was dissuaded from bothering with that in mind when I realised I'd only left a few hours of 2014 to write it up. Here I am, though, two weeks later in what is my 10th year of blogging with a sense of obligation to drive myself to produce something. It may not be a long list this year (the shortest duration in the nine years I've done this), but there is plenty I want to get off my chest regarding some releases.

Music: Response

Some favourites, me on flickr

It's been a bit of a paradox that I'm most productive on this blog when I'm not having the best time at work. 2008 and 2009 were the lowest points in my time blogging when I was close to ditching it even though I had so much spare time from finishing work early from the latter half of 08. I got moved in 2010 to a much more physically challenging duty and yet turned the blog right around with a prolonged burst of activity. Now I'm back to being shafted and yet I've let the blog slide for the past month. Truth is, I've been busy in another medium. I usually think of writing as my hobby, and the various other interests I have more as on-off projects which wax and wane in my focus. I'm sure they're all tied together as creative outlets, probably all stemming from my love of building with Lego many many years ago. I mean, it's easy to use a hammer to wreck things, but wasn't there underlying symbolism in Jesus being a carpenter? Amongst the projects on the go are occasional dips into programming (or scripting, strictly); and, of course, my long-running conlang efforts which comes and goes depending on how much I've exhausted myself in completing some aspect. So as I mentioned in my end of year post, I've dipped into making music in the past two months.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year started slowly as Lone's Galaxy Garden was still in hard rotation - or whatever technical phrase applies in the iTunes era. In the latter half of last year it suppressed everything else and continued to do so into the first half of 2013. 'Dream Girl/Sky Surfer' overtook 'Roygbiv' as my most listened song and is now beyond five hundred plays. Last time I checked I was listening to it twice a day on average, though I've slowed down a lot since it passed that mark. The rest of the album isn't far behind. Lone released a standalone single in June which you can see only six places into the list, giving you an idea of how little anything else caught my ear. It's a slightly shorter annual list than usual and probably more padded than I'd prefer, but that doesn't mean that there's little to talk about.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

How fitting that in a year when everything I think about seems to be from a decade ago the average year of release for the below is (rounded up) 2002. Once again, though, the tracks are skewed toward the first half of the year as one album has truly dominated since then, thus I've stuck with 2011's format.

A couple of years back I said there was always a drive toward finding new material and never giving something a second chance and an opportunity to grow on me. Three years ago I bought Be Your Own Pet's two albums, but they never really meshed, though Bicycle survived on my iPod all that time until I decided to offer them a make or break chance to sit alongside the other compact discs. Well now they do. Coincidentally the other album I gave a second chance was Wire's 154 which I obtained that same summer three years ago. Perhaps I hadn't been in the right mood at the time.

Where Does Time Go?

Part Two of Two.

A Wistful Look, James Carroll Beckwith

He's supposed to be old, like 26.
-The Brain, Brick (2005)

Yes, I did wait a year to use that quote. The previous post tangentially touched on my own pessimistic suspicion that I have missed the metaphorical bus. Like the time I decided to take a real bus home from work four years ago on a torrential day before Christmas - I waited in the rain for twenty minutes (not that it mattered since I had already been in it for four hours at this point) and not a single bus appeared. I was therefore prepared for two to appear at once. It turned out they were cancelled due to the flooding. At other times I instead feel there's enough time to just catch the last one. And yet whenever I take a few moments to just lie in bed and think I glance at the clock to find time is flying and I have somewhere to be - it hardly ever seems to do that illusion where it holds onto a second, but then is there really anything meaningful you could do in a second that would wipe out any death-bed regrets you might have?

You Spin Me Right Round

Rear cover art (G, Garbage, 1995)

The final track of the album fades out. The laser assembly returns to its starting position with a whir and the disc slows to a halt. All that remains is the faint hum of the speakers. The disc ejects and you place it back in the case, glancing at the artwork before slotting it back into the rack.

The older generations oft pine for the crackle of vinyl and the large elaborate cover art, and I sympathise as someone who has undergone the rite of digging through parents' vinyl collection. Our attitudes to distribution media are more tied up with memory and nostalgia than any qualitative superiority as some audio enthusiasts are always attempting to prove. Whilst technological progress enables me to carry one and a half thousand songs on my old 8GB iPod Nano, which is a hell of a lot more than the 8 track decks my Dad remembers, my own musical experiences in the 90s bind me to the compact disc.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year started with a rich mixture of contemporary releases and older hidden gems thanks to "legal downloads", until May or halfway through the list when I was recommended Trademark Ribbons of Gold. I almost didn't listen to anything else for four months until the pace picked up again when I finally purchased GTAIV and Rockstar did once again provide some well playlisted radio stations. Come the end of November I remembered to check for new releases which led to a cascade of new material for consumption. The below playlist is no longer by month as it would be pointless listing one track for each between May and September.

Ready Let's Go

Beyond The Infinite, Prij, 2005 

Every year I forget to write something on the anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's flight, and judging by the lack of material here this year was no different!

I remember when I was around nine, and hardly anyone in my class could name the first man on the moon, my dad had told me about the first man to go into space. He and the others that followed him were mortal men and women, but they have and will find themselves amongst the heroes in the sky. I'd rather kids want to be like Yuri Gagarin or Neil Armstrong than one of Simon Cowell's puppets because it's exactly what needs to happen in order to regain the future that should have been already.

One of the earliest releases from the original Human League was a tribute to Gagarin, but also a tribute to the people of the Soviet Union that made it possible. The Dignity of Labour chronicles the miners digging coal to make steel with which engineers construct the launch pad and craft that propel Vostok 1 and its occupant upward into the void.

[188]

Music is Math

Broken Record, Auntie P, 2005

Like a broken record [industry], people are constantly portending the death of the album. In an age when every released track is a potential chart entry the album is an obsolete collection of songs.

Originally the album was a collection of physical media containing a lengthy coherent piece. The limited length of a single record necessitated that something like Beethoven's Ninth be split across many records bound together like photographs in a photo album. With increasing storage and a commercial and cultural shift in the post-war era toward self-contained songs, the album came to be a compilation of a group's output.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year was by far the most contemporary year I've had since I stopped listening to Radio 1 - only two songs from this year's selection pre-date my living memory. This is probably because I stumbled into the "chillwave" genre and am currently consuming all the in-print material available. The lack of releases from the eighties or earlier is also because I haven't obtained any offbeat and out of print albums. Or rather, I'm not willing to shell out £30+ for an out of print album (again) and can't get it by 'alternative means'. As such, there is no now-out-of-print-good-band-your-parents-shunned award this year. Since this is the year of chillwave, I will instead present the Roygbiv-eargasm award to Imprint After by Toro Y Moi. Not since said BoC track has a song withstood incessant listening and accelerated toward the top of my most played Top 50.

Imprint After

unidentified compact disc, Janesdead, 2005

I hate being subjected to Radio 1. Either my tastes have evolved considerably, or pop music's standards have dropped considerably. Yes I know, I'm twenty-three so that probably puts even me far outside its tweeny demographic; but I swear we've witnessed the idea of the musical composition known as a 'song' eaten from the inside out by the refrain. The refrain - often called the chorus - has always been the catchy part of a song, often where the hook resides. Naturally, it was only a matter of time before the chorus came to form an entire song whereupon the hook ceases to be a means to catch the listener's ear and instead acts more like the little slots on a cheese grater. Coupled with a gratuitous looped sample being shouted over, the whole concoction shreds my eardrum over the course of three minutes.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

This time last year I was quite excited about La Roux. Here was a band I thought was going to finish what Yazoo started. But the voice and the bleeping began to grate. Music in the early eighties sounded like that because of hardware limitations. Consider these words from All Music Guide on Simple Minds' second album: "It's where [they] ventured beyond the ability to mimic their influences and began to manipulate them." I hope their next effort will endear itself more, but I'll probably forget to check up - which is why it took me till May to find Fujiya & Miyagi's Lightbulbs disappointing. Unfortunately life is too short to spend it listening to stuff again in the hope you might appreciate it second time round.

Only with a band as good as Boards of Canada would I do that. Having devoured Twoism, Music Has The Right to Children and Geogaddi last year, I started searching for In A Beautiful Place..., The Campfire Headphase, and Trans Canada Highway, which were not included in the set I procured (Bought them all since). When I came across Macquarie Ridge, I swore I had heard it before. I listened to it endlessly, trying to remember when I thought I had heard it, before realising it had actually overwritten a memory of hearing Kelly Watch the Stars on a school trip in 1998. That is the genius of BoC.

Last year Dalek i was my now-out-of-print-good-band-your-parents-shunned of 2008. This year it's The Passions. Bet they could only remember through Ashes to Ashes.

William's Last Words

Journal for Plague Lovers cover art

In the age before my disposable income, a visit to the local record shop involved lengthy deliberation on which CD I really wanted to justify handing over a massive £10 of pocket money. The problem here was that the price of a CD limited how much you could purchase from decades of musical output. This is why it took so long for me to acquire The Holy Bible (henceforth THB). As a recent newcomer to the Manic Street Preachers, I set out with the money from my 13th birthday to buy their then previous album, Everything Must Go (hf. EMG), only to encounter THB in every shop. At the time I was uninterested and largely unaware of its legendary status - my first encounter with it was actually the title chiselled into a table in the school's music department. Naturally when I tried to find THB, all I could find was EMG - which I eventually got for my 16th.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

Largely thanks to Introducing, I heard some music that's actually recent. I've shattered last year's record number of album purchases (1, 2, 3), though Nights Out has yet to arrive, and Amazon is still looking for a copy of Fourth Drawer Down two months on. Also, Roygbiv is the greatest thing I've ever heard.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

Here we are, another orbit around the Sun...

I got three CDs in the last six weeks of the year. It's a bit difficult to explain everything between March 2006 and then.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

How does one reconcile the fact that I only bought 3 CDs this year, and yet managed to hear all the below listed? *cough*

Since there was no Christmas Top of the Pops this year, and everyone got along fine without it, see below my soundtrack of the year:

Unde Praha...

The Bay, Prij, 01/06/06

Fuck, how can it almost be July? I completely forgot it was the solstice today, and any hopes of seeing Sol, let alone photographing it, are out the window with this constant cloud overhead (not a metaphorical cloud).

Feeling under the weather is quite a suitable phrase - I feel the year's ran out of steam, and we're only half-way. Listening to Metamatic, Low, Dazzle Ships, The Dignity of Labour, and the Blade Runner Soundtrack hasn't (and was never expected to) make me any happier. Why do I listen to so much night-driving music if I don't have a car or, indeed, a license?

Now that we're at the peak of Summer, perhaps it's time for a redesign. I'll probably scrap the Dardanelles site in the coming months. Looking at it now, most of the graphics could do with a decent anti-aliasing. Why fix the two year old issues with the site preceeding that when I can design a whole new one? The only thing on my calendar for the foreseeable future is some summer job with the council and looking out for new crescent moons (the next being on the 25th).

[201]

I Am Stronger Than Mensa

I don't think there's ever been a greater contrast in the music I've listened to: Faster, Manic Street Preachers, The Holy Bible, 1994 followed by Wichita Lineman, Glenn Campbell, Wichita Lineman, 1967 (lovely drumming at the end). I hold that up as a sign of my musical diversity, and I'd put on some late-50s doo-wop if I was in the mood.

Since the world continues to try and crush me into submission, I look to the Manics before they became middle-aged stadium rockers - ie, The Holy Bible era.

[On Top of the Pops] lead singer/guitarist James Dean Bradfield [wore] an IRA-style balaclava as part of the band's new military image [...] The band have said since that the reason for this was because they [...] believed that having a unified, militant image would bring them together again. (Wiki)

Draw strength. You'd think I'd get depressed listening to THB, but it's oddly the other way around. That also applies to The Smiths - contrary to people's conception that The Smiths are inherently depressing, Morissey made some very clever and funny songs. It's probably not the music that's depressing, it's the context.

[204]

Somewhere There's a Morning Sky / Bluer Than Her Eyes

Time for a customary middle-of-the-night, blurry-eyed, half-asleep, doing-fuck-all but not in bed even though I'm fucking tired stream of conscience post. I've been listening to selected pieces from Bowie's 1976 Station to Station album. I too have stopped blinking - and I think I'm approaching the sort of mental conditions that precipitate the formation of such an album... "It's not the side-effects of the cocaine / I'm thinking that it must be love." Currently I'm listening to Human League's WXJL Tonight (from the 1980 album Travelogue - not the shite pop of the mid 80s they put out after Marsh and Ware left to form Heaven 17) over and over again (3 hours as of 4AM in rotation with The Black Hit of Space). There's something captivating and disturbing about it. "I don't want you to go tonight."