“… and fruit flies like a banana”

Where did March go?

Work last month left me with little time or energy to do anything else, um, constructive. No blogs, no website updates, no books read (but several bought — the to-read list that is my bookshelves gets ever longer/more crowded… OK, I couldn’t sustain that metaphor very well), no new art… Oh — I did “discover” Twitter.

What have I been doing? Well, I was co-chairing one major conference — we were over target for delegates, only slightly below target for revenue, so pretty darn successful in the current economy. Two meaty reports, one to be published very shortly, the other still in draft… Both late, but both (I hope) worth the wait — we’ll see what our clients think! And early work on some shorter reports to be published through the spring and early summer.

Will I have time for more and better blog posts from now on? I’d like to think so… I see you shiver with antici— !

PS. 13,422 songs in my iTunes library.

PPS. “Time flies like an arrow… ”

Music wants to be free!

Having extolled the pros and cons of low-cost digital music downloads from emusic.com, there are, of course, ways of getting digital music free… legally!

The one that’s in the news at the moment is Spotify, an interactive streaming music service. You can take out a paid subscription, but — if you can tolerate the occasional advertisement — you can listen free! So it’s kinda like commercial radio – but without the annoying DJ! And – really the main thing – you get to choose the music you listen to, either by setting preferences for genre and era, or by searching and setting up playlists. The sound quality is fine and play is pretty much continuous (the Spotify client software uses a local cache).

The range of music on offer is good, although it’s focussed on mainstream stuff, both rock|pop & orchestral, with few of the electronica artists I’m following these days…

However… you can’t download the music, and thus can’t download it to play offline or on your iPod (whaddya mean, there are other MP3 players?). So… I’m not convinced that it’s an alternative to actually owning the music…

But it’s certainly a great way of checking out artists or works that you’re not familiar with.

The other “discovery” I made this week – rather later than many others (I’m so not hoopy sometimes) – is netlabels, online music sites that (mostly) offer free downloads. See the description from No Type:

No Type exists since 1998 to provide discriminating listeners with remarkable free music releases from artists who choose to operate outside of the evil music industry. And because we’re contrarians at heart, we’re also offering a selection of related CDs & vinyls, which you can purchase online.

Most are dedicated to electronica and related genres – which is fine by me! – though this is apparently changing. And much of it is experimental – that is, tending towards the unlistenable! But there is some very good stuff amongst it; for example, Loscil’s Stases on One.

Other netlables that I’ve begun to explore are Chill Productions, Nishi, Stadtgruen, and thinner. There are hundreds more – see the netlabels section on the Internet Archive!

PS. 12,903 songs in my iTunes Library!

“Post murum somnii”

Or… “Does downloading embiggen your appreciation of music?” (And I still mean legal downloading, of course!)

I now have 12,548 “songs” in my iTunes Library. Every month I download 90 songs… OK, you’ve read that before.

Fourteen or fifteen years ago, on my way home from work, I stopped to browse in a record shop – in Station Square, Harrogate, directly across from the railway station. In one of the racks I found a CD by a group that I hadn’t heard of before, The Future Sound of London. (OK, maybe I had heard of them; but I hadn’t heard any of their music yet.) I was intrigued by the cover painting that depicted a young girl contemplating a sea-anemone-like creature that floated above her outstretched hand… It was Lifeforms. A double CD. And only £9.99. Yet I hesitated…

A few days later, I’d resolved to buy it, but going back to the record shop I found that the price had increased to – what? – maybe £15. Which broke my resolve. At £9.99 it could have been the first electronica CD that I had bought – that distinction was to go to System 7.3 Fire + Water by 777 (the U.S. pseudonym of System 7) – but at £15? No.

Now, I have 4,272 electronica “songs” in my iTunes Library. By 209 different artists… It’s one of my favourite genres – mostly ambient and IDM, with a smattering of drum’n’bass and trance. Yet, I’d hesitated… 

But what if I could have bought the whole album for less than £4? (Which I could if emusic.com actually offered it. The iTunes Store does… but it still costs £9.99!)

But there’s a huge range of music (and other stuff) on emusic.com at a ridiculously low price. It’s cheap enough to take a chance on something intriguing, to buy on a whim something new, fresh, different, to boldly buy music in a genre that I’ve never bought before… And tons to choose from. 

Frankly, some things are quite disappointing. Mmm… Master drummers of India and Sonic Youth’s Goodbye 20th century, for example.

And there’s not a lot of mainstream stuff (although I did find Snow Patrol’s back catalogue there). But that’s really the point…

I’ve discovered far more, and more varied, music that I do like, that I might otherwise have dithered over and not bought – or might not even have found. Orchestral works by Philip Glass, by Steve Reich, by Baltic composers with far too many As in their names. Finnish rock groups like Amberian Dawn, Nightwish and Unshine. Pretty much the whole catalogue of Ultimae Records. Boris Karloff – Boris Karloff! – reading Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. 

And an album of Black Sabbath songs translated into Latin and arranged for mediæval instruments (Sabbatum by Rondellus). 

Now, my wife may not agree…

But I think I’ve found something.

“My head feels like a frisbee”

Or… “Does downloading erode your appreciation of music?” (And I mean legal downloading, of course!)

I now have 12,548 “songs” in my iTunes Library. Every month I download 90 songs – maybe 10 albums – from emusic.com. Sometimes 50 songs more, if I feel inclined to buy a booster on top of my subscription. It’s cheap – it works out at about 17-22p per track. And occasionally I’ll buy songs from the iTunes Store or amazon – which are a little more expensive…

That’s a lot of new music to listen to each month… on top of the huge volume of music I have already. 

I’ve added 13.9 hours of music this month! The total playing time of my iTunes Library is 42.7 days!!!

When I bought music only on vinyl – vinyl! – or CD, every new record (or CD) was an “event”. The record would go on the turntable (or the CD in the CD player or computer… ah, my first Apple Mac) and I’d play it through repeatedly. (Often to the annoyance of – over the years – my parents, my neighbours in college, my parents again, my wife…) I’d kick back and read through the lyrics along with each song. I’d really get to know the album (even if, with a CD, I might start skipping the odd track).

But now I buy so much new music… I don’t. Even when I do buy music on CD (sometimes cheaper… and it’s a ready-made back-up!) – or borrow my sons’ or, less often (our tastes differ!), my wife’s – I just rip it and add it to the pool.

Sure, I do listen to all that new music album by album at least once, maybe a few times. And I have set up playlists for particular artists (or, more rarely, albums) – like the Shpongle playlist I'm listening to as I write this. But most of it just falls into that wash of music in longer, more generic playlists that I play on “shuffle” as I work (or avoid work).

So it seems that my relationship with my music has changed. Most of those songs are far more casual acquaintances than intimate friends… 

Mostly – often even when I really like them! — I don’t even remember their names. ( I had to check this… the song that’s now playing is “My head feels like a frisbee”. Hence the title…)

I feel I’ve lost something.

Mazes & Minotaurs

I “know” Scott Oden from The REH Forum, and I have his first two books, Men of Bronze and Memnon (although – sorry, Scott! – I haven’t read them yet).

Anyway, I was reading his blog, and came across this post, which is so cool I thought I’d steal it!

To cut a long story short — a longer story is on Scott’s blog, obviously, but the full story is here — French game designer Olivier Legrand, with inspiration and help from veteran game designer and ancient historian Paul Elliott, has created an alternat[iv]e version of Dungeons & Dragons, as if Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had been inspired far more by Greek myth than by Howard, Leiber, Tolkien, Anderson et al.

Mazes & Minotaurs has a fictional publishing history stretching back to 1972 and even a 1987 revision (corresponding to AD&D)! But several books exist (in PDF format) for both versions and are free to download.

How cool is that?

Vox clamantis in deserto

This is my blog. Yes, another voice crying in the wilderness of the world wide web. Will anyone hear or care?

Well, I already have a personal website — homepage.mac.com/antallan/ – and it still surprises me that I get email from folks who have read and enjoyed some of my articles. So – hopefully! – others will read and enjoy these posts.

This blog will, I suppose, explore the same kinds of interest as my website, but I intend to post here more often than I update the website. Not necessarily regularly, just more frequently… (That’s not going to be hard: The time between updates can be v-e-r-y long.)