Category Archives: Music

Music for Blogging

Seefeel’s QuiqueFor moments of concentration, when I want to be particularly productive in hammering out a paragraph of overly articulated prose, I set iTunes to play “Quique,” an album of ambient, droning sound-spaces by the English quartet Seefeel. It betrays the fact that I came into adulthood in the mid-1990s to say that, because if there ever was a height of that obscure band’s popularity, it was the last decade, when dissonant and amorphous sound structures became all the rage. Good times.

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I Was a Twenty-something Print Designer

The RopersWay back when I had no idea how cool the information superhighway really would be — this was the mid-1990s — I was trying to make my way in life as a print designer. I did some lamentable work at a small advertising agency in McLean, Virginia and then at a slightly more glamorous design studio in downtown Washington, D.C., basically graduating from real estate advertisements at the former to stylistically fickle marketing work at the latter. Neither position was particularly satisfying for my creative aspirations.

For a while, I took refuge in freelance work, mostly doing work for the small army of independent bands hiding out in the outer-reaches of Northwest Washington. This meant designing album covers, CD covers, tee-shirts and posters on little or no budget, but getting a fair amount of creative license. I only did this for a few years and, because my day job at the time was so time intensive, I never became particularly prolific, producing only a handful of pieces during my four years in D.C.

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I Designed a Mixtape for Me

Sophia LorenWhen I think back to some of the earliest graphic design impulses I had as a kid, I think of mixtapes and the hours and hours I used to spend manually compiling them for friends and for my own enjoyment. The only design tools I had at my disposal were a set of rapidograph draughting pens, a can of rubber cement, an X-acto knife and a surfeit of free time. Without the benefit of scanners, Photoshop or even press-type, I’d painstakingly hand-letter the track listings and sometimes create elaborate illustrations for the covers, doing my best to approximate some kind of professionally designed end product, even though I had then only a vague understanding of what graphic design really was.

It was a primitive process but it was also enormously satisfying, because it was a very personal kind of design. There were no other stake-holders involved, no clients or committee members, just me. I was responsible for the product from end to end: the songs were mine to choose and sequence, the title was mine to author, the presentation was mine to art direct. I’m sure they’d cause me no shortage of embarrassment to look at now, but at the time, I pored over them for hours, admiring and critiquing my own work endlessly.

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1996 Tears

To some extent, you’re forever doomed to listen to whatever music you favored in your formative years. For me, from college up to my late twenties, I spent a lot of time listening to music from the United Kingdom — the dance-rock graftings of Madchester, the so-called “shoegazing” brand of droning indie experimentation, and then the more distinctive, less obscure — and less characteristically independent — brand of traditionalism known as “Britpop.” These days, I can sport all the Arcade Fires and Ying Yang Twins I can muster, but at heart I’m most inclined towards the catchy, knowing and facile hooks of pale British youths from the early to mid-1990s.

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Musical Batonism

iTunesWeblog posts about music, in my opinion, are a kind of no win situation, because there’s nothing that you can say about a piece of music about which you’re currently very enthusiastic that will really mean anything to anybody unless they’re already familiar with it, or unless they’re so powerfully predisposed to that particular genre or style that a positive reaction is a foregone conclusion. The exception to that, of course, is if you have a weblog that is primarily focused on music and/or has accrued a significant share of musical credibility when it comes to endorsing bands. I don’t have that kind of weblog, clearly, so when I think about writing a post about music that’s exciting to me, I generally resist it.

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Replacing iPod Earbuds

iPod EarbudsOkay, I’m getting a little concerned about iPod theft on New York City’s subways, which are up 24 percent over the same period last year, according to recent police reports. It’s been a long time since I really thought that anything I carried about my person was in danger of being stolen — or would make me a candidate for a mugging — in New York, but something about the ubiquity and attractiveness of iPods make that scenario seem not quite so far fetched now. I could just stop using my iPod on subways, but a less counter-intuitive and more agreeable solution would be to replace those telltale white earbuds with something a little more discreet. As a side benefit, it will prevent me from appearing, as a commenter suggested in a previous post I wrote about iPods in New York, to be a “tool of Apple.”

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A Matter of Perceptionists

The PerceptionistsThere’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

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Fine-Tuning iTunes

iTunes RatingsIt was about 11:00p the other night when I sat down in front of my computer, ostensibly to add a few new songs to my iTunes database so that I could load them onto my iPod photo. While I was at it, I decided to grab the attendant album cover artwork too, something that I’ve been doing more frequently since buying the iPod photo — these models displays covers nicely if diminutively on their color screens. There’s no rational motivation for wanting the artwork, except perhaps as a small way to compensate for the complete dissolution of visual design as a component of music in the digital age… but I’m not bitter about that.

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Do the Shuffle

iPod ShuffleHaving been, for nearly a week now, on the cusp of buying myself an iPod shuffle, I was reminded by my girlfriend that the principal mode of listening to music through this new device is antithetical to my own listening nature. That is, by habit, I still listen to songs in the mode of albums, and that I rarely will put iTunes in shuffle mode across my entire music library. When she said this, my reaction was first, “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.” But then I thought about it for a moment, and I realized that she’s right. When I’m sitting here at my desk in our apartment, I’ll launch iTunes and play whatever albums I’ve recently acquired over and over — and over and over.

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Name That iTune

iTunesThe current generation of iPods can be had with a hard drive as big as 40 Gigabytes, and the iPod Photo can be had in a 60 Gigabyte model. If you don’t limit yourself to the storage available in a portable digital music player, you can have an exponentially more capacious warehouse for all of your MP3s on your computer’s hard disk — a desktop computer with a 250 Gigabyte internal drive is not uncommon these days. That’s a lot of music. So it occurred to me this morning, when the chorus of some half-remembered song popped into my head inexplicably and then haunted me all the way to the office, that iTunes and iPods — or whatever substitutes you care to name — still don’t allow you to find that one song that goes something like “Doo de dum de doo…” You know the one I’m talkin’ about?

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