I recently changed my Facebook profile. I've got some new music in my head that speaks to me and I dig it enough to share.
The first is Joe Satriani. I've been listening to him for about three months now, and he's just the kind of stuff that makes perfect sense for me in my post Return to Forever summer concert days. It's odd that I was expecting more of this kind of music from Jaco Pastorius, but Jaco has never really moved me. I don't quite get Jaco, or maybe it is that I just don't like listening to him. I get Cecil Taylor. I get Sun Ra. I just don't like listening to them. Same thing with Rashaan Roland Kirk. I know, it hurts to say it, but these dudes aren't fun, or I just haven't heard any of their fun music. With the exception of Sun Ra's "When You Wish Upon a Star", their music is just too .... academic? spiritless? random? It's missing a strong narrative flow. What it does is way back in a corner of my mind, a corner that has little emotional connection with the rest of me. But Joe Satriani does that rock/jazz fusion like a champ and it flows and overflows with passion. I've got about 20 cuts of Joe's, and I'm liking him big time.
Anybody who follows me knows one of the things I hate most are broken links. So every once in a while I engage in what I call Recovery, which involves me accounting for the things I know I know somewhere deep inside of me but can't bring to mind at all. Like what's the name of that African dude from HBO's Oz? And what other songs did I actually know by Foghat other than 'Slow Ride'? And what is the name of that restaurant with the sawdust on the floor in the South Bay? And which book about Dick Feynmen did I actually read first, and did Thomas Sowell actually hip me to how the South African Nationalists used minimum wage laws to keep blacks unemployed? Sometimes Recovery takes work and intiative - sometimes answers to such mysteries just fall into my lap. Boards of Canada is one of those lap dances.
For about five years now that I have given up Winamp and been using iTunes, I have also been listening to SomaFM. Specifically there are a couple webcasts in the 'radio' section of iTunes under 'Ambient'. Groove Salad. I listen to Groove Salad, Secret Agent and Drone Zone very frequently. In fact, my next post is going to be an information review, because it's good to get that out there. Anyway, I can remember three years ago listening to a very cool tune that sampled a Mr. Rodgers kind of voice saying the word 'orange' and some kids voices saying 'yeah that's right'. I could never find the name of that song.
I didn't realize at the time that SomaFM would give artist and title of the songs in their stream and I never bothered to ask the stupid question by email. I was satisfied that I did at least learn about Cafe Del Mar which led me to Talvin Singh and all that bhangra. At the time it was very difficult to find an of the Cafe Del Mar albums at the record store or on Amazon. They were all 25 dollar imports if they were available at all. But when I finally got my hands on the Kid Loco mix of Traveller, well it is my chillout theme song. But I've been used to not being able to find the sorts of stuff that got play on Groove Salad, but their scrobbling has improved and now the artist and title shows up in iTunes.
Sometime two weeks ago, listening as usual, the 'orange' song came on. It turns out that the name of it is Aquarius, on the album Music Has the Right to Children - which makes perfect non-sense. Few such instrumental ambient songs have any names that make narrative sense. It turned out that AmazonMP3 had all the tracks, and I have also found Roygbiv, another funky-ass groove I knew in the back of my head but never on the tip of my tongue.
I might have saved many years knowing that the kind of music I like to compose as Sixoseven is exactly the sort that Boards of Canada does make. But I decided a few Christmases ago that I would not be investing in Pro Tools and the big Yamaha, despite all the love I was getting at the local Sam Ash. It is a great pleasure nonetheless to be grooving to my new favorite group, Boards of Canada. I hear they're Scottish.
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