Sounds from Innerspace

innerspaceboy · 08-13-2015, 06:13 PM

Today's entry is a break from the usual music news. As you're undoubtedly aware, media servers occasionally require a bit of maintenance and today was that day.

For days the Windows 10 free upgrade offer had been calling to me from the bottom of my screen. After nearly a week's hesitation I gave in and accepted the offer. Of course, this was a Microsoft upgrade, so it wasn't going to be a smooth ride. Three failed attempts and a non-responsive Windows Update later I found myself once again growing tired of Windows issues.

Curiously, my fiance was experiencing similar difficulties with her own machine - her latest Windows Update had run for an eternity with no response. Manual installation attempts were fruitless so we gave up and ran the full version installer.

The full version offered an opt-out for updates, but problems persisted when the installer failed to complete due to my multi-boot configuration.

Worse still an attempted removal of the secondary partition resulted in a corrupted MBR. I'd really had enough. Now the system was locked in an infinite booting loop with a dodgy partition. This called for drastic measures.

I raced to the nearest office supply store and snatched up a $9 novelty 8GB flash drive shaped like Superman. At the checkout, I asked if the store had a resident Linux guru and was directed to a scruffy fellow with a yeard (clearly qualifying him for the task). I asked if he knew whether a bootable USB Linux distro would be robust enough to repair a damaged MBR. He wisely responded, "well... it IS shaped like Superman."

And so I went to work. A quick bit of research produced a boot-repair-disk 64bit Linux distro and pendrivelinux.com's UUI software. I had previously left Linux behind in favor of a few Windows-based music management applications a few years ago, but this incident was a wake-up call that I needed to get back to Ubuntu.

After a successful system repair and a bit of research I successfully identified Linux alternatives for two dozen of my most-used applications and worked out the necessary Terminal commands for each of their respective installations.

The Guayadeque Audio Manager - a potential replacement for MediaMonkey Gold

And with that harrowing experience behind our intrepid hero, Innerspace Labs and our media server are now operating 100% in a Linux environment. It was long overdue, but it feels great to have made it to the other side.

Thank you, Superman.

innerspaceboy · 08-15-2015, 06:04 PM

It's a fantastic weekend so what better to spin than my Lemon Jelly favorites!

Pictured:

- their EP collection - Lemonjelly.ky

- their first LP, Lost Horizons

- the unofficial gold disc in a hessian "burlap sack" single - Rolled Oats (which does not bear their name due to uncleared samples)

- the '64-'95 DVD

- post-LJ bootleg "The One You Call On" by Fred Deakin performing as "Frank Eddie" due to further sample robbery

- a similar boot, "Stay Another Day" which served as the farewell from their graphic design team, Airside

Also pictured are limited ed. singles by Jelly-buddy Hamstall Ridware's band, Sundae Club:

- One of the 50 copies of the autographed charity single for Haiti earthquake relief - a wonderful remix of "Angels in the Sky" from 2005

- Copy 6/250 of the "Everything is Fine" single feat. Matt Berry, along with the center labels designed for the limited 78RPM version of the single

Happy weekend everyone!

Spoiler for Click here for a look at my Analog and Digital Jelly Collection thus far~:

innerspaceboy · 08-15-2015, 09:09 PM

UPDATE: The final task in my transition to a Linux environment was to customize a powerful music library manager and player to work for my needs.

The most intriguing contender was gmusicbrowser - a robust utility with impressive handling for libraries in excess of 100,000 tracks, and best of all - a fully-customizable interface.

This evening I came upon a magnificent library of gmusicbrowser interface layouts from vsido.org with an accompanying step-by-step installation guide. After about 30 minutes of perusing the 40-odd layouts bundled in the collection I came upon one which wowed me. A few minor tweaks later and I found myself with a large library manager and player with an incredibly powerful interface which permits me to fully-indulge my metadata fetishism.

Have a look - this is better than anything I had Windows-side! Highly recommended for Linux users with archival collections!

Spoiler for Click it! It's beautiful.:

innerspaceboy · 08-16-2015, 09:23 AM

Last night's music-related film: The Sound of Noise. (2010)

It's a French film by writer/director Ola Simonsson who you likely know from the film short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001)

Here's the original short:

(Frownland is likely familiar with this one.)

The feature-length film unites the concepts of anarchism, Luigi Russolo's classic manifesto, and the spontaneous performance art of Cage's Theater Piece No. 1 from 1952 and the Happenings which followed throughout the 1960s. The result is an engaging and enjoyable film.

Here is the film's trailer. Enjoy!

innerspaceboy · 08-20-2015, 08:58 PM

In recent weeks I've found my listening habits growing stagnant as my artist and label discographies are slowly exhausted. The challenge for users with large media libraries is the task of finding yet-unexplored territories and developing strategies to facilitate the charting of those new waters.

One of the caveats of my otherwise-stellar media server software is that there is no way to browse by genre. I realized this evening that queuing a chronology of albums from a given genre would be a wonderful way to explore new sounds within my library so I went to work straight away and by nightfall the project was a success.

A few initial discoveries - classics of soul jazz

Using the genre text cloud feature in gmusicbrowser I constructed .m3u playlists of several intriguing but unfamiliar genres within my collection. Each list contained 10,000 to 17,000 of the tracks best-representative of the genre based upon RYM data and discographic libraries from the genre's most prominent artists and composers.

I ended up splitting the Jazz list into two subsets - early jazz recordings from 1924-1958 and modern jazz recordings from 1959-1979. This will help make the listening experience more uniform and will be an easier load on my mobile devices when spooling the lists.

With the task completed, I'm now ready to queue up thousands of hours of quality content from an array of genres I'd only explored superficially when I first acquired the recordings. I'm looking forward to new discoveries and to the wonderful soundtrack it will provide for my days at the office!

The first batch of playlists are as follows:

Hot on the One - A Funk Odyssey
Ambient Worlds
Anatomy of a Murder: Film Noir Soundtracks
Beatless Space - Pure Drone
Beautiful Noise - 90s Dream Pop
Friday Nights - Intelligent Drum & Bass
30 Years of Music from the Hearts of Space
Ninja Tune - The First 150 Albums
Psybient Dreams
Cinematic Soundscapes - Music for Films
The Chill Out Room - Downtempo Classics
The Imaginarium - Early Gypsy Jazz
The World of Jazz (1924-1958)
The World of Jazz (1959-1979)

Time to start listening!

innerspaceboy · 08-27-2015, 05:18 PM

I've completed the final phase of my playlist project with 27 in all and commenced the listening process.

Now that all my LPs are boxed up for the big move I'll be fully-indulging my digital playlists for the duration of the transition.

So here goes...

Day 1: ANATOMY OF A MURDER: Film Noir Jazz.

Quincy Jones' "Shoot to Kill" from the 1965 film, Mirage is a classic example from this list.

The list also features the Crime Jazz and Crime Scene USA collections. Great stuff.

innerspaceboy · 08-27-2015, 05:23 PM

(Supplemental) This was followed today by Cinematic Soundscapes: Music for Films.

This list features some of my favorite album selections from my vinyl catalog with all the convenience and portability of my music server.

Now playing: Philip Glass' scores to Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi as well as the follow up trilogy of Chronos/Baraka/Samsara each scored by composer, Michael Stearns.

Also included are other vinyl favorites like Louis and Bebe Barron's groundbreaking score to Forbidden Planet, various scores by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Clint Mansell, and of course the many incarnations of Vangelis' music for Blade Runner.

innerspaceboy · 08-28-2015, 05:59 PM

The latest news from the 5 Percent Nation of Chocolaty Delicious: It comes down to THIS!

The long-awaited and much-anticipated Soul Coughing 180g vinyl issues have arrived!

MusicDirect lists the official ship date as 08-31-15 for the Sept street date but pre-orders shipped in advance from their Chicago distribution center and arrived in NY this morning.

If you missed the pre-order and still want to grab these for your collection, each of their albums are still available at the regular price from MusicDirect here.

This is the very first time Ruby Vroom has ever been made available in a vinyl format. If you're a fan (or if you had a pulse in the 90s) this is the time to claim some SC love for your own.

"And it booms as cool as sugar free jazz"

innerspaceboy · 08-29-2015, 05:33 PM

Weekend Update: Saturday Afternoon Project

Born in '81, I was just a few years too young for some of the best music of the 80s. This afternoon I dedicated some time to rectifying that issue.

I collected all of the genre-defining albums of the era from RateYourMusic.com and assembled a 175-hour playlist titled Days of the Lords: 1976-1997 comprising 55 artists from the period's most prominent genres:

Ethereal Wave
New Wave
Dream Pop
Gothic Rock
Shoegaze
Post-Punk
Jangle Pop
& Noise Pop

All the major players are here. Neoclassical darkwave and goth rock mainstays like The Cure, The Church, The Cult, Joy Division, The Smiths, Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins. Plus post-punk artists like The Chameleons, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Einstürzende Neubauten, Jesus & Mary Chain, Swervedriver, and Fad Gadget.

All the shoegaze giants made the list, from My Bloody Valentine to Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, Soda Stereo, The Boo Radleys, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Belly, and The Catherine Wheel. I've really done my best to assemble all of the artistst discographies that defined their generation's sound from 1976-1997.

Here's a preview of the completed list in action. I've got a lot of listening to do!

innerspaceboy · 08-30-2015, 10:49 AM

Sunday Playlist of the day - Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio - Legends of Krautrock.

450 of the greatest kosmische musik albums from 77 German artists.

Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio

Spanning 1969 to the present, personal favorites among the list include discographies from:

Can
Faust
Kraftwerk (particularly the pre-Ralf und Florian LPs)
Amon Duul I&II
Neu!
Popol Vuh
Harmonia
Tangerine Dream
Klaus Schulze
Manuel Gottsching
Cluster
Ash Ra Tempel
Embryo
La Dusseldorf
The Cosmic Jokers
and A.R. & Machines

The list also includes modern artists who celebrate and revive the genre, like London's Public Service Broadcasting.

Album now-playing: Cosmic Jokers' s/t - the band that never was.

Their albums were acid party jam sessions recorded and released without the supergroup's knowledge. Participants included Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, Jurgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf of Wallenstein, and Dierks. Regardless, it's wonderful stuff!