Chula Vista

Love the McIntosh tube amp. I worked along side of Ron Fone for a few years back east. He was the president of McIntosh back in their glory days. Very cool guy.

__________________

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well,
on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away
and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

innerspaceboy

Thanks Chula! Great to see love for the MAC on MB. In January I published a short entry about my last few McIntosh amps. This one's for you!

...

The Merits of Nostalgia and a Cozy Placebo Effect
Originally published 1/12/15

And so it came to pass that my beloved McIntosh C39 pre-amp was not made happy by replacing the volume pot. I'd decided in advance that if that didn't fix it, I would cut my losses and consider, for the first time in my 30+ years, to explore the possibility of a brand new pre-amp/power amp combo.



My first McIntosh - a MAC 4280. RIP 2013.

I am fully aware of the tried-and-true code of the audiophile - quality vintage gear will generally out-perform and out-last newer contemporaries dollar-for-dollar. But after repeatedly battling oxidation, bad resistors, and a few bad volume pots for the better part of three decades, I was ready to consider something new.



The Next Generation: My McIntosh C39

My life-long trusted audio adviser and best friend tossed a few suggestions my way, namely the emotiva xsp-1, some newer Rotel models, and the most alluring of his suggestions - the Parasound Halo p3. But for the interim, I had a local hi-fi shop tune up my Yamaha CR-840 - the first real amp I ever had. Years ago channel A stopped working, and oxidation built up rending the amp nearly-unusable, but I'd never given it up, as it was a very special gift. Thankfully the shop returned it to me the next day in PERFECT working condition!

I'd forgotten how great it sounded. Please understand - I know it's not remotely in the same class as some of the finer amps I've used, but the warm and familiar tone of this amp transports me back to college and all the memories attached to those years. I completely acknowledge that this nostalgia trip is in no way a measure of the amp's technical performance. It is of no quantifiable measure an amp comparable to my MACs or, likely, to the Parasound amp. But I will fully-embrace the head-trip it brings and am more than satisfied to use it until the right upgrade comes along.



Next up - Perhaps the Parasound Halo P3

To make the amp-swap official, I chucked the eyesore of a component rack that I'd picked up from a thrift shop. 30-seconds of Craigslist searching produced a nifty 60s record shelf for only a few bucks to serve as both a surface for the amp and as additional record storage. Better still - the funky elderly couple selling it were ridiculously adorable and had mirrored-and-velvet-patterned wallpaper with matching decor all about their home.



Not kidding. This... with mirrored panels.

The shelf has a very "college" feel to accompany the amp, and the space was PERFECT to relocate all my LPs pressed between 1995 and the present. All my favorites are in here - DJ Food, Boards of Canada, Lemon Jelly, DJ Shadow, The Orb, Underworld, Stereolab, Spiritualized, The KLF, St Germain, Bonobo, Aphex Twin, Cinematic Orchestra, Sigur Ros, Pantha Du Prince, Low, Beck, The FLips, with just enough room to sneak in nearly all of Brian Eno and Tom Waits' albums.



The Nostalgia Corner

This is as good a time as any to resolve to listen to more of my records in 2015 - to enjoy what I have instead of always searching for the next grail.

And there you have it - an objective and meticulous audiophile reduced to a nostalgic dolt by his trust old amp. Think what you will, but I'll be happy here, spinning some great tunes.



Eno & Hyde Postcards from their first two LPs

__________________
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innerspaceboy

Yesterday evening I took a hard look at my vinyl library and was alarmed by how many classic LPs I've purchased but never spun. I promptly set myself a resolution to get to know my music better.

I quickly assembled a list of an initial 70 critically-acclaimed records in my catalog which I myself am not well-acquainted. I built a reference Google Sheet of the pressings and catalog numbers and scheduled listening sessions on Google Keep for the next 30 days to check those titles off my list.

November evenings will be spent immersed in music education. What good are records if you don't take time to enjoy them?



First on my list was a record which never fails to surface on avant garde electronic lists of the 90s - The Future Sounds of London's Lifeforms LP.

The Future Sounds of London is the work of Garry Cobain and Brian Dougans, both of Manchester. Brian Dougan's father was involved with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop which was a heavy influence in the almost music concrete feel to the Lifeforms LP.

Written and produced by Cobain and Dougans, Lifeforms also involved a number of contributors including legends like Robert Fripp, Klaus Schulze, and Elizabeth Fraser as well as sparse sampling from sources like Ozric Tentacles and Cronenberg's Scanners.

The result is an incredibly rewarding listening experience - a cerebral ambient soundscape which never quite settles into 4/4 dance territory. Instead the focus is ever-shifting as elements drift toward and away from the center of the listening space, and each track moves seamlessly into the next.

I'm truly glad I made time to take in this recording in a dedicated listening session, and it warrants repeated play. The critical acclaim is well-deserved - this is a record for the books.

__________________
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innerspaceboy

As you may (or may not) have heard, Tom Waits has filed suit against Adele over the similarities between her song, "Hello" and his song, "Martha" from his debut album, Closing Time from 1973.

Waits' track is a staple song of love lost and the passage of time. It's a stripped-down and vulnerable piece comprising only a sustained piano melody, minimal strings, and Tom's lonely voice professing his hopeful outreach to a physically (and metaphysically) distant soul for which he once felt perhaps a touch of warmth.

Adele's pop track falls horribly flat by comparison. The lyrics are transparent, lacking of heart and authenticity. The synthesized backing track is appropriate in that it, too is devoid of soul or feeling. It's just another pop track with pantomimed lyrics by a dolled-up product of commercial radio.

Adele's contract was a low-point for XL Recordings, who once carried artists of substance and character. Adele is utterly dull as a performer, her music is instantly forgettable, save for the super-saturation of the airwaves with her infantile hooks and ridiculous lyrics (because barking the phrase, "rumor has it" 136 times apparently qualifies as a song).

I was baffled to learn that Adele is still producing music in 2015, and further astounded by her sales accolades in the pop market. But this really only speaks to how miserably low the bar has been set for artistic ability in the world of pop today.

In a decade's time, no one of artistic merit will be discussing Adele. Mr. Waits on the other hand, remains and will remain a critical artist of popular and avant-garde music.

If Adele makes the claim that the songs are incomparable, I'll agree wholeheartedly. But as even embarrassingly-poor mimicry is still grounds for suit, it will be interesting to see how this plays out.

Here's the original track, "Martha" from a young Tom Waits way back in '73.

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Frownland

Fingers crossed that this will help make Adele irrelevant again.

__________________

Studies show that when a given norm is changed in the face of the unchanging, the remaining contradictions will parallel the truth.

innerspaceboy

After being blown away upon first-listen to Future Sound of London's experimental ambient epic, Lifeforms from 1994, I did a bit of digging to find more exciting sounds from the artist. I quickly discovered that the same gents from FSOL also perform under the moniker, Amorphous Androgynous with quite an expansive catalog for the project. But the real shocker was the realization that FSOL was in fact the other half of the brilliant psychedelic EP I'd ordered from DJ Food earlier this year!



The Amorphous Androgynous

DJ Food & The Amorphous Androgynous collaborated on The Illectrik Hoax EP in 2012 producing a fantastic electro-psych-rock-leftfield mix that really gets inside your skull.

It sounds as good as it looks.

DJ Food & The Amorphous Androgynous - The Illectrik Hoax EP







I wasted no time in picking up an archive of both FSOL / Amorphous Androgynous' extended discographies as well as a complete archive of their radio broadcasts, live mixes and anthologies, anxious to learn more about the psychedelic side project.

For those who own copies of FSOL's primary albums, there is a treasure trove of other material in the presently-circulating lossless discographic archive and its accompanying radio broadcast collection. The content is organized chronologically into a series of categorical subfolders thusly:

The Future Sound of London Studio Discography
The Future Sound of London - Complete Radio Broadcasts
BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes
The Collected Electric Brain Storms
The Collected ISDN Live Transmissions
The Collected Kiss FM Transmissions
The Collected Monstrous Psychedelic Broadcasts

The Future Sound of London Studio Discography:
Albums
Anthologies
EPs & Singles

Albums:
(1991) Accelerator
(1994) Lifeforms
(1995) ISDN
(1996) Dead Cities
Environments Series
From the Archives Series

Environments Series:
(2008) Environments
(2008) Environments 2
(2010) Environments 3
(2012) Environments 4

From the Archives Series:
(2007) From the Archives Vol. 1
(2007) From the Archives Vol. 2
(2007) From the Archives Vol. 3
(2007) From the Archives Vol. 4
(2008) From the Archives Vol. 5
(2010) From the Archives Vol. 6
(2012) From the Archives Vol. 7

Anthologies:
(1992) Earthbeat
(2006) Teachings From The Electronic Brain (The Best of FSOL)
(2008) By Any Other Name
(2008) FSOL Digital Mix
(2013) The FSOL Remix Anthology
(2013) The Papua New Guinea Anthology

EPs & Singles
(1993) Cascade
(1994) Expander
(1994) Lifeforms EP
(1994) Promo 500
(1995) Far-Out Son of Lung and the Ramblings of a Madman
(1996) My Kingdom
(1997) We Have Explosive
(2007) A Gigantic Globular Burst of Antistatic
(2008) The Pulse EPs

The Future Sound of London - Complete Radio Broadcasts:
BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes
The Collected Electric Brain Storms
The Collected ISDN Live Transmissions
The Collected Kiss FM Transmissions
The Collected Monstrous Psychedelic Broadcasts

BBC Radio 1 Essential Mixes:
(1993) BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 1
(1995) BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix 2

The Collected Electric Brain Storms:
01 Vol. 1 (2008)
02 Vol. 2 (2008)
03 Vol. 3 (2008)
04.1 Vol. 4A (2009)
04.2 Vol. 4B (2009)
0.5 Vol. 0.5 (2006)
05 Vol. 5 (2009)
06.1 Vol. 6A (2010)
06.2 Vol. 6B (2010)
07 Vol. 7 (2011)

The Collected ISDN Live Transmissions:
01 Transmission 1- (1994) ISDN Tour
02 Transmission 2- New York, 11th May 1994
03 Transmission 3- Edinburgh, 28th October, 1996
04 Transmission 4- Netherlands, 9th September 1994
05 Transmission 5- Rome, 16th May 1994
06 Transmission 6- France, 17th May 1997
07 Transmission 7- Manchester, 6th November 1996
08 Transmission 8- Los Angeles, 22nd January 1996
09 Transmission 9- London, 25th March 1997
11 Transmission 11- Berlin, 12th June 1996
14.1 Transmission 14a- Barcelona 1995 - Preshow
14.2 Transmission 14b- Barcelona 1995 - Art Future Festival
16 Transmission 16- France, 1997
[1997] ISDN Show

The Collected Kiss FM Transmissions:
Test Transmission (Pts 1-6)
Test Transmission 2 (Pts 1-6)
Transmission 1 (Pts 1-6)
Transmission 2 (Pts 1-5)
Transmission 3 (Pts 1-2)
Transmission 4 (Pts 1-6)
Transmission 5 (Pts 1-6)
Transmission 6 (Pt 1-6)

The Collected Monstrous Psychedelic Broadcasts:
A Monstrous Psychedelic Bubble Exploding In Your Mind: 13-Episode 8 Volume Library

01 AMPBEIYM Vol. 1 (Part 1)
02 AMPBEIYM Vol. 1 (Part 2)
03 AMPBEIYM Vol. 2 (Part 1 - Paul Thomas Mix)
04 AMPBEIYM Vol. 2 (Part 2 - Annie Nightingale Mix)
05 AMPBEIYM Vol. 3
06 AMPBEIYM Vol. 4
07 AMPBEIYM Vol. 5
08 AMPBEIYM Vol. 6
09 AMPBEIYM Vol. 7 (Part 1)
10 AMPBEIYM Vol. 7 (Part 2)
11 AMPBEIYM Vol. 7 (Part 3)
12 AMPBEIYM Vol. 7 (Part 4)
13 AMPBEIYM Vol. 8

Similarly, DJ Food has generously made a multitude of his mixes available at djfood.org for your listening pleasure. And NinjaTune has 37 of DJ Food's Solid Steel mixes uncut on their Soundcloud page.

This latest musical discovery has really pushed these two libraries to the front of the line. In the weeks ahead I'll be further-exploring the IDM / trip-hop / dub / psychedelic / and ambient wonders of DJ Food and Amorphous Androgynous. When I emerge from the funky depths, I'll go on to explore FSOL's thirty other aliases -

• Aircut
• Amorphous Androgynous
• Art Science Technology
• Candese
• Deep Field
• Dope Module
• EMS:Piano
• Heads Of Agreement
• Homeboy
• Humanoid
• Indo Tribe
• Intelligent Communication
• Mental Cube
• Metropolis
• Part-Sub-Merged
• Polemical
• Q
• Sand Sound Folly
• Semtex
• Semi Real
• Six Oscillators in Remittance
• Smart Systems
• Suburban Domestic
• T.Rec
• The Far-out Son Of Lung
• The Jazz Mags
• The Orgone Accumulator
• Unit 2449
• Yage
• Yunie
• Zeebox

...I've got some work ahead of me.

Tune in to the title track from The Illectrik Hoax below.



And check out the ambient epic - Lifeforms from 1994.



UPDATE: Before the end of the evening I was able to acquire the remaining stray albums and DJ sets missing from the above catalog. Now I've added:

1993 - Amorphous Androgynous - Tales Of Ephidrina
1994 - Future Sound of London - ISDN (Black Edition)
2005 - Amorphous Androgynous - Alice in Ultraland
2008 - Amorphous Androgynous - The Mello Hippo Disco Show
2008 - Amorphous Androgynous - The Peppermint Tree & The Seeds of Superconsciousness
2013 - Amorphous Androgynous - The Cartel Vol. 1
2013 - Amorphous Androgynous - The Cartel Vol. 2
2014 - Amorphous Androgynous - The Cartel Remixes
2015 - Amorphous Androgynous - A Monstrous Psychededlic Bubble Exploding in Your Mind - The Wizards of Oz (2CD)

__________________
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innerspaceboy

Originally published 11/22/2014

Over the last eight months I’ve conducted a multi-tiered experiment to develop a complete system of music discovery on the web.

The first stage of the experiment analyzed the top aggregate metadata websites to see which yielded the most productive media recommendations.

The test began with one of the longest-established contenders -

STAGE ONE - LAST.FM

I provided 25,367 scrobbled tracks between March 20th and November 22nd, (an average of 102 tracks per day) to build a viable sample set of my listening preferences.

The case study -

LastFm breaks your recommendations into genre tabs, which is a plus-3 for organization.

The resulting artists, however are far from enlightening. Nearly every result was either an artist already in my play history, or a token “poster-boy” artist for their genre.

For electronica (a terrible term we're still trying to bury,) the top suggested artists were Faithless and Orbital.

For jazz, it suggested Charlie Parker, Eric Dolphy, Lee Morgan, Albert Ayler and Cecil Taylor (appealing to the free and avant-garde jazz trends of my listening)

And for modern classical avant-garde, Pierre Schaeffer, Terry Riley, Kronos Quartet, Pierre Boulez, Michael Nyman and Arvo Pärt.

There were no surprises among them, which I suppose is to be expected from a popularity-contest recommendation system. I don't fault LastFm for using this method; it's simply not a resource I would utilize to find anything new.

STAGE TWO - STREAMING SERVICES

Sites evaluated:

RDIO - Rdio

SPOTIFY - https://www.spotify.com

RHAPSODY - Rhapsody - Music Streaming
SOUNDCLOUD - https://soundcloud.com

GROOVESHARK - http://grooveshark.com

8TRACKS - 8tracks internet radio | Free music playlists | Best app for music

After repeatedly giving these sites a try over this past year, I've been disappointed every time by the lack of user control, the low bitrate of their streams, the advertisements, and most of all the universally abysmal selection of available tracks. The fundamental flaw with these services is that if the rightsholder(s) of any particular record haven’t worked out a deal with these services, you won’t likely find their content any time soon.

And furthermore, there's an excellent editorial from this user who gave up on Spotify after 400 days of compounding problems.

STAGE THREE - MUSIC BLOGS

A few years ago, I subscribed to a handful of absolutely exceptional music blogs. But one after another, these sites were taken off the web for claims of copyright violation. Most were sharing massively obscure content not available for purchase anywhere on the web, but by the end of the last year all of my favorite blogs had been taken down.

Still, new blogs are born every day, and sites like Hypemachine and NPR track the most active and best-ranked blogs at the links below.

Hypemachine's searchable index of 800 blogs - Index of Music Blogs / Hype Machine

NPR's most-recommended blogs - NPR Music: New Music, Music Reviews and Music News : NPR

And the ever-popular GORILLA VS. BEAR

But if you're more interested in a daily, up-to-the-minute feed of new and interesting tracks, perhaps this guide is more your style.

STAGE FOUR - A GUIDE TO GENRE SUBREDDITS

This list organizes the most active and most popular subreddits for every genre you can think of. It also includes composite lists grouping related subreddits together into a single stream.

One of the better subs is r/vintageobscura which has strict policies for its users -

- Under 30K Views on Youtube video and related videos by the same artist.

- Under 50K listeners on Last.fm.

- Recording dates ranging between 1930 and 1980

They're looking for space age bachelor pad music, early electronic, proto-punk, library music, jazz, chamber pop, exotica, krautrock, ambient, and space rock - all of my favorite things.

Vintage Obscura also has a web radio station on radd.it - radd.it!

STAGE FIVE - RATEYOURMUSIC

But if you want simple, hands-down, best-of-the-year/decade/genre/artist/etc lists - rateyourmusic.com is the answer.

The rateyourmusic site is an online collaborative metadata database cataloging 1,026,663 artists, 3,065,684 releases, and 37,955,810 user-contributed ratings as of April 2015.

Search their index here - http://rateyourmusic.com/lists

(Or browse by category at the right of your screen at the link above)

Custom user-defined charts - http://rateyourmusic.com/customchart

Or start from scratch here - http://rateyourmusic.com/find/

And The GNOD Engine

Or if you prefer a down-and-dirty text-based artist cloud, mapping related artists by proximity, check out Music-Map - The Tourist Map of Music.

They also have a recommendation engine called Gnoosic - Discover new Music.

These just scratch the surface, but will introduce you to more music than you could hear in several lifetimes.

WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
PUTTING ALL THIS DATA TO WORK

From pp35-46 of
The Innerspace Library Reboot Manual
2014 Ed. v2.75

All right, so you've found a new microgenre or an artist you really dig. What do you do with all this data?

Here is the official Innerspace Guide.

1. Discover something which would be of value to the archive.

2. Research the history of genre, historical/social context, etc.

3. Read the Wikipedia entry for the genre and log all relevant artists.

4. Read related literature (e.g. Mark Pendergast's The Ambient Century in the case of ambient music, The Penguin Guide to Jazz, all related manifestos, the Rough Guides series, biographical texts, etc.)

5. Check for essentials Collages of the genre on the world’s largest private tracker. Download all as reference material.

6. Generate a Custom Chart at rateyourmusic.com with the following parameters:

TOP + ALBUMS + ALL-TIME + ONLY INCLUDE GENRES: + [GENRE] + SUB-GENRES + AS RATED BY RYM USERS

7. Log the top 20 entries / albums with a score of 3.5 or higher.

8. Cross-reference Collages, Wiki recommendations, literature highlights, and RYM Top 20 to find recordings named in 3 or more sources. These are the albums you should pursue first.

9. Obtain all box sets and compilations related to genre.

10. If there is a label directly associated with the genre, pick up a complete label archive (such as Ninja Tune, Warp, Ohr, Nonesuch, Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde, Command, Chess, Philips Prospective 21e siecle, FAX +49-69450464, et al.

11. Pick up all albums, EPs and singles from the artists within the top 20 release map.

12. Structure %album% tags and folders chronologically by date of release: "[%year%] %album%" and uniformly tag the %genre% value to populate as a chronological autoplaylist of the genre as a whole in MediaMonkey or a similar player with dynamic playlist support.

13. Construct a tier of standard playlists:

A. ~60-100 disc map of albums best-representing the genre.

B. Record label playlists (if applicable.)

C. A top 10 essential albums set (as determined by metascore.)

D. Separate playlist for featured artists with 50 or more albums in their discography.

14. Listen to recordings, beginning with albums from step 6, followed by the top 10 essentials list, and then first 2 LPs from each artist, and so on.

15. As most of these recordings will likely be decades out of print or have never been produced in a digital format, you will not be able to purchase (or even preview) these albums from commercial sources like iTunes. Utilize other resources to acquire these albums, explore and discover the ones which resonate most with you, and purchase original issues via Discogs and your local shops specializing in rare and import vinyl.



CLOSING THOUGHTS

While this methodical and systematic approach to musical discovery may appear somewhat “clinical,” it is an efficient and refined means of employing the rich systems of metadata available and the largest assembled music databases in the history of recorded sound. This should prove particularly advantageous for the music scholar faced with the daunting challenge of poring over decades of rare recordings.

By no means do I intend to downplay the critical role your local used record shop owner plays in the search for new music - no amount of metadata can match his or her years of experience living the sounds you seek. But for the eager listeners who do not have access to such a shop, there are multiple resources like those described above which return a wealth of information you will never find on popular streaming services like Spotify, Rhapsody, or Rdio.

Through this system of discovery, you can combine the available information from blogs, literature, RYM, the Wikipedia, trackers, box sets, label archives and your local record gurus and organize the resulting data in an accessible fashion which will inspire many rewarding purchases for your library.

Happy hunting!

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innerspaceboy

A big thank-you to the entire MB community - I'm delighted to have found a corner of the web for thoughtful discussions of music and other impassioned interests.

My journal's first nine months have been very active, and I thank Trollheart for all his hard work keeping up with the Weekly Member Journal updates thread.

Thank you to all who read and enjoy my content. It's wonderful to have a community of musical peers.

But full-speed ahead and on to new content! It's curious - and I'd love to hear MB's expert input on the subject -

What Lies Ahead for the Future of Music Blogger Journalism?

Chuck Von Rospach wrote a piece in March titled The Future of Blogging is... Blogging in which he examines the global trends of the blogosphere. He addresses the "Post-Blog Era" discussed in a feature on SixColors.com and the conflicting opinions as to the present state of blogging in general.

A user in Reddit's Let's Talk Music subforum called 2005-20013 the "peak-blog era" when discussing the future of music discovery. This proposed date range corresponds with my own music blog's peak readership. In 2012 I had 23,000 annual views, but year for year this has steadily declined to 14,700 views in 2015.

One possibility is that my content has simply become too specialized for general audiences. Whereas in 2012 I posted acquisitions of autographed Parliament/Funkadelic LPs, by 2015 I had moved on to discuss trends in socio-musical culture and technology, and focused onseveral milestones of early electronic music.

But some of these recent articles and threads suggest that blog readership worldwide is in decline. Still others proclaim this a renaissance for long-form blog journalism in the content-rich vacuum created by the explosion of listicle articles from sites like Buzzfeed.com.

Another factor affecting the music blogging community is the prominence of streaming services like Spotify. Listeners less-inclined to read a longform article will surely opt instead for the convenience and immediacy of these services' content.

Statista has some interesting numbers to contribute to this conversation. Looking particularly at Wordpress performance over the years cited above, it appears that pageviews have steadily risen each year from 2007 to the fall of 2014.



What do you think? Will readership continue to rise into the next generation of listeners? Or will a social media focused community of listicles cause the longform article to fall from favor?

UPDATE: A fellow blogger offered the following in response to this entry:

To which I responded:

A sound perspective. I too think this will be the case. For my own blog, I don't count it as a loss, as those who favor instant gratification are unlikely to be among my readers in the first place. But it does concern me for the welfare of society and internet culture at large.

It's the classic dystopian struggle - Network all over again. And passive media consumption has been a hot documentary topic of late, with Zeitgeist producer Peter Joseph's series, Culture in Decline, Adam Curtis' The Century of the Self, and the free documentaries hosted by Metanoia-Films.org such as Psywar (the real battlefield is the mind), Plutocracy, and Human | Resources : Social Engineering in the 20th Century.

These films examine the post-industrial era problem of goods surplus and product efficiency and how they spelled doom for modern capitalism. Together, a reprogramming of western culture to consume goods and information passively and ceaselessly, and the implementation of planned obsolescence ensured that the capitalist dogma would remain intact.

I see the effects of this system in media outlets like the increasingly-commercialized internet and in the way western culture consumes it. All of the elements above - cultural reprogramming, consumerist propaganda, and an increasingly commercialized internet - these foster consumers' desire for "fast food journalism."

He also offered an excellent article for further reading - Is Google Making Us Stupid?

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innerspaceboy

Revisiting a few familiar favorites this evening.

Every listener has a few - one or two exceptional records which transport them to a metaphysical beyond, or one could say, records that take them to church. One unparalleled example is Glenn Goins calling down the Mothership at Parliament Funkadelic's performance in Houston in 1976.



But my personal favorite out-of-body musical experience is Spiritualized's Ladies & Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space. The entire album is a neo-psychedelic gospel noisepop anthem and one of the finest and most cohesive works of the shoegaze genre.
J Spaceman and his band are accompanied by Dr John on the piano and the Hammond B3, as well as the voices of The London Community Gospel Choir. There are touches of hammer dulcimer, autoharp, accordion, string and horn sections, and pedal steel making for one brilliantly-refined heroin-inspired masterpiece.

The 17-minute closing epic, "Cop Shoot Cop" is a monumental performance. The track's foundation is a simple gospel blues oscillation between two fundamental chords. J's understated half-spoken vocals usher the listener through a series of verses varying on a primary lyrical theme, each punctuated by twelve bars of distortion pedal punching noise which culminates after the final verse with 6 minutes of an unrelenting eruption of cacophonous clamor. Impressively, the hyperactive electric bass which has been walking up and down scales for the duration of the piece slowly introduces and repeats the root note of the track and guides the performers through the fog machine and wall-of-sound pandemonium back to the familiar gospel structure for a few minutes of meditative peace while Spaceman repeats, "and I will love you... and I will love you..." for the album's finale.

This is a record best-experienced in your finest pair of circumaural headphones, and bested only by the 3-disc UK Expanded Edition.

Ladies and gentlemen... we are floating in space.

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innerspaceboy

This was a night like any other night. I returned home from work and put on a familiar favorite record. A quick skim of Facebook and a forum or two are part of my routine method of relaxation before I get in to the evening's project. But, as fate would have it, this would not be just any ordinary evening.

I'd felt disheartened of late, fearing that my obsessive exploration of 20th century music had exhausted all possible niche and microgenres and that there were no real surprises left to experience. I understood each of the major artistic musical shifts which had occurred aligning with the ever-changing social identity and value set of each generation. It was a melancholic notion - that perhaps I'd heard it all.

But this evening, something caught my eye as I scrolled passively through my Facebook feed. WFMU had shared an image from Alex Ross' website. (Ross is the author of the ultimate guide to the music of the 20th century - The Rest is Noise.) The image was a print advert which appeared in the Village Voice on June 19, 1969. The ad reads:

Well that certainly grabbed my attention. I jumped over to RYM and looked up Partch's most celebrated work, which was Delusion of the Fury. Cross-referencing the title at Discogs.com revealed that a 3LP box set edition was issued in 1971 with a book featuring the unique instruments featured on the recording as well as a bonus LP showcasing each instrument.



Only the album's opening track was available on YouTube, so I queued it up and was wowed at first-listen. Before the track had completed, I tracked down a clean copy of the deluxe edition for my collection and it is presently en-route to my address.

Thank you, Mr. Partch for dispelling my silly fear that I'd heard it all, and thank you WFMU for waving the 1969 advert in front of my face.

December will be a month of microtonal bliss.

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