I’ve been listening to the same music every night when I go to sleep 10+ years now. Weird endorsement; I’ve listened to it with more attention plenty of times too. But it’s particularly good for going to sleep; calm, interesting, and comfortably familiar.

That music is GAS, Werner Voigt’s ambient techno project (Bandcamp, Youtube). The primary collection is Nah und Fern, four albums that were made over 1996–2000. In 2017 he released a new GAS album, Narkopop. Followed in 2018 by Rausch and 2021 Die Lange Marsch (a sort of remix). I like the first four most.

Ambient music is pretty hit or miss. For every brilliant work like Music for Airports or Aphex Twin’s early music there’s a zillion gormless electronica and “earth fart” recordings that fail to inspire. Furniture music is supposed to be in the background, sure. But still high enough quality to be appreciated.

GAS succeeds. It has just enough of a beat (sometimes) to make time flow without being overwhelming like regular techno or something rhythmically complex like Autechre. The sounds are richly textured with a bit of fuzz and noise to make it organic. And I like the slightly broody or sinister tone. Not scary, but they make me happy I’m snug in my home under the blankets.

I continue to be obsessed with Orville Peck. The new pleasure is his video of "Jackson" with drag queen Trixie Mattel. Compared to other Peck numbers this one is way more upbeat and light. They also play perfect homage to a classic pop and Western song while gaying it up in a fun, non-overt way. It fits right in with Peck’s career of playing classic country with love and respect but making it his own.

The song is from the 60s. Written and first performed by Billy Edd Wheeler as a straight up, fairly slow country song. The Jerry Leiber lyrics are great, too, a puffed up rooster bragging about how he’s gonna cheat on his wife and her just being completely unimpressed by his strutting.

We got married in a fever / Hotter than a pepper sprout

The lyrics get modified a bit and the song gets spunkier in the best known version by June Carter and Johnny Cash. Still a country song but now played with a lot of uptempo spark. But my favorite version might be Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood looking like recently deprogrammed cult members. It’s not the best arrangement but there’s something just so authentically late 60s about it. Also it’s the B-Side for Nancy Sinatra’s Bond title song and how weird is that?

Anyway, Mattel and Peck do an excellent version of Jackson. The costuming for Orville Peck in particular is fascinating; I can’t stop staring at his ankles twisting in those amazing gold boots. In the Behind the Scenes video they say "We just really look like if neither the North or the South won. The gays won." I’m not very familiar with Trixie Mattel but I’ve come to appreciate her outlandish makeup and look. She’s perfect performing the wife in this video, just the right touch of mocking and sass.

I’ve been greatly enjoying gay country & western musician Orville Peck’s new cover of the song Fancy. No video yet, but give it a listen, maybe before or while you read this post.

Fancy was written and first performed by Bobbie Gentry in 1969. But the song is best known as the Reba McEntire 1991 cover. Both performances are pretty similar, upbeat and with doowop backup singers. It’s a great song, but it feels a bit dated and strange.

Peck’s album version is quite different. He plays it spare and tragic. The song comes off a lot more dark and sad this way and to me, more meaningful. Worth noting this variant is unique to the EP; Peck’s live versions from last year I can find online (1, 2, 3) are more upbeat and read a lot like the Reba version.

But the real change Peck makes is in a single lyric.

Staring back from the looking glass
There stood a woman where a half grown boy had stood

The original lyric is "half grown kid"; it’s remarkable Peck chose to bend it to gender-specific. It instantly recasts the whole song as a transgender tragedy. Which then gives so many of the other lyrics more powerful meaning. "To thine own self be true", "Said I was gonna be a lady someday though I don’t know when or how". "I couldn’t see spending the rest of my life with my head hung down in shame." It even gives the unlikely name "Fancy" a new entrendre as a chosen name, maybe a drag name.

A gay man singing a woman’s song in a baritone is always going to queer it up a little bit. But as the Esquire article notes Sam Hunt covered the song last year and it just sounded like a man singing a woman’s song, nothing too unusual. I give Peck’s LGBT stage persona plus his smart choice of changing that single word to infuse the song with something new. I sure hope he does a video for it; both Gentry and McEntire have elaborate story-telling videos for the song and I’d like to see him take a swing at that.

Peck’s still out on the fringes of country and western but happily C&W is pretty broad and welcoming. His big breakthrough might yet be Legends Never Die, his new duet with Shania Twain. The song’s not particularly queer but it’s great and must sound terrific on the radio. The video is fantastic and pretty gay.

Here’s your one chance Fancy, don’t let me down
Here’s your one chance Fancy, don’t let me down

I’ve been obsessed lately with Blixa Bargeld, the front man for Einstüzende Neubauten (and formerly with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds). He’s aged remarkably well! The middle picture is early 80s Blixa doing his more-heroin-chic-than-Peter-Murphy look. The other two images are from his latest videos where he looks like your cool degenerate uncle. Looks much healthier with a little meat on his bones.

Looks aside the new album Alles in Allem is excellent. Taken as a whole it’s a love letter to Berlin, with four songs explicitly about various neighborhoods and the whole thing having a Berlin cabaret feel. The two videos are a good place to start: Ten Grand Goldie and Alles in Allem. But the whole album is great and very listenable. If like me you mostly think of Einstüzende as the arty machine noise group from the 80s, you missed their turn to more lyricism. Still plenty of unusual percussion sources though, not to mention Blixa’s trademark shriek. May they have another forty years as productive.

I’m about to go to Bali, home to Gamelan, one of the most interesting musical traditions in the world. Equal parts rhythmic and melodic, amazing harmony and counterpoint, and an interesting participatory music culture playing one-of-a-kind musical instrument ensembles. I’m fortunate enough to have a friend who has studied gamelan in Bali. Here’s what Chris wrote me as on what I may hear when I visit. (He also gave me a copy of A House in Bali, a 1947 book about a Canadian musician who went to Bali to study.)

Most all links to video or music files, give it a listen!

Style: Gamelan “Gong Kebyar”

This is the style that is most associated with Balinese gamelan today. It’s a style that came into its own in the early 1900s-1930s, evolving away from the slower Javanese-style court gamelan that preceded it. A hallmark characteristic of this virtuosic style is the “kotekan”, or interlocking wherein different players each play one half of the melody at high speed and it’s which are zippered together at high speed (example here). It is also quite often accompanied by dance.

Jagra Parwata: This is a virtuosic gong kebyar piece, one of my favorites. I believe it won the All-Bali competition about ten years ago. It’s also the first piece I ever learned to play on Gamelan – a true “trial by fire”. Note the loose interpretation of time; it changes tempos both languidly and abruptly. This is a classic aspect of gong kebyar.

Taruna Jaya: This is the most famous of the gong kebyar dance pieces, created around 1950. For a Balinese female dancer, this is the single most important piece and is used as a required dance to judge the All-Bali competition. Taruna Jaya stands for “victorious youth”, and is intended to convey the wide range of emotions of an impetuous youthful princess. It is danced by a young girl who (as it was described to me by my Balinese teachers) is pretending to be a young man pretending to be a young girl. There’s a good description here. Carefully controlled, intense eye and finger movement are the hallmarks of this piece, and much of Balinese dance. The dance requires so much energy that most Taruna Jaya dancers peak out at around 15 years of age.

Style: Gamelan “Gender Wayang”

This is a ceremonial form of gamelan, used for religious ceremonies (weddings, tooth filings, etc) and also puppet shows. As opposed to gong kebyar, this style is played with either two or four players who sit facing each other, each side playing one half of the melody in a fashion similar to the gong kebyar kotekans.

Here’s a video from someone playing at a local temple festival. Here’s another video of someone practicing his half of the ankat ankatan melody at about half speed; it gives you a good idea of how both hands work together and how half of the melody sounds. This song is the first one I learned on the gender wayang, because it’s pretty simple and repetitive. It translates to “walking music” and is used as filler during the parts of the puppet shows when the characters are supposed to be “walking around on a long journey”.

Gending Rebong: This is a song used during puppet shows when two characters are expressing their love for each other.

Style: Balaganjur

This is a marching form of gamelan. You will see this in parades and cremation ceremonies. It has all the elements of gong kebyar but is much simpler and more repetitive and is easy enough that every villager learns a couple belaganjur patterns so they can take part in ceremonies for members of their village. In that sense it’s the form of gamelan that most non-musician villagers take part in at least once or twice a year.

The Belaganjur of group Jaya Sakti: I don’t think this even has a formal name, but it’s the most awesome belaganjur I’ve ever heard. I love how it starts out incredibly simple and, simply through tempo change along, seems to transform from something calm and relaxing into something violent and exciting, and then back again. If this doesn’t make you want to march, nothing will.

I have no idea how I find new music anymore, but here’s two mix tapes I’ve been listening to a lot lately thanks to mentions on Metafilter.

Nicolas Jaar uses techno mixing techniques to work slow tempo music into lyrical, meditative pieces. His two hour set on BBC Essential Mix is absolutely amazing, an eclectic and fresh mix of various music that’s incredibly thoughtful. Jaar also runs the Clown & Sunset label. (MeFi thread).

DJ Shadow is justly famous for his crate digging and hip-hop derived mixing, although honestly other than Endtroducing I haven’t like much in his CD releases. But the All Basses Covered set is absolutely fantastic. He was infamously kicked off the decks after 20 minutes at a stupid South Beach club for being “too future”. Happily he cleaned up the set and put it online. It has a lot of depth and humor; the chopped & screwed Simpsons theme is particularly clever. (MeFi thread).

Today I learned that one of the key themes in the electronica soundtrack for the film Liquid Sky is an arrangement of a 1723 piece by baroque composer Marin Marais. Compare for yourself: Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris, Noon and Afternoon from Liquid Sky.

Liquid Sky has always been one of my favorite films. The plot’s ridiculous. But the music, the art direction, the costumes, the acting, it’s all beautiful and unique. A particularly heady film for 1982. Sadly my love for the film is not shared by all.

I came to all this while listening to Nicolas Jaar’s essential mix, excellent listening itself. He mixes the baroque piece on top of some Aphex Twin around 19 minutes in.

I just organized my entire music collection into well tagged MP3 and M4A files and couldn’t be happier; both iTunes and Sonos work better with clean metadata. The majority of my music comes from CDs which I’d ripped over the years. Between the crappy 128kbps MP3 of the earliest rips and the inconsistent metadata I decided to start over with a clean rip from a ripping service. I’ve also got some stuff bought or downloaded from various sources (mostly Amazon) with varying quality that I had to fit in. 1200 albums in all, 300GB.

A clean rip of the CDs was a great place to begin. I took all my discs to ReadyToPlay, a service down in Palo Alto. They aren’t the cheapest (I paid $1.40/disc) but they came well recommended and their website does a good job explaining how they take extra care with metadata. I was really happy with the result of their work and enthusiastically recommend them.

ReadyToPlay’s setup is a few robots loading discs into CD-ROM drives with dbPowerAmp doing the ripping and conversion. They ripped to Apple Lossless (m4a); now that Apple has opened the format it seems the best choice. ReadyToPlay licenses high quality metadata from All Music Guide and other sources so album and artist names are much more accurate than I’ve seen from free sources. They also do some hand editing and data entry as well as careful handling of the CDs and cases. Money well spent.

ReadyToPlay got me started with a metadata schema. Just 18 genres without silly micro classification. Artist vs. Album Artist vs. Composer is a headache, particularly with Classical music, but iTunes mostly does the right thing even if Sonos is a bit confusing. One clever thing ReadyToPlay did was stuff detailed genre info into the Grouping tag, so while Autechre shows up as “Electronic” in the basic Genre I can also find it in iTunes via a search for “Techno” or “IDM” or “Experimental”.

I didn’t really need to edit any of the ReadyToPlay metadata, it was correct from the start. The other music was more of a mess. I’m surprised at how poorly labelled Bleep and Amazon’s early MP3 sales were. It took a few hours to collapse down the genres, fix up mislabeled album titles, and try to figure out what some of these unlabeled BBC Essential Mix tracks really were. But all that work is done and now I’ve got a great, easy to use music collection.

Anyone want to buy several boxes of used CDs?

Portishead’s new album Third is due to be released on April 29. It’s highly anticipated; their 1994 and 1997 albums were amazing and then the band imploded, unable to produce. Fans have been waiting nervously. But if your ethics are flexible you haven’t had to wait quite so long; a near-final edit of the album was leaked to the Internet on March 6. First to BitTorrent, then to Usenet, then to YouTube. And the album is great. I’ve preordered my copy of the real thing.

If you were politely waiting for the actual release, yesterday a full copy of the album showed up for streaming on last.fm. It looks legitimate, branded “last.fm exclusive.” Except the streams sound identical to the March 6 release. Including the abrupt end of the end of the first track, Silence, a rough edit. And including the IM popup sound 2:14 into track 5, Plastic, sounding like an error on the initial pirate’s computer. Why is last.fm distributing these glitched tracks?

I love services that passively record things I do. So I was excited to find Audioscrobbler from last.fm. It silently watches my Winamp and Squeezebox traffic and tells a server what I’m listening to. Simple, well executed.

What last.fm is missing is doing anything useful with that data. The site has some complex dashboard social network thing that is impenetrable to me. And it has a music recommendation function which is pretty good, but too junked up by crappy quality free music to be enjoyable.

So hooray for third party graphs! lastgraph is a simple web site that plots your music listening history from last.fm. The tool is a bit awkward, but the resulting graphs are beautiful and readable.

I hope last.fm has already made the appropriate overture to provide these graphs themselves. Simplify the creation tool a bit, publish a PNG, and fix poor Édith’s name and you’ve got a fine product feature.

I’ve been listening to Woody Guthrie’s 1940 album Dust Bowl Ballads. It’s mostly pretty grim folk blues, the misery of people fleeing the economic disaster of the Oaklahoma Dust Bowl. So I was a bit surprised to find this funny little sexual entendre hidden in his Dust Pneumonia Blues.

If it wasn’t for choppin my hoe would turn to rust
If it wasn’t for choppin my hoe would turn to rust
I can’t find a woman in this black old Texas dust

“Choppin” must be what the boys called it back in the 30s.

One of the best features of the new Amazon MP3 store is the new album music preview. Single click to preview all the tracks, all Ajax loading in the page. 30 second snippets from each track automatically play, cleverly from the middle of the track, not the start. Simple and effective.

Thanks to last.fm I’ve learned I need some Air in my life, but their albums vary quite a bit. The previews are great; I’m finding I like the older stuff like Moon Safari and Primiers Symptômes best.

They’re serious about the MP3 store. I just found they’re offering a 20% referral fee for all sales via links from Amazon Associates. That’s about $2 an album. Some music blog somewhere is about to get very wealthy. And Apple must feel a little nervous. Big play.

The new Amazon MP3 store is awesome. $0.89 or $0.99 a song, $9 or so an album, and simple MP3 files with no DRM or iTunes nonsense. The MP3s come with great ID3 tags and excellent quality 256kbps encoding (sometimes VBR). The downloader app is even decent; I think it’s there to make life simple for people who aren’t download experts.

This store is it, folks. We’ve been whining for years that buying music online sucked and we got better results stealing it. Well, that’s not true anymore. If Amazon sells a piece of music there’s no advantage to stealing it other than thieving something for free.

Proper respects to Warp Records whose online store Bleep has been selling unencumbered MP3s for almost four years now. Bleep is awesome but it has a limited catalog. Amazon will be the big time.

Overhead the albatross hangs motionless upon the air
And deep beneath the rolling waves
In labyrinths of coral caves
The echo of a distant tide
Comes willowing across the sand
And everything is green and submarine

And no one showed us to the land
And no one knows the wheres or whys
And something stirs and something tries
And starts to climb towards the light

Thanks to Metafilter I’ve enjoyed watching an old Beatles video for the song Rain. That’s one of my favourite overlooked Beatles songs and the video is just lovely. Hard to imagine that music like this could survive in today’s hipster ironic world. “Rain” is just straightforward and sweet and a little goofy. And the boys are cute and nice, not snarling tortured artists hating their world or gangsta thugs demeaning women.

I tend to be pretty snidely ironic myself. It’s an obnoxious reflex, a lazy substitute for actual wit. Why not speak plainly and pleasantly? I mostly fail to banish my own irony, but I have at least learned to appreciate honest things.

I’ve talked before about how Sonic Youth was one of my few contacts with hipness when I was a nerdy high school kid. I was excited to learn that their first album release is finally out on CD. It was caught up in the legal mess of SST records and unavailable for a long time. Now it’s out and only $8.50 on Amazon.

Oh yeah, and it’s still awesome. It’s much less rock than most of their music, more of a droning rush of sound thing going on. The original EP is just five tracks; the rerelease includes a live set from the same year. Haven’t even listened to that yet, just excited to have the album I remember from high school.

The Burning Spear • I Dreamed I Dream • She Is Not Alone • I Don’t Want To Push It • The Good and the Bad

I love non-dance electronic music, glitchy groups like Autechre and Pole and mellow stuff like Vladislav Delay and Boards of Canada. Electronic music is notoriously difficult to categorize, so it’s often hard to find new things.

And I really like the new thing I just found, music published by Thinner, a German electronic music label that’s put out 80 releases over the last 5 years. The catalog currently totals 60 hours and 5.5 gigs of MP3. I’ve never heard of most of their artists, but I stumbled into them because of their Vladislav Delay release. They characterize themselves as “dub inspired electronic music”. No idea what the hell that means; there sure isn’t any Scratch Perry going on, but it’s mostly mellow and noodly electronica that’s interesting and without an annoying 120 bpm pulse. The online album covers have some great animated graphic design, too.

The best thing? It’s all free! CC licensed. As I write this I’m listening to track 1 from Digitalverein. It’s easiest to download the entire zip for a release. You may note the release naming is consistent for easy download scripting.

“The Surviving Bee Gees”

It goes without saying, but Jimi Hendrix rocks. Earlier today I was listening to King Crimson and was sadly thinking “was all 60s music this awful and pretentious?”. Then I queued up Are You Experienced? and on came the sublime “May This Be Love” (aka Waterfall) and my faith was restored. Blues influenced rock? Good. Progressive rock? Bad. Next up: Little Wing.

For the last 24 hours I’ve been listening over and over again to this new new Thelonious Monk / John Coltrane release from the Five Spot era. It’s absolutely brilliant, overwhelming in its beauty. If you care at all about jazz rush out and buy a copy of this now.

The existence of this recording is a miracle, something like finding a previously covered up section of ceiling in the Sistine Chapel. It comes from the legendary 1957 collaboration between Monk and Coltrane, at the height of their development, of which there are almost no recordings. Until someone stumbled into a tape in the Library of Congress archives this year. And it was good.

But forget all that, just listen to this recording. It’s amazing.

I am a computer
I have been programmed to dance
I am here to digitize you

Bleep, the online music store for Warp Records, is awesome. DRM free MP3 for cheap and convenient.

I just went there to get the new Autechre release Untilted and was surprised to see Bleep is now selling FLAC as well as MP3. FLAC, if you don’t know, is a lossless compressed format. Giant files, but “perfect quality” for the audio nerds. $10 for the album on MP3, $14 for FLAC. Honestly, high bit rate MP3 is fine for me. But it’s nice to have the option.

BoingBoing notes that Bleep will also be selling XviD for a new video collaboration between Chris Cunningham and Aphex Twin. I’d probably never buy this video if I had to get a physical object, but I’ll definitely buy a download.

One of my favourite bands, Pink Martini, just released their second album. Hang on Little Tomato comes seven years after their fantastic debut album Sympathique, neatly extending their cool lounge style beyond the standards to new material they’ve written themselves.

I cringe to call the music “lounge”, since that implies a sort of faux-clever cynical hipster sound. Nothing against the US Esquivel set, but part of what’s lovely about Pink Martini is they play their music with sincerity, and are enjoyed straight ahead, without irony. They’re calling themselves a little orchestra, that seems about right. They’re also first class musicians playing a lovely style of music that’s mostly abandoned.

But listen for yourself. Click the Pink Martini radio link on this page. On Sympathique I recommend “Amado Mio” or “Andalucia” for a quick flavour.

When I was in high school the really cool outcast kids all smoked, drove old VWs, and listened to Sonic Youth. I was mostly a nerd, but sometime around my junior year I got a bit cooler and started listening to KTRU and hanging out at The Axiom.

But I never quite felt cool enough to listen to Sonic Youth. It was just a bit too raw and punk for my nerdishness. Now I’m an adult and my music doesn’t identify me and I’m glad to say Sonic Youth still rocks. Sister, Evol, Dirty, even Washing Machine are all just great. I feel both alienated and hip.

I continue to look for a copy of their first album. At this point I’m almost ready to rip an 18 year old cassette tape.

The advertisement said the pleasure’s everlasting.