The Rhythm of the NIght - Corona

[link] This brings in a new dance subgenre: Eurocance/High NRG.  From 1993, this comes after the house stuff that I've been talking about.  The tempo is faster.  It's synth/sequencer driven.  Really really good, this one.  The big hook is everything.

Finally - CeCe Peniston

[link] This is one of the mixes of this song that falls under the Piano House subgenre.  I really like the organ progression that drive the B part,which is later picked up in piano. A nice complement to the strong vocal.  As a keyboardist it's really attractive to have songs that are driven by the keyboard chords, which the whole tempo is here.

Italo-House and Hip House

I listened to some examples of both of these genres today trying to figure out a difference.  From what I heard there isn't much of one, except for perhaps where the artists are from.  They both have piano and synth hook chords and both can have rap elements.  Both have diva singing (or samples) and sort of gender-neutral soul-ish vocals.  I like and dislike examples of both.  Italo- does seem more upbeat and anthemic, whereas Hip House tends to be more edgy.  But there seem to be huge overlaps.
Here is a Chicago Hip House mix

(Hip House is most associated with Chicago DJs in the late 80s)

Here is an Italo-House mix (also called Piano House)

Italo-house is associated with the producer Gianfranco Bortolotti

In these particular examples, the latter is more atmospheric and instrumental.  There are a lot of mixes on Youtube and they vary all over the place.

Everybody Everybody - Black Box

[link] Love this song, from 1990.  It was a staple in my 80s mix when I was an informal, amateur DJ. I'm not an expert on the genre, but the sub-genre that Black Box is described as is Italo-house or Italian.  The defining characteristic is the specific electric piano chords.  That sound, and the particular chords and chord progressions are really what make it.  Also, the tempo is slightly below the faster rave music of that same era.  Everybody Everybody has an infectiousness and accessibility that is really noticeable.  When it goes on, people dance.

The Sorceress Amy

[link] Finally got a decent recording of this (decent enough for now; I screwed up the ending). I've been working on playing standing up.  The strap I'm using is a Mobiusstrap.  Works really well.

Alison - Slowdive

[link] A more canonical shoegaze sound from these guys.  This way of making music defies the melodic convention, although there are usually melody elements present in the vocals.  The instrumental sound is sort of a color faucet that is pointed outward and manipulated.  The effects on the guitars and sustains and reverb in the other audio elements set up a background, which is then manipulated and sculpted by the performers. I think the narrative content of the music can be huge, such that the vocals themselves are often free to go abstract.  In the case of the Cocteau Twins, one of the founders of this sound, the vocals typically went into experimental and conceptual (if not sonic per se) spaces that musical composition usually reserves for the instruments.  The era of shoegaze was pretty short. But it never really ended, either.  There is still huge potential for the genre.

Crazy for You - Slowdive

From 1995. The dream pop side of shoe gaze.  The atmosphere almost goes into ambient, thanks to the samples and repetition.  Very dreamy.  Almost cold.  But also warm.  I like the miasma...

Drive, She Said - Stan Ridgeway

[link] Stan also fits in the New Wave idiom I discussed below.  His voice was made for storytelling - especially with a background of kitsch/Americana, which was a major focus of American New Wave (e.g. the B-52s, most famously).  He structures his songwriting and production around this storytelling aspect.

Interesting Dream

I often have interesting dreams but I seldom remember much. In the one I just woke up from, I was one of hundreds of workers being transported large distances by plane, train, and bus working on building a pipeline. We were going ever further south to eventually finish in Antarctica. We would hear the pipeline humming at each stop and I was tringvto figure out if the humming was getting higher as we got closer to the pipeline's source in the south. We were laying down plastic tubing or hose in an underground facility and one guy asked me if I could hear the D note of the humming. I replied that I don't have perfect pitch so I couldn't tell. At one point we got out of buses at night and we were trying to figure out where we were. It was warm and the stars were bright. We concluded we were in southern Africa. There were several buses of other crews there. I think we were supposed to have a meal there in a large cafeteria but I got separated from the group and missed the meal. The team I was in had men and women of various ages, none were known or recognizable people from real life. But in the dream I thought I recognized one or a few of them as character actors from movies or TV and I was going to talk to them about that. The person I was invthe dream had also played minor parts in a few movies. Toward the end when we were outside just before I lost the group i remember that I had put down a oair of fingerless gloves that were mine on the ground. A third glove was found, maybe by me, that was identical but I concluded that it wasn't mine.

World Party - The Waterboys

[link] From 1989.  I really like Mike Scott's vocals and the use of fiddle in these guys' songs.  Songs like this one and We Will Not Be Lovers are intense.  A lot of soul here.

Boheme - Deep Forest

[link] Listened to these guys (specifically this album, from 1995; this is the title track) a lot ca. 1996. They do a good job with most of the samples.  Extremely atmospheric, which is kind of the whole modus here.

Devo, the Talking Heads, and American new wave

At Ru-Jun's dance recital over the weekend, one of the classes danced to Whip It by Devo (in red futuristic dresses).  This is the only Devo song 99% of people know and it's a really good song.  It got me thinking what Devo actually did to music.  Like the Talking Heads, Devo had its roots in the punk movement of the mid-late 70s and many of their songs had rootsy origins (e.g. Working in a Coal Mine) (TH had more funk flavors).  Both of these bands stripped down those sounds and made them abstract, sometimes by adding synthesizers, other times by just going really minimalist.  Then stuff could be added back to expand the possibilities of the abstract essence.  Both bands did it with the rhythm section. TH did it predominantly with rhythm section, reflecting the funk essence, whereas Devo added a lot of synths on top of things (TH was no slouch at this either) and later got into more of the 80s synth pop sound (whereas TH ended up going toward what David Byrne eventually did solo with the Latin influences he got into).  I really like this about these bands' role in new wave: abstracting, finding the essence of the music, and using it to make a completely different, and often completely infectious, sound.

September Morn - Neil Diamond

[link] From 1979.  That year I ended up listening to a lot of AM radio, more than most years of my childhood.  I think this was due to car rides to the Pittsford YMCA for swimming lessons and swimming with my dad and brothers.  Anyway, this was one of the big hits of that year and it kind of grew on me.  I learned this on the uke a few months ago, then forgot it, then relearned it again tonight.  I hope I can keep it available in the set.  Should be fun to play live.

Piccadilly Palare - Morrissey

[link] Morrissey  has to be indulged  when it comes to the dark material, but this song is musically delightful with any words.  Bouncy and sing songy. The edginess doesn't overwhelm.  And he really knows how to build through the song and rally out of breaks.  The dynamics of the song parts are great.  Just a terrific song.

Brilliant Mind - Furniture

[link] This song was on the sountrack of the 1987 movie Some Kind of Wonderful, which was one of my favorites back in the day.  Hugely wonderful song, especially for the introvert.  Everything works here, the tempo, the progression, the rhythm track, the vocal.  It's a lonely, yearning, song.  I was there then.
Tonight I've been going through old poems from 10-20 years ago.  I really was tied up into myself just as this song makes me feel.  Kind of got stuck in the process of writing through myself, running rusty water out of a pipe to get to clean fresh water.  Anyway, this song does a supreme job of complementing my inner life back from the late 80s on.  Still does today...

Papua New Guinea - The Future Sound of London

[link] From the 1992 movie Cool World. One of several songs from the then current rave culture that is on the sound track.  I really like this one.  I've never gotten sick of the use of vocal samples like this one uses.  I'd love to mess around with this kind of recording myself, but have never had the time.

New song memorized

I have the new song memorized. I just need to practice it a lot to work it into the set. I also want to record a vid if it. Tough to get time for that these days. Being a musicuan is mostly for people with no parenting responsibilities.

Special One - Ultra Vivid Scene

[link] Kurt Ralske's work as Ultra Vivid Scene was one of the trenchant sounds for me in the early 90s.  Here, with Kim Deal of the Pixies (another one of the trenchant sounds).  The emotional range here is narrow.  But it gets at a laconicness I had at the time.  Life was simultaneously moving fast (school and some science) and not moving at all (personal life and other stuff in science).  I was lurking in the universe somewhere, like Kurt's voice, with stuff to say that was poetic but hard to decipher.  I didn't have any stories so I made up words that could be interpreted as a lot of different stories if anyone were looking.  No one ended up looking.

New Song

I wrote this on the piano in March 2010 as a song for Megachild.  I decided to dust it off to see if I could play it solo with the uke.

Here are the lyrics.

My Life as a Tree

Princess Amy
One day would be Queen
She learned the spell craft
Walking beneath the trees
From the wizard Tralfaz
The magic - it was good
It came from the Earth
The soil and the wood
Her father aging
The king - he was not well
The kingdoms borders
Were visited by beasts of hell
Evil dragons
Were hatching in the north
Diabolical mages
Cultivating the dragons' source

My life as a tree
Got as tall as I could be
We marched down to the sea
But then the axe men came for me

Amy was crowned
A full Sorcoress and the Queen
But Tralfaz had departed
For a universe unseen
Her high council
Was corrupted by piles of gold
And she knew there was evil
Building in the mountains cold
She knighted many
Brave fighters for her cause
She built her army
Still hoping to avoid a war
The demonic mages
Saw their time was short
So they unleashed the dragins
--- it was War ---

When the clouds had broken
And the sun came beaming through
The field was scattered
With dragon scales of every hue
Many knights had fallen
But the dragons were all dead
The mages that did not perish
Threw down their staves and fled
Amy's face was blood
As she looked out in victory
But the Queen's tears streamed down
Because she had lost all the trees

including me

My life as a tree
Got as tall as I could be
We marched down to the sea
But then the axe men came for me
The Princess planted me as a seed
She grew up beneath my leaves
She became the Good Witch Queen
But then the dragons got free
No time to say goodbye
I let some of my seeds fly
In a Princess's garden someday
They may fall from the sky
-

The Unforgettable Fire - U2

Among their mid 80s material, U2 had some wonderfully atmospheric songs. This is a great example. In fact the entire Unforgettable Fire album really is of a piece with this.  It often gets lost in the analysis between their early punk-influenced breakthrough hits and their world-dominating Joshua Tree and later days.  For me, this was their peak.  I don't need any of the stuff after this album.  It hit me at a very inward part of my existence.  My latest conclusions about that particular time in my life are pretty damning, but at least I had this music, which was great even though I didn't really know how to be an interactive human being at the time.

A sort of dream

I would like to perform somewhere as a street musician.  Or at least try it.  Preferably out here on the island somewhere, not in NYC.  I saw some advice online and one of the points was to stand up, not sit down.  That's a bit difficult, for long, with a uke without a strap, because with the ukes I have (except the banjo, which has a strap) I have to hold them up while playing them.  It's tiring.  So I'm looking into various ways to use straps and types of straps.  There are a couple of them that don't require installing buttons on the uke.  One called the uke leash holds the head stock and frees up the left hand.  I got one of these and tried it.  Not good.  Playing angle not good and it doesn't free me up enough.  There's another that I will probably try, called the mobius strap.  It wraps around the waist of the body.  Looks like it could do the trick.  We'll see...

White City - Thomas Dolby

[link] One of the classics off The Flat Earth.  Wasn't one of my favorites at first but has grown on me immensely over the years.  The lyrics are great.  The dialogue at the end (by Robyn Hitchcock) has stuck with me over the years.  Dolby at this time is a master of creating a personal landscape within a song - really great atmospherics.

Hold Me - Fleetwood Mac

From 1982.  This song was played interminably when it came out.  But I always liked it and it still isn't worn out with me.  I think the piano intro and the verse really do it.  Whispery yet somewhat complex vocal.  There really isn't much to the chorus.  Weird how some songs manage to sound good.

Shot by Both Sides - Magazine

From 1978.  These guys were part of new wave from the UK.  Definitely on the edgier and harder side, and there are strong flavors of what would soon emerge as the goth sound.  The late 70s had a miasma of undercurrents in pop/rock.  Always rich to re-explore them...

Nothing Compares 2U - Sinead O'Connor

Usually not a fan of down temp ballads.  But this one works thanks to the production.  Very nice layering and atmosphere.  And her vocal captures soul like a windmill in a storm.

Overall

I'm pretty happy with the Earthstock set.  The weather really kind of ruined it but I can't complain about that.  I had a good number of different songs from last year and given the conditions, my playing and singing went off OK.

The rest of the set

And here's the rest of the set:

Country Roads

Layla

Ring of Fire

Please Come to Boston

Blue-Footed Booby Blues

A few more

The wind is a problem in most of these but here they are:

Southern Cross

Country Roads

Layla

Some of the Earthstock set

Finally got some time to work with the video files.
Here are the first four songs of the Earthstock set:

After the Gold Rush

Folsom Prison Blues

Evangeline

Last of the Famous International Playboys

No stupid questions

On its face, I originally thought the question "why do organisms age and die?" to be kind of a no brainer.  Stuff breaks down.  But of course I now appreciate that this is a complex evolutionary and biological question and that "stuff breaks" is only one of many facets.  In the same vein, the question "why are kids so troublesome?" sounds similarly kind of dumb.  They are developing; they are not fully self-aware or able to control their compulsions, etc.  But as in aging, this is a complex question with likely several biological and evolutionary facets. 

Man Turned Inside Out & Sexi Luv - Devo

[link] Two pretty good songs from Devo's 1988 album Total Devo, which seems forgotten and got panned by some.  They sound a bit like Blancmange et al. here.  Sort of a different sound for them...