Category: Music

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And Down Another Rabbit Hole I Go!

Purple Disco Machine In The House | Disco House & Electro Funk Mix | Defected | Semperoper Dresden

Every now and then the world reminds me that I'm really just a 28 year old trapped in a 65 year old body.

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I Won't Say It's My Muse, But…

Among my iTunes to MD transfers yesterday was Philip Glass' Satyagraha. I first heard this piece leaking through a wall I shared with a Folsom Street neighbor in San Francisco sometime in 1988 or thereabouts. I didn't know what it was—and this was long before Shzam and SoundHound (hell, I hadn't even bought my first modem at that point) were around to identify songs—but I recognized Philip Glass' unmistakable signature and went next door to finally meet the hunky neighbor who'd moved in a few weeks earlier and find out what was playing.

(Finding fellow Glass aficionados is pretty rare, TBH.)

Like nearly all of Philip's work, Satyagraha just plays me, but this one in particular—possibly more than even Akhnaten or the Koyannisqatsi soundtrack—reaches in on a deep, fundamental level. I haven't listened to this in years, but it was calling out to me as I scrolled through my library in search of things I wanted to transfer to physical media. I got about halfway through listening last night before my body was demanding sleep, but in that time—oh boy—it still packed a punch.

I won't go so far as to say this recording is my muse, but many, many years ago I put it on one day after I got home from a particularly stressful day at work, and by the time we got to Act 2 – Tagore, Scene 1 the music was all but screaming at me to get off my butt, pull out a blank canvas that had been gathering dust in a closet for months, and start painting.

This was the result of that push:

"Joe" (2004)

I won't say the music had the same effect on me last night as it did twenty-one years ago, but damn if it didn't clear away cobwebs, sweep away years worth of accumulated emotional and mental gunk, and as the woo-woo crowd might say, "aligned my chakras."

Postscript 3/26/25: Well, it seems I've written about this before. If it sounded vaguely familliar to any of my long-time readers, thank youfor not pointing it out and making me feel even more addled than I do for discovering it myself.  I wonder how many duplicate subjects I've covered in the 20 years of this blog. Probably more than I care to know…

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Blast From The Past

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I stumbled upon this collection of house music back in the mid 00's and immediately fell in love with it, adding them all to my iTunes library. They were perfect "background" music for working on the computer or around the house.

I eventually got rid of the original CDs (along with most of the rest of my collection) after we moved to Denver and the music pretty much fell off the radar.

But a few weeks ago I rediscovered house music on YouTube via the Yoyaku Record Store and Humano Studios channels, and it was at this point I rememberd Bargrooves, and immediately ripped them from iTunes onto MiniDiscs.

Imagine my shock then when I first listened to my newly ripped discs and uniformly hated every one of them! "I liked this stuff?" I asked myself.

The other day I was going through disks and retitling everything (one of the perks of the format) and while pulling up the track lists on Discogs I realized that the songs I'd ripped to iTunes all those many years ago were completely out of order. It's no wonder I hated the sets…there was no continuity, no "groove" as it were.

Thankfully, another perk of MiniDiscs is that you can rearrange tracks to play in whatever order you want. So—even though they were originally ripped in the wrong order—I was able to reshuffle them into their proper sequence and voila! my love for this music returned.

The only problem is that there's now a break in between each of the tracks (the downside of ripping from iTunes) so I've tracked the original discs down on Discogs—for cheap!—and should be receiving them next week so I can gaplessly re-record them onto MD.

I can hear you all now: "He's such a nerd."

Yup.

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It's Not Awful

I just discovered this bootleg collection of unreleased tracks from Madge's Rebel Heart sessions. I don't understand the online hate regarding these songs. Granted, some of them aren't her best work, but it can be argued that entire albums she's released aren't her best work. A few of the songs are actually quite good and for the life of me I can't understand why they weren't released with Rebel Heart.

If you're interested, you can hear the album here.

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Released 36 Years Ago Today

Madonna: Like a Prayer (1989)

This anniversary also marks for me 36 years of being Pepsi free.

When Pepsi dropped Madonna as a spokesperson, citing the "sacrilegious" imagery in the Like a Prayer (Jeez, they had no idea what was coming, did they?) video, I swore I would never drink Pepsi again. And I haven't.

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This Place Could Be Dangerous

The Hard●Off chain of stores (including Book●Off) are a well known brand in Japan. (Something I learned while researching MiniDisc on YouTube.) They're expanding into the US market with a handful of stores, the most recent being the one in Phoenix that just opened a few weeks ago.

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Recommended Series!

You can find the CDs new on Amazon, but used copies are much cheaper on Discogs, even when you factor in shipping. I picked up near-mint copies for around $3-4/disc (not including shipping).

Interestingly, when I had these in my collection prior to the purge, I didn't rip them in their entirety to iTunes—something I now regret (and now has been corrected) since I've gotten them back in my collection.

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It's Rare These Days…

…that music can give me physical chills, but here I am listening to the Blade Runner soundtrack and the End Titles cut is making the hair on my arms stand up. What a brilliant piece of cinema…

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One Of My Grails Finally Obtained

I've been in love with Cerrone's "updated" Supernature (the original version was released in 1978 and I remember many a night at Maggies twirling to it) since I first stumbled across it online more than a dozen years ago. The original Supernature—and it's message—was good, but this "new" version was an aural orgasm. Finding a physical copy at the time however was problematic. All my usual venues didn't have it—or hadn't even heard of it—but after discovering Discogs, I found it was actually in print and available…albeit for a steep price. That didn't mean I stopped wanting it…

Well, considering that my disposable income is going to take a major hit after the 31st and considering certain events of the past couple months, I said fuck it—we're all gonna die anyway—and dropped the coin. It wasn't the most I've ever spent for a CD, but it was more than the $20 I usually pay for a sought after release.

Marie Kondo would undoubtedly ask, "Does it bring you joy?" And to that I respond, "Yes bitch. Yes it does."

In case any of you are interested…