Category: Music

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I Was Busy This Afternoon

I saw today that Robert Pattinson has presumably been signed on to play Scytale (the Tleiaxu Face Dancer) and primary antagonist in Denis Villeneuve's upcoming Dune Messiah project. Pattinson is one of those actors I simultaneously love and hate, which may actually be a good thing considering the character he'll be playing in the film.

All this got me to thinking and I realized I haven't read Messiah in probably fifteen years at least, but acknowledging I now have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to reading, I still wanted to give it a go. To that end, I thoought a little musical accompaniment might be in order, so I ripped the various Villeneuve Dune soundtracks I have stored in my laptop to MiniDisc this afternoon.

I have all of Frank Herbert Dune novels in Kindle, so when I was done recording, I put the music on in the background and fired up the app. It seems to have worked wonders for keeping me focused. I'm about a quarter way through the novel and despite my disappointment of certain aspects of what Velleneuve did with the second Dune film, I'm very much looking forward to seeing what he brings to the silver screen with this story.

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Rediscovering A Few Old Friends

Hard to believe these are 25 years old. These double-CD sets were my constant companions once upon a time, and stumbling upon them while going through my iTunes in search of music to transfer to MiniDisc after so many years of neglect has done wonders for my mood. I also discovered that when I went to purchase them again on Discogs that at one point I had marked them as already being in my collection—meaning they—and a half dozen of their Euphoria brethren were in that banker's box that was lost after the fire. They weren't cheap then, and they're not cheap now, but definitely worth replacing.

Yes, I have them ripped to iTunes, but the original CDs were continuous mixes, meaning that once they're burned to any other medium from iTunes—whether it be to another CD or a MiniDisc—there's now an annoying little split-second gap between tracks that isn't present on the original recording. And yes, while I know there are so many more important other things that are happening while Rome burns that should be commanding my attention, and in the overall scheme of things this is silly, but not having that gap is still important to me, as it's one small thing in my life that I do have some control over.

So they've been ordered, and their siblings will be replaced as funds allow. A couple are coming from overseas, and frankly—after the events of the past couple weeks—I fully expected to receive notice that the seller does not ship to the U.S. any longer (because I have seen it appear in some listings). But so far all is good; my funds were readily accepted and I was provided with tracking numbers for the shipments.

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This Guy Gets It

Nostalgia. It's a hell of.a drug. I've said it before.

Randy gets it, and is the first person I've seen so succinctly sum up what I feel whenever I put on a CD or rip a new MiniDisc. It just feels good. And as a collector, the dopamine rush of walking into a thrift store or our local Hard-Off, not knowing what I may find lurking on those shelves, or when a new-to-me piece of gear that I probably overpaid for arrives in the mail is exactly as he points out.

I grew up with vinyl as a teenager, spent my 20s and 30s with the arrival and peak market of CDs (I remember to this day the smell when you walked into Tower Records), and ended my 30s and spent my 40s with MiniDiscs. Even though the whole cancer thing occurred when I was deep into MD (I remember having my Sony MZ-S1 at the hospital, listening to whoever was on my radar at the time) I still have so many fond memories associated with the format.

I look at my music collection and think, "That's me. That's my vibration." And even though my tastes have expanded over the years, every one of those recordings is a part of who I am.

And since everything I buy is used from individuals, it gives a stiff middle finger to the orange felon's tariff madness.

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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.