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running commentary

The internet is filled with things. Here are some of them.

#music

2025

The Grateful Dead, Helicopters, and More Power 2025 Feb 22
Linked is the webpage of Janet Furman, founder of the brand bearing her name. Furman lead her firm in creating audio and power gear for musicians. But before all that, she was a Grateful Dead roadie, traveling along with the band in order to help capture recordings of their live shows, most famously for the Europe '72 album. But while that's interesting, far more wild is the crazy way Furman helped the Dead achieve their awesome sound at the Watkins Glen Summer Jam, the first festival New York State allowed after Woodstock. Held in 1973 on a racetrack, 600,000 people showed up – a double-digit percentage of all young people in the area, and twice as many as Woodstock – and more power was definitely needed.

Detouring briefly, Watkins Glen is also famous for the debut of digital delay lines, a new technology created by Eventide which was needed to keep the sound in sync as it was played through a series of PAs for a crowd that stretched far, far away from the stage.

But back to Furman and the Dead's power needs, in her own words since she's a captivating storyteller:
The Dead would need a massive amount of amplification to reach all those people. At the time, they insisted on using only McIntosh 2300 power amps, an audiophile rather than pro audio product, made in small quantity and hard to find on short notice. The McIntosh factory happened to be near Watkins Glen, in Binghamton in upstate New York. We were already backstage at the concert, and every road in the area was clogged with concert traffic. My assignment was to get five more of those giant amps, any way I could. Sam Cutler, the former Rolling Stones road manager now working for the Grateful Dead, handed me $6000 in cash and the use of a helicopter and pilot. Though it was a weekend and the McIntosh factory was closed, I tracked down the owner at his home. The pilot flew me from the venue to downtown Binghamton. Helicopter landings there were not an everyday affair, and there was great media interest. Flashbulbs popped and reporters stuck microphones in my face. In the summer heat, I was wearing only shorts and a concert T-shirt, with the cash wadded up in my pocket. I met up with the owner, who drove me to the factory and sold me the amps off the production floor. We drove back to town in his station wagon, his wife and kids aboard on their way to a summer vacation, and transferred the amps into the copter. At over 100 lbs each plus two people, it was a heavy load for a small helicopter. We had a very scary moment as we took off, coming within inches of crashing into a highrise building. But back at Watkins Glen, the sight of that enormous crowd from the air was unforgettable. In the moment I landed, delivering the goods, I became an instant hero.
Ewige Blumenkraft 2025 Jan 29
Illuminatus! is one of my favorite books, featuring a narrative held together by duct tape and twine but absolutely brimming with cleverness throughout. In my mind it's the conspiracy version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a similar wit and observational awareness shared equally between the two.

Ewige Blumenkraft ("eternal flowerpower") is, according to Illuminatus!, the first half of the passphrase for the Illuminati, ending und ewige Schlangenkraft ("and eternal snakepower"). References are layered on top of each other, alluding to hippies, sexual symbolism, and occult motifs. Blumenkraft is also the name of Ott's first LP, an acid trip into pure psychedelia.
Woody Guthrie on songwrting 2025 Jan 3
I hate a song that makes you think that you are not any good. I hate a song that makes you think that you are just born to lose. Bound to lose. No good to nobody. No good for nothing. Because you are too old or too young or too fat or too slim too ugly or too this or too that. Songs that run you down or poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or hard traveling. I am out to fight those songs to my very last breath of air and my last drop of blood. I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it's hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work.

2024

Spotify playlists are full of low-effort slop, and nobody notices 2024 Dec 20
This is a Harper's article about "ghost artists" – sound-alike muzak created for "mood" playlists that Spotify encourages the creation of because it's cheaper to play these tracks than music created by real artistic effort. It's presented as yet another eking away at musicians' ability to make a living from their art, yet the deeper issue I wonder about is the listener's inability to tell that they're listening to pandering, derivative slop. Quoting one of the musicians hired to create these tracks:
Honestly, for most of this stuff, I just write out charts while lying on my back on the couch. And then once we have a critical mass, they organize a session and we play them. And it’s usually just like, one take, one take, one take, one take. You knock out like fifteen in an hour or two.
It comes as little surprise that the muzak companies behind this have close financial ties to Spotify, and are also starting to lean into AI-created music, because of course they are.

And then there's this Hacker News comment about the Harper's article, from a person claiming to run one of these muzak firms, which passes no judgement, but does add a new point-of-view:
I run a label that has direct deals with certain major DSPs. We do over a billion streams a year.

The entire “wellness” music category is programming driven. Much of my energy is spent building and maintaining relationships with the programmers, even with our direct deals. We take a reduced payout on the master side in return for preferential treatment on playlist positions.

I have an active roster of extremely talented producers. It’s a volume play. I’ve made tracks that I’m quite proud of in 90 minutes that have done 20+ million streams.

It’s a wild system but we’ve made it work. Not really a critique or an endorsement - just making a living making music.

Edit: fun fact, Sleep Sounds is generally the #1 streamed playlist on the entire Apple Music platform.
Not to be a snob, but... (I am a snob) listen to real fucking music, people.
Blue Öyster Cult's Buck Dharma talks about More Cowbell 2024 Dec 2
Twenty-five years ago Saturday Night Live had a skit mocking the recording of Blue Oyster Cult's (Don't Fear) The Reaper, lampooning the use of cowbell in that recording (a recording that was twenty-five years old at that point) with a line that Christopher Walken has since unfortunately become known for: "More cowbell." Linked is a Vulture article with the BÖC frontman and songwriter Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser on how he looks back on that skit and how it affected his life and the band. It's kinda insightful, unlike this embarrassing and awkward interview of Will Farrell by Jimmy Fallon (both of whom were also in the skit, with Farrell starring opposite Walken and Fallon forgetting his lines and breaking character).
Toto, David Lynch, and Brian Eno: Dune 2024 Nov 20
Steve Lukather, from the band Toto, on sharing a credit with Brian Eno on the soundtrack to David Lynch's 1984 Dune:
I’ve never met Brian. Love his work, but he wrote a 30-second theme and basically got the same credit as us. They used him because of his name value, so people attributed our work to him and his work to us, and it was confusing. It was much hipper to say Brian Eno wrote the score than Toto at the time. If they didn’t like the movie, they’d go after us. If they liked it, they’d give Eno all the credit. I have no beef with Brian Eno, I have no beef with David. That’s what he wanted so he should have it. I love Brian Eno.
And later in the interview, David Paich, the primary songwriter for Toto, on visiting David Lynch's home:
I remember when I went to his house, he had this haunting, low, whistling sound. I said, “What is that?” He said he went to Scotland up into the hills where there was supposedly a haunted castle. This was the wind whistling through the castle, and he recorded that. He puts it on all of his movies. This low wisp of a sound. It’s almost like a foghorn.
The Disintegration Loops 2024 Oct 8
The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.

Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD.
Bruce Arntson's "Tree Climbing Shoes" 2024 Sep 11
This ridiculous song from Ernest Goes to Jail has been living rent-free in my head for thirty years. "Don't make me climb the coconut tree, these aren't my tree-climbing shoes."
Text messages between Billy Corgan and D’arcy Wretzky 2024 Aug 11
When D’arcy Wretzky left Smashing Pumpkins details were scant but that there was drama was certain. That's ancient history, though, twenty-five years in the past. And although there've been rumors and hints that Wretzky may once again play with Corgan, it has yet to be. These 2018 text message screenshots (reportedly) shed some insight into their once-fraught now-extinct working relationship, but more than that, share some of the high-level decision-making that goes into a major rock band planning a concert tour going into their fourth decade of existence. They're a fascinating read all around.
Interview with Wallachian Cobwebs 2024 Jul 20
I started listening to this weird spooky music from an act called Wallachian Cobwebs maybe about three years ago (my favorite track: An Accumulation of Anguish). I know nothing about who these people are other than that the creepy, haunting, ethereal sounds are strangely captivating and addictive. The creators stay mysterious, except linked here is an interview with them, on a now-defunct Wordpress blog dedicated to the genre "dungeon synth," a label new to me but which sounds appropriate.
The Decemberists Pave Their Own Way 2024 Jun 21
This is a music magazine called Paste's long analysis of the recently-released 9th studio LP from The Decemberists, "As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again." He talks a bit about the process, the inspiration, the place in The Decemberists' overall catalog, and how frontman and songwriter Colin Meloy feels writing songs for a band now entering its second quarter of a century. The author doesn't care much for The Decemberists' previous LP, 2018's "I'll Be Your Girl," but this is because he's wrong. Otherwise the article is good and interesting.
“The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time” Dungeons Ranked by How Well They’d Serve as a Music Venue 2024 Jun 17
This is the type of quality video game content our society depends on.
Brian Eno on nostalgia in art 2024 May 27
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Heavy Metal Parking Lot 2024 May 12
Step back in time to 1984 in this seventeen-minute long VHS-quality video of footage edited together by Judas Priest fans interviewing each other in a parking lot prior to one of their concerts. Apparently this used to be traded around in bootleg copies only before eventually making its way, as does everything, to the internet. Now you can pay $1 to watch it on Amazon. And should, because it is simply amazing.
Reunited After 33 Years, Cyberaktif Reveal Their “eNdgame” 2024 Feb 17
How did Skinny Puppy's cEvin Key and Front Line Assembly's Bill Leeb and Rhys Fulber come together to create the first new Cyberaktif album in over three decades? Bandcamp explains it all.

2023

How to shuffle songs? 2023 Dec 28
When people want their music player to play them a "random" song, do they really mean random? Turns out, no, they do not. What they actually want is the next song to be different than what is currently playing, whereas pure, mathematical random does in no way guarantee this.
The Music Stats Project 2023 Dec 11
Sometime in 2007 I finally acted on a thought that'd been bouncing through my brain: "iTunes logs playcounts for tracks, but wouldn't it be great if it did the same for albums and artists, too?" I wrote a script which read an iTunes export file and generated those album and artist playcounts. Since then, I've been periodically exporting my iTunes library to update those counts whilst incrementally improving that script. The biggest step up was in 2018, when I added to the script the ability to compare a recent export against an older one. This created a view into 'recent playcount', thus answering questions such as "What's popular now?" and "What's fallen from favor?" And yet... is it even more insightful if the script, rather than just compare two points in time, compiled all of the static export files into a continuous moving picture of my iTunes library? Or would that be a bunch of work for what is essentially highly-personal trivia? Baby, it's both!

Introducing, sixteen years in the making, the (almost complete) new version of my interactive iTunes library!
What's a Synth Pad? 2023 Oct 19
This article (despite it ending with a sales pitch for their product) is an eye-opening view into what a synthesizer can do for a piece of music, why it's used, and what it replaces compared to classical compositions. And, icing on the cake, the example it shows just happens to be the live Spiritualized recording from 1998 that I just had to purchase on physical CD to get my own copy of, as no digital downloads of it are available.
Devo covering Neil Young's "Ohio" 2023 Oct 15
Here's a 2002 cover of Devo playing the song "Ohio," written by Neil Young about the Kent State shootings. But why would this goofy band play such a serious song? Quoth songfacts:
Mark Mothersbaugh and Jerry Casale were on campus, and after the shootings, they developed the band Devo based on the concept of 'De-Evolution,' meaning the human race was regressing. Said Casale, 'It refocused me entirely. I don't think I would have done Devo without it. It was the deciding factor that made me live and breathe this idea and make it happen.'
Postal Service + Death Cab covering "Enjoy the Silence" 2023 Oct 14
On Monday this last week I caught the Death Cab for Cutie / Postal Service 20th anniversaries of both Transatlanticism and Give Up Tour when they came through the Greek Theater in Berkeley. It was a sold out show where the two bands (both fronted by Ben Gibbard) played the entirety of the two albums. They then capped off the evening with this, a full-ensemble cover performance of Depeche Mode's "Enjoy the Silence." Perfection. Recording by yours truly, via my iPhone. I guess that makes this a bootleg recording?
Synthpop Fanatic 2023 Oct 12
This is an online "modern synthpop" music magazine after my own heart.
Where'd you go, Space Cowboy? 2023 Sep 9
Way back in the 2000s there was this French musician, Nicolas Dresti, who released music as Space Cowboy. He released a a bunch of singles and a few albums -- all cool dance music -- and even worked as a regular DJ for Lady Gaga. But then, he disappeared. Nothing has been heard from him at all in over a decade. Where did he go? What happened? His music is crazy catchy, and his ability to craft a dance song is enviable. But he's vanished!
Nick Cave on ChatGPT making things faster and easier 2023 Aug 11
Rather than approaching ChatGPT with arguments stemming from technology, or philosophy of intelligence, or creative theft and appropriation, the esteemed artist Nick Cave steps in with thoughts about what these tools mean to the creator themself. What does it mean to the artist when artistic endeavor becomes easy?
BassoonTracker 2023 Aug 10
Create open-source Amiga-esque music right in your web browser. Or just listen to the music that others have created, which is what I did, as song-writing is very difficult and I have no ear for it.
Banco de Gaia: Farewell Ferengistan 2023 May 6
This is a Banco de Gaia album review of their 2006 release written at that time, and it's harsh. But it approaches BdG's catalog from the point-of-view of a fan since their first release. I was not, I only came to appreciate BdG later on, well past the peak of the band's fame, and so while I don't disagree with the review, my take-away is different. Yet, I find this review fascinating, because it talks about a musician's inevitable fade from relevancy on each of their successive, post-peak releases, which is a phenomenon I've been pondering a lot lately as all my favorite bands from my youth age in their own way.
DrawBeats 2023 Apr 30
A fully web-based beat synthesizer that's so easy even I can use it!
Introduction to Microphones 2023 Mar 11
This website is a full catalog of broadcast and production microphones, with detailed explanations of their histories and workings. Check out the Neumann U87 to see the classic model that NPR prefers when creating their crisp, clean sound.