Digital Music Files Suck
Yes, I know, all you young folks swear by them, but digital music files just drive me up the wall. They suck. On the list of things that make my life miserable, digital music files, whichever format they happen to be in, are in the top ten, slowly creeping towards the number one spot.
Let’s just assume that you rip lots of CDs to your hard drive(s), either because you also want them on your PC or because you simply want to make a backup copy for safety’s sake. After all, if you were dense enough to invest 500 Bucks into a limited Mosaic box which has been out of print for ages, you also want to make sure it survives at least the next century.
Just for arguments’ sake, let’s also assume that it took a whole load of time to do all that ripping, tagging and filing away. On top of that, let’s add the assumption that you paid for and downloaded a plethora of tunes that you wanted to have without having to shell out the dough to get the full album. Finally, let’s just assume that all of the work and all of the downloads add up to about a terabyte of music, perhaps a bit more – after all, you do have about 55 to 62 meters of music, depending on how many of the clunkers you are willing to put on that list, a lot of which have ended up on your hard drives. Continue Reading →
UFO: Walk on Water
The other day I basically ransacked the various online stores I frequent, hunting for special offers. January and February are my busiest shopping months, simply because the various stores do their spring cleaning early, throwing out their stock to make space for the new year’s upcoming releases. These past years, a pattern began to emerge: January is clearance sale around the globe and end January and beginning February, at times, is extra clearing sale, getting rid of the stuff that wasn’t sold the weeks before.
So, I was clicking my way around the globe and I came across a name that I hadn’t heard for quite some years, UFO. It should come as no surprise to you regular readers that I decided to jump on this one, especially since it cost the equivalent of about two dollars (good for me, perhaps not good for the band, although the record label probably sold the copies at a fixed price). Continue Reading →
Music for Contemplative Moods
Music is a mood thing, always has been and always will be. There’s the loud stuff for the beginning weekend (at the moment I’m enjoying the hell out of Jeff Beck’s – for that time – extremely noisy but also fun-driven albums “Truth” and “Beck-Ola” from 1968 and 1969 respectively), there’s music to celebrate the good things in life with which for me is always jazz from the 30s to the 60s, there’s music to get penned-up aggression out of the system with (Judas Priest always gets that job done for me), there’s music to work to (I’ve written about that extensively on this site), and there’s music to simply listen to attentively.
Lately I have noticed that very often I end up in contemplative moods in which just about anything that is too noisy gets on my nerves. As my life is going through some major changes, I spend quite a bit of time sitting and thinking and it is really not all that easy to find music that can further that process without interfering too much. Continue Reading →
Royal Mail Issues Beatles Stamps
For all of you that can’t collect enough music and memorabilia, I’m sure it is good news that Royal Mail will today issue 6 Beatles stamps. Continue Reading →
“Musikstapler” by Nils Holger Moormann
Design has always been a passion of mine. I know that lots of people don’t afford that aspect a second glance, at least not consciously, and here in Germany people often forgo the design aspect to opt for the cheaper variants, but often things catch my eye and stay on my radar, no matter if they are furniture, glass, china, cutlery or any other item.
Some months ago I came across an item which I thought might be of interest to music collectors who are looking for space-saving solutions, and Nils Holger Moorman’s “Musikstapler“, which could be translated as “Music Pile(r)”, fits the bill perfectly. Continue Reading →
Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy
Note: This is a long post. If you are looking for a discussion of the song, scroll down 15 paragraphs … or so. ;)
I think it was William Blake who once said that “those who control their passions do so because their passions are weak enough to be controlled.” Right on, I would say, but when you have spent some time contemplating the idea of passion in relation to your own life, perhaps Robert Sternberg said it best when he narrowed everything down to a simple statement: “Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.” If you add Seneca’s age-old observation that “it is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted”, what you have is not only a much more complicated idea, but also a pretty solid framework to go by.
I could write about this endlessly, but suffice it to say that it’s easy to see that three golden rules can be derived from the quotes above:
01. Be strongly passionate about at least some things and don’t let others tell you that you shouldn’t be.
02. Passion is never enough if it doesn’t develop into more.
03. Don’t allow harmful passions into your life. Continue Reading →
The Siegel-Schwall Band
After having worked my rear end off these past weeks and after having gotten up too darn early today, on this year’s 23rd of December, to get some last minute rush jobs done, I have to say that the Christmas spirit has been about as far away from my own life as possible much of this past month.
Looking back at 2006, which I’ve been doing these past days as well, I have to say it wasn’t a good year, at all. I had some major problems, had to admit to myself that I had made one major mistake these past years, I lost a good friend, and many other things didn’t turn out at all.
Mind you, there were many good things as well, but they were few and far between and didn’t really come in larger numbers until the end of the year, and although things have started picking up again, to have to write off an entire year (probably even the ones before) and file it (them) under “Life sucks and then you die” (a motto which I used to jokingly refer to all the time) does not put one into any sort of Christmas spirit. Indeed, it kills just about any spirit.
Along came The Siegel-Schwall Band. Continue Reading →