(via clusteflock)

‘No Sound But the Wind’ is a track by Editors that I discovered by accident: I was looking for information about the composers who had scored Twilight, New Moon, and Eclipse (Howard Shore, an amazing composer, produced one) and happened to see that Editors featured on the soundtrack to New Moon. I read somewhere that the track was originally written for the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but was dropped and was changed a bit so it could be used in New Moon. I’ve not seen that film, so I’ve no idea where it features, or if it adds anything to the experience. However, as a track in its own right, it has had me on a short leash, has truly captivated me, which frustrates me, a bit, as there isn’t much substance to it at all. After listening to it (and I’ve been listening to it a lot) I feel a bit used.

I managed to pull myself away from the track, but after reading this want to go back to it and listen again. Maybe a bad idea. But we’ve got to have guilty pleasures.

Arcade Fire: Old vs New

‘Neighborhood #1′ vs ‘Black Mirror — I think this one has to go to Funeral, as no matter how intriguing ‘Black Mirror’ is at times, ‘Neighborhood #1′ will always win over, for me, as it has so many mental associations, particularly from around the time I was staying in Moscow. But, the more I listen to Neon Bible (and I’m listening to ‘Black Mirror’ right now, in fact), the more I feel that the new album is a very interesting progression. But this one, for now, is going to go to Funeral.

‘Neighborhood #2′ vs ‘Keep The Car Running’ — This one is a bit trickier, as I like both the tracks, but don’t really love either. I guess I’m going to go with ‘Funeral’ again, because it seems a little less cluttered: ‘Keep the Car Running’ seems, at moments, to lack clarity. However, I might change my mind later.

‘Une Année Sans Lumiere’ vs ‘Neon Bible’ — I think the newer of the two tracks is the clear winner, here. Yes, the lyrics in the older track are great (“…eyes are shooting sparks…”), but ‘Neon Bible’ is excellent both lyrically and musically (the segment from around 1:15 to 1:36 is lovely), so the winner by a mile seems here to be Neon Bible. But, wait, two minutes and forty-six seconds into ‘Une Année Sans Lumiere’, something amazing happens. And it keeps on happening for almost a minute. So, I’m not sure. But I’ll be firm: this time, Neon Bible wins. Close, though — very close.

‘Neighborhood #3′ vs ‘Intervention’ — Much as I love the older of the two, not least because of that storming opening, I think ‘Intervention’ was the first track on the new album that made me sit up and really listen. I’m practically listening to it on repeat right now, and the layering is magnificent. So, yes — the winner here is definitely Neon Bible.

‘Neighborhood #4′ vs ‘Black Wave, Bad Vibrations’ — I don’t actually like the old track, the fourth Neighborhood, all that much. But I really like the vocals and the arrangements in ‘Black Wave, Bad Vibrations’. It is funny: taking them one by one, Neon Bible is doing pretty well. But having said that, I think Funeral is hanging together better as an album, for me, right now.

‘Crown of Love’ vs ‘Ocean of Noise’ — Well, ‘Crown of Love’ is a masterpiece, and I need to keep reminding myself of that, as I sometimes forget. But ‘Ocean of Noise’ is cool, too. Here, though, Funeral gets it, even though “an ocean of violence, between me and you” is a fantastic lyric.

‘Wake Up’ vs ‘The Well and the Lighthouse’ — I don’t actually like ‘Wake Up’ all that much, and ‘The Well and the Lighthouse’ has a spectacular opening, so this is an easy one: Neon Bible gets the prize.

‘Haiti’ vs ‘(Antichrist Television Blues) — ‘Haiti’ has this slightly dreamy, upbeat quality, which I really like; but the newer of the two tracks as a punchiness and passion, particularly in the lyrics, that really works for me. Another, then, to the newer of the two albums.

‘Rebellion’ vs ‘Windowsill’ — O, this one is tricky. ‘Rebellion’ is epic and very powerful, but I may actually have tired listening to it now, after over a year with the album in my life. But ‘Windowsill’ (if that is the correct title) needs to be with me a little longer before I can really be sure it is better than ‘Rebellion’. Actually, the segment from 2:02 to around 3:30 may just have swayed me, as something about that portion really does walk all over the now over-familiar ‘Rebellion’. But if you take 3:00 to on ‘Rebellion’, you get something very, very special, too. Particularly that little hand-clap at around 3:20. Problem, right now, is that the track feels too long. No, okay, if I allow for the fact that I’ve listened to it too much, I have to give it to ‘Rebellion’, right now.

‘In the Backseat’ vs ‘No Cars Go’ — I have to be in exactly the right mood to enjoy ‘In the Backseat’, which is a bit of a problem, right now, as I don’t think I’m in the right mood. ‘No Cars Go’ is wonderful. So, Neon Bible, again.

The last track on Neon Bible, ‘My Body Is a Cage’, really doesn’t work for me, though, so it is lucky it doesn’t have to go against anything on ‘Funeral’, as it would almost certainly lose. And it is an awful reprise of those organs from the wondrous ‘Intervention’.

As a side note, the cover of ‘Maps’ performed by The Arcade Fire on Radio 1’s Live Lounge might just beat everything on both of those albums. And the same is probably also true for the live version (also from Live Lounge) of ‘Rebellion’ — simply extraordinarily beautiful, particularly that piano playing.

I’m not sure who wins overall.

I’d completely forgotten about their cover of ‘Maps’. Need to dig that out. And digging out anything by Arcade Fire is always worthwhile.

Arcade Fire, live. (Source)

The “official” composer for Inception is Hans Zimmer, but the “official” website keeps crashing in this browser, so I can’t hear much of Zimmer’s score (parts of it are over there, if you can get it to load). If it’s anything like the music featured in the third trailer for the film, music by Hemsey, it’s likely to be epic (the trailer itself is spectacular, and not just because of the excellent score — check it out).

Zack Hemsey’s put up a bandcamp page for the music featured in that trailer (it’s called ‘Mind Heist’), and if you like what you hear, you can buy it. You can embed it, too, which is handy:

A still from Inception. (Source)

For more than 30 years the Shortwave radio spectrum has been used by the worlds intelligence agencies to transmit secret messages. These messages are transmitted by hundreds of Numbers Stations.

Shortwave Numbers Stations are a perfect method of anonymous, one way communication. Spies located anywhere in the world can be communicated to by their masters via small, locally available, and unmodified Shortwave receivers. The encryption system used by Numbers Stations, known as a one time pad is unbreakable. Combine this with the fact that it is almost impossible to track down the message recipients once they are inserted into the enemy country, it becomes clear just how powerful the Numbers Station system is.

These stations use very rigid schedules, and transmit in many different languages, employing male and female voices repeating strings of numbers or phonetic letters day and night, all year round.

The voices are of varying pitches and intonation; there is even a German station (The Swedish Rhapsody) that transmits a female child’s voice!

One might think that these espionage activities should have wound down considerably since the official end of the cold war, but nothing could be further from the truth. Numbers Stations (and by inference, spies) are as busy as ever, with many new and bizarre stations appearing since the fall of the Berlin wall.

Tantalising oddness. Wikipedia has more information, here. One “mysterious, powerful shortwave numbers station” was nicknamed “The Lincolnshire Poacher”, apparently. And more information on the influence of The Conet Project, here; and an article from The Washington Post; and another article on the subject from Salon.

The discovery of the day has to be ‘Less Unless’, a track by CIVIL CIVIC: tremendous music, begging to be played again and again, louder and louder. I’m hoping there is much more from this group. You can hear the track on The Hype Machine, here. And this is the video:

The Year of the Ox just ended, the Year of the Tiger just began; fireworks are still exploding (Explosions in the Sky, Friday Night Lights — good stuff), and will continue to explode for a few more days. Last year I listened to a lot of music, and I’ve been going through my Last.fm account, consolidating my memories. There was a lot of Regina Spektor (I can’t remember when I first heard her, but it was love on first listen), quite a bit of Laura Veirs (a fascination with Viers’ voice has been creeping up on me slowly), not enough Basia Bulat (I heard Bulat while walking to work in Mianyang one day, and proceeded to listen to the same track all morning), lately a considerable amount of Emily Haines (as with Spektor, love at first listen, and as with Spektor, I’m not sure when I first heard her voice, although it might have been while I was in South Korea, after Chris recommended Metric), a smidgin of Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of Serge Gainsbourg), and a dose, here and there, of Seu Jorge (thanks to Hugo for that one).

Here is what I wrote about Jorge a week or so ago:

I won’t ever tire of listening to Seu Jorge’s Portugese renditions of songs originally sung by David Bowie. What grabs me is in part the genius of the originals, in part of the beauty of the translated words, words I understand only tentatively, each clause or sentence calling on memories of the English, but remaining, always, a little mysterious.

These are some of the Portuguese lyrics to ‘Starman’:

Adeus amor
Não sabia que horas eram as luzes eram baixas oh como
Debrucei-me para trás em meu rádio oh oh
Alguns gato foi deitada abaixo um pouco de rock n roll lotta soul, disse ele
Então o som alto pareceu desvanece-se uma ade
Voltou como uma voz lenta em uma onda de Hase ha fase
Jive que DJ não werent que foi nebulosa cósmica

Há um Starman waiting in the sky
Hed gostaria de vir conhecer-nos
Mas ele acha que ele ia explodir nossas mentes
[…]

It’s a beautiful version, full of seductive sounds creating very vivid imagery. I like, in a way, that in these versions, for me, the meaning of the lyrics is at a remove from the music.

Also, recently, a lot of Beirut. Astonishingly beautiful music. The Flying Club Cup has been played almost every day for the last couple of weeks, either at work or at home. Beirut can be connected to Arcade Fire via Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy), and then from Arcade Fire it is only a short leap to David Bowie (the version of ‘Life on Mars’ recorded at Fashion Rocks is spine-tinglingly good). I imagine this concert was memorable.

Broadcast & The Focus Group Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age was an unusual collaboration between one group I knew of, one I didn’t. I listened to it a lot, for a time, and need to revisit it. When I first got it, it was, like Amiina, something I listened to before sleeping; but I should listen to it while walking, to see what thoughts it inspires when released into the wild. (Walking, music, photography — I am happy to think about the first of these things, right now; the third is off-limits, thoughts of cameras and images currently creating a numbness.)

In my mind, that album is clustered together with albums by Elegi, Natural Snow Buildings, and Max Richter. Richter’s music is dense with meaning, but light on the ears; possessing density, but touching gently. I always feel that the compositions are like self-contained poems. I hope to be listening to Richter a lot more this year. Natural Snow Buildings have a darker hand, perhaps, but are no less beautiful for it. Their album Ghost Folks can be downloaded in its entirety from Last.fm.

Related to those three, to differing degrees, is Philip Glass. I listened to Koyaanisqatsi very frequently last year. The music is so effortlessly, tirelessly good, and the world does feel, “out of balance”, so the tracks became, at moments, concilitary: like old friends who nod in silent agreement at some mutually acknowledged problem. Other music by Glass that stood out this year: his score for Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, and also his score (from 2002) for The Hours (I had failed to make the connection with The Reader — has Stephen Daldry really only made two films in ten years?), a film about Virginia Woolf (I have been listening to a dramatisation of The Waves, and have also been wondering if I should read, again, To the Lighthouse).

On a completely different note, there was also a lot of Tegan and Sara and Belle & Sebastian, this year, according to Last.fm. I can remember the Tegan and Sara (it was something about Shanghai, and cleaning, and needing to feel upbeat — “I feel you in my heart…”); the Belle & Sebastian, however, is explicable (I have listened to them since before university — 1997, or thereabouts; and I always listen to them, periodically), but a bit strange (I don’t remember listening to them much over the last six months; I don’t remember my nostalgia, or cravings, pointing me in that direction). Also connected to this is a fairly recent burst of Pulp (‘Mile End’ still sounds so vividly alive). (From ‘Mile End’ my mind goes straight to my time in London, naturally, and to a completely different set of memories, but not memories that seem to have a distinctive musical signature.)

And so ends, a little abruptly, a little glance at the music of the last year. There is more, I am certain, but that is what comes to mind, right now. May the Year of the Tiger be equally intriguing.

In other news, I’ve finally updated scribeoflight.org, which feels like a good start to the year.

The song of the day has been ‘Changes’:

I watch the ripples change their size,
but never leave the stream
of warm impermanence and
so the days float through my eyes,
but still the days seem the same.
And these children that you spit on
as they try to change their worlds
are immune to your consultations:
they’re quite aware of what they’re going through.

I have a feeling it’s going to be an interesting year.

Some background on MCMP Redux can be found in the first installment of the series.

Yinchuan, 2007.

Here is the first tab:

That’s basically just the entire library, searchable via the search box, and also browsable via the columns (genre, album, and artist).  I don’t actually use this tab all that much, but it can be useful when I’m in the mood to browse, and particularly useful when I want to find something of a certain genre, or something with a particular feel.  (On a somewhat related note, most of the genres you can see there were pulled off of Last.fm with a very handy MediaMonkey script; sadly, the genres on Last.fm aren’t always all that helpful.)

Now for the second tab:

I use the playlist tab all the time, switching between permanent autoplaylists (‘Recently Added, Never Played’, for example) and more temporary garden variety playlists (‘David Bowie — Station to Station’, say).  The autoplaylists are powerful, but setting them up requires a little understanding of the syntax foobar2000 requires.  Thankfully, this information is easily found via the the software’s “help” links.

Number Three:

Really simple: a search bar and a list of sortable search results.  It is here that I usually generate the playlists that end up in the previous tab (generating playlists from the first tab is also possible, but not quite so easily, for some odd reason).  Tracks can also be played directly from this pane, should you so desire.

And onwards to the fourth:

This one is purely for reference: the properties and embedded artwork of the track currently playing.  Annoyingly, you can’t actually change the album artwork in this screen, or anywhere in foobar2000.

The penultimate tab:

Visualisers! I do like looking at how music dances around.  Sadly, these aren’t particularly exotic, just three of the standard visualisations packaged in with the basic foobar2000 download.  You could get prettier ones, but it all depends on how many CPU cycles you want f2k to devour.

And finally, number six:

The nuts and bolts, back-of-shop stuff. Prior to my coming to Guangdong, there was no equaliser, just the console: I didn’t ever really use the equaliser in Hanzhong or Xi’an, except to fiddle.  However, a budget set of speakers that didn’t sound anywhere near great out of the box required a lot of equaliser tweaking, so I decided to add it into the last page.  And anyway, the console alone doesn’t really warrant an entire tab: I only ever use it to check that tracks picked up off of my iPod are being scrobbled to Last.fm.

On the subject of iPods and Last.fm, it might be worth dropping in two more screenshots:

The first I stuck there to illustrate how easy it is to get foobar2000 to work with your Apple-branded digital music player of choice.   Itdoesn’t illustrate it very well, though, so I should give a bit more information: you download a small component (foo_dop, I believe), drop it into the components directory in your f2k installation, and then turn on foobar2000.  Easy.

The second image shows a handy little menu created by foo_scrobblecharts component, a wonderful piece of code that generates a playlist of music similar to, or related to in some way, the track you selected (in this case something by Neutral Milk Hotel).  It’s a little like Genius on iTunes, only much, much quicker, as it only deals with the one track you select, in contrast to Genius which indexes your entire library and can take an age before it has anything to offer you.  A playlist will usually be returned in around five seconds.  The powers of the interwebs are with us.  And the playlists are often excellent: a list it generated from a Sigur Rós track was full of music that was very much of the vibe I had had in mind.

So, there you go: my foobar2000.   A boring post, perhaps, but one I took great delight in putting together for public consumption.

There is an Adobe AIR application, too, and I’ll probably try that soon, if I can remember where I put the Adobe AIR installer (I haven’t yet installed it onto this netbook).