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Date: Wed, 27 Jan 2010 14:58:05 -0800 From: slapbandjam@yahoo.com Subject: Re: Brian Eno about recorded music To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com Electric LadyLand = favorite album of all time
From: "looppool@cruzio.com" <looppool@cruzio.com> To: Loopers-Delight@loopers-delight.com Cc: loopers-delight@loopers-delight.com Sent: Wed, January 27, 2010 5:32:33 PM Subject: Re: Brian Eno about recorded music That was an excellent and eye opening post, Tyler. thanks for taking the time to elucidate your views for us. I have been firmly in the opposite camp that you are in , but it made me pause and really reconsider my own position and, certainly, soften my own prejudice against the iPod phenomena. One thing you said made me pause and want to reply, however. You said: "....... more often than not, they wouldn't have exactly what i was looking for, so i'd end up blindly buying other stuff with mixed results. so that can be pretty frustrating. sure, i came upon some great finds, but NOTHING can compare with highly tuned recommendation algorithms, not even friends recommendations." I have to agree to disagree with you on this point and say that some of the very best (and most surprising) entries to my own musical life have come , specifically from NOT finding things in record stores and randomly walking through sections of music. I've even had luck picking out CDs by artwork alone or by chance conversations with someone browsing in the same section as me. This was almost my entire method for falling in love with abstract electronic and getting into the genre. I did purchase things that I didn't like and had to sell them back but the return, aesthetically for my chance taking was returned ten fold by what I stumbled upon that then really influenced my own artistry. I also have a dear friend, John Connell (who has played the looping festival twice), who is the buyer for the world music, electronica, metal, industrial and goth sections at our Streetlight Records who has contributed incredibly to my musical life. John's tastes and mine are frequently diametrically opposed. But he is a very, very intelligent, sensitive and dedicated fan of music in many forms and I've discovered that out of 10 recommendations I will return 9 of them (to get 75% of my purchase price back) and then 10th one frequently will change my life musically. It'll be something I'd never try on my own like that shirt someone buys for you for your birthday that you'd never buy but that becomes your favorite because it lets you see yourself in a different way.....one that expands you. What an inexpensive and terrible percentage of connection, eh? But to me, the things he's turned me onto in my life are things I would have never discovered on my own and wouldn't have been served up to me on a platter on Pandora. Part of my beef with the way things are currently, is exactly that we can live in micro niche's musically because of the ways that Amazon, Ebay, Pandor and other entities keep recommending things that are like what we have liked in the past. I'm all for resonance, but: I remember when underground FM radio first started in the hippy days in Northern California that you could listen to a DJ play Odetta, the Doors, Joni Mitchell and then Ravi Shankar on the same program. There was a sense that you could discover new worlds, musically at that time. For this reason, Bill Graham would specifically book the Duke Ellington Orchestra and, say, Jimi Hendrix on the same bill because he wanted to educate the young hippy audiences that he booked for. I saw Gordon Lightfoot, Canned Heat and some local SF psychedelic band at the Fillmore on my 16th birthday. Lately, I find that the kids that I teach know only specific genres of music and frequently , aren't interested in other kinds of music at all. This makes for some shredding speed metal and punk drummers, I'll have to admit, but there seems to be a mono fixated quality to their listening and playing habits. Additionally, they don't have any concept of longer forms of music. They never listen to an artist's albums because they are always purchasing single songs on iTunes. I frequently get, "Jimi Hendrix? What songs does he do?" I have to admit that I can't remember all the song titles on the wonderful Electric Ladyland double album but try to convince them that they are missing something if they are only playing his 'greatest hits' and not experience how he, as an artist created this beautiful long form musical work. Listen to single tracks out of order from THE side of Abbey Road by the Beatles and you've missed something important in my own opinion. I guess this is just a bloated paean to diversity and chance in our musical adventures. I certainly don't want to become the embittered old man that I used to hate as a very young angry man...............you know: "we had to walk through snow and broken glass barefoot to school when I was a boy and WE LIKE IT!!!" I want to keep an open mind about the way things are going, but I do miss a bit of the diversity that the new ways of purchasing music, digitally seem to be missing. Educate me, however, Tyler, you've got a really good head on your shoulders! yours, Rick Spread the cheer with Messenger for mobile. Learn more. |