Sunday, January 12, 2014
Musical Discovery - Alstroemeria Records
So the new year has begun. For my first non-update post of the year, we're going back to Music Discovery. The topic of this post is the group Alstroemeria Records. With this post, I will retroactively also be adding genre tags to all my previous Musical Discovery and Top Tracks posts.
Alstroemeria Records is a Japanese group headed by Masayoshi Minoshima. Genre wise, it falls into the trance category with more recent tracks starting to feel more on the dubstep side of the electronica spectrum. Historically, Alstroemeria Records has only released during Comiket which occurs twice a year, once in August and once in December, and Reiteisai (博麗神社例大祭) which occurs in October. The reason for this is because as a group Alstroemeria Records does covers of tracks from a game called The Touhou Project. These are largely unimportant things, besides the fact that a lot of the music I listen to is related to these events.
Back to Alstroemeria Records though. The sound of Alstroemeria Records has changed from when they started releasing back in 2003. At the beginning the sound was more instrumental and less electronic. Throughout the years, more vocal tracks have been added and the sound has become decidedly more electronic mainly in the veins of trance and dubstep.
In the category of Japanese Touhou cover groups, Alstroemeria Records is likely the most famous due to a viral video released in 2009 that has since seen many copies in various form like this. I'm personally a fan of the video I linked because it uses carved apples instead of just shadow art. They're known because they're responsible for the song that goes with the accompanying video.
While far from mainstream, I do think that Alstroemeria Records has a sound that is appealing to many different kinds of people. While some of the newer material can be jarring for those not into dubstep or harder hitting electronic music, compositionally the material is still very good. In my opinion, I feel that by expanding and experimenting in different genres, Masayoshi Minoshima has gotten better at composing and arranging and allowing new material into what began as rather general covers.
At this point, I'm just going to end with a mix of some of the tracks Alstroemeria Records has released in the past. I hope you enjoy and until next time.
**Sorry for all the pops on the p's and b's I really need to get a pop screen. If/when I do, I'll redo all the recordings.
**Also, if I ever get any notices saying I should take down any cross fades or mixes, I will.
--CsMiREK
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Moving forward
Regardless if you're new here or have read a thing or two here before, welcome. I hope everyone had a great new years and because it is a new year I would like to review my year here. I started this blog a little over a year ago on January 1st of last year. Honestly I find this blog to be an extension of myself. My interests, my flaws, my regrets, my triumphs. During the course of writing this blog, I have become more aware of myself and what I really enjoy.
Besides starting this blog, this past year I graduated from college. I moved halfway across the country for work. I started to work. I spent WAY too much money on audio gear for the amount I make. I hung out with friends. Most importantly though, I spent this last year reflecting on who I am as a person. While I'm still unsure where I will go in future years, I know this for sure, I am very lucky and thankful for my past. Sure I have many regrets, but honestly life has been good to me so far. And while I am still young, I know to appreciate what I've been given.
A few days ago I was thinking about disabilities. Most notably I was thinking about being blind or deaf and how being either would affect my life. Given a choice between the two I think I might rather be dead. I know this sounds disrespectful to those who are either blind or deaf but given how I've lived and my interests, I don't think I could survive being either. With how much I listen and enjoy music, I could not survive being deaf. To be so for me, would be equivalent to cutting out one of the most important facets of my life. To be blind would be equally devastating. I'm not sure if I could survive as a programmer without my eyes. I spend almost my entire day looking at a computer screen, and while my eyes aren't great, to the point where I might as well be blind without my glasses, I spend my entire day looking at things. I'm sure that there are ways to do my job without being able to see, but I can't imagine that they'd be efficient in any manner.
In thinking about all this I came to a realization that the internet is not for the blind. A system of pages interlinked largely visually is just inherently unusable to those unable to see. I'm aware that it is possible to enjoy the web as a blind person using screen readers that verbalize the words on a screen. There are entire sites however devoted to the visual arts, which is fine just completely inaccessible. For more on this you can read this article written by Gizmodo a couple years ago.
While W3C standards include things about accessibility like use <strong> instead of <b> if you want to have strong emphasis on something semantically. Eg you want something bold to actually "sound" bold or have a strong emphasis. To blind people, it can be hard to tell that you mean something to be strongly accented unless you mean to have <strong> tags around things. More importantly, this isn't even standard. For example, I tried to set something bold in the blogspot editor and they use <b> tags. Assuming I meant whatever I had bolded to be strongly emphasized, anyone using a screen reader wouldn't hear it. Knowing that, I can tell that the web isn't quite there yet for those with really bad vision impairment.
I would love to make changes to the entire internet to make the internet more accessible. However, I know that that isn't possible by myself. Instead, I would like to make this blog at the least more accessible. For those who can't see or those who would rather listen, I am going to start recording myself speaking my blog posts. Kind of like a podcast but more of a vocal transcription of each post. This makes this more of an audioblog now, and I'm completely ok with that. That said, each post will likely take longer as I'll have to both write and record myself for each post. This will all begin with the next post. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you keep reading/listening.
--CsMiREK
Besides starting this blog, this past year I graduated from college. I moved halfway across the country for work. I started to work. I spent WAY too much money on audio gear for the amount I make. I hung out with friends. Most importantly though, I spent this last year reflecting on who I am as a person. While I'm still unsure where I will go in future years, I know this for sure, I am very lucky and thankful for my past. Sure I have many regrets, but honestly life has been good to me so far. And while I am still young, I know to appreciate what I've been given.
A few days ago I was thinking about disabilities. Most notably I was thinking about being blind or deaf and how being either would affect my life. Given a choice between the two I think I might rather be dead. I know this sounds disrespectful to those who are either blind or deaf but given how I've lived and my interests, I don't think I could survive being either. With how much I listen and enjoy music, I could not survive being deaf. To be so for me, would be equivalent to cutting out one of the most important facets of my life. To be blind would be equally devastating. I'm not sure if I could survive as a programmer without my eyes. I spend almost my entire day looking at a computer screen, and while my eyes aren't great, to the point where I might as well be blind without my glasses, I spend my entire day looking at things. I'm sure that there are ways to do my job without being able to see, but I can't imagine that they'd be efficient in any manner.
In thinking about all this I came to a realization that the internet is not for the blind. A system of pages interlinked largely visually is just inherently unusable to those unable to see. I'm aware that it is possible to enjoy the web as a blind person using screen readers that verbalize the words on a screen. There are entire sites however devoted to the visual arts, which is fine just completely inaccessible. For more on this you can read this article written by Gizmodo a couple years ago.
While W3C standards include things about accessibility like use <strong> instead of <b> if you want to have strong emphasis on something semantically. Eg you want something bold to actually "sound" bold or have a strong emphasis. To blind people, it can be hard to tell that you mean something to be strongly accented unless you mean to have <strong> tags around things. More importantly, this isn't even standard. For example, I tried to set something bold in the blogspot editor and they use <b> tags. Assuming I meant whatever I had bolded to be strongly emphasized, anyone using a screen reader wouldn't hear it. Knowing that, I can tell that the web isn't quite there yet for those with really bad vision impairment.
I would love to make changes to the entire internet to make the internet more accessible. However, I know that that isn't possible by myself. Instead, I would like to make this blog at the least more accessible. For those who can't see or those who would rather listen, I am going to start recording myself speaking my blog posts. Kind of like a podcast but more of a vocal transcription of each post. This makes this more of an audioblog now, and I'm completely ok with that. That said, each post will likely take longer as I'll have to both write and record myself for each post. This will all begin with the next post. I hope you enjoy it and I hope you keep reading/listening.
--CsMiREK
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