Musical Taste

It's been a year and a half since I started this blog and I just realized that I haven't really mentioned anything about my personal musical tastes.  Through my Musical Discovery and Top Tracks posts I hope that it strikes you that I have at least somewhat eclectic tastes when it comes to music.  From electronic like Alstroemeria Records to rock like 9mm Parabellum Bullet to pop like Sara Bareilles and St. Vincent I end up listening to almost everything.

Since my first post of Musical Discovery when I had around 17000 tracks I've added another 5000 taking the total to over 22000 tracks.  So I think that it's good to know what I look for in music and what I enjoy.  In doing so I hope that you take some time to look at what determines the music that you enjoy.  For me, I look for two things and two things only.  The first is whether I find the music interesting and the second is whether the music fits my aesthetic for music.

So what defines interesting to me?  As a kid growing up with classical music along with regular pop music, defining interesting is a somewhat odd thing for me.  I heavily favor music that is complex in structure.  However, I also realize that there is a cutoff where complexity does not equate to better and simplicity wins out.  What that means in more digestible terms is that I tend to enjoy music that keeps me thinking.  A lot of pop music I find to be repetitive in a bland way.  The general texture of most pop music is consists purely of a vocal (singular) track, some sort of 4 beat percussion track, and a nondescript instrumental track.  By nondescript I mean that there is no memorable part to almost any instrumental track I hear on the radio.  This doesn't mean that I don't like repetitive music.  I can very much enjoy music like Robot Rock by Daft Punk which is a pretty repetitive track.  I can also admire the works of Steven Reich, in particular Piano Phase and Come Out.  While not super impressive nowadays, the ideas are really interesting and the use of panning in Come Out is just plain awesome to listen to.  I guess what really defines interesting to me is how much I can pick apart and understand a piece which is perhaps a bit outside of what others might think about music.

The other half of my musical taste is my aesthetic for music.  This is more in line with what most people would say musical taste is.  My aesthetic brings me closer to electronic music at the moment while still enjoying rock and pop.  I love the sound of string instruments and orchestral works in general.  Brass in particular is so fun for me to listen to, I'm a huge fan of the big band sound even though I don't have much in my library.  While ambient and rap or hip hop generally don't veer into my aesthetic, I can appreciate them if they provide a substantively interesting musical part.  As an example, Nujabes was a hip hop artist first and foremost even with the jazzy elements.  The jazzy elements helped a lot for me to embrace his music.  Alternatively, Eminem is just straight up rap music.  However, he or whoever produces his music has a very clear and good sense for how to treat his lyrical rhythm in a musical setting even if that setting isn't the most complex.  I find myself impressed with Eminem more than most other rappers or hip hop artists.  The other thing to realize is that musical aesthetic changes as you get older.  I implore you to listen to things that you don't like initially as your aesthetic changes.  Just 4 or 5 years ago, there is no way I would have seen myself liking Eminem or Daft Punk or Alstroemeria Records but in time I've gotten to the point of embracing good music regardless of genre.  Sometimes interesting music overrides what your usual aesthetic is.  After all the two are wholly separate things while simultaneously being heavily interrelated.  I hope you enjoyed this post and I hope it makes you think about what your musical tastes are, what you find interesting and what you're currently drawn towards.  With that, until next time.

*Audio will be up later*

--CsMiREK

Gear Days: Headphone Spreadsheet

Recently I've been going back through all of my headphones and re rating them.  The results of which I'm glad to share with you here on this link.  When I obtained a pair of Beyerdynamic DT880 headphones all of my rankings needed to change.  Simply put, at the current moment they are the best headphones I own and everything needed to get re rated in order to compensate.  In the sub tabs of the spreadsheet I'll be breaking down the sub sections of headphones I currently own with the best in each category taking the 10/10 slot and everything else adjusted to the headphones that hold the 10/10 slot for the category.  The last sub tab is a list of songs I like to listen to for various reasons that I try to elucidate.  If you are ever in the position of looking for headphones I hope you can refer to that spreadsheet for some advice at any time.  I'll also be leaving the link on the side for reference at all time.  And with that, until next time.

*Note: No audio for this post*

--CsMiREK

Gear Days: Brainwavz B2 Brazen Brightness

And...we're back.  Well at least I am.  For my return to posting we have another issue of Gear Days.  For this post, I'll be talking about the Brainwavz B2s.

The Brainwavz B2 headphones, henceforth referred to as the B2s are in ear headphones that you can get for around $125-$140.  At this point you might be asking yourself, 'Why would I ever spend over $100 for a pair of earbuds?'  Well firstly, if you've read any of my other posts on headphones you'd notice that I make a distinction between in ear headphones and earbuds so get your shit straight.  Second, honestly if you like in ear headphones and want a good step up, the B2s are some really nice headphones for the price so now let's get down to the specifics.

Musical Discovery - 9mm Parabellum Bullet

As harsh as I am about pop music, there are glimmers of hope in the muddled trash.  While not perfectly analogous, the Japanese pop scene also has its own particular tropes and crap that is followed which I find marginally more enjoyable.  But this isn't really about pop music.  It's about rock.  More importantly, this is about the band 9mm Parabellum Bullet.

As a band, 9mm Parabellum Bullet was formed in 2004 and so have been around a decent amount of time now.  However, throughout what's amazed me about them is not their sound, but their ability to experiment and improve.  In the past 10 years they've released 5 albums which is not too bad.  Not nearly as prolific as Alstroemeria Records who I posted about last month, but 5 albums in 10 years isn't too shabby at all.  More importantly, like Alstroemeria Records, each album is different from the last whether that's good or bad.  Since there are only 5, I'll talk about each of them just because.

Rant Corner: Pop music

New month, new rant corner.  Gotta vent my anger some way right?  This time around, it's pop music.  You might like pop music, you might hate it.  Personally, I find it bland, boring, and quite frankly kinda sad.  For as much money and effort is put into pop music, it's so...generic and so...homogeneous.  What I find even worse or perhaps disturbing is that artists that create really unique and textural complete songs seem to lose that edge when they become famous in the US.  It's like the status of being a pop music star makes artists completely pedestrian and unable to experiment musically.  Although unable to experiment might not be completely accurate.  More accurately I would say that being in the pop music limelight makes people so reticent to experimentation and failure that they churn out shitty music that all sounds the same.

But let's not just take my word for it.  Let's dive into some examples.  At the point of this post, Katy Perry is a famous singer who sings pretty shitty formulaic party pop music.  From "Hot n Cold" to "California Gurls", you get overly simple and repetitive messes of music.  While it's true they're dance worthy, so's this song by UK band Belleruche.  Almost annoyingly so though, her first few songs, namely "I Kissed a Girl" and "Ur so Gay", look them up if you don't know them, which made her famous are full of little tidbits of interesting things.  There's textural contrast and an almost out of place electronic sound in the latter.

But let's even get away from simply shitty overly simple pop music.  I think the real root to my anger towards pop music is the idolatry surrounding vocalists.  For whatever reason, no matter how famous of a guitarist or cellist or drummer you are, you are never going to be more famous than an arguably shitty singer.  However, this didn't used to be the case.  In days past we had the Jimi Hendrixes, the Pablo Casals and Jacqueline Du Pres, the Louis Armstrongs, and Scott Joplins of the world.  Nowadays, ask anyone for a famous musician that's active.  I can almost guarantee you that they'll pick a singer or a group focused on a singer like the way Maroon 5 is focused around Adam Levine.  Yea, sure you might get the odd answer from an electronic music buff who'll say Deadmau5 or Avicii or Pretty Lights, but for the greater populace, the only musicians are singers.  Where and when did we stop caring for the instrumentals that truly make music special?

I understand that the human voice is special to us.  After all, with a little practice anyone and everyone can sing.  The barrier to entry is so very low in comparison to playing an instrument.  What is it though that makes us revere and look up to singers the way we do?  I find myself enthralled in music more often when the background to a song is more engaging.  Pop music just sounds so stale and almost robotic in its cleanliness and distinction between vocals and background.  In the end, a human voice is just another vessel, another canvas with which we can paint music with.  This ridiculous fixation and obsession with individual singers needs to end.  When it does I think that pop music can make a step forward and stop being the shallow mess of overly used tropes where it currently festers like a pus filled boil popping disgusting slop over our ears.  Sorry if you like pop music, there are hidden gems but honestly they're almost not worth it.

--CsMiREK

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

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