Tag Archives: music

Music

Music Meme

Because I am bored.

The rules: No Indian, Icelandic or Japanese music. No instrumentals. All information valid through the last couple of week, hence not much thought, and all rankings/lists liable to change without notice or fanfare. A tip of the hat ( Hat? what hat?) to sonataindica for the idea.

My Top Five Most Heard Songs of all time of the past few weeks
Tough, very tough. The list over the last couple of months would be:

1) Portishead – Mysterons
2) Cake – Up So Close
3) Matmos – Three Guitar Lessons
4) Juno Reactor – Hotaka
5) Travis – Side

Top Five Feel Good/ Cheer me up/ Anti Depressant Songs of all time that I can think of

1) The Beatles – Two of Us
2) The Eels – Mr E’s Beautiful Blues
3) Kay Hanley – Pretend To Be Nice
4) The Temptations – My Girl
5) Gene Kelly – I Got Rhythm

Top Five feel like shit/ Life sucks/ Ultra-Depressing songs of all time ditto

1) Bruce Springsteen – Ghost of Tom Joad ( all the songs from the album, actually)
2) Radiohead – Exit Music (For a Film)
3) Nirvana – Polly
4) Ralph Stanley – O Death
5) Eminem – Mockingbird

Five Funny songs of all time yeah, yeah

1) Richard Cheese – Rape Me
2) The Beatles – Norwegian Wood
3) Tenacious D – Fuck Her Gently
4) Singing In The Rain OST – Moses Supposes
5) All the Monty Python songs.

Top Five Chick Songs of all time what I said above

1) Suzanne Vega- Caramel
2) Elizabeth Fraser – Tear Drop
3) Mazzy Star – Disappear
4) Lacuna Coil – Swamped
5) Imogen Heap – Who’s Getting Scared Now

Top Five Romantic Songs of all time yada yada yada

1) Susheela Raman – Love Trap
2) Sixpence None The Richer – Kiss Me
3) Nicole Kidman/Ewan McGregor – The Elephant Song/Come What May
4) Fleetwood Mac – Songbird
5) Billy Joel – She’s always a woman to me

Top five Songs with the Coolest Names of all time that I can think of

1) The Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
2) Trilok Gurtu – Once I Wished a Cherry Tree Upside Down
3) Frank Zappa – The Sheik Yerbouti Tango
4) The Prodigy – Smack My Bitch Up
5) Don Davis- Bow Whisk Orchestra/Switch or Break Show/Exit Mr Hat

Top Five Covers of all time that I can think of

1) Eva Cassidy – Fields of Gold (Sting)
2) Filter – One (Harry Nillson)
3) Tori Amos – Smells Like Teen Spirit (Nirvana)
4) Jose Feliciano – Light My Fire (The Doors)
5) Cowboy Junkies – Sweet Jane ( Lou Reed)

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Did I mention that my discman died two weeks ago? My faithful companion since 2001 ( or possibly 2000, considering that it was originally absolut_69‘s baby that I stole away and paid him six months later), my ecape valve during final year examinations, Sunny Deol-infested bus journeys, my PRECIOUS little precious finally gave up. Was bound to happen, but I am not giving up easily. It’s off for repairs now, and the guy at the service center ( unauthorized, the Philips guys said they don’t repair discmans, especially not the Expanium, and DEFINITELY not this model.), the guy said the lens needs to be changed. I don’t have too much hope of it working for more than a year, new lens or not, and I am pretty sure it won’t be able to read any of my older Frontech mp3 CDs. But no matter. I am not giving up on you easily, precious.

It’s one of those unacknowledged laws that whenever you lack the means to listen to music, your urge to listen to music increases dramatically. I have been spending my free time ( Ha ha ha) revisiting some CDs that I hadn’t heard in quite sometime. Travis, Moby’s Play, Dixie Chicks, Bad Company, Jethro Tull, Van Morrison, Cowboy Junkies. Loads of Suzanne Vega too.

Has it ever happened to you that you hear a song, and then don’t hear it for a long time, and when you hear it again, it sounds completely different from what you had thought it sounded, in terms of the orchestration and the arrangement? That happened to me with Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, a song which I keep remembering because of the opening lyrics, that go – If I ventured in the slipstream, between the viaducts of your dream, where immobile steel rims crack, and the ditch in the back roads stop – Could you find me? Would you kiss my eyes? – the imagery just kills me, man. I heard it after a long time, and was really, really taken aback to find that it was not really as guitar-driven as I remembered it was.

And now for some venom.

I think it was V For Vendetta that did it, finally, but I realised that the ratio of returns to investment has been mindblogglingly low for all the movies I’ve seen in theatres this and the last year. Movies that I’ve loved and enjoyed, like Sin City, Hostel, The Devil’s Rejects, even The Corpse Bride have no chance of attaining theatrical releases in India. What do we get? Pap. Bile-inducing insults to my brain. Pixellated eye-candy with six tracks of digitized nonsense. So I say, enough. No more movies in theatres. No more paying inflated prices to be mentally assaulted for 90 to 180 minutes, and with cellphone ringtone interruptions too, to boot. Especially comicbook movies. I have been completely uninterested in Superman Returns ever since yada yada yada and I am not really interested in talking about it, thank you. If you see it and you like it, well, I am happy for you. Obviously you haven’t been reading Doom Patrol or All Star Superman, so I can’t really say I am too happy for you, but yeah, you should know that I have absolutely no problems with you watching Superman Returns. Nope, none at all. Not a teensy weensy bit. Honest.

The trailer for Spiderman 3? Not interested. Ghost Rider? Pah! 300? Ditto. Nacho Libre? Well, yeah, interested, but I don’t think it’s coming to theaters here, so there!

I was also more than a little pissed off because the last copy of Hanzo The Razor available at secondspin.com got sold off this week, as did the two copies of Varttina’s Miero. GRRRAH! My credit card’s maxed out, so I couldn’t pick it up. CD-WOW still has it, but it’s almost twice the price.

I am a man of taste. I shall now go home and listen to Himesh Reshammiya until I fall asleep. I have a presentation to make tomorrow morning. Er, today morning. I am in such an ebullient mood (Part of the reason: Roger Ebert gave Superman Returns two stars. I don’t really like the guy, but that didn’t stop me from grinning a lot on reading his review) that my technical presentation has taken on shades of a standup comedy routine. Wish me luck.

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Mixtapes, Music

The Mix: with tracknames

Ah well, I had forgotten that I didn’t update my mix mp3 post with the names of the songs. The songs represented a major part of my work-music, and my late-night playlist – that happens to be the theme of the collection, by the way. With the exception of one or two, which I knew had to be on the list, they were all very tough selections for me. What do you select from an album that gives you so much pleasure as a singular entity? Is each song a mindblowing experience on its own or is it the cumulative after-effects of the song that preceded it and the one that will follow? And then the order, should song A become track 2 or is it better as an end-track? Should this song come before that one, and what should follow it? Decisions, decisions….

Took me about 8 hours of continuous listening to the 20 songs I selected, before deciding on the final thirteen, and the order.

The tracks, then.

Track 1: Queen of All Ears by The Lounge Lizards. These guys were supposed to be proficient in “fake jazz” when they began twenty years ago, which is just a way of saying that they played whatever they felt like, with surprisingly melodious results. This track “Queen of All Ears” is the fifth in their 1998 album of the same name, the name taken from Jimi Hendrix’s liner notes to Electric Ladyland “And on he walked until after crowning Ethel the dog the Only Queen of Ears…”.The rest of the songs on the album are mindbogglingly good as well, but what drew me to this track is the Indianness of the lead instrument. What, you didn’t notice?

Track 2: Do The Whirlwind by Architecture in Helsinki. My favourite band of the year, one that really unsettles you and forces you to listen to their music. This Australian band has released two albums so far – the first, Fingers Crossed (described as “eight people playing 14 songs in 37 minutes with 31 instruments”) was released in 2003, and the next, In Case We Die, from which this track is taken, in 2005. The song wins my vote for the catchiest song of 2005, bar none.

Track 3: Summer by Joe Hisaishi. While much has been written ( and said) about Hisaishi’s collaborations with Hayao Miyazaki, his collaborations with film-maker Takeshi Kitano are equally magical – piano-laced melodies, mellow instruments tinged with just the right amount of pathos. This track is from a very unlikely Kitano work, the story of a young boy who goes on a trip, during his summer vacation, to find his mother. The main piano line is infectious, I once heard this track over and over again between 7 PM and 3 AM, just because I could not get the main piano line out of my mind.

Track 4: Horizon – The Cinematic Orchestra – I completely dig the percussion line in this song, the clean sound of the jazz drums and the way the conga drums kick in at 2 minutes 48 seconds and go completely berserk for the next 40 seconds. I also love the bass line. And the female voice. And the organ motif that repeats after every eighth bar. Most of the other Cinematic Orchestra tracks do not have vocals in them, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, trust me.

Track 5: Assassin’s Tango – John Powell (from the Mr and Mrs Smith score) – Mr and Mrs Smith was one of these movies that made me fall asleep in the theater after the interval – there is just so much oozing coolness one can take, even in a Hollywood blockbuster. But just like the other cool yawn-inducer of the year (Ocean’s Twelve, in case you weren’t paying attention), MaMS had a very..er…cool background score, markedly lacking in cliched orchestral cues and sweeps. Case in point, this track.

Track 6: Green Grass of Tunner – múm – I have already spoken about the band before, the other Icelandic outfit I love. This track was off their 2002 album Finally We Are No One, which was the first album of theirs I heard.

Track 7: Love Trap – Susheela Raman –
Ok, so I could go completely berserk and write a huge account of how
much Susheela Raman completely rocks and why I am sure I will buy all
her albums this year, but I will let do the honours. ( They don’t call me Beatzo Magnanimity Phreniac for
nothing) The lad has stalked her in ways and means that put us lesser
stalkers to shame. And that’s a compliment, believe me.

Track 8: Ba Ba – Sigur Ros –
This is a band that takes the concept of musical layers to the nth
degree. Little sounds chitter in your ears, strange twisted sonic
collages that you might ignore at the first listen, hypnotized by the
main melody but that break into your senses when you listen more
carefully. Possibly the soundtrack to a dark fairy-tale.

Track 9: The Real Story – David Holmes (from the Ocean’s Twelve soundtrack) – I don’t think this track featured in the actual Ocean’s Twelve tracklisting, and that means even I have no idea how it landed up with me. I love the way this tries to imitate the classic spy themes of the sixties and the seventies, like some kind of a bastard offspring of Schifrin-Hayes-Norman, without going overboard.

Track 10: Yekermo Sew – Mulatu Astatke ( from the Broken Flowers soundtrack) – While I haven’t seen Jim Jarmusch’s latest movie ( I should buy it, now that the DVD is in National Market), the soundtrack, which boasts of an impressive range of Jazz-tinged tracks by not-too-well-known World Music artistes, had been playing in my room quite a number of times this year. Selecting this track, from out of the others, was a chore – all of them are that good.

Track 11: Islandisk – Rinneradio – My friend from Finland, who is now wading around in lakes in his hometown at minus fifteen degrees, introduced me to a lot of Finnish bands during his trip to India ( on the upside, I introduced him to Varttina, heh) and Rinneradio was one of my favourites. Prog jazz with electronic influences, the band’s huge in the Finnish music scene.

Track 12: Oceans Apart – Julie Delpy – Sasi thinks that the whole collection was a buildup to this song. Heh, I wish I could tell him it was not so. Heh heh, just kidding. Fact is, after I finished watching Before Sunset, I just let the DVD menu play over and over again, just to hear this song – and proceeded to get absolutely mad at myself for not being able to find this song anywhere. Of course, when I did, I went a little loony for sometime. Watch the movie, if you haven’t already; you will know what I mean. What a voice, what a song!

Track 13: The Real Folk Blues – Yoko Kanno – Probably, without having watched the TV series Cowboy Bebop, you won’t understand why this song is a perfect one to end a CD. Hearing this song play on the end credits of every episode is almost like exhaling after holding your breath after a long time, a head rush of sorts. Yoko Kanno, people, remember the name.

Right, that’s it then. Now I need to figure out an effortless way to upload large volumes before I can think of preparing the next instalment of mixes.

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Seasonal impulse

Mix-tapes are fun. Mix CDs even more so. Mix mp3s? Dunno. Thought I would give it a try. Before packing my stuff ( yes, I am going back to Hyderabad. Jan 1st. What a cool way to start the New Year!) , I chose, not so randomly, 13 tracks that rocked my world in 2005. The attempt was not just to select “favourite” tracks, but also to get some kind of a cohesive listening order out of the playlist, to make it seem like it’s an actual mood CD. Truth be told, the music does not stick to a particular mood, but I like to believe that there is a…umm…pattern to the selection. No, nothing trivia/funda based. Had to leave out a lot of tracks that would have sounded great as standalone tracks, or maybe in another mix, but were not in sync with the theme of this compilation. Not all these songs were released this year, it’s just that I heard them this year, and heard them quite a few times – mostly after 1 AM in the night.

A zip file of the thirteen tracks can be downloaded here, and the individual tracks are here.

The best way to listen to the tracks would be in order, so I would really advise you to download the zip file, unzip the lot, and enqueue in your favourite player. If you are wondering why there are no ID3 tags or titles to the songs, that’s just my way of handling individual prejudices. But yeah, I will give out the tracklist and the artistes sometime soon.

By the way, Pandora.com says that I like music with mild electronica influences, subtle use of vocal harmony, mild rhythmic syncopation, a vocal-centric aesthetic, and horn/woodwind passages. I am kind of upset about the words “mild” and “subtle”, guess I can never be an extreme kind of a person. *sigh*

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Moochwala, Retief, Holiday.

It’s s a good day when you find a Detective Moochwala collection – one of those Lost Childhood Treasures – in a forgotten corner of a bookshop. Getting it for twenty rupees is an added bonus, true.

This is the part I go into a nostalgia session about Target and Ajit Ninan Matthew and Mooch and Pooch and names like Besan Lal and Bhujiya Singh and Inspector Doodhmalai, but what the heck, fuck it. I am not in the mood for nostalgia right now.

Another interesting find was a hardcover graphic novel called Retief!, based on a sci-fi series I had come across once on the Baen bookshelf. The character was created by a gentleman named Keith Laumer, and Baen has an interesting write-up on him, mirrored in the foreword to the graphic novel. What interested me more than anything else was the artist – Dennis Fujitake – whose earlier collaboration with Jan Strnad, a comic about a dog-faced alien named Dalgoda was another Lost Childhood Treasure, picked up at second (and first) hand bookshops in Guwahati. Fujitake’s style is a clean, warm cross between Moebius’s linework on The Incal and Varley’s soft colours on Ronin (in Dalgoda, that is. This one is black-and-white.) Yummy!

I heard Ranjit Barot’s soundtrack to Holiday last night, from a colleague’s MP3 CD I whacked. Awesome stuff, really, and just to prove that I support good music regardless of its non-Rahman antecedents, went and bought the CD at lunchtime today. All the songs sung by very aptly-chosen singers – Ranjot Barot’s vocals on ‘Aashiyan’ worth the price of the CD alone. A quick look at the liner notes – not too much of it, unfortunately; too many pictures of Dino Morea and whoever that lady is, along with a couple of obligatory beach-babes in bikinis and a happy-grinny family – reveals that the saxophone solos were by Raghav Sachar. This uncanny Sax-man is the multi-instrumentalist who released a catchy remix album about a year back, full of instrumentals of Asha Bhonsle cabaret numbers, and one that I cannot seem to find anywhere anymore. His latest album sounded very electronic the first time I sampled it, so wasn’t too interested. Acoustic drums by Mr Barot himself, flute by Navin. Dominique Carejo’s voice appears on a semi-English song, which gets very embarassingly Celine Dion at times, but manages to stay right in the groove. The bulk of the female vocals are by Shreya Ghoshal, and the lady’s rocksteady success rate is starting to scare me. All in all, an album that manages to stay in tune without veering into item-number territory. Market logistics dictate the presence of an obligatory dance remix of ‘Aashiyan’, however, and DJ Nasha does the …umm…honours.

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