Most of the music I have on my x2 phone/iPad/iTouch is stuff I'm trying
to learn or appreciate enough so that I can learn it better from some
other source. Since most all the stuff I'm trying to learn has
choreography and staging components; there are very strong visual
elements that interact in complex ways, so I need movies that I can cut,
run through slow-mo or frame-by-frame, etc. There are exceptions, but
for the most part mp3's don't quite cut it. I have a strong bias
towards unamplified, acoustic groups in performance and while I respect
folks who have gone down the electronic music path, I confess it doesn't
do much for me at this time. (though if somebody wanted to drop a
Roland Handsonic at my front door I'm sure I could find a use for it).
So, I think for me I relate to recorded music pieces (sometimes just
fragments) as objects of study if they're going to be on my devices.
There are few enough of those things at one time for the notion of
clouds and auto searches to be less than useful.
Yes, I listen to Hearts of Space every so often, and yes, during a
massage it's nice if Pandora's on, and yes, Performance Today there in
the car, but seldom on my iTouch, no. That stuff is just in a different
realm.
I like the idea of fragments that performers might put up on SoundCloud
to ask what fans might like to see developed further. (see, for example,
Vienna Teng). But its an interactive process; any DVD's or salable
recordings are largely epiphenomena that are only out there to in some
small way support the process, which is just the pointy end of a larger
tradition.
Yeah, blues, only live. Even Better if you made your own instruments,
and brewed your own whiskey and lived your own angst. From scratch.
Carl
On 11/17/11 2:50 PM, glen wrote:
Russell Standish wrote circa 11-11-17 12:59 PM:
I suspect there might be quite a few others like me :)
Yep. I have gone one step further, though. I now try to buy all my
music sans plastic (i.e. online). But I relish the diversity between my
collections on various devices. I make some sullen attempts to sync my
phone and laptops with my server. But I'm inconsistent. And I make no
serious attempts to acquire all the music I listen to on myspace,
last.fm, pandora, or anywhere else.
I'm not a musician, but I pretend to understand a little of how many of
them seem to feel. With the ability to construct a fresh experience
anywhere you go, the robotic automation of studio recorded music pales a
little bit. It took me awhile after puberty to really appreciate music
as a contextual whole experience rather than scripted emotion.[1][2]
When I finally did grok it, I began to appreciate all sorts of things I
didn't even perceive before. Even bad music, if I'm there while it's
being constructed, seems quite fulfilling.
The diversity in my collections across devices feels like a shadowy
reminder of that understanding.
[1] I remember an event right out of college. I used to frequent the
bars in Dallas and Houston that allowed open jams ... anyone with an
instrument was welcome to walk on stage and play with whoever was up
there already. That's where I fell in love with the blues ... or what I
called the blues, anyway. I mistakenly told a coworker that I liked the
blues. When he came to my apt for a party one time, he accused me: "I
thought you liked the blues?!?" after looking through my LPs. I said,
"Yeah, but only live." He scoffed and dropped the subject.
[2] I've recently gotten into lots of "noise" performances. It's hard
to describe. But for me, it's a bit like a good book or riding a
motorcycle. There are windows (>100 pages, but still far from the end,
into a good book, or from [2,8] hours on the bike) wherein you're sense
of context is transformed, made expansive in some weird way. Noise
bands do that to me (at least the good ones do). But I've tried
listening to pre-recorded noise. It just ain't the same... it has an
antiseptic feel... all tin-ny, weak, and unidimensional. Much of that
is the attention most noise geeks pay to the venue and pa system, I'm
sure. If they had a good production engineer and I used headphones, it
might be better.
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