Category Archives: Music

High Bitrate

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5°C, dull.
iPod Sampling rate really does make a difference. In practice, it means that the Classic sounds better than the Nano because you can rip CDs at a high sampling rate and get better sound quality. There is plenty of space on the 120Gb drive to do that. I’m shopping around for a dock/player for it now, I neeeed music in the kitchen! Sound is so much part of the house’s atmosphere, along with smells- which reminds me- I bought wood for the open fire today, but with no music or TV downstairs, there is no real incentive ot spend time in that part of the house.
Soon grasshopper, soon.

Buying iTunes from Amazon

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1°C, thin overcast. Sleet this morning

OK, not what you’d think: albums cost £7-8 from iTunes. You can easily buy the same thing from Amazon, 2nd hand for as little as £3, then make the conversion in the iTunes software ready for your iPod. there are other advantages apart from cost, that is – quality. Play the CD on a real hifi and enjoy real hifi sound quality. I shall experiment with higher sampling rates in iTunes soon to see how much clearer it sounds..

I need a little poison

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10°C, penetrating rain this afternoon.no real wind.

Hands still stained with black: oil, rubber and aluminium corrosion, that stuff doesn’t want to wash out.

iPod Classic: possible sound quality improvement on the square Nano. Not sure yet, they need comparing with a wide range of music.
Bright Yellow Gun

With your bright yellow gun
You own the sun
And I think I need a little poison
 
To keep me tame
Keep me awake
I have nothing to offer but confusion
 
And the circus in my head
And the middle of the bed
In the middle of the night
 
With your bright silver frown
You own the town
And I think I need a little poison
 
I have no secrets
I have no lies
I have nothing to offer
But the middle of the night
And I think you need a little poison
 
You leak one apple a week to survive
And you still have to ask if you’re alive
 
You have nothing to offer
But police my dreams
Keep me clean
Keep me awake
 
With your bright yellow gun
You own the sun
And I think I need a little poison
 
With your bright silver grin
You own sin
And I think I need a little poison

Bright yellow gun

~Throwing Muses

Complicated

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4°C, sleety showers; no ride today

Borderline: this is going to be complicated, drive to North London to help someone move house, then to the gig at Borderline near Tottenham Court road. Ice and rain will have cleared, and I have company. Tomorrow will be for recovery from lack of sleep and eat Japanese food.
The audience was an uneven demographic distribution: lots of blokes (about my age), some couples, and lots of lesbian couples. I never suspected that KH would have a large lesbian following. The venue turned out to be likable, we were all close, the sound was adequate (very important to me as you know). There was a cloakroom and nice bar with drinks at fairly normal prices for London.

Zoe Rahman

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10°C, drizzle + NW winds. Very dull cycling weather: 52 miles.

Gig at the CBSO Centre, Birmingham: Colourful lively but not overbearing jazz group. See their myspace page. We had excellent seats in the middle of the front row. Actually, maybe they weren’t the best seats because the speakers fired their sounds passed out ears either side.
Anyway, a good night out.
Getting phyched up for the K. Hersh concert later this month; here is a taster:
   :
These clips are tricky to choose, either the video is poor quality or there are oddities with the sound. Flash has known issues with sound synchronising with the video, more so in music it seems.

Sky Motel

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Wind, rain and difficult keeping the house warm.11°C.

K Hersh: Sky Motel delivered in school yesterday. Since it was a staff training day, I played it over the speakers in my room. First impression wasn’t great. Now I’m at home listening on a proper Hifi, a change of mind is unavoidable. The concert next month should be stunning. Note: take spare cash for any goodies for sale. A book of lyrics would be perfect.

Making more pictures today, searching for things, and finding things to throw out. With rain outside, that’s the kind of day we’re having.

I’m going…

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14°C, brisk winds

An Evening With Kristin Hersh: a birthday outing for me in London. How the day will pan out is not at all clear yet. But the tickets order made it in time.
In the meantime, I am thinking over the way she writes. Writers are so interesting aren’t they. I love the way they talk about the process.
She says in in a 1995 interview with AOL’s
Critics’ Choice electronic music magazine:

"That’s the way a song hits
you right here, right here (she motions to the heart and gut) instead
of in your brain because the words themselves are all real sweaty,
color, action words, so they just go bang-bang-bang. They’re not supposed
to make you think and try to figure out some puzzle. People think that
I’m trying to trick them, that I have some thing I could write down and
I haven’t done it and I’ve just given them a bunch of poetry instead. I
find it to be the clearest way to talk. It’s like the way little kids
talk because they have no filler words and no overriding thoughts to
color your impression of what’s happening in a song."
Though feeling more contented this week, I am tired by all of this; very tired.

Jacob Golden

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15°C, rain this afternoon.

Revenge Songs; by Jacob Golden is getting rave reviews in the media, is that because of the record’s euphonic sound? I’m not really sure how long I will like this album, but for now I am playing it every day. I never ever play an album more than once in a day, I really hate doing that- it just ruins the experience. On the negative side, is seems a little naive in places, and the production is a bit heavy on the reverb (or whatever it is).

News: I get to keep the toaster and the kettle!