Sickness behind, hope ahead

Well, another Christmas come and gone.  Mostly I was sick for it.  In fact, I didn’t eat anything at all for over 24 hours: no Christmas cookies, no Christmas chocolate, no ham biscuits.  And, when I did finally eat (right before bed on Christmas night), it was cinnamon toast and turmeric tea.  But enough whining.

The kids seemed to have a lovely day at least.  (They got over their respective bugs well before the big day.)  There was lots of playing with videogames and dolls, and the eldest one and I got to play D&D on Christmas night.^*  So it wasn’t all bad.

Still, hoping New Year’s will be disease-free.  Oh, and that you, dear reader, will have a lovely 2020.

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* This was the second of the “flashbackstories” that I mentioned previously.

A season's greeting musical update

Well, it’s nearly Christmas again, and so time to wish you a merry christmahannukwanzaakah.^*  As I apparently only do new Christmas mixes every 5 years, I guess it’s not time for volume III of my excellent collection of holiday classics Yuletidal Pools.  Which is a shame.  But I’ll offer you the next best thing: minor updates to volumes I & II.

One creates one’s mixes with the best of intentions, and the belief that they will last forever.  Alas, every now and again you find that something you were sure you were going to love always is starting to grate on your nerves a bit.  To that end, I’ve found that two of the tracks I picked for Yuletidal Pools (one on each volume, as it happens) aren’t really working for me any more.  So I’ve updated the tracklists with new replacement tunes.

For volume I, I’ve replaced “My First Xmas, as a Woman” with “Merry Christmas I Fucked Your Snowman” by Botson punks the Showcase Showdown.  A bit of a risky move, as, in a few more years, the latter may begin to annoy me as much as the former has begun to.  But it seemed an appropos swap, and it really is a fun little tune, if a bit over-the-top.

For volume II, I found that “Xmas at K-Mart” began to grate on my nerves as much as it always has my family’s.  So I replaced it with the much slicker “Santa’s Lost His Mojo,” by the Lost Fingers.^**  It’s less of a 1-for-1 swap, but I think it still flows pretty nicely in the same spot, and it’s certainly a much nicer tune to listen to.

So there’s a least a couple of new tracks for ya.  And, if you hadn’t yet discovered my Christmas mix, it’s two full sets that you can enjoy as an antidote to the typical holiday pablum that your ears are currently being assaulted with.  You can thank me later.

Wishing everyone the best, and wondering if I’ll actually manage a full post between Christmas and New Year’s ... happy holidays, you guys.  Take care.

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* As always, ™ previous co-worker Jon Sime.
** And thanks to new co-worker Max for letting me know about those guys.

No Time Like the First Time

This past summer, while sitting in the hot tub with my youngest child (age 7), she announced that she had an idea for a D&D character.

Now, I am not a sports dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you for the first time to say they want to learn how to throw a football.  And I am not a musician dad, so I don’t know what it feels like to have your child come to you at a young age and tell you about the song they’re trying to write.  But I imagine that what I felt at that moment, in that hot tub, was comparable to those scenarios.

My two youngest spend a lot of time in the pool (mostly fighting, or playing, and sometimes doing both at once), and I like to sit out with them and work on my computer stuff and watch them.  Occasionally I get in, but, honestly, I’m not much for playing in the pool these days.  I still do laps sometimes—it’s really the only exercise I actually enjoy—but that’s not a thing you want to try to do while kids are playing (or fighting) in the water with you.  But, when they’re all tuckered out from playing and fighting and playfighting, they often get in the hot tub to cool down (figuratively, obviously).  My littlest one likes it way more than the middlest one: like her old man, she loves the heat.  The middle child will usually give up after a while, complaining “it’s too hot!” And then it’s just me and her.  Sometimes we play 20 Questions.  Sometimes we just talk about mostly nothing.  But, this time, she decided to tell me about her D&D character concept.

It’s perhaps important to establish that she’s never played before.  She’s watched us play many times, of course, and once I let her be a sort of pet character,¹ but she didn’t really do much.  Sometimes we listen to a D&D podcast in the car—specifically, the excellent Dames and Dragons, which is the one she really likes—but, overall, not any real prior experience.  And, yet, this was not a vague idea she was presenting to me.  This was a fully-fleshed out concept: this character had a name, a race, a class, hair color, eye color ... she even told me what type and color of armor she wore.  When she said, “now, her parents—well, she has kind of a dark backstory,” I almost squeed.  I’ve had thirty-year-olds who put less effort into their characters than this.  “Dark backstory”?  What kind of weird YouTube crap is she watching?  But, from a GM² perspective, it’s gold.

Now, some things changed as time went on, but the final character is remarkably similar to what she gave me that first day.  Corva Ravenstone is a half-elven ranger with turquoise hair and lavender eyes.  Here’s the current version of her backstory:

Corva’s parents disappeared into the jungle when she was just a baby.  Corva thinks they were studying nature, but she doesn’t really remember because she was too young.  When she was barely old enough to walk, they never came back from collecting herbs one day; the only clue Corva has is that some blood and black fur were left behind. From then on she was raised by her tiger friend Bone.

Corva dresses all in green, except for her light blue armor.  She carries a bow and has a monkey companion named Chip.

Please note that, although I helped put the thoughts above into nice-sounding sentences, I didn’t really write any of it.  None of it.  It’s all her.

So, naturally I decided that this deserved a corresponding effort on my part.  This couldn’t just be a throw-away character concept; this had to be a real character that my daughter played in a real campaign.  The problem, of course, is that creating D&D campaigns is a major effort.  I did a little bit of it for my eldest child, but mostly it’s just been using pre-written adventures for the last several years.  But for this I felt like I had to put together something memorable.  The other two kids are joining us, of course, for what we’re currently dubbing “the Family Campaign.” And I’ve probably put more time and effort into trying to write background and plot and adventure hooks for this one game of D&D than I have in the past 15 years.

Therein lies the problem, of course.  I bit off more than I could chew, and it’s taken me six months to get ready to go.  All this is pressure I put on myself; the kids, I’m sure, would be happy just to play whatever.  But, the more I thought about it, the more ideas I had, and the more the older two started to get excited as well, and the more complicated it all became.  Definitely no one to blame but me, but it just felt like it had to be ... well, not perfect, but at least special.

And I’m definitely not done yet.  But I came up with this wacky idea where each of my three children would play a short, solo intro adventure, which would set up the whole background, and then they’d come together.  I’ve taken to calling these “flashbackstories,” an over-obvious portmanteau word to be sure, but too cool to pass up.  They will each take place 5 – 7 years “ago”³ and they will tell the story of how each character left their original home and came to be indebted to a mysterious benefactor, who will then call upon them to perform a certain mission in return (which will be the kickoff to their shared adventure).  For this purpose, I’m designing mini-adventures that are specifically too hard for their beginner characters, but then pairing them up with a higher-level NPC.⁴  So, the idea is, basically, there’s a fight they can’t really handle alone, discovery of a greater danger, and a guide to help them get out alive and take them away to some relative safety, whence they, years later, come together at last.

Did I mention I was making it way too complicated?

Anyhow, I finally got to the point where I could start with the first flashbackstory, which is Corva’s.  And, this past Wednesday night, my youngest child played her very first game of D&D with her own character.  And it was pretty amazing.

She took to it pretty naturally.  There was the standard amount of newbie fumbling around with which dice to roll, and which numbers to add to the totals, but my eldest volunteered to help out with that aspect.  What is often harder for people to get into is putting yourself into your character’s position and really roleplaying.  That part she just instantly grasped.  She asked intelligent questions and made intelligent choices.  When she ran into her first dangerous encounter, she understood instinctively that it was a fight that she couldn’t win and opted to stay under cover while her much more capable tiger mentor went in to do the heavy lifting.  Then, in a twist that frankly astonished me, she correctly identified my NPC as a friendly and ran to her (staying hidden, of course), and said “I want to grab her by the wrist and help her run away and hide.” This was the character I sent to make sure she survived, you understand.  But my girl knew that Corva knew the jungle better than this outsider ever could and wanted to get her to safety ... she was trying to save her would-be-savior.

We played for a couple of hours before we called it quits, and the next morning she asked when we were playing again.  “Soon,” I promised.  “Maybe when you get out of the shower?” she asked hopefully.  “I have to go to work,” I pointed out.  She seemed very disappointed.  And she’s already asked at least twice more since then.

So I would have to say it was a success, and, assuming I don’t kill myself trying to do all this extra work, I think it will be a pretty cool campaign.  And I think my youngest child will, at age 7, be a pretty amazing player.  I can’t wait to see how it all comes out.

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1 For those of you who speak 5th edition D&D, I was playing a pact of the chain warlock, and so she played my improved familiar.

2 And, for those of you who don’t speak D&D, the GM is the “game master.” Sort of like the referee of the game.

3 That is, from the perspective of “today,” which will be whenever we start the full campaign and they all meet for the first time.

4 You might find it interesting if you’re a fellow D&D player (and especially interesting if you’re a D&D player from my old gaming group) to know that, for these NPCs, I’m using updated-to-5e versions of my own old player characters.  At this point, I’ve played for long enough that I have an old character for just about every occasion, and I found what I think is the perfect one for each of my 3 kids’ character concepts.

It's the most overstressed time of the year ...

This has been one of our busiest weeks of the year:

• Monday the Smaller Animal was in D&D class.
• Tuesday The Mother took all the kids to Magic Mountain.
• Thursday was Inspire’s Winter Wonderland followed by Dojo Boom.
• Friday was Dave & Buster’s.
• Saturday was our belated National Heroscape Day celebration; I took the kids and The Mother stayed home this time.
• Sunday was a birthday party.

Additionally, there was going to be a vendor fair Wednesday and the annual holiday party for $work on Thursday night, but somethings had to give.  Partially because it’s been raining like crazy here in the desert, which is, needless to say, somewhat uncharacteristic.  So, I wish I had time to write more, but I’m just too tired.  Next time.

Shadowfall Equinox VI

"The Hungry Ghost That Lingers"

[This is one post in a series about my music mixes.  The series list has links to all posts in the series and also definitions of many of the terms I use.  You may wish to read the introduction for more background.  You may also want to check out the first volume in this multi-volume mix for more info on its theme.

Like all my series, it is not necessarily contiguous—that is, I don’t guarantee that the next post in the series will be next week.  Just that I will eventually finish it, someday.  Unless I get hit by a bus.]

I really thought that, after narrowly missing being the first mix to achieve a sixth volume, surely Smokelit Flashback would be the second.  But it’s funny how things work out.  See, I listen to a lot of music at work, and, when I’m doing more mindless work that I don’t have to allot that much mental capacity to, upbeat fare rules the day: Salsatic Vibrato is a go-to, but Sirenexiv Cola or Totally Different Head are good choices too.  When I need to actually concentrate on stuff, though, I need something that’s a bit mellower, a bit more background-able.  For many moons Smokelit Flashback fulfilled that need for me.  Lately, though, Shadowfall Equinox has been coming to the fore.

This makes perfect sense, of course.  As I began describing way back with the inaugural entry into this series, and perhaps culminating with my deeper exploration of just what “ambient” means as a musical style in the third installment, SfE is all about ambient, and ambient is all about contemplative thought and creative endeavor.  As Brian Eno put it way back in ‘78, “Ambient Music is intended to produce calm and a space to think.” So it’s a crucial part of my work regime, and every once in a while I decide I need some more variety ... something new.  And that invariably leads to a new volume of this mix, my tribute to the Hearts of Space program that really kicked off my mixes as they exist in the modern sense.  So here we are.

Just as with Salsatic Vibrato VI, this mix is falling into a groove, but also showing even more variety as it goes along.  Volume I, you may recall, featured 3 tracks from Jeff Greinke and 2 from Black Tape for a Blue Girl, whereas this mix has only one track from each and no repeated artists at all.  In fact, only 3 other tracks are from artists we’ve seen before in this mix, leaving a whopping 13 tracks from new artists.¹  Sure, that means that several artists we’ve come to expect—such as This Mortal Coil, Falling You, and Stellamara—aren’t here this time out.  But fresh faces are always good: new blood keeps the mix from going stale.

Of course, old blood provides continuity, and we weren’t about to see a Shadowfall installment without hearing from Jeff Greinke, who is the only artist to appear on every volume.  Though we’ve explored a few other albums from this ambient master, we haven’t fully exhausted the album where we started, Wide View.  “Glide” is another track typical of that amazing album: slow and autumnal, with a crispness somehow reminiscent of the brittleness of first frost.  From Black Tape for a Blue Girl,² also a fairly typical piece: “Tear Love from My Mind,” from one of Rosenthal’s early(ish) albums, A Chaos of Desire.  There are muted, muddy vocals in there somewhere, but mainly it’s a swirling, floating, goth-drenched ethereal piece that epitomizes the darkwave sound.  And, while Kevin Keller didn’t show up for our very first volume, he’s been on every volume since, and this one is no exception.  “Peace” is a calm, soothing piece from only about a decade ago, and shows off Keller’s style admirably.  His marriage of ambient and neoclassical is sometimes referred to as “ambient chamber music,”³ and this track embodies that pretty perfectly.

Our other two returning artists are Jade Leary and Jens Gad, both of whom we saw for the first time last volume.  “Salvatrice,” is a fairly typical piece of gothic minimalism from Leary, while “El Momento” harkens pretty strongly back to Gad’s days with Enigma.  It’s tough to beat “The Orbiting Suns” (which is his piece from last volume), but this one is pretty solid too.

The Cocteau Twins are not technically a returning artist, but only because their track from last time (“Sea, Swallow Me”) was a collaboration with Harold Budd.  For this volume, I thought it high time we have a proper, solo⁴ effort from the Cocteaus.  “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” is another beautiful piece off Victorialand⁵ which provides that amazing, dreamy sound that the Cocteaus are so well-deservedly known for, as well as a touch of a dark reminder that they started out as a goth band.  Angels of Venice we’ve not seen before on this mix, but of course we’ve seen them plenty: mainly on Numeric Driftwood—every volume so far, in fact—but also on Penumbral Phosphorescence and even Fulminant Cadenza.  “The Sins of Salome,” from their second album, has a bit of Middle Eastern flair (as the name implies), but mainly its wordless vocals and sombre cello carry us, relaxed and untroubled, into our closing track.  Likewise, Télépopmusik has so far been relegated to Smokelit Flashback—specifically volumes IV and V—where their downtempo trip-hop fits in perfectly.  But “Swamp” is something a bit different: not quite creepy, but not quite not creepy either, the science-fiction background noises and the lonely jazz saxophone backed by strings in the foreground combine to make something more downbeat and ethereal than their usual fare.

Many of the new faces here result from an exploration I did looking for neoclassical bands I had not yet discovered.  Mira Calix, for instance, I was assured (by the Internet) was neoclassical, but I’m not sure I buy it.  South African born, London bred, Calix is mostly electronica of the decidedly weird variety, though she does have a tendency to mix in classical instrumentation.  “Schmyk” is a minimalist piano piece with some concurrent synth noodling and not as much discordancy as she seems to be prone to from my limited experience with her thus far.  Opener “Somnolence” is from Swedish dark neoclassical band Arcana.  They remind me quite a bit of Dark Sanctuary, the French dark neoclassical band we first heard on volume II.⁶  For a while, this volume just opened with “How to Bring a Blush to the Snow,” but eventually I decided it needed a short intro piece, and “Somnolence” is just too awesome to pass up.  I don’t like all of Arcana’s output,⁷ but this track is great: quiet, just slightly menacing, and building up to something.  Here I pay that off with the Cocteaus, which I think is a better choice than whatever Arcana used on their album.  Finally, Ludovico Einaudi is an Italian pianist whose spare “Solo” (from Nightbook) is the perfect closer for this set of late-fall-inspired contemplative tunes.

As for the new ambient artists, the collaboration bewteen Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner is actually one I’ve had for a while now, but I think I must have forgotten about it and only recently rediscovered it.  It’s pretty amazing, if not particularly genre-transcending, and “Vicis Pro Vicis” is one of the most spare and ethereal pieces on an album where spare and ethereal are the words of the day.  Whereas Esther Garcia, who I originally found on Jamendo with one of those sets I like to refer to as “soundtrack portfolios,” is harder to pigeonhole.  Like all such albums, her Incidental Fussion is very eclectic, with no two tracks really sounding alike, but the delicate, airy beauty of “Air Elements” is the one that seemed perfect for this mix.

Like Télépopmusik, Laika is mostly downtempo trip-hop,⁸ but “Dirty Feet and Giggles” is more of a weird interlude on its home album.  Here it makes a bare-bones, echoey, too-long-to-be-a-bridge into the second third of the volume, and specifically into Kid Loco’s amazing remix of Talvin Singh’s “Traveller.” The original is a meandering piece of rave-adjacent electronica from Singh, a Brit known for fusing Indian style into drum&bass.  What French DJ Kid Loco does with it here, on the other hand, is much closer to downtempo/chill.  It’s just a hair away from landing on Smokelit Flashback, but it’s just light and relaxing enough to end up here instead.

When it came to picking a volume title, it was slim pickings indeed this time out.  The line I used is from the Black Tape for a Blue Girl track, supposedly; I sure can’t hear it, but the Internet assures me it’s true.  And it sounded cool in any event.

Shadowfall Equinox VI
[ The Hungry Ghost That Lingers ]

“Somnolence” by Arcana, off As Bright as a Thousand Suns
“How to Bring a Blush to the Snow” by Cocteau Twins, off Victorialand
“El Momento” by Jens Gad, off Le Spa Sonique
“Vicis Pro Vicis” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“Dirty Feet and Giggles” by Laika, off Sounds of the Satellites
“Traveller [Kid Loco's Once Upon a Time in the East mix]” by Talvin Singh [Single]⁹
“Swamp” by Télépopmusik, off Angel Milk
“Salvatrice” by Jade Leary, off And Come the Sirens
“Tear Love from My Mind” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off A Chaos of Desire
“Sleepwalker” by Colourbox, off Colourbox
“Godnat” by Analogik, off Søens Folk
“Peace” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“Schmyk” by Mira Calix, off One on One
“Glide” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Air Elements” by Esther Garcia, off Incidental Fussion
“Find the Song” by Mary Youngblood, off Dance with the Wind
“The Sins of Salome” by Angels of Venice, off Awake Inside a Dream
“Solo” by Ludovico Einaudi, off Nightbook

Total:  18 tracks,  80:19

In the “what the heck are these guys doing here?” category, we have first and foremost Colourbox, the not-really-dreampop alternapop labelmates of the Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance.  And, since they were part of the 4AD stable, members of Colourbox appeared in the music collective This Mortal Coil, which is how I discovered them.  Colourbox is known—inasmuch as they’re known at all—for eclectic, upbeat songs, but “Sleepwalker” is something entirely different: another spare piano piece, but (unlike Keller’s “Peace”) with a more lonely sound, almost like the background music in the sad part of the movie, where the protagonist is feeling low before the climactic comeback.  Next up, Analogik, a Danish electrojazz group who came to me via LittleBigPlanet.¹⁰  “Godnat” is uncharactistically slow and meditative; its electronic sounds—reminiscent of an old ship creaking on the waves—are almost hypnotic here.

And, last but not least, I found Mary Youngblood when I went looking for some Native American music ... not the traditional sort, but more modern fare infused with Native American elements and, if possible, performed by Native American artists.  This is how I discovered that there used to be such a thing as a “Best Native American Music Album” Grammy, and that Mary Youngblood had won two of them.  I confess that I don’t properly appreciate all her songs, but her flautism is undeniably beautiful, and “Find the Song” is easily my favorite tune of hers.

Next time, we’ll swing back a bit more upbeat, to our bright-and-shiny videogame-inspired mix.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox V

Shadowfall Equinox VII ⇒

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1 Although, to be fair, several of them have been seen before here on different mixes.

2 Who we’ve seen on every volume but one.

3 At least Wikipedia refers to it that way.

4 Well, I suppose “solo” is not the right word to describe a three-person band named after twins, but you know what I mean.

5 Feel free to refer back to my full discussion of how I discovered this amazing album.

6 And, since the two bands started within a couple of years of each other, I can’t help but wonder if there’s a whole dark neoclassical scene in Europe that I’ve missed out on.

7 Come to think of it, I don’t like all of Dark Sanctuary’s stuff either.

8 Only they’re from the UK instead of France.

9 As always, I hate linking to YouTube.  But this one doesn’t seem to available for purchase anywhere, at least in the US.  Maybe if you’re overseas you’ll have better luck.

10 And, thus, they will eventually start showing up on volumes of Paradoxically Sized World.