Music Story #3: Into the Groove

[This is the third post in a sub-series of my music mix series.  It’s basically a story about some music discovery event in my life, so it’s a combo of music info and personal history info.  You can find a list of all the music stories in the mix series list.

This is one I originally published on my work’s Slack channel #tunes.  It’s a shorter post than usual, but I thought it worh sharing nonetheless.]

This sub-series has covered music in various formats.  But they’ve all been about music formats that you buy.  Obviously that’s not the only way we hear music—in fact, one might argue that we hear way more music for free than we ever do paying for it.  And that’s primarily because of one thing: radio.  Or it used to be, anyway, before the Internet came along.  I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with radio.  Here’s a thing which happened to me recently that may help illuminate that.

A week ago today, we packed up the whole family and went to the Renn Faire (I wrote about this last week).  My youngest had never been, and the other two hadn’t been in years (and the eldest’s partner had also never been), so there were six of us.  Obviously we weren’t going to fit in my Prius, so into The Mother‘s SUV we hopped.

Now, The Mother’s SUV is old enough not to have a Bluetooth connection for the sound system; it used to have an “aux” plug that we would just plug our phones into, but the jack got wonky, so we either have to do CD’s, or listen to the actual radio like we’re the Flintstones or something.  For this trip, we decided to do the radio.

Now, when I listen to the radio, I have a very low tolerance for songs I don’t like, and zero tolerance for commericals, so it’s a constant bouncing around of stations.  The Mother has programmed all 12 possible FM stations with something, even if one is country and one is classical, so it’s like we really only had 10 stations.  But it’s an eclectic mix: KROQ, K-Earth (our local oldies station), Jack FM (which there’s one of in every market, I gather), MyFM (current pop music), etc.  We were just as likely to hear Led Zeppelin as Lady Gaga (both of which we did hear on the trip, for the record).

[Brief tangent: I don’t typically like pop, so I would never listen to stations like MyFM in my own car.  Still, there’s almost always one song by every megapop star that I really love.  So I hate Ricky Martin, except for “La Vida Loca,” which is awesome.  Can’t stand Whitney Houston, except for “How Will I Know?” which I adore.  Or, for a more contemporary example, I’m fairly unimpressed by Olivia Rodrigo ... except that “Brutal” is absolutely bangin’.  I’ve never really cottoned to Taylor Swift either, and thus far had also never found her one exception.  But I stumbled across “Anti Hero” on the way to Renn Faire and I was like, shit, that’s Taylor Swift??  It’s great.  (I had a similar reaction to “How Will I Know?” ... for months I was convinced it was the Pointer Sisters and that’s why I loved the song so much.  But I digress.  In my digression.)]

Anyways, there was a fair amount of 80s music, as K-Earth—who originally played like fifties music when i first arrived in Cali—now considers 80s music old.  Bastards.  But, nonetheless, we heard some 80s classics on the ride down, like “Our Lips Are Sealed” by the Go-Go’s, “White Wedding” by Billy Idol, and “Into the Groove” by Madonna.

Then we had a lovely day at the Renn Faire (although it was was more vendors and way fewer entertaining bits than I’d remembered), and we got in the truck again to head home.  On the way, we heard “We Got the Beat” by the Go-Go’s, which wasn’t too surprising ... but also “White Wedding” again.  Then, a half an hour later, there was “Into the Groove” again.  Weird.  I probably hadn’t listened to any Madonna in a few decades—Madonna is less of a megapop-star-with-one-good-song-exception to me, and more like a used-to-be-a-cool-alternative-singer-then-turned-megapop-star-and-so-I-stopped-liking-them type thing.  Early Madonna is great: “Lucky Star” is awesome, “Borderline” and “Holiday” are pretty good too.  Then you get to “Material Girl,” which is still pretty good, and “Like a Virgin” is okay, and by the time you hit “Papa Don’t Preach” I’m pretty much checked out.  So “Into the Groove” is right on that borderline (pun inteneded, I suppose) between good-to-mediocre Madonna and bleaugh Madonna.  So I’ve probably listened to Madonna at some point in the past couple of decades, but certainly not that particular song.

Friday I had jury duty.  My county’s courthouse is about an hour’s drive for me, and it was The Mother’s truck again (for family-vehicle-related reasons).  By this time it was all 80s Memorial Day weekend or somesuch on K-Earth and KROQ was doing some sort of “top 500” thing, so I was mainy back and forth between those two.  And I heard “Into the Groove” again.  And I was like, what the fuck is going on???

Yesterday we drove my middle child out to another city about an hour away (though in the opposite direction) for homeschool prom.  We took the youngest with us and went out to dinner to kill time so we didn’t have to drive all the way to Glendale and back twice in one night.  On the way back home, guess what came on the radio again?  Yes, that’s right: “Into the Groove.” By Madonna.  Again.  A song from nearly forty years ago (I looked it up: it was released in 1985) that I haven’t heard in around twenty years and now I’ve heard it four times in a week.  On the radio.  Which I rarely listen to any more.  What the fuck is up with the universe?  I was ranting in the car a bit about how unlikely it was that I heard this stupid song 4 times in a week when i hadn’t heard it once in the past 20 years, and my middle child opined that perhaps the universe wanted me to refamiliarize myself with the song.  I was like, I was plenty refamiliarized by play #2: numbers 3 and 4 were just redundant.

So, anyway, that’s my random weird radio story for the day.  Or week.  Or month—hell, probably for the year.  I hope.

How Doth Fare Thee, M'Lord?

Today we took a trip to the Renn Faire (or the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, as it’s more properly known).  Our youngest had never been, and the pandemic is totally over (right?), and our eldest is back in town (with their partner), so it seemed like a good year to do it.  I have to say, I didn’t enjoy it as much as I have in the past.  But perhaps I’m just too old for this shit, as Danny Glover is wont to say.  Here are my observations:

• It’s very dusty, and very hot.  I’m sure this was true in past years as well, but I was definitely in better shape back in those days.
• There are way more vendors.  I wondered if maybe I was just misremembering how many there used to be, but Christy agreed with me that this was far more than last time (which was, to be fair, probably around 10 years ago, if not more).  Essentially, we had to hunt for non-stores in between all the stores—it was crazy.  There were 3 shows, 1 one which was terrible, and the joust, which was so packed we had no hope of getting in.  And a few games (archery, throwing axes, that sort of thing).  Other than that, just rows and rows (and rows) of shops, overpriced food stalls, and sellers of of $7 water bottles.
• Our middle child (that would be the one with the heart condition) really does not handle heat well.  I think they might be done with Renn Faires and amusement parks and that sort of thing.
• I could be wrong, but I swear I walked right past Amy Dallen (late of Geek & Sundry, currently at D&D Beyond).  I would have stopped to say “hey,” but people were moving along so fast, I barely registered it was her before she was out of sight.  Perhaps not a major celebrity sighting, but still worth sharing.
• Other than food and drinks and parking, we bought some fancy honey, and the youngest got a pretty nicely carved wand for only $20.  Other than that, everything was just too pricey for us.
• The youngest claims to have enjoyed herself, so I suppose it was all worthwhile in the end.

So, I’m not sorry we went, but man am I exhausted.  Until next week.

Dreamtime II

"Colourless and Dangerous"

[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 series introduction for general 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.]

As I discussed last time, Dreamtime is one of the mixes (the first, actually) that I developed after the pre-modern mixes but before the “modern” mixes.  (I used to call these “mood” mixes, but it wasn’t a very distinguishing term, which is why I now use “transitional” instead.¹)  None of these were every designed with any thought to burning them on CD, which is why part of the challenge of updating them is finding natural volume groups.  Even after adding a few tracks to what is now Dreamtime I, what I had left over from the original Dreamtime playlist wasn’t really sufficient to make a volume II ... in some ways.  It had just about enough length, but it didn’t have any throughline, and it also had that really long track that I mentioned last time, which meant that pretty much as soon as I started adding tracks to make it a bit more coherent, it became too long.  So, I set aside a few tracks for a potential volume III—including the really long one²—and started filling out the rest.  And now here we are.

There’s a few returning artists.  Of course we need to hear from the inimitable A Produce again, and once again he’s our closer.  A Produce tracks are just really great for that, and “The Far Shore” is no exception.  It’s slow, mellow, and dreamlike in the way that reminds you of the sensation of moving in slow motion, which is something that you’ve only ever done in a dream.  And I wouldn’t want to leave out the darkwave twins, Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Falling You.  From the former, we get one of those Sam Rosenthal concoctions which starts out as one song—minimalist, but almost carnival-like (if somewhat creepy)—and then, halfway through, becomes an entirely different song: a folding and intertwining of sinuous background whispers, underpinned by a lonely synth melody.  From the latter, a more classic John Michael Zorko composition which is Jennifer McPeak’s only vocal track on the magnificent Touch,³ though this time Zorko eschews the trip-hop bassline and just does an extended, almost ambient synth noodling, while McPeak abandons words altogether and just provides an almost operatic, swooping vocal track.  At 7 minutes long, it was probably never going to land in any of the usual places I tend to slot Falling You,⁴ but it’s kind of perfect here.  And I wouldn’t want to skip This Mortal Coil, of course, who often provide dreamlike instrumentals thanks to Ivo Watts’ tendency towards synth minimalism.  “The Lacemaker” is a curious little tripartite track that starts out as just that, then becomes a lonely wind behind which you gradually start to pick out a voice on the breeze (speaking our volume title, as it happens), which is then superseded by some adjacent-to-creepy chamber music.  Songs like this (and the BTfaBG track) that sort of don’t know exactly what they want to be are often impossible to slot into typical mixes, but the advantage of having a mix based on feeling like you’re in a dream is that weird transitions actually fit the theme.

And we couldn’t forget Ensemble of the Dreamings, those weird snippets of music I found on the very early Internet that were supposed to go into a dreamlike videogame.  I’ll mine them all eventually; for this volume, here’s two more: “Processional” is about two minutes of vocals that you can’t quite make out with the standard synth backing, while “Angel Knife I” is (naturally) an angelic voice for which you can mostly make out the words, and a slightly more coherent melody, but it’s barely more than a minute before it melts into our other returning soundtrack, Mirrormask.  “Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” is an anticipatory track which climaxes but then keeps going into a very unsettling groove.  Iain Bellamy turns in another great track that wouldn’t really fit anywhere else.

The only new artist to achieve two tracks on this volume is Al Gromer Khan, a German-born sitarist who spent seven years learning the instrument in India, and only added the “Khan” to his name after being accepted into the Khan-I-Gharana tradition.  “The Anahat Syndrome” is something I first heard on a Hearts of Space program (specifically, “The Perfumed Garden”), and I was inspired to pick up the full album (1984’s now impossible-to-find Divan I Khas).  It’s a lovely, dreamy piece of sitar work that’s been on the Dreamtime playlist forever.  Adding “Oiram Qarz” was a much more recent inspiration; I felt that “I No Longer Remember the Feelings” just needed a better lead-in, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that the fading strains of “Oiram” butted up pretty nicely against “Remember.” “Oiram” is a bit more slow and meandering than “Anahat,” and it works pretty well right after our opener, Angels of Venice’s “Persentio,” especially if you overlap the fade-out and the fade-in just a skosh.  “Persentio” is a fairly typical outing from AoV (who we’ve heard from many times thus far in these mixes⁵), meaning it’s some lovely harp work from Carol Tatum with cello and flute backing from her collaborators du jour, but I always felt this particular piece had a bit more of a feel of the nighttime breeze through the trees.  I think making it the opener of volume II was part of my more recent rejiggering, but honestly it feels so natural at this point that I can’t really remember for sure.

Ambient tracks can be dreamlike too, so it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Deborah Martin and J. Arif Verner back (we’ve seen them twice so far, both on Shadowfall Equinox⁶) with “Inter Astrum”—this sprawling, synthy track makes you feel like you’re traveling between the stars indeed.  And that bleeds nicely into “Anahat,” which in turn bleeds nicely into some Twin Peaks music.  Unlike most of the music from that show that I’ve used, though, this is a more guitar-driven track by Lynch himself, off the Fire Walk with Me soundtrack.  “The Pink Room” is a bit menacing, a bit minimalist, and thoroughly Lynchian.

Dreamtime II
[ Colourless and Dangerous ]

“Persentio” by Angels of Venice, off Forever After
“Oiram Qarz” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁷
“I No Longer Remember The Feelings” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The First Pain To Linger
“Basketball Dream” by the Presidents of the United States of America, off II
“Processional” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“... a cry for the broken-hearted” by Falling You, off Touch
“Inter Astrum” by Deborah Martin & J. Arif Verner, off Anno Domini
“The Anahat Syndrome” by Al Gromer Khan, off Divan I Khas ⁸
“The Pink Room” by David Lynch, off Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me [Soundtrack]
“Party of the First Part” by Bauhaus, off Swing the Heartache [Compilation]
“Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, off Legion of Shadows
“Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, off Carnival Arcane
“Circus Waltz” by Sweetback, off Stage 2
“Angel Knife I” by Ensemble of the Dreamings, off Chthon [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Meeting the Sphinx and the Dark Queen” by Iain Ballamy, off Mirrormask [Soundtrack]
“The Lacemaker” by This Mortal Coil, off Blood
“Words of Tranquility” by Koop, off Sons of Koop
“The Far Shore” by A Produce, off Land of a Thousand Trances

Total:  18 tracks,  78:53

One of the tracks which has been on this playlist for the longest is Bauhaus’ trippy little song called “Party of the First Part,” which lets the non-Peter-Murphy contingency of the band⁹ do some classic goth noodling in the background of clips of (of all things) The Devil and Daniel Mouse.  This oddity is, so far as I know, only available on the CD reissue of The Sky’s Gone Out, but it’s well worth tracking down in my opinion.  And it was a great excuse to get the goth legends onto this mix.  (Plus, if I’m honest, I’ve always loved this song—possibly due to remembering watching the cartoon that provides the samples in my youth—and where the hell else was I going to put it?)

But what to put after it?  For a long time, it just fed directly into “Angel Knife I,” which was ... okay, I guess.  But I really felt like it needed more there, so I came up (again, fairly recently) with the weird little trilogy that now follows it: “Dreamscape” by Nox Arcana, “Mesonoxian Visitors” by Midnight Syndicate, and “Circus Waltz” by Sweetback.  Now, the first is a creepy synth vibe, perhaps inspired by some of the soundtracks to the John Carpenter classics of the 80s (particularly Halloween, but also The Fog and Prince of Darkness), but then the second (from Midnight Syndicate’s album Carnival Arcane) really starts to lead into the creepy carnival vibe.  Which is what you’d expect from these two purveyors of what I like to call “gaming music” (meaning it’s often used as mood music for TTRPGs), but then the Sweetback track is a bit of a surprise.  Sweetback is the backing band for Sade,¹⁰ and normally I would describe them as “smooth jazz” and just leave it at that.  And, “Circus Waltz” has a bit of smooth jazz in its DNA to be sure ... but there’s also something more here, an auditory glimpse into a carnival that’s just a little off, and I thought it worked perfectly after “Mesonoxian Visitors,” which sounds like the arrival of said creepy carnival on a Depression-era circus train.

Which only leaves us with two more tracks in the “unexpected” category.  I’ve put a lot of Koop on these mixes—on Salsatic Vibrato,¹¹ on Moonside by Riverlight,¹² and of course on Zephyrous Aquamarine—but “Words of Tranquility” is something different from their normal electrojazz.  It’s the first track I’ve used off their debut album Sons of Koop, which is way more electro than jazz, and it’s ... dark.  I don’t know how else to describe it.  The vocals are credited to “K (23),” which is certainly a bit mysterious; whoever she is, she provides the vocals for four of the ten tracks on that album, which is more than any other singer, and more than there are instrumentals as well.  The words are intelligible, which doesn’t mean they make sense: they include lines like “my desires are made of cold” and “I’m a pilot, I’m above, you’re a chauffeur, down below.” It’s definitely very dreamlike, and definitely couldn’t fit anywhere but here.

Finally, perhaps my favorite track here is the very strange “Basketball Dream,” by the Presidents of the United States of America, the closer of their very simply titled II.  This is some basic guitar noodling backing a spoken word description of a dream involving Magic Johnson, as recited by a young boy.  It’s very weird, in that way that makes you believe it was an actual dream, and you can hear one of the band members feeding the lines to the kid, and sometimes the kid just giggles in delight at the preposterousness of it all.  Just a delightful track that epitomizes the dream state.

Next time, more meditative, autumnal fare for getting work done.

⇐ Dreamtime I

Dreamtime III ⇒

__________

1 In this blog series, anyway.  In my tracklists/ directory, they still live in a subdirectory called moods/.

2 It’s just a second shy of 20 minutes long, if you must know.

3 Jennifer provided all the vocals on Falling You’s debut album Mercy, but became a more infrequent collaboration on later albums.

4 The “usual” places in this case being Smokelit Flashback, where we’ve seen them so far on volumes II – V, and Shadowfall Equinox, where they’ve appeared on I, II, V, and VII.  But Falling You is nothing if not versatile, and I’ve also used them on Tumbledown Flatland I, the previous volume of this mix, and slotted them for several other mixes that we will, presumably, come to in the fullness of time.

5 On every volume of Numeric Driftwood so far, on Shadowfall Equinox VI and Darktime I, and, somewhat atypically, on Fulminant Cadenza I and Penumbral Phosphorescence I.

6 Specifically on volumes VI and VII.

7 This album seems to be impossible to locate these days.  The link is to a YouTube video which contains the full album, which is annoying to parse individual songs out of, but it is what it is.

8 Same album as the previous Gromer Khan track.

9 Occasionally known, eventually, as Love and Rockets.

10 In fact, they were recommended to me by a coworker who was a Sade fan and was surprised to hear me play one of her tracks in one of my mixes one late night in the office.

11 Volumes III and V.

12 Twice on volume I and once on volume II.

Puzzle Plotting

This week I’ve been working on a D&D one-shot (that is, an adventure that should ideally only take a single session to complete) for my youngest child’s birthday.  Which has, technically, come and gone, but we’re running a bit behind on such things, not to mention that I didn’t even realize that I was supposed to be doing it for a while there.  But now I know, and I’m trying to put together something that she’ll like.  Which is a tiny bit tricky, because she’s a bit different from my other children: she likes roleplaying more than combat, and she’d rather solve a puzzle or talk to an NPC than go slay a dragon.  So it takes a bit more finesse to make her happy.

In fact, designing puzzles for D&D is notoriously difficult, for two reasons.  The first is that it’s easy to make the puzzle too easy, and your players just blast through it.  It’s also, weirdly, easy to make it too hard, and then it takes forever.  So it can be basically impossible to predict how long it’ll take, which means you can’t necessarily guarantee that your one-shot will get done in one shot.

The second potential problem is that it’s easy to put your players in a situation where they just get stuck.  If they miss a clue, or they just have a mental block and can’t figure out a clue, all of a sudden your game grinds to a halt and there’s not much to do other than just tell the players what to do, which sort of defeats the point.  So it can be tricky to design something that is challenging without being impossible.

I’ve attacked this problem in a few different ways.  (And I’m going to keep it a bit vague just in case my kids actually do read this blog, which I find particularly unlikely, but better safe than sorry.)  First, I’ve designed a set of interlocking puzzles that can be done in any order, and it’s highly randomized.  So, at the first sign of getting stuck, I’m calling for some dice to be rolled, and everything will change.  Secondly, I’ve built in a bunch of “back doors” (basically, hinting structures) that will get revealed over time, so that the game will get easier as it goes on.  If it needs to.  And, if I’ve made it too easy, it won’t.  But then I can also use the randomization to change everything if the players start getting too close too fast.

Now, overall, this is a bit tricky to do in a natural fashion.  But, happily, D&D is a fantasy setting where anything goes, so I can make it work fairly easily—worse come to worst, I can always wave my hands a claim “a wizard did it.” But I’ve also come up with a theme that should make it make sense, even when it doesn’t make sense.  I can’t be more specific than that just yet; maybe I’ll post again once I’ve revealed things to my players.

I’m actually a bit excited for this.  It’s taking me a fair bit of work—inevitably, it takes more time to design a puzzle game than it does to play one—but I think it’s going to work out pretty well, and I’m pretty sure my kids won’t have too much trouble figuring it all out.  We’ll see how it goes.