Springs Eternal

Several months ago, my work machine started flaking out, so I got the folks at work to order me a new one.  It came, and I was able to use it to work around my immediate problems, but I never got the chance to completely switch over to using it—too much work shit going on.  Well, a few weeks ago, my laptop started flaking out.  And, as of Friday, my new laptop has arrived, and now I have two machines to set up and get configured and transfer hundreds of thousands of files to.  Lucky me.

So, even if I had planned to do a full post this week (which I had not), I simply wouldn’t have the time: I’ve got a laptop to configure, a desktop to configure, gigabytes to copy, filesystems to share, my wife to murder, and Guilder to frame for it—I’m swamped.  Still, there’s some hope that, after this process (as difficult as it may be), things will be better.  Honestly, I’d be happy if they were just not worse than they were before all this madness started, but I suppose I can’t help but hope for better.  Call me foolish if you must: I won’t deny it.  We’ll see how it goes.

Shadowfall Equinox VIII

"Oceans of Storm Clouds"

[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.]

Last volume I noted that Shadowfall Equinox was catching up to Salsatic Vibrato in terms of number of volumes.  And, with this latest one, they’re officially tied.  Realistically, I think SfE may hit a volume IX before SVb does.  We shall see.

As I said last time, the primary reason is that Equinox is what I use for background music when I work, and this volume is no exception to that.  And, as usual when getting to these large numbers of volumes, the challenge is to bring something fresh to the mix without abandoning the dependable artists that have been with us on every volume.  Let’s see how we did.

In the category of repeating artists, there’s one who has been on every volume, and two who have been on every volume but one, and they’re all three here.  The inimitable Jeff Greinke is certainly back, with an album we haven’t heard from yet on this mix: Winter Light.¹  “Mountain in the Clouds” is the same drifting, ethereal ambient that we’ve come to expect from Greinke, but this album has more of a brittle, crisp feeling, as the seasonal reference in its title implies.  Still, I feel this particular track works in a more autumnal setting, which is what this mix is all about.  As for pianist Kevin Keller,² “Stillness” is a melancholy, cello-heavy piece that’s pretty perfect for the mix.  And, finally, darkwave masters Black Tape for a Blue Girl³ also provide a cello-heavy piece, “Fitful.”  This is a particularly ambient track for Rosenthal, with the occasional crescendo of what might be brass (or just synth), and the gentle, almost unnoticeable, wordless vocals of an uncredited female singer.

Other returning artists include Ruben Garcia (seen on volumes IV, V, and VII) and Ludovico Einaudi (seen on volume VI), whom I paired back to back so that Einaudi’s spare piano on “In Principio” could highlight Garcia’s departure from that style with some fuller, synthy work on “Five Dreams from Yesterday” (which really sounds more like Greinke than Garcia’s normal output); Dead Can Dance and Loreena McKennitt (who I paired on volume V), here again with a touch of worldmusic: on V, I used McKennitt followed by DCD as an opener, whereas here I’ve followed DCD’s somber “Agape” with McKennitt’s beautiful “Tango to Evora” as our closer; and, last but not least, cellist Jami Sieber (seen on volume IV).

Cello, in fact, is a pretty common instrument for this mix: we’ve heard not only from Sieber before, but also cellist David Darling and groups like Amber Asylum and Angels of Venice who feature full-time cellists.  Plus various guest cellists: Martin McGarrick on This Mortal Coil tracks, Audrey Riley on Hope Blister tracks, and Mera Roberts on several Black Tape for a Blue Girl songs.  Here, I’ve put together a solid block of cello music as our centerpiece: 5 songs in a row, and I kick it off with Eugene Friesen.  He’s a recent find for me, which explains why we haven’t seen him here yet, but he’s been around since the 80s, and I think he may become a regular here.  For his debut on this mix, I’ve chosen the title track from his 2005 album In the Shade of Angels, a very spare, not-quite-melancholy, ultimately gorgeous instrumental to kick off the block.  From there we go into the melancholy track from the Kevin Keller Ensemble (including Clarice Jensen on cello), and then to Colm McGuinness, who we’ve mostly seen in this series as a purveyor of gaming music: his “Welcome to Wildemount” is the explosive opener of Eldritch Ætherium II, and he has one more track there as well as one on the following volume.  But he’s also an excellent cellist (as well as playing many other instruments) and “Koala” is a sweeping yet still tenebrous track that is perfect for the midpoint of this block.  Then we hit Sieber, who is surely my favorite cellist of all time, with “The Burning Dawn” from 2013’s Timeless.  It’s an anticipatory track, though it’s not clear exactly what the listener is waiting for.  But it carries us sedately to the block closer, BTfaBG’s “Fitful.”  Frequent contributor Mera Roberts plays the cello here, and the light, wordless vocals may well be Roberts herself, who provides vocals as well as cello for her other two projects.⁴  She’s very talented, and lifts this BTfaBG track to a level of sublime I don’t think it could otherwise achieve.

And, speaking of blocks of tracks, I close out the mix with a fun triad of worldmusic, starting with Thievery Corporation’s “Indra.”  The DC-based Corporation is normally too upbeat for this mix: we normally see them in places like Smokelit Flashback (volumes III and V), Paradoxically Sized World (volumes I and IV), and Apparently World.  Still, we also heard from them on Zephyrous Aquamarine and even once on Numeric Driftwood (volume IV), so we know they can do mellow when the mood calls for it.  And “Indra,” while it maintains a decently strong hip-hop beat, really brings the dreamy trip-hop with some Middle Eastern flair.  Then to “Agape,” continuing the Middle Eastern theme with what is probably an oud and a qanun, layered with more of Lisa Gerrard’s powerful vocals, singing in a language which might be Earthly or might be just Gerrard’s glossolalia.  And we close with McKennitt’s “Tango to Evora,” which starts out with a simple flamenco-style guitar and then layers on violin, harp, and finally McKennitt’s angelic wordless vocals.  A gentle, soothing track which makes for an amazing closer.

Once again, we’re quite short on lyrics to draw a volume title from, so I used the now-typical method in such situations (that is, I plucked words from various song titles and glued them together).  I actually really like this particular one.

Shadowfall Equinox VIII
[ Oceans of Storm Clouds ]

“For the West Coast Dark Ambient Bedroom Warriors” by the Mountain Goats, off Goths
“Oceans of Change” by Stray Theories, off Oceans, Volume 1 [EP]⁵
“Tanaris” by Tracy W. Bush, off World of Warcraft Soundtrack [Videogame Soundtrack]
“Aquarium” by Casino Versus Japan, off Whole Numbers Play the Basics
“Stay with Me” by Clint Mansell, off The Fountain [Soundtrack]
“In Principio” by Ludovico Einaudi, off Nightbook
“Five Dreams from Yesterday” by Ruben Garcia, off Lakeland
“Riders on the Storm” by Yonderboi [Single]
“In the Shade of Angels” by Eugene Friesen, off In the Shade of Angels
“Stillness” by Kevin Keller, off In Absentia
“Koala” by Colm R. McGuinness [Single]
“The Burning Dawn” by Jami Sieber, off Timeless
“Fitful” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Remnants of a Deeper Purity
“Mountain in the Clouds” by Jeff Greinke, off Winter Light
“Seelenlos” by Scabeater, off Necrology
“Indra” by Thievery Corporation, off The Mirror Conspiracy
“Agape” by Dead Can Dance, off Anastasis
“Tango to Evora” by Loreena McKennitt, off The Visit

Total:  18 tracks,  80:11

Clint Mansell’s beautiful if haunting score for The Fountain makes its first appearance here; “Stay with Me” is a slow, synthy track that seems to have ghostly tones in its background.  The World of Warcraft soundtrack also makes its first appearance outsdide Eldritch Ætherium, where I used two of Jason Hayes’ tracks on volume III.  This is a Tracy W. Bush composition, “Tanaris,” which also has a very haunted quality, as well as sounding somewhat oceanic.  I thought it might be a bit too much to put those two back to back, so I broke them up with an interesting track I found while looking for different versions of Saint-Saëns’ “Aquarium.”⁶  This track of the same name by Casino Versus Japan (the musical moniker of Wisconsin electronica artist Erik Paul Kowalski) has nothing to do with the piece from Le Carnaval des Animaux, but it’s a great, underwatery ambient/downtempo piece that I’m glad to have stumbled onto by accident.

For the rest, there’s nothing too unexpected here.  Stray Theories is a cinematic and electronica project by New Zealand artist Micah Templeton-Wolfe; “Oceans of Change” is a gorgeous ambient piece that flows insanely well off of our opener and sets us up for the more cinematic tracks to come.  That opener, of course, is the exquisitely named Mountain Goats’ track “For the West Coast Dark Ambient Bedroom Warriors,” which is, as the Brits would say, exactly what it says on the tin.  John Darnielle’s long-running (since 1994) project is musically eclectic, and was originally a one-man affair, though by the time of 2017’s Goths, he was opening up to more long-term bandmates.  This amazingly spare track is, as its name suggests, the epitome of what this mix is all about, so the second I heard it I knew it had to be a volume opener.  It’s a bit of a departure for the Mountain Goats, but then you can say that about most of their songs, so it starts to become meaningless after a while.

And that just leaves us with a small bridge from Scabeater, a band not only so obscure that neither AllMusic nor Wikipedia know they exist—which, you may recall, are my criteria for “really obscure band”—but even Discogs says “hunh??” when you ask about them.⁷  I found Scabeater on Jamendo, and their Skinny-Puppy-adjacent brand of industrial-flavored goth is certainly not for everyone—hell, a lot of it isn’t even for me—but they hit a winner every once in a while, and the 46 seconds of strings-backed piano simplicity that is “Seelenios” is just sublime.  For the longest time, “Mountain in the Clouds” just butted directly up against “Indra,” and it wasn’t working for me, but I couldn’t figure out what to do about it, until I remembered this perfect little bridge.

And that just leaves us with perhaps the oddest choice, Hungarian producer László Fogarasi Jr., better known as Yonderboi, who here graces us with an instrumental, jazzy-to-the-point-of-being-loungy version of “Riders on the Storm” by the Doors.  I love the original track (it is almost certainly my favorite Doors song), and something about this offbeat cover really caught my ear.  It takes the song in a completely different direction (as all the best covers do) and is somehow faithful to its inspiration while also being a completely new song.  I’ve drug it around through several volumes of this mix, never quite finding the perfect placement for it, until it finally managed to land here.  Its Hammond-organ-style melody flows beautifully off the fading synth of Garcia’s “Five Dreams,” and it serves as the perfect palate cleanser before we leap into the 5-cello block of Friesen / Keller / McGuinness / Sieber / BTfaBG.  I’m glad I finally found it a home.

Next time, we’ll look at some more creativity-inducing gaming music.

⇐ Shadowfall Equinox VII

Shadowfall Equinox IX ⇒

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1 Although I used “Orographic” from that album on Mystical Memoriam.

2 Seen on every volume except the first.

3 Seen on every volume except IV.

4 Mera is half of Mercurine, a third-wave goth band that occupies the same space between goth and industrial as Faith and the Muse, and all of Oblivia, a cello-driven dark ambient project reminiscent of Amber Asylum, but with more vocals.  Both are relatively unknown, and both undeservedly so.

5 You guys know how much I hate to link to YouTube, but I can’t find anywhere else to get this song.

6 I used one version on Classical Plasma I and a different one on Phantasma Chorale I.

7 I may have to invent a new term ... super duper obscure band, perhaps?

Dinner and a Show

Today was Father’s Day, and we took the whole family out for a teppan yaki lupper.  If you don’t know what “lupper” is, it’s a meal about halfway between lunch and supper, in the same way that “brunch” is halfway between breakfast and lunch.  Of course, according to the terminology I was raised with, “lupper” is still dinner, despite the odd timing, because “dinner” means “the biggest meal of the day, no matter what time you eat it.” But that’s a technicality.

If you don’t know what “teppan yaki” is, it’s the Japanese cuisine where they cook on the table (which is apparently called a “teppan,” although most of us Americans just say “hibachi”).  Where I’m from (the DC-VA-NC East Coast corridor), we typically just called it ”Benihana,” because that was the only such place there was.  Well, at least that’s the way it was when I was growing up, which admittedly was a long time ago.

But, here in Southern California (and/or here in the aftertimes), we had a whole bunch of options, of which Benihana was only one (and not even the best one, apparently).  We went with a place called Musashi, which, going by their website, used to have 3 locations, but is now down to just one (the pandemic was not kind to most restaurants, but for teppanyaki restaurants in particular—where more than half the point is the showmanship of the meal preparation, so take-out isn’t as enticing—I’m guessing it was devastating).  Anyway, Musashi has been around since 1981, which is one of those years that seems ancient to my children but doesn’t seem that long ago to me.  But, it was 42 years ago, which is at least long ago enough that it seems like these folks know what they’re doing.  So, I don’t really want to tell you how much it cost us, but the food was excellent, and the kids seemed to enjoy the show (and, honestly, that was the main reason I wanted to go).  So I call it a success.

Next time, a longer post, assuming all goes well.

Do Androids Dream of IQ Tests?

Recently, I was listening to a podcast—it happened to be Election Profit Makers, with the lovely and talented David Rees.¹  In this particular episode,² David offers this “hot take”:

I also think AI is kinda bullshit.  I’ve been thinking about it; I think there’s some stuff that AI can do, but on the other hand it really is not ... we shouldn’t call it AI.  Someone was making this point, that calling it “artificial intelligence” is kind of propaganda.  It’s not really intelligent yet.  It’s just like a word prediction algorithm, you know?  You give it a topic—it doesn’t know what it’s saying.  It’s ... it’s like an algorithm that predicts what the—given any word or paragraph, it predicts what the next most likely word is, I think.  I don’t think it really thinks ... I don’t think it’s artificial intelligence.

Of course, I put “hot take” in quotes because it’s not particularly hot: as David himself notes, other people have been making this observation for a while now, especially in relation to ChatGPT.  I gave my own opinions of ChatGPT several months ago, and it’s only become more pervasive, and more useful, since then.  Now, David’s assessment is not wrong ... but it’s also not complete, either.  David’s not a tech guy.  But I am.  So I want to share my opinion with you on this topic, but, be forewarned: I’m going to ask a lot of questions and not necessarily provide a lot of answers.  This is one of those topics where there aren’t any clear answers, and asking the questions is really the point of the exercise.

So, first let’s get the one minor detail that David is wrong about out of the way.  What David is referring to here are the LLMs, like ChatGPT.  To be pendantic about it, LLMs are just one form of AI: they just happen to be the one that’s hot right now, because it’s the one that’s shown the most promise.  If you’ve had the opportunity to interact with ChatGPT or any of its imitators, you know what I mean.  If not ... well, just take my word for it.  LLMs are extremely useful and extremely promising, and the closest we’ve come so far to being to talk to a machine like a person.³  But they are not the totality of AI, and I’m sure there will be AI in the future that is not based on this technology, just as there was in the past.

But, forgiving that understandable conflation, what about this notion that an LLM is just a “predictive algorithm,” and it doesn’t actually think, and therefore it’s a misnomer to refer to it as “intelligence”?  David goes on to cite (badly) the “Chinese room” thought experiment; if you’re unfamiliar, I encourage you to read the full Wikipedia article (or at least the first two sections), but the synopsis is, if a computer program could take in questions in Chinese and produce answers in Chinese, and do so sufficiently well to fool a native Chinese speaker, then a person who neither speaks, reads, nor understands Chinese could be operating that program, and taking in the questions, and passing back the answers.  Obviously you would not say that the person could speak Chinese, and so therefore you can’t really say that the program speaks Chinese either.  Analogously, a program which simulates intelligent thought isn’t actually intelligent ... right?

This immediately reminds me of another podcast that I listen to, Let’s Learn Everything.  On their episode “Beaver Reintroductions, Solving Mazes, and ASMR,”⁴ Tom Lum asks the question “How does a slime mold solve a maze?” A slime mold is, after all, one of the lowest forms of life.  It doesn’t even have any neurons, much less a brain.  How could it possibly solve a maze?  Well, it does so by extending its body down all possible pathways until it locates the food.  Once it’s done that, it retracts all its psuedopods back into itself, leaving only the shortest path.

Now, the conclusion that Tom (as well as his cohosts Ella and Caroline) arrived at was that this isn’t really “solving” the maze.  Tom also had some great points on whether using maze-solving as a measure of intelligence makes any sense at all (you should really check out the episode), but let’s set that aside for now.  Presuming that being able to solve a maze does indicate something about the level of intelligence of a creature, isn’t it sort of sour grapes to claim that the slime mold did it the “wrong” way?  We used our big brains to figure out the maze, but when a creature who doesn’t have our advantages figures out a way to do complete the task anyway, we suddenly claim it doesn’t count?

Let’s go a step further.  If I give the maze to a person to solve, and they laboriously try every possible pathway until they find the shortest one, then are they really doing anything differently than the slime mold?  And does that mean that the person is not intelligent, because they didn’t solve the maze the way we thought they should?  I mean, just keeping track of all the possible pathways, and what you’ve tried already ... that requires a certain amount of intelligence, no?  Of course we lack the advantages of the slime mold—being able to stretch our bodies in such a way as to try all the pathways at once—but we figured out a way to use our brains to solve the problem anyhow.  I wonder if the slime mold would snort derisively and say “that doesn’t count!”

Now let’s circle back to the LLMs.  It is 100% true that all they’re doing is just predicting what the next word should be, and the next word after that, and so on.  No one is denying that.  But now we’re suddenly faced with deciding whether or not that counts as “intelligence.” Things that we’ve traditionally used to measure a person’s intelligence, such as SAT scores, are no problem for LLMs, which are now passing LSATs and bar exams in the top 10%.  But that doesn’t “count,” right?  Because it’s not really thinking.  I dunno; kinda feels like we’re moving the goalposts a bit here.

Part of the issue, of course, is that we really don’t have the slightest idea how our brains work.  Oh, sure, we can mumble on about electrical impulses and say that this part of the brain is responsible for this aspect of cognition based on what lights up during a brain scan, but, at the end of the day, we can’t really explain what’s going on in there when you can’t remember something today that you had no trouble with yesterday, or when you have a crazy idea out of nowhere, or when you just know that your friend is lying to you even though you can’t explain how you know.  Imagine some day in the far future where scientists discover, finally, that the way most of our thinking works is that words are converted to symbols in our brains, and we primarily talk by deciding what the next logical symbol should be, given the current context of who we’re talking to and what we’re talking about.  If that were to ever happen, seems like we’d owe these LLMs a bit of an apology.  Or would we instead decide that that aspect of how we think isn’t “really” thinking, and that there must be something deeper?

Look, I’m not saying that ChatGPT (for example) actually is intelligent.  I’m just pointing out that we don’t have a very clear idea, ourselves, what “intelligent” actually means.  It’s like the infamous Supreme Court definition of obscenity: we can’t define intelligence, but we know it when we see it, and this ain’t it.  But what I find to be a more interesting question is this: why does it matter?

An LLM like ChatGPT serves a purpose.  Now, overreliance on it can be foolish—just check out the case of the lawyers who tried to use ChatGPT to write their legal briefs for them.  As the Legal Eagle points out in that video, their idiocy was not so much the use of an LLM in the first place, but rather the fact that they never bothered to double check its work.  So you can’t always rely on it 100% ... but isn’t that true of people as well?  Honestly, if you’re a lawyer and you get a person to do your work, you’re still responsible for their mistakes if you sign your name at the bottom and submit it to a judge.  An incisive quote from the video:

... the media has talked about how this is lawyers using ChatGPT and things going awry.  But what it’s really revealing is that these lawyers just did an all around terrible job and it just happened to tangentially involve ChatGPT.

So you can talk to an LLM as if it were a person, it talks back to you as if it were a person, it can give you information like a person, and oftentimes more information that you can get from most of the persons you know, and you can rely it as exactly as much (or, more to the point, exactly as little) as you can rely on another person.  But it’s not a person, and it’s not really “thinking” (whatever that means), so therefore it’s not “intelligent.” Is that all just semantics?  And, even if it is, is this one of those cases where semantics is important?

I’ve got to say, I’m not sure it is.  I think every person reading this has to decide that for themselves—I’m not here to provide pat answers—but I think it’s worth considering why we’re so invested in things like LLMs not being considered intelligent.  Does it threaten our place up here at the top of the food chain?  (Or perhaps that should be “the top of the brain chain” ...)  Should we seriously worry that, if an AI is intelligent, that it poses a threat to the existence of humanity?  Many of the big tech folks seem to think so.  I personally remain unconvinced.  The Internet was proclaimed to be dangerous to humanity, as were videogames, television, rock-and-roll ... hell, even books were once considered to be evil things that tempted our children into avoiding reality and made them soft by preventing them from playing outside.  Yet, thus far, we’ve survived all these existential threats.  Maybe AI is The One which will turn out to be just as serious as people claim.  But probably not.

And, if it is the case that AI won’t take over the world and enslave or destroy us, then what difference does it really make whether or not it’s “technically” intelligent?  If it’s being useful, and if we can learn how to use it effectively without shooting ourselves in the foot, that’s good enough for me.  Perhaps it can be good enough for you as well.

[For complete transparency, I must say that, while ChatGPT did not write any of the words in this post, it did come up with the title.  Took it six tries, but it finally came up with something I felt was at least moderately clever.  So, if you like it, it’s because I’m very good at prompting LLMs, and, if you hate it, it’s because ChatGPT is not very smart.  This is one of the primary advantages of having an LLM as a contributor: I can hog all the credit and it will never be offended.]

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1 If you’re not familiar—and can figure out where to stream it—you should check out his Going Deep series.  It’s excellent.

2 Approximately 40 minutes in, if you want to follow along at home.

3 “LLM” stands for “large language model,” by the way, although knowing that is really unnecesssary to follow along on this topic.

4 Again, if you want to follow along at home, jump to about 44:45.

Puzzle Progress

Well, I finally kicked off my baby girl’s birthday campaign, and I think it started off pretty well.  She (and my eldest’s partner) seemed to enjoy it at any rate.  The other two kids ... well, let’s just say that they more of the “I don’t have patience with anything I can’t kill” school of D&D.  Still, they’re contributing, and I think they may come around.  And, if they don’t ... welll, it isn’t their birthday game.

Longer post next time, most likely.

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.