Friday, July 17, 2015

Series Listing: Music Mixes

This a list of posts in my series about my music mixes. You should probably start with the introduction. The mixes themselves are listed in a spectrum order from most upbeat to most downbeat, although of course these are generalizations and indidivual tracks may buck the trend. As explained in the introduction, each mix is divided into several volumes, and each post covers one volume. So the volume subtitles are the links. Where a mix has no volumes listed, that means I haven’t gotten around to doing a post on it yet, so the inclusion of it here is just a teaser. I’m cruel like that.

Here are some phrases I use in these posts, their definitions, and links to the posts where I talk more about them (if any):

mix: A collection of songs, arranged in a particular order, that share a common theme. Can be infinitely long. Has a name which I invented.

volume: A subdivision of a mix, usually 60 to 80 minutes long. Has a title, generally drawn from one track in the volume.

mix starter: The song that inspired a particular mix.

transition: The flow from the end of one song to the beginning of the next. Very important to a mix’s integrity. The reason why you must never touch the “Shuffle” button on your player.

bridge: A short song, almost always under two minutes, interposed between two other songs that don’t have a very good transition.

hardening: The process by which the transitions of a mix, while perhaps not perfect at first, grow ingrained over time through repeated listening, until I can’t imagine breaking them. Contrasted with transitions that are perfect out of the gate.

No Reuse Rule: The rule that says that any given song can only ever appear on one mix. Well, not a rule so much as a guideline, really. There are, naturally, exceptions:

If I make mixes for other people, they are not subject to the No Reuse Rule. For instance, my Mother’s Day mix may very well contain songs on one of the mixes here; likewise for any of the mixes I made for my eldest child when they were younger.
Also, if I were to make two different mixes for The Mother or any of my kids, I might be willing to use the same track as a previous mix for that person. Which is subtly different from the above exception (and probably worse, so then again I might not).
Every once in a while I just screw up and accidentally break the No Reuse Rule. Generally I try to rerrange things in order to fix the mistake once I find it. Sometimes this can be difficult if the song has “hardened” (see above) in both mixes.
Certain mixes are just different, and they’re not considered part of the main series, so they’re allowed to use the same track as one of the main mixes (but not to repeat a track on that mix, no matter how many volumes it goes). The prime example of this is the 80s My Way mix. I also have 3 “mood” mixes (which is a dumb name for them, as all of my mixes are really mood mixes) called Dreamtime, Darktime, and Pasttime which used to fall under this exception. Lately, however, I’ve been re-examining that decision, and starting to move some things around so that those mixes will also follow the No Reuse Rule. I also have a “gaming” mix which originally I didn’t consider part of the main mix series, but it has also since come into line.
“Bonin’ in the Boneyard” by Fishbone is exempt from the No Reuse Rule. It can be on as many mixes as it wants. It’s just that good.

modern mix: A mix that was developed as a digital playlist.

pre-modern mix: A mix that was developed as a mix tape. Any pre-modern mix in this series is actually a recreation of the original.

proto-mix: A collection of songs that was sort of randomly jumbled together on a mix tape; proto-mixes were what preceded pre-modern mixes. There are no proto-mixes in this list because they were all crap.

transitional mix: The mixes that came between the pre-modern mixes and the modern mixes. They were developed as digital playlists, but not with the full rigor of modern mixes. There are 3 of these in total, and at least 2 of them are being updated to follow the moden mix guidelines.

moderately obscure band: An artist with an entry on AllMusic but no bio, and either no page or a stub page on Wikipedia.

really obscure band: An artist that can’t be found on either AllMusic or Wikipedia.

cover image: A faux CD cover generated for a mix volume out of my fevered imagination using the Gimp. Only a few volumes have this.

In addition to the mixes themselves, I also have a few personal stories of music discovery that I’ve written:

The mixes are arranged from most upbeat to most downbeat. I’ve tried to provide a super-short summation of what each mix conveys; these are necessarily oversimplifications and may not capture the full range of emotion the mix provides. Mixes with no descriptions or volumes listed are still under construction.

Most Upbeat

⇓ Thrashomatic Danger Mix

loud and hardcore, to work out your aggression

I. Dog Will Hunt

⇓ Cumulonimbus Eleven

powerful songs that should be cranked all the way up

I. Devastate the Night Forever

⇓ Funkadelic Bonethumper

⇓ Creeping Rageaholic

songs that start out mellow, then break into aggression

I. Set Shit on Fire

⇓ Totally Different Head

punk meets new wave

I. The Devil Take Your Stereo

⇓ FasterHarderDarker

⇓ Distaff Attitude

female vocals with attitude

I. Warm Us Up and Watch Us Blow

⇓ HipHop Bottlerocket

party mix

I. Saddle Up Your Salamander

⇓ Tsunwave Tsunami

⇓ Salsatic Vibrato

brassy and upbeat

⇓ Solar Superposition

⇓ Apparently World

upbeat worldmusic

I. The Universal Language

⇓ Snaptone Glimmerbeam

happy-making mostly instrumentals

I. All I’m Sayin’, Pretty Baby

⇓ Yuletidal Pools

Happy Christmahannukwanzaakah!

⇓ Tripping Flibbertigibbet

⇓ Honeysuckle Bubblegum

⇓ Stumbling Locomotive

⇓ Sirenexiv Cola

female-fronted alterna-pop

I. You Sparkle and Burn
II. Sneaky Like a Fiery Fox

⇓ 80s My Way

my tribute to 80s music

⇓ Fulminant Cadenza

rock and alternative with an operatic bent

I. Thunderbolt and Lightning

⇓ Cantosphere Eversion

inside-out songs

I. Where Time Becomes a Loop

⇓ Paradoxically Sized World

inspired by LittleBigPlanet

⇓ Midnight Synthesis

darkly sparkling synthwave

I. The Moon Is Shining in the Sky

⇓ Bleeding Salvador

mid-tempo featuring surreal lyrics

⇓ Penumbral Phosphorescence

mid-to-high-energy goth music

I. And Death Scourged Her

⇓ Eldritch Ætherium

music to inspire gaming creativity

⇓ Candy Apple Shimmer

shimmery, ethereal, but still upbeat, dreampop

I. If All You Dreamed Was New

⇓ Gramophonic Skullduggery

mischievous songs with an old-timey vibe

I. White Spats and Lots of Dollars

⇓ Moonside by Riverlight

jazzy lounge

⇓ Loungeomatic Dangly Mix

⇓ Pasttime

⇓ Slithy Toves

slinky, sinuous tunes ranging from mellow to mildly upbeat

⇓ Primeval Rainlands

⇓ Zephyrous Aquamarine

desert island inspired chill-out

I. Out Upon the Islands on a Cool Summer Night

⇓ Smokelit Flashback

druggy trip-hop and dreampop with a noir feel

⇓ Classical Plasma

an orchestral melange of classical, neoclassical, and soundtrack music

I. The Night Aquarium Is Closed

⇓ Incanto Liturgica

celebrating chant, both religious and ethnic

I. After the Clouds

⇓ Mars de la Morte

⇓ Irie Vibrations

⇓ Porchwell Firetime

folksy songs which tell a story

I. I Came Here from Nowhere

⇓ Tumbledown Flatland

western-tinged songs with the feel of a lonesome prairie

I. I Have Water, I Have Rum

⇓ Dreamtime

surreal and psychedelic music that suggests a dreamlike state

⇓ Dreamscape Perturbation

surreal dreampop with a mildly disturbing vibe

I. Dark Twisted Fantasy

⇓ Smooth as Whispercats

alterna-pop with a smooth jazz feel

⇓ Dreamsea Lucidity

lofi and trip-hop with a pschedelic bent

I. But You Dream About Islands and You Go to Them

⇓ Mystical Memoriam

pretty instrumentals that suggest magic and memory

I. Behind the Purple Stars

⇓ Plutonian Velvet

creepy alternative with unsettling lyrics

I. Ministers of Night

⇓ Phantasma Chorale

creepy, childlike music inspired by the soundtrack to Coraline

I. Shadows Are in Hiding
II. Her Fatal Charm

⇓ Darktime

dark ambient tunes that suggest nyctophobia

I. My Shadow Will Cover

⇓ Rose-Coloured Brainpan

downbeat with a nostalgic feel

⇓ Darkling Embrace

love songs with dark overtones

I. Welcome Your Nightfall

⇓ Shadowfall Equinox

contemplative and autumnal

I. Mystery Dwells Deep
II. This Town of the Dying
III. Five Fathoms Below You
IV. It’s Dark and It Looks Like Rain
V. Keep the Dark Inside
VI. The Hungry Ghost That Lingers
VII. The Garden, by Moonlight, Turning Dark
VIII. Oceans of Storm Clouds

⇓ Numeric Driftwood

to drift off to sleep by

⇓ Wisty Mysteria

wistful, with a touch of mysterious

⇓ Tenderhearted Nightshade

poignant and contemplative

I. You Bleed Just to Know You’re Alive

Most Downbeat

Special Mixes for Other People

Mother’s Day

for The Mother

I. Every Little Thing Gonna Be All Right

In the P!nk

the Church of P!nk

Numeric Princess

Disney music for my little princess

I. Fairy Tales Can Come True

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Perl blog post #41

Occasionally my geek worlds collide: being simultaneously a technogeek and a gaming geek often means writing code to do things for games. I’ve mentioned here that one of my games is Heroscape, and I’ve also mentioned that I’m part of something called the C3V, which attempts to create new units for this now discontinued game. I don’t know if I specifically mentioned what I do for that group ... I’m one of the Editors, which means I help make sure that the wording for any new cards we create are just as official as the existing cards. To that end, I have a file with all the text from all the official cards in it, and I have a script which lets me search that file in interesting ways in order to look at all the different official ways to say something.

So this past week or so I’ve had occasion to ponder a way to make this script even more useful. It turned out to be a bit tricky, though, and evolved into a mini-programming-project. So I decided to write it up for my Other Blog. You’ll find this particular article technical, as per usual, but if you know anything about Heroscape I think you’ll still be able to glean some interesting tidbits nonetheless. If you know neither gaming nor coding, well ... you know the drill by now. Just look up a couple of inches.

Sunday, July 5, 2015

Shadowfall Equinox I

"Mystery Dwells Deep"

[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.

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.]

It wasn’t the first Hearts of Space program I ever heard,¹ but “Shadowfall II” was probably the one which most cemented my love for that show. To quote Stephen Hill:

No matter where you are in the United States, the arrival of autumn reveals the inescapable retreat of the sun. Colors decline to the somber, and the music of the season is darker as well.

Slowing down after the active days of summer, we hang, suspended, for a moment, waiting for the feast and festival days to come. On this transmission of Hearts of Space, we look for the sound of the season on a program called “Shadowfall II.”

I don’t know that I can describe this mix any better than that. I loved that episode: I hunted it down somewhere on the Internet and downloaded it and burned it to a CD and wore that sucker out. The music is somber, as Stephen Hill says, but it’s not actually depressing. It’s the perfect mood music for contemplative thought, for creative endeavor, for living in the background while you go on living, not dragging you down but not lifting you up either; it doesn’t fade into the wallpaper, but rather makes you think; it doesn’t engage your brain actively, but somehow sneaks in under the radar, making your subconscious race and your dreaming self wake up and take notice.

Given how much I was influenced by Hearts of Space in general in terms of mix creation,² and given how much I love this program in particular, I suppose it was inevitable that eventually I would try to create my own version. Although I resisted for quite a long time: I didn’t want to bother unless I could improve on the original. Well, I’m not saying that Shadowfall Equinox—and now that you’ve read the words that inspired this mix, I’m sure you see where the name comes from—is definitely an improvement, but I do think it has something to offer, and I’m happy to present it here today.

What this mix has most in common with its namesake is a predominating artist: Jeff Greinke. Both have three tracks from Greinke,³ although not the same three. They are all from the same album though, and I even open my mix with the same track that opens “Shadowfall II”: “One September.” You don’t argue with the perfect opening track just to be different. The two I didn’t use in this volume will no doubt show up on future volumes—in fact, realistically, this mix will eventually use nearly every track off this excellent album (Wide View). It’s just too perfect for this mix.⁴

Other than the Greinke tracks, I stayed away from recycling artists from the Hearts of Space program, at least for this volume. This meant finding some stray tracks on unlikely albums, and exploring some other artists that I’d discovered via Hearts of Space, such as darkwave icons Black Tape for a Blue Girl⁵ and Falling You,⁶ or cello guru David Darling.⁷

The darkwave bands are a good place to find tracks like these. Most of them are fond of instrumentals, and even their vocal tracks are often muted enough to fit well here. So Black Tape for a Blue Girl gives us “The Scavenger Bride” (from the album of the same name, possibly their best) and “I Have No More Answers,” Love Spirals Downwards provides “Sidhe” (from Ardor, one of their best), and Falling You contributes “hope thrown down” off Touch (which is absolutely their best). These bands also give us our only 3 songs with words (except for the formless vocals we’ll get from Amber Asylum), so “hope thrown down” is also our volume namer.

I’m pretty sure I discovered Falling You via Hearts of Space, and I’m pretty sure that’s how I ended up finding Magnatune.⁸ The “we are not evil” folks contribute 3 artists to this mix (above and beyond Falling You), including the two that give us our worldmusic vibe. Shiva in Exile is mostly electro-world, like Transglobal Underground or Thievery Corporation, with a focus on India and slight gothic tendencies. Most of his⁹ tracks are more energetic than will fit here, but “Aldebaran” is a more contemplative piece that works well. On the other hand, Stellamara is mostly world with a Turkish bent and medieval meanderings, but quite a lot of it has an ambient feel that is part of what this mix is all about. “Persephone” is one of their beautifully dark, mellow pieces, and it serves as an excellent closer here. We’ll hear more from them on future volumes as well.

Also from Magnatune is Lisa DeBenedictis, generally a purveyor of anti-folk, but “Cello Song” is a darkly pretty piece given its gravity by the titular instrument. The cello is in fact a fantastic instrument for conveying the mood that this mix embodies, and you’ll hear it over and over again throughout the mix. Besides this song, and probably both of the Black Tape for a Blue Girl tracks, there is of course Amber Asylum, whose music is often described as “dark ambient,” which basically means classical/ambient jammed sideways into goth.¹⁰ I think I found them by accident, from clicking on one of those “similar albums” or “if you liked that, you’ll probably like this” type links. Not all of their albums are gold, but this one (The Natural Philosophy of Love) is a winner. With just a touch of dream mixed in, AllMusic’s description of them as a combination of the Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, Julee Cruise, and Lisa Germano is pretty spot-on.

And speaking of a bunch of 4AD superstars, we also have an instrumental track from This Mortal Coil, the supergroup composed of an ever-shifting lineup of 4AD band members. This track is “Ivy and Neet,” featuring Simon Raymonde of the Cocteau Twins on guitar and bass, Richard Thomas of Dif Juz on saxophone, and what is almost certainly Martin McCarrick, who bowed the wood for several Siouxsie albums, on cello.¹¹ McCarrick isn’t quite my favorite cello player,¹² but he’s pretty high up there.

Shadowfall Equinox I
[ Mystery Dwells Deep ]

“One September” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Winter” by Bent, off Ibiza by Day [DJ Mix]
“Clementina” by Xymox, off Twist of Shadows
“The Scavenger Bride” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off The Scavenger Bride
“Interlude” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Cello Song” by Lisa DeBenedictis, off Fruitless
“Looking Glass Reprise” by Amber Asylum, off The Natural Philosophy of Love
“hope thrown down” by Falling You, off Touch
“Aldebaran” by Shiva In Exile, off Ethnic
“Io - Moon of Jupiter” by Anugama, off The Lightness of Being [Compilation]
“I Have No More Answers” by Black Tape for a Blue Girl, off Remnants of a Deeper Purity
“Twin Peaks Theme” by Angelo Badalamenti, off Twin Peaks [Soundtrack]
“Slow Circles” by Jeff Greinke, off Wide View
“Ivy and Neet” by This Mortal Coil, off Filigree & Shadow
“Sidhe” by Love Spirals Downwards, off Ardor
“Persephone” by Stellamara, off The Seven Valleys

Total: 16 tracks, 75:36

The remaining 4 tracks are a bit of a hodgepodge. We get a bit of electronica via Bent’s “Winter,” which is ostensibly a downtempo tune, but seems to be trying to break out of that mold and resonate a little darker, at least to me. A touch of new age comes via “Io – Moon of Jupiter” by Anugama, which purports to be a meditative piece,¹³ but again goes beyond. From Angelo Badalamenti’s insanely good soundtrack to Twin Peaks we have “Twin Peaks Theme,” which infuses a bit of shadowfall into dream pop.¹⁴ And, finally, from true goth genius Ronny Moorings, we have “Clementina.” This is from the Xymox period (as opposed to the Clan of Xymox periods), which means it’s from an album that’s a bit poppier than most of their ouevre. Specifically, it’s off of Twist of Shadows, which I understand some hardcore (Clan of) Xymox fans detest, as they feel it’s a sellout disc.¹⁵ However, I’ve always loved it, and find it quite relaxing, with just enough dark undertones to make it interesting. Being an instrumental, “Clementina” slides perfectly into this mix.

Next time, I’ll explore yet another of the pieces that Depression fragmented into.

Shadowfall Equinox II ⇒

__________

1 I’m pretty sure that was either “Africa West” or “Multiculti.”

2 I discussed this way back in the beginning, remember?

3 This was a mistake I made in the original post; actually “Shadowfall II” contains four tracks from Greinke’s Wide View.

4 The only other artist to be repeated in “Shadowfall II” was Kevin Keller, but we won’t see him until volume II (and later). I did restrain myself a little.

5 “Liquid Desires”

6 “Funeral Songs”

7 “Shadowplay,” although we won’t actually see tracks from Cello Blue until Shadowfall Equinox II.

8 I.e. because I then went looking for places to download Falling You albums.

9 Like Black Tape for a Blue Girl and Falling You, Shiva in Exile is mostly one guy, specifically Stefan Hertrich.

10 We’ll hear from other dark ambient artists, such as Dark Sanctuary, in future volumes.

11 As well as Gini Ball on violin, who provided strings for Siouxsie, Psychic TV, Wolfgang Press, Big Country, Peter Murphy, and Nick Cave, just to name a few.

12 That would probably be Jami Sieber.

13 In fact, it’s from Anugama’s collection The Lightness of Being, which he “designed specifically for meditation and relaxation,” according to AllMusic.

14 And we’ll hear more off this album on future volumes.

15 Whereas I would reserve that appellation for the following album, Phoenix.

Sunday, June 28, 2015

Paradoxically Sized World I

"The Whole World Is Yours"

So far all but one of the mixes I’ve introduced have been downbeat of center.¹ So, in the spirit of balance and paradox, I thought I’d rectify that with a more upbeat mix that also contains a fair amount of slower tracks. And, hell: “paradox” is right there in the name of the mix.

The name is fairly obvious once you know that this mix was inspired by LittleBigPlanet. This cute but addictive video game has a lot to recommend it, but its music is one of its best features. It’s an electic mix of electronica, world, jazz, hip-hop, pop, and dream, with touches of funk, latin, new age, cinematic, classical, and medieval revival. None of it fits together, and yet it forms a coherent whole. The remarkably diverse music all just seems to flow, and you get to the point where you hear other music from random places and think “hey, they ought to use that in LBP.”

So I made a mix.

Now, let’s be clear about the parameters of this mix. First of all, there’s quite a lot of original music composed for the game, but, with rare exception,² I don’t put those songs on the mix. That would be a very different type of mix altogether. No, it’s the songs by real artists, off real albums, that I use. And I go hunting down the original versions of those songs, which means that this mix often contains vocal versions where you would hear an instrumental version in the game. In fact, LittleBigPlanet has been responsible for my discovering quite a few new artists that way that I’m pretty sure I would have never come across otherwise. I now own several albums by LBP artists: Röyksopp, Trentemøller, Lullatone, Plaid, Ladytron, Mocean Worker, just to name a few. And there are at least two bands—Ugress and Tashaki Miyaki³—that I now consider among my favorites.⁴ So, for me, LittleBigPlanet is not only a fun game to play with my kids, it’s also a music discovery service.

Now, as I mentioned, not all of the songs on this mix are actually from LittleBigPlanet. Only about half are, in fact. The remainder are just songs that seemed like they belonged in this grouping—perhaps other songs from LBP artists, or just, as I said above, songs that I felt ought to be in the game but weren’t.⁵ I also didn’t bother to restrict myself to those LBP games that I’ve actually played: we own LBP 1, 2, and 3, but there’s also LBP for PSP,⁶ LBP for PS Vita, and LBP Kart. Thanks to the Internet, I know the names of most all the songs from all the different levels of all the different games, and I’m not shy about stealing whatever strikes my fancy. Of course, I’m also not shy about rejecting music: just because a tune appears in LittleBigPlanet doesn’t mean it automatically lands on this mix. Some of them just aren’t as good as others, and I continue to employ my usual artistic sensibilities when creating the mix. That also means that you shouldn’t expect to find the music from the game in the same order you’d find it in the game. Nor even expect to find it all in the same order that the games were released, although, since I started this mix between LBP 1 and LBP 2, you’ll get a rough approximation of that order.

In this first volume, the music is all from LBP 1 and LBP PSP, more or less alternating with non-LBP tracks.⁷ Most of the non-LBP artists I discovered via the “Zen” music channel of my television provider.⁸ There’s also one track by Lullatone, who I discovered via LBP 3. Naming volumes in this mix is tough, as many of the songs are instrumental even in their original versions, and ofttimes the ones that do have words aren’t in English.⁹ In fact, there are only three songs on this entire volume with any words in English at all,¹⁰ so I chose a phrase from the spoken word intro to “The World Is All Mine” by Clutch Player.

In the mix list, I’ve thoughtfully added a note for all the tracks used in LittleBigPlanet games: either 1, 2, 3, PSP, PSV, or Kart. If a track doesn’t have a note, it isn’t from an LBP game.¹¹ All of the LBP artists on this volume were unfamiliar to me when I first heard them in game, except of course Thievery Corporation.¹² The only non-LBP artists I didn’t first hear on the “Zen” channel was Transglobal Underground, who I talked about way back in Smokelit Flashback I.¹³

Paradoxically Sized World I
[ The Whole World is Yours ]

“Left Bank Two” by the Noveltones [Single]

“The Awakening” by Tom Teasley, off Painting Time
“Get It Together” by the Go! Team, off Thunder Lightning Strike

“Count the Daisies” by Chris Joss, off Teraphonic Overdubs
“Dancing Drums” by Ananda Shankar, off A Life in Music: Best of the EMI Years [Compilation]

“The World Is All Mine” by Clutch Player, off The Atlantic Connection All Stars
“Satyam Shivam Sundaram” by Thievery Corporation, off The Cosmic Game

PSP

“Tapha Niang” by Toumani Diabaté's Symmetric Orchestra [Single]

“Isis Unveiled” by Hossam Ramzy / Phil Thornton, off Eternal Egypt

PSP

“Flutter” by Bonobo, off Dial 'M' for Monkey
“Cornman” by Kinky, off Kinky

“Jatayu” by Transglobal Underground, off International Times
“2 Sips & Magic” by Nickodemus, off Sun People

PSP

“Curio” by Stratus, off Fear of Magnetism
“Still Feeling the Waves When You Go to Bed” by Lullatone, off Summer Songs [EP]

Total: 15 tracks, 71:00

Two other things I’ll mention before I close.

If you are a fan of LittleBigPlanet, you’ll recognize most of the tracks here, especially “Left Bank Two” by the Noveltones, which is a piece of sixties “library music,” but more famous as the music for the tutorial level in LBP 1.¹⁴ So I thought that made a good mix opener. I believe the only surprise here among the LBP tracks is that I’ve used the vocal version of “Tapha Niang,” which is the music from The Savannah in LBP 1. I’ve read that they originally wanted to use the vocal version in the game, but there was some legal hang-up with the copyright, so they ended up going with the instrumental version. So now you can hear it as it was meant to be heard. Probably my favorite of the game music on this volume, though, is “Dancing Drums” by Ananda Shankar, nephew of Ravi.¹⁵ Ananda put out some great music in the seventies, fusing traditional Indian music with jazz, along with touches of funk and psychedelia. I’d never heard of him before playing LittleBigPlanet, but I’ve now picked up his greatest hits compilation, A Life in Music, and we’ll be hearing from him again in volume II.

Among the non-LBP tracks, “The Awakening” by Tom Teasley is so LBP that my children swear it’s a game track and fight over which level it’s in. “Count the Daisies” by Chris Joss is another track that is quite strongly reminiscent of the game, but then again Joss’ music is primarily composed of retro-recreations of the music from movies of the late sixties and early seventies, so it’s not surprising it fits right in here. Electronica artist Bonobo is also a natural fit, and we’ll hear more from him in future volumes. “Jatayu” from International Times is one of the more upbeat tunes here, but it fits well with the world vibe and flows beautifully into “2 Sips & Magic” by New York spinner Nickodemus. Stratus gives us “Curio” to help wind down, and we close out with the lovely “Still Feeling the Waves When You Go to Bed” by Lullatone, who would go on to provide the background music for the LBP 3 trailer.¹⁶ It’s a calm, relaxing piece which provides the perfect closing for this mostly upbeat mix.

There are several more volumes of PSW to come, but I like to keep things mixed up.¹⁷ Next time I think we’ll drift into even more instrumental territory, but take a darker turn.

Paradoxically Sized World II ⇒

__________

1 The exception being Salsatic Vibrato, which is pretty upbeat.

2 Only twice so far, in fact. But not until volume II.

3 One of which, as you can see, meets my criteria for being an “obscure band”; the other has no bio on AllMusic, but does have a Wikipedia article. Although it occurs to me that, the Internet being forever, you may well be reading these words in a time when both those things exist for both these bands, and you’ll wonder what the hell I’m on about. Just trust me when I tell you that, as of this writing, these bands are obscure enough that, without LBP, I doubt I would have ever discovered them at all.

4 Although, to be fair, my list of “favorite bands” is very long.

5 Yet. By the time you read this, who knows?

6 The kids have played that one, but I never have

7 There’s one 3-track stretch of all LBP in the middle, and we close with 2 non-LBP in a row, but other than that, strict alternation.

8 Which happens to be DIRECTV. But as far as I know they all have these sorts of music channels.

9 Not that I have anything against giving a mix volume a title in a foreign language, in principle. But I like the names to be something I can remember, something that puts me in mind of the songs on the mix. Rarely would a foreign phrase work in that way for me.

10 And two of those are more in the English-as-a-second-language camp.

11 At least as far as I know. Lacking omniscience, I welcome corrections.

12 I’ll be telling you the story of how I discovered Thievery Corporation once I get to Smokelit Flashback III.

13 And Smokelit Flashback II, for that matter.

14 Unless you’re a Brit of a certain age, in which case I gather you’ll always think of it as the music for Vision On.

15 Ravi Shankar is perhaps best known for introducing George Harrison to the sitar, although he probably ought to be equally celebrated for fathering Norah Jones.

16 “Race Against the Sunset,” which is also used in the Needlepoint Peaks level. We’ll see it show up on volume IV.

17 Pun not intended. Though admittedly not removed after being noticed either.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Saladosity, Part 5: Further Adventures in Produce

[This is the fifth post in a long series. You may wish to start at the beginning. 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.]

So at this point we’ve raided our produce section for the base veggies for our salad. But that doesn’t mean we’re done here in produce. On the contrary, there’s a good deal of other bits and bobs we’ll need for extras, dressings, etc. Let’s break it down.

Fruit (eating)

Fresh fruit is awesome, and you should probably buy lots of it. I don’t add it much to salads though. I generally eat it straight, mostly in a desperate attempt to use it to replace sweets. Sure, eating sugar-packed fruit is not necessarily the best choice you can make, but compared to eating candy, or cookies, or that sort of crap, it’s easily the better choice.

The biggest problem with fruit is keeping it from going bad. So you not only have to buy fruit that you like to eat; you also have to make sure it’s going to survive in your fridge for a week. ‘Cause, let’s face it: you’re not going to go to the grocery store more than once a week. Maybe you want to, maybe you even should ... but you’re not gonna. You just don’t have time.¹ So concentrate on stuff you can both eat out of hand and keep around for a week without rotting. My favorites are bananas, apples, grapes, and pineapple. But pineapple only because my local TJ’s² sells it precut. There’s no way I’m going to chop up my own pineapple. Way too much effort.

All this will last just fine for a week, all in the fridge except the bananas. At the end of the week, whatever I have left over I freeze, or just toss out for the birds and squirrels. (If you compost, that’s also a great choice.) Never be afraid to throw out food and get fresh stuff. Of course, some stuff will last two weeks: the grapes and apples generally will,³ and bananas I buy green as hell every week and let them ripen throughout the week while I work on last week’s bunch. At the end of two weeks, though, into the freezer they go. Pineapple, strawberries, blackberries, and cherries can only stay for a week.

Now, we will need a fresh fruit accent for one of our salads. In a perfect world, I’d use pears. But here’s the problem with pears: they don’t keep all that well, and I don’t like to eat them out of hand. So, if I were to use pears, I’d only be able to have this salad toward the beginning of the week, and, if I missed my opportunity, I’d end up with pears lying around and nothing useful to do with them. So I use apples instead. Apples are just as good as pears, really, and much more likely to get eaten for other purposes. And they last longer.

Get organic apples, and look for sweet varieties. My TJ’s has recently started carrying opals, and I think they’re amazing. (So do my kids.) So that’s almost always what we buy these days, when they’re available. Other good choices are pink ladies, galas, or honeycrisps.

Fruit (juicing)

You’re also going to need lemon juice, so buy some lemons. You won’t need these every week (or even every other week, most likely). I like to buy a bag of organic lemons, which generally contains about six or so lemons, and juice ’em all at once. This will last anywhere from two weeks to a month before I need to buy lemons again, and, generally speaking, the lemon juice will last that long. In my experience, lemon juice doesn’t go bad: it just gets extra sour. But it’s so acidic anyway that I dunno if bacteria can live in there. Keep it in small tupperware containers (I keep mine up in the butter area at the top of the refrigerator door), and, if it gets a bit cloudy, just skim off the white bits with a spoon.

You can substitute limes here if you prefer, or maybe Meyer lemons. Mainly what we’re going to use it for is making mayonnaise, so, you know: however you want your mayo to taste.

Don’t be tempted to buy bottles of lemon juice though. That crap almost always contains sulfites, which is not good. I’ll show you how to juice lemons so it’s not a huge chore. Promise.⁴

Aromatics

I always buy a bag of organic yellow onions, which I will cut up along with my base veggies. But, strictly speaking, we won’t need those for any of our salads. I just like to do all my veggie chopping for the week in one go.

On the other hand, we will need garlic. I also buy organic garlic, which happily will last basically forever. It’ll sprout, eventually, although I rarely keep any around that long. And, even after it sprouts, most of the garlic is still good. If you do manage to keep garlic around for more than, say, a month, it’ll get soft, and I consider that a sign that it’s time to toss. As long as it stays firm, it should be fine.

I also love garlic, so, fair warning: I will advise you to use lots of it for those dressings where we need it. If you don’t dig garlic as much as I do, you can tone down the amounts. As I say, I buy organic, but that’s mostly on principle. Garlic is actually one of the few items of produce that I can’t really taste any difference between organic and non-organic varities.

I suppose jalapeños aren’t technically aromatics, but I threw them in this section anyway.⁵ We’re going to make some cilantro dressing which needs a bit of heat, and jalapeños are an easy way to provide that. Now, cutting up fresh jalapeños is a giant pain in the ass, although I will try to offer some tips to make it as easy as possible. I used to buy them in little cans, pre-cut, but my TJ’s stopped selling them. So I bit the bullet and started buying fresh. TJ’s sells a small package containing about 3 or 4 peppers, which is enough to make 4 batches of dressing. So what do you with the other 3 batches? Simple: you freeze them. And, since one batch of cilantro dressing will last a week and a half to two weeks, you only have to go through this giant pain in the ass once every six to eight weeks. I can live with that.

Herbs

I’m not huge on fresh herbs. I’m perfectly happy with buying powdered or ground or pummeled whatever from the spice section. But there’s one area where you really do need to buy fresh: cilantro. If you can manage to grow it yourself, bonus for you. But for me, TJ’s sells it in little flat plastic packs that’s a perfect amount for a single application (either cilantro dressing, or aloo gobi, which are the two things I use fresh cilantro for). I also sometimes buy it at my local farmer’s market, but the smallest amount I can buy there is about 3 to 4 times what I need to use at a time, so then it becomes a challenge to keep it from going bad. But I’m working on getting better at that.

So far I’ve not seen any organic cilantro. (Although my local farmer’s market⁶ grows their produce using generally organic means, they don’t choose to get certified organic, so their products don’t have that label.) Certainly if I saw it I would buy it.

That’ll do it for us in the produce department. Next time, we’ll move on to nuts and dried fruits.

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1 If you do, I doubt you’re reading this anyway. You don’t need tips from me.

2 Remember how I said I was going to be a walking advertisement for Trader Joe’s?

3 Apples will in fact last much longer than two weeks if kept properly. But they generally won’t last that long.

4 Although I will admit to using the bottled crap sometimes when I’m feeling lazy. It does last forever. But that’s primarily because it’s chock full of sulfites. So I try to avoid it as much as possible.

5 Primarily because there’s wasn’t anywhere else good to put them.

6 Which, honestly, is not all that local, which is why I don’t go that often.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Perl blog post #40

This week I’ve been off with The Mother, her parents, her sister, our 3 human children, and our 1 canine child, on simultaneous vacation and work conference. This year’s YAPC was in Salt Lake City, a mere 700 miles from our home and 550 from that of the grandparents and aunt. So we met in the middle(ish) and rented a small vacation house. I rode the train into the conference every day and brought the boys in at night for social activities. If you’re interestd in the mostly technical details of my experience, feel free to check out my Other Blog. But there’s also some non-technical stuff buried in there, so hopefully it’s of some value even to my non-geeky readership. Assuming there’s any readership at all out there, despite my repeated warnings to the contrary.

But in any event, my YAPC reflections is all you get this week. The vacation part was quite lovely, to be sure, and I’m quite glad we got away for a while, and quite glad we got to see the closest things I have to in-laws again. Still, it’s an exhausting week: driving 1500 miles or so, sleeping not in one’s own bed, dietary changes (e.g. a hell of a lot more fast food than I’ve been eating lately), dealing with multitudes and multitudes of people. So these few paragraphs are about all I can muster at the moment. Next week I hope to return to my salad series.

Sunday, June 7, 2015

Saladosity, Part 4: Choose Your Veggies

[This is the fourth post in a long series. You may wish to start at the beginning. 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.]

Obviously the first step to making a good salad is buying good ingredients. This time around I’m going to give you some tips on how to do just that.

First, let’s give ourselves some goals on what we’re looking for:

We want veggies that taste good.
We want veggies that provide a variety of tastes and textures.
We want to buy organic as much as we possibly can.
We want veggies that can stand to be in the fridge for at least a week, after they’ve been chopped up.

Hopefully it’s obvious why we want all these. #1 is because, if they don’t taste good, you’re not going to eat them. #2 is because, if your salad is boring, you’re not going to eat it. #3 is because a) organic just tastes better, and b) it’s at least probably better for you.¹ And #4 is because chopping up veggies for salad is an annoying task, so you’re not going to want to do it very often. You’re going to want to shoot for once a week, maybe twice a week at the most. Any more often than that and you’re going to come to dread it, which means you won’t do it, which means you won’t have salad in your fridge when you want it, which means you’re not going to eat salad that often. Severely counter-productive.

So, first off, find yourself a grocery store that’s not too far away and has decent prices on organic food, especially veggies. For me, that’s Trader Joe’s, but you can use whatever you like. (But I have to warn you: I buy just about everything at TJ’s, so I’m going to sound like a walking billboard for them throughout this discussion.) Perhaps you find Whole Foods affordable.² Or maybe it’s Fresh & Easy. Or maybe even a local Wal-Mart which carries organic produce—whatever. As long as it’s convenient and moderately cheap. Expect it to be a little more expensive—never fret over paying more for healthy and delicious food—but not so much that you’re tempted to stop eating salad for budgetary reasons. Again, counter-productive.

Next, you have to find the mix of veggies that you like. For me it’s this:

lettuce
cucumbers
bell peppers
celery
scallions

Every single salad will use the same veggies. Why? Two reasons: First, it’s just easier to distinguish salads with their extras rather than their base. Secondly (and probably more importantly), if you have exactly one giant bowl of pre-chopped veggies in your fridge, making salads will be easier and more convenient. And that’s what we’re shooting for.

Now, you don’t have to use my mix. Maybe you like radishes.³ Maybe bell peppers give you gas. Whatever. Pick your own 5 or 6 veggies. Experiment if you need to. I strongly recommend you have some sort of lettuce, but, other than that, use what you like. Go crazy.

Now let’s talk about the individual veggies. I’m going to tell you how I choose my varieties; hopefully you can extract the general principles for yourself.

Lettuce

So, first let’s address the pervasive myth that “iceberg lettuce has no nutritional value whatsoever.” This is not completely without merit, but it’s also a vast oversimplification. The truth goes something like this: the greener the leaves, the more nutrition it has. The dark green leaves are the best, the light green less so, the yellow leaves are pretty pathetic, and the white bits are mostly just water in plant form. So, while it’s true that iceberg lettuce has more white than green, and what green it has is pretty light, that’s not the same as saying it has no nutritional value at all, now is it? Not to mention that all types of lettuce have some yellow and white.

Furthermore, there’s a vast gulf between “not necessarily good for you” and “bad for you.” The white bits of lettuce may not have a lot of nutrition, but you know what they do have? Crunch. Do not underestimate the value of crunch in a salad. Crunch is crucial for a good salad, so don’t turn your nose up at the white bits of the lettuce. They’re great for providing crunch, and if they don’t provide much else, who cares? You’re still eating plants, not crap.

Now, all that having been said, I don’t use iceberg myself.⁴ But don’t be so quick to rush off to the romaine: in my experience, romaine will turn slimy in the fridge so fast it will make your head spin (and your stomach turn). I tried romaine a few times, only to vow “never again.”

In my opinion, the best lettuce you can get is butter lettuce. It has some crunch, some darker green leaves, and it will hold up in the fridge for at least a week. This is perfect for salad purposes.

As always, buy organic if you can get it. Although I find organic lettuce a lot harder to come by. If all you can find is non-organic, that’s fine. I buy mine in bags, just because that’s the most common way I find it. Or buy heads if you can get them.

Cucumbers

Cucumbers are absolutely my favorite salad vegetable. You can generally find 3 varieties at your store:⁵ American, English, and Persian. American cucumbers are the ones you’re probably most familiar with ... they’re fat, dark green, and about as long as your hand (or a bit longer). English cucumbers are longer, skinnier, and lighter green, as well as far less regular in shape, but not a whole lot different, really. Persians, on the other hand, are a whole different thing. They’re small, thin, and vaguely cute—they fit easily in your hand, and they’ll keep well in the fridge. Keep them in the fruit drawer—with the humidity cranked up—rather than the meat/veggie drawer; I’ve found this makes a huge difference in how long they’ll keep prior to cutting.

The best thing about Persians is that they’re firmer, crisper, and less mushy than the American or English varieties. That means less water content, and that means they’ll last longer after they’re cut. I buy organic only; they come in a little plastic container with about six in each.

I also sometimes throw an Americn or English cucumber into my mix.⁶ I used to do this very regularly, but it does limit how long your base salad mix will last, so I’m starting to discontinue this practice. If you can eat all your salad in well under a week, that’s fine. Otherwise, you may want to stick with just the Persians.

Celery

Not much to say here. Celery provides a great crunch that even the whiter parts of the lettuce can’t achieve, and it tastes great too. I buy organic celery when I can get it, which is most of the time. You can buy precut stalks, but I usually just get the whole “heart” (comes two to a bag at my local TJ’s). There aren’t different varities of these to choose from, at least not in my store.

Bell Peppers

Some people don’t care for peppers. They are nightshades, and some people have a problem with the nightshades.⁷ However, in my opinion peppers provide even more of that great crunch you need, plus they have a great flavor: it’s not really spicy, like their cousins, but it certainly ain’t bland. Plus they come in red, yellow, and orange, so they provide some color for your salad.⁸

Again, buy organic if at all possible. My local store sells a bag with three organic bell peppers: one red, one yellow, and one orange. So that’s what I get. I personally can’t really taste much difference among the various colors, but perhaps you can.

Scallions

Also known as green onions, a scallion is not just an immature onion (and, if that’s what you’re getting at your grocery store, you’re being sold a bill of goods). A scallion is a whole different species which doesn’t form bulbs. They’re milder than regular onions, making them perfect for salads. At my store, they come anywhere from 6 to 12 in a bag, and I’ve never seen any organic ones. I would certainly buy them if I could though.

I go to my store once a week and raid the produce department pretty heavily. I generally plan to make one or two large batches of salad base, plus cut a few extra veggies along the way. So my shopping list looks like this:

2 or 3 bags of butter lettuce
1 or 2 packages of Persian cucumbers (about 12 cucumbers)
1 bag of celery (two celery hearts)
1 bag of bell peppers (3 large-ish peppers)
1 bag of scallions/green onions (6 to 12 stalks, depending on size)

Of course, this is just the base veggies I’ll need for my salad mix. We’ll need more stuff from the produce department to make our various dressings. But that’s a topic for next time.

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1 Yes, that opinion is contested here and there, and people will also claim that not everything labeled “organic” is necessarily any healthier. But I think it’s a generally accepted principle. Besides, if it tastes better—and it really really does—who cares whether it’s any better for you or not?

2 Perhaps you’re in a very tiny minority.

3 Whereas I think they taste like dirt. But, hey: to each his own.

4 Although I would in a pinch. It’s still better than many of the alternatives.

5 At least that’s what I commonly encounter at my Trader Joe’s.

6 Yes, in addition to the Persians. I really like cucumbers.

7 Or at least are convinced they do. Or believe that there are health concerns. Personally I don’t subscribe to this point of view.

8 As I’ll talk about later, I’m not a big “we eat with our eyes” sort of guy, but that doesn’t mean I think your salad should be monochromatically boring either.

Sunday, May 31, 2015

Perl blog post #39

This week I finally solved a Perl problem that had been kicking my ass for quite a while now. So I decided to write a post about it on my Other Blog. If you’re not one of my more techie readers, you may want to take a pass. But, if you are, go check it out. It’ll be fun. Promise.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

Moonside by Riverlight I

"Far Beyond the Stars"

Retro-swing is all about recreating the big-band sound, but that means more than just swing. Swing songs are the fast songs, the upbeat ones, the ones that make you want to move your body. But of course any band has to have at least a few slow songs, and many have more slow than fast. The big bands were no different, and the retro-swing bands follow suit. This slower music, typically performed by the same bands doing the more upbeat swing, is itself sometimes lumped in with swing. But in my view it’s more correctly referred to as lounge.

Frank Sinatra is of course the godfather of lounge, but his compatriots Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr., as well as other greats such as Tony Bennett and Burt Bacharach are equally famous for this style. The “lounge” of the name is undoubtedly referring to a lounge in Vegas, where most of these fellows became famous. In contrast to proper swing music, lounge is smooth, usually with a slower tempo, inspiring one to slow-dance rather than jitterbug. The vocals are crooned, and while the instrumentation is still brass heavy, it’s more likely to be one lonely saxophone than an insistent horn section. Even when the tempo is faster, it’s more likely to make you want to snap your fingers and bob your head in your seat than to get up and dance. It’s the type of music you might expect to hear while sitting in an outdoor café, with a huge full moon in the background, the sound of the river closeby, the house band playing, the singer singing directly to you and your date ...

Several of the same bands we’ve grown familiar with from the various volumes of Salsatic Vibrato can be found here as well. In fact, it was Cherry Poppin’ Daddies’ excellent “Come Back to Me” that inspired this mix in the first place, and it kicks off the festivities here on volume I. It’s a fairly upbeat tune for lounge, but it still has that smooth, romantic quality that defines the genre. The Brian Setzer Orchestra is back as well, with two more cuts off The Dirty Boogie—including an excellent duet with Gwen Stefani (“You’re the Boss”), and a rich, smooth ballad that really epitomizes the sound (“Hollywood Nocturne”)—as is Lee Press-On and the Nails with another excellent track off El Bando en Fuego!. Koop and the Honeydrippers are actually even better suited to this mix than Salsatic Vibrato, and both contribute two tracks here. For Koop the standout is another Yukimi Nagano track (“Come to Me”), which is probably the least electro- this electro-swing band has ever done. For the Honeydrippers it’s their hit “Sea of Love,” which is of course a song from way back in 1959. We also have what is likely Pink Martini’s best song ever (“Let’s Never Stop Falling in Love”); they too are a band whose ouevre falls more into lounge than swing. And, finally for the Salsatic Vibrato crew, we return to the soundtrack for Swing, for the rare track not sung by Lisa Stansfield, Georgie Fame’s playful “I Thought That’s What You Liked About Me.”

The most prevalent newcomer is, indirectly, Bobby Darin. Now, remembering that my father is an avid collector of early rock-n-roll 45’s, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that I always thought of Bobby Darin as “that guy who sang that silly song about taking a bath.” That is, until I saw the fascinating biopic Beyond the Sea. It turns out Darin had like 3 totally different careers: the first with straight pop/rock like “Splish Splash,” and the final one drifting more into country/folk. But that middle one ... pure lounge, baby. Kevin Spacey plays Darin, and Kevin Spacey can sing. I picked up the soundtrack pretty quickly after seeing the movie, and I found that I enjoyed Spacey’s versions even more than Darin’s originals. So we have 3 tracks off of that album here, all great, but the title track being the greatest. There’s something about that song that really makes my blood sing. It also provides our volume title this time out.

Of course, while most of the artists we associate with lounge are men, the truth is there are some great female vocalists in the genre as well. Besides the Pink Martini track, and the aforementioned Koop track, I use the Brian Setzer/Gwen Stefani duet to springboard into a female-dominated section which takes us to the center of the mix. And that stretch kicks off with Sarah Vaughan.

Now, I have to confess that I never even heard of Vaughan before accidentally stumbling across “Whatever Lola Wants” (and I can’t even remember how that happened). I was blown away. Now, often when I hear an older track like this, I immediately start hunting around for more modern versions, to see if anyone has done anything exciting with the tune that might strike my fancy more than the original.¹ But the simple truth is that no one else can sing this song the way Vaughan can. Her voice just oozes sexy, and it traipses up and down scales in a way that makes you shiver. When she sings

I’m irresistable you fool

you fucking well believe it. And the arrangement (by lesser-known bandleader Hugo Peretti) is strongly rhythmic, containing just a touch of the exotica sound that will be more featured on another mix.² Like Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing,” Sarah Vaughan’s “Lola” isn’t the original version, but it’s the definitive one.

“Lola” blasts right into “Heartbroken” by Meaghan Smith. The Mother heard Smith’s version of “Silver Bells” sometime around last Christmas and asked me to download it for her. Since I’d never heard of her before, I decided to see what else she’d done, and discovered The Cricket’s Orchestra. This album is a little bit lounge, a little bit pop, and a little bit country, which means that it has two songs on it that I have to skip every time I listen to it. But the rest of the album is crazy good, and “Heartbroken” is probably the best.

Then we hit “Coax Me a Little Bit,” another fine Lee Press-On tune sung by Lee’s lovely wife.³ And we wrap up this stretch of songs devoted to crooners of the fairer sex with Devil Doll. Another of my Pandora finds,⁴ Devil Doll is the ultimate purveyor of that style I keep threatening to make up a name for.⁵ Wikipedia calls DD’s music “rockabilly,” but it isn’t. Nor is it neo-rockabilly, like the Stray Cats or Dave Edmunds, nor is it psychobilly like the Cramps or the Reverend Horton Heat. Although that last is much closer: it’s fast, and vaguely punky, like psychobilly, but it’s not punky enough, plus it lacks the camp so often associated with true psychobilly acts. And it has brass, which destroys the basic rockabilly simplicity of guitar + bass + drums. All the other bands I’ve mentioned as examples of this style also do retro-swing, so of course it has brass, and the 50’s songs it harkens back to (without ever truly imitating) often had some brass in them as well, or at least a single saxophone. While Cherry Poppin’ Daddies and Eight to the Bar are about half-and-half between this and retro-swing, Imelda May is closer to 70/30, and Devil Doll is all the way, baby. It’s a rich, diverse style⁶ that allows for some rollicking tunes, some dancy tunes, and the occasional slow ballad ... such as might fit on this mix. “Bourbon in Your Eyes” is a smoky, sultry track that fits in perfectly here.

And, speaking of psychobilly and the Reverend Horton Heat, he has a track here as well: “In Your Wildest Dreams,” one of the rare serious moments from the good Reverend. Not that serious is a requirement here: both the Jane’s Addiction track and the one from the Circle Jerks are examples of the respective bands just goofing around. Although they’re fine tracks: “Thank You Boys” is a lovely bridge into our first Kevin Spacey/Bobby Darin tune, while “When the Shit Hits the Fan” provides one of many amusing moments in Repo Man (“I can’t believe I used to like these guys ...”).

Moonside by Riverlight I
[ Far Beyond the Stars ]

“Come Back to Me” by Cherry Poppin' Daddies, off Zoot Suit Riot [Compilation]
“In Your Wildest Dreams” by Reverend Horton Heat, off Liquor in the Front
“Let's Elope” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“Let's Never Stop Falling In Love” by Pink Martini, off Hang on Little Tomato
“Thank You Boys” by Jane's Addiction, off Nothing's Shocking
“Hello Young Lovers” by Kevin Spacey, off Beyond the Sea [Soundtrack]
“You're the Boss” by The Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“Whatever Lola Wants” by Sarah Vaughan [Single]
“Heartbroken” by Meaghan Smith, off The Cricket's Orchestra
“Coax Me a Little Bit” by Lee Press-On and the Nails, off El Bando en Fuego!
“Bourbon in Your Eyes” by Devil Doll, off Queen of Pain
“Young Boy Blues” by The Honeydrippers, off Volume One [EP]
“Beyond the Sea” by Kevin Spacey, off Beyond the Sea [Soundtrack]
“I Thought That's What You Liked about Me” by Georgie Fame, off Swing [Soundtrack]
“Flake” by Jack Johnson, off Brushfire Fairytales
“Wedding Vows in Vegas” by Was (Not Was), off What Up, Dog?
“Sea of Love” by The Honeydrippers, off Volume One [EP]
“Hollywood Nocturne” by The Brian Setzer Orchestra, off The Dirty Boogie
“Wicked Ways” by Blow Monkeys, off Animal Magic
“Come to Me” by Koop, off Koop Islands
“When the Shit Hits the Fan” by Circle Jerks, off Repo Man [Soundtrack]
“That's All” by Kevin Spacey, off Beyond the Sea [Soundtrack]

Total: 22 tracks, 72:19

The other 3 tracks here are a mixed bag. First we have Jack Johnson’s first hit, “Flake.” Johnson can’t really be described as lounge, but there’s something polished and laid back about this tune that’s always put me in the same headspace as the true lounge songs. Towards the end of the tracklist, a reminder that the 80’s weren’t composed entirely of new wave and synth-pop; occasionally there was a band that hit a mood I usually describe as “alternative smooth jazz.” Most of those tunes will have to wait for another mix,⁷ but the Blow Monkeys often blew well past smooth jazz territory into lounge-land. “Wicked Ways” wasn’t the hit off this album,⁸ but it’s a smooth track that slots in nicely here. And, finally, a true gem of a song, Was (Not Was)‘s offbeat track “Wedding Vows in Vegas.” WNW is one of those bands that’s very hard to pin down: much of their output was powerfully soul and R&B infused alternative tracks such as “Walk the Dinosaur” and “Spy in the House of Love,” but every once in a while they would just go off the map the map entirely and do something really out there. This is a true lounge tune with a wry lyrical twist, sung by no less than Frank Sinatra Jr, giving this volume a real touch of authenticity and respect for its roots.

There’s another volume of Moonside by Riverlight in the works, but it’s not yet ready for primetime. Instead, next time, I think we’ll see what happens when the music from a video game gets under your skin.

Moonside by Riverlight II ⇒

__________

1 Although the Vaughan version in this case is not the original. Much like the situation with “Sing, Sing, Sing” from Salsatic Vibrato III.

2 Which we shall come to in the fullness of time.

3 LPN vocals tend to be split about 50/50 between Lee and his wife Leslie Presley.

4 Along with Caro Emerald, Imelda May, and Eight to the Bar, as we discussed back on Salsatic Vibrato III.

5 Recall that I brought it up in both Salsatic Vibrato II and Salsatic Vibrato III, in connection with Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Imelda May, and Eight to the Bar.

6 In fact, I note that, of the five Devil Doll tracks that I’ve put on mixes not a single one shares a mix with any other. That’s pretty unusual for an artist.

7 Which we shall come to in, you guessed it: the fullness of time.

8 That would be “Digging Your Scene,” which ... well, refer to previous footnote.

Sunday, May 17, 2015

Another working weekend

I started on a blog post this week, but I never got the chance to finish it. I’ve been working on a particularly thorny problem for $work. Well, it’s particularly annoying to test in any event. I have to build two different machines simultaneously, but they have to coordinate with each other at various points as well. An interesting problem, and most of it is solved, but it’s still giving me more trouble than I’d expected. So I’ll have to finish the post later this week and throw it up for you next week.

In the meantime, I’ve got to get back and iron out the last lingering issues in this script of mine. It’ll annoy me no end if I can’t figure it out before it’s time for bed.

Sunday, May 10, 2015

A Developing Biannual Traditon

Four years ago I wrote my first blog treatise about The Mother.

Two years ago I wrote about her again.

Apparently, every two years I feel compelled to write a meandering post on Mother’s Day noting how much I appreciate The Mother of my children. So, I suppose it’s that time again.

Although that makes it sound like a chore. The truth of the matter is that every two years is about how often I need to be reminded of how much I rely on The Mother and appreciate her. Obviously without her I wouldn’t have my 3 adorable children. Who, I was just recently pondering, are very similar to the Animaniacs: one talks a lot, one eats a lot, and the other is small and cute. It’s somewhat disconcerting living with real-life Warner Brothers (and Warner Sister), but at least it’s always entertaining. And I would have none of that without The Mother.

Every year around Mother’s Day, we ask The Mother what she wants to do—where she wants to go, what she wants to eat, if there’s anything we can buy for her, and so forth. Her demands are always very modest, considering. Here’s a person who does a fair amount of cooking and cleaning, not to mention all the bill-paying and child-educating. She plans all the family trips, handles all the appointments for medical visits, home repair, and yard work, and does all the educational and financial planning. In return she asks for very little—this year, at her request, we’re going to relax, maybe swim in the pool a little, and grill outside. We might go out this afternoon and buy her some wind chimes. Not terribly taxing for a once-a-year celebration of all she does.

When we first moved to California, she decided to become a stay-at-home mother. This despite the fact that she had continuously held a job since she was 17 (which is longer than I have, honestly). I was convinced she would hate it. I told her she’d be bored, that she’d fight with the kids too much. That they’d soon be sick of each other. But I was wrong.

She deals with crap that I don’t want to, so that I don’t have to. Which is a good thing, because I generally suck at dealing with things I don’t enjoy. Happily, I enjoy my chosen profession, and I enjoy going to work every day, and even more happily I’m employed by a group of people who respect me and treat me well (including paying me well). But paying bills and dealing with repairpeople and all that: I hate all that. So I procrastinate doing it forever, and then I suck at it when I finally get around to doing it. Except that I don’t, and I don’t, because I don’t do it at all, because she does.

Likewise, I really suck at planning things such as vacations or children’s birthday parties. This is partially because I’m not very organized. But also because of my laissez-faire attitude towards outings: I prefer spontaneity and just going with the flow. Which is one of those things that sounds nice in theory but in reality means you’re just plain unprepared. So The Mother takes care of those things for me. I’d like to tell you it’s because she’s better at it, but that’s not it at all. She’s just more determined to do a good job than I am.

Sometimes I think I’m not as impressed by everything she does as I ought to be. As time goes on and stuff just happens without you having to really think about it, it becomes easy to take the agent of those accomplishments for granted. But it’s not like the planning fairy stops by, or the chore gnomes come out at night. These things take time, and effort, and patience. None of which I have a large supply of. Happily, I don’t have to worry about it.

So, for the most part, I get to concentrate on my work, and my hobbies (such as this blog), and, when it comes to my children, I get to have the fun times without much worry over the parts that are more like work. That’s something that is worth celebrating, I think. And, if some food and some swimming and maybe a set of wind chimes once a year is all it costs me, I’ll count myself lucky at twice the price.

To The Mother, I say: cheers. And thank you. For everything you do. It’s more than I deserve. And I just wanted you to know that I know that.