New Ear

Still Machine - Echoes Within (Official Music Video)
Someoddpilot Records

I dunno about this tune. It's not pop-rock with snappy lyrics and a cool beat. Atmospheric is what I say now. We shall see. But this story on Willamette Week is why I'm posting the tune:

Portland’s Salvo Beta Releases New Music for the First Time in Decades by Daniel Bromfield

A cochlear implant has inspired Sean Wolfe to try making music in a new way.

Salvo Beta, the project of Portland electronic musician Sean Wolfe, just put out its first new music in nearly 25 years. And in order to make it, Wolfe had to learn to hear music in a totally new way.

His two remixes of the Chicago band Still Machines’ song “Echoes Within” are directly inspired by his experience with a cochlear implant, or CI—a surgically implanted prosthesis he received in 2024 after losing most of the hearing in his right ear.

“There’s basically a wire with a bunch of electrodes, and each electrode only triggers a certain frequency band,” Wolfe explains. “The in-between sounds are kind of weird.”

In order to achieve the desired effect on the remix, Wolfe manipulated a Moog synth sound through spectral shaping, a production technique that allows producers to alter individual frequencies. The result sounds something like a bell pinging underwater; the post-punk source material is clear, but the music sounds waterlogged.

“One of the things that really kind of shaped how I started making the music is inferring how frequencies can be shifted and perceived by someone like me, who has one of these CIs,” he says.

Analog versus Digital Recording

The Real Reason Why Analog Recording Is Better
Freaking Out With Billy Hume

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

Goodreads

Google summary:

. . . a 1993 science fiction novel, part of the "Brainships" series, about a "shellperson" (a disembodied brain) named Simeon who runs a space station and must use his hobby of wargaming to defend it and refugees from brutal pirates. The story follows Simeon and his new, strong-willed human partner, Channa Hap, as they work together to save the station and its inhabitants from the invading Kolnari.

Not the greatest book, but the exploration of the psychological aspects of the characters in the middle section was pretty good. There is a weak attempt at fitting Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel with local space travel, but why do you need cold-sleep if you have FTL? Yeah, and when you start looking at tactics, you really need details on how this flavor of FTL works, and that is pretty much completely missing. Never mind, all the important characters and important action are going on on the space station.

Some items that caught my eye:

Page 164 paragraph 3 new-to-me word: sicatooth - "... and I want you to start pulling together those tasty goods we're going to use to tempt the ... sicatooth ." Google can't find it. I suspect it means something like a wolf-like attacker, a pirate, for instance.

Page 184 new-to-me word: antiphonally - in a manner characterized by the alternation of musical parts in a responsive manner between two groups of singers or musicians

Page 184 also a sex scene without using any sexual terms. Clever.

Page 202 paragraph 6 - a new-to-me term: stranger'n - contraction of 'stranger than' I expect.

Page 203 paragraph 9 - new-to-me word: chatelaine - the mistress of a household or of a large establishment

Page 234 "lost her rag" - all the good people say it means she has lost her temper, but I like this explanation I found on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Men have always dismissed women who have lost their temper as losing their rags meaning they were only in a bad mood/short tempered because of their period.

Page 237 paragraph 3 - Another unknown word: precocity - it is just the noun version of the adjective 'precocious' which means 'exceptionally early in development or occurrence'.

Page 249 paragraph 10 - In the last sentence we get some clever invented slang from Joat, a renegade girl, describing crawling around in the station's maintenance access tunnels:  "Some of the places pinch grudly but they're in-able if you're sveltsome."

Page 276 paragraph 2 - Hebrides Suite. Hmm, there is The Hebrides, a concert overture that was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830, but there is also Clare Grundman's Hebrides Suite (1962), a popular four-movement concert band work based on Scottish folk songs from the Hebrides Islands. 

Page 276 last paragraph - whipped Jersey - Jersey cow cream is so rich that you can thicken it with a few good shakes (as used on an Irish Coffee), and whip it in no time at all. - Foodie Pilgrim

Page 287 and Page 288 fragments of three poems

• Ode to Duty By William Wordsworth
• Ode on Solitude By Alexander Pope
• The Waste Places by James Stephens

Page 293 paragraph 8 - Carmina Burana could be a medieval collection of poetry or it might be the a cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff. Video. Includes O Fortuna. I suspect the cantata is the correct one here.

Page 313 top, fragment of a poem - The Quest by Rudyard Kipling

Space Guitar

Magnetically hovering guitar strings (sounds unreal)
Mattias Krantz

This is kind of nuts. Near as I can tell it has no benefits or advantages other than being kind of nuts. On the other hand, it is a good demonstration of just how powerful those magnets are. It was also very entertaining.

Resurrecting Old Tape Recordings

How a beef jerky machine saved a lost 1980s dance music classic from oblivion!
creativeplanets

That's the problem with all this new fangled technology, it can't stand the test of time.We should be carving our records in stone, the way the ancients did it, and we have their records, don't we?

Creative Planets has a video of the restored song. You have to go to YouTube to watch it as they have disabled embedding on other web sites. Twerps.

Kaohsiung Music Center

Kaohsiung Music Center

The Kaohsiung Music Center is on the Ciajhen harbor in southwest Taiwan. I got onto it from this photo from Aljazeera:

Taiwan lies near the junction of two tectonic plates and is prone to earthquakes [File: I-Hwa Cheng/AFP]

Taiwan

Wikipedia has a page about it.

Concerto for Excellence

Martinu: Thunderbolt P-47

Borepatch got me started with a music video of Bohuslav Martinů's Thunderbolt P-47. It's too early for classical music for me, but it piqued my curiosity. I looked around and found this on SheetMusicX:

Hans Kindler was one of the most brilliant and dedicated musicians of his generation. Born in Rotterdam in 1892 and trained at the city’s conservatory, Kindler emigrated to the United States in 1914 to become Principal Cellist of the Philadelphia Orchestra. After serving in that distinguished ensemble for six years, he followed a solo career until choosing in 1927 to devote himself to conducting; the following year he led the premiere of Stravinsky’s ballet Apollon Musagète in Washington, D.C. Realizing that the nation’s capital did not have an adequate permanent orchestra, four years later, at the height of the Great Depression, he founded the National Symphony Orchestra. The venture was a success, and Kindler became an influential advocate of contemporary composers during his seventeen years as the ensemble’s music director.

Early in 1945, when World War II was entering the final phase of its exhausting course, Kindler commissioned Bohuslav Martinů to write a work for the NSO. He could only offer $200 (of his own money) for the job, however, so a short, one-movement piece was agreed upon. Martinů chose to write a high-energy scherzo for Kindler and completed the score during the first two weeks of September (“lots of work for little money,” he grumbled to a friend). He titled the piece Thunderbolt P-47, a tribute to both the pilots of the U.S. Air Force and to Republic Aviation’s eponymous plane, America’s largest, heaviest, most expensive, most durable and most effective single-engine fighter-bomber of World War II. Martinů’s Thunderbolt P-47 follows the traditional tripartite form of the scherzo (A–B–A), though its style embodies a decidedly modern musical evocation of the speed and power of military aviation: the muscular outer sections are driven by strong, repetitive rhythms and full scoring, while the central episode is rather dance-like in mood and lighter in texture.

As you might expect SheetMusicX will sell you a paper copy of the score, all three pounds of it, for $600. Sheet music. Huh. Don't know when the last time I saw a piece of sheet music. Probably in high school. I vaguely remember we had a piano at home, and the bench seat was stuffed with sheet music. I think my mom aspired to play the piano, and she did play a bit, but I don't think she ever mastered it. I, at least, did learn to read sheet music, though I never learned to play an instrument. I learned the mechanics of playing, blow on the mouthpiece, move your fingers up and down, but it never sounded like music to me, and probably not to anyone else either.

Africans in Moscow

Spasskaya Tower Military Music Festival 2025: From Zimbabwean rhythms to Russian classics
RT

The announcer sounds just like any modern western, TV announcer. I mean, he doesn't even have a Russian accent. Kind of disappointing. Also kind of weird seeing Africans in Moscow.

The embed code doesn't specify width or height, so the video expands to fill the available space. Have to try that with YouTube videos.

From a story on RT.

Narco Ballad

Narco Ballad

The memory of a tune appeared in my mind recently. I can recall the tune, but only vaguely. I am sure that I would recognize it if I heard it again, but do you know how many tunes are out there floating around in the world? Zillions, that's how many.

The tune was a narco ballad that I used to listen to maybe 30 years ago. It doesn't sound anything like the narco ballads that seem to be common on YouTube. Shoot, it's been so long that I may not even remember it correctly and it's just a figment of my imagination. Very annoying.

A narcocorrido is a subgenre of the Regional Mexican corrido (narrative ballad) genre. - Wikipedia

Ice Ice

Ice Ice

Over the last couple of days while I've been flipping through YouTube Shorts, a bunch of videos playing Ice Ice Baby has been showing up. I don't know whether this some freak phenomena and the whole world is tuned into this tune, or there some event that triggered it, or whether YouTube just decided I needed to see all these. I thought it was a little odd, so I collected them into a playlist.

TDS on Display

TDS stands for Trump Derangement Syndrome. It seems to have infected a large portion of the population. People who are so afflicted are convinced that Donald Trump is the devil incarnate and everything he says or does is just more evidence that he is a bad, bad man.

I watched this video short of the Army Chorus performing at the White House. I was curious as to why the poster found this humiliating. It was hard for me to understand the lyrics, but after some rooting around I found them. It's the finale from the Broadway musical Les Miserables.

I looked in the comments to see what people were saying and they all seemed to be suffering from (or enjoying) their TDS.

I'm sorry, I don't see it. I see Trump as the liberator of the oppressed, downtrodden, deplorables from fly-over country. I thought about telling the poster that I disagreed, but you can't argue people out of their religious beliefs. I suspect the only thing that will change their minds will be when the 2 by 4 of reality hits them over the head. That 2 by 4 hasn't hit yet, but it's coming. I hope.

Do You Hear the People Sing?

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight
That will give you the right to be free

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes

Will you give all you can give
So that our banner may advance
Some will fall and some will live
Will you stand up and take your chance?
The blood of the martyrs
Will water the meadows of France

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again

When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes.

Meme Me

All stolen from Tamara.

I've heard of all the terms in the last image, but the connection between Ska and Checkers escaped me. Google knows:

The checkerboard pattern in ska music and fashion represents racial unity and a fight against segregation. The pattern was popularized in the late 1970s during the second wave of ska music, also known as the "two-tone" era. 

I remember Ska music being sort of popular once upon a time, but I didn't know any Ska tunes, so again I asked Google. This one struck me as 'authentic'.

Desmond Dekker & The Aces - 007 (Official Music Video)
Trojan Records Official

YouTube blurb:

In the summer of 1967, Desmond Dekker & the Aces’ rude boy anthem, ‘007’ became one of the first Jamaican-produced recordings to breach the UK’s national Pop Singles charts; its unexpected international success prompting an urgent need for material to promote the 7” single.

 

Consequently, Graeme Goodall, MD of Doctor Bird Records, the company behind its British release, hastily secured the services of respected Jamaican director, Perry Henzell, who wasted little time in filming the group live on stage and in the streets of island’s capital before editing the resultant footage and rushing it to the UK, where on the evening on 3 August, it was aired it on the BBC’s hugely popular ‘Top Of The Pops’ TV show.

 

Notable for being one of the earliest promotional music films ever to be created in Jamaica specifically for a global audience, it now not only provides a truly fascinating glimpse of Desmond & the Aces in action, but also of Kingston street life back in the mid-Sixties.

Here's a couple of tunes that I know that are supposedly Ska, but I never would have thought so:

• Take On Me by Reel Big Fish
• The Impression That I Get by The Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Nosferatu

NOSFERATU - Official Trailer [HD] - Only In Theaters December 25
Focus Features

This afternoon the family made our annual pilgrimage to the movie theater. We went to see the latest Nosferatu. Creepy, creepy, creepy, but that's about all I can say for it. My mind was not engaged by any of the characters. The leading lady is either possessed or hysterical, and leading man doesn't do anything, rather things happen to him. He seems a bit out of his depth. Large numbers of rats are present in some scenes, and the plague plays a prominent role, and I'm wondering why nobody is killing the rats, but then I checked. The story is set in 1838 and the connection between rats, fleas and the plague wasn't established until 1898, so the movie gets a pass.

Nosferatu The Vampyre (1979) - Trailer
BFITrailers

I saw Werner Herzog's version of this story back in 1979. That one I was impressed with, though I can't tell you why. I just remember thinking it was a great film.

Dean Lemire - Hollywood Theatre
macvoxman

A few weeks ago St. John went to see the original silent version from 1922 at the Hollywood theater, where the sound was provided by the pipe organ that was concealed behind the screen. I've been to the Hollywood a few times and I never realized there was a pipe organ there.

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour show, Vancouver, CA, Dec 7, 2024 - Carolyn Porco

One more seismic event that I don't understand. Carolyn Porco (she led the imaging team of NASA's Cassini mission) went to a Taylor Swift concert and then wrote about her experience. I''ve heard a couple of Taylor's songs, but they made no impression on me. I don't even remember what they were, so all this blather about Taylor Swift makes no sense to me. Anyway, evidently Taylor's concert tour was exceptional in every way. Here are some numbers I pulled from the middle of Carolyn's piece.

• Swift performed 149 shows in 51 cities across 21 countries on 5 continents between March 2023 and December 2024.
• By its completion in Vancouver, Canada, on December 8, 2024 (the day after the concert I attended), the Eras Tour had sold a total of $2,077,618,725 in tickets to 10,168,008 people, breaking the previous record by a wide margin. And those numbers do not include a secondary market of ticket sellers, sales of merchandise ($200M in 2023 alone), earnings of $262M from the highest-grossing concert film of all time, and more. No other concert tour has come close.

Automatic Drumstick

LOST MY JOB PLAYING THIS
El Estepario Siberiano

I don't understand how he manages to keep that drumstick rocking in place. It's just nuts.

Tone Matters?

Making an old piano sound new
The Piano Doctor

I am going to assume this guy believes what he is saying. I'm sorry, I can't hear any difference between old and new. Okay, I might be able to hear a slight difference, but not enough for me to say one is better than the other. It might be because I am old, or because my loudspeaker is weak, but I suspect my brain is not as sensitive to sound as some other people.

I was talking to a guy I know about tunes and he tells me he doesn't really care for instrumental music, he prefers singing. That shocked me. I never understood the popularity of opera. I find opera tedious in the extreme. Singing by itself is not my favorite. I like a tune with music, singing and lyrics that are clear. Lyrics don't have to be totally clear, nonsense is sometimes okay, and there are any number of tunes out there I have zero affection for. Rock and roll and jazz are more my cup of tea.

More Joy

Love Will Tear Us Apart - Joy Division
That One Sound

'Joy Division eh? What's all that about?'

'The name of a brothel German soldiers used during the second world war'. 

WHAT!?! Umm, yeah, Wikipedia knows:

In World War II, Nazi Germany established brothels in the concentration camps (Lagerbordell or Freudenabteilungen "Joy Divisions") to increase productivity among inmates. Their use was restricted to the more privileged Aryan prisoners, primarily the Kapos, or "prisoner functionaries", and the criminal element. Jewish inmates were prohibited from using the brothels according to rules against racial mixing. In the end, the camp brothels did not produce any noticeable increase in the prisoners' productivity levels but, instead, created a market for coupons among the more privileged camp prisoners.

The women forced into these brothels came mainly from the women-only Ravensbrück concentration camp, except for Auschwitz, which used its own prisoners. In combination with the German military brothels in World War II, it is estimated that at least 34,140 female inmates were forced into sexual slavery during the Third Reich.

Ka-tzetnik 135633 wrote a book (House of Dolls) about it.

******

Then I found this post about Joy Plots:

Let’s talk about plots and joy. The Joy of Plots, if you will. Also, Joy Plots.
Henrik Lindberg coined the term Joy Plot on the weekend , and it’s quite clever. Not only does it describe a plot of things people enjoy, it’s also a nice reference to that Joy Division album cover everybody knows even if they’ve never heard the actual music.

Previous Joy Division post.

Tubular Bells

Came across a couple of people playing with sound in tubes today.

Innovative Thinking
The_Curiousguy

COPPER PIPE MADE INTO A STUDIO DELAY THAT RUNS AT THE SPEED OF SOUND
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER

Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm

The electronic looking box in the video is a Roland CR-78 CompuRhythm, the first actual drum machine from 1978. Used ones are still available.

Since we are looking at electronic black boxes, here's a couple of shots of a strange looking box from the Nexflix series Kleo.

Black box with blinking lights hanging on the wall in Uwe's garage in Kleo season 1 episode 4 just after the 30 minute mark and the 50 minute mark.

It plays no role in the story, it just hangs on the wall, blinking its lights. I have not been able to identify it and I even asked reddit but I have not received any response. Let me know if you recognize it. The show is set in East Berlin in 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down.

Here's the original tune, in case you have forgotten, or maybe you never heard it. I mean it came out in 1973, so for pop music, it's old.

Mike Oldfield - Tubular bells
4esno4ok

Bongo Bong

The Big Push - Bongo Bong (Manu Chao cover)
The Big Push

I've been watching YouTube Shorts and some of them are pretty good. Then I figured out you could save them to a playlist (for the second or third or nth time), so then I started looking over my YouTube playlists and I've got a bunch of them. There's one for each year of music videos that I posted here, and there's also a bunch of other lists that I have accumulated over the years. Some of them are probably from the days before there was YouTube Music, or maybe they've always been there but I didn't figure it out.

Anyway, I'm poking around in these lists, trying to make sense of what I've got and I come across this video. I had it classified as oddball. I'm not particularly keen on the tune, but just watching these three guys work together, and thinking about how much time and talent has gone into making them skilled enough to produce this is, to me, just mind boggling. I dunno, I have zero musical talent but maybe for them it's as easy as falling off a log.

Anyway, the thing that hit me was the cutaway guitar. Guitars have their classical shape because that's what produces the guitar sound, or so math and physics tells me. But he's playing this cutaway, and it's basically a guitar with a big dent in it, and that's gotta change the sound, right? I mean, theoretically speaking. If I sat down with a guitar player with two acoustic guitars, one classical and one cut-away, and we played with them for an hour, I might learn to distinguish the difference in sound that these two make. But I ain't gonna do that, am I? I don't really care about, about what? I dunno even know what I don't care about. All I know is whether I like the tune or not. You spend all the time you like, use whatever instruments you like, perverted or not, and play the tune and either I'll like it or I won't. Hell of a way to make a living, eh?

Happy Hour

Lively discussion at happy hour last night. I made notes because I am looking for some science fiction to read and we're looking for concerts to attend this summer.

Science Fiction Books

• The Coincidence Makers - Yoav Blum 
• Jennifer Government - Max Berry

Science Fiction Authors

• Randolf Monroe - XKCD, NASA
• Daniel Suarez
• Blake Crouch
• Justin Cronin

Tunes

• Dermot Kennedy - Giants
• Bodine
• Rodrigo y Gabriella
• Ryan Sheridan
• Violent Femmes
• Which version of 'I Shot the Sheriff' is better? Bob Marley's version or Eric Clapton's?
• Icicle Works
• Yes
• Jethro Tull - Ian Anderson
• John Anderson 
• America - Warm Springs Oregon July 27th