RichRock : Running Free

I’ll say I’m a dance music fan. I grew up listening to early 70’s electronic music like Edgar Froese, Tangerine Dream, Didier Bocquet, Vangelis and Jean-Michel Jarre. Then I found out about electro - I was fascinated by the concept that electronically generated music could become popular. It did. The rise of house in the late 80’s, with acid house, then moving into the 90’s with techno, then I got into ambient music around 94-95, never looked back. In fact, I have an ambient mix online for download here. I listened to all sorts, catching the wave of early pioneers of IDM like Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, any of the Warp Records posse. I never once professed to liking pop/rock music, although some bands held my attention, like Jansen, Barbieri & Karn (they of Japan fame), Bjork, Kubb, and even Fiona Apple!

Then I experienced Pete Namlook aka Peter Kuhlmann. A one-man record label, producer and produced more albums in one year than most people would in a lifetime. This guy did more for my musical interests than any other. He was a father figure to my view of ambient and electronic music, as he pushed the boundaries, exploring old school Berlin electronics, new wave ambient sounds, dance rhythms, and world music. It was a little hard to get his music though, but that was to change again.

I found the internet. Full of useful information, I trawled resources about creating music. When broadband arrived it brought two important things.

1 - The Creative Commons Licence. Without this, there is no legal way to redistribute music. This license comes in a variety of flavours, and it interested me, as I always stated on my own productions that the music could be copied, as long as my name remained as the creator of that music. I have a personal affinity with the CC license.

2 - The rise of the Netlabels. Netlabels are just that. They release music on the internet, for people to download, using the aforementioned Creative Commons license. My favourite netlabels are listed below :

• Sutemos - a Lithuanian netlabel dedicated to electronica in a variety of forms from, you guessed it - Lithuania. The site is available in english too.
• Laverna - An italian netlabel catering for electronica, with a leaning towards IDM. Pretty good, but not exceptional. Materaelectronics, Transient and D.a.f. are my favourite artists.
• Monohm - a netlabel from Vienna, mainly outputting material from Markus Brosel, who does some excellent ambient piano pieces, but also providing releases from other artists. They even have collaborations with mainstream artists like Vidna Obmana, Asmus Tietchens and Kraftwerk.
• Spheric Lounge - not a netlabel, but an improvisational/gathering/outlet for experimental electronic musings. The gist is this: Musicians gather at a location for a weekend or however long, create ambient noodlings over the weekend, then they are masterered and released on the website. Forthcoming gatherings are posted on the site too. Music varies from the sublime to the ‘why???’, but it’s a dropping in point for me every now and then.

So there you go. An update on my musical voyage. It’s going to continue for a while, what with Christian worship music and hiphop, plus the odd foray into classical tunes. A work in progress.

And look, I got through the whole post without mentioning Sigur Ros!

I’ve been listening to the rather interesting remix album of Unkle’s ‘Never Never Land’ (4CD ltd ed) (courtesy of my parents )

And even though I’ve heard it many times before, I thought I’d post up the lyrics I found interesting…

1st track - ‘In A State’ -

My mind is in a state
”cause all I seem to do is tempt my fate
Well I try a real space
But all the while, I’m crashing at the gate
This time…
This time…
Reality struck me between the eyes

My mind is in a state
”cause everything I’m missing comes too late
So I try and disappear
But there is only one way out of here
This time…
This time…

My mind is in a state
But all I need to do is change my pace
And I know there’s fear to face
But happiness is found in its embrace
This time…
This time…

And the 2nd track - ‘Reign’

I am the lightning, i am the heat
I am the reign, reign oh, reign oh, reign all day
I am the reign
I’m gonna reign this way again
I am the reign

I am the spy
Before the blade
I am the raindrop out at sea I cause
The ripples that becoming crashing waves
I am the reign, reign oh, reign oh, reign all day
I am the reign

You thought a different day had come
A day you thought the earth was done
And if you could have said it all
I know you would have said it all
You thought a different day had come
A day you thought the earth was done
And if you could have said it all
I know you would have said it all

I am the reign
I’m gonna reign this way again
I am the reign, reign oh, reign oh, reign all day

You thought a different day had come
A day you thought the earth was done
I am the reign
And if you could have said it all
I know you would have said it all
I am the reign

Reign sung by one of my favourite male vocalists, Ian Brown.

There’s an excellent remix by RJD2 of Reign, and DFA do an awesome remix of ‘In A State’, which has to be one of the best build-up tracks of all time…. In A State has a remix by Moby which has a sample at the start which although I cannot recognise, would love to know the source, because it sounds like a surf film, and because ‘theres the God they taught me about at school, and theres the God thats, ‘hidden’.’ Might do a plugin to create favourite tracks of all time…

Sigur Ros. I love this band. I’m not really one for ‘band’ music, nor even pop/rock generally, but this Icelandic folk/rock quartet certainly know how to make a four-piece sound, well, ‘interesting’.

Know my propensity for obscure, found sound music, ambient noodling, etc, these guys provide it in spades, all from pure natural organic sources. So I was really chuffed to have been given the 2-disc standard edition of ‘Heima’.

Heima means Home in Icelandic, and is an interesting variation on a music DVD. Firstly, although this is about a series of free concerts at the end of a world tour, the primary film is a documentary about how it came about, with clips of performances from the shows. The second disc shows the performances in more detail.

Having only really watched the film Heima, I can’t fully comment on this. However, Heima as a documentary is beautifully shot, with fantastic sound, an excellent structure charting Sigur Ros’ free concerts in Iceland, how they felt, what it meant to both them as a band and the people they played for. One outstanding moment is when they revisit a disused fishing factory, where a lot of film footage was shown of it’s heyday. The fact that so many people travelled to this remote, abandoned building, and the comment, ‘It was good to return life to this place, if only for one night’ makes it seem so poignant.

Sigur Ros are not a performance band. In fact they are the complete opposite. This makes them suited to a variety of venues, such as the aforementioned factory, a tea room, at a reservoir protest, a schoolroom, and many more, leading up to the more traditional stages commonly associated with events like Glastonbury.

It’s not often that music moves me, but this music, combined with the scenes of God’s natural beauty, moved me to tears. This is a superb DVD, and I’m slightly gutted yet relieved that I didn’t get the special edition, although it might be worth adding to the Sigur Ros collection I have. Now, anyone got a spare copy of Von they want to sell off?

For those into the deeper sounds of ambience, I have uploaded my old Drone Mix. Available from the Audio page, this is a compiled mix mostly of drones from the Drone Download Project.
Free to download and listen to. The run time is 1:05:24, so it can be put on a CDR. I compiled and layered this a couple of years ago, and my favourite track is at the end, the last 7′ or so.

To relax in the evenings (when I get the chance) I like nothing better to listen to a few tunes from Emusic - I recently purchased (I subscribe - it’s a technicality) Tiesto’s ‘Parade Of The Athletes’ which is an awesome tune selection. Also obtained an excellent album called ‘Exploring The Tributaries’ by Vibrasphere. A fine mixture of ambient and trance which is at moments beautiful, other moments have you wishing you were on a dancefloor. A great album I’ve played pretty much solid since yesterday. Also, they have another album called ‘Archipelago’ which is probably more in the ambient vein, but these are two great albums worth a download from emusic.com.

I’m currently in the process of completing a site for another client, can’t really give details, but the deadline is tight. So that’s eaten a lot of personal time too. Again. Still it gets money into the business, and keeps me in a job.

My girlfriend’s gone through some troubles recently, requiring a hospital visit or two. It’s a delicate situation, and although we are looking at a drastic resolution to matters, we are also expectant of a God who heals. I myself am a testimony to this, as I was diagnosed with an infection in the ears which would have now left me deaf nearly 6 years ago. The fact I love music and can still listen to it is testimony enough to that same God. So, in one mind we are praying that God will heal, but if He decides not, then that is also a realistic viewpoint. I think that people can become misguided when prayers are offered for healing and none is received. I sincerely wished for healing during my severe headache phase (I used to get severe cluster headaches), and none was forthcoming. Was this a problem? No. Did it mean God doesn’t exist or that He didn’t care? No. To the contrary, God does care, and He did pull me through. Without healing the illness, but then if it was that easy, everyone would jump on the bandwagon.
God has plans and purposes beyond our reckoning. That much we know. I know this: God has me here, enduring my trials, enjoying life, and still feeling that this is the right place and right time for me.

Sorry about that, just a little rant about stuff. Anyway, I’ll post again soon.

BTW - All that about changing to Joomla. Not yet. Still working on it. However, Wordpress works fine for me. It also has a relatively small webserver footprint too.

Well, finally, the weekend is here. I’m sitting here in front of my PC, listening to some mixes by Jonah and Gabriel, you can check em out at http://stickybeatz.com/wordpress/ for the awesome funky/tech/house mixes they post online. My favourite at the moment is Stickybeatz Volume four, about 37 minutes in. There’s an awesome tune that still gives me goosepimples!
Anyway, the babe came over tonight, we watched some Simpsons, had dinner together, and just talked about a few things I’m not going to type here. That was cool, great even. Got to go and photograph some hedgehogs tomorrow afternoon, but before that, my favourite weekend activity (church excepted) - Mountain Biking!! There should be a group of us, so that will be good. It’ll be good for me if this blooming headache goes away!
The nervous thing is that I’m meeting the girlfriend’s parents this weekend. That could be interesting, and we’ll see what happens. My parents seem to have taken to my babe, and they ask after her, how she’s doing. They’ll probably get her something for her birthday no doubt. It’s something of an occasion for me to have a girlfriend, so I’m sure they’ll do something. No worries if they don’t, but that’s my personal hunch. If my parents are reading this, don’t stress about that last part!!
Today in work was cool, just trying to figure out some custom code to do dynamic dropdown searches on specific table entries in MySQL. What do you mean that’s easy? Try that with someone who’s had to do a ‘Teach Yourself PHP in 24Hours!” in order to figure this out. One day I’m sure I’ll be figured out for a sham. I’m not a trained Web Developer, but I’ve self-taught myself what I needed to know. It’ll be interesting meeting one of our clients soon - he’s a Linux user! Hurrah! My first real contact with another human who uses Linux. Although he was surprised that I use it for a desktop environment - he asked me if I did everything on the command line!! I said I do a fair bit there, but also a fair proportion graphically. That’s the beauty of Linux, especially Ubuntu - you can choose to do things the graphical way, or dive into the machine and command line it all the way.
Anyway, my beer’s finished, and I’m going to bed.