Tag: music

  • Partytime — The Jazz Butcher

    My tastes in music run fairly eclectic. It’s quicker to say what I don’t usually care for than to list off the things I do care for. Fewer caveats that way.

    So I was sad to be belatedly notified that Pat Fish died a few years ago in an off-hand manner by a DJ on a radio program dedicated to “alternative before there was alternative”, but mostly plays music that got decent airplay and the acts/songs were not all that “alternative” or edgy when you get down to it (Ramones, Tommy Two Tone, “Love Will Tear Us Apart”, etc.).

    Apparently, it was worth mentioning because it is around the anniversary of Pat Fish’s passing. Not that absolutely anyone aside from myself who was listening (and only listening to it because of the occasional “oh wow” moments while driving) would know who the hell The Jazz Butcher was.

    I played Pat/Jazz Butcher a bit when I worked at a second-hand record store “back in the day” (which is a fancy way of saying that I would rather not mention just how far back that day was) — their records never seemed to sell and I should have bought them myself, but why do that when I could listen to it while working and afford to upgrade my meals to PBJ sandwiches instead of ramen for my decision.

    Always a bit tongue in cheek, Jazz Butcher were a fun act to listen to.

    In case you haven’t run into them before (and I’d honestly be surprised if most of you have) and want a gander, here’s a good specimen for your ears (but not your eyes). It might surprise some of you, as Jazz Butcher is fairly tame and most of you are used to my exotic listens being shared.

    As always, leave some comments if you have them.

    [...T]his is partytime
    And you've got to say its better than a war

    This is partytime
    And its better than a cold bath with someone you dislike

    This is partytime
    And its good to drink for free when you haven't any money

    This is partytime
    Oh, she might just possibly take me home

  • Kids playing music

    I’m not quite sure why I decided to give Phoebe Bridgers a whirl yesterday on recommendation by The Guardian. I am not her target audience, so maybe it was was the description of her sound as “folk” that caught my attention.

    Whatever the reason, I ended up watching the official video for her new single and thought, “Huh, not bad.” It reminded me of the late 90s Lilith Faire sounds that were making the rounds on the somewhat progressive radio stations of the time. A nice change of pace from what I’ve been mostly hearing for the two decades or so. I always appreciate a retro feel (good gods, I’m now retro!). A little slicker than I usually like, but most things are slicker in the digital age than I usually prefer. The conceptual official video was also a nice change of pace from the plotless stage (or inside of cheese-grater) videos that most folks do these days.

    Anyway, I was feeling like a potato and doing potato kinds of things, I started watching YouTube videos on the big television. And, because it is YouTube and I watched on video of Phoebe Bridgers, I obviously wanted to watch more of the same.

    A live video came up of a live show performance and I thought I’d see how she sounded live. It’s a potato thing to do when one is potatoing.

    I was expecting live — I was not expecting kids to be her supporting band.

    Kids.

    Like 10-12 year old kids.

    And they knocked that shit out of the park and into the next county.

    I mean, that 10-year-old drummer is banging on those skins like a champ. I absolutely love her energy.

    Give it a whirl. Turn off the sound if the music doesn’t appeal and just be impressed with the ear-to-ear smiles of kids performing live as if they are having the time of their lives. If you really don’t care for it, jump to the end when Jimmy is shaking everyone’s hands. That’s worth a ton right there.

    What a joy to watch kids just being kids and being awesome!

    But I’m weird that way. I’m mostly potato.

  • Hardware

    I recently decided to take the plunge and get a hardware synth to stop my dallying and futzing around with software emulation of synths.

    For several years now, I’ve intended to lean less on pre-loaded patches and work on an understanding towards how a patch is created from the basic soundwave (sine, saw, square, pulse, etc.) and massaged into the sounds you hear in music — whether it is someone like Depeche Mode or cinema’s Vangelis.

    I have played with the software synths on my digital audio workbench (DAW), and purchased a few other software variants in an attempt to find something that “clicks” with this wee walnut I store where most folks store a brain.

    Not a one clicked.

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  • Gimme Some Truth (cover) | The Wonder Stuff

    “I’m not a Beatles fan, but I am a John Lennon fan.”

    I'm sick to death of seeing things
    From tight-lipped, condescending,
    mama's little chauvinists
    All I want is the truth
    Just give me some truth, now

    I've had enough of watching scenes
    With schizophrenic, egocentric,
    paranoiac, prima-donnas
    All I want is the truth, now
    Just gimme me some truth

    No short-haired, yellow-bellied,
    son of Tricky Dicky
    Is going to Mother Hubbard soft soap me
    With just a pocketful of hope
    Money for dope
    Money for rope

    Amazing, isn’t it, how topical this song is 50 years later?

    Stuffies doing their cover of the Lennon song.

    That song was always a blast to busk in downtown Minneapolis around 1989.

    Did I mention I occasionally did “air guitar performances” while singing (sic) with an empty guitar case? I took great efforts to carefully put the “guitar” back into the case when I was done with my performance.

    Okay, singing was probably a bit strong of a word to use here. You get the idear tho’, right?

  • Voyager | PJ Harvey

    New music by Miss Polly Jean was released yesterday. Different than her “usual”, which just means different.

    last note, last sign
    Neptune, Triton
    fading signal
    choose light...choose love

    Voyager, look back
    at a pale-blue dot
    all we don't know
    a flake of snow

  • Darkwave songlet

    I recently upgraded my DAW and have been meaning to play around with it AND get more familiar with synth soundcrafting rather than using the synth presets.

    Some of this is crafted sound, some of it is presets, about half-and-half.

    I’m just playing around, not sure if this will end up as something.

    Detail free description: I was looking for a mid-speed darkwave sound that was upbeat enough to dance to with an emulated classic Roland 808 drum machine sound (although I may modify it).

    Slightly more detail: The arp and one layer of the pads are crafted sounds and the original bass sound was as well, but I wanted something punchier and livelier than what I was getting, so I went with a preset and tweaked it. The guitar is a great preset I live for guitar, so I did almost nothing with it. 134 bpm, for the curious.

    This is two sections, repeated. If I were to flesh this out, I would add some bridges and empty space between. But this is something just cobbled together in about two or three hours and, while it was interesting to play around, I’m not sure how much mileage I can pull from it (it would need lyrics, singing and full engineering work to make it sound better). We’ll see. I can already hear the arp levels were lower than I intended. And there is zero panning.

    Anyway, another one of my songs in less that two minutes thingies. This one clocks in currently at around 65 seconds, so you’ll only have around that much of your time to demand back from the timelords.

  • Towards the Within — Citizen I.C.E., Dropkick Murphys

    Too scared to join the military
    Too dumb to be a cop
    Citizen I.C.E.

    This is an old song of theirs, formerly called “Citizen C.I.A”, and lyrically reworked to reflect current events. The rest of the lyrics are in-video.

    I have to admit, I should probably listen to more Dropkick Murphys than I do, and that will probably change in the coming weeks. Every time I encounter news about the band, I see them in an increasingly positive light. I don’t have to like every song a band writes to know them to be stand-up folks that deserve my support.

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  • songlets — may faire

    It was a bit of a surprise when an old song I had written way back when the dinosaurs still roamed the earth came into my head yesterday and wouldn’t get out. Much to my amazement, when I pulled out the guitar, the chord progression and rough playing style came back to me almost instantly.

    For a bit of perspective, the song, “May Faire” has never been performed. So, it’s not like I spent uncountable hours rehearsing the song. I may have toyed around with it whenever I could not come up with something new for a few years, but it was not on the forefront of my thinking.

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  • half-penny thoughts — 05jan26

    I’m probably overlooking quite a few artists, but it sure seems like the vast majority of them these days are very serious about their music.

    That’s not to say that I didn’t listen to and work with musicians in the past who were very serious about their music, but it seemed there were more folks in earlier eras who were a lot less serious about it. Or, they were serious musician who leaned into satire instead of saying things like, “We are artistes, not baboons. Go away and baboon elsewhere.”

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  • Towards the Within — Vicious Thorn, Rose Chronicles

    It’s been a spell since I added a song to the series of posts that was originally intended to look backwards to look forwards for music discovery.

    I was disappointed with the discovery process, which either sent me to bands I already knew full well or directed me to bands that sounded nothing at all like my “seed” music.

    Rose Chronicles, copyright status unknown

    After yesterday’s post quoting an opinion piece writer who has essentially declared that we have settled for the enshittification of our culture via the monetization of everything artistic thanks to the internet, I was left thinking about the last time I really enjoyed most of the music I was discovering. I can safely say that started to wane at some point near the end of the 90s.

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