Everybody Needs A Hobby

Blade Runner Soundtrack

Back on May 18 I wrote:

Been spending some time with Blade Runner soundtracks this weekend.  Some really good sonics there too, which I was never able to hear before.

The soundtrack has a troubled history.  It was not released in 1982, for reasons that have never really been fully explained.  Some licensing disagreement between Warner Brothers (who own the movie) and Polydor (who own Vangelis).  Instead we got an awful Muzaky orchestral version.

Vangelis was not able to release his score until 1994 (twelve years later), and it does not include all the music.  In 2007 a 3-CD "25th Anniversary Edition" was released, with the 1994 disc, a disc of outtakes, and a disc of new (inferior) music "inspired by Blade Runner."  In the meantime several bootlegs had appeared, some containing music from the film (apparently dubbed from the DVD) that had never been officially released. To top it off, a Hollywood soundtrack guy named Edgar Rothermich released two albums of "The Music of Blade Runner by Vangelis" but if you listen closely -- VERY CLOSELY -- these are his re-recordings, using the exact same synthesizer voices and arrangements as Vangelis but not quite as well-done.  On these albums he includes a couple of the "missing" tracks that are otherwise unavailable.

What a mess.

So anyway, I made myself a CD-R of the best of the outtakes/unreleased stuff to supplant my 1994 soundtrack disc.

The opening of the movie shows Deckard's spinner flying across L.A. while plumes of natural gas explode underneath him.  On my TV with my subwoofer this has always been a visceral scene, the explosions rattling the floor most sincerely.

Alas, the official soundtrack album does not include this music, and the music that IS included is not in chronological order.  There are a couple of non-Vangelis tracks included which I could do without.

So today I endeavored to make the "ultimate Bladerunner Soundtrack," taking the opening theme and some incidental music from the outtakes albums, mixing in the best of the official album, and the one long excellent track (11:01) from the Rothermich albums that really fits in.  Put everything in mostly-chronological order and adjusted the heads and tails so the tracks flow together.

And you know what?  Those natural gas explosions really rock the music room floor too.

6 trillion 635 billion 520 million bytes.

That's what I estimate my current music collection holds.

82 years 2-1/2 months.

That's how long it would take to listen to everything.

149 years 8 months.

That's how old I'll be if I start today.

Last week I added a four-foot top shelf to my A-to-B CD shelf, which is THE LAST opportunity I have for shelving space growth.  I'm maxed out now, at 300 feet total shelf space, about 9,000 CDs.

I really need to curb my "new music addiction."  I couldn't even begin to listen to what I have anymore.  I really shouldn't need to own a copy of everything I take a liking to. Even IF I can download it for free (or close to).

It's been a hobby for about sixty years, but now it's time to retrench.

Oh, who the fuck do I think I'm fooling?  Making CDs is my hobby.  I can't quit.  

It doesn't hurt anybody.  So WHAT if I don't have room.  So WHAT if I can't listen to everything anymore.  It makes me happy.

As you know (if you've been paying attention) I collect binaural recordings, which are startling on headphones (if properly done).  They give you a palpable sense of "being there" unlike any other technology.

Unfortunately there are a lot of "fake binaural" recordings out there.  There are a lot of "binaural beats" recordings which have nothing to do with binaurality, as far as I can tell. There are some 1930s-1940s monaural piano recordings which somebody has played through a speaker in a studio and captured the result with binaural microphones.  That's not binaural either.

The interest in binaural recording peaked a couple decades ago, and only about 6 or 7 albums were ever recorded in true binaural.  Some of them are just plain awful music (needed a gimmick).  A couple more are live albums that were recorded (from the audience) with binaural mics and that's not really binaural either because all the instruments are 40 feet away up on stage.  There are two synthesizer records which don't give any binaural image on headphones because they HAVE no natural imaging.

So I'm always disappointed when I search for new postings of binaural recordings online.

Last night though I discovered somebody had posted the 21 tracks from the 1988 Stax Binaural Demonstration Disc.  I've always wondered about it, but it goes for close to $200 online which was way beyond my curiosity level.  But for free on YouTube?  You bet.

It's an odd production.  The are short instrumental selections -- a wind quintet, a piano, an orchestra, an African singing group, an opera singer, a pipe organ -- which are true binaural but not terribly impressive.   There are two introductory tracks -- one recorded in a studio, and one outdoors -- demonstrating the binaural effect but they're in GERMAN.  They're impressively binaural, but rather silly, with a lot of walking around and talking and closing of doors.  And I have no idea what they're saying.

So I was listening to a couple Joe Sample recordings this a.m., including a Japanese piano trio set ("The Three") that is often touted as a wonderful recording.

It's pretty good for its time (1976) but by today's standards it's weak.  That set me to wonderin':

Bass, drums and piano are a wonderful combination for showing off a stereo's capabilities.  You got your highs, you got your lows, you got your dynamic range.  You've got your imaging.

ARE there any wonderful modern piano trio recordings?

I could think of a few in my collection: Jacques Loussier.  Bruford/Borstlap.  E.S.T.  Ray Brown Trio.

Decided to Google the idea.
https://www.jazzwise.com/features/article/ten-life-changing-jazz-piano-trio-recordings

Of this list I already had all but four.  Decided to download and burn three of the four (the Phronesis set didn't do much for me.)

The Michael Wollny set suffers from poor studio monitoring.  Like another record often mentioned as a stereo showcase, Patricia Barber's "Nightclub," the sound system in the studio did not reproduce the full frequency spectrum -- causing the engineer to BOOST the 30Hz signal to compensate.  On a system flat to 15Hz this results in an unpleasant flabby rumble in the bass.

The 1998 Mehldau is pretty good, but the recording of the drums is just okay.  They don't sound "live," but instead distant and obviously recorded in an iso booth (and mixed way too low).  The  bass has no "string sound" so it was probably recorded with a contact mic inside the body.  Pretty conventional recording for the end of the century, IOW.

So, "life-changing"?  No, sir.

For some reason this afternoon I remembered an old (1971) two-fer compilation album of Steve Winwood.  It features 21 songs written by, and sung by him, in bands he used to belong to: The Spencer Davis Group, Eric Clapton & The Powerhouse, Traffic, Blind Faith.  I used to have the LP.  It has apparently been released on CD (in 2007 in Japan only), but I've never seen it.


Turned out to be simple to recreate.  I had all but the SDG tracks, which were available free on YouTube.

The cover reminded me of another two-fer compilation on United Artists put out about the same time (which I recently recreated):


I wonder if they did a whole series of these?  Those are the only two I've ever seen.

NoCoPilot wrote:

There are, apparently, very few (if any?) compositions that use actual birdsong as the musical motif.

So yesterday I ran across a Wikipedia article called "Zoomusicology" all about academic studies of animal calls as music. Of which there are, basically, none -- because animals use calls to attract mates or defend territory. There is no evidence any animal besides man creates "music," not even the elaborate songs of the humpback whale which appear to be some kind of oral history of their species.

I decided to edit the wiki page to add a few other examples / variations, like the Thai Elephant Orchestra (created by humans but played entirely at the elephants whim) and link to some classical music that used either recordings of animals or imitated animals with the instruments.

At the end of the (very poorly written) article the author mentioned somebody named "AJ Mithra" who was described as an Indian ethnomusicologist who used bird and frog sounds to compose his own music. I'd never heard of him -- and I've been following this field for decades.

He has no albums out. He has no website. I did find about an hour's worth of YouTube videos (with hideously amateurish visuals) and 31 short (0:30 to 2:00 or so) musical numbers, in which he plays bird calls (looped and spliced) over his instrumental backing of Indian percussion and keyboards. Not revolutionary by any means, not even very listenable, but a new example of human-animal musical interaction for my collection.

Alas, I found an article on him in India Times which turned out to be an obituary. He died in February 2014, aged only 54.

NoCoPilot wrote:

82 years 2-1/2 months.

That's how long it would take to listen to everything.

I'm maxed out now, at 300 feet total shelf space, about 9,000 CDs.

Not quite sure what kind of math I was doing here, but I was WILDLY off.

If you figure CDs are an average of 60 minutes apiece, then 9,000 of them would be just over a year of listening.

Apologies fo getting carried away with myself.  I do that, more often than I care to admit.

Track Markers

In looking up various "ideal listening rooms" on the internet, I started reading the description from 6moons, the room I liked the best, of how / why it was set up the way it was.  During the course of the article they listed several CDs they used for evaluation, most of which I had.  A few I didn't.

Always on the lookout for new show-off music, I tracked down the ones I didn't have.

One was by bassist Rob Wasserman, who plays an electrified hybrid (upright acoustic/electronic) bass.  I used to have all his albums, but was surprised to find I didn't anymore.  Must've gotten rid of them at some point, but I can't remember why.  I was also surprised to read that he'd died in 2016.  I had no idea.

Anyway I downloaded (for $0.80 each) his "Solo" and "Duets" albums and gave them a careful listen.  They're okay.  Nothing special.  The music didn't really grab me.  Glad I only spent $1.60 on them.

But that reminded me of Edgar Meyer, another acoustic bassist (who uses a lot of bow).  I have several CDs of his already, but thought I should check to see what's new that I didn't have.  Turns out he's done two albums with mandolinist Chris Thile, mostly duets with just the two of them.  Big differences in dynamics and tone between a mandolin and a bass played arco, which makes for a very interesting sound palette.  And the recordings are astonishingly good -- no artificial hump at 30Hz and plenty of "string sound" from being miked near the strings (unlike the Brad Mehldau recording mentioned above).  Even during the bowed passages, you can hear the horsehair bow being pulled across and activating the thick bass strings.  Delightful.

There were two 45-minute albums with Chris Thile, and one 38' one with David Grisman, another mandolinist.  So I took the best of these three albums and burned one 80-min CD-R I titled "Bass & Mandolin," which conveniently happened to be the title of the 2nd album with Thile so I had a ready-made cover.

But here's the thing, and the belated reason for posting about all this. The Grisman CD has incorrect track markers.  Every song starts 3-seconds into it, and includes the first 3-seconds of the track that follows it.  Never, ever seen that before.  Weird.

I had to do some cutting-and-splicing to get my compilation CD to play correctly.

Generally I don't care for choral music, the words get in the way of my reading.  But a couple days ago I was listening to something, I forget what, that had a boys choir in it, and I thought gee that's an awful nice sound.

I looked online for any recordings by the Vienna Boys Choir, the only one I knew about.  The only download I could find was contemporary pop songs(!) by the current version of the choir, and wowsa, did that SUCK!

But my googling soon turned up a Russian adult all-male chorus, called the Moscow Rybin Choir or the Rybin Choir Moskau (depending on the language).  The choir is about 2/3 basses and baritones, with only a few tenor soloists thrown in.  They sing liturgical songs in Russian, slowly, with a lot of long-held notes, sounding a bit like a pipe organ.  Truly a lovely sound, and unique so far as I know.  

Like the Gregorian Chant I wrote about earlier, the Rybin Choir transports the listener to a place of peace and repose unlike almost any other music I've heard.  The fact that it's recorded in a big resonant church or cathedral of some kind (liner notes are in Russian) doesn't hurt.

NoCoPilot wrote:

It started yesterday with me idly wondering if I could find any more music for antique pump organs, of the type I mentioned loving so much when discussing "Alpenmusik."

Today, for lack of anything better to do(!) I put together a CD-R of a couple tracks from Sigfrid Karg-Elert on harmonium, the tracks from "Alpenlander" featuring squeaky defective pump organs, some tracks on reed organs from my various Renaissance Dance Music CDs, and a couple more reed organ tracks I found on Apple Music and YouTube.  Most feature some kind of extraneous noises / wheezes which aren't supposed to be there.  Several caused me to check my surroundings for suspicious goings-on.

I called it "Music for Small Organs."  I was tempted to make an indecent cover, but I restrained myself instead to using a picture of an abandoned and decrepit church organ.

"Pipe organ records" are usually big and grand and loud and boastful.  This one isn't.

Eugene Ormandy

On the Portland classical radio station that I often listen to online, yesterday they played an orchestration of one of Bach's organ pieces.  That reminded me of an old 1970 2-LP set I used to have, called "The Bach Album," with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra playing a whole bunch of Bach's organ pieces, transcribed for orchestra.

Checking, it of course has never been released on CD.

Not in single album format anyway.  I discovered the tracks WERE released a few years ago in the middle of a 10-CD boxed set of Eugene Ormandy, which includes lots of '70s and '60s recordings (pre-digital, but still excellent productions) of Tchaikovsky, Bartok, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, Resphigi, and others.  Checking the contents I think either my parents or I had all the original LPs.  NONE of which has seen re-release.

The whole set, on Apple Music, downloaded for $9.99... a buck a disc.  I guess because these are older recordings, and maybe Ormandy isn't as highly regarded as he one was.

I still love his stuff though.  

Busy making covers and burning discs and listening to my childhood.

Couple months ago I did abbreviated surveys of the "RCA Living Stereo" series and the London/Decca "Phase 4 Stereo" series, so now I add Columbia's "The 360° Philadelphia Sound" to the collection.

Huh.  I did not know Ormandy's real name was Jenö Blau.

The only issue that remains is the one of filing: do I keep all ten albums together as a set filed under "O"?  Or do I file each one under the composer on the cover?  How will I need to access them in the future, I need to try to predict. "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." - Yogi Berra

Here's a weird one (sorta).  

Turner Classic Movies this morning was playing "Walpurgis Night", an early (1935) Ingrid Bergman film (in Swedish).  Made me remember "Queen of Saba," a 1972 album by a German band called Walpurgis, which was really just Manfred Stadelmann (singer & drummer) with a bunch of guest musicians including Jürgen Dollase from Wallenstein.  Its main claim to fame was that it was recorded by Dieter Dierks in his studio (where so many other famous Krautrock albums were recorded).

Found the whole album had been posted to YouTube, so I downloaded the tracks and got ready to burn it.

But something was wrong... the track lengths didn't match what was listed on the cover.  Track titles didn't match the lyrics inside the songs either, which are sung in English.

So I popped over to my Ukrainian site, and it showed the exact same tracks in the exact same order.

So I popped over to Shazam and it identified the tracks as what they were shown in both sites.  But that can't be right -- the lyrics are a dead giveaway.  I found that by renaming the tracks according to their lyrics, and then putting them in the order shown on the cover, the times line up with the LP release.  APPARENTLY... everyone has the titles and running order wrong.

Looking at the listing for the album in Discogs, someone left a note that Side A on the original 1972 LP listed the tracks in the wrong order.  For the 1981 reissue LP somebody discovered this and corrected it.  The first CD reissue in 1992 used the correct running order, but the 1999 2nd issue returned to the 1972 incorrect track listings. In 2001 it was again reissued in the correct order.

I mean really.  It's not that hard to figure out.  The song titles are right there in the lyrics.

My mind was wandering last night--as it is wont to do--and I spent 30 minutes watching some guy dig out an excavator that got stuck in the mud.


As a kid I spent a lot of time as an excavator operator in the vacant lot next door, and at that age thought it would be the coolest career ever.  It still fascinates me, sorry to say.

But at a couple points in the video, when they're skipping ahead to the relevant action, they play some instrumental heavy metal rock that's kinda cool.  I didn't recognize it, so I Shazamed it, and came up with the band name "Divorce Applause."

Discogs has no listing for a band under that name (and they have EVERYBODY).

BandCamp has no listings under that name.

Apple Music has no listings under that name.

Googling the name brought up a Spotify listing for them (which is lower than putting up a card table in your front yard to sell CDs).  Actually there are a few streaming websites than host their songs, but nothing for download or sale.  On a whim I checked YouTube--which increasingly has EVERYTHING--and sure enough, was able to download the 18 tracks the band recorded 2014-2015, for free.

Still no idea who the band is, or where they're from.  They're not bad.

Tangerine Dream

Tangerine Dream arrived on the scene just when I was beginning record collecting (1971-2), and they used a lot of cool synthesizers. I bought all of their albums up to the late-'80s, when they started putting out soundtracks at the rate of a half dozen or more per year. Their formula got a little stale, they dabbled in electric guitar, they dabbled in vocals.

I lost interest.

When I sold my record collection I had only a half dozen TD-CDs, and thought that would probably be enough. I was sick of them.

Then, this weekend, I was playing my synthesizer channel on Pandora and they played a track by Michael Hoenig. He's another German synthesist who did a handful of albums, most of which I had but Pandora found some tracks I DIDN'T have, so I tracked down another couple of Hoenig albums and burned 'em. Nice.

Hoenig played in TD for a short while in 1975, subbing for Peter Baumann on an Australian tour and a gig at The Royal Albert Hall. I discovered the full 2-hour RAH concert had finally been released (after years of crappy bootlegs) as part of a an 18-disc boxed set in 2019 (TD like to do massive boxed sets re-releasing their entire catalog over and over, with enticers thrown in). So I downloaded the concert & burned it. It's okay, not great. Surprisingly great sound for '75 though.

That prompted me to set up a TD Pandora channel.

After a couple days I decided I needed a few more TD albums, specifically the 1983 line-up with Johannes Schmoelling in for Peter. This lineup was more melodic, less repetitive and used some state-of-the-art digital synthesizers. I downloaded and burned three albums, only to discover afterward I actually already had one of them. Oh well. Only cost me about $1.50.

The TD channel continued to play, and a few more tracks caught my interest. They were from a 2007 album called "Booster" which I'd never heard of. Turns out "Booster" was followed by Boosters II, III, IV, V, VI and VIII between 2007-2015. They're mostly re-recordings of older material with new digital synthesizers (needless to say, it's MUCH easier to do stuff with sequencers today...) Each of the seven Booster albums is a double CD, so what's that, 14 CDs in all? Each CD is about 80 minutes long, so 18-2/3 hours total. I found 90% of this material was tedious and unnecessary. But here and there, one or two tracks per CD, some quite good unknown music. I was able to assemble one CD-R of 1:19:45 which I think is pretty decent stuff.

TD are nothing if not prolific. They have well over 200 albums. That's a rabbit hole I will try mightily not to fall into.

I liked TD back in the 70s, but I wasn't a collector of albums.

John Coltrane

My brother-in-law took a risky move this Xmas, buying me a CD.  It's hard to find something I don't already have, that I might be interested in.

But he managed.  He got me a newly-released 1965 recording of "A Love Supreme," one of Coltrane's masterpieces but one he performed in public only two or three times.  This recording, from The Penthouse in Seattle, was professionally recorded off The Penthouse's mixing console, but the tapes languished in somebody's basement for the past 56 years.  This was recorded October 2, 1965.  Just a couple days earlier, September 30, Coltrane's famous "Live in Seattle" set was recorded in the same venue with the same personnel.  Originally a 2-LP set, "Live in Seattle" was reissued on 2 CDs in 1994 with an hour's extra material, and two half-hour performances restored to their uninterrupted state.

1965 was the start of Coltrane's "free music" period.  He was taking LSD, after years of abusing heroin and alcohol, and his band was abandoning all the conventions of live jazz.  There were a lot of group improvisations based on modes, sometimes with the wispiest of musical ties.  His albums between here and his premature death two years later (hepatitis, liver failure, drug abuse, hard living) were increasingly "out there": Sunship, Interstellar Space, Stellar Regions, Ascension. It was the days of the Watts riots, the civil rights demonstrations, the Black Panthers.  John was frustrated with the limitations of his tenor saxophone, and playing what he called "sheets of sound" to make it sound as unlike a saxophone as possible.  If he'd lived just another year or two he'd have loved the synthesizer.

It's not easy listening, and it's not always easy to discern what he was going for.  

But it's questing music, in search of something otherworldly, new, different, maybe even spiritual.

Or maybe it was just the LSD talking.

NoCoPilot wrote:

During the course of the article they listed several CDs they used for evaluation

Occasionally I google "audiophile CDs" or "best recorded jazz" or "hi-fi test tracks," just to see what people are recommending.  Almost always you get a list of the author's favorite bands, with absolutely zero attention paid to recording quality or good engineering.

https://www.whathifi.com/us/features/12-great-jazz-recordings-to-test-your-hi-fi-system
https://tidal.com/browse/playlist/8e63a991-8154-45ca-b941-5ae4c0884f32
https://store.acousticsounds.com/pdf/tas157_jazz1.pdf
https://www.discogs.com/lists/50-best-hi-fi-albums-for-audiophiles/404275
https://www.whathifi.com/us/features/best-produced-recordings-to-test-your-speakers

Some recordings from the fifties are pretty good, but none approach to dynamic range or clarity of modern digital recordings made since 2010.  Buncha wankers.

NoCoPilot wrote:

I had a chant compilation I made for myself several years ago of my favorite Gregorian Chant performers, the Choir of the Monks of the Abbey of St. Pierre De Solesmes, Dom Joseph Gajard, O.S.B, director.  No other chant ensemble sounds so soothing, so musical, so (dare I say it?) otherworldly.  

Oh what a twisted web we weave, the careening path my little brain takes when it's on a chase....

On December 24 I listened to a very old CD-R a friend had made for me, of an electronic music group (basically one person) from Poland named "RongWrong."  (The name derives from a 1917 magazine by Marcel Duchamp (and a couple other dadaists) started after one of them lost a bet and had to close down a different magazine, but nevermind that's not important.  It's also the name of a very famous song by Phil Manzanera's band "801" but that's not important here either.)  I know the exact date because I wrote an email to the person who made the CD, asking if he had any more by this guy (Maciek Piaseczyński).

Anyway, I hadn't heard this disc in a very long time, and had no recollection what it sounded like.  I was VERY pleasantly surprised.

Enough so that I went on a snipe hunt to find more.  As per usual these days, there were bits & pieces online: An album from 1993.  A single from 1994.  A newer single from twenty years later, 2014.  And two tracks from a 2014 album... no matter where I looked, I could find only these two tracks, not the whole album (which Discogs informed me completed their oeuvre).  There were three gentlemen from Poland selling copies on Discogs, but shipping was like $13 from Poland and probably takes forever.  Nevertheless, listening to these two tracks over and over (and the rest of it) convinced me that I really wanted to have it; and when I realized I had a $10 leftover balance in my Paypal account, the decision was made.

The CD arrived yesterday, a couple months ahead of expectation, and it's every bit as wonderful as I'd hoped.

The music is very iconoclastic, unlike anyone else, seemingly arising out of virgin soil with no antecedents.

Which reminded me of another musician, László Hortobâgyi, from Hungary.  Similarly unclassifiable.  Similarly untraceable.  So I looked to see what else by HIM I could find.  Unlike RongWrong, Hortbâgyi has released a couple dozen albums in his native Hungary, of which I found four online.  Downloaded, burned, enjoyed immensely.

Hortobâgyi utilizes a lot of "found sounds," singers and instrumental passages from other musicians used out of context.  This method of working, pioneered by David Byrne & Brian Eno in 1981's "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts," has also been used (in a vastly different context) by Biota & The Mnemonist Orchestra (1980-2004), Stephen Zulli (1982-1999), Enigma (1990-2008), and the whole fad of "Mashups" (mid-2000s).

I did not have any Enigma.  Another friend of mine is a huge fan, but I found their (again, it's actually a single guy named Michael Cretu) gimmick of putting public-domain Gregorian Chant over an unchanging beatbox to be simple-minded and repetitive.  Checking into it, I discovered Cretu had about three dozen releases... of which at least 30 are re-releases of his two hits: remixed, repackaged, re-sequenced, re-recorded...  Talk about milking the cashcow!!!  Anyway, he DID do a couple different albums, and within those LPs there were a half dozen songs which were not quite as boring as the rest.  Bingo, made a CD-R. (I'm such a geek, I had to burn it four times before I got the order of the tracks right.)

Chant went through a minor revival in 1994, due to Enigma's hit.  A "chant album" was released by The Benedictine Monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, but I always avoided it like the plague because I was afraid it included beatbox.  Turns out it doesn't, it's straight chant.  Not as good as the chant I mentioned in my earlier post, but I was glad it wasn't butchered.

Not so an album called "Chantmania" by The Benzedrine Monks of Santo Domonico, which parodies the cover of the last-mentioned album.  In this one, some pop songs ("Losing My Religion," "The Monkees Theme Song," "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy") are performed in a chant-like manner.  It's just exactly as horrible as it sounds.  Turns out the group behind it is called "Big Daddy," and they have been doing current pop hits in a doo-wop style for twenty years.  I'd never even heard of them.  Checking their catalog, I'm going to call this a blessing.

Jimi Hendrix

It's not very often I admit defeat, when looking for something I know exists, but tonight I had to throw in the towel after about six hours of searching and trying very trick I knew.

When I sold all my LPs I also got rid of almost all my cassettes, most to a guy in Germany and the rest to the dumpster.  I kept only a small box of ones that meant something to me.

Three of them were a radio show I taped in 1987, giving the history of Jimi Hendrix in his own words and the words of musicians who played with him, and including lots of rare and unreleased tracks.  It was a very well-produced show.

Not something I'd listen to very often though, so I kept my cassettes when the set was released in France on 5-LPs in 1988, or 3-CDs in 1989.

But this afternoon I thought it'd be nice to put together an MP3 disc with the whole 4-hour show on one disc.

I looked EVERYWHERE.  No luck.  

Found out the set had been withdrawn around 1990, due to some legal rights issues.  That was long ago enough that nobody was hosting the files.

A few people were selling used copies, however, for up to $787.  Found one guy in the US who only wanted $20 for the 3-CD set, plus $4 shipping -- so I bit the bullet and admitted defeat.  Before I did, I listened to part of the first cassette, and yup it's still interesting, and yup my cassette isn't very good quality.

Dunno if I'll bother with the MP3.  Maybe I will, and then sell the set again.  Depends on the booklet I suppose.

[Edit later]: Decided against making an MP3 disc of the whole 4-hour show.  That's a substantial stretch of time and I doub I'll ever want to sit through the whole thing in one sitting.  It's better in smaller chunks.

But I did investigate "Electric Ladyland" outtakes.  There's a DVD of "The Making of 'Electric Ladyland'."  There's a semi-official(?) album called "At Last... The Beginning." And there's the 50th anniversary 3-disc edition of "Electric Ladyland" of which disc 2 is outtakes.  Jimi, as you know, spent FOUR MONTHS inside The Record Plant recording studio in New York, at an unheard-of cost of $200,000, working out ideas and writing material. So there's no shortage of demos and outtakes.  These three releases overlap to a large degree (even under different titles) but gleaning the best of them yields a solid hour of unique material.

My sister ran across some cassettes I'd made her, back in the day, moving back in after her floors were refinished.  She asked if I could duplicate them on CD.

Or better yet, expand them to USB with more songs.

Did I say, "Hell yes"?

One was a random collection of '60s and '70s songs we grew up with, not mostly the famous songs but ones you'd recognize and remember and enjoy.  Because the 20 songs on the cassette didn't duplicate any bands, I decided to see how many one-song-per-band tracks I could think of for the USB.  I'm up to 255.  Lotta one hit wonders, lotta bands you've totally forgotten about, lotta bands that should've been bigger.  Fun project.  On shuffle play it'll be like listening to the radio in 1969.

[Edit Friday]: Mailed the USB today with 279 songs on it.  I was running out of ideas.  I went through the "Easy Rider" soundtrack, I went through my Motown compilation (doing only one song per artist trimmed that down substantially), I went through my recent CD-R lists.  I wanted the whole thing to flow when played on shuffle play, which meant no 1980s drumbox tracks, no 1950s doo-wop, no duplication of bands.  Pulling the non-obvious track from most bands was a fun challenge.  I included a few instrumentals (to break things up) and a few "surprises" like the Rockford Files Theme Song by the Mike Post Coalition.  But after 279 tracks, almost 20 hours of material, I ran out of ideas (it was still only 2GB of the 32GB stick).  We'll see how she likes it.

Smearing

I've been a big fan of Richard Strauss since I was a kid, and have bought several CDs of his massive tone poems.  I pulled out "The Alpine Symphony" last week, after hearing a bit of it on the radio.

But the recording I had, by Edo de Waart & The Minneapolis Philharmonic, was shrill and hurt my ears.  The Alpine has several places where a lot of brass and a lot of strings play together in unison, and the result was just a painful ringing smear.  You couldn't tell the brass from the strings.  The ringing frequency for both was the same, and made them an indistinguishable shrieking.

The one I heard on the radio, by Zubin Mehta & Berlin Phil, wasn't shrill.

So I ordered a copy, and it arrived today.  They're both digital recordings, similar timeframes 1991 and 1989, but what a difference!  The Mehta is bright and brassy and dynamic, but never rings or becomes shrill.

Dunno if it's the microphones, or the hall, or the conducting, or the orchestra, or the studio equipment but the two recordings couldn't be more different.

Hypnagogue

Ran across a long review of a piece of music by Robert Rich that Robert had posted to his BandCamp page.  It was a fairly intelligent and well-informed review.  Having done reviews myself for over ten years I'm pretty sensitive to bad review techniques. Okay

Anyway, the review had a link after it to the reviewer's website, which is called Hypnagogue.  The proprietor, John Shanahan, apparently did reviews (on request) from 2006 to 2017, when he got tired of doing them and quit.

Been there, done that myself.

Instead John started a podcast where he could play 90 minutes of his favorite submissions every two weeks, like a radio show with no radio station.  He's done 349 shows(!)

I thought I knew most people in the electronic music community, but I guess that was many years ago.  I've never heard of this guy.  Or 90% of the music he's played on his podcasts, which are available online. There is A METRIC TON of bad music released every day.

When I quit reviewing it was because I could no longer tell the submissions apart.  Everything followed the same formula, and was interchangeable with everything else.  It got to the point where I said oh what's the point anymore.

Well, John's been at it since 2006 (so, 16 years?) and he apparently hasn't reached that point yet.  After sampling a dozen of his shows I very quickly reached saturation point, and then soon afterward overload.  Same shit over and over.  And over.  All totally unoriginal, totally unremarkable, unmemorable, & unrewarding.

Does all music have to be original? Is there value in plowing land that's been plowed, sometimes for years, beforehand? Maybe it's just my perversion to want something new and challenging every day.

Humpf.  I sound like an old fart.  To these kids it's all still new and wonderful.

NoCoPilot wrote:

Generally I don't care for choral music, the words get in the way of my reading.  But my googling soon turned up a Russian adult all-male chorus, called the Moscow Rybin Choir or the Rybin Choir Moskau (depending on the language).  The choir is about 2/3 basses and baritones, with only a few tenor soloists thrown in.  They sing liturgical songs in Russian, slowly, with a lot of long-held notes, sounding a bit like a pipe organ.  Truly a lovely sound, and unique so far as I know.  

Okay, this is a first for me.  I wanted to hear this today but could not find the CDR anywhere!   It is not filed under "Rybin," not under "Choir," not under "Moscow," not under "Gregorian Chant."  Not laying on the table with my other new burns that are waiting to be played again.  WTF did I file it?

No matter.  The cover was incomplete anyway.  Made a new cover, burned a new disc.  It'll turn up eventually -- and then I can throw it away.

I may have too many CDs.

Direct-to-Disc

Last night I went looking for some of the Sheffield Labs direct-to-disc productions from the early 1970s.  I had a few of them, but there were several I did not have.  Even more that I didn't want.

You see, these things had to be recorded live, everybody in the same room.  No editing.  If anyone made a mistake they had to start the whole LP side over.  Because of this, the productions were usually limited to about 15 minutes per side.  Minimal electronics, no studio effects, no EQ, and the musicians had to be experienced top notch studio musicians.

Consequently the music was often safe & boring & very conventional.  Even MOR (middle of the road), or ACR (adult contemporary radio), i.e. Muzak for boomers.

While the recordings are usually remarkably good (for 1972) they're typical analog recordings: no ultra highs, and nothing below 50Hz.  Sometimes the dynamic range is better-than-average, but not remarkably so.

After doubling my collection from six to twelve, I think I'm done.  They're an interesting dead end in the development of audio, but not more than that.

By-the-by... I'm not unaware of the irony. These D2D productions were supposed to be the "ultimate analog experience"... now digitized, posted to YouTube (in hi-def MP3s), downloaded digitally and burned to digital CD-Rs. Oh the humanity.