Hans Christian Andersen V’s Blog

it’ isn’t all new and undiscovered music in my little 110-square-foot hi-fi shrine.  In fact, most of the time I’m just endlessly cycling through a handful of recordings.  Especially whenever I change something about the layout of listening room (read: frequently, on account of an acute case of audiophilia nervosa), or when I’m sitting in the aftermath of a bad day at work, or when I’m sitting in the after glow of a good day at work, or… well, it doesn’t take much to send me scurrying for my favorites.

If you were Angyl, newly moved in to the Greenhaus, you’d think that Hans’ music collection consists solely of:

• Kind Of Blue - Miles Davis
• Side A of Somethin’ Else - Cannonball Adderley
• Side A of In San Francisco - Cannonball Adderley
• Rook - Shearwater
• Side B of Who’s Next - The Who
• Schubert’s Death & The Maiden String Quartet- Lindsay String Quartet
• Beethoven’s Fifth - Carlos Kleiber
• Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Paganninni - Vladimir Ashkenazy

Two observations: Except for KoB and Rook, these are all single-sides or half-CDs.  I find myself wanting complete chunks of music that are small enough to fit within the window of time it takes Png to devour a fresh twisty nom-stick.

Also, except for the three classical selections, they’re all on vinyl.  I’m sure that if I could get the rest on LP, I would certainly do so.

Tiempo Libre / Bach In Havana

Last time I was at Barnes & Noble I was waylayed by a classical music sale in the music department, and as I approached the register I was constantly distracted by the piped-in music, which was obviously Bach, yet riding on top of an infectious Cuban rhythm section. Seemed brilliant on first glance, it was ultimately disappointing. In most tracks, the Bach itself is either too deeply buried in the arrangements, or Cuban timba elements feel too slick and overproduced, too studio-sounding.

It’s too bad, really; I really like Classical/Dance mixes when done well - think Classical Mushroom, or even ‘A Night on Disco Mountain’. But aside from a few standout tracks, the album itself just didn’t pan out.

Fleischer / Mozart Piano Concertos

Leon Fleischer, backed by the Stuttgarter Kammerorchester.

This album has and incredibly intimate quality, like he’s playing for you alone. Or maybe for himself alone. Nothing even remotely showy, and yet it’s vividly human and alive. The impression is one of someone sitting in his study, reflecting on his life and playing utterly unselfconsciously. It’s a warm room with a rich, inviting, relaxed sound; thick carpets and walls of worn leatherbound books. The impression is so overwhelming that I almost feel like I’m tresspassing, as if I’m intruding on someone else’s private space. While Two Hands and The Journey both had the same intimate quality, they were both solo piano works albums and that somehow makes an important difference. In those albums, I could imagine eavesdropping on Fleischer in his study, lingering a while to hear him play. In this album, I imagine accidently tresspassing into his very counsciousness as he in turn plays his piano to an imagined, spectral orchestra.

Beethoven / Piano Concerto no. 4 In G Major, Piano Concerto No. 5 In E Flat Major

Oh goodness. The Fifth is really an impressive piece, especially the first movement that constantly tugs at my memory, with call-outs to a dozen of other half-remembered pieces.

Ashkenazy’s playing is, as on the Rachmaninov album that I’m constantly referencing, sublime. There’s a splendid sense of conversation between the piano and orchestra, a sinuous quality as they dance around each other and braid through each other, although the piano never loses its identity as a separate entity from the rest of the ensemble.

The sonics on the CD aren’t terribly inspiring, with a strident mid-90’s DDD sound and a thin bottom end. But I’ll gladly tolerate

U2 / No Line On The Horizon

The last couple of U2 albums have been easy to pin down; All That You Can’t Leave Behind was fluffy pop, How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb was gnostic/charismatic pop. And before either of those, Pop was Eurotrash pop. The first LP feels like a culmination of the ATYCLB/HTDAAB radio-friendly arc, tweaking and refining the pop formula. I might like it better than either of those albums, I’m not sure. The reason I’m not sure is that Side 3 arrives and blows the first slab out of the water by taking sonic elements from Achtung! Baby and The Unforgettable Fire, layering them on top of chunkier, harder-rocking guitar riffs than I expect out of U2, and rechanneling them into something that sounds somehow forward-looking. Plus, Bono finally seems to grok that his voice doesn’t have the range it used to be, and he ditched the swooping and soaring of his younger years for some rather effective syncopation. He’s left the horn section and joined the rhythm section.

Mendelssohn / Incidental Music to "A Midsummer Night’s Dream", Schubert / Incidental Music to "Rosamunde"

George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. Note to self: Need more Szell - I like his style, it’s like a Solti but with more laser-tight focus. Further note to self: Need more Mendelssohn - I continue to like what I hear, especially as I stray away from the symphonies, which are fine but are taking a while to grow on my. Additional further note to self: There’s not such thing as too much Schubert.

The Midsummer piece keeps throwing me for a loop because it has a phrase in it that is straight out of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. (Wikipedia points out that the similarity is there, but my ordering is backward - the Mendelssohn was written some 63 years prior.) When my brain expects one musical line and I get another, I have to either focus my full attention to listening, or turn the music off entirely. I chose to focus, which put me in a state of mind to be utterly enchanted (fitting, given the subject matter) byt the third movement, the Nocturne, which was so unspeakably lovely it nearly moved me to tears.

I know the Rosamunde can sound wonderful - I’ve heard several lovely renderings of the string quartet version - but the few versions I have of the original orchestral "incidental music" were wishy-washy at best. But surely Szell/Cleveland can do better? $4 bargain bin vinyl FTW.

Also, hot on the heels of seeing The Marriage of Figaro last weekend, I made sure to turn down the volume - live orchestral music is typically much quieter than the volumes I like to blast away at.

Brahms / The 3 Violin Sonatas

Itzhak Perlman on the violin, Daniel Barenboim on piano. What a shame that so many great recordings were done circa 1990 on DDD toolschains, they’re always a little underwhelming. Still, better that than a whole generation of Telarc classical SACDs that are impeccably recorded and musically uninteresting.

The third sonata is the most interesting of the three here, like listening to a pair of old friends have an interesting and wide-ranging conversation, until you realize nearly half-an-hour has slipped by.

Thanks To Gravity / Avogadro’s Number

The first full-length album from my favorite neurotic 90’s pop/rock/alternative/whatever band that never went anywhere.

Heavier on the syncopation than I’m used to… is this a different drummer? (The band’s website mentions that their next album is the first to use electric guitars, maybe that’s what I’m hearing here, layers of rhythm guitar) This must have been a heck of a fun small-venue live show; who needs studio polish when you’ve got this kind of energy on display? (Which also may explain the band’s utter flameout after their first major-label record.

This may be the first Happel/TtG record I’ve heard where Andy’s violin sounds really well integrated with the rest of the group. Aside from the violin-heavy track, and the pair of tracks with funk and flamenco influences, respectively, there’s a lot of sameness to the rest of the album. I didn’t do it any favors by listening to it immediately after a re-play of Toad’s Fear, which does a much better job of traversing the same sonic terrain.

Also worth noting, Happel’s voice sounds shockingly different than on any of his other CDs, far more raw, far less nasal. (He has a really nasal voice for a rock frontman.)

Thanks To Gravity / Sonata Brutale

The nasal voice is back. The compositions sit halfway between Avogadro’s Number and Start, with less fury and more polish than its predecessor. It’s an uncomfortable middle-ground to occupy. And he’s still too neurotic and emo to be successful in his day and age.

TV On The Radio / Return to Cookie Mountain

Huh. Experimental. And I don’t mean that as a pejorative. It’s a sonic tapestry, layers upon layers upon layers, in strange and unintuitive combinations. There’s also a lot of 50-60Hz content, which in my office (10′x11′x8′) turns into a truly righteous set of standing waves that pressurizes the whole room. It’s also really cohesive and stimulating. While listening, I suddenly felt inspired to go bang out the answers to a pair of essay questions that I have to fill out for my upcoming iaido tests. I had them both done in the space of five tracks.

In fact, the only real complaint I can level against the album is that there is too much of it. It’s a bit overwhelming to let this run for an hour. And for the record, I’ve officially turned into one of those luddites who thinks 24 minutes per side, times two sides, is *just about right*.

Needs a second listen, perhaps in a week or two when this bout of allergies and stuff-ears has passed.

Better Than Ezra / Deluxe

Why do some groups hit the big time, big time - while others get relegated to the status of also-rans or too generic? This here is straight-up 90’s alt-rock with a little New Orleans southern vibe layered over it, and I can’t shake the feeling that the only thing that kept this band obscure while others thrived is the beating of a butterfly’s wings somewhere in Australia.

That, and the absence of a truly catchy single to build buzz on the airwaves.

I’m eating a cheeseburger, listening to Ashkenazy & the VPO storm their way through Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto #5, and reading Musashi’s Book of Five Rings.  All three are excellent and stimulating, but so far only two of the three are actually enjoyable.  I’ll leave it to you to guess which is the weakest link.

Here’s a hint: it’s not the cheeseburger.

This theme may not have a shiny orange RSS icon, but there is a feed.  Check the sidebar on the right for a link.

The feed may or may not actually give full-article content, it might instead just give a lame teaser.  If that’s the case, that’s lame, but will be fixed later.

wp->lj test post 2

(I wouldn’t mind deleting this test post, but wordpress doesn’t seem to want to let me.  D’oh!)

There’s a hifi store practically next door to The Dreaming. I’ve walked past it dozens of times without noticing it was there.

The owner is more than a little neurotic – sort of the audio-store-owner version of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons -  but he has some very shiny things in there, including lots of vacuum tube gear, lots of turntables, and surprising selection of new vinyl. And not just the classic rock reissues that you can find even in Barnes & Noble these days, but lots of classic jazz, and even new pressings of classical music from the RCA Living Stereo and Mercury Living Presence lines. Most of them are 180g or 200g pressings, so not cheap at all. But they sound sooooo gooooood.

Saint-Saens / Symphony No. 3 "Organ"

I’ve had this exact recording on SACD for quite some time, but given its identity as part of the RCA Living Stereo series, I’ve always wanted to hear it in its original consumer release format. It doesn’t disappoint. But then again, it didn’t disappoint on SACD either. I once did a four-way shoot-out of "Kind of Blue", and found that multi-channel SACD beat stereo SACD, which in turn beat LP, which beat CD. Same results here. But any excuse to re-listen to it is a good one; last time I cued it up was off my iPod on a flight to California. This time, it’s sitting in the Comfy Chair in the office, with the subwoofer rattling the floor on the sustained pipe organ notes.

Rachmaninov / Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, de Falla / Nights in the Garden of Spain

The Rhapsody - chunky, with tempos and conductorial choices that seem almost the 180 degree opposite of my favorite version. Very stompy and larger-than-life, but hardly sublime. I suppose I should just suck it up and admit that I’m never going to find a version that can stand up to the Vladimir Ashkenazy recording that I so adore. Le sigh. The B-side, however, proved to be quite a gem, creepy and evocative. I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around it; it was a series of three pieces evoking wonder, curiosity, and not a little dread as well. No bombast, but lots of tension. The L.A. Philharmonic has a better writeup on it then I do, go see what they have to say about it.

Pearl Jam / Ten - Recent Fancy Schmancy Edition

Yeah, I already have this on 90’s vintage CD and a standard-weight vinyl pressing. But I’m sucker for special edition rereleases and the like, especially when they shine some new insight or appreciation on an old favorite. I like hear in the "Redux" remix; it’s the same music, the same parts, the same performance, but with less studio trickery; Vedder’s vocals and McCready’s guitars no longer trade turns in front of the microphone like a duet; their levels are more evenly matched at all times, and the other band-member’s contributions and harmonies have a chance to shine through. It sounds more like it could be a live album. Not a huge huge change, but my inner nerd insists it’s more than just the difference between "Ocean Grey" and "Military Grey". More like the difference between a studio recording and a live show; the sound-guy sets the levels before the show starts and just leaves the board untouched for the duration of the performance.

John Coltrane / Giant Steps

Y’know, I swear I can hear the Monk here. The center of gravity in my jazz collection is clustered around Miles, Cannonball, and Monk, and this definitely sounds like the latter. Maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised - this is one of the earlier albums to focus on Coltrane’s own compositions, and the man did spend some serious formative time under Thelonious’ wing just two years prior. Like Monk, it seems to demand focused listening; this isn’t chill music or bopping around the house music. So while it was good, very good, it’s also not going to get as much play as it deserves.

I finally set things in motion to get my Green Lake townhouse on the rental market, after it sat idle for a few more months than was really financially healthy.  Go me!  Unfortunately, the leasing agency was dangerously close to Silver Platters’ Northgate location, and I failed to resist the seductive lure of a stack of Schubert.  Hence the title of the blog.  Nevermind the fact that I already have a stack of mid-90’s Southern rock sitting on my desk that Angyl wants me to listen to.  While I don’t have any CD-listening targets this year, I do want to get back in the habit of blogging about every album I buy; I get more for my music dollar if I have to say something about the experience.  Best get started.

 

Cake / Fashion Nugget

 

“The Distance” was ubiquitous in high school, one of a handful of tracks that I heard an ungodly number of times.  This is noteworthy mostly for the fact that I did not listen to music at all in high school, so if I heard something more than once, it must have been truly, ridiculously overplayed.  It holds up reasonably well, actually.  The rest of the CD?  Couldn’t tell you much about it, because I was too busy listening to their cover of “I Will Survive” over and over again.  Brilliant cover, cleverly executed, no matter what the music snobs at Allmusic.com think about it.

 

Schubert / Symphony No. 9 ”Great”  in C Major, Wagner / Sigfried Idyll

 

Georg Solti, helming the Weimar Philharmonic.  I generally like Solti, and I adore Schubert’s Ninth, and apart from a spritely third movement I didn’t find much to like here.  There’s no trace of the spritelyness that Munch/BSO injects into the piece, nor the gravitas and sincerity that Bernstein/NYPhil evokes.  To make matters worse, Solti takes several repeats that those other recorded versions omit, and that last movement just drags on and on.  As for the Wagner piece, it felt like the slower, duller parts of the middle of Siegfried; the parts I nap through while waiting for the dragon to show up.

 

Schubert / Piano Sonata in D Major D850

 

I need more recordings by Vladimir Ashkenazy.  I have trouble listening to any Rachmaninov piano concertos featuring anyone else, I’m so spoiled by him; ditto the Variations on a Theme of Paganini.  I have some old used vinyl of him playing wonderful Mozart piano concertos.  This Schubert piece is the first recording I have of him playing solo, without the interplay with a full orchestra.  This surprised me; I thought I had picked up a piano concerto, not a sonata.  It wasn’t until about five minutes in that I noticed the lack of strings or brass.  He just doesn’t need an orchestra.  He has such a marvelous range of textures, from a mischievous bounce, to thundering slams, to effortless glides. There always feels like a gentleness, a playfulness underlying every note.

 

Fastball / All The Pain Money Can Buy

 

Okay, there’s some nice songcraft going on here.  Short, poppy songs, anchored by a couple of classic late-90’s hit (”The Way”, “Out Of My Head”).  Angyl pointed these guys out as being representative of Austin at the time, and I hear a lot that sounds like homage to country sounds, plus a heck of a lot of Beatles and early Who.  I’m not enamored of the mix; there’s a lot going on here - chunky basslines, shimmering country organ, rhythm guitars, unapologetic vocal harmony, and solid drumming - but the dynamics have been leeched out; chorus-verse-chorus-verse is robbed of its impact.  Even so, I’ve had “The Way” coursing through my head for days, and none of the other CDs here have managed to evict it.

 

Yo-Yo Ma & the Silk Road Ensemble / Silk Road Journeys

 

A mix of arrangements and newly-commissioned pieces of Mongolian, Chinese, Finnish, and Persian musical styles.  I’m unsure how much is traditional, and how much represent modern fusion elements - but the occasional wide dynamic swings within individual pieces seem like modern nods to cinematic tastes.  Quite possibly the most dynamically wide-ranging recording in my collection.  I haven’t listened to much “world music” of any variety - mostly when it’s embedded in a movie or game soundtrack.  Nerd confession: I even picked this up mostly because of the Mongolian and Chinese content, because of David’s kung-fu-themed Exalted game.

 

Gershwin / Rhapsody in Blue; Concerto in F; An American in Paris; Variations on “I Got Rhythm”; Cuban Overture

Arthur Fiedler, Boston Pops Orchestra.  Oops.  It seems I mistakenly lumped Gershwin in with Cole Porter in the list of American Popular Composers I Can’t Stand Listening To.  Not quite sure where that impression came from, but when I heard Rhapsody In Blue while watching Fantasia 2000 with Angyl, I realized I needed to give him a fresh listen.  And I like what I hear, with caveats.  The caveats are that much of the music shows its age; it practically screams “pre-war American”, just like Copland screams “post-war American” - except, of course, for the parts that sound extremely French.  Either way, not my favorite idioms.  I’m also not sure how I feel about many of the jazz influences; normally it doesn’t bother me when white musicians steal black innovations and do something mainstream with them; early Elvis, for example; but for whatever reason it bothers me a bit here.   On the plus side, I’m pretty sure that this CD covers the template for basically EVERY Looney Tunes score EVER, except the ones based on operas.

 

Schubert / Trout Quintet; Sonata in A Minor for Piano and Arpeggione, D.821; “Die Forelle” D. 550

A cheap CD for completist purposes; I called myself a Schubert fan, and yet the only recording I had of the Trout was an almost inaudible $1 used-vinyl-bin acquisition.

 

The Who / Live At Leeds

I’m coming into Who fandom all backwards, starting when Jason loaned me Quadropenia and Who’s Next; I only recently acquired Tommy, and now this.  It’s a powerful argument for relocating my subwoofer from the Media Shrine to my main office.  It’s a different side of the band; a much rawer sound.  Take the sheer crunch and howl of early Zeppelin, mix in the mental instability of the Doors, and then add some really good drugs to the mix.  Smash a guitar or three, and here’s the end result.

Okay, so.  The first few entries were imported from a temporary hosted WordPress account that I made a few days ago.  One of the things I discovered in the process is that the default WordPress interface for authoring entries is wretched.  So little screen real estate is actually devoted to composition that it makes me yearn for the days of 80-character 20-line displays.  So now I’m trying to use the non-beta build of Windows Live Writer instead.

Here goes…

(edit: huzzah, it worked)

Was it really five years ago?  Wow.

Ahem.  A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I participated in 2004’s “Son of Iron Game Chef” competition on The Forge.  My game, “Snow Day! - or - Fort Joey Must Fall” won one of the runners-up awards.  After the contest, there was some buzz about a potential anthology publication; I revised the text, incorporating some playtest feedback and some art I conjured up for the occasion.  The files sat on my hard drive, following me across five years and four laptops, until last night when Ben Lehman succesfully goaded me into publishing it.

Download link: snow-day-published-version

Enjoy!

I’m having a devil of a time rationalizing how to integrate all the various social networking and blogging sites into some kind of coherent system.  Here’s my current working model; may not be valid tomorrow.

• Livejournal isn’t very “hip”, has an uncertain future, yadda yadda.  However, its ACLing system is great, and there’s enough people I know on the system that it works very well community interaction.  Metcalf’s law, and all that.  I’ll keep reading as long as my peeps are still present, and I’ll occasionally post regarding topics that don’t fit into either Facebook or Wordpress - particularly things I don’t want to broadcast to the world.
• I increasingly want a non-LJ blog for long-form public posts - in particular, things like the CD reviews that I did in 2008, or the rambling posts I occasionally do when I’m on a vacation somewhere.  I set up this Wordpress account for this, primarily because they’re not owned by Google.
• Anything owned by Google will be avoided by default, on the grounds that I don’t trust them or their corporate trajectory.  (This has very little to do with the fact that I work for Microsoft).  Ergo Wordpress instead of Blogger.  Google Reader is the one big exception to this principle, because it’s the only RSS environment I’ve ever seen that actually does what I want it to do.
• Anything owned by Microsoft almost certainly isn’t targetted to me as an audience.  The Windows Live services suite just don’t do much for me.  (Client-side is a different story entirely; I’m planning on standardizing on a Win7/Live Mail/Live Photo Gallery/Live Mesh/IE8/OneNote software stack.  Mesh in particular is the greatest thing since Sliced Bread, or at least since OneNote.)
• Instant Messaging is a dead medium for me; the only person I IM on a regular basis is Angyl, and Facebook Chat (though craptacular) suffices.  I get the impression that most folks who aren’t me are using gmail for their personal email, which means they have embedded gtalk for communicating with anyone else on gmail.  Maybe that’s where all the chatter has gone.
• Facebook, for all its myriad failings, appears to fit all of my short-form social-networking needs.  I’m generally not a FB Apps user, but I’ll make an exception for D&D Tiny Adventures.
• Twitter annoys me, except in small doses.