I just added TOSHIYA TSUNODA to my Reader OPML. Feed subscribing seems such an easy process now days. I even have a few twitter feeds in Reader, solely dealing with Japanese music. So long as one knows what they are following, it’s without a doubt the lightest and most versatile way to get an open view of nearly any content one may enjoy.
No strings attached.
Unfamiliar with Ryuichi Sakamoto, I decided to have a go at his 2009 compilation album, Playing the Piano, this past month. Amusingly, I find it fitting for this season and cooler weather in general. At times I am reminded of Charlie Brown, but it is merely light layer of reminiscence.
A calm, composed, and warming mix of pieces, some which irreversibly affect the heart. Thoughts of sharing scarfs in the snow and the stillness of a warm smile in the cold Northern air, this is a softness I enjoy.
It is a casual enjoyment, but I am quite fond of Put Your Hands Up, Bolerish, and Self Portrait.
(I am not fond of Composition 0919)
Having a listen in the middle of the night (2am). Films has something delightfully familiar about it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is the Charlie Brown to Ryuichi Sakamoto, no. It’s not a feeling of reminiscence, simply relaxing and ensuring. Why does Nodame Cantabile come to my mind? Modern classical music in mah Nodame… blasphemy.
under the deep Sea has me smitten.
Had someone suggested Yuichiro Fujimoto to me, I’m not sure I would have taken the bait after listening to a few tracks. His music comes off noisy perhaps, but in comparison to a number of avantgarde artists out of Japan, Fujimoto’s essence is modest and natural.
Natural, like the sounds we hear while half-awake, sleeping with eyes shut, only somewhere in the countryside of Japan. Both Kinoe and The Mountain Record have beautiful pace for this time of year (Autumn). I’ve been quite taken by the simplicity which nearly mocks my own complexities.
Something to exploit nostalgia… it’s possible.
The past 40 or so hours have yielded hellish issues interesting findings on my home server. Rather than go into that, here’s a nice little circle-chart (some call it pie).
Image taken from Disk Analyzer packaged with various Linux distributions.
Pretty much don’t use most of that chart, and lately just stick around the Current/Burner/Burner-J directories. Now if I did the animu drive, I wonder what that would look like…
Lately, there’s been a ton of new music1 to listen to around my abode, but it’s not such a simple matter; listening to unheard albums.
Perhaps the downfall to new album introduction is the passivity of listening. How familiar do we get after just one listen? Even with an active listen, I’d say it’s a very small imprint, and so I’ve devised some tips to deal with audible overload.
Grab 3-5 albums of the bunch, at random works, and plan to listen to the group throughout a single day. This is a good way to eat though mega lists. Also, it is recommended to NOT go by artists alone, just grab albums from different artists, without regard for who made it2.
Use a desktop-based music application and listen to an album from the beginning, with a catch. Put the player on single-track mode (play only one song at a time) so that you have to keep going back to the player and manually click the next song…. naturally, I’m assuming multi-tasking and a passive listen.
This helps with the pacing, so that an album doesn’t woosh fly right by. It isn’t always necessary to listen through an entire album (we know what we enjoy, right?), but listen enough to be able to categorize the album.
Meta-data is nice for organization, but I have my quips with auto-tagging (specifically genre). Anyhow, it’s a good idea to manually assign genre and/or style tags to tracks. Genre is great for overall categorization (ie. Classical, Jazz, Rock, Pop, Electronic…), but style allows definition of finer attributes, such as j-rock, experimental, fusion, indie, lo-fi or larger genre if the work touches, but doesn’t quite focus on it. For example, a rock album that tends to have jazz influences could be listed as, genre:Rock style:Fusion, Jazz-influence… etc.
Using style could be an entire post itself, but the main concept is organizing while or just after listening. Listening to the music and asking, “what genre/style is this,” makes it slightly more active.
Then rename. I’m sure we all have music organization preferences, but following with the genre-style tag idea, why not use them in the name? Generally, my naming format:
<artist>/(<date>) <album>/<tracknumber>. <track>
But let’s see that with categorizing tags:
<artist>/(<date>) <album> [<genre>,<style>]/<tracknumber>. <track>
The advantage of having genre as part of the album’s folder name is simple, it’s quite difficult to remember every artist/album and their sound. More than likely, the sound will be remembered, but then finding which artist it was will take playing songs from random album folders. With genre-style properly and personally assigned, filtering possible albums becomes a simpler process.
And that about sums the method. Sure it’s heartbreaking to listen to tracks that aren’t the current addiction, but working though many albums efficiently yields a good feeling and help avoid music overload3.
Melative Current Anime
