Tom Roper's Weblog

Curst Sons

The Curst Sons were doubtless wonderful; I couldn't tell you, gentle reader, as I stood outside Brighton Komedia, hungry, wet, reading Georges Bataille and listening to the iPod, before asking the box office for "two tickets for the Curst Sons, my good man", only to be told it's sold out.
Rats

The Curst Sons

I must give the oxygen of publicity to the Curst Sons who launch their second CD on Thursday 28 April at 8pm at Komedia in Gardner Street, Brighton. Competing interest declared:  I am related to one of them, Tim Dunkerley (slide guitar, mandolin), by marriage.

Lost recordings

In the modern superabundance of music, how is it that apparently popular items can disappear?
I have two items in mind:
Simunye, a collaboration between i Fagiolini and a South African choir, the SDASA Chorale, bits of which I have heard on Radio 3 on several occasions: Erato Detour 0630-18837-2
Rafael Puyana's recording of Soler's Fandango. I hear this first as a teenager, though it was recently played on Radio 3. I'm no harpsichordist but I'm sure Puyana's playing diverges from today's performance standards, but it's wildly exciting.

Bearded pigs blog

Bruce the Almighty tells me that the Bearded Pigs now have a blog

Two iPods?

Two iPods? I understand, Scott, though I've only had mine since Christmas, but can already see the need. I came to it from a much more impoverished background than Scott, as I never had a portable CD-player.
It has indeed, as Scott says more eloquently, changed the way I respond to music I know well, given me new insights and made me listen to unjustly neglected stuff. Scott juxtaposes Dylan, Wagner and Coltrane; my favourites are the 48 prelude and fugues of Das Wohltemperierte Clavier which I have in a recording played by Davitt Moroney and which fit ideally and serendipitously with all other sorts of music, never failing to surprise and excite.
See this on Wired: Wired News: Hide Your IPod, Here Comes Bill.
And see also last Sunday's lebrecht.live on Radio 3.

More on Audioscrobbler and LastFM

I can now offer my personal radio and my profile radio to the world, thanks to LastFM; the distinction is that the personal radio plays things from my iTunes playlist, the profile one plays things from playlists by people who are supposed to have similar tastes (cum grano salo I would suggest, today it tried to suggest that I might enjoy Led Zeppelin and Frank Sinatra's reading of White Christmas but I dare say it will learn). You'll need to register.

Audioscrobbler

A week ago, on other words about the time of Edward the Confessor in blogging terms, the Observer's Music Magazine ran a piece on Audioscrobbler.
Audioscrobbler uses a plug-in for iTunes (or WinAmp for lumpen-proletarians who don't have Macs) and records what the user plays and  compares that list with other users. It then produces charts of favourite artists and songs and can show other Audioscrobbler users with matching tastes. Audioscrobbler have recently enhanced the charts to show weekly favourites. Here's my Audioscrobbler page, complete with RDF feed. The clever bit, which I hadn't really explored until I read the Observer article, is  Last.FM; once you've played sufficient tracks for Audioscrobbler to be able to analyse your tastes, Last.FM will deliver a customised radio feed. I've been listening to this over the weekend and it really is very good
Two criticisms:  (apart from wondering why on earth did it think I would be interested in the appalling Stranglers?) why can't I get it on on my iPod?
Secondly and more seriously, I can see that if Audioscrobbler can map a user's tastes against those of others, it could lead to a frightfully homogenised musical world. Last.FM played me a lot of material I liked and indeed knew, but there were no surprises. Serendipitous and shocking musical discoveries seem to me unlikely.

Music shuffle game

I found this first at Unfogged.
One sets iTunes to shuffle and posts the first ten tunes listed, no matter how odd or embarrassing they may be. Here's my contribution:
1. Aria Detta La Frescobalda  Frescobaldi
2. Venus In Furs   The Velvet Underground
3. Prelude and Fugue in C Sharp Major Bwv 872 J S Bach
4. Cannibal's Hymn Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
5. Monkey Wash Donkey Rinse  David Lindley And Ry Cooder   
6. The keel row Kathleen Ferrier 
7. A fuego lento Horacio Salgán
8. The Lamentation of a sinner John Dowland 
9. Meet Me In The Indian Summer Van Morrison
10. Easy To Love Hank Mobley

Not bad, fairly representative and a bit could almost be entered in the Late Junction playlist thing. Compare with my Audioscrobbler page. It does expose the limitations of the CDDB metadata which iTunes uses by default. I had to edit several of these before posting: composers and perfomers are confused and in the worst example, a CD of Busoni's transcriptions of Bach for piano played by Nikolai Demidenko, I was offered a track listing in Japanese or Korean.

Now playing...

Currently playing in iTunes: You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To by Paul Chambers

St Cecilia's Day

The soft complaining flute,
In dying notes, discovers
The woes of hopeless lovers,
Whose dirge is whisper'd by the warbling lute.