My neighbors decided that I didn’t need any sleep this weekend. Consequently, my mind is too fuzzy to focus on the posts I have planned. Instead, here’s another batch of miscellaneous nonsense.
Category: Music
Grain elevators and Odin
“No unmet needs exist and … current unmet needs that are being met will continue to be met.”
See also Thog’s Masterclass at Ansible.
Fans of ’80s music, maskerade has a request for you.
Today’s mystery
[ASFS] Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari – (Bakemonogatari ED) from jacklong on Vimeo.
Why is “Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari” the top seed in the Anime Music Tournament? It’s not bad; the arrangement is solid, if a bit overwrought, and the recording demonstrates that Ryo can work with real singers as well as Hatsune Miku. It may well be one of the better songs in the tournament. But I don’t hear anything remarkable in it. I’ve listened to it several times, and as soon as it ends, I can’t remember a single phrase well enough to hum.
I’ve gone through all the tournament entries now, and what I said earlier stands. (I’ll admit that I didn’t listen to each and every one all the way through. Sometimes, if a song didn’t catch my interest after the first verse and refrain, I skipped to the middle to see if there were any surprises there. There weren’t.)
A few further notes:
1. Radiohead? Really? Gah. At least Yes is worth listening to. Radiohead is allegedly brilliant, but whiny twit Thom spoils everything they do.
2. The more homogenized, pasteurized pap I hear, the more I appreciate forthright rock ‘n’ roll like “Ride on Shooting Star.”
3. Evidently Ali Project is out of favor these days. I expected at least “Coppelia no Hitsugi” to make the cut.
4. While the majority of the nominees were new to me, most of the ones I judged to be good I was already familiar with. I did find a few songs worth adding to my playlists, though. “Forces” sounds like Karkador-era P-Model — no surprise, since it’s by Susumu Hirasawa. I might have to track down the Berserk soundtrack. “Hanaji” has a pleasantly trashy psychobilly feel, and “Shoujo S” (which reminds me of The Monkees for some reason) rocks nicely.
5. Curiously, the opening and ending themes for The Tatami Galaxy sound better separated from the animation. The wispy vocals in the latter song, “Kami-sama no lu Toori,” are peculiarly effective combined with the spooky synths.
Why do engineers confuse Halloween and Christmas?
In lieu of a substantive post, here’s some miscellaneous nonsense I came across recently.
A Gentile goes into a men’s clothing store, where he sees an elegant suede jacket. “How much is that jacket?” he asks the clerk. When the clerk tells him $1,200, the Gentile says, “I’ll take it.”
At the last minute, a Gentile calls his mother to announce that, owing to pressure at work, he will be two hours late for the family Thanksgiving dinner. “Of course,” his mother says, “I understand.”
Put Jews in both of those situations and you have the working premise for at least 50 possible jokes….
The most harrowing performance of Bach you’ll ever see (via Dick Stanley):
(Via Charles Hill.)
Poor Matt Labash. Not everyone has what it takes to be a brony.
Notes, mostly off-key
The first round of the Anime Music Tournament is underway. The organizers have made all 256 nominated tunes available in a convenient two-gigabyte download. I’ve been working my way through it. Since they usually picked the full-length version of each song, there’s just a bit less that twenty hours of music. It’s going to take me a while to listen it all.
A few comments on what I’ve heard so far:
1. Is this the best anime has to offer? There are some good tunes, but the majority are forgettable.
2. About half the songs sound alike. You can tell them apart if you listen carefully: song A has a disco-ish rhythm section, song B has a particularly breathy singer; song C has piano and strings; song D has distorted guitar and strings; etc. But the similarities are greater than the differences. They’re all based on the same template, all feature nasal girl singers at the upper end of their ranges, all are overarranged and overproduced, and they all blur together in my mind.
3. Masumi Itou, by virtue of her superior songwriting skills, has earned the right to sing in a little-girl voice if she wants to. All other female vocalists need to learn to use their full vocal ranges and sing full-out.
4. Japan needs altos, baritones and basses.
5. I forbid all use of string sections, real or sampled, in popular music. Synth pads, too. After listening to hours of gooey music, it takes something like The Rodeo Carburettor to blast the slime out of my ears.
6. What the hell is Yes doing here? “Roundabout” is an old favorite, and I prefer it to the vast majority of the other nominees, but it’s an “anime” song only by the loosest possible definition. (Beware: the track included in the big download skips once near the end. If you have another recording — and you should — listen to that instead.) ((I have no problem with including such numbers as “Duvet” or “The Sore Feet Song,” since they are generally unknown outside of anime, but Yes has an enormous world-wide audience.)) ((Let me offer a deal to the tournament organizers: “Roundabout” can remain in the running if they can explicate the lyrics.))
7. Those who only know “The Sore Feet Song” from watching Mushishi are in for a surprise.
Miscellaneous links
It’s taken years, but Miku is at last coming to the Mac.
What can you say about nothing? Quite a bit, actually.
Orwell is not the only writer who comes to mind when I read the news these days.
Iwo Jima, one of the less hospitable places on earth, might not be around much longer. Also, Kyushu is an exceptionally violent place, geologically speaking.
Anthony Weiner and his ilk would do well to consider the example of John Profumo.
Dark Shadows, Guiding Light
Is there worse than the St. Louis Jesuits? Perhaps. (Keep the anti-nausea medication handy.)
Bach times 377
Amazon.com is currently offering the complete harpsichord works of Bach, performed by Martin Galling, for 99 cents. This includes both books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the partitas and French and English suites, and much else. Even if the recordings are not to your taste, you’re only risking a dollar for fifteen hours of music.
The performances, to my non-expert ears, are acceptable but not outstanding. Here’s Galling’s rendition of the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from the first book:
Compare it to Malcolm Hamilton’s
and Takahiro Sonoda’s
Galling is a plodder. I’m being unfair — he usually picks better tempos than he does in that prelude — but there is a reason why he is seldom mentioned in the same breath as Glenn Gould and Wanda Landowska. Still, Galling generally does play Bach well enough to give pleasure, and the set is a good deal. You can indeed find better recordings of Bach, but they’ll cost you much more than one dollar.
For the heck of it, I found MIDI files of the prelude and fugue and ran them through a synthesized harpsichord on my computer:
Musical interlude
Just a few music videos that caught my ear recently.
Tim and Myles Thompson will be at Winfield this year.
Probably as painless an introduction to twelve-tone music as you’ll ever find. I’m less enthused by the philosophy, though — Josh calls it “rank nominalism.”
I experimented with some highly-simplified twelve tone techniques some years back. The results were not pretty. For the morbidly curious, “Twelve Toes” was probably the least unsuccessful.
Free noisemakers
My old computer died last month. The hard drives are intact, so I didn’t lose any files. However, several frequently-used applications will not run on my middle-aged laptop, some because of technical incompatibilities, some because of tyrannical DRM. I spent a little time recently searching for freeware to substitute for missing soft synths, and I found a few.
• Spicy Guitar is a pretty good physically-modeled acoustic guitar. In a mix with with a pinch of reverb, it can pass for the real thing, and it’s a lot cheaper than the AAS Strum Acoustic.
Krummhorn, ukelele and tuba
The past seven days have been rotten. It’s time for the Kuricorder Quartet. (You might remember them from Azumanga Daioh and Tsuritama.)
Update: I know what I want for Christmas.
Notes, musical and otherwise
There is an anime music tournament in the works, and the organizers seek your nominations. The following are what I came up with during breakfast this morning. There’s a lot of Susumu Hirasawa, Masumi Itou, Yuki Kajiura and Yoko Kanno. It’s not by accident.
Haibane Renmei — “Free Bird”
Paprika — “Mediational Field”
Azumanga Daioh — “Soramimi Cake”
Noir — “Salva Nos”
Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magica — “Sis Puella Magica”
Jinrui wa Suitai Shimashita — “Yume no Naka no Watashi no Yume”
Macross Plus — “Voices”
Paranoia Agent — “Yume no Shima Shinen Kouen”
Bakumatsu Kikansetsu Irohanihoheto — “Kouya Ruten”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Lithium Flower”
Shin Sekai Yori — “Wareta Ringo”
Ghost in the Shell SAC — “Inner Universe”
Paranoia Agent — “Shiroi Oka – Maromi no Theme”
Pumpkin Scissors — “Mercury Go”
Level E — “Cold Finger Girl”
Inevitably, I forgot a favorite: “Poltergeist,” from Ghost Hound.
***
No one ever visits my photo gallery. I decided to open a Flickr account, so even more people can ignore my pictures. It seems I timed it just right — the Flickr page sure looks pretty, but I have to wait for it to load completely twice before I can do anything there. I joined a few Flickr groups and, again, I timed it just right. It seems that Wichita photographers hang out at Facebook nowadays. Although I do have a Facebook account to keep tabs on family and friends, as a policy I post virtually nothing there. That’s not going to change.
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Satsuma-jima, not far from Kyushu, has been a bit feisty lately. I grabbed the picture above from the JMA webcam (third from the bottom of the list) this morning.
From the chariot boudoir
If you can’t find the video you want on YouTube, look elsewhere. (This is the complete recording of the song, not just the excerpt included in the eighth episode of Girls und Panzer (and censored on Crunchyroll). The missing section of the anime begins around 1:50.) ((Though the censored section is back on Youtube for now.))
So we’ve had girls with guns, girls as guns (or is that guns as girls?), girls with mecha, girls as combat aircraft, and now with girls with tanks. ((It’s actually not that new. See Those Who Hunt Elves — on second thought, don’t. It’s lousy; not even Kotono Mitsuishi could redeem it.)) It’s probably all just pandering to otaku, but perhaps there is something more sinister going on. If anime reflects reality, Japanese young men generally are either hapless dweebs or sparkly bishies and crossdressers. If you want to form an army, they’d be useless. You’d be better off drafting young women, who in Japan have talent for using the tools of war, and often magic, too. Girls und Panzer may be just the latest in a series of entertainments designed to accustom the Japanese to the idea of women as warriors.
At least one Chinese writer sees “evil intent militarism” in Girls und Panzer, though it’s difficult to follow the argument as interpreted by Giggle Translate. ((Giggle Translate insisted that the original language of the linked page was Irish.))
Cultural notes
For those who remember Leonard Pinth-Garnell.
*****
Norman Lebrecht says that The Rite of Spring was “a glorification of primitivism that challenged the values of modern society. Its response was reciprocal violence.” My own theory is that the riot at its premiere was caused by time-traveling aesthetes happy for an opportunity to get rowdy.
*****
The Locus Science Fiction Foundation bought the rights to R.A. Lafferty‘s writing a couple years ago and is planning to reprint his complete short stories. The first volume is due out early next year, in time for the centenary of his birth. Twenty or so years ago I tried to collect every book by Lafferty in print. Although I found numerous chapbooks and small-press editions, most of his writing was out of reach. The new edition is very welcome, even though the first volume costs $66.
If you’ve never read Lafferty, there are a handful of his stories online:
I’m pleased to observe that I am not the only R.A. Lafferty obsessive around. Andrew Ferguson is reading his way though Lafferty’s stories in order and commenting on them at Continued on Next Rock. See also The Ants of God Are Queer Fish.
Readers of Lafferty are often readers of Gene Wolfe as well. I recently found a couple of weblogs devoted to Wolfe, Silk for Caldé and The Silk and Horn Heresy.
Notes from Nineveh
The bishop administered Confirmation this Pentecost Sunday at the Cathedral this morning. While he was annointing the confirmandi, a string quartet in the choir loft played the “nocturne” from Borodin’s quartet. I would have enjoyed it under other circumstances, but this was the wrong place and time for the music. I suppose I should grateful that it wasn’t Marty Haugen or the St. Louis Jesuits.