According to Old Holborn, everyone is already doing this, so I am probably late.
Top 5 rock albums:
1 Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Emerson, Lake and Palmer
2 Magma: Mekanik Destruktiw Kommandoh
3 Emerson, Lake and Palmer: Brain Salad Surgery
4 Yes (with Patrick Moraz): Relayer
5 Premiata Forneria Marconi: Photos of Ghosts
Pretentious, complicated and classically-based: now that’s what I call [...]
Archive for the ‘music’ Category
Top 5 rock albums
Posted in music, tagged Rock Top 5 on 22 April, 2009 | 5 Comments »
“We have both kinds. Country and Western.”
Posted in music, tagged Tom Jones on 21 March, 2009 | 4 Comments »
[The Blues Brothers]
I really shouldn’t listen to the BBC.
Having completed the pre-news political indoctrination slot, in which a member (or fanatical supporter) of the Labour Party holds forth, usually upon the topic of social engineering, without any pretence at balanced debate, Radio 4 got on to the news, the main story of which was a [...]
Mama don’t allow no clarinet-playing here
Posted in music, tagged risk assessments on 11 November, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Register reports that
A dozen London boroughs have implemented a “risk assessment” policy for live music that permits the police to ban any live music if they fail to receive personal details from the performers 14 days in advance. The demand explicitly singles out performances and musical styles favoured by the black community: garage and [...]
Lovely Ludwig van
Posted in music, tagged Beethoven on 29 October, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Johnathan Pearce, at Samizdata, says that Ayn Rand
…regarded Beethoven as “malevolent”, which is a pretty bizarre comment on the creator of “Ode To Joy”, about as unmalevolent bit of music you can ever hear.
I beg to differ. I feel that Rand was prescient in this, as perhaps in other matters.
The Ode to Joy has been [...]
Cloth-eared git
Posted in music, tagged hi-fi on 30 September, 2008 | 4 Comments »
David Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance, appears to be a member of that highly exclusive group sometimes referred to as ‘hi-fi subjectivists’.
Once upon a time everyone was into hi-fi, and very good some of it was, too. Then (just as with cameras) people stopped worrying about quality, and started wanting automation, convenience, and features which [...]
Electromagnetic percussion
Posted in music, tagged electromagnetic on 29 September, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m so glad I never had to work in the lab next door to this fellow’s.
It is a finely composed (by him) and executed (by his computer) piece of something between musique concrète and the Art of Noises, but while he was working it all out I bet it sounded no better than his camerawork [...]
Stockhausen Night
Posted in music, tagged stockhausen on 2 August, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The Proms concert tonight features Stockhausen.
This is the sort of music referred to by Sir Arthur C. Clarke as ‘atonal cacophonies’, and by Mrs. Underclass’ mother (a classical soprano) as ’squeaky gate music’.
If I were properly English then I should be obliged to like, or at least plausibly pretend to like, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten [...]
