OSI’s new album Blood is at least as outstanding as their previous two: a masterpiece between (sometimes heavy) melodic rock, smart grooves, and electronic music. In addition, Kevin Moore’s calm and soothing voice raises the chill level to the extraordinary. I’ve never paid particular attention to the actual words sung, just enjoyed the ambience.

The first verse of the second song, “Terminal”, kinda changed this for me. Whether due to the rhyme, a pathetic attempt to be alternative or strangely cool, alien brain infiltration, or excessive, mind-boggling drug consumption, at some point he sings:

I wanna talk shit when we get outside
I wanna play tough when you’re terrified
I wanna have fun like we used to did
I wanna […]

Oh the pain!

My friend Nicole and I rode our bikes from Chur across the San Bernardino (2066m) to the Lago Maggiore this weekend. The final 30-odd kilometres had us cycle down a busy road, against strong headwinds, with hurting necks, backs, bottoms, and thighs. It was then that OSI came to my head and I found myself singing a later portion of the aforementioned song:

Goin’ goin’ goin’, feet don’t fail me.

If OSI hadn’t screwed up the grammar so painfully, I might have never noticed how cheesy their lyrics were. Now I need to learn to fade them out and return to absorbing the truly excellent tunes alone. The album hovers high up there with other must-haves nonetheless.

NP: OSI: Blood

Dear recording industry: I hate almost all of you. One of my all-time favourite albums, Poland: The Warsaw Concert by Tangerine Dream, has been castrated, probably to save cost by squeezing a double LP onto a single CD. Today, Wikipedia turned my world upside down. Screw you, money-greedy recording industry. Please fuck off and leave music to those who care. This includes smaller labels who know what they are doing.

I now must have the full-length track. Unfortunately, it’s seemingly impossible to come by. I searched the Web, even dreaded sites like Ebay, but after an hour I gave up without success. There’s a seller on Amazon, but s/he consistently gets negative feedback, so that’s a bit risky for the price asked.

Thus, dear world, please save me: does anyone have the full-length third track of that album, titled “Barbakane”, in a high-quality digital recording and would let me have it? I will pose with the album and today’s newspaper to prove legal ownership. Heck, go ahead and make a ridiculous request, such as standing on my head. I’m desperate.

Update: Eric pointed me in the right direction, and now I have the track. Thank you so much. I have also found the album second-hand and ordered it, but I am a bit sceptical as to whether I’ll ever see it. It was worth a try though.

NP: Tangerine Dream: Poland (The Warsaw Concert)

While I have most of my albums encoded as Ogg Vorbis files, the music from my college days (and before) is still only on disc, either in a big box in storage, or in one of a couple Case Logic CD wallets I used back then to lug my tunes around the globe.

I’ve long been meaning to encode those and shove the boxes and cases into storage, but in more than a year, that hasn’t happened. A few weeks ago, my adorable girlfriend offered the necessary encouragement, suspecting that I might enjoy going through old music again. Right she was: it’s great fun. I didn’t think I was ever going to listen to Drum and Bass again, and now I am quite enjoying the music I listened to in high school.

Unfortunately, while encoding all those discs, there’s a pattern emerging: the discs from the box are all processed without any problems; the discs from the wallets yield many read errors. Inspecting the physical media, the cause seem to be scratches in the plastic deep enough to damage the reflective layer.

When CDs came out, they were touted to be rigid and sturdy. The material quality has noticeably decreased in the years, as the producers kept cutting their costs. Discs of the past 15 years aren’t good enough anymore to be stored in the Case Logic way. I wish I had known 15 years ago.

NP: LTJ Bukem: Logical Progression

I just saw The Cure, supported by 65daysofstatic, to which we arrived late. But the organisers had a reason why they started early. True to the concept of a Cure concert, the band played three hours, and two minutes more. And boy was it good. It felt like they were having the time of their lives on stage. Flawless.

If you have a chance, see them.

Gazpacho, one of my all-time favourite bands, are (finally) coming to Switzerland!!! On 17 October 2008, they’ll play a gig at the Z7 in Pratteln/Basel. Guess who’ll be there!?!

It makes me very happy that they have recently signed WiV Entertainment as event/tour managers, because it means I’ll probably get to see them more often in the future. To help a bit, I have agreed to be their Swiss “street team” (together with Tibor from Basel), which means I’ll be distributing flyers and posters when I return from Ireland, in exchange for free tickets for Penny and myself. You should join us! Tickets are €22 and can be ordered from the Z7 concert page (scroll down, I can’t link directly, unfortunately).

According to their news page (scroll down a bit), they are also playing in Oslo on 26 September, in Verviers, Belgium on 18 October, and in Den Bosch, The Netherlands on 19 October. Don’t miss them!

NP: Pulp: Freaks

When Graham Bell invented the telephone in 1876, he probably didn’t expect the rise of the cellphones we’ve been seeing over the last 20 years. At first, there were C-net phone too huge to carry, but mobile still, as they communicated wireless. Then, devices became smaller, networks faster and ubiquitous, and today, the number of cellphones sold worldwide has exceeded the population.

Much like everything else, “it used to be better back then”. When phone calls were still ridiculously expensive, people were able to enjoy their peace and life progressed slow for everyone to think enough, not do or say without engaging their brains. Then, when the first cellphones stuffed people’s pockets, they did their job pretty much from the start: you could make phone calls. Some genius discovered SMS as a splendid tool to rip off customers, so phones grew pager abilities, but other than that, they just worked; I remember my first phone, which didn’t break in years.

Obviously, if you’re a phone manufacturer, you don’t like that, because once you sell a phone that works, the customer won’t come back to give more monies in ten years. Clever as you are, you devised two schemes to ensure your cash flow: make phones more brittle and crap, so that they break within a year, at most two; and drag ever younger people into the debt trap. For the truly stupid, sites and services offer ring tones and games and what not, and the lesser challenged you keep close by the continuous addition of new features that noone needs.

So these days, almost every phone can play music files, which is mighty convenient to spice up your work commute with some tunes, but our youngsters are overburdened by that, it seems.

I almost soiled myself laughing at a group of five Italians at Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires, who were sitting around waiting for a bus, every one of them ear plugged and grooving to the beats (you know how dorky it looks when people silently sing along rap songs?). That’s not the funny part. The funny part is that every minute, one of them would say something, which would cause the others to unplug one ear, and form their lips to bleat “what” (making sure to add just a little bit extra of the tone of general disinterest, which is “cool”). This elicited one of two responses: either the original speaker would say “oh, nothing” and everyone nodded, or he’d repeat his wisdom, causing everyone to laugh and nod… before in both cases they replugged and returned to luff themselves. I wonder how they made it to the airport themselves, and why they travel as a group.

Worse than that, however, is that cellphone manufacturers remembered that their phones had speakers (for fancy ringtones) and consequently added the ability to blast tunes through them. As a result, groups of kiddies walk around or sit in trains, with one (or more) of those cellphones blaring into the environment.

Apart from being generally inconsiderate, what I don’t understand is how they put up with the sound quality. It’s mostly hip-hop music — you know that genre that makes some homies out there install 5000 watt subwoofers into their cars so make sure the windows rattle with the base — but these phones have a frequency spectrum comparable in width to that of your grandfather’s, way further up the scale (meaning they just don’t do base). Playing hip-hop through those is like putting a flute concerto on a subwoofer, just worse, because high-pitch tones are harder to filter by those who don’t want to hear them.

And yet, I see it all over the place, kiddies “listening” to music through cellphone speakers. Is it because silence would kill them?

NP: 65daysofstatic: The Fall of Math

The Japanese post-rock band Mono delivered an amazingly powerful album in 2006: You Are There. It features beautiful and spacious sound scenes produced with real instruments (as opposed to electronic music), in some ways much more so than Mono’s other, earlier albums, which I adore as well.

This album captivates me to the point that I can’t really to work to it; yet, it’s also just too good to turn off. I am stuck between a rock and a hard place, it seems.

On a related note: I am going to see Explosions in the Sky in Zurich’s Abart club next week. The music is very similar, not only because both bands are published by the same label, Temporary Residence (along with many other really good artists).

And I am excited about this for two reasons: first, because they rock. And second, because I’ll be with a certain someone then, whereas now I’d have to say that “you are there”.

NP: Mono: You Are There

People who know me are surprised when I tell them I play Guitar Hero, simply because I don’t ever touch gaming consoles, or any computer games whose complexity surpasses Pac Man, with a stick… except Guitar Hero, which is just fun.

I also listen to a bunch of music, whenever possible, basically, and there are plenty of songs that I’d love to try on Guitar Hero. Mel and I decided that e.g. Shine on You Crazy Diamond or Comfortably Numb are far up there (and they probably exist somewhere), but today I listened to Damn the River by The Phoenix Foundation and thought the same, yet I doubt that this song has been transcribed, which is a shame.

I am well aware that sites exist, or must exist, which have songs for download, or you could make your own (check out Metallica’s Master of Puppets there!). But that sounds like a lot of time lost, which I prefer to spend otherwise…

… like today it occurred to me that Guitar Hero 2000 is long overdue. Guitar Hero 2000 is the Guitar Hero game that takes your song on audio input and scans it in advance and that fits the song to play to the five frets in the game in real-time. It can’t be that hard. Where is it?

NP: Pure Reason Revolution: The Dark Third

I spent the night doing all these normal things in my dreams: washing dishes, coding, shopping, cleaning up my desk, etc..

The only thing that was common to all was that I sang Bohemian Rhapsody all along. In the morning, I was afraid I could have kept my flatmate awake, but he denied hearing anything.

Regardless, I am declaring today Queen Day and I’m already grooving.

NP: Queen: A Night at the Opera

I’d like to make it publicly known that I think Pulp are awesome.

NP: Pulp: It