The middle piece was horrifying! But in a good way! It was by a female Russian composer who Vadim worked closely with many years prior. I’ve never taken a liking to Shostakovich, who always seems to fall short of the mark for me. It’s just not extreme enough for me.

Sofia Gubaidulina’s masterpiece Offertorium was compelling, anxious, and terrifying, like the soundtrack to a Hitchcock thriller. Not everyone there loved it (most people prefer beauty to horror; I like both), but I was riveted. Astounded. Sofia has more balls than any male composer I’ve ever heard. It was the most maculine, unyeilding, strong piece I’ve yet heard in a classical music setting.

Awesome!

Audiophiles rejoice! This is a script for iTunes on intel Macs. Decompress, and put it in your ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts folder (create that folder if you don’t have it!).

This will create a menu in iTunes that allows you to import MP3s using the awesome LAME encoder, for top-quality MP3 encoding. This software differs from the original in that it is mostly made of intel-native binaries, offering a massive performance increase and better memory usage over running iTunes-LAME via Rosetta.

The actual iTunes-LAME app is still compiled for PPC; however, the LAME and AIFF-to-Quicktime binaries are now optimized for intel’s Core architecture.

If you are wondering why anyone would bother with iTunes-LAME, the answer is:

• iTunes’ MP3 encoder is focused on speed rather than sound quality
• LAME is as good as it gets in terms of sound quality; LAME is state-of-the-art, and very fast on intel Core processors.

My recommended flags for iTunes-Lame are:

My tastes are fairly broad, although I lean towards progressive (house/trance/breaks), and minimal techno.

I really can’t wait to share some of the gems I’ve found over the last few years! Most of the tracks highlighted on freshtunes.ca will be songs you can purchase for a small fee (usually about $1.50 per song) from sites like Beatport and KarmaDownload, but I’ll host some free live sets I’ve gotten my greedy hands on as well.

At some point I want to put google ads on freshtunes.ca, as well as link to amazon CDs and such, to try and generate revenue to cover my costs, but to be frank, the costs aren’t that great (~$100 USD/year), and I’m doing it for the love of it.

The site design (a WordPress theme) will be available shortly to the public.

I always say 98% of anything is crap; it’s the top 2% that keeps me going. Art, movies, music, etc. I guess I have high standards? Or everyone else in the world has lower standards. (Occam’s Razor: it must be everyone else.)

Anyway, I’ve come across a Canadian artist named Solvent at Beatport; he does melodic, bittersweet vocodered electro. That may sound clich?, but Solvent does it so very well that I can’t resist. I’ve got like 6 Solvent tracks in my basket (along with like 20 other tracks) so that when I’m, er, solvent again I will purchase them, stat. Or maybe I’ll charge them to my credit card and pay later, which is usually how these things work out.

Recommendations:

• My Radio (Extended mix and Schneider TM Mustang interpretation), a touching lifestory of Solvent’s love of music, from his first guitar, etc.
• Wish, more bittersweet vocodered musings for rainy days.
• Devices and Strategies, a classical-inspired staccato melody.
• Radio Goo Goo, a patient, slightly sinister darker track with middle eastern influences.

Listen here

Visit Solvent’s homepage

Download free tracks! (A Quiet Life is good)

I should also mention I’m not super-huge into house; most house is a little too “flaming” for me… a little too disco-ish or tacky or whatever. I’m generally not into vocals either.
This guy doesn’t just do house; he does druggy, spatial, liquid, freaky, groovy house that ripples and smears with tracers, that hovers in the air between your speakers and you. This guy does my kind of house. This music reminds me of coming home high as a kite as a teenager and listening to CITR 101.9 FM in Vancouver and listening to the alien sounds of house, drum and bass and techno until the wee hours of the morning, or until the drugs wore off and I could sleep. Music so far out there as to be almost inaccessible, yet strangely seductive. True human creativity in its rawest, purest form.

This music actually makes me feel high, the highest honor of any urban art work. It makes me nostalgic. And speaking of drugs, I’m guessing Joshua Collins did his fair share of acid back in the day.

Whoa.

linky

more linkage

Songs I bought:

Without You, Mesmotized, Mesmorize, Never Let Go, Nastiness, Feel It In The Air, Must Please You, Last Chance, World Keeps Turning, Evolution (Josh Collins remix)

I keep running in to Andrew’s sister, Katherine, and her/Andrew’s dad… always a pleasure. It’s always nice to see someone in my age group (the vast majority are in their 60-70′s) at these events.

Thank you, Anne, who gave me season tickets to such wonderful concerts. The best gift I’ve ever been given?