moods, music and movement
Both R and i were in pretty dismal moods over the past week or so. It came to a head a few days back when she admitted she was under a lot of stress because of her boss being on vacation and the replacement guy creating drama, plus her family wants her to go out and socialize for various events even though she is still worried about COVID. Meanwhile i am feeling utterly powerless due to the usual immigration process grind, i can't make any plans until i have work permits and visa and all the rest of it, but i can't do anything to affect the processing - i am just stuck in limbo... And, even worse, stuck in limbo in somebody else's house, in a town that is a sprawling and depressing suburb.
After talking to each other, it seemed to ease the tension. I decided i'd get out of her hair so she could deal with her family stuff and be able to come back to a home of her own instead of being stuck with yet more social interaction. She assured me it was okay to stay through Father's Day, which apparently is something that people actually celebrate outside of Hallmark cards (who knew?) because it makes a good excuse for her not to have to go. But next week Tuesday i will head out to BC. Not because my work permit has arrived and i have anything useful to do there, but just to give R some space and to make me feel like i am doing "something", even though that something will affect nothing.
Before leaving Windsor, i decided to take a walk up to Lake St Clair, which isn't considered a Great Lake, but imo it totally counts as a great lake, because you can't see the other side of it.
It was a long walk, around 25km round trip, and on a day that counted as an "extreme heat warning" for this part of Canada, by which they meant in the low 30s. I found it comfortable weather to be outside, pleasantly warm and not too hot at all. But because there are virtually no highrises and very few trees, it was a whole hell of a lot of direct sun, and my skin really felt it, even with the 100SPF sunblock i picked up in Colombia. But... end of the day, i felt happy. It was good to get some exercise and some sun.
Today i got completely distracted by music. For the first time in a very, very long time. Music used to be one of the most important things in my life. I bought music all the time, i listened to it a lot, when i was younger i made music, when i was older i learned to DJ, i love analyzing it, the different sounds, the history, the cultural aspects... But nowadays i rarely even listen to it, because i find that i cannot really enjoy music unless it is the only thing i am doing. I am not really able to listen to music in the background while doing something else. It just takes all of my attention. And because i have so many other things to do - whether working or traveling or watching TV or playing a game or reading or writing... i find that music doesn't really get a moment any more.
But i realized how important it still was to me when i took photos of the two boxes of CDs in R's basement that survived the flood of a few years back (one did not). I have ripped 261 albums into my music player - that's just CDs. I've also bought 948 individual tracks and have 417 pirated ones (mostly copied from friends the old-fashioned way). But even with all those songs, i still have dozens of CDs that i haven't ripped yet. I ripped almost all of the indie label stuff before leaving in Canada, so most of what's left is major label pop and rock, which is trivial to find on YouTube so i don't really care, but there were still a few rare and long out-of-print CDs down there. Unfortunately i do not have a CD-ROM drive any more, and neither does R.
So instead i spent today visiting my favorite dodgy Russian torrent website tracking down CDs that i actually owned but cannot rip, that somebody else has ripped lossless, then backing up the FLACs and reencoding to 320k MP3 to put in my music player. There are still a bunch of tracks i'll probably never get back, but i got a bunch of stuff back that brought back a lot of memories.
People always say that your music tastes get stuck in your teenage years and they're right. Even for people like me who keep on buying music well into their adulthood, and who even find new favorites in their adulthood, and construct awesome memories around those... there will always be something magical about that music that you discovered when you were a teenager. For me it was electronic music. Techno, house and even a bit of trance. I heard it and fell in love. It was music that sounded like what my brain sounded like on the inside. I'll never really understand rock/guitar music or anything with lyrics as deeply as i understand techno. Synthesizers just speak to me, they make more sense than any kind of lyrics or acoustically plinked or plonked sound generator.
I think i have posted a lot of my favorites on LiveJournal before, i don't need to play them again. But here is one song that i haven't listened to in years and just got back on my music player again today. It came out in 1993, and i think i found it in 1995 when i was 15. Around that time it had already been remixed into an extremely overwrought, extremely popular big room trance classic. Everybody knows the remix. It's still played in clubs to this day. But i always found it wanky and overblown, everything i hate about trance - or what trance became from around the mid-90s onward. The original, however? Wow. It's just so clean and simple, with that perfect refrain twinkling up in the top layer. I often find the riff dancing through my mind as i wander around the world, cycle out in the country, just that simple four note sequence. The song is Schöneberg by Marmion. Listen for those high bells coming in at 1:45... Bliss.
Marmion - Schöneberg
Even though over the years i ended up getting more into deep house on the slow end and acid techno on the fast end, as much as i hate to admit it, the music i made myself always ended up sounding more like that early/mid 90s melodic techno. I can't stop myself from wanting to use pleasant harmonies and minor scales for everything.
Here is another track from a similar era - Hardfloor's The Last Marshmellow Machine. Prior to their 1995 album they did full-blown German acid trance, and afterwards they went more into more cerebral stuff, but for a very brief period - the exact period that i got into them - they had some lovely stripped down tech house and acid music
Hardfloor - The Last Marshmellow Machine
The wonderful thing when listening to it is you can hear the way we used to write electronic music, with each instrument in a slightly different stereo channel - one tom panned a bit to the left, one tom panned a bit to the right, because why not? You don't hear that as often nowadays because people run all their instruments through effects that create a stereo reverb or delay of some sort, so the music sounds "wider" but somehow less clean. I love the era of techno where what you hear is what you get, just putting synthesizers front and center, without so many effects muddying up the mix.
Do you remember this one?
Sun Electric - Beauty O'Locco
After talking to each other, it seemed to ease the tension. I decided i'd get out of her hair so she could deal with her family stuff and be able to come back to a home of her own instead of being stuck with yet more social interaction. She assured me it was okay to stay through Father's Day, which apparently is something that people actually celebrate outside of Hallmark cards (who knew?) because it makes a good excuse for her not to have to go. But next week Tuesday i will head out to BC. Not because my work permit has arrived and i have anything useful to do there, but just to give R some space and to make me feel like i am doing "something", even though that something will affect nothing.
Before leaving Windsor, i decided to take a walk up to Lake St Clair, which isn't considered a Great Lake, but imo it totally counts as a great lake, because you can't see the other side of it.
It was a long walk, around 25km round trip, and on a day that counted as an "extreme heat warning" for this part of Canada, by which they meant in the low 30s. I found it comfortable weather to be outside, pleasantly warm and not too hot at all. But because there are virtually no highrises and very few trees, it was a whole hell of a lot of direct sun, and my skin really felt it, even with the 100SPF sunblock i picked up in Colombia. But... end of the day, i felt happy. It was good to get some exercise and some sun.
Today i got completely distracted by music. For the first time in a very, very long time. Music used to be one of the most important things in my life. I bought music all the time, i listened to it a lot, when i was younger i made music, when i was older i learned to DJ, i love analyzing it, the different sounds, the history, the cultural aspects... But nowadays i rarely even listen to it, because i find that i cannot really enjoy music unless it is the only thing i am doing. I am not really able to listen to music in the background while doing something else. It just takes all of my attention. And because i have so many other things to do - whether working or traveling or watching TV or playing a game or reading or writing... i find that music doesn't really get a moment any more.
But i realized how important it still was to me when i took photos of the two boxes of CDs in R's basement that survived the flood of a few years back (one did not). I have ripped 261 albums into my music player - that's just CDs. I've also bought 948 individual tracks and have 417 pirated ones (mostly copied from friends the old-fashioned way). But even with all those songs, i still have dozens of CDs that i haven't ripped yet. I ripped almost all of the indie label stuff before leaving in Canada, so most of what's left is major label pop and rock, which is trivial to find on YouTube so i don't really care, but there were still a few rare and long out-of-print CDs down there. Unfortunately i do not have a CD-ROM drive any more, and neither does R.
So instead i spent today visiting my favorite dodgy Russian torrent website tracking down CDs that i actually owned but cannot rip, that somebody else has ripped lossless, then backing up the FLACs and reencoding to 320k MP3 to put in my music player. There are still a bunch of tracks i'll probably never get back, but i got a bunch of stuff back that brought back a lot of memories.
People always say that your music tastes get stuck in your teenage years and they're right. Even for people like me who keep on buying music well into their adulthood, and who even find new favorites in their adulthood, and construct awesome memories around those... there will always be something magical about that music that you discovered when you were a teenager. For me it was electronic music. Techno, house and even a bit of trance. I heard it and fell in love. It was music that sounded like what my brain sounded like on the inside. I'll never really understand rock/guitar music or anything with lyrics as deeply as i understand techno. Synthesizers just speak to me, they make more sense than any kind of lyrics or acoustically plinked or plonked sound generator.
I think i have posted a lot of my favorites on LiveJournal before, i don't need to play them again. But here is one song that i haven't listened to in years and just got back on my music player again today. It came out in 1993, and i think i found it in 1995 when i was 15. Around that time it had already been remixed into an extremely overwrought, extremely popular big room trance classic. Everybody knows the remix. It's still played in clubs to this day. But i always found it wanky and overblown, everything i hate about trance - or what trance became from around the mid-90s onward. The original, however? Wow. It's just so clean and simple, with that perfect refrain twinkling up in the top layer. I often find the riff dancing through my mind as i wander around the world, cycle out in the country, just that simple four note sequence. The song is Schöneberg by Marmion. Listen for those high bells coming in at 1:45... Bliss.
Click to viewMarmion - Schöneberg
Even though over the years i ended up getting more into deep house on the slow end and acid techno on the fast end, as much as i hate to admit it, the music i made myself always ended up sounding more like that early/mid 90s melodic techno. I can't stop myself from wanting to use pleasant harmonies and minor scales for everything.
Here is another track from a similar era - Hardfloor's The Last Marshmellow Machine. Prior to their 1995 album they did full-blown German acid trance, and afterwards they went more into more cerebral stuff, but for a very brief period - the exact period that i got into them - they had some lovely stripped down tech house and acid music
Hardfloor - The Last Marshmellow Machine
The wonderful thing when listening to it is you can hear the way we used to write electronic music, with each instrument in a slightly different stereo channel - one tom panned a bit to the left, one tom panned a bit to the right, because why not? You don't hear that as often nowadays because people run all their instruments through effects that create a stereo reverb or delay of some sort, so the music sounds "wider" but somehow less clean. I love the era of techno where what you hear is what you get, just putting synthesizers front and center, without so many effects muddying up the mix.
Do you remember this one?
Sun Electric - Beauty O'Locco