The Clan of the Cave Bague

For those of you who may be reading on facebook, you might be better popping over to http://www.nelefa.org to read this. If you’re already here – well, that’s alright then

Ok, so these weren’t all necessarily released in 2009, but some of them were. They’re albums that affected me in various ways throughout the course of the year. They’re not listed in any particular order as it’s just not possible to compare them as they cross so many genres of music. For each album, I’ve suggested a couple of tracks that listeners unfamiliar with the artist can listen to to get a semi-representative view of the album.

Bruce Springsteen – The Rising. Ok, so the boss is getting on a bit and maybe even getting a little introspective in his old age, but that’s not a bad thing. The Rising seems, at first listening anyway, to be a lot more spiritual than you’d expect from Mr Springsteen. There’s a lot of Gospel influences in here as well as the slightly-cheesy patriotic Americana we all know and love. I’d recommend listening to “The Rising”, “Worlds Apart”, and / or “My City of Ruins” for a bit of an insight into the overall tone of the album.

Note: if you find poignant songs about 9/11 annoying, you may rate this album slightly lower than I do.

Sabaton – The Art of War. I seem to have arrived at the Sabaton party a good while after everyone else – I discovered them after Apple finally got Genius working as far as recommendations go. The Art of War is a stonking album largely based around, as you might expect from the title, various aspects of Warfare. Naturally, guitars dominate the album, but that doesn’t prevent Joakim Brodén’s titanic vocals from keeping you riveted in your seat for the duration. I’d recommend “The Art of War”, “40-1″ and “Cliffs of Gallipoli” but this is really an arbitrary choice. There truly isn’t a bad track on the album, so take your pick.

The Devin Townsend Project – Addicted. A little poppier than the other two, but don’t let it fool you – this is a seriously heavy album. Production-wise, it’s like a spiritual successor to something by Phil Specter – from start to finish, the album is a wall of sound. It has the same dominating qualities as something like, say, Blind Guardian, but presenting catchy pop songs instead of overly laboured bewildering slices of WTF?? There’s touches of KMFDM / Black Lung style industrial electronica mixed with grind metal all with garbage style guitar hooks and cheeky lyrics. There’s even a little bit of pathos in there. I’d recommend listening to “Bend it like Bender!”, “Supercrush!” and “Hyperdrive!” as a way of getting started.

Them Crooked Vultures. Well, any band featuring John Paul Jones, Dave Grohl and Josh Homme has to be something special. This is most definitely a special album. Soundwise, you get the impression of a very rough ‘everything in one take’ recording, which is perfectly in fitting with the musical style. There’s a bit of everything in this album; psychedelia, metal, rock, pop, beautiful harmonies and strangely effective discords. It also benefits from what is possibly the fattest guitar sound I’ve ever heard. I guess this is what you get when you stick three seriously accomplished musicians in one place and leave them to their own devices. This album manages to sound old and familiar at the same time as being new and exciting. Go figure. Really, you should just go and buy it immediately, but if you insist on recommended tracks, go with “No one loves me & neither do I” or “Elephants.”

Turisas – The Varangian Way. This isn’t only the most epic metal album I’ve ever heard, it’s quite possibly the most epic ANYTHING. Varangian Way is Turisas’s second album and builds on their debut, Battle Metal, in almost every way. The same “viking metal” style is there, but the accordions have been replaced by full orchestration on many tracks. I wouldn’t say Varangian Way is better than Battle Metal because the two albums are complimentary and each serve their purpose equally well. Varangian Way just seems a little richer. Again, there  isn’t a bad track on the album, but start out with “Miklagard Overture” and “Cursed be Iron”.

So there we have it. Notable mentions go to “Dark Passion Play” by Nightwish, “Marshall Mathers LP” by Eminem and about a million others, but those five up there have made the biggest impact on me.

Just because. No particular reason.

It doesn’t do this, by default, unless you’re syncing your whole music collection automatically. Which is a bit rubbish if, like me, you have an 8Gb iPod Touch and a 60Gb music library.

See, what I tend to do, to make sure I actually rotate my music and listen to more than one album (:-)) is have a smart playlist which contains 25 unrated songs selected randomly. But what I want to do is rate them on the ipod as they play and have their rating in iTunes updated on my next sync. Well, I’ve worked out it CAN be done, albeit in a slightly roundabout way.

1. Create your smart playlist: Mine matches the rule Rating is: (no stars), limit to 25 items, match only checked items, live updating.
2. I have another smart playlist which is my highest rated songs (this is one of the defaults you get) and another that I just drop random stuff I want to listen to in.
3. Connect your iPod. In the summary screen, make sure “Sync only checked songs and videos” is checked. In the Music tab you want to check “Sync Music” and “Selected playlists”.
4. Now select your playlists – I have me “Random Stuff” playlist, my “Top Rated” one and, of course, my “Unrated Songs” one.
5. Sync your ipod. Listen to songs. Rate them. Sync it again and POOF! iTunes updates!

This all sounds horribly obvious, you cry – why bother writing about it? It’s the “Summary” tab that’s the stumbling point. By default, you wouldn’t check “Sync on checked…” because that would be silly. But if you don’t, it doesn’t sync back. Go figure.

Despite loving music and loving reading, I very rarely do both at the same time. For some reason, though, while sitting on the sofa reading “Wizard and Glass” this morning, I felt an urge to put on “Greetings from Asbury Park N.J.” by the inimitable Mr Springsteen.

I wonder if Stephen King was listening to this album while writing – it seems like such an incredibly appropriate soundtrack. Or maybe it’s just because it’s an album I really like. Either way, it’s an awesome experience – you should try it sometime.

Well, that’s an odd thing! Getting a bit better now – the repeated scales and slurring exercises have enabled me to at least wrest a tune from its brassy bowels. Or something. But the odd thing is, since exercising in earnest, I can actually get a reasonable sound of a Mrs Gubbins tenor horn and Master Gubbins junior’s cornet!

So, it would appear that what They say is true – practicing low notes makes you better at high notes. Either that or I’ve just been blowing the baritone wrong and the bass (which is, I believe, a much less forgiving instrument) is pulling me up on my slopping breathing / blowing.

Slurring. That’s what I need to do. Low G/A -> F is flawless. G -> B Fine. High(er) C->F fine. Low G/A -> High(er) F not as smooth as it could be – mostly because of the changes in embouchure at C, G and C.

So back to C->G->C->G->C slurring. Over and over again. Until I’m dead, my lungs come out the end of the bass, or I can do it. Whichever comes first.

We’re very pleased with ourselves. Last night was the Livingston and Broxburn Brass Band’s christmas concert and the whole lot of us were playing! And we weren’t awful! So, nerves shot to hell, the panic is just starting to subside (panic, I might add, caused by hearing just how amazing the senior band are) and I’m looking forward to going back to learning at a sedate pace instead of worrying about performing.

I’m sure we’ll be more relaxed the next time.

Just when the jingly-jangly boyband-poptastic misery of Christmas was getting into it’s sticky-sweet candied frenzy, an amazing discovery has been made! The Crash Test Dummies made an album of Christmas Carols and I never knew! It’s a collection of all the traditional christmas standards and it’s completely awesome! From now on, my Christmas listening habits will be directed very much in the direction of Brad Roberts’ funereal sonorous drawl.

I am a very happy bunny.

Ok, so here’s the problem:

1. I have a decrepit old PC that I need to find a job for or it’s destined to sit on a scrapheap biodegrading over the next 10,000 years.
2. We don’t have room to have all our CDs anywhere near handy so have to listen to our music on the computer speakers.
3. We have a very good and very expensive hi-fi seperates system going to waste.

Here are contributing issues:

1. Despite having a nice hi-fi, we’re not too bothered about the loss of quality of playing stuff via MP3 because we rarely get a chance to actually sit and listen these days – it’s generally background.
2. We don’t like have cables stretched across the room and the PC is too far from the hi-fi to have a cable run.

So here’s the solution.

First of all, nab a copy of Ubuntu Server from http://www.ubuntu.com. Ubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Debian and is free software.

Next, we need to stick in a big enough disk to hold all the MP3s. In our case, I put in two disks in a RAID1 (mirrored) configuration cos I really don’t want to have to rip all those CDs again if we lose the disk.

Now then – time to get the “server” out of the middle of the living room before my lovely wife batters me – it’s duly lugged behind the TV unit (where the hi-fi is) and the sound output connected to the amplifier. Also, this particular machine has a USB wifi dongle plugged in (Thanks Dad!) so there’s no need for trailing network cables.

So, boot it up and off it goes. When installing Ubuntu, I told it I wanted a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) machine – it’s easy enough to set up normally, but Ubuntu does it all for you. I also installed openssh-server so I can actually log in to the thing.

Next thing I need are a couple of extra pieces of software:

1. GD PHP extensions – for manipulating images from PHP scripts.
2. MPD – the music player daemon. This little wonder sits on a network port and waits to be told what to play.
3. MPDscribble – an optional one this, but it basically submits everything played by MPD to my Last.FM profile, so you can see it listed on the right of this site.
4. Some extra codecs – Ubuntu, by default, doesn’t provide support for restricted formats like MP3. As it happens, I wanted to check that the audio was all working so installed mp3blaster – that pulled in all the restricted modules as dependencies so I  didn’t have to specify them manually. I also needed a mixer program to make sure the volumes were set properly.

The following terminal command does all that:

sudo apt-get install php5-gd mpd mpdscribble mp3blaster rexima

Grind crunch grind all done. First of all I ran rexima to set the mixer volumes. ACE.

Now then – time to get some music on it. I scp’d my MP3 files to /home/jmd/music. MPD, by default (on Ubuntu at least) looks in /var/lib/mpd/music for music files. I have the choice of either changing /etc/mpd.conf to point to /home/jmd/music or replace /var/lib/mpd/music with a symlink back to /home/jmd/music. I did the latter cos it’s a bit neater. Then I made sure that /home/jmd/music was readable by the apache user. One restart of mpd later and it can find all my music. ACE.

Now then – how will I control the thing remotely? The answer is via a web browser. Remember we told Ubuntu to set up a LAMP server? Well, it was off to http://www.jinzora.org to download the latest release. Jinzora is a full-featured web based jukebox which, as well as providing an interface to a local mpd instance, can also stream music from the server over the internet. I’m not interested in the streaming part (although it might be useful for listening to The Goons in my bed via my wireless Ubuntu laptop ), just the mpd jukebox part.

So, download Jinzora, untar it and copy the contents to /var/www, followed by a quick chown www-user:www-user of the files so it can modify itself, and then follow the instructions.

The result – I can play, update, organise and manage our music collection via a web browser and it plays back via the hi-fi. ACE.

I’ve done this kind of set up before so it took my literally 15 minutes (excluding the time taken to copy 40Gb of MP3s over the network) to set up – I reckon a first time user could do it in less than an hour.

Now begins the tweaking!

Or that’s how it seemed. After what seems like an eternity of listening to music on mp3 players and laptops, we finally got our nice shiny hifi set up last night. Between the big chunky toroid transformers and the fairy-dust powered magical crossover in Linn speakers, we dragged Nina off the surface of the disc and planted her in the middle of the room to sing for us.

And lovely it was.