Winter Music

I know Winter's on the outs.
I had planned to do one of these probably in late December, but I didn't.

Just like Autumn, though, Winter brings with it a certain mood that - for whatever reason - makes certain music seem more desirable. Sometimes, it's just because I happened to buy or receive an album in the season in question, and it's some kind of internal and mechanical nostalgia that my brain wants to hear the same music it heard around the same time last year (things get cramped as I buy more music, but it all works out in the end).

I had a tough time with this, because I wanted to do a better job of distinguishing between albums I just happen to want to listen to in the winter vs. albums which actually share some kind of thematic feeling with the season - where I would be showcasing the latter here.
Likewise, it's a little difficult to pick just one album by a particular artist, given that some artists just happen to write a lot of music that sounds wintry to me. I'll probably mention a few alternates here anyway.

For some reason, Winter seems to my mind to be a season of electonics. Electronic music, fused with organic sounds like orchestras and choirs, glockenspiels... that sort of thing. You'll see.


Bjork - Vespertine
Bjork is one of those artists who has a few wintry albums. She explains that she had wanted to capture some of the essence of her native Iceland, using organic sounds as percussion, but programming it digitally. The result on the album she was talking about - Homogenic - and to a much greater extent on Vespertine is music that conjures images of trudging through deep snow or soaring over mountainous icecaps and glaciers. While Homogenic seems to clumsily try to execute that fusion of organic with electronic by nailing it to the back of popsongs - Vespertine eschews the throwbacks to film music, jazz standards, and angry-girl music in favour of structured, but free songs about making love.
Yep. Pretty much every song on the album is, in some way about making love - sometimes a little more explicitly than I'm comfortable with. That said, there's something pretty wintry about fucking. As a child born in August, it's no surprise to me that in the cold of winter, people try to warm up by getting close to eachother... in a sexual sort of way.

Here's one of the more illustrative tracks from Vespertine: "Hidden Place"
Also check out: Pagan Poetry, Aurora, Unison



Radiohead - OK Computer
I wanted to feature Kid A instead, because it's my favourite, but it's not exactly the right choice. Kid A is a dark sort of album, and evokes the feelings of winter you might have while driving through grey slush in a salt-crusted car. That's not exactly what I'm going for here.
On the other hand, its predecessor OK computer is a more lush and atmospheric sort of album that - while still making me think of driving in a salt-encrusted car - makes me think of a brighter snowier time. Perhaps it would be accurate to say that OK Computer is the bright sunny winter day to Kid A's dark, damp winter's night.
On Kid A, singer Thom Yorke's voice haunts the listener, while on OK Computer, it simply soars.

Here's my favourite track from OK Computer, "Subterranean Homesick Alien"
Also check out No Surprises, Airbag, Let Down, The Tourist



BT - This Binary Universe
I want to emphasize just how much I love this album. I discovered it by chance on the last.fm radio service. I had been familiar with Brian Transeau's work as a dance music producer of some renown. I'd heard some remixes. It didn't blow my top.
This album did. This album is not dance music.
For This Binary Universe, BT took elements of film music, orchestral music, and meshed it with glitch music, jazz, breakbeat, ambient, acoustic guitars, soft pianos... a bunch of stuff. As I've mentioned, it perfectly combines electronics and organics in some of the most beautiful and compelling ways. Some tracks are more wintry than others, but overall, the whole album gives one the sense of flying in the night sky and looking down on snow-covered landscapes around the world. The CD even comes with an addition DVD with a 5.1 surround mix and each song gets its own short film to accompany it. It's really something.

Here's one of my favourites from this album: 'Good Morning Kaia' - written for his daughter.
Also try The Internal Locus and The Antikythera Mechanism.



Hybrid - Wide Angle
Few people have heard of Hybrid, for some reason. A friend (who has now gone on to do some pretty decent music himself) introduced me to them ages ago. Once again, they are primarily electronic music producers, but as the name suggests, they create a hybrid of orchestral music and 'nu-skool breaks' as they're known, that provides something lush, beautiful, and often very driving.
On Wide Angle, Hybrid gives their first and, in my opinion, their best example of a winter album and also just a beautiful fusion of orchestral with breakbeat. Much of the cohesiveness of the album relies on the amazing vocal work of frequent David Lynch collaborator Julee Cruise. She's on a number of tracks on the album.
Part of what makes me think of winter with this album is the combination of those string sections with the beats (I'm trying not to repeat myself), in that I imagine myself doing what I've done a number of times while listening to this album: walking through the snow down main street in my home town at a fast pace in order to get where I'm going as fast as possible. The energy of the music makes the briskness of the weather something refreshing and energizing rather than oppressive.

Here's my favourite track from the album, and also one of my favourite songs: "If I Survive" featuring Julee Cruise on vocals.
Also try Dreaming your Dreams, Sniper, and Finished Symphony.



Nine Inch Nails - Still
It's not exactly an official album. Still was released as a bonus disc for the 2001 live album And All That Could Have Been. It only has a limited amount of new material on it, but in many ways, it bridges a gap between the last official album The Fragile, and its live album. Now, most fans have an understanding that Trent Reznor was in a very bad state by the end of recording The Fragile, and was near death due to his addictions to alcohol and drugs by the end of the following tour.
Still is an album that takes some older songs and re-imagines them in a stripped down way, with Reznor on piano a drum machine, and the occasional atmospheric or guitar part.
However, that stuff, while interesting, soft, and introspective isn't really the centrepiece (nor the wintriest part) of the album. The rest of the music is primarily made up of instrumental outtakes from The Fragile, and unused pieces of music meant for Mark Romanek's film One Hour Photo (which ended up using music by Johnny Klimek, who scored Run Lola Run).
Two key tracks from the album which are both very wintry to me are the new vocal song "And All That Could Have Been", (whose lyrics evoke images of snow, ice in order to reflect a love gone cold), and the closing instrumental track "Leaving Hope" whose instrumentation and melody bring to mind the darker side of winter. The isolation, the melancholy, the cold...

Here is Leaving Hope.
Also listen to Adrift and At Peace, Gone Still, and And All that Could Have Been.



Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
I actually tend to associate Goldfrapp's other albums with winter, more because that is when I bought them and listened to them until I got sick of them. On the other hand, the album Felt Mountain is a different sort of animal than her other albums. This album has been described as a cross between James Bond Themes and UFO movie soundtracks. I don't disagree.
The beautiful string arrangements, oddly sexual and sometimes sinister lyrics and delivery, the subdued, jazzy rhythms. It's very Bond... but then there's something altogether weird and sci-fi about it too.
Now, what makes it wintry? Again, this album is a night-time sort of album (or at least, a very early morning sort of album). But rather than the harshness of winter, the album evokes the warmer moments, sitting by a fire and looking out at snowflakes illuminated by streetlights... poofy stuff like that. Of course, I have to add that the combination of electronics with an organic sort of sound is very much what makes me think of winter when I hear it.

Here's a favourite of mine from the album: "Pilots"
Also try Lovely Head, Paper Bag, Human, and Utopia (the whole album, really).



Rush - Power Windows
Power Windows comes from a strange, transitory time in Rush's career. While they had previously cut a niche for themselves as philosophically charged, masterful prog-rockers, their early 80s album Signals saw them drop the extended rock numbers in favour of synthesizer driven rock songs in a more new-wave style.
Power Windows came in 1985, the third of these albums laden with synthesizer. And, while I had initially been put out by the transition to synth-rock, as soon as I heard the opener "The Big Money" I had to rethink things.
It's a punch in the face. It's a snow-plow of awesome, charging through a snow-bank and revealing the best band ever, playing behind it.
Okay, that was a little silly.
But, something about the cold tone of the synthesizers coupled with Alex Lifeson's reverbed guitar makes me think of ice and snow. To me, it's as though the drab winter slush of the previous album Grace Under Pressure is being buried in fluffy snow, and the band has come out to play.

Whatever. Just listen to this: "The Big Money"
Also try Grand Designs, Manhattan Project, and Territories.


(try to ignore how ridiculous and 80s they look).

Sigur Ros - ( )
Technically, every Sigur Ros album sounds pretty wintry. They come from Iceland, like Bjork, and they also employ a combination of electronics (less so than Bjork) with strings and ethereal atmospheres. The album ( ) is unique in that none of its songs have official titles, and the album itself is named with a pair of parentheses. The liner notes are empty, and you're encouraged to write your own. The lyrics are a nonsensical made-up language called 'Vonlenska' (which translates loosely to 'Hopelandish' - a combination between hope, icelanic, and english).
There is a duality to the album, in that the first four tracks are more uplifting, and the latter four are much darker and melancholy.
The album is very wintry, with the album art showing images of what appear to be dead, leafless tree branches, the sound of feet trudging through snow, the ethereal drone of bowed guitar, Jonsi's soaring and drifting falsetto...
It's all very beautiful.

Even the music video for the first track (unofficially known as "Vaka") has winter imagery, with a bit of an ironic twist.
Also check out Track 3, Track 6 and Track 8.



M83 - Before the Dawn Heals Us
This album was a bit hard to choose, because I know that apart from Saturdays = Youth, an album which I included in my Autumn Music post, most M83 albums are very wintry.
They create a wall of electronic sound, burying ethereal and dreamy vocals underneath layers of drum and keyboard. The french duo create soundscapes that make one think of a cold winter city at night. Snow sparkling under street lights while cars speed by. Like others on this list, Before the Dawn Heals Us is a reflection of the darker, sadder side of winter. Its choirs and long sad ambient pieces tend to echo the emotions of the person who feels isolated and cold in winter.
I remember, one of the first times I heard the album, I was on a bus packed with strangers and carrying a heavy suitcase, and moments of the album nearly brought me to tears.

Here's one of the better tracks: "Don't Save us From the Flames"
Also try Teen Angst, Farewell/Goodbye, Safe




Well... that was a lot of music.
Enjoy.

Where my Au20 gold discs at, fuggah?!

I've come to the conclusion (it was not hard to come to) that I am an audiophile.

Quoth wikipedia: "An audiophile, from Latin audire "to hear" and Greek philos 'loving,' can be generally defined as a person dedicated to achieving high fidelity in the recording and playback of music."

To be clear (for clarity is prized), I have a greater appreciation for music that sounds as close to the original source material as possible.

Human ears are a highly sensitive stereo system.

Quoth some random university's website:"A reasonably standard definition of audible sound is that it is a pressure wave with frequency between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz and with an intensity above the standard threshold of hearing."

I'm not sure whether that refers to the perceived loudness, or the actual frequency at which the waves wobble (the difference being that higher frequency wobbling means a more "treble" oriented sound, while a lower frequency wobbling means a more "bass" oriented sound... Pretty much anyone who listens to music with more than a passing interest knows this stuff).

The important thing to take from what I'm saying is that an audio recording which has higher or lower frequencies cut out or misrepresented, will sound less like it did when it was actually being played by instruments. This kind of thing can be detected because anything that would normally fall within a certain range of frequencies, normally detectable to the human ear which is heard in a recording with misrepresented frequencies is going to sound thinner, tinnier, muffled, or muddy (these are words that smart people actually use to describe sound).

Now, an audiophile, being concerned with hi-fi recordings is going to want to hear a recording that can represent the entire range of frequencies that were originally being produced by say, a four piece band. This doesn't sound like it should be that hard. If you're like me, you listen to CDs and mp3s all the time thinking "this is pretty darn great." If you're also like me, though, you can certainly tell when someone's sent you a shitty-quality mp3, with a subpar bitrate (128 is considered normal... but is it?), and a lower frequency than your device or file was meant to be heard at.

Here's the problem: CDs as we know them are not normally capable of representing the full range of frequencies, and a vile thing known as "compression" has caused many a recording's range of frequencies to be "compressed" by shaving off the higher and lower frequencies (which admittedly, does not usually result in unsatisfactory listening) with two purposes: to fit audio onto a CD, and to decrease dynamic range to avoid clipping.

Why compress?

Quoth wikipedia (again): "The trade-off of slightly reduced audio quality is clearly outweighed for most practical audio applications where users cannot perceive any difference and space requirements are substantially reduced. For example, on one CD, one can fit an hour of high fidelity music, less than 2 hours of music compressed losslessly, or 7 hours of music compressed in MP3 format."

For the sake of useful redundancy: The standard CD can hold only 800MB (at best). This means that in some cases, a lossless recording of an album won't fit. This doesn't apply to the usual pop-album, which contains between thirty and fifty minutes of material (a rip-off considering the potential 80 minutes of writeable surface). Other albums, though, that take full advantage of the CD space, require compression*. However, the result is something unnatural. The result does not actually sound the way the recording sounded before it was recorded.

Over the years, mastering engineers and producers have figured out how to use compression to reasonable effect without causing noticeable losses to quality, through the use of computer algorithms which encode a lossless recording (typically a .wav format) into a coded lossy format like mp3, or even a lower quality wav.

Now, there's a whole other kind of compression which causes even more trouble. I mentioned that compression is used to modify the frequencies of a sound. Frequently, in remasters of releases that were originally vynil releases, loudness is an issue. We have grown accustomed to a certain level of loudness, which is much louder than what was common during the age of vynil. The process of digitally compressing say, a drum track allows for the drums to seem louder, without having an amplitude that would cause clipping. Clipping is what happens when audio becomes so loud as to be distorted. Compression avoids clipping, but at the cost of dynamic range - which means that the difference in volume between the sounds in a recording is smaller. The result of using too much compression for this purpose is that the brain has more trouble distinguishing between sounds, and some frequencies end up being lost in the mix - so you don't hear everything that was recorded.

So, for audiophiles (who tend not to enjoy pop albums anyway), we encounter problems when we listen to modern CDs that have compression (and for some, all CDs), and when we listen to CDs that were mastered before engineers had quite figured out how to do it best.

The solution? vynil.

The gramaphone or phonograph record is the solution. Somehow, through the miracle of analogue recordingsound wave is etched into the vynil disc. We see this in the form of the groove, which we put the needle into. If we could zoom in super-close, we'd see a wiggly sound wave (they look like this!). The groove, though tiny, can represent the full dynamic range of frequencies in the actual sound to the recording. So, why don't we always listen to vynil? After all, the capacity of vynil is actually limited to the amount of space on the disc. The spiral can only go around so many times before you run out of room. How much room does a record have? About 45 minutes in total. How many minutes is the average pop-album? About 45 minutes. the quality of the original recording is maintained. Here's how: when records are pressed, the actual

Well, vynil is fragile. It can warp, deteriorate and scratch. Worst of all, if anything manages to make the tiniest dent in the groove, then the sound wave at that point is permanently affected by whatever has happened to it. A piece of dust can get in the groove, and you get a pop or a click. Any thing that the needle of your record touches will be picked up by the amplifier. Any abnormal bend in the sound wave is going to be heard, and there's nothing you can do to fix it. Not to mention the fact that flipping the damn thing over is a bit of a chore...

That said, I think we need a bit of an example to show how vynil is/can be superior. In the early days of the CD, audio compression was a new and complicated thing. For one thing, computers were ASS. We're talking early/mid 80s, here. Tech-savvy artists were trying to convert their standard vynil releases to the new and exciting CD medium, which was smaller, didn't scratch as easily (no clicks or pops!) and you didn't even have to flip it over.

One such artist was Frank Zappa. Zappa fans (who are almost exclusively audiophiles for some reason), know that there were several albums that ended up getting mixed very badly for the CD reissue of their vynil favourites. Specifically, Shiek Yerbouti, Tinseltown Rebellion, and You Are What You Is. The masters for these albums were revisited and compressed for the CD releases. The result was horrible. The worst offender was You Are What You Is, which had so many problems that a guitar solo ended up being cut out, there were random volume spikes, and other issues that could cause average listeners headaches.

Later on, the album was re-remastered using the original master tapes, and everything was fine again... but in the end, the real audiophiles all went back and searched out the vinyl.

Unfortunately, audiophiles (and shitty DJs and hipsters) seem to be the only people keeping the vynil industry alive. Very few artists release their albums on vynil these days (more on this later). What alternative is there to vynil for those of us who don't want to send our valuable energy off into the entropic void by flipping the record over?

Solution: Lossless audio codecs.

Like I said before, there are lossless digital formats, like PCM (.wav). For computer users, if they have the capabilities, it is possible to rip lossless recordings from CDs (if those CDs are lossless themselves, otherwise, you're just encoding a lossy file without any further loss). Furthermore, if you don't mind having cables all over your floor, you can run a vynil turntable through your line-in (basically an all-purpose input) port in the back of your soundcard. Using audio programs, you can record the entire album in a lossless format.

But, what do we do about compressed CDs when vynil isn't available? Well, there's a bit of a movement going on that could be of some help.

With the dawn of the digital release, music artists are able to distribute the high-quality media files directly to you. Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails has partially pioneered this method of album release, letting his listeners download 320kbps mp3s (that's better than CDs), FLAC (almost lossless, but not quite), and wav (all lossless).

Not to mention the fact that SACDs, DVD-A, and Blu Rays have the kind of space you'd need to not only present the highest quality stereo version (which is the normal way to hear things with your ears), but also in surround sound! Yes, surround sound! the ridiculously unnecessary audio experience that lets you hear the music from anywhere between 3 and in some cases 10 (but usually 5.1) different locations. If you've got it set up right, it's supposed to sound like you're there with the band. I'm a fan of surround, but the lengths to which I will go to hear the band as if I was there are limited.

Anyway, with the increasing capacity of portable music devices, and the fact that you CAN burn lossless audio to CDs, even if the commercial CD release wasn't released in a lossless format, it seems that there will be (and are) audiophiles wandering around listening to hi-fi recordings on mp3 players.

However, in my view, vynil will always be the best choice.

*this is worded a bit incorrectly. It's not the case that 80 minutes of music is available to be written, but based on standard wav encoding and filesizes, 80 minutes is the standard for a lossless PCM format.