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.

The Rab Townsend Video Experience Part II: The Guitar/Pantymess Connection

It's the guitar/panty-mess connection!

The Rab Townsend Explodo-Pantsuit: Episode Two from Rab Townsend on Vimeo.

In which Rab fails to keep his show within an hour long format by twenty minutes because the guitar solos therein were too epic to condense.

Other topics of conversation include unemployment beards, DDR failure, and the last Canadian God of Rock.

Song List:

1.  Jakalope – Feel It (3:53)

2. Radiohead – Just (3:53)

3. Steve Vai – Answers (2:41)

4. Tool – Lateralus (9:24)

5. Frank Zappa – Drowning Witch (12:13)

6. Rush – Freewill (5:24)

7. Primus – Bob’s Party Time Lounge (4:44)

8. Nine Inch Nails – Deep (3:36)

9. Moby – Face It (10:01)

No Label, No Problem

This is old news, but here it is for posterity. 

Originally published in MacMedia Magazine

No doubt many of you have heard about Radiohead releasing their new album In Rainbows online as a digital mp3 download for whatever price you thought it was worth. To many this seemed to be a marvellous step forward in combating both tyrannical labels and music piracy – simultaneously catering to the age of digital music distribution. Of course, little did anybody know that the band had secretly planned to release the album later through a major label on CD (presumably for the usual high price determined by that label). What appeared to be an honest ‘eff you’ to the system, turned out to be a marketing ploy, and perhaps even a case of cheating fans out their money (some poor people paid hundreds of dollars as a sign of support).

Then, Trent Reznor (you know, that NIN guy) and up-and-coming spoken word/hip-hop artist Saul Williams did the real deal. They released their (amazing) collaborative album for free with higher quality than Radiohead’s downloads, no strings attached, and giving the option to pay 5 dollars in support of the artists. I think there are two main reasons why artists have turned to self-distribution in a digital format.

The first reason is probably somewhere near you right now: your mp3player or iPod (I’ll just call them all iPods from here on, for convenience’s sake). It is clear to me that we have reached a stage at which it is impossible to live without digital music. Since Napster, we’ve been using our computers as jukeboxes, and with Apple’s help, we can carry those jukeboxes around. However, a large problem was created by these technologies: piracy. Sure, we had the mix-tape problem in the 80s, but once it came to CDs and the Internet, the sheer scale of the problem made the blank-tape tax seem like a drop in the bucket. Now that the damage is nigh irreversible, it’s only logical that the fumbling record labels would join us after failing to beat us.

In this age of the mp3, we face a burgeoning frontier of music marketing. The labels want to keep you from stealing music so they can make huge bucks, and the artists want to get heard by as many people as possible without losing money. After recognizing that money could still be made on the Internet, the labels and Apple got together and formed the iTunes Store as a way of allowing the music industry (mostly the Recording Industry Association of America or RIAA) to make you pay for songs that you would otherwise have acquired illegally. Of course, this helps the labels more than it helps the artists. A much larger percentage of the money you spend with iTunes is going to the label, than to the artist (more than is usual, I’d guess, though I couldn’t say specifically how much).

The reason is this: you are not paying for the music; you are paying the label for the ability to hear the music (note that due to copy-protection, many songs are subject to harsh limitations, in terms of sharing and backups). Were you to pirate it instead, you could be sued by that label for sums well outside of your price range– regardless of whether you were someone’s dead granny, or someone’s nine-year-old grandson.

Obviously, some artists are not pleased with the way this system works. Allegedly the Zappa Family Trust had all of Frank Zappa’s material removed from the iTunes store. The action certainly follows from a quote by Frank Zappa himself: 

“The manner in which [people] ‘consume’ music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie– it’s consumed that way without any regard for how and why it was made.”

I’d venture to say that many artists feel this way. The pop-single mentality, which seems not only to be supported, but also endorsed by iTunes, is the kind of mentality that completely disregards the artistic process, and the effort that goes into making a cohesive album. So, if we are to continue living in an age of digital music distribution, and we want to support the artist, it seems that perhaps we need a better business model than what we have right now.

The second reason for self-distribution follows from that poor model. Artists would love to be heard, and by many, many people. Obviously, they can’t very well distribute their physical albums to the entire world efficiently. They must pay a label to distribute it, allowing the label to set a price (in some cases, unnecessarily high), and further delay their albums without good reason in order to somehow satisfy their label’s wishes. The Internet provides the kind of global market they want, without the money-grubbing middlemen. However, the digital age poses the problem of losing the physical aspect of the album, including the artwork, the lyrics, and obviously the disc itself. However, if the music is all that’s important, maybe people like Trent Reznor and Saul Williams can still get by. Without releasing their album through iTunes, and without going through middlemen, they have released an album with lossless quality, for as much money as an overpriced cup of coffee, or alternatively, for free! Such a low price potentially allows that the casual music pirate might actually consider paying for the album, as a sign of support for the artist. Certainly this is the best way we have to support the artist, and only the artist, in return for giving us some great music.

That said, I do have problems with the self-distributed model. For one thing, I like having the physical album. Here’s a little fact for you: the blank CD-Rs that are sold to us are missing something crucial. Whereas on commercial CDs, there is a lacquer finish over the burned music, increasing both the duration of its fidelity and its durability, blank CD-Rs do not have this lacquer finish, which significantly decreases both. This means, that if I don’t have an iPod, and I want to listen to digitally distributed album in my eight-year-old discman, then I’ll have less chance of maintaining the quality of that recording. I also like having the artwork, and the little booklet with all the lyrics in it. Sure, they can give me a .jpeg or a .pdf file with all of that stuff and more, but there’s something to be said for having an album and its artwork; appreciating it in the context it was made for.

In order to reconcile the physical album with the digital age, I propose a method that I’ve borrowed from Rob Sheridan (artwork designer for Nine Inch Nails). Basically, if we want to support the artists who aren’t ready or able to innovate to the level that Radiohead pretended, or that Saul Williams succeeded, without supporting the greediness of the RIAA, we should simply not buy CDs released by labels under the RIAA. Sure, you’ll be deprived of some good music, but maybe they’ll learn a lesson if enough people try, and maybe, just maybe, the labels and the artists can cooperate in creating a marketable system, that will benefit both the label, the artist, and most of all, the consumer of the digital age.

Addendum: For the record, I did buy the physical release of In Rainbows, and it was worth it. Saul Williams’ Niggy Tardust saw a physical release with added tracks, which made me feel somewhat betrayed, having written this big honking article about how revolutionary the method was. That said, I will buy it. The importance of the physical album is too great to hold grudges about the 5 bucks I spent. That said, I also coughed up five bucks and fourteen more bucks for both the digital and physical versions of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts (but there were no secrets about that physical release). To some extent, my desire for the physical album far outweighs any impulse to hear the music as soon as possible, and wherever I am.

Furthermore, at the risk of revealing myself as a hypocrite, I ended up getting an iPod (and later, an iPhone!). It has many flaws (iTunes is crap software - especially on  a PC). That said, it makes for good listening when it comes to albums I’ve downloaded because they’re out of print or unavailable… or simply not bought yet. I still carry a box of CDs with me everywhere I go, for stationary listening.