Re: [dev] [OT] Music?

On 8 Sep 2010, at 11:27 pm, David Tweed wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 10:35 PM, Joel Davila <6336737_AT_gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> On 8 September 2010 15:12, Nikhilesh S <s.nikhilesh_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> What kind of music do you listen to? Your favourite artists, genres,
>>> etc.?
>>
>> Interesting.
>>
>> Suckless music may be classics as Beethoven, Brahms,Chopin, Ravel,
>> Tchaikovsky...
>
> I thought the only music that would count as suckless is John Cage's
> 4′33″. It's the only piece where there's just no bloat. Even that
> Nokia "classic" ringtone has 13 notes that are unnecessarily inflates
> the NOM (notes of music) metric.
>
> [I'm sorry, this is cruel caricaturing but I couldn't resist].

I got a laugh out of it. :)

I very much enjoy the rich sounds of classical music but I can't see
how it could be suckless at all. Some jazz pieces pack an immense
amount of feeling into a very sparse melody only using a few
instruments. I would listen to jazz a lot, but the good stuff is
rather overshadowed by the sheer volume of pointless crap which
somehow manages to get the same genre label.

Anyway, in classical my tastes have changed recently. I used to like
Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, anything dramatic and/or wild, I forget who
wrote the Hungarian Dances, but I loved those too. I won't say what I
think of Tchaikovsky now. ;-}

Now, listening to last.fm I find I like anything from the renaissance
to baroque transition and a smattering of composers from all eras
since, including Schönberg. I know nothing of 12-tone and post-
modernism, maybe what I like is transitional music; music from
artists who are just discovering new forms. I like most musical forms
in their early stages. Once they're well-defined and people start
getting taught the form rather than feeling their way you start to
get pointless crap promoted as 'really good'.

I don't listen to last.fm very much, I find it takes a bit of
managing to keep it on track with what I want to listen to, and there
are several different themes I'd like to train it to. Perhaps I need
several accounts to use it properly, and I really couldn't be
bothered. I prefer to download from Jamendo. Still with the
classical, Jamendo has a couple of albums by Arnaud Conde which I
absolutely love, but I haven't generally gone looking for classical
there.

Picking out my most played albums, all downloaded from Jamendo, gives
a fairly varied list:

Giac Juan - Kingdom
Rob Costlow - Solo Piano - Woods of Chaos
Silence - Encre
Nicolas Faubert - Eclipse
Vincent Bernay - Etincelle
bod - cyberpunk
bod - lambshift
bod - obscuriteas
Kitasen - Fuzzy Dream

That's some varied stuff. Kingdom ought to sound sleepily pastoral,
but is actually good. Woods of Chaos, Etincelle, and Encre are
haunting. Encre is captivating, Woods of Chaos almost soul-twisting.
All bod's albums are fun, obscuriteas is perhaps the best. Fuzzy
Dream I had to include because it's out of this world wild, but it
sounds a little off, somehow.
Received on Thu Sep 09 2010 - 20:33:04 CEST