Category: Music

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Home Base Music Spamatozoa

December 4th!

Doctor Who soundtrackThe release date for the Doctor Who soundtrack is December 4th; there are more details here. This will conclude what’s actually been a very good music year for me – for someone who sits out most everything that actually charts these days, I’ve still been picking up a lot of music this year. (Which, by the way, the L.E.O. CD I mentioned a while back is excellent, definitely worth the wait, and even better than the streaming samples would lead one to believe.)
Sorry I’m running late on theLogBook.com site update for this week; this morning I had a killer fever kick in and all of a sudden, if it was attached to my body, it hurt. I wound up taking one of the pain pills I was prescribed on Saturday, thinking “I’ll get up again around 2 o’ clock and finish the update.” Nope, I didn’t get up until it was time to go to work. I still need to ship out recent eBay wins, and a small piece of paper tells me that a shiny round thing containing the elder Mr. Finn’s latest opus has arrived, but these things didn’t get done today. :-/
I got a spam in my e-mail tonight that isn’t even worth joking about; it entreats recipients to join the craze that is currently seeing “two blogs started every second” because they could be “blogging for dollars!” 🙄 I would go into why this isn’t going to work, but then I realized: I wrote that editorial over seven years ago. (In fact, you can see it right here.) At the time, the subject was quick-start web sites to sell more or less generic merchandise, but the same thinking is just as applicable to this situation: now we’re going to run into a bunch of spammy blogs (as if there aren’t already enough of those around, just aggregating feeds from other sources) that have no reason to exist other than that their creators have been misled into thinking they’re going to Get! Rich! Quick! If you’re going to blawg all over the place, do it because you enjoy it. If you can reap some ancillary benefits from it beyond that, cool, but there has to be a reason for it to be there – and a reason for people to want to read it, because after all, they’re the ones who are supposedly supporting you.… Read more

Categories
Music

Doctor Who soundtrack Q&As

I got, and responded to, an e-mail from a reader recently and asked him if it’d be cool for me to post his questions and the responses here, because I figured they’d be of interest to…well…someone. Maybe.

Has “Dr. Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop” folded? The last release of which I know is “Devil’s Planets” and that was what, four years ago? I am really eager to hear “State of Decay” which should logically be the next release in volume five.

Doctor Who - Devils' PlanetsThe last anyone’s heard out of Mark Ayres, who tirelessly does the restoration of the Radiophonic Workshop material for CD release and for inclusion as isolated music tracks for the classic series DVDs, the Radiophonic Workshop CDs have been in limbo pending a larger reorganization of BBC Music (which is also supposedly why we haven’t gotten a Murray Gold soundtrack from the new series yet – something which it’s interesting to note isn’t available for pre-order yet). Another thing to consider is that the classic series DVDs are selling many, many more copies than the Radiophonic Workshop soundtrack CDs, so the market reality is that the BBC is going to have Mark directing all of his energy to restoring soundtracks for DVD; we might still get CDs out of it later as an ancillary thing, but with all of the isolated music soundtracks that we’re getting on DVDs, I wouldn’t be completely surprised if we’ve seen the last of the CDs.

Since “Survival” is a bootleg, chances are I’m not going to see it advertised for sale anywhere.

The Survival bootleg, like the other three “unofficial releases” I reviewed a while back, are nothing to write home about, in terms of either packaging or sound quality. The Survival CD is especially bad because it’s kinda like the soundtrack to part 3 only – not even the whole story. Given that Survival is (IMHO) one of the better Sylvester McCoy stories that hasn’t made it to DVD yet, I’d lay good odds that we’ll be seeing a Survival DVD, complete with a decently remastered isolated music track, in the next 18 months. I’d just wait for that.

Was “Delta and the Bannermen” ever released as a bootleg?

Bits of Delta And The Bannermen are on the 25th anniversary album, but if there’s a bootleg out there, I haven’t seen it. (That doesn’t mean that such a beast doesn’t exist, just means that I haven’t seen it!) Again, this score exists in its entirety, so it’ll wind up on DVD eventually.
Any other Doctor Who soundtrack questions? I’m not the expert, but I do play an expert on TV. (Well, kind of. It’s an unbilled guest appearance. As a voice-over.)… Read more

Categories
Gadgetology Music

Dingle dongle, the wicked witch is dead

UPDATE: Dongle located. HEY AVID: Somewhere in the world, a video editing suite just changed hands, you didn’t get a freakin’ dime out of it, and there ain’t a damned thing you can do about it. 😛
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, as the dongle is…well…dongling its way to me…
Earl's Avid
The name of the beast.
Earl's Avid
The first order of business was to get the machine online long enough to update Windows 2000, update the browser, get AVG and Spybot/Teatimer installed…
Earl's Avid
…and pull the special wallpaper I cobbled together over from one of my other machines. This being Arkansas and this being a dual-monitor machine, the wallpaper is, appropriately enough, double-wide.
Earl's Avid
The whole shebang, such as it is. And yes, I do like my Okudagram wallpaper/screen savers, thankyouverymuch.
Earl's Avid
Now, let’s be real for a moment – this is probably how this setup will appear to my eyes most of the time. 😆
Also, thanks to Dave, I discovered that Tim Finn released a new album without letting me know about it – that sneaky Tim. Ah well. There went the Amazon UK store credit that was being saved up for the Doctor Who soundtrack…gotta have priorities, y’know.… Read more

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Music Television & Movies

Endangered species: main title themes

Very interesting CNN article about the precarious state of that increasingly rare beast, the full-up TV theme tune. They hold up Lost as an example, but since Lost has always had the 11-second atonal drone for a theme, it doesn’t bug me. It’s when they take away main themes from shows that previously had them that bugs me – such as what happened with the Stargates at the beginning of their 2005-2006 seasons. I have yet to get tired of the Galactica theme music, or Murray Gold’s nifty reworking of the original Doctor Who theme, or the Stargate Atlantis title music for that matter. Unlike some producers these days, I’ve always placed a great deal of importance on a show or movie’s music (hence my insistence on crediting composers in our episode guides). It sets the mood. It’s that important. There have been shows where I actually hated the series but loved the music (basically, anything post-Star-Trek whose title was prefaced by “Gene Roddenberry’s…” fits in this category).
Is the composer the next job description to wind up being shunned by Hollywood, now that scripted series are back in vogue and writers are back in demand?
In other music notes, check out this article about Queen guitarist Brian May. My already considerable respect for the man has now skyrocketed into the near-infinite. A guitar god who hangs out with Patrick Moore of the Royal Astronomical Society? That’s cool.… Read more

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Music Serious Stuff Toiling In The Pixel Mines

Why I hate election season.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t for a moment begrudge our ability and our privelege to choose our own leadership. Sure, I’ve spent 6+ years really questioning whether or not the infrastructure by which we do that actually works, but I’d rather have the ability to vote, and to question the system, than to not even have the ability.
That said: I completely f’ing hate election season when it comes to work. I hate it. With the white-hot passion of a billion dying suns. On an ideological level, I hate that campaign advertising has essentially become a vituperative exercise in misdirection and stuff that would be considered actionable slander if it wasn’t a campaign ad. This helps no one. This informs and enlightens no one. It merely plays to passion, knee-jerk reactions, and polarizes communities rather than inciting them to ask questions. There is an equal time rule for news coverage of candidates running for office, though somewhere along the way this seems to have become an “equal time for Democratic and Republican candidates only” thing.
And how do the respective campaigns monitor the equal time process? Why, by watching our coverage, of course. And this is where it gets blisteringly, brain-boilingly ridiculous. Several years ago, I came up with a solution: anytime we do a story on, say, candidates for governor, I put together a multi-split-screen montage showing every candidate for governor. There’s your equal time right there – you’re all up for exactly the same amount of time. This year, though, it’s already sunk to new levels of pedantry – let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a transition from one story to another within the same promo takes the form of a lens flare that starts at lower left and moves to the upper right. Now you’re likely to hear from some campaign that the lens flare obscured their candidate for a split-second longer than it obscured the other guy.
It’s enough to make me fall back on that most impartial of methods: Text On A Screen, Showing No Candidates. It’s also enough to make me scream, but the soundproofing in here, such as it is, couldn’t silence a moderately noisy mosquito.
It’s a month before the election, and I’m sick and tired of it already.
L.E.O. - Alpacas OrglingIn tonight’s good news: check out this upcoming CD from a group called L.E.O. (warning: the page that link goes to will begin playing music to you immediately, just in case you’re at work or something), a sort of all-star collective of folks ranging from Andy Sturmer (ex-Jellyfish) to Bleu (??) to the Hanson brothers (!!) and numerous others, all put together in a style paying homage to ELO. Tasty stuff, actually. You can listen to the whole thing online (lo-fi of course), but some of it is really good if you’re into that kind of music. I’ll be trying to pick this up as soon as funds permit. Damned if there isn’t a lot of good music coming out right about now – and again, mostly not on the major labels.… Read more

Categories
Critters Music

Olivia: hero of the Rebel alliance

Olivia got into a spot of trouble on Tuesday afternoon for destroying daddy’s new Death Star. 😯 Seriously, there was no major damage, but it convinced me to go ahead and take all of the newly disassembled pieces and put them back in the box until I have a more permanent place for it to go.
I'd just as soon kiss a kitten
Laugh it up, fuzzball!
So...you have a sister
A rare non-playful brother-and-baby-sister shot.
In other news, I have a new CD to add to my album anticipation list – well, okay, technically it’s already out. It’s Peter Frampton’s new instrumental album Fingerprints, which I didn’t even know about before Kent insisted on playing Frampton’s cover of “Black Hole Sun” over the phone to me. Normally I’d shake my head at anyone trying to introduce me to an album that way, but I was amazed at how Frampton, of all people, rocked it out, complete with his trademark “talkbox” effect.
Kent’s also wondering when the next OVGE is. Aren’t we all?
I was under the weather Tuesday so I stayed home. I’ve had a very sore throat since Sunday and today I just woke up feeling like crap. Hopefully I’ll feel better Wednesday, but curiously, I didn’t miss work all that much…… Read more

Categories
Music

Album anticipation – fall ’06

It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but maybe once a year there’s a confluence of musical talent, old favorites, and stuff I’m Just Curious About all hitting at roughly the same time. (There was a time, long ago, when this was more of a quarterly thing.) Some stuff I’ve already ordered, some stuff I’m still slobbering over, and other stuff I’m just thinking about. Here’s a rough rundown of this fall’s candidates for curing my mystery melody malady. … Read more

Categories
Music Television & Movies

Who shoots! Who scores!

THIS IS SO NOT THE DOCTOR WHO CD COVER. This is just a monstrosity I whipped up in Paint Shop Pro.So, at long last, the BBC is releasing a soundtrack album for the new Doctor Who. Hooray!…kinda. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll certainly buy a copy, and I look forward to listening to it. But in only two seasons (a total of 27 episodes), dear old Murray Gold has achieved the same effect that it took Christopher Franke about four years to accomplish: he composed a lot of music that I thought was brilliant the first couple of times I heard it, and then reused all of these wonderful pieces to the point that it just completely robbed them of a lot of their power.
Franke did that for me during the fourth season of Babylon 5. Don’t get me wrong, that whole “floor” of my CD shelf that’s wall-to-wall Babylon 5 episodic CDs says it all: I loved me some B5 music. (Same for that shelf below it and one over – the one that’s almost wall-to-wall Doctor Who music spanning from the second story shown in 1963 to the 1996 TV movie.) But Chris Franke started reusing certain bits of music in the fourth season until I just started tuning it out (the music, that is, not the show – you know me better than that).
I’ve interviewed quite a few composers, and in a conversation (not published in any of the interviews on this site), I let my guard down a bit and mentioned my beef with Franke. My interviewee’s response was more or less, “Hey, let’s see you come up with completely new music that doesn’t in any way reference anything you’ve done in the past, or sound similar to it, every week for five years.” And I stood corrected in that opinion – yeah, it’d be next to impossible not to sound like…well…yourself. And as big a fan of TV soundtracks as I am, I will admit that it is a limitation of both the medium and the schedule on which it has to be made. And let’s face it, not a brag here, but I probably listen to television scoring more closely than the average viewer. For the average viewer, the occasional reference in the musical library merely reinforces a consistency of sound, rather than red-flagging a reuse of material.
That said, I’ve loved Murray Gold’s music from day one of the new Doctor Who, and yet I also admit that the Franke Effect is in play. There’s one theme in particular which is rolled out every time Rose experiences some emotional revelation, and by now it’s come up so many times that it’s almost its own cliche. But it’s a beautiful piece of music. Also, for season two, even the cues which were recycled from season one were recorded anew with big, widescreen arrangements by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. (I’ve a feeling that the CD is going to present us with very few, if any, of the all-synth/sampled scores of the first year.)
There have been one-off episodes whose scores, never referenced again, have been brilliant – School Reunion and The Girl In The Fireplace, to name but a couple – and truthfully, the scores have probably all been that brilliant, but like a perfectly good hit song played ad nauseum on the radio, they’ve just been overexposed.
That said, I look forward to the CD. There are plenty of bits that I hope are on it (and I’m hoping like mad that the pleasantly Phil Spector-ish “Song For Ten”, heard at the end of The Christmas Invasion and later referenced toward the end of School Reunion, is among ’em). I hope against hope that anything from the Eccleston season isn’t automatically out of consideration just because no one paid to put a real orchestra in (surely the choral stuff from Dalek / The Parting Of The Ways is grand enough to make the cut, and I liked the theramin-esque version of the End Of The World theme just fine, thanks), and I’d like to add both the Eccleston version of the main theme and the orchestrally heavy Tennant version to that wish list too.
Just look at that. Orchestral Doctor Who music. And to think, people still write off the 1996 McGann movie as a detour? It was more of a road map to the future of the show, like it or not.
Thanks to the readers of this site, I’ve got a few pounds’ store credit laying in wait at Amazon UK, just waiting to pounce on the pre-order for this. If you haven’t been able to tell from the number of music reviews I’ve done from this series and its offshoots, or that huge overview analysis of the music’s influences and styles, or the number of times that a Doctor Who track appears up there in my “now playing” box on this very blog, chances are I’ll still like it.… Read more

Categories
Music

I shall call it…the Alan Parsons Project.

Frame from Don't Answer Me video, 1983For some reason, I’ve got Alan Parsons on the brain. It’s amazing what comes to you while you’re sweating your arse off doing farm work.
I’ve got an unorthodox approach to music, at least in terms of making it. Also a very frustrating one. Out of the blue, the whole arrangement of a piece of music arrives in one big, beautiful chunk. I don’t read sheet music – I’ve never learned how – and yet I can hear that in my head and know what every instrument is doing when. I might come up with words later if it’s something that’s just popped into my head from pure inspiration – the words are seldom there from the get-go.
The frustrating part comes when I try to match on tape what I hear in my head. That’s really the part that becomes a curse – a fully completed song is playing in my head, and sometimes I’m damned if I can export that to a medium where anyone who happens to be outside of my head – which, as it so happens, tends to be the rest of the entire human race – can hear it. So I slave over a multitrack recorder and try valiantly to match even a fraction of the potential of what’s going on in my head. I’m no great musician, and even less good as a singer, so I’m seldom able to get close. For the past 3-4 years I’ve slowly “written” – in my head, at least – a whole song whose chorus would require at least 12 parts of vocal harmony. It’s a lovely song, the lyrics have finally evolved into a coherent shape (at least those I can write down), and it’s scary to think that should anything ever happen to the misshapen lump that is the aforementioned head, no one else will ever hear that song.
Anyway, that’s a bit of a detour. Today, while working on the farm, and admittedly this may have been a byproduct of the heat getting to me, full chill-out/lounge arrangements for the Alan Parsons Project instrumentals “The Gold Bug” and “Mammagamma” came to me out of nowhere. I like “The Gold Bug” especially – it’s already funky in a late 70s kind of way, and a lounge arrangement would turn the corner into downright jazzy. Perhaps even scarier than that is that I also dreamed up a marching band arrangement of “I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You.” I couldn’t even begin to demo that – all the brass sounds on my various keyboards wind up sounding like car horns instead of French horns. That’s another great funky 70s number where the bridge section would allow the horns and especially the drummers to just go batshit crazy. And here’s the killer – I don’t even think in terms of marching band arrangements. I was never even in band. Why that particular style would occur to me, I have no freaking idea.
I’m not going to really get worried about it until I start envisioning the choreography for that number. At that point, either the world is going to have to chip in and get me some professional composition software that I can use with one of my MIDI keyboards, something that’ll turn my flimsy fingerings into a digital recording with realistic samples, or you can go ahead and call the wacky wagon, which in all honesty would be a lot cheaper.… Read more

Categories
Gaming Music Television & Movies

Jar Jar links.

Not much to speak of this morning – my digestive system is still engaged in a lively debate with itself over whether or not the pork chops with stuffing my wife cooked for me are agreeing with it in any civilized way – so here are a couple of nifty links you might want to check out.
Doctor WhoThe Beginner’s Guide To Doctor Who: Whether you’re only casually acquainted with the original series of Doctor Who, or only gave in to the Time Lord’s charms when the new series started, here’s a nifty little semi-interactive guide to the original show. It’s not a terribly deep survey of classic Who (and the “monsters” segment is little more than a target game minus the reward), but it’s a decent enough refresher course. There’s a focus on classic characters and enemies who have appeared in the new show (i.e. Sarah, K-9, the Daleks), though some of the other mentions are somewhat curious, and one wonders if they have any bearing on the upcoming finale of the second season…
John BillingsleyMad props to Phlox: The Futon Critic is giving mad props to John Billingsley (formerly Enterprise’s Dr. Phlox) as the “breakout star” of ABC’s new fall drama series The Nine. (I’ve seen some preview stuff on the network feeds myself, and this review of the pilot only confirms for me that this is a show to keep an eye on later this year.) I’d find it riotously funny if DVD sales of Enterprise suddenly spiked because everyone wanted to see that show that Billingsley used to be on.
Pre-owned games and the law: a fascinating essay from a legal perspective about the rumors that Sony has plans to squash the used video game market, and largely right on the money. Now here’s a wild idea: how about making games that are just so darned cool that we don’t want to ever get rid of them? (Novel thinking, I know.) Still counting down to the Red Star release to see if it fits that category. Back on track, it’d also help if the pricing was a little more realistic on new games. The last current-generation game I bought new was We Love Katamari; total outlay was $25. (Well, technically, total outlay was nothing – I got it with a Wal-Mart gift card I got at Christmas.) Quick check of the ol’ PS2/Gamecube shelf…I’ve bought more than 2/3 of my current-generation games used. (Curiously enough, the only ones I’ve gotten new have been both Katamari games, Taito Legends and Pac-Man Vs. for the ‘cube, though that latter game was packed in with a budget “greatest hits” re-release of the otherwise forgettable Pac-Man World 2. So, if you’ve got a cheap game from Japan, I guess I’m all yours.) In short, if Sony and its licensees weren’t pricing their new product into the stratosphere, and were producing stuff with real replay value, that’d go a long way toward solving this perceived “problem” of the used game market. (Or, if you want the statistics spun in a different direction: I’ve spent more on Odyssey2 games this year than I have on Playstation 2 games. But admittedly, that’s just me.)
And last but not least – a new Weird Al song for free! Weird Al Yankovic is apparently coming down the home stretch of a new album, and if that wasn’t good enough news for you, he’s unleashing a free song that didn’t make the cut, for – rough estimate here – zero dollars. (I also see Al has linked to Rob’s UHF pilgrimage on his links page!)
Hope you have a good weekend. The Mrs. is headed out of town for several days for a postal convention, or she’s going to go postal at a convention, or something like that – I really need to get some clarification there. So for a few days it’s me, Othello, Olivia and Xena. How much you wanna bet we’ll have the place completely trashed by Monday night?… Read more