Paradise Lost
Apr 29, 2023
In 2007, Progressive Metal band Symphony X released the concept album “Paradise Lost” for which they took a good amount of pages from John Milton’s book (speaking figuratively) and mixed in some themes from the Bible, too.
What did we get?
An album’s worth of well-executed Progressive Metal with more Metal than Progressive. The heavy Metal-bias is not unsurprising considering that at least half of the ten tracks are from the perspective of an angry Satan full of malevolent rage to corrupt and entangle as many and as much as possible of creation in his doom.
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The Machine of a Dream (Man & Machine Pt. 1)
Jan 15, 2023
If you listen to a lot of music, you might derive unexpected enjoyment from discovering familiar elements, which connect different pieces of music. For example, you might recognize a sample incorporated into a beat, or a vocal line paying hommage to some other artist’s lyrics.
Less in the acoustic domain, but rather in terms of content, common lyrical themes can create clusters of music, too. As hinted at in an earlier blog post, one of these themes is the mythical man-machine relationship.
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The Launch
Jan 02, 2023
Some time ago, I was walking somewhere, listening to some music, and the thought struck me:
“What, if you lived in earlier days and never experienced the sound of electric guitars and synthesizers?”
I felt like these people have missed out on some great listening experiences, and I even felt a bit sorry for these people. On the other hand, as someone else rightly pointed out, these people probably couldn’t even imagine what sounds comprise the music of the future and therefore wouldn’t have had much reason to feel sad about living in “pre-electric guitar and synthesizer” ages.
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“Hublot, I don't know”
Jun 04, 2022
It is becoming summer again. Time for me to slowly circle back to Hip Hop, Jazz, and Funk genre-wise, and, while doing so, I also sometimes revisit the discography of artists that are “already in my catalog”.
Speaking of Hip Hop, Kxng Crooked (TAFKA Crooked I) is one of my go-to artists not just because he has released an enormous amount of tracks and continues to do so. (Someone should do the number crunching and confirm the hypothesis that he has rapped more bars on his guest appearances than most rappers in total).
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A Sad Rainbow
Apr 30, 2022
Though I hope that we’ll never be able to comprehensively rationalize the appeal of music to us humans, we may well be able to put into words some explanations that address only some fragments of the whole of what makes us like music.
One of these attempts at explaining why we like music involves the social part of the human condition: We as individuals can find ourselves living through situations and circumstances where we desire some sort of companionship which is not available to us in our immediate surroundings.
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Trapped in Turquoise
Jul 06, 2021
I never “got” Trap as a music-genre. I want roomy, sampled drums, not some flimsy snares and hi-hats. Lyrically, I neither like endlessly repeating hooks.
I’ma-I’ma make a million in my Moncler jacket Moncler jacket, Mon-Moncler jacket
Nor am I a fan of incomprehensible list-like lyrics.
I’ma concord grape jelly roll Eddie Jones
I don’t even know which words go together. Are we talking about concord grape jelly rolls? What’s Eddie Jones got do with it?
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Talk of the Town
Nov 16, 2020
Recently on one of those rare occusions that I can be witnessed browsing Youtube, I was surprised to see that another Ayreon project, called “Transitus”, had been released.
If I hadn’t actively searched for Ayreon, I probably still would not know that this new project was released, but that only shows how much of an outsider to that particular part of the music scene I appear to be. Or maybe, “Ayreon-instigator” Arjen Lucassen really did keep a low profile while working on this—and then back-dated the Ayreon album announcement to March of 2020.
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Diggin' On Blue
Nov 15, 2020
Recently, I acquired a 2-CD release called “Diggin’ On Blue mixed by DJ Krush and Muro”. If you look at the backside of the CD case, you might mistake it for some kind of compilation: both CDs contain twenty-something tracks from almost as many different artists. Actually, on the back-cover it says as much:
A Universal Classics & Jazz release; This Compilation Ⓟ&Ⓒ2019 UNIVERSAL MUSIC LLC
However, if you listen into it, it is clear that this is a classical DJ mix in the original sense of the word.
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“All the Power of Death Is Dead”
Apr 12, 2020
At the time of writing this, the Corona virus kind of has the world on lock. Even good ol’ Europe, the center of modern civilization1 is affected. Where I live, staying at home and avoiding physical (social) contact is strongly encouraged, hence I, as probably many others, adjourned my regular outdoor focused physical free-time activities and turned towards more intellectual occupations such as watching TV series and YouTube videos, listening to music, reading, and maybe writing a blog post, or two…
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Hip-Hop Culture In The House
Feb 22, 2020
Having recently rediscovered the rejuvenating effects of running down-hill to boom-bap beats, I figured I should write about some more Hip Hop songs.
Everyone agrees that 90’s era hip-hop is undoubtedly the greatest. This becomes evident, e.g., in the many post-90’s songs reminiscing about the “good ol’ times”1. But while one might argue that these newer retrospects glorify the past, there are songs from the 90’s which manage to capture that Golden Era-vibe quite well.
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