{"id":719,"date":"2008-12-19T16:58:35","date_gmt":"2008-12-19T16:58:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/12\/19\/friday-random-ten-december-19\/"},"modified":"2008-12-19T16:58:35","modified_gmt":"2008-12-19T16:58:35","slug":"friday-random-ten-december-19","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/12\/19\/friday-random-ten-december-19\/","title":{"rendered":"Friday Random Ten, December 19"},"content":{"rendered":"
    \n
  1. Olivier Messiaen, “Turangalila – Symphonie: II. Chant d’amour 1”<\/b>: This
    \nwas an unexpected wonderful surprise. A few years ago, my older brother gave me
    \na book on Stockhausen, who is a fascinating guy on an intellectual level, but
    \nwhose music I find absolutely unlistenable. The book talks about Stockhausen’s period studying with Messiaen. I was expecting Messiaen to be another one of “those 12-tone guys”; I’ve never been able to develop an ear for 12-tone. But I decided to give Messiaen
    \na listen, and was amazed. He’s not exactly an easy listen, but it’s beautiful music. It’s
    \nvery dissonant, frequently atonal, and yet melodic. This section of the symphony is extremely dramatic, almost theatrical. It’s really a beautiful piece of music.<\/li>\n
  2. Peter Schickele, “Funeral Oration from ‘Julius Ceasar'”<\/b>: from the sublime to ridiculous… A doo-wop funeral oration based on Shakespeare.<\/li>\n
  3. The Tempest, “The Winning Game”<\/b>: What a great song! I’ve lately totally fallen
    \nfor “The Tempest”. It’s a group that started as a collaboration between Andy Tillison and Roine Stolte. They’ve got members from Tillison’s old band (Parallel or 90 degrees),
    \nStolte’s band (the Flower Kings), and Van Der Graff Generator. It’s some of the best
    \nneo-progressive rock you’ll find anywhere. Stolte later left their band, which resulted
    \nin a serious change in the band’s sound, but both before and after Stolte, they’re
    \nan amazing group, with wonderful compositions and absolutely dazzling performances. <\/li>\n
  4. King Crimson, “Frame by Frame”<\/b>: One of the things that King Crimson has been
    \nable to do is to combine some of the most far-out experimental progressive rock with
    \nsome wonderfully catchy, easy-to-listen-to pop songs. This is a great example of that;
    \nFrame by Frame is a very catchy poppy song, and yet it’s incredibly deep and complex.<\/li>\n
  5. Porcupine Tree, “Dislocated Day”<\/b>: some older Porcupine Tree. PT did one
    \nreally wacky album of mostly very long-form neo-progressive tapestries. This is off
    \nof that album.<\/li>\n
  6. Marillion, “Essence”<\/b>: a track off of Marillion’s brilliant new album. Just
    \ngo buy it!<\/li>\n
  7. Isis, “Holy Tears”<\/b>: what were the odds that I could get through a FRT
    \nwithout some post-rock? Isis is a post-rock band on which leans towards the
    \nheavy-metal end of the post-rock spectrum. They’re terrific – great composition,
    \ngreat performance. They do sometimes use vocals, which is fine; but a bit too
    \noften, the vocals are distorted shrieks. This track uses a bit of that; it’s OK
    \nin moderation; in fact, I really like this track a lot. But listening to too much
    \nIsis at a time, that use of shrieking growl vocals gets to me.<\/li>\n
  8. Bela Fleck and the Flecktones, “Misunderstood”<\/b>: I used to be a huge
    \nFlecktones fan. But I despise<\/em> Jeff Cofflin, the saxaphone player they added
    \na few years ago. I just simply cannot stand to listen to the guy – he’s absolutely
    \nawful. He’s incredibly predictable – the guy’s got the creativity of a
    \na small rock; he knows how to play at exactly one volume – too damned loud;
    \nand he’s in love with stupid gimmicks. He’s playing on this track, so guess
    \nwhat I think of it?<\/li>\n
  9. Tony Trischka, “Hawaii Slide-O”<\/b>: interesting that this came up in the shuffle
    \nright after Bela. Tony is Bela’s former banjo teacher. (I’ve taken lessons from Tony
    \nas well; Tony is a great guy who’s happy to give lessons to anyone<\/em> who’s
    \ninterested.) This track is Tony experimenting with playing slide banjo. Back when
    \nI was taking lessons with him, I heard an early version of this track – he was
    \nshowing me what he was working on at the time, and he’d just started playing with
    \na slide on the banjo for the first time in years. Tony is a fabulous musician,
    \nand I love everything on this album. (In fact, I can’t think of anything Tony’s done
    \nwhich I haven’t loved.)<\/li>\n
  10. Rachel’s, “Where have all my files gone?”<\/b>: more post-rock, this time from the
    \nclassical end of things. Rachel’s is an amazing group. This is very typical of their
    \nsound. Very atmospheric, beautiful.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Olivier Messiaen, “Turangalila – Symphonie: II. Chant d’amour 1”: This was an unexpected wonderful surprise. A few years ago, my older brother gave me a book on Stockhausen, who is a fascinating guy on an intellectual level, but whose music I find absolutely unlistenable. The book talks about Stockhausen’s period studying with Messiaen. I was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-719","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-bB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=719"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/719\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=719"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=719"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=719"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}