A scrapbook of thoughts on arts, culture and the Christian life.
The number of books read was dramatically smaller this year, close to zero in fact! However, I did finished a lot of music, so I’m going to start tracking that here as well as each song take about as much time (and a lot more effort!) than reading an entire medium-length book. Books Read Keep …
There are SO many voices telling you that as an independent musician you MUST promote your work on every freakin’ social media platform. So I gave it a shot for once when I released my Dante 1981 Purgatorio album back in December 2021. It was tiring to keep everything updated! Here are the rough results …
Continue reading “My experience with small-time music promotion”
I meanwhile thought of how thrilling it is when a baseball outfielder grabs the ball off the wall and throws it dead-on to home plate to catch a runner. Doesn’t happen very often. A computer with a throwing arm, of course, could do the same every single time, without fail. A simple machine can throw …
Continue reading “The beauty in music that is barely staying glued together”
This week EDM (I grew up saying ‘techno’) artist AVICII died rather tragically. But why even talk about this guy at all? Consider his most recent hit ‘Wake Me Up’: He doesn’t sing on it – the husky vocal are provided by soul singer Aloe Blacc. In fact, Avicii (whose real name is Tim Berling) …
Continue reading “How the rise of DJs shows how the pop music sausage has always been made”
As a teen in the mid-nineties, I spent several years imagining myself to be a recording musician. The centerpiece of my activities was a massive Turtle Beach sampler/synthesizer full-size add-on card in my PC with a whopping 32 megs of expansion memory. I met a group of folks online in a seedy IRC chat room …
Continue reading “The moment when music production is demystified”
I picked up Roger Scruton’s The Aesthetics of Music at the library. I’ve liked a lot of what I’ve read of him online in the last few years. I find it surprising that I went so many years without having heard of him. As music was my academic discipline (ages ago it seems now), I …
Continue reading “In need of a bigger tent for music aesthetics”
Discussion on pop music lyrics and meaning, from fans and critics alike, frequently feel like an exercise in missing the point. Ripped from the context of their 3 minutes and 45 second productions, they lose most, if not all of their weight. Recognizing that, I’d still like to take a stab at identifying a few …
Continue reading “The youth/maturity tension in pop music, feat. Ellie Goulding’s Delirium”
It was 1994. Tom Petty’s Wildflowers album was on the radio. I was a young teen in my bedroom trying to hack out “You Wreck Me” on my first cheap electric guitar. It didn’t take long before I had the notes figured out – there are only three chords for most of the song after …
Continue reading “Manipulating harmony or timbre in church music, via analysis of Tom Petty”
Perhaps the first thing that [the average man] can learn from the artists is that the only way of mastering one’s material is to abandon the whole conception of mastery and to co-operate with it in love: whosoever will be lord of life, let him be its servant. If he tries to wrest life out …
Continue reading “Cooperating with your musical material, rather than trying to dominate it”
A brief bit of music analysis follows. Pop music may be a perennial rubbish heap, but that doesn’t prevent an occasional song on top 40 radio from making your ears perk up and then, after a closer listen, slam you into the wall with its emotional power. I know I’m nearly a year late to …
Continue reading “Sia’s overdrive vocal technique and vicarious emotion in music”