puredanger.com Blog

Cool blog entry! It’s occurred to me before that certain types of music are basically designed for their medium of delivery, and probably the most interesting example I can think of is music designed for loud, low-end car stereos. Y’know, booming car stereos you feel before you hear, from blocks away. For awhile I had a compilation cd saved in my Amazon shopping cart that I was thinking about getting for Nick, it was called something like “Booty Mix” and had songs with lyrics like “We like the cars, the cars that go boom!”. There’s a case where the music is designed especially for that medium – the booming car stereo. And the motivation of the music is also based on the medium, the motivation being I presume to irritate the general populace and to compete with other car stereos. A sort of urban mating ritual perhaps?

I love classical music, but certain classical music is hard to listen to at work on the headphones because of the extreme dynamics. Ambient electronic music is perfect for work, though – but ambient electronic music is not something I would ever expect to hear live in a concert.

Somewhat related – I’ve pondered before how my criteria for judging music varies based on the type of music and on what I want the music for. On one end of the scale, for jazz and maybe prog rock I pay a lot of attention to the performances of the musicians on their instruments, I place some judgement on their skill at their craft. This is partly why I would be interested in bootleg recordings of this sort of music – recordings of crappy sound quality, but where I could hear the live musicians playing instruments and where I am interested in their departures from the studio recordings. Or, I might check out a jazz recording soley to hear the drummer, and pay little attention to the rest of the music. (It’s worth noting that I used to be a live instrument snob – the music was somehow not as pure if synthesizers were involved. So, at one point AC/DC was a good representation of purity to me, and I would not have touched, say, Depeche Mode.) On the other end of the scale is the purely electronic music that I have more recently gotten into. My criteria is much simpler – do I like how it sounds? It’s all about pure sound. I would probably never have any reason to listen to a bootleg recording of electronic music, the crappy sound quality would defeat the purpose. I suppose to a lesser extent I have some criteria based on composition – I might really like a ten-second trance loop but I would get bored of it real quick, whereas something like Radiohead or Chroma Key is the perfect blend of sound and song composition.

That’s an interesting point Byrne makes about music as a commodity in the recent past versus music being now once more about communication. A lot of us guys remember well the days of amassing cd’s, of the urge to have physical copies of so much music. But, that music was trapped on the cd, it was not easily communicated unless you put it in a cd player in house or car, and even then you didn’t have fine-grained control of mixes unless you programmed a cd player or made a mix cassette tape (until CD-R’s). Now, with digital music, you can throw music all around the web or from phone to phone – I can imagine now one of us forwarding “Pick up the Pieces” to someone’s phone as we caravaned somewhere in our cars. Having a mobile device with random access to any arbitrary clip of music in our entire library, and being able to wirelessly transmit them to others just to make some inside joke or reference – communication.