There are ca. 9 seconds that will ruin your experience when listening to the dark ambient classic Lustmord’s Heresy. To fix it: Have a 9-second cough attack, munch on nachos for 9 seconds, or simply skip the time between 2:03 and 2:12 in Part V.

Hey B. can’t you record a version that’s 9 seconds shorter???

I’ve just received the last two CDs I was missing from this 5-CD set.

And I can only say, there’s no space ambient spacier than that, EVER.

Symphonies Of The Planets is a 5-CD set of NASA recordings made by Voyagers.

According to the CD inlay the sounds come from:

• Interactions of the solar wind with magnetospheres of the planets
• Magnetospheres themselves
• Radio waves bouncing between planets and the surface of their atmospheres
• Field noise within space
• Interactions of charged particles & solar wind
• Charged particle emissions from the rings of planets

The instruments on board the Voyagers picked up all these emissions, and the CDs contain a selection of what happened to have fallen into the audible frequency range.

Every one of these CDs has a different flavor and contains ca. 30 minutes of droning sounds.
Unfortunately they sound exactly as I would like space ambient to sound. Why “unfortunately”? Well, because it raises an interesting question - if the human-generated drones (Lull’s Continue being a good example) sound like the “real stuff”, what’s the point in generating them at all? It’s like if someone were fabricating real stones (not to mention that other someone willing to go and buy these human-made real stones). I’ll have to sleep on that problem.

Have seen this story linked on mobileread.com:

This guy in Wilkes-Barre Pa. has ca. 3000 books and thus “poses a fire hazard”. So the authorities were forced to close his home.

Yeah sure, fireman Guy Montag can confirm that books do pose certain hazard…

But why only books? CDs, DVDs, VHSes, Betamaxes, are all plastic, so they’re probably a hazard too. Digitize them all, and send the originals to a museum!

Damn, I am fine reading off the PRS-500, I don’t miss the smell/touch/feel of a real book. Call me a fetishist, but I just can’t imagine enjoying music without that je ne sais quoi of “physical” CDs, inlays, booklets and digipaks!

A while ago I wrote about the CDs I ordered. I got one then, and was waiting for the other (Wolfgang Press; Legendary Wolfgang Press and Other Tall Stories). Surprise surprise - it’s more than 4 months now, and I am still waiting. Well, actually I doubt I will ever get it, since the CD is “out of print” (hmm. how do you call it in case of a CD - “out of burn”?). Anyway, they don’t make it anymore. No big deal.

Just that every week or so I get an email with a link which I have to click, to acknowledge that I want to continue waiting for the CD. I stubbornly nurture my relationship with vivid.pl’s order-processing system. 4 months and counting. If I don’t blow it one week, I will eventually win with the machine.

* An explanation - Rotten Fodder is from Wolfgang Press’ Standing up straight

Update: This post became stale. The prices I wrote about just have gotten reasonable, dispelling my plan of making a fortune ;-)

Where do they take these prices from? I just got this CD - The Wolfgang Press - Standing Up Straight - delivered and paid ca. 12 euros for it. OK, that’s not a special editon. I am curious if I will also get this The Wolfgang Press - Legendary Wolfgang Press and Other Tall Stories, that I ordered as well, for 12 euros.

70$ for a normal CD! Oh well, that’s just simple economics - the demand exceeds the supply. Taken it’s #299,670 sales rank, I reckon it must be something like 1 CD for a handful of prospecive buyers. Impressive :-D

Things that creep

Lion’s share of the music I enjoy listening to, is, well, not quite mainstream.

From today’s perspective I don’t even understand how I managed to find new music just a couple of years ago. It must have been a bit of everything - late-night radio broadcasts (Artur Boryczko!), some press articles, having a chat with CD store owner and listening to his favourites, you name it…

Since none of my friends share any enthusiasm for most of what I listen to, the numerous ways
to broaden the horizons, were often strange, unusual and unpredictable.

And that was definitely fun!

Nowadays, I have a “must/should haves” list, evergrowing - thanks to recomendations in amazon, generally googling on things, and more recently looking in musicplasma.
But the whole joy of searching is gone. A pastime of buying new findings, got replaced by a regular frustration when I need to prioritize before ordering something.

So, could it still be called searching, that what we are doing regularly on the internet? Wouldn’t sieving be a more proper name for that kind of activities?

PS. Check out musicplasma. Sites like that sweeten somewhat the loss of the real searching pleasure.

Update:
Just had a look at the title and it sounds very backward. The RANT-LOCK on my keyboard must have been stuck again, I guess :-P. I will not change the post title, of course. So I added the subtitle instead, to convey the point: Although I regularly search the internet, and seldom do a search in the “real world”, I never took the time to realize that shift in the meaning.

More things that creep will sooner or later appear on these pages…

My 9-month old daughter seems to be liking Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. Probably I won’t learn soon, whether I should be happy or sad about it. My father played Mozart all through my childhood and baby-hood, the result - I could tell “Linzer” from “Prager”, without hearing, just by comparing the bile levels. I hope Massive Attack won’t traumatize her like that.

My working theory is, that it’s probably the low bass sounds that she reacts to. When I buy some CD-shelf and unpack the CDs, I will be able to do more extensive testing, subjecting her to some low-frequency explorations, like Axiom Dub or Biosphere Shenzou. And when I finish the unpacking altogether, I’ll possibly dig a little deeper into the topic.

Sooooo I started this blog, I made it greenish, quite to my liking. What I was missing was some unusual design element, a special twist, extraordinary touch. So I came up with the idea of using the titles in Morse code, their linear appearance making for good separators. The idea is not fresh, namely one of my cds - global communication 76:14, has the band name written in Morse on the cover. So I dug out the cd:

And it is greenish! Like this very site! Argh!

That’s not the first time it happens to me - Now and then I discover that I put efforts into reinventing someone else’s wheel - like when I was taking classical guitar courses, for instance. I composed a march, In what I believed was a genuine creative effort, I wrote what was playing in my head. A couple of months later I found my march in an etudes book! Hmmm… how did it appear in such a place? Mystery, mystery…

All in all, no-one, except myself, would have a faintest idea about any link whatsoever between this cd and my site, that’s a pure coincidence, so why should I worry? Just because I have a strong post-factum gut feeling?

Or maybe? What things could there be, that are someone else’s, but I sincerely believe are mine? Attitudes? Political opinions? Life? And how to really tell the genuine from a mere copy?

Back to the cd: It is a really good ambient-spacey-landscapes kind of stuff. Lengths of songs are their titles, same with the cd title itself - The idea is to not influence the listener’s imagination - so the authors. Good for relaxing, dreaming and falling asleep to (unless your stereo wakes you up with this stupid mechanical noise, when it turns off, as mine does :-))

Update: I have just seen a two-cd extended edition - one is THE 76:14, another is a bonus cd - don’t waste your time, you can throw the bonus away without much regret…