Playlists

[seekingferret]

For sanguinity!

A Mixture of Things I Find Entertaining And Think You Also Might

Download Here!

1. "Aria (Cantilena)" from Hector Villa-Lobos's Bachianas Brasileiras #5, recorded by Nashville Symphony Orchestra
-Because it does beautiful melody/ complex orchestration things, happy/sad things, Americas/Europe things, early music/modern music things, and is just generally arresting.
2. "Deep Blue" by the Arcade Fire
-Because it's a great rock song about a chess computer.
3. "Lady Luck Blues" by Bessie Smith
-Because Bessie Smith.
4. "Go to the River" by Yael Naim
-Because Yael Naim? And because I feel like the brilliance of the whole "She Was a Boy" album slipped past people because it began as a difficult-to-acquire import.
5. "Applause" by Lady Gaga
-Because I don't know sanguinity's feelings about Gaga, and I am curious. And this is kind of a shockingly excellent song. (I may have a kink for songs that use recorded applause as a musical figure)
6. "Joan" by Heather Dale
-Because of the chorus.
7. "Redemption Song" by The Chieftains and Ziggy Marley
-Because the original Bob Marley song is great, but this version does weirdly effective Americas/Europe things and somehow manages to not feel oppressively appropriative because of Ziggy's participation.
8. "Speeding Motorcycle" by Daniel Johnston
-Because the metaphor is weird and wonderful and this song needs to be shared and appreciated.


For batdina!

A bunch of synthy pop songs, mostly

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1. "Let's Pretend" by Fluorescent Pea Pod
-Because I love how terrible a romance it celebrates
2. "Futurepop" by Eloquent
-Because it's dancy and fun and futuristic.
3. "J.S. Bach: Prelude" by William Orbit
-Because Orbit made two albums in this style and I have no idea why.
4. "Da Funky Greenspan" by Keith Spillman
-Because it recognzes the mesmeric potency of an Alan Greenspan speech
5. "Adagio for Strings" by Bond
-Because I refuse to feel guilty for loving Bond.
6. "Hardcore Symphony" by Digital Explosion
-Because it almost is symphonic synthpop, and that is silly and delightful.
7. "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb
-Because the Orb.
8. "Orange Grove Lullaby" by Kiss*The*Star
-Because the band name has two asterisks in it.
9. "Sensations" by Alphaville
-Because some part of my heart is still in weird German 80s music. And this is one of the Alphaville songs with an elusive/allusive reference to Mighty Maomoondog, whoever that is.


For bookherd

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A bunch of great songs released in 2014, plus a few released in 2013 that I didn't find until 2014 because I am not hip at all

1. "Grand Theft Stutinki" by Shtreiml
- Because I still haven't figured out why a band called Shtreiml sounds so Mizrachi.
2. "Banjo Banjo" by Bela Fleck and Abigail Washburn
-Because it's the best song on an album of amazing duets by an adorable banjo playing married couple
3. "Big Cig" by the Hold Steady
-Because there's something Tom Waitsian about the character Big Cig.
4. "Hodu" by the Toure-Raichel Collective
-Because it was surprising and exciting to hear Raichel bring music of his Jewish faith into his amazing collaboration with Vieux Farka Toure.
5. "In Mirrors" by Colin Stetson
-Because this is probably the song my parents heard me listening to this year and were most disapproving of, and I like that I can still shock my parents with my musical taste.
6. "GTO" by Puss 'n Boots
-Because Holy Shit Norah Jones singing classic country covers
7. "Adoration of the Earth" from "The Rite of Spring" by The Bad Plus
-Because The Bad Plus recorded the complete Rite of Spring and I think I need to say that again. In capslock. THE BAD PLUS RECORDED THE COMPLETE RITE OF SPRING!!!!
8. "Brooklyn Babylon: An Invitation" - by Darcy Argue's Secret Society
-Because it proves that big band jazz is not dead. (I think it was on starlady's end of year list last year.)

Comments

[sanguinity]

Yay!

Scattered notes from the first listen:

1. That was stunning. I’m hard-pressed to say anything more cogent about it.
   
2. Because it’s not a Ferret playlist without a Skynet song. :-D
   
3. Mm, Bessie Smith, indeed.
   
4. …and obvs I’m going to have to go listen to lots more of Yael Naim.
   
5. My opinion of Lady Gaga is that she goes down very easy if you’re fond of the ‘80s pop palette, which I am. (This one does not remind me of Madonna, but of Falco and the Eurythmics.) I often have an odd sensation of nostalgia-but-not-nostalgia when I first hear a song of hers: lots of scattered sense-memories of highschool friends and dances and the freedom of a driver’s license, but blessedly free of the discomfort of being the song that was playing during AWKWARD. There, now you know my extremely shallow Lady Gaga opinions. :-P
   
6. Hahaha, hard split in this household: Grrlpup had an instant and visceral hatred of it, while the chorus gave me happy gooseflesh. I am barred from further listening, however, until I am alone. (Which is fair; there's stuff of hers she's not allowed to play when I'm around.)
   
7. …and that's as close as I’ve come to liking a Chieftains song. (There is some instrument in their ensemble that consistently sends me scrabbling for a back button.) In this one’s favor, it’s an interesting collaboration, with some neat tension between the two styles. It also helps that whatever-the-instrument-is that grates so badly on me isn’t taking front and center, like it does in so much of their music. It grew on me on second listen; it may yet grow on me more.
   
8. Hahaha, I have to admit, I half-expected an entire playlist of peculiar things like this. (And yes, I like it on its own terms, too, and not just as the kind of thing that makes me laugh and think of you.) CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE SUCCEEDED IN SURPRISING ME.

I enjoyed that immensely (and will again!), thank you.

[seekingferret]

1. If you liked that, you should check out the Joan Baez recording on youtube, which is stunning in very different ways.
5. This is an opinion that makes a lot of sense. My sense of Gaga is that her music is extremely carefully constructed to feel that way to as many people as possible... friends of my generation catch homages to Ace of Base and 90s pop music in the same songs that are undeniably playing with, as you say, Madonna and Falco and the Eurythmics and a lot of 80s pop- and there is definitely a disco presence as well. Because I like digging in for meta, my attraction to Lady Gaga is the fact that she doesn't hide the fact that she's doing this, that she throws out Easter Eggs for fans to catch... actually this has me wondering what you would think of Girltalk.
8. Novelty music I have plenty, but novelty music works best when its deconstruction of musical tropes is set up against the tropes themselves.

[bookherd]

Thank you. Obviously, the thing to do here is to download all three playlists. I will report back on at least one of them.

The only track I'm recognizing by title is "Speeding Motorcycle", and I applaud that choice, loudly.

Would you like a playlist, Ferret? And if so, any particular kind?

[bookherd]

Hmm. I'm getting an error message when I try to open all of these, even after re-downloading.

Archive: /home/[username]/Downloads/for_bookherd.zip
[/home/[username]/Downloads/for_bookherd.zip]
End-of-central-directory signature not found. Either this file is not
a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive. In the
latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
the last disk(s) of this archive.
zipinfo: cannot find zipfile directory in one of /home/[username]/Downloads/for_bookherd.zip or
/home/[username]/Downloads/for_bookherd.zip.zip, and cannot find /home/[username]/Downloads/for_bookherd.zip.ZIP, period.

Obviously the zip is openable, because Sanguinity did it. She's got a Mac, and I'm running Ubuntu, if that clarifies anything... I'll hunt around for an answer on this, but let me know if you have any suggestions.

[seekingferret]

Huh... I created them using Ark on Kubuntu, so it's strange that you'd have trouble with them in Ubuntu.

Since you have Ubuntu, I assume you have tar/untar, so I just threw it up in a gzipped tar archive too in case that helps. Untar with tar -xvzf for_bookherd.tar.gz

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1754253/for_bookherd.tar.gz

[batdina]

THANK YOU for this! I'm downloading now and looking forward to hearing new sounds.

[bookherd]

Success! I opened the original .zip in Archive Mounter instead of Archive Manager, and was able to extract the files that way. Thanks for posting the tar, though. I liked what Sang did with her first impressions, so here are mine:

1. Oh, this is fun. Yay klezmer!
2. I love banjos. I love them so much I even play one, albeit slowly and clumsily. Two banjos are better than one (if played well, and these certainly qualify), and the info that it's a married couple playing is just frosting on a really great cake.
3. I agree - it's a cock-eyed, bleary portrait, believable and very much in a Waitsian vein.
4. Wow. This is gorgeous. This will get a lot of replay. I need to seek out what else these people have done.
5. From your description, I was expecting something with really lewd lyrics, so a minute and a half of creaks and squawks was actually kind of a relief. ;)
6. Haha, very nice. I'd totally lost track of what that woman was up to, and am pleased to find it's this. Goes down easy.
7. I've only heard one other track by The Bad Plus, a cover of "Comfortably Numb" that does some really unsettling things. Brilliant, and incredibly disturbing. "Rites of Spring" seems like the obvious next step, and the matchup is as perfect as I would've guessed.
8. Vivid musical depiction of a crowded, noisy city: very well done.

Very much enjoyed this! It's been ages since anyone made me a mix of any sort. Thanks again!

[seekingferret]

4. The first album by the group, The Tel Aviv Sessions, released in 2013, was one of my most-listened-to albums of last year. The new album isn't quite as interesting to me, but it is just as objectively good.

7. The Bad Plus are probably my favorite band. "Comfortably Numb" is off "For All I Care", an album where the core jazz trio collaborated with a singer, and the only Bad Plus album to date with vocals. They're probably most famous for their rock covers- "Comfortably Numb", "Smells Like Teen Spirit", and "Barracuda" among them... but they are top-notch jazz musicians extremely comfortable in a variety of jazz idioms and I love a lot of their original jazz stuff, particularly on "These Are the Vistas" and "Made Possible".