New music

I used to find new music the way most people did: the radio. I was never a big radio listener but I heard enough at various times throughout the day, at home, at work or in shops to pick up on what was going on. TV supplemented this diet, from the heyday of Top Of The Pops to MTV (TOTP no longer exists, and MTV no longer plays music).

When I moved away from the UK my radio and TV consumption dropped dramatically, and this was also around the time that the way people bought (or didn’t…) music changed dramatically thanks to the internet. Nowadays I feel I’m between two generations: I use the internet to research new music, but I still buy a hard copy on CD.

Shares

Often I’ll find something after a friend shares it on facebook, twitter or a blog. Like this one, dropped in the middle of a friend’s recent blogpost just because she was listening to it at the time of events she was describing.

 

Precedents

One of the easiest ways to decide on a purchase is “Did I like their last album?”, and on that basis I just bought the new Florence + the Machine CD. But I don’t do it “blind”. I’ll still read some reviews just in case, and for that reason I avoided the last Björk.

 

Magazines

Once in a while I’ll pick up a copy of Songlines which, in addition to all the articles and reviews also gives you one or sometimes two free cds featuring the best of that month’s releases. A few from the last issue I liked:

Anoushka Shankar. Flamenco sitar. I bought the album at the weekend.

 

The Bombay Royale. Australian Bollywood Surf Guitar. Sadly they don’t seem to have released a full album yet.

 

Ali Khattab. North African flamenco. Album is proving hard to track down in CD format.

 

Old stuff still sounds new

Whenever I go back to the UK I’ll pop into HMV and scan the discounted section. These days it takes up most of the shop, as so few of us actually buy shiny discs any more, meaning that almost half their stock is available for five quid or less. Usually in these situations I’ll pick up a compliation or greatest hits package. On this trip I got Missy Elliott and Roxy Music.

 

How do you find new music?

Pop quiz, hotshot

I’ll give you a shiny new penny if you can tell me what these two 80s hits have in common.

And another one if you can tell me where the blogpost title comes from.

Musical Alphabet: Z

So, we’ve reached the end. I’m a little ashamed to admit that I had to cheat for Z. Zakir Hussain should technically go under ‘H’, but I couldn’t find anything else suitable on YouTube from the one or two other Z-artists I liked.

We were lucky enough to see Zakir and his “Masters of Percussion” live in concert in Dublin in 2000. He’s considered to be one of the best (and fastest) tabla players in the world.

And if you like tabla, Talvin Singh’s pretty good too:

Musical Journey: Y

I first heard this during an episode of Six Feet Under, when Nate goes to visit an old girlfriend, and this song plays as he walks up to her house. It struck me immediately, and so I went to the HBO website and found the music listing for that episode. I’d never heard anything by Yo La Tengo before, but I soon got my hands on a copy of the relevant album, “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out”; a woozy, hazy dream of an album.

Musical Alphabet: X

Not an easy one, this. I don’t own any music by an artist beginning with X, but a little research threw up the name of a little-known group who once collaborated with David Byrne on a single I heard once on MTV.

The only alternative was an old XTC song which turned out not to be as good as I remembered it to be. Plus this one has a fun video.

Musical Alphabet: W

You could say that movie soundtracks, moreso than pop, was the first kind of music I fell in love with.  I saw Star Wars at the age of four and subsequently bought (well, it was probably my Dad who bought it for me) the soundtrack double album, listening to it obsessively and memorising every note. Back in those pre-DVD (pre-VHS, even) days this was the next best thing to seeing the film again. Better, in some ways, as you didn’t have to suffer through any of the bland dialogue or flat performances.

As time went on I sought out other discs by a variety of composers, but I kept coming back to John Williams, who turned out one classic after another: Star Wars, Close Encounters, Superman, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., Jurassic Park. Perhaps more than any other musician he provided the fantasy soundtrack to my childhood.

He could perfectly match a movie’s soaring emotional highs, like this iconic moment from E.T.

He could punctuate an action or comedy scene. Remember in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Indy confronts the sword-swinging Egyptian and shoots him dead? You should be able to identify that moment in this piece of music at about the 2:30 mark:

And of course with the Imperial March first featured in The Empire Strikes Back he wrote the greatest movie villain theme tune ever:

Musical Alphabet: V

I own copies of Suzanne Vega’s first four albums, and all of them contain favourites; songs which are delicate yet tough, romantic, tragic, sad, funny, warm and cold, lush and spare. She once described her voice as being like a pencil, “it’s not very fancy, but it gets the job done”.

This one’s from her first, eponymous album, and I think it shows off most of her strengths. In fact for me it’s probably the definitive Suzanne Vega song. 

Musical Alphabet: U

I remembered this song recently when I was drafting a (subsequently abandoned) blog post on ’80s nuclear paranoia pop. The kind of scenario shown in this video was much discussed in the media and classrooms when I was a child, often framed by the question “What would you do if you heard the four-minute warning?”

Some wag would always reply “Have sex four times!”

Musical Alphabet: T

 I got into They Might Be Giants just after they broke into the British pop charts with Birdhouse In Your Soul in the late ’80s, and devoured their first six albums and B-sides compilation. Each album contains a cornucopia of oddity, intelligence and irresistible melodies.

The one below is from the album John Henry. How many pop songs do you know that make a reference to Plato’s cave allegory a key part of their narrative?

And because I couldn’t resist, here’s another one. Sensurround was never released on any official album but featured on the soundtrack of the first Power Rangers movie (heard briefly on a car radio). The lyrics describe how an unborn child is affected by the vibrations from a Sensurround movie his mother sees while pregnant…

Musical Alphabet: S

I bought the album Beyond Skin without having heard any of it, purely on the basis of what I’d read about Nitin Sawhney’s work. He mixes traditional Indian music, electronica, jazz, flamenco, soul, hip hop and anything else that takes his fancy with contributions from a wide range of guest vocalists.

The track below is instrumental and probably not most representative of his style, but it is one of my favourites.