Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Five songs I first heard in 2020 that I like a lot
Tuesday, December 15th, 2020m~u~s~u~c
Friday, July 31st, 2020I forgot to mention that I salvaged what I could of my old music blog, after the Tumblr mistake, and put it up at musuc.ryliejamesthomas.net.
It’s using a blogging tool called TextPattern, which I’d never used before, but I like it a lot more than WordPress. Feels really simple, gotta get your hands in and customise it, nice and DIY. More work (and the reason I took so long to mention it is that I wanted to get it setup right), but not to hard to tailor it to what you want to use it for.
I’ve been thinking about tying it to a wiki—either its own or my regular one—so artists and songs would have pages with bits of other info.—or even making it entirely wiki-based. But happy enough with it as it is now.
Clean Up Efforts Underway
Tuesday, May 28th, 2019I made a little piece of music for a film, and it’s currently up on Recess:
Clean Up Efforts Underway, by Erin Crouch, with text by Ainslee Meredith.
The music’s a cover of a song from an Ian Thorpe documentary. Making it was a nice little test of my fresh music-making setup. Nothing extravagant, just LMMS and a little MIDI keyboard, but it was nice to see it all working together, and to have an excuse to play with the software synths. People like to bang-on about the difficulty of making music in Linux, but I just ignored all that JACK stuff ’cause I wasn’t really relying on anything real-time. Hopefully I’ll have more music to post soon :)
CHAI
Sunday, March 10th, 2019Been mostly just listening to this one band for the last bunch of months (also Zombie-Chang and a bunch of different African disco and soul and funk, but—). Can’t remember where I heard of them, but I found フューチャー in my bookmarks and followed it round Youtube. I think I’d listened to it before and kinda dismissed it for being too cutesy, but hearing more of their stuff it made sense and the positivity and enthusiasm and the rhythm section really stuck in me.
Also I love this lyric:
Jellybeans, lollipop,
Chewing gum, ice cream,
Beef, gyoza, fish, oranges,
Everything yummy foods!
There are some real good live videos on YT too.
Here’re some Miis I made of the group:
New website
Thursday, July 21st, 2016I’ve redone my website: www.ryliejamesthomas.com www.ryliejamesthomas.net
Also taken everything off SoundCloud and chucked it on /music.html
Seven Guidonian hands, and one Guidonian foot
Tuesday, July 21st, 2015
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Best of J-Pop
Tuesday, May 6th, 2014I am really happy with this.
I’ve been listening to a lot of 80’s J-Pop. And, apart from enjoying it a lot, find myself often frustrated that the introductions—a standard ingredient in the formula—are often the best parts of the songs, and also often quite different to the rest of the melody.
I made a half-serious resolution to make an album of only J-Pop intros, thinking I might make one or two. I was really pleased to find a lot more in the results. It’s gotten me excited about the idea of making things designed to not hold a person’s attention. A stimulating place where attention drifts in and out, and gives a person a place to think and daydream. I find myself alternately keenly focused on every element of the short looped clips and having productive thinking time. I guess these clips are all of moments in songs that are particularly transitory, and dare I say the overused term: liminal. It’s pretty easy to join the dots between this album and other works of mine.
I also left a comment on the album’s Bandcamp page calling these ‘serving suggestions’. They loop perfectly, so you can listen to any one as long as you wish. I could probably listen to Dancing Hero (modern version) all day, maybe all day every day.
As an interesting piece of trivia: this release is exactly seven years after my last album (which has been tidied up a bit and it also on Bandcamp).