Posts Tagged ‘Music’
Five songs I listened to a lot this June
Tuesday, June 27th, 20232022
Monday, January 16th, 2023I do rough drafts of these kinda posts every year, but this year I’m publishing one! Here’re some things I liked in 2022.
I was given a book for my birthday, which started me reading again after a long break. The one that’s really stuck with me is Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane. I saw a doco on him in 2019, and have been meaning to read one of his books ever since. I’m reading Tamarisk Row now.
None of the films I saw really-really-really stand out, but:—
The The Cleaning Company doco I saw on SBS about a trauma cleaning company and the life of it’s owner Sandra Pankhurst. Really heartbreaking in a life-affirming, encouraging way.
My favourite thing from MIFF was Demon Pond. The main actor, Tamasaburo Bando, has a background in Kabuki theatre and is mesmerising. There are also some really cool monster costumes in one part.
(I thought I’d seen August In The Water in 2022, but turns out it was right at the end of 2021.)
Seems like I didn’t listen to much i really liked, but I found a video for a great Nana Love song I hadn’t heard before called Dancing in the Rain, I think this was the year I listened to a bunch of Yasuha songs for the first time, and I keep getting this Doug Parkinson version of I’ll Be Around stuck in my head. Also finally went through the Talking Heads discography, but my faves are all obvious ones I’d heard before (Lady Don’t Mind, Girlfriend Is Better).
I mostly just played boring fancy game shit like Monster Hunter. One interesting one that stands out is Deity Driving. I like to be a car. I liked Domestic Dreams and Robots, too.
African Disco, Funk, Etc. – XMas 2020
Saturday, August 28th, 2021
Been meaning to share this for ages, but anyway, here’s a little compilation I made for Christmas pressies.
I wanted it to be more diverse, but turns out most of the stuff I like comes from Ghana and Nigeria.
SVGs for printing the cover are included. Tags might be fucked should be fixed. I’ve been moving from Foobar2000 to Quod Libet, so the music library’s a bit of a mess at the moment.
Track list:
- Only You, Steve Monite
- Enjoy Your Life, Oby Onyioha
- You’re My Solution, Eric Kol
- Living Everyday, Tee Mac
- Sweeper Soul, Super Mambo 69
- Talking About Music, Nana Love
- Groove I Like, Veno
- We Can Move, Free Youth
- Disco Dancer, Kiki Gyan
Cunt
Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021Been sitting on this song for a year and a half, but just finished the video.
Sorry if you didn’t make the list!
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:
