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I finally managed to get a new amplifier an Audiolab 8000a from ebay. I wired it up last night with my new speaker cables (The Chord Company Carnival Silver Screen) and I’ve been enjoying discovering our music collection again.

As I mentioned in an earlier comment, I’m pretty familiar with this Audiolab model, because my Dad had one for years. In fact, I’d even heard it with my current speakers, because they also used to belong to my Dad. What I wasn’t quite prepared for was how much my old amp must have been deteriorating over the last 6 months or so, because I was blown away by the quality of this amp. It gives an enormous amount of what we audiophiles call ‘wellie’ (a technical term, you understand). So much so that I had to dive for the volume control because I wasn’t prepared for what would come out of the speakers. The volume knob starts at about the 7 o’clock position, and 9 o’clock is more than enough to fill the room. The sound is gloriously transparent, so I can hear the wonderful warm quality of my Rega Planet CD player, as well as the totally different quality of the AR turntable. In short, all the sources sound different, which is just as it should be. The speaker cables probably need a little while to bed down, but I’m very happy with it.

I like a nicely balanced sound, but it is nice to hear properly weighty base again. When I was testing the system out yesterday, I played a few tracks from ‘Knives to the Treble’ by Burning Babylon via the SliMP3. A huge grin spread over my face, and I ran to get Mr. Bsag, dragging him into the living room. “Sit down here and feel the sofa vibrate!” It wasn’t overdone, just very, very deep.

I’ve finally signed up at last.fm. I don’t know why I resisted for so long, but the increase in the numbers of full tracks that they feature was certainly an encouragement . I do sometimes listen to the radio stations at work when I’m away from my main iTunes library, but I’m mainly interested in it as a way of discovering new artists. A ‘similar artists’ station turned up ‘Iron & Wine’, who I had never heard of before. I liked him (yes, it is just a ‘him’ rather than a ‘they’) so much that I bought ‘The Shepherd’s Dog’ recently, as you can see from my recently scrobbled tracks.

It’s also interesting to look back at your listening habits. It isn’t completely characteristic of all my music listening, because I also listen to CDs on the stereo downstairs, but I seem to oscillate between fairly random playlists of a wide range of my collection and intensively listening to a few albums straight through. I’m in the latter mode right now, it seems.

I haven’t really done anything with the social side of last.fm yet (if you’re on there and think you might enjoy my musical tastes, do point me to your username), and I wish that the player integrated with iTunes rather than using a standalone player, but otherwise I’m liking it a lot.

This Sunday, my Mum and I took part in the ‘Singalong with the CBSO’ event. I took part in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it, and Mum and I both went along in 2006, because she enjoys singing too. This year’s piece was Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. If you’re not a fan of Classical music, you probably know at least once movement from either the Old Spice advert or The Omen, depending on your age and cultural tastes. It’s one of those Classical pieces which a lot of aficionados look down their noses at, but I think it’s wonderful, particularly if you see it performed live, or — even better — if you sing it.

There are a nice mixture of movements, including jolly, bawdy songs about drinking, pretty, lyrical pieces, and even a very strange song from the viewpoint of a depressed roasted swan on a spit who is about to be eaten. There’s plenty of orchestral colour too, with two pianos, plenty of timpani, bells and even something that sounded like a football rattle. But you can’t get away from the fact that ‘O Fortuna’ (the aforementioned advert/horror film music) is the real star of the show.

Even if the association hadn’t already been forged in my mind by the Old Spice advert, singing O Fortuna is a lot like surfing. If you’re singing it with about 2,000 other people as we were on Sunday, it’s like surfing one of those monster waves off the coast of Hawaii, where you have to get towed on to the wave by a jetski.

As you are travelling out to the wave, it opens with a few big, slow chords. They seem pretty impressive at the time, but it’s nothing to what comes later, when you’re right up close to the wave. Then, as you’re towed into position, there is a soft, staccato passage where the choir sings in unison. Gradually, this builds in volume and tension as the parts of the choir spread out on the scale, and you see the gigantic wave you’re going to ride. Just when you think you can’t stand the excitement any longer, you let go of the tow rope, stand up on your board, and tip over the lip to career down the mountainous face of the wave. Ten kinds of orchestral and choral hell break out as the Symphony Hall is filled with 2,000 voices giving it some serious vocal welly, booming timpani and a full orchestra having a blast. As the wave starts breaking behind you, you gradually coast to a halt on a chaotic turmoil of unwinding music, desperately trying to sustain the long, last note as the adrenaline knocks all the breath out of you.

Phew. Woohoo! Can we do it again? Luckily, we get to do just that, because the theme is reprised at the end of Carmina Burana.

Happy New Year, everyone! I know I’m a day late, but what’s a day between friends?

I’ve taken a couple of extra leave days, so I’m not back at work until next Monday, and I’m enjoying just pottering around, and trying to shake off a weird bug I seem to have picked up. I had one of those days today where you start off with the intention of fixing one small thing, and end up putting a whole host of things right by accident.

It started with my long-disconnected SliMP3 player. When we moved into our new house, I didn’t get around to connecting up the SliMP3 player, for a number of very dull reasons, but partly because I didn’t have a long enough Ethernet cable. (I know: it’s a classic GTD situation of not having the right next action written down…) It’s only taken a year, but I finally got around to finding a cable and fixing the other impediments and hooking that sucker up. They are beautifully simple devices, so the configuration was fairly straight-forward, except that I’d forgotten that in the interval between last using it and now, I’d converted most of my iTunes library to AAC format from MP3. My player can’t transcode AAC on the hardware (I believe some of the new players can do it), but the server software can convert AAC on the fly to MP3 and play that. Except that I needed LAME installed, so all I got was a ‘Can’t play file’ message. After a quick install of LAME all was well. Except that the horrible distortion I’ve noticed intermittently in my audio system downstairs was really ruining my enjoyment of listening to the SliMP3.

So I decided to see if I could track down the problem. We have a very noisy mains electrical system in our house, and the boiler controller is a particularly bad source of noise. I’d assumed when I heard the distortion before that it was the boiler switch, but today I was listening with the heating system off, and it was still distorted. I checked cable connections, tightened speaker terminals and swapped out power strips, all to no avail. Just when I was beginning to despair of being able to find the source of the problem, I noticed that when I listened with my ear to each speaker in turn, the left was producing all of the distortion. Checking the speaker cable to that speaker carefully, I found that the insulation had cracked, exposing the wire. Aha! Fifteen minutes of pottering in the garage looking for my wire strippers, and some cutting back of the cable, and the distortion had gone. Now I could sit back and listen to my SliMP3 player.

But now I noticed that there were huge numbers of mislabelled files cluttering up the artist listing, making it hard to chose the artists I wanted to listen to. I then felt compelled to go into iTunes and clear up the database, getting rid of some temporary files, and naming everything properly with the correct metadata.

By the time I came downstairs to finally listen to my distortion-free, nicely organised music, it was time for tea. Seriously, where did the day go?

We were on our own for Christmas and Boxing Day this year, so we had a couple of quiet days. After a hectic time at the tail end of this year, it was great to just stop and do very little. On Christmas Day itself, we cooked a crackingly good dinner (salmon en croute, in case you were wondering, with stir-fried carrots and sprouts and roast potatoes and parsnips), opened some presents and watched Doctor Who.

While we were eating dinner, and for a while afterwards, we listened to a World Routes which Mr. Bsag had recorded from Radio 3 earlier in the month, in which the presenter Lucy Duran travels to Georgia to listen to the traditional polyphonic choral music. I’ve been a fan of Georgian music for a long time, but the live recordings (if you’ll forgive the tautology) in the programme were incredibly good. While we were eating, we heard a couple of hymns by the St. Panteleimon Chanters (their name gloriously close to Lyra’s daemon, you notice) recorded at a funeral. That might sound an oddly depressing soundtrack to Christmas, but it was beautiful, ethereal, peaceful music, and far from depressing. In fact, it almost made me want to convert to Orthodox Christianity and move to Georgia, just to have the St. Panteleimon Chanters sing at my funeral. The only slight flaw in that cunning plan is, of course, that I wouldn’t get to hear the music at my own funeral.

They moved on to the traditional ‘table songs’ of the Tusheti region, which is my favourite Georgian style. This included some live recordings of the Tsinandali choir which blew me away. While I listened to their music with a huge lump in my throat, I tried to think what their music reminded me of. It was on the edge of my mind, but when it popped to the forefront, I was rather surprised: their music is like a wolf pack howling. That sounds like an insult, but actually I mean it as the highest praise. Like a wolf howl, there are shifting pitches, voices supporting and intertwining with one another. And like a wolf howl, it speaks to you of joy, longing, sorrow, exultation, fear, power and a wildness that immediately raises the hairs on your neck, and fills the night with electricity. It was a very special experience to hear the recording, so I can’t imagine how powerful it must have been like to be there and hear it live.

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Birmingham can be a constantly surprising place. Just when you think you’ve explored all that it has to offer, you find something that’s new to you, tucked away somewhere.

My brother came to visit this weekend, and Mr. Bsag suggested that we go to St. Paul’s Gallery, tucked away in the Jewellery Quarter. Despite the fact that I’ve visited the RBSA gallery many times, which is just around the corner, I’d never been to St. Paul’s Gallery before. It’s a fantastic place, specialising in fine art prints of album cover art, and features the work of Storm Thorgerson, who produced many of Pink Floyd’s album covers, along with some great covers for other bands.

The brother and I are both big Floyd fans, so seeing huge, beautiful prints of the original cover of Dark Side of the Moon and the Atom Heart Mother cow, signed by Thorgerson, made us go squeee! with geeky excitement. Thorgerson’s covers are incredibly visually arresting (if slightly disturbing), and seeing them so much larger than even the size of a vinyl album cover is a treat. I’ve always loved the look of his cover from Pulse, and that was particularly good at a large scale. The colours are wonderfully vibrant, and you get the full effect of the repeated circle motifs, and the morphing imagery around the edge.

It isn’t all Storm, though. They have a number of other great pieces, like a fantastic portrait of BB King by Robert Crumb, which is signed by both. Since Mr. Bsag loves the work of both of them, that would make a brilliant anniversary present, but I’d have to do a lot of saving up for it.

Another piece we both loved was a special print from Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds, and depicts the HMS Thunder Child battling against a Martian fighting machine. My brother and I both grew up with War of the Worlds — we both know the first part of Richard Burton’s terrific (in the proper sense of the word) narration by heart, and will quote it to bored listeners on the slightest pretext. In fact, we had just been drooling over an original vinyl copy of War of the Worlds in Swordfish, so it was quite a coincidence — enough of a coincidence to set the “oo ee, oo ee, oo ee” musical motif running in my head for the rest of the day, with the odd, “ULLA!” thrown in for good measure. Readers how have not heard War of the Worlds won’t know what the heck I’m on about, but that’s OK.

Anyway, if you’re in Birmingham at a loose end, particularly if you are a Pink Floyd fan, St. Paul’s Gallery is a great place to visit.

Encouraged by the new DRM-free iTunes Plus tracks, and in a fit of mild nostalgia, I bought a few tracks off albums that I only have on vinyl or (long defunct) cassette tapes. Among them were a selection of my favourite tracks from three of Kate Bush’s early albums: ‘Lionheart’, ‘Never For Ever’ and ‘The Kick Inside’. Listening to ‘Oh England My Lionheart’ for the first time in ages reminded me that it is one of my Improbable Situations Discs. This is a similar idea to Desert Island Discs, but covers a range of very specific and highly unlikely situations I might find myself in, and in which would — in my opinion — require a suitable soundtrack.

Quite why these particular bizarre situations have popped into my mind at various points I don’t know, but I’m confident that I’ve chosen the right music to accompany them. There’s nothing like being prepared… The links to the songs take you to the song on the iTunes Store (where available), in case you’d like to check them out.

1. Seeing the Earth from Space: obviously, this calls for Hello Earth by Kate Bush. I might also feel the need to blot the Earth from sight “with just one hand/held up high”. However, I would need to be careful about listening to this in a space suit: if the sight of the Earth from space wasn’t enough to make my cry, listening to ‘Hello Earth’ while doing so definitely would, and I wouldn’t want a blurry view.
2. Having to escape from a burning building (or some other situation against impossible odds), possibly rescuing someone else in the process: Troy by Sinead O’Connor. I’ve always felt that listening to (or more likely thinking about) this song when in a situation requiring enormous fortitude would give me the strength to carry on. I suppose I’m trying to avoid being in a kind of Touching the Void situation with nothing but ‘Brown Girl in the Ring’ by Boney M playing in my head.
3. Being the last human left alive: ‘Walk This World’ by Chris Wood. If you know the song, you can probably guess why I chose it. It has a certain kind of grim but resolute hopefulness about it which might cheer me in an odd way.
4. Sinking into an aimless, numb rut: Time by Pink Floyd. Absolutely right to acknowledge the feeling but shock me out of it.
5. Being permanently exiled from Britain: Oh England My Lionheart by Kate Bush. By all rights, this should be a terrible song (some may argue that it is, but I won’t be swayed from my opinion). It references just about every ‘Ye Olde England’ cliché going — Shakespeare, the Thames, Wassailing, apple orchards, shepherds, Spitfires and so on — and as if that wasn’t bad enough, features the harpsichord. It ought to sound either hopelessly twee or like an advert for the National Front or the BNP. I don’t have a patriotic bone in my body, so I ought to loathe it. And yet, somehow, it’s really moving. It makes me feel homesick while I’m still in England. Perhaps it’s because it’s about a kind of fictional, idealised England we create together. Or perhaps it’s because of lines like:

Our thumping hearts hold the ravens in
And keep the Tower from tumbling

So those are my Improbable Situations Discs. Does anyone else have a similar list, or is it just me?

I was writing a review on Shtetl Superstars, when I realised that I really don’t like the term ‘World Music’. Surely, all music should be world music, since we’re all part of the same world? The unspoken implication of ‘World Music’ is often Music from somewhere that isn’t the U.S. or the better known parts of Europe. ‘Roots Music’ is a little better, but it’s still not right. It implies a a kind of museum music, something stuck in the past, reproducing and preserving what’s gone. There’s nothing wrong with that, in its way, but a lot of Roots Music is vibrantly situated in the present. It’s as much about leaves and flowers as it is about roots. It’s about the present and future as well as the past, about growing up in a new environment, incorporating the musical culture around you into the culture of your parents or grandparents, and transforming it into something new which expresses your own unique situation.

Music isn’t just entertainment; it’s an expression of life and identity, and a part of human nature which is as unique and essential as language.

I don’t very often make playlists in iTunes, because I primarily use it to feed my iPod and I don’t mind just listening randomly to everything on that. But I’ve started to listening to iTunes more when I’m working in the office at home, and I fancied something a bit more… tailored.

I started out with a particular feel of song in mind, and manually constructed a playlist around that feeling. It’s not a particular genre, but — for me at least — the songs I chose formed something quite coherent. They weren’t just a random selection of songs. When I came to name the playlist, I realised that I couldn’t put a name to that coherence. In a spirit of curiosity, laziness, and really wanting my playlist to have a name, I’m opening it up to you: Name My Playlist (like Pimp My Ride, but with less chrome and no Hip-Hop).

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