The unfortunate death of Fuji Fabric’s Shimura Masahiko pretty much overshadowed another bit of news released on Christmas Day: Furukawa Miki is releasing a new album on Feb. 17. The 14-track album is titled Very and includes the single "Saihate", which was released on Dec. 9. Not much information is available beyond the brief post on Furukawa’s official site, but I noticed the catalog number looks like she’s back in the Sony field. Her first two solo albums were released by BMG Japan.
I can’t help it. Anything that I buy or download is potential content for this site.
Sometimes, I’ll listen to something with no intention to review it, only to like it so much I want to talk about it. Other times, I’ll listen to something with every intention to review it, only to end up feeling ambivalent about it. It’s easy to hate an album or to love an album. Merely liking? Merely not hating? Much, much, much harder.
So that’s where this GTD thing comes in — I combed through a few past entries to come up with one big list of music I’ve consumed over the past few months, about which I haven’t written much. I hope having everything on one screen gives me a better sense of how to prioritize.
Do I have anything to say about those Felix Mendelssohn chamber works I downloaded? Is there anything else to say about the Replacements’ Let It Be? Do I want to subject myself to another spin of Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimist, knowing full well Department of Eagles’ In Ear Park is way better?
Maybe GTD will help. And for the first order of business, let’s take out the trash.
Wow. So I made it to the last day of Holidailies. Of course, it helps to cheat.
Allow me to confess that I’m currently writing this entry on New Year’s Eve, during a time when the office is pretty much empty. Most of the entries I’ve written for this month were done ahead of time.
Yes, it helps to have a backlog of music to review, news to discuss and a year to review. But did I really need to spend five entries counting down my favorite albums of the decade? (Padding.) I did enjoy writing about my trip to Japan, which was very tangentially musical. But that kind of personal writing would have gone on my Vox site instead.
I did like the fact I created a new channel for music-themed book reviews, and I like how I’ve gotten back into the habit of recreational reading. I hope this fascination with non-fiction lasts me for the rest of the year.
I also hope this GTD thing keeps. Maybe the shift in priorities about which I fretted at the start of the month is a good thing.
None of my entries earned special recognition for Best of Holidailies. Eh, I figured music punditry wouldn’t go over well on a project based more on personal storytelling.
And as I predicted, I don’t think I’ve captured any new readers as a result. (If I did, holler out in the comments section. Did you enjoy the Holidailies Audio Guide to Musicwhore.org?)
I have to say I’m exhausted. That’s a lot of writing. And this weekend I’m taking a trip to San Francisco as research in my effort to relocate from Austin. In other words, the radio silence that befell this site before the trip to Japan is re-emerging once again.
Don’t worry. I still have that big-ass backlog to get through.
I mentioned before that I’m not much of a link collector. That has turned out to be untrue.
Thing is? Unless you follow me on teh Facebookz, you won’t see any of these links, and they all aren’t focused on music.
I’ve expounded elsewhere on why I prefer to share links in a closed system like Facebook than on a public blog like this one — factor: convenience — but in an effort to pad this final stretch of Holidailies entries, I’ll offer some of the links that caught my eye in the last few weeks.
The Decade in Music Genre Hype The Internet really is eroding a sense of mass culture. In order for popular music to be "popular", it needs to grow out of an underground culture before it crosses over, or so my pop studies professor posited back in college. The fact none of these mini-genres coalesced into a mass movement indicates how much the audience is splintering.
40 Years Old, a Musical House Without Walls ECM has always struck me as a label I could get into, but so far, the only ECM album I own is Meredith Monk’s Book of Days. And this label first released music by Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt.
Classical music bucks the trend Could the classical recording industry be the indicator of what will happen to the popular music industry? Smaller labels and artist-run ventures pick up where the major labels have abandoned. This reality is already in place in classical music but still only theorized in popular music.
What’s Your Workout with Nathan Gunn It’s a Flash feature, so deep linking is not possible. (Suck.) The bottom navigation should have a link to Gunn’s profile. Needs more half nekkid pictures.
Rufus picks his gay icons As commented by AfterElton.com, the picks themselves are unsurprising, but their descriptions are hilarious.
The story of the release of Duran Duran’s Rio in the United States is circuitous. If you were a preteen in 1983 — like myself — this story would not reveal itself till the advent of the compact disc.
When I cross-graded my copy of Rio from vinyl (and cassette) to CD in 1992, I was shocked and dismayed by the music that came out of the speakers. It was not the one I spent my junior high school years spinning endlessly.
The arrangements of the side one tracks were thinner, and many of them were shorter. Surely, this mistake was made at the pressing plant? Actually, it wasn’t. (Ed note: And don’t call me Shirley.)
Capitol Records told Duran Duran the album had to be remixed to make it marketable to American audiences. For the CD reissue, the band opted to use the original UK mix instead. Over time, I would get accustomed to the original mixes, but they didn’t hold a candle to the album I studied at great length.
Today, I’m old enough to be a sucker for the reissue market, and yet again, I repurchased Rio, this time with the remixes I know and love.
After years of working in the tech industry, I finally broke down and read that most fashionable of time management tomes, Getting Things Done by David Allen. Spend any amount of time around tech types, and they’ll mention some tool or other used to track their various GTD lists.
I don’t lead as cluttered a life as it seems most of my friends do, so I’ve never felt the compulsion to read Allen’s book. I get things done, and I don’t feel too stressed about it. I’ve read about and heard of GTD so much, I didn’t really learn anything new by the time I did read the book.
Still, I didn’t want to dismiss the concept out of hand. It seems to have a lot of practitioners, and it seems to work. So why not try it out?
As it turns out, GTD has finally gotten me listening to stuff I’ve had on a back-burner for too long a time.
I warned you all at the start of the Holidailies endeavor that I would be writing a bunch of filler entries, if the Japan entries weren’t proof enough. (Although given the focus of the site, those entries weren’t exactly off-topic.)
I usually fill out the following meme every two years, but now that we’re in the final stretch of Holidailies, I figure I may as well get lazy.
Yes, I have a whole bunch of stuff I could be reviewing, but I need a break too, you know?
We’ll get back to the regularly scheduled punditry tomorrow. Perhaps.
Do As Infinity, like many bands, is greater than the sum of its parts. When the duo announced it would break up in 2005, it seemed Do As Infinity had run its course. At the same, it was difficult to picture Van Tomiko and Owatari Ryo in another context.
Owatari’s band, MISSILE INNOVATION, didn’t have much innovation, and Van? Her solo career looks like a lot of bad planning.
First, she springs a solo album, Farewell, in 2006 with no singles to precede it — an odd course of action for a pop star in Japan. Then she releases a series of promising singles that … don’t lead to an album. Rather, she spends two years releasing covers before those singles are collected onto an album.
And the resulting work sounds like … Do As Infinity.