Stuff I'm Listening To

Fred Wilson and I are roughly the same age, therefore went to high school roughly at the same time, and I roughly agree with many of his top 50 favorite album rankings. (There are some surprises in that list. . . why folks rate, for starters, Paul Westerberg, The Replacements, The Ramones, or Black Sabbath, so highly I'll never understand.) But I find I'm listening to fairly different stuff than he is these days.

Here's some stuff I'm listening to (besides tuning in to KCRW on a regular basis):

Home by Engineers. Engineers (they don't use "The" before their name) like to say they sound like nobody else. But they sound like lots of other bands. That's ok. I still like "Home".

Cosmic Game, the new album from Thievery Corporation.

Ennio Morricone Remixes, Volume 1. A mixed bag, but the good stuff is REALLY good.

Ken's Last Ever Radio Extravaganza - deeply weird and troubling and fascinating all rolled up into one . . . sound samples played fast, slow, sideways, backwards, upside down. KLERE is basically a weekly podcast that's been going on for over eleven years.

Radio David Byrne - what Byrne is listening to these days.

The Musical Box from Genesis' Nursery Cryme album. Timeless.

Midnight in Moscow - I've only ever bought a few recordings from the Apple iTunes Store, but I bought two renditions of Midnight in Moscow, a version (sounding like it's right out of the Dr Zhivago soundtrack) by the Osipov State Russian Folk Orchestra with Vitaly Gnutov as well as a jazzy version by Kenny Ball and His Jazzmen. I was in 7th grade when my English teacher played the Kenny Ball recording to the whole class. All the kids hated it, except me.

Bruckner's Symphony No. 5 in B flat major. A favorite.

Things We Said Today as performed by Mary McCaslin.

1983 and Voodoo Child from Jimi Hendrix.

Posted by brian at 07:35 PM | Comments (4)

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy . . . Without Ship B?

There's something terribly appropriate and unsurprising, I'm afraid to say, that the whole Golgafrinchan Ship B segment didn't make it into the Disney film version of Douglas Adams' A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Oh, to have been a fly on the wall in the room where that decision was made. One can only imagine the reasons . . .

Thankfully, there's the original BBC television series from 25 years ago which is an infinitely better rendition of the book than this new Hollywood fare.