A Statement of Purpose, Slowly

My listening project began in February 2008 (link) and continues today. The idea was simple: listen to everything in my music library and review it on my blog. I was faithful about the concept until 2010, when a big move and a long period of unemployment left me in poor emotional state to muster the blog reviews. I have kept the music appreciation side, though. As of this morning, I have listened to 53,140 tracks out of the 72,340 in my library. I have spent just over 150 days—five whole months!—in the last five years listening to my music alphabetically. That is 3,600 hours. This does not include new tracks, repeats, ephemera such as podcasts, little obsessions, and deletions. If I were to add nothing new to my library, I would have 19,200 tracks left with 50 solid days of listening before me. My current rate of listening (1 solid month per year) indicates that this will take another year and a half to complete the project.

Today I rarely update my blog. Perhaps my job and family are more demanding, but in truth, my creative reserves are too often just empty. I work. I parent. I play music and tinker with electronics. I try to keep up with interesting TV shows and movies. This stuff takes time, and I’m uncertain that the ramblings of a middle-aged man are worth anyone else’s time but my own. So the blog is a low priority.

This project was about looking at the world differently. I intended to slow my consumption down and try to appreciate the music I love on its own level. This year I am 41 and appreciably slower than I was when I began this project at 36 (actually I was 35, with my birthday still some months away). Anyway, my point is that I am more in tune with the act of slow listening and I am unsure whether this is more because of the influence of the project or the inevitability of time.

I have an enormous and growing backlog that lives in a folder on my iTunes called “To Review.” It is at 16,363 songs and just over 45 days of music. Just shy of what I have left to listen to, and a little less than a third of what I’ve covered thus far. In the interest of reaching the end, I have threatened in the past to do faster, more perfunctory posts, even if it violates the spirit of this project. But I have balked at this. Without its animating spirit, what is the project? If I get annoyed and simply rush to the end, am I not cheating myself, breaking my own rules for instant gratification, despite the fact that delayed gratification was the point from the beginning?

So I will give it another go. Because five years is far too long for a project to be unnamed, I hereby call this The Slow Music Library Project.

Music Library Catch-Up!: Can, Cardinal, Cat Power, Nick Cave, A Certain Ratio, Chaise Lounge, James Chance

Can - Lost Tapes Box Set (2012, recorded 1968-1977). A boatload of studio outtakes and demos compiled, mastered, and generally overseen for release by Can keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, the Lost Tapes is occasionally brilliant and sometimes illuminating for showing how certain songs were completed. It's a must for a Can fanatic, but I wouldn't recommend it to anyone before picking up a copy of, say, Tago Mago or Future Days. Studio Can. Live Can. I wrote those posts almost four years ago. Geez.

Cardinal - Hymns (2012). The great supergroup of Richard Davies and Eric Matthews join forces in the studio after a 15-odd year hiatus. This album is lovely but unfortunately missing something. I've never quite grasped what, though, and hope that it will grab me at some point. Because I wanted to love it straight out of the gate.  More on Cardinal.

Cat Power - The Covers Record (2000). The stripped-down cover album can be done right. Much in the vein of Mark Kozelek's radical reinterpretation of his covers, Chan Marshall turns the songs inside-out and makes them her own. Usually. Sometimes not. Anyway, this is half-great and half-dull. More Cat Power.

Nick Cave - Tender Prey (1988), The Good Son (1990), Henry's Dream (1992), Abattoir Blues/Lyre of Orpheus (2004), B-Sides And Rarities (released 2004), Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008). It's only been a little over a year since I started getting into Nick Cave, but I definitely still dig the guy. The best of these is Henry's Dream, which works in an extended reference to John Berryman's Dream Songs, but that's only by a hair. The worst is the B-Sides collection, but even that has some striking gems among the misses. Excellent stuff. I'm saving the Grinderman albums to the Gs. Here's a little more on Mr. Cave.

A Certain Ratio - Early (1981-1985). This is an interesting compilation of early singles from the English post-punk band. I had only heard a track or two from them before and found it rather striking.

Chaise Lounge - Symphony Lounge (2010). A swing + symphony album. I'm so not the target audience for this, although my wife likes it. Seems a little out of date, even for the swing fad of the 90s.

James Chance/James White and the Blacks - Off White (1979). No-wave punk provocateur makes racially-charged impossible-to-dance-to dance music. Cool.

At the AV Club: Ken Jennings's Fun New Book On Received Parental Wisdom

Check it out!

At the AV Club: Penn Jillette's new booklike object, reviewed

I haven't written for them in a while, so here's my first piece for the AV Club since April or so.

Music Library Catch-Up!: Blakey with Monk, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Boredoms, Boris, Bowie, Briggs, Broadcast, Brokaw, Built To Spill, and Butthole Surfers

Art Blakey – Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers with Thelonious Monk (1958). The game-for-anything Blakey and the speed demon Johnny Griffin (soon to join Monk’s quartet full-time) with the sublime Monk himself on piano playing five tunes by Monk and one by Griffin: how could this be anything but utterly brilliant? Previous Blakey here.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy – Blue Lotus Feet (1998). Does anyone call Will Oldham “Prince?” This is a 14-minute EP full of Oldham’s usual lovely songs. More Bonnie “Prince” here, here, here, here, and here. Not linking to any Palace albums, though. What, were you planning on reading this stuff all day?

Boredoms – Chocolate Synthesizer (1994). Like all Boredoms albums, this one sounds like a headlong attack of schizophrenia. Rocks like crazy. More Boredoms.

Boris – Golden Dance Classics (split single with 9DW, 2009), BXI (EP with Ian Astbury, 2010), Live At The Republik, Calgary AB, August 19, 2010 (bootleg), Variations (2010), Klatter (EP with Merzbow, 2011), Attention Please (2011), Heavy Rocks (different album than previous album of the same name, 2011), New Album (2011). Boris continues to confound expectations at every turn. The split single is an electronica/shoegaze thing not unlike My Bloody Valentine. The EP with Ian Astbury sounds like, as you may guess, The Cult with a heavier vibe. I like it, but it lacks the insanity of Boris’s best music. The live bootleg lacks the great sound quality of Rock Dream, but it has unofficial fourth member Michio Kurihara on guitar in place of Rock Dream’s Merzbow, and Kurihara is a far more conventional (and palatable) psychedelic guitarist. Variations is a greatest hits collection, Boris-style, meaning that it intentionally fucks with its audience. The first track is an edited version of Akuma no Uta’s “Introduction.” Tracks 2, 6, 7, 11, and 12 are all re-recordings of earlier tracks with Kurihara. There are a few tracks from Pink, one of which has a longer edit, a track from Rainbow, two tracks from the Japanese version of SMILE, and a B-side. Crazy, but not as much as what comes next. First, there’s the Klatter EP with Merzbow, released in February 2011, which has re-re-recordings of three tracks from Akuma no Uta, a cover of a song named “Jane” by a German prog-rock band named Jane, and a Merzbow noise-boogie jam. Then in May, Boris released in the US the electronica/dance album Attention Please with the lovely guitarist Wata on vocals on the same day as the heavier, but still electronic-dominated, Heavy Rocks, which is a completely different album than the 2002 album Heavy Rocks, even though both share covers that are extremely similar. Confusing, right? Well, it could be even more baffling. About two months before the US albums dropped, the Japanese market got New Album, which combines tracks from both Attention Please and Heavy Rocks with an alternate mix that blends the dance and the metal. And the thing about Boris is that they are so incredibly talented that they can pull this crazy shit off. All three 2011 albums are fantastic. More Boris here, here, and here. I was trying to find a video to capture the dichotomy of sound on display in 2011, but Boris did it for me. Thanks, Boris! You are the best.

David Bowie – Young Americans (1975), Let’s Dance (1983), and Tonight (1984). These arrived at different stages in Bowie’s career, but these albums seem more of a piece than not. In all three, Bowie is trying to hit pop marks with a nod toward R&B. More Bowie.

Amy Briggs – Tangos For Piano (2010). I am so not the person to judge a pianist playing tangos. It ain’t my favorite, but for all I know, Briggs is the best damn tango pianist out there.

Broadcast – Work And Non-Work (1997), The Noise Made By People (2000), Haha Sound (2003), and Tender Buttons (2005). Somewhere between Stereolab and the Monks, Broadcast plays organ- and vintage-keyboard-dominated indie rock. They are excellent.


Chris Brokaw – My Confidante Plus 3 (2004). An EP by the dude who has played with everybody: G.G. Allin, Liz Phair, Come, Consonant, Codeine, Rhys Chatham, Steve Wynn, you name it. Great songs! More Brokaw.

Built To Spill – There’s Nothing Wrong With Love (1994), Center of the Universe EP (1999), and Live (2000). Built To Spill is one of the greatest indie-rock guitar bands. On the first of these, they are still working towards their signature sound. The EP has a track from Keep It Like A Secret, a B-side, and some interesting acoustic versions of two of their songs of the period. The Live album showcases the band’s Crazy Horse-esque guitar ecstasy, with the two guitars constantly circling around each other and the influence made explicit with a 20-minute version of Neil Young’s “Cortez The Killer.” More Built To Spill here and here.

Butthole Surfers – Humpty Dumpty LSD (2002). A collection of outtake, demos, and compilation tracks, this album, like many of its type, has gems scattered among the junk. More Butthole Surfers.

Music Library Catch-up!: B-52s, Bats, Beach Boys, Beck, Bee Gees, Beethoven, Adrian Belew, Andrew Bird, Birthday Party, Bis-quits

The B-52s – The B-52s (1979). This is the sound of sublimely silly dancing joy. There should be a sociological dissertation in the frisson between all the Southern post-punk/jangle bands that went out of their way to incorporate disco and dance beats into their sound and the Southern indie audiences who steadfastly refuse to dance to this music. I wrote briefly about the B-52s back at the beginning of this project here.

The Bats – Couchmaster (1995) and Free All The Monsters (2011). Speaking of folky jangle-rock, the Bats continue to churn out excellent folk-psych rock with a steady focus. If I didn’t know before starting that these albums were released 16 years apart, I would have thought they were roughly contemporaries. On a personal note, I managed to say hi to Robert Scott when he was in town with The Clean earlier this year, which made my day. I’ve written about the Bats before here, here, here, and here.

The Beach Boys – The Smile Sessions (recorded 1967, released 2011). Oh, my beloved Beach Boys. Giving the uncompleted SMiLE album the same treatment as the Pet Sounds Sessions box of the mid-1990s, this box set collects all the available tracks, scratch tracks, and false starts from the aborted SMiLE sessions. This edition starts with a reconstructed SMiLE from the original sessions that sounds quite similar to the Brian Wilson-Wondermints collaborative SMiLE from a few years back. This one is better, though, because it’s the fucking BEACH BOYS on vocals. And the Wrecking Crew on instruments. This is the 5-disc version with many, many variations on the tracks as Brian Wilson tried to figure out what he was doing. One of the best albums of the rock era, even though it just saw the light of day at the end of last year. Previous posts on SMiLE and the Beach Boys here, here, here, here, and here.

Beck – Record Club 4: Kick and Record Club 5: Yanni Live At The Acropolis (both 2010). Beck’s Record Club concept from 2009-10 was one of his best ideas in years. The first of these was a cover of the INXS album with St. Vincent, Liars, and Sergio Dias of Os Mutantes. Although the INXS album itself sounds like 9th grade to me now, the Record Club’s cover is full of pleasantly alien sounds and appealing looseness. Beck made the Yanni cover album with Tortoise and Thurston Moore, and it is, as you might guess from these collaborators, a hot noisy mess drenched in irony. Previous Beck and Record Club entries here, here, and here.

The Bee Gees – Odessa (1969). This is a great example of the early, Beatles-besotted Bee Gees. Like the similar and similarly titled Zombies album Odessey And Oracle, the Bee Gees deliver a bunch of little pop symphonies one after another with each track burning with ambition and bursting with pop hooks. Excellent stuff. Earlier Bee Gees entry here.

Beethoven: Symphony No. 5 (Roger Norrington and Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, 2003). I must claim my usual inability to speak intelligently about classical music here (and I know, you’re asking why I would limit this to just classical music). It is Beethoven. The music is moving and intellectually stimulating. Not even going to link to my last attempt to speak about Ludwig van B.

Adrian Belew – Lone Rhino (1982). Belew’s first solo album follows years of making his mark as the most fluid and synthetic-sounding guitarist in the world on the Talking Heads’ Fear Of Music and Remain In Light and as the vocalist/guitarist for the early 1980s New Wave version of King Crimson. Belew is an endlessly creative guitarist, able to conjure otherworldly sounds from his instrument and yet still find the heart of the song, and this is a stunning album. My King Crimson notes are here and here.

Andrew Bird – Break It Yourself (2012). Here’s a bit of a troublesome album to assess. It’s my least-favorite Bird album in years, but it’s also one of my favorite albums of 2012 so far. Perhaps I have not sat with it as much as I should have, but none of the tracks have really taken root in my head. So, for the time being, let’s say that it’s enjoyable, but it’s not quite as epic as I have come to expect from Mr. Bird. Previous Andrew Bird here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The Birthday Party – Junkyard (1982), Mutiny/The Bad Seed (1983), and Live 81-82 (released 1999). This is awesome stuff: violent, harsh, ugly, and utterly extraordinary. I’ve become quite enamored of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds recently, and hearing how Cave and Harvey sprung from this unholy union with Rowland Howard is breathtaking and sometimes frightening. Previous Cave post here.

The Bis-quits – The Bis-quits (1993). Inside baseball, Nashville-style. This sub-supergroup brings together Tommy Womack of Government Cheese (and author of The Cheese Chronicles, a brilliant memoir of life on the road with a second-string band), Will Kimbrough (who is not just a great singer/songwriter/guitarist on his own terms, but one of the hardest working sidemen in all of Music City), Mike Grimes (proprietor of Grimey’s, which is Nashville’s greatest music store), and Tom Meyer on drums. Great stuff, although the different influences of the personalities involved means that it’s a bit uneven. My pal Andy wrote an article about the Bis-quits and the Nashville scene for a little magazine called The High Hat that figures large in my past. One of these tracks discussed here.

A Man, A Plan, A Soldering Iron, Pt. 2: The Fuzzening

When last we checked in, I was yakking about my first few projects, which culminated in a buffer-the-tone-vampire-slayer pedal. With that pedal working like gangbusters, I tackled my next two projects: a CS-3 mod and a few Fuzz Faces, two of which would be Christmas gifts.

My Boss CS-3 compressor/sustainer was a gift from my buddy Mike Nix, who is, I should say, a hell of a guy. He knew I was down in the dumps and sent me the pedal to cheer me up. I'm saying now, in this public-ish forum, that I will build him something cool to say thanks.

Compressors, for those who may need a refresher, squeeze the sound to flatten the volume. An uncompressed guitarist can play quiet or loud based on how hard he or she hits the strings, but a guitarist playing through a compressor plays every note at the same volume. This produces a sharp and clean effect, one often used by country guitarists. A compressor also sustains each note by raising the volume on the note's usual decay, which can give the guitar a pleasant overdrive effect.

The general consensus on CS-3s is that they are the most inferior compressor that Boss has produced, but there was a wealth of information online to how to tighten up the sound. I made a workplan based on a number of sources:

• Ovnilabs;
• Brian Wampler (his mods have been taken down from indyguitarist, but can be found, along with some other recommendations here);
• a helpful guide from Lone Phantom;
• Recommendations in the Ultimate Guitar forum;
• Some that popped up on DIY Stompboxes from a guy calling himself Sava.
• More on Sava's stuff here.

Here's the technical side of what I replaced. Please feel free to skip this if you have no interest in pedal modification.

1. LED Mod: I switched out the LED and R35, which Sava had incorrectly listed as R33 somewhere. That was a little tight.

2. Wampler/Fat Body/Ovnilabs Mods. I switched out:

• C1 (was a .027uF cap, is now a .22uF cap)
• R5 (10k to 470 ohm)
• R36 (10 k to 100 ohm)
• R32 (220 ohm to jumper)
• D10 (1N4148 to jumper)
• C2 (.022 to .1uF)
• C13 (.047 to 2uF [two 1uF caps wired in tandem, which is too big for the board, but barely fits, so there])
• C4, C6, C14, and C17 (1uF to 1uF film cap).

These changes made the pedal sound much, much better. Highly recommended.

3. Ultimate Guitar Mods:

• D2, D3, and D6 (didn't record what the diodes were, but I switched them for 1N34A)
• C10 and C16 (.047uF to .1uF)
• C9 (didn't record what it was, switched for .047uF
• IC1 and IC2 (used a stacked board from Monte Allums to lift the dual stacked opamp daughter board over the main CS-3 board and switched the DIPs for a RC4558P and a BBOPA2134PA) 

I didn't hear much different from the capacitor changes. The diodes gave the sound a little more clipping. The major thing was the op-amps. The new ICs took the sound from great to AWESOME.

4.  Sava Mods:

• C7 and C15 (.01uF to the same in metal film)

Heard no difference. If I were to do this again, I'd leave all the capacitor changes from the last two mods out. Here's an image of the board. Note Monte Allums's boards sticking up on the right side. One is folded partly down, but the other has room to stick straight up on the board. I added all the reddish brown caps and the jumpers, but I'm too lazy to figure out what else.

Here's how it looks. I painted an infinity symbol over the 3 in its title, but that's pretty silly in retrospect. Here's a video of someone playing a CS-3 with the Wampler/Full Body mod. Mine sounds sort of like this, but it pops more.



Feeling pretty good about the success of the CS-3 mod, I decided to tackle the traditional first pedal build of the nascent pedal hacker: the venerable Fuzz Face. One of the earliest guitar pedals, the Fuzz Face uses positive ground germanium transistors to distort the heck out of the sound. Discerning fans will recognize this as the key component of Jimi Hendrix's tone. Here's a demo:



After some discussion with my wife, I decided that a household with two curious kids was no place to keep the kind of chemicals I would need to make my own PCBs. Probably a good idea for the time being. This time I bought materials from two of the best vendors out there:

• Mad Beans Pedals: Brian at Mad Beans makes some of the best available PCBs for hobbyists. As I intend to document, I've bought from him pretty much every time I've built a pedal. I bought Mangler boards from him. 
• Small Bear Electronics: Steve at Small Bear was one of the first online hobby shops to provide high-quality components for pedal builders. He offers parts that no one else can touch. I bought enclosures and components from him, especially the germanium transistors I needed.

I decided to build three. One for me, one for my brother-in-law Jeff, and one for my pal Matt. The transistors at the heart of the pedals must be paired together, one with a high output within certain restrictions and one with a low output. Also, since these are vintage components that have hardly any uses outside of pedal building, they are quite scarce. I intended to buy three pairs of tested and paired transistors from Small Bear, but he wrote me that his stock was too depleted for that. Instead I wound up buying one set of paired transistors and about ten untested and unpaired ones. Using information from a handful of websites (this one was the best), I learned how to test these transistors and pair them myself.

I also decided to add a dying battery simulator directly into the pedal using the crystal-clear instructions from Dano of Beavis Audio Research, which is, flat-out, one of the best damn sites out there for pedal hobbyists. Dano, if you ever read this: thanks, man. You are the best.

So I populated the board and drilled out the enclosures. As the photo on the right shows, I used Hammond 1590BB enclosures and drilled them out with the idea of putting the footswitch on the right and an extra potentiometer, which I'll always call a pot from now on, on the left. I used MXR-style knobs and put a rubber MXR-style foot control on the dying battery pot. Here's what they looked like with the knobs attached before being painted.

And here's what they look like when painted. Matt got the red one and Jeff got the yellow one. The green one lives on my pedalboard. When I want Stooges tone, that's where I go.

Next time: The Rat and how to fuck it up.

Music Library Catch Up: Aesop Rock, Afrirampo, Alabama Shakes, Alice Cooper, Alice Donut, Animal Collective, Ass Ponys, Atlas Sound, Avey Tare, Aye-Ayes, Albert Ayler

I have a lot of albums that I've missed out of my regular music library coverage over time. Here's a few.

Aesop Rock - Float (2000). I've written about Aesop Rock a few times over the course of this project: here, here, and here. And yet I've never said anything of substance about his work. I'm a lousy writer about hip-hop, so maybe that's for the best. This is a great album, though.

Afrirampo - WE ARE UCHU NO KO (2010). Psychedelic in a uniquely Japanese way! Two ladies singing, shouting, harmonizing, and screaming, all while kicking out some truly amazing tribal-meets-crazy-noise-meets-heavy-stoner guitar and drum mojo. Fantastic.

Alabama Shakes - Alabama Shakes EP (2011). Nothing new under the sun, as you've probably heard from the infinite number of stories about this young band, but they mine Janis Joplin in a fun way.

Alice Cooper - Mascara And Monsters: The Best Of Alice Cooper (1971-1989). I don't need much Alice Cooper in my life, but a little bit, which nicely coincides with the first half of this collection, is just great.

Alice Donut - Mule (1990). I've had a bunch of vinyl from this band over time, but this is my first digital copy of one of their albums. Great stuff, even if it is very similar to the Butthole Surfers.

Animal Collective - Honeycomb/Gotham (2012). Good lord, have I written about this guys a lot. This is the new one, and I still like them less with each new release. Here, here, here, here, here, and, comprehensively, here.

Ass Ponys - Electric Rock Music (1994). The only other thing I have by these guys is a mix from a friend, which I like a lot. I have yet to explore them as much as I'd like, but this is a good start. Excellent album.

Atlas Sound - Orange Ohms Glow EP (2008). More trippy soundscapes from Bradford Cox. I wrote about another Atlas Sound album very briefly more than four freakin' years ago. Has this project eaten my life? Maybe.

Avey Tare - Down There (2010). I actually like this better than the recent Animal Collective albums. And the previous Avey Tare albums, which I review here. 

Aye-Ayes - It's Immediate (2011). Whereas the previous Aye-Ayes album had the feel of 80s college radio, this one is more like 80s commercial radio, which is much less my thing. Sorry, guys. It's good for what it is, and I think that people younger than me who didn't live through 80s radio may enjoy it more.

Albert Ayler - Holy Ghost (1962-1971). This box set is the greatest thing since the invention of, well, ubiquitous food stuffs. Ayler live and burning down the house over and over again. He sought transcendence and found it in pretty much every song. Covered previously here, here, here, and here.