within twelve inches of my life

a digital forshadowing

2011-11-12T14:43:00.001-05:00

I learned about New Order my freshman year in college. I don't remember how I came across this album but it's been played thousands of times. Supposedly Factory Records took a loss on every copy of this album they sold because the die cut sleeve and artwork were so expensive to produce. Power, Corruption & Lies was my introduction to the band and it threw me. From the introduction to Age of Consent all the way through to Leave Me Alone I felt this album was complete.

The artwork was fantastic, a mock-up of a floppy disk (5 1/4") the painted roses with the digitized corner, it all spoke to someone very attuned to the future. And like every album that was ever dear to me, I felt like I was in on the joke, even though much of it was over my head.

As soon as I consumed this I needed more. I dove into their back catalog and then learned about Joy Division and had to get everything I could by each band. I was surprised as to how much carryover there was from Joy Division to New Order, with some songs even being recorded by both groups. Though I enjoyed the direction New Order was moving this has always been my favorite album of theirs. It's raw and simple, much like I felt I was at the time.

The photo doesn't do it justice, but you can see there's a lot of wear on this copy of the album. The album doesn't bring back any specific memories, but many feelings of nostalgia for a young man dreaming of what was to come.

Though I never saw New Order perform live, I've seen all the members perform in their solo careers afterwards. I was always disappointed as to how big a jerk Peter Hook became as he got older. It's possible he was always a wanker but when I was young he was on a bit of a pedestal. He was one of the few bass players I ever knew by name and I always admired him because he wrote amazing songs. Meeting him in the 90's put that away for me. Shame he's such an ass, but it won't take the music away from me. Meeting him was one of the first events that turned me off of meeting celebrities. They never turn out to be who you want them to be. Sometimes it's best to leave them as the idealized people your mind has made them out to be.

Chloe in the afternoon

2011-11-03T07:51:00.001-04:00

Heather and I had only been dating a month and her birthday was approaching. I had it bad for her and took a chance asking her to go see St. Vincent on the night of her birthday. She accepted and picked me up after happy hour. It was the first time I rode in a car with her and I found that she was a good driver, but was a bit distracted talking to me while looking for parking. Scared the hell out of me. ha

Heather had never heard St. Vincent before I invited her and I managed to get us seats in the VIP section. It was an amazing show and an amazing date (one of many). At this point I already had Actor and Marry Me as MP3s but I went and ordered the vinyl soon after this show. Ever since then we've been waiting for her new album to be released. I pre-ordered it on vinyl and have been thrilled with Strange Mercy since it arrived.

Tuesday night we saw St. Vincent again. There was a lot of anticipation to this show because Heather and I have a connection to the live show that isn't there with the just the music. The show was great and we both had a wonderful time. I love watching Annie play the guitar. She has a presence I've never seen before in a female guitarist, and often don't see in male guitarists. I love watching her beat the hell out of her guitar to get the sounds she wants, she's forceful as a musician but still incredibly feminine.

I'm listening to Strange Mercy more on vinyl than I am on MP3 which is a nice change. It's a challenging piece as it doesn't seem to stick to any one form yet it feels complete as an album. All of her records are connected to my memories of standing next to Heather and watching her reaction to the show and the music. I see her face light up and feel her hanging on my shoulder every time I hear St. Vincent. These are incredibly happy memories and I'm glad they're connected to such a fantastic artist.

This woman

2011-10-28T14:06:00.000-04:00

Whenever I see my copy of The Sensual World or hear a track from it I'm brought back to late fall turning into winter. Buff had a 2nd floor apartment that overlooked the campus and I remember both of us eagerly awaiting the release of this album. She was a much bigger fan of Kate than I, but we both embraced this album entirely.

The music, haunting, enchanting, and strong, always puts cinematic images in my mind of a cloudy, windy day looking up at that apartment from the street with the leaves blowing along the grass and falling like snow. Kate's music has always been very visual, however, my associations with her music are linked to the visual memories I have of listening to it. Drinking tea with Buff, laughing, and talking about how great her lyrics are and how weird her videos were. Her early videos are interesting but somewhat hard to digest as they are mostly interpretive dance numbers.

Love and Anger is the song that moves me most off this album, though This Woman's Work is the most well known due to it's use in the movie She's Having A Baby. The musical phrasing of this song is great, the build up to "it's so deep you don't think that you can speak about it" is so well done and the follow-up sublime. It feels like a scream, which is, I assume, the intention.

Although there are other songs by Kate Bush I like more than anything on this album, The Sensual World as a whole is my favorite album in her catalog. Kate is releasing an album soon, 50 Words For Snow, her first in a decade or more. It'll be interesting to see what she's done and how she's developed musically.

The summer of love

2011-10-25T21:59:00.000-04:00

This album was originally released in October of 1985, but I didn't find it until sometime in the spring of 1986. It was my senior year in high school and I was convinced that nobody else had this album, and to some extent it was true. The album itself didn't become big in the states until later, and wasn't well known in my neck of the woods.

I was working at Riccardo's Market as a stock boy and had the freedom that a part time job created in the form of gas money. I was beginning to explore life outside of the prep school I just graduated from, realizing there were many more people in the city I didn't relate to. When I wasn't grounded for some offense or another I was in the car with this album blasting at full volume from the cassette I made the day I bought it. That summer was great in so many ways, I was liberated in finishing high school and the idea of moving into college was exhilarating, but this was the soundtrack that shaped so much of those emotions and memories. This album was so brilliant, it wasn't quite punk, and wasn't straight rock, but it was so right. It was the music I blared as I went to buy a keg for a house party at the lake, the music I played to get over the missed relationships that were always so fleeting, and the songs that made me feel oblivious to the stares I was sure I received everywhere I went.

There's something so right about blasting this album on a summer night and driving down a country highway with the windows open, the wind in your hair, speeding as much as you dared while keeping vigilant for random deer across the road. This is the sound of the carelessness of youth that is so driven by fear.

I still have my original copy of the record (pictured) that has been beat to hell. In the four years I was a DJ in college I played a track from this album on every show I did, except for a few Saturday afternoon shows that were strictly new age and jazz, and when I got a CD of it I played it almost every night I performed throughout the 90's. Truly one of the greatest albums of my time.

You'll dance to anything...

2011-10-19T19:01:00.000-04:00

It was the end of my sophomore year in high school and I wasreading Orwell’s 1984. It was also 1984, but most of the irony of theexperience was lost on me. Musically it was an exciting time as I had recentlydiscovered the local college radio station and was diving head first intopost-punk and new wave. It was also the year Some Great Reward was releasedand, after hearing People are People for the first time it was an album I hadto possess.

The childish, self-indulgent, navel gazing lyrics spoke tome in the way I needed at the time even though I recognized all the faults inthe writing. The songs were catchy though and I spent hours and hours listeningto this album. I was struggling, trying to fit in at a prep school without the prep school pedigree. I didn’t relate to anyone around me and my childhood friendshad all but abandoned me. I think this made me vulnerable to the shallow, sappylyrics. People are People called out to the pragmatic pacifist in me, even becominga catchphrase of mine for a while. There are so many great, and I use that wordin an almost campy sense, songs on this album its difficult to choose a favorite. Master and Servant, Somebody, and Blasphemous Rumors are the mostknown, but even today I can still sing every song on the album word for word.

This album also changed my perception ofhomosexuals as it became clear to me that Martin Gore, if not the entire band,was gay, but he still wrote the songs I related to most. I’d listen to this album and stare at thecover, as I so often did with records in those days, and decided I didn’t likethe cover art. The blue and grey color pallet was fine, but the bride and groomtenderly looking at each other in front of an industrial warehouse? I determinedthat it was clearly a ruse to hide the band’s homosexuality and still keep themmarketable. Much like 1984 the album title and cover art’s irony were lost onme.

Change or Progress

2011-10-14T14:55:00.000-04:00

Yesterday I added a post about how a record changed my ideas of music, of form, and of culture. Last evening I received my copy of Wye Oak's Civilian.Though I haven't had a chance to listen to it enough to even have an opinion it did make me smile. I unwrapped it this morning and put it on the stereo, I then went to my desktop to download the mp3s of the album. It's the same as I did with so many records in my youth, just without the awful need to press record and play at the same time.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Filigree and Shadow

2011-10-13T13:31:00.000-04:00

If I wrote a book about what this album means to me and the impact it had on so many of my musical choices throughout the 80s, and believe me I probably could fill a book with this, it would have to start like this: My brother returned from a London vacation and promptly destroyed my life.

He had no idea what he was doing when, in a truly benevolent gesture, he brought me a copy Filigree and Shadow as a souvenir from his trip. At that point I had no knowledge of This Mortal Coil, and only cursory knowledge of 4AD records, but here was what became my Torah. This album was so different from anything I knew existed, physically, visually, and musically. It was my first experience with an imported record and my initiation into the cult of Ivo. I remember thinking he bought me a used record (at the time the idea was blasphemous to me) because the album was in a stiff plastic sleeve with a sticker sealing it instead of being shrink-wrapped. After it finally sunk in that this was a brand new record, that plastic sleeve became a badge of honor for any of my records as it signified they were imported and thus superior in every way to what you could get in the states. The packaging and design blew me away and were only a tease for what I would find inside.

The first time I listened to the record, with headphones of course, I was, to say the least, mesmerized by it. At that time in my life my practice was to purchase an album, listen to it once as I made a copy of it to cassette tape, and then put it away. Filigree and Shadow was an exception to this and I played the record daily. I would sit in the living room when everyone else was asleep and with all the lights off except a small work light my father had over the stereo I’d embrace the sadness of The Jeweler, and try to understand the meaning behind Tarantula, but it was Strength of Strings that sent me on a still uncompleted quest to find everything I could by Dominic Appleton and Breathless.

Though I still listened to a lot of punk and post-punk at the time, this album opened my ears to what was then “the 4AD sound” but what became goth and shoegazer. I’m not sure I would have ever found Breathless, Cindytalk, Pale Saints, Dead Can Dance, or even Red House Painters without this album
.

Moving Pictures

2011-10-09T08:01:00.000-04:00

Leo was a "burnout" and, though I liked him, we had pretty much nothing in common. He smoked, listened to Lynyrd Skynyrd, and was always wearing a beat up t-shirt that was handed down to him from an older brother. I wasn't supposed to hang out with him but I did in school. He was funny and had the allure of "the bad guy" even though he never seemed to be a bad influence on me. He never offered me cigarettes or chew, never spoke about illicit things or tried to get me to steal. I think Leo was just from a different social class and lifestyle.

It was in 6th grade one afternoon when classes let out I found Leo at his locker pulling what seemed like an endless supply of stuff out of it and onto the floor. He had about four records and I was awed by them, not that they were special, but more that he had them stuffed in his locker. He pulled one out and casually handed it to me.

"You listen to Rush?"
"Don't know who they are. They any good?"
"Yeah they're OK. This record's warped. You want it?"
"Really? Ok. Thanks."

And that was the day my life changed. I took the record home and examined the warp. It was pretty bad, but only at the lip of the record. I devised a plan to repair it and put it on top of one of my father's speakers in the living room, then got the family Bible, a few encyclopedias, and a photo album or two and placed them on top to try to flatten it. Two weeks later the warp was reduced enough to make the record playable and I moved it to the turntable.

I grabbed my father's headphones, plugged them in, put the needle on the record and sat down to be blown away. From the very first note on Tom Sawyer I was brought into a world I didn't know existed. I'd never heard anything that heavy before and had never heard anything that intriguing either. By the time Red Barchetta started I was hooked. I instantly became the most dedicated Rush fan alive.

I'd sit for hours listening to this album, staring at the cover and the strange artwork trying to understand how the image on the album cover related to the music inside and how the stories they told had nothing in common.

I don't have my copy of Moving Pictures anymore, I sold it at some point in college because I had stopped listening to it by then, but to this day it is still one of my all time favourite albums though I'm not sure if it's for the music or the memories. But that's the thing about records, they become more than just music. They capture a time and hold you there, audible photographs of what seemed a more innocent age.

how it all started?

2011-10-08T23:02:00.000-04:00

I've always been attracted to music and was fascinated by my father's records that he kept in the front closet. I'm not sure if it initially started with the music, or with the allure of the "forbidden" aspect of these records, tucked away in an overstocked closet filled with winter coats, hats and gloves, a vacuum, and other miscellanea that were too mundane to be worth a trip to the attic or into the basement for storage. I remember sitting in the closet pulling the records out and staring at the photos on the sleeves, imagining what the record may sound like, or at what time in his life my dad may have actually listened to them. The secretive visits to his record collection began when I was young, and thus forbidden from playing the records. It wasn't until I was in college and listening to whatever I could get my hands on that pushed the musical envelope that I realized how banal his tastes were. Though I never tried to "inherit" any of his collection I still have incredibly fond memories of my first experiences with his records.