make it a mirror

Song: "Love and Space"
Artist: Akron/Family
Source: The Meek Warrior
Day: 10/13
The mystery song from the set I saw back in March is a mystery no more. I feel like I should hate this song. On the face of it, the song is AK AK at their most naively hippy, which should annoy the part of me that remembers being young and disillusioned with the world. The religous overtones should raise the hackles of the knee jerk agnostic/secular humanist in me.

But it doesn't. No doubt part of the reason is its a capella and I'm a sucker for group sing these days. More important is the restraint of the performances. If they were trying too hard, it would sound like they are speaking to me and trying to convince me of something. But they don't, they sing artfully yet plainly. It reinforces the commonality of the desire to live a better, more love-filled life, and directs that request to whatever force can make that happen. And I would hope few of us are nihilists to the extent that you could find fault in that.

Side note, am I the only one who can't hear the title of the new Akron/Family record without thinking of Timothy Treadwell?

Song: Theme from Fenn O'Berg (?)
Album: The Magic Sound Of Fenn O'Berg
Artist: Fenn O'Berg
Day: 10/15/06
This is the Fenn O'Berg song I always wanted to hear. The experimental electronic drones (but they're not drones, they are too active and buzzing to be ambient, yet don't move enough to be something else) are paired with a brass-and-string sample that give the piece a more easily digestable structure for the electronic music novice (which I am as evidenced by my use of the phrase "electronic music"). The piece ends up somewhere between triphop and a movie soundtrack of impending disaster and something far more relaxed.

Song: Four on Six
Artist: Wes Montgomery
Day: 10/17-10/18
Source: The Increbile Jazz Guitar of
Every so often I'll put on a Wes Montgomery album (I really only have 2 or 3) and realize its what I've been meaning to listen to for a while. Smooth but definately swinging post-bop (my records are from his combo period). This song has cool, angular, stepping riff that sounds like little else I've heard from that era, except for maybe Thelonious Monk.

Other stuff I've been listening to... The new Life at These Speeds Album is pretty good so far. A little more mainstream than the "fugazi meets mid-90s emo like Maximillion Colby or maybe Shotmaker" sound of previous efforts but it still has good energy and probably tighter songwriting than previous records. The raccoo-ooo-oo-ooooooooooon (or however you spell it) record on Release the Bats (Is Night People) is pretty good as well if one is into Animal Collective style weird folk.