Piecespeak #11 - 15-06-09

This week, Pieces gorged on Futurism at Tate Modern, marvelled at how much better Kate Bush sounds on vinyl, and discovered the joys of cardoid microphones. All very geeky. Do we care? A little bit...

I was sitting eating some brilliant homemade soup (potato and vietnamese coriander – suppose it could have been a bit more middle class, but not sure how, not to bite the hand that fed me) at a friend’s house last week, when he said something pretty innocuous that nonetheless came as something of a revelation. “I’ve still got your book and CD”. Now, it’s not that much of a big deal that this friend had these things. But those seven words made me realise how much of a habitual lender I’ve become over the years. As soon as I’ve finished reading or listening to things I really like, I’m desperate to get them off my hands. Maybe the reason this particular moment caught my attention so vividly is that the book in question is one of my favourites from the last year (The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross – read it now if you’ve ever thought you could be interested in twentieth century music), and the CD is one of my favourites ever (a collection of early New Orleans funk). In spite of my intense attachment to these things, they haven’t been in my possession for at least half a year, probably more.

The knock-on effect on my life at home is surprisingly significant. It means that at any one time more than half of my favourite things (given that a hell of a lot of my favourite things are books and/or CDs) are not in my possession. My bookshelves are full of a combination of books that I either haven’t read yet or don’t really like so much, even though I may still really like them. Thanks to Spotify I don’t need to worry so much about lending music, but until someone makes every books available to download (and when someone comes up with a viable way of consuming them that doesn’t involve staring at a headache-inducing screen for hours on end) I’m stuck with this malady. Of course it goes the other way, and I’m really grateful for the fascinating book on animals that are nearly extinct (which I really should give back…) and others that I have lying in neat dust-free piles – another symptom is that I treat others’ things way better than I do my own. This has all made me realise that when the time comes that all media is available from central hubs and noone needs to own anything any more, I’m really going to miss being able to basically loan my soul out and share it with people I like.

It’s also got me thinking about how my situation fits into the wider world, where people lend each other more than just books and pens. Even though it doesn’t quite seem like Capitalism is going to melt slowly and caramelise any more, we’re still living through a time where lending and borrowing are tricky things to talk about in terms of money. Obviously despite Shakespeare’s (well, ok, Polonius’) oft-quoted advice to ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ whole countries built there economies on the assumption that it’s ok to borrow against future earnings and potential success. Just last week, Florentino Perez, the new president of Real Madrid Football Club (stick with me, non-football-fans, this won’t last long…) justified spending a world-record 80million euros on Christiano Ronaldo by claiming that "Shirt sales will fund the deal". Borrowing, rather than lending, has become a tool to manipulate money markets, and indeed all kinds of markets including those for Real Madrid football shirts, to produce millions of multiples of small profits that together make a big profit.

What has always puzzled me about this situation is that it makes it incredibly easy for anybody to make massive amounts of money. All you have to do is convince someone to lend you enough cash, at a low enough interest rate, to be able to invest in enough money-making schemes (and these can be as wonderfully brilliantly profitable or as gut-bustingly hard work and low profit as you want) to turn that money into more than you started with. Most business people will insist that it’s possible to make a conscious decision to make a lot of money and become stinking rich, and they’re partly right: if you’re happy with creating wealth by basically playing a game where you match big numbers with small numbers in the right order, then it’s yours for the taking. So why isn’t everyone doing it?

I like to think it’s because humanity has an inbuilt safety mechanism: one that makes at least a protion of the population realise that for everyone to survive at least some of us have to actually make things. If every farmer suddenly decided, you know what, fuck it, I’m sick of digging leaf mulch into my tomato beds every morning, I’m gonna get a fat bank loan and invest in millions of Tesco shares and sell them at a fat profit in a year’s time, the world would starve. It would be so easy for them to do it. But they don't. Safety mechanism at work. Please don't let it get rusty any time soon.

This week's Piecesounds mixes it up a bit with some live poetry alongside the one and only...well see for yourself. Click below to mash up your ears big style.

1. Gary Numan - Airlane
2. Cyndi Lauper - Money Changes Everything
3. Tammi Terrell - I Can't Believe You love Me
4. Bronski Beat - Smalltown Boy
5. Morrissey - You're Gonna Need Someone On Your Side
6. Django Bates - Once A Penguin, Always A Penguin
7. Antony & The Johnsons - Aeon
8. Leonard Bernstein - Serenade II (Allegretto): Aristophanes
9. Buddy Rich - What Is This Thing Called Love?
10. The Cookies - Girls Grow Up Faster Than Boys
11. The Walkmen - No Christmas While I'm Talking
12. Walter Lowenfels - All Our Valises Are Packed
13. Fela Kuti - Mister Follow Follow
14. The Flaming Lips/Stardeath/White Dwarfs - Borderline

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/543P5UzIESHwtbJSk1HRyI

Enjoy!

See you next week for more.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #10 - 08-06-09

This week, Pieces travelled across London to vote, and look what happened - we now have BNP representatives in Europe for the first time. Brilliant. Almost as heart-warming as the news that the Tube will basically not exist for two days this week. Why can't they strike like they do in Australia, where instead of closing things they let people in for free over the strike period? Imagine, a strike that actually made people happy and got them on the side of the strikers...

One of the advantages of delaying this week’s Piecespeak (I would love to be able to blame the Tube strike but a] I do this from home and b] it didn’t start until after I finished writing this. Never mind) is that I get to do one of two things: either point anyone who didn’t see Nick Griffin getting pelted with egg at a self-organised press conference outside Westminster in the direction of this video, or remind anyone who did just how good it was to see him literally get egg on his face at last.

Fun as it was to watch an arsehole get peltered with righteous anger and abuse, this was the perfect illustration of the contradictions facing anyone who seriously opposes extremist parties. You’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. Do you ban them from the political process, or censor their broadcasts and policies? Then you’re just instigating the same discrimination you’re trying to prevent. Do you leave them to it and try to ignore them in the hope that they’ll either just go away or that noone will care about them? Well, nice idea but this just leads to a bizarre kind of press martyrdom, where the BNP campaign along the lines that they’re being unfairly marginalised – and they would be under those circumstances. Not very democratic. The view taken by Unite Against Fascism, the organisers of today’s protest, is that they are justified in trying to silence the party, because the BNP’s aim is to silence the views of those they hold grievances against. But if you have even the smallest, most wavering belief in free speech and the power of people to make up their own minds, you have to believe in the right of any political party, no matter how unsavoury, to express their views and present their proposals for ways of running the country.

See, there’s no way out! And it sucks because not only are a lot of the possible ways of making extremist parties very counter-productive in the sense that they serve to fuel their ‘discrimination’ fire, even more of them actually provide amazing publicity, that they clearly relish. Does Nick Griffin actually get a strange kind of pleasure hearing people calling him a wanker in the street? Probably – at least it means they know who he is and it might get him a slot on the news. Would the BNP have got any TV coverage today if their amateurish press conference on a patch of grass hadn’t been ambushed by protestors? Probably not.

At a party recently, I was talking to an old friend about ways to stifle the rise of parties like the BNP, UKIP (just as an aside, how can anyone, no matter how disaffected, take a party that chooses bright garish pink as its colour seriously??) and in Europe the NPD and FN. The best he could come up with was the idea of introducing intelligence tests before voting, to ensure that noone under a benchmark IQ would be able to have a say in the selection of the Government or local Councillors. I know, I know, not exactly a great solution, and we could go on for hours about what’s wrong with ignoring the very people who probably most need to be heard by political ears. But what it does show is that if that’s the best idea a pretty intelligent, insightful person can come up with then any kind of solution must be pretty damn hard.

In any case, most political historians seem to agree that what’s really alarming about the results of last week’s elections is not the rise of the Right across Europe (troubling though it might be), but the total collapse of the Left. In almost every voting country there’s a lack of support among traditional Left voters, and because the nature of ‘the working class’ has changed so much since the last major continent-wide political shift, there may never be the same support base that parties of the Left have enjoyed up to now. And if that proves to be the case, what happens to political choice, balance and liberal democracy? Who knows. But we’ll probably still be able to get crisps and a drink with our sandwiches.

This week’s Piecesounds is a lot of fun: crazy homemade synthesisers, funk freakout Beatles covers, ridiculously high notes and mega key-change spectaculars all over. Lovely. Click the link below to hear all of this, and more! Not much more, but still.

1. David Bowie – Speed Of Life
2. XTC – Making Plans For Nigel
3. Silver Apples – A Pox On You
4. Company Flow – Silence
5. Run-DMC – Jam-Master Jammin’
6. Allen Toussaint – Goin’ Down’
7. Gregory Isaacs/The Revolutionaries – Leaving Dub
8. Camille – Money Note
9. The Staple Singers – This World
10. Eddie Hazel – I Want You (She’s So Heavy)
11. The Pretty Things – Baron Saturday
12. Stevie Wonder – Something To Say

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/11lSGbNl671Prg5Ct37imL

Next week: something even deeper. Maybe.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #9 - 01-06-09

This week, Pieces walked a lot to save bus money, ate home-grown to save food money, and generally enjoyed the free pleasure of basking in bright sunlight. Best time of the year? Sunny late May runs Christmas pretty close…

Besides the sunshine and the improbable heat, the main thing on our minds this week was the difficulty of finding band names that don’t sound either ridiculous or stupidly contrived. Several friends are looking for names for new groups, and each one asks for advice, and each time we say the same thing – ‘oh, that’s the hardest bit of being in a band’. Because it is. The pitfalls are many: pick a bad name and you’ll be labelled with it for all time, the shelves of HMV will forever mark the moment of madness that saw you decide that Arctic Monkeys was the best you could do. Poor guys.

There are actually precious few really, really good band names written in the annuls of history, which may be one of the reasons that we find it so hard to do right now. The ranks of the massively great bands who went by similarly great names is very small. Joy Division is probably the best band name ever – exciting, full of both suggested and referential meaning, wonderful metaphorical implication. Thank god it was found by a group whose music fit it perfectly and not a bunch of leather-dressed pub rock stallions from Philly. Thank god also that The Mother Of Invention were formed by someone as effortlessly inventive as Frank Zappa.

The catalogue of bad bands with bad names is too huge to properly sum up in a blog post, so I’ll just list a few of my favourites: Gay Dad. Hootie And The Blowfish. Bowling For Soup. Milli Vanilli. Wet Wet Wet. Babyshambles. KoЯn (as in, sweetKoЯn?). Get Cape Wear Cape Fly. Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Coldplay. Counting Crows. And so on…

Then there are bad fits. These can be subdivided into at least two categories: Bad Bands With Good Names, and the infinitely funnier Good Bands With Bad Names. Razorlight are a great example of the former – decent name, sounds like it could mean something. Then you put on one of their CDs and it all unravels. Never mind. I always thought The Darkness was a pretty good name too, and it’s amazing that noone actually used it before a bunch of cock-rockers with silly voices came along six years ago. By contrast, there’s any number of good bands whose good taste just didn’t quite extend to picking a good moniker. Then the ultimate clunker – The Beatles. Bad pun, bad connotations, looks awful. Guys, you’ll never make it in this town with a shite name like that. Not a chance.

Then there are the It Could Have Been So Much Worse files. The band names that could have been foisted upon an unsuspecting world but instead were snatched away just in time. The Beach Boys were only given their all-american-surf-buddy name by a record company drone at the last minute, when he realised that The Pendletones is, well, just terrible. Blur were famously called Seymour before having second thoughts about their ‘why don’t we give it a person’s name’ moment. Pink Floyd toyed with The Tea Set for ages before finally noticing that it’s crap, and would have led to lots of uncomfortable ‘so you play with The Tea Set?’ conversations. And the less said about On A Friday the better. Before anyone asks, Pieces were once known as Out Of Her Reach, so we’re not immune to the perils of awful, awful bags of poo being slung across our shoulders.

There. See, occasionally we think about things other than massive cultural or political trends. Next week – Pieces shows you how to erect an attractive yet practical yurt.

Piecesounds this week combines the slick with the very, very daft. Enjoy Sparks rubbing shoulders with Van Dyke Parks – possibly the biggest silly/sensible divide in the history of pop music. As ever, click the link below to hear all of this in, of and through your own ears.

1) Spank Rock – Chilly Will

2) Architecture In Helsinki – Heart It Races

3) Johnny Trunk – Sister Woo

4) Ofo The Black Company – Eniaro

5) Sparks – Amateur Hour

6) The Bonzo Dog Band – Canyons Of Your Mind

7) Van Dyke Parks – All Golden

8) Nico – The Fairest Of The Seasons

9) Los Campesinos! – You! Me! Dancing!

10) Sly Stone – You Really Got Me

11) Thomas Dolby – Hyperactive!

12) Richard and Linda Thompson – When I Get To The Border

13) Gene Greene – King Of The Bungaloos

14) Manic Street Preachers – William’s Last Words

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/62wYvLieWQdpVtHvS2fFeX

Catch you next week for more

Pieces x

Piecespeak #8 - 25-05-09

This week, Pieces spent too many hours playing annoying computer games. Shame on us for getting hooked on something so unproductive, when we could have been outside in the sun, doing cartwheels and picking daisies. Or something.

Speaking of picking small flowers, watching one too many old movies this week got me thinking about little things that fill childhoods. Sliding down slides, falling off climbing frames into piles of bark chips, digging around in sandpits filled with greying sand – all pretty typical kiddy things. Except that hardly any children growing up today will do any of these things, because something about childhood is gently changing under our noses…

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be a big rant about how kids grow up too fast nowadays, and ooh isn’t it awful how we dress our children in little versions of adult sexy clothes and my-goodness-gracious-why-not-just-let-them-be-kids. That’s all been done. I’m talking about the little things that seem to get ignored by the typical rants, because it’s assumed that they have stayed the same in the face of some all-encompassing shift. We may well force young people to wear mini-Topshop monsters, but they still have playgrounds where they can swing on swings, right? And they still eat ice-cream and accidentally dribble it down their shirts in that awww-it’s-so-cute way. And cmon, they might be exposed to sex and money and swearing much earlier than in my day, but they still. Right??

Well, yes and no. this train of thought began as I was walking past an old childhood haunt, a playground that used to be filled with half-rotting wooden ladders to climb and a massive sandpit filled with anonymous brown lumps that mothers always seemed to be nervous of (can’t think why). All of these wonders have been ripped out and replaced by a state-of-the-art twenty-first century grey-and-black streamlined…thing. And it looks amazing. Best thing to play on, ever. No slide, but still – climbing studs, really soft-looking crash mats to land on, poles to navigate and climb up. Perfect. But charm? Sadly lacking. I’m not exactly a stickler for old-fashioned anything, but there’s definitely something a little…sterile about it all. There’s definitely something very unnatural about it all, it’s all plastic and flashy bits of metal. Not a single bark chip ANYWHERE. Scandal. Maybe this means our children are going to grow up not knowing what a tree looks like, or where bark comes from, or what wood can be made into apart from Primark bags and bog roll. But hey, at least the kids still have somewhere to run around and play, right?

So yes, lots of children do still technically have a lot of the things that supposedly ‘make’ a childhood. But I can’t help thinking that the tokens that are left are being changed in ways that influence the ways they’re growing up in ways that are just as profound as the whole Daily-Mail-shock-horror-twelve-year-old-dad bag.

And finally, just in case there were any suspicions, none of this has anything to do with the Pieces song Playgrounds. Definitely not a subliminal plug. As if we’d Children ever do Of something Fire like that.

And so to Piecesounds, which this week is remarkably bouncy. Apart from the slower songs. And the jazz. And the frankly astonishing fragments that make up Tzigane. Remarkable.

As always, click on the link below to hear all of this in your very own ears.

1. Animal Collective – Peacebone
2. Dr. Octagon – A Gorilla Driving A Pickup Truck
3. Sonic Youth – Tunic (Song for Karen)
4. The Flaming Lips – It Overtakes Me
5. The Neon Philharmonic – Brilliant Colours
6. Talking Heads – Love = Building On Fire
7. Jane Birkin/Feist – The Simple Story
8. Jett Brando – The Centre Of Gravity (Sit Right Down)
9. Yo La Tengo – Damage
10. Joni Mitchell – Car On A Hill
11. Maurice Ravel – Tzigane
12. Django Reinhardt – Night And Day

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/24l8bl8dDcqpv840IJFd4H

Stay here. And there. Until next week.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #7 - 18-05-09

Another week, another set of scandalous people doing scandalous things in the name of simple, primal greed. But we won’t mention that…

This week, Pieces has been thinking. Again. We’re getting closer to the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and it’s at these kinds of avenues that sad people like me start thinking about what identifies the times we live in. In previous posts I’ve talked about certain musicians and artists who some might say have passed their creative peak (mostly in jest, sometimes with crushing sincerity). One of the things that troubles me about the century so far is that there are very few creative people who have managed to carve an identity as strong as even the worst offenders in my previous posts. And then the next step beyond that depressing thought is to look back and see how effortlessly people can construct names for movements or collectives that cropped up in every previous century. It’s pointless to be too optimistic about this – it’s very unlikely, for example, that a new century would have thrown up anything equivalent to the birth of Rock n Roll or the impressionists. But looking back on the last 9 years doesn’t exactly fill you with hope for the future: where are the seeds of the next big ‘happening’? have we just become a species content to be fed what comes up without hoping for something new? For whom art is no longer a force for change but a tool that follows outside events?

Obviously, every event and/or movement that ever changes things is usually only noticed in hindsight, unless it’s really explosive – people still disagree about which was the first real Rock n Roll record, but it’s pretty undeniable that the October Revolution (confusingly) took place on 7th November 1917. But even five years after Rock Around The Clock (definitely not the first Rock n Roll record, but certainly one of the first to sell squillions of copies) people were aware that something had happened that had changed the world, that had caused nearly every business on the planet to realise that there was a new billion-strong marketplace for them to pitch to, and pitch they did.

Now, nearly every major album review refers to the musician’s comments on the world of today, as if it’s assumed that artists have become commentators and journalists rather than visionaries. No reviewer really wants to hear imagination any more, just a ‘creative’ way of rephrasing things that have already happened. If this doesn’t happen, the record gets slaughtered for not being ‘relevant’. If it does, the record runs the risk of dating incredibly badly, or at best just not meaning anything anymore (even the greatest are not immune – just listen to Taxman by the Beatles. Only those who have more than a passing acquaintance with British politics of the 1960s will get anything out of those cute ‘ah ah, Mr Wilson’ backing vocals, even though they’re a crucial part of the song’s ‘meaning’).

Reaction is traditionally the spur for action in art, not its content. The best way to illustrate the difference is this: listen to Masters of War (Bob Dylan, not Pearl Jam), and sit in awe at the way the reaction to atrocities is used to create something vicious and powerful in its own right, that would eat at the soul of any perpetrator who heard it. Then listen to the new Green Day record – ‘silence is the enemy so gimme gimme revolution’. The reaction to…well, whatever it was, was obviously along the lines of ‘hey, this is really bad, let’s write a song about how it’s really bad’. So they did. And it’s a song about something really bad. Great.

Maybe I’m wrong, maybe our music has always just reflected the way we all feel, and that’s what people have always loved about it. But I can’t help but feel that something has been missed somewhere. I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor lets you know on no uncertain terms you’re listening to the story of one man’s (very contemporary version of a) crush on a girl. Listening to Diana Ross sing You Can’t Hurry Love makes you feel like you’re falling in love for the first time, even though it was sung 40 years ago. That doesn’t mean it’s better, but there’s definitely a difference. And don’t let Phil Collins tell you otherwise.

Thanks, kudos, love and magic to everyone who came along to Pieces’ gig on Saturday. It was a really great night and we raised tons of money for the church, so give yourselves a little round of applause before clicking below to load this week’s Piecesounds…

1. The Sugarhill Gang/West Street Mob – Sing A Simple Song
2. Gnarls Barkley – Who’s Gonna Save My Soul?
3. The Pop Group – We Are Time
4. Wildlife – Let’s Talk It Over
5. Kate Bush – Delius (Song Of Summer)
6. Brian Eno – Here Come The Warm Jets
7. The Monkees – Zilch
8. Pulp – This Is Hardcore
9. Isaac Hayes – When I Fall In Love
10. Chick Corea/Bobby McFerrin – Song For Amadeus (Mozart Sonata No. 2 in F Major)
11. Young Marble Giants – N.I.T.A.
12. Tower Of Power – Down To The Nightclub
13. LCD Soundsystem – Sound Of Silver
14. Joy Division – These Days

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/0HM1YHI6QVFA1x1x0uOLmS

(if you haven’t got a Spotify account, then do something about it. Either get someone you know to invite you, or if none of your friends have an account you can email contactpieces@gmail.com and we’ll sort you out. We can’t have people going without music – that’d be like asking people to live without air. Or the colour green. It just wouldn’t be right.)

See you next week for further developments.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #6 - 11-05-09

This week, Pieces has been mostly pondering…

In most walks of life, and most businesses or areas of interest, there is an interplay between different kinds of people that makes things happen and creates the little moments of inspiration and the small differences that make life worthwhile. A lot of these relationships are very difficult to summarise, and really it’s pointless to try and reduce the oddities of human behaviour to a cute analogy. But I’m going to anyway, because for years I’ve had swirling around my head the idea that actually the music industry, and probably a lot of other industries, creative and otherwise, operate in a very similar way to the national grid.

I’m not necessarily talking here about the actual production of music itself, like the manufacture of CDs or the marketing of new MP3s and everything else that goes into pushing product to make people money. I mean the process of creating ideas, because that’s really what keeps the music industry, and so many others, going, and actually allows people to make a living. Without a supply of inspiration of some kind, whether that’s an album by a band that plays in a completely new way or a ‘loving tribute’ to music that was fashionable 20 years ago but played by someone who wears a slightly shinier hat (thanks, Lady GaGa), there’s no reason for people to get excited and no reason for them to think of music as something that can make a contribution to their lives.

So, to the point – it seems to me that there are three main channels for this inspiration, and they can be roughly attributed to sections of the system that gets electricity to us. At the very beginning, we have the individuals or groups that produce ideas that have never been thought of before – they are the Power Stations. The substance that they produce is often raw and unrefined, and can’t really be used until it has been channelled through a mechanism to make it more easily consumable.

This is where the next group come in – the Transformers. In your home, these are the little boxes that change the high voltage current coming from the plug in the wall to something your toaster can use. In music, these are the people who make popular music that draws on the innovations of others but turn them into something accessible and memorable.

Once the current is transformed into something easily digestible, it gets plugged into the last group – Appliances. These are the toasters, the TVs, the hair straighteners, that everyone uses almost without thinking. They use the power created by the Power Stations and channelled through the Transformers, and give it a shiny face.

The next step is to think about which musicians fit into which categories. When you start to think about it, most of the most famous artists of the last 50 years are Transformers – they are people who have taken on the best ideas from what has come before and assimilated them into very successful songs and albums. Take a look at the ‘List of best-selling music artists’ on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_music_artists). Elvis Presley, the guy who gave a white face to Rock ‘n’ Roll and got away with stealing the best black music for 20 years. Madonna, who changes her face and her sound every 3 years to fit in with whatever’s playing at whatever clubs will still let her in. Even The Beatles, who no-one would ever claim didn’t experiment and influence countless other musicians, ripped off more than their fair share of Chuck Berry riffs and Buddy Holly whoops (Little Richard still claims today that he taught Paul McCartney everything he knows). AC/DC? Well, that’s the very definition of a Transformer…

It’s actually pretty difficult to think of artists who fit the Power Station category, because so many come up with their inspiration by taking the best bits of what’s come before and chanelling them in a new way. But there would be no music without the innovators, like the Throbbing Gristles, the Jelly Roll Mortons. Once again, we have band whose name fits its category perfectly: Kraftwerk.

As for Appliances, well, they should be pretty easy to identify for anyone who’s grown up in the western world in the last 50 years. From Alvin and the Chipmunks to The Monkees to Leona Lewis, they’re the people (or characters, a lot of the time) who play music either designed to sell or to tap into whatever trend is hottest.

This is all very tenuous, but at the very least it’s a fun little game to play for 5 minutes – who fits where? And really, isn’t that what music’s all about? Fun little games? No.

This week’s Piecesounds includes more lovingly selected gems from the vaults of Spotify, which if you haven’t signed up for yet you really should. Honestly, it’s the best thing you can do with your computer. Better than Excel. As ever, click the link below to listen to the whole delicious lot.

1. The Dixie Cups – Iko Iko
2. Jurassic 5 – Quality Control
3. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Man
4. Bootsy Collins – Psychoticbumpschool
5. Cliff Richard – Wired For Sound
6. Yo La Tengo – Sugarcube
7. Fairuz – Ana Indi Haneen
8. Love – Seven & Seven Is
9. Panteón Rococó – La carencia
10. Billie Holiday – God Bless The Child
11. Dead Can Dance – In The Kingdom Of Blind The One-Eyed Are Kings
12. Fats Domino – Walking To New Orleans
13. The Notwist – One Step Inside Doesn’t Mean You Understand
14. TV On The Radio – A Method
15. Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds – Breathless
16. Sheb Wooley – The Purple People Eater

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/5LwGKNmVpgRpPhKGT0GXbS

Enjoy. More next week.

Pieces x

Piecespeak #5 - 04-05-09

This week, Pieces was consumed with the all-important question: which decade from the twentieth century would win in a battle royale? Obviously the 1970s, because of the sideboards and flagrant sexism, but the contemplation of hoards of flower-wielding hippies charging against lines of politely coutured Edwardian gin-swillers was a lot of fun.

On a more serious note…

Not long ago, in a review of the rather-good Radiohead reissues, Scott Plagenhoef from Pitchfork speculated that the manner of the release of the remastered Beatles albums in September (cue massively exaggerated squeak of anticipation from nerdish fab-o-philes like me who can finally hear ever-so-slightly-beefed-up versions of songs they can already sing backwards – how sad) is a sign that the era of the physical record is coming to an end. People have been saying similar things for years; basically ever since the first legal mp3 stores appeared online. Check out some earlier examples here and here. This time, though, there’s some more substantial weight behind the claim. The argument is this: the fact all of the Beatles records are being released at the same time (September 9th, Fab-o-philes!), instead of ‘being slowly and ceremoniously rolled out as they were 20-odd years ago’, indicates that record companies are now scared to release physical product because of recent shrinkage in the worldwide music market, and that ‘they best sell non-vinyl physical products now, immediately, before the prospect of doing so is gone’.

It’s a scary thought, for those of us who were brought up on the thrill of sticking a pencil in the holes in cassette tapes to make them work again, and the heightened anticipation built up by the difficulty of removing shrink-wrap from CD cases. But only the bravest music journalist snob would argue with the truth: music lost its attachment to physical embodiments a long time ago. It’s becoming more and more clear that the question to ask is not whether there will ever be a time when we don’t think of music in terms of its medium, but what form a new age of universal access to all music will take.

Even someone like me, who has a comprehensive collection of every piece of plastic produced by The Stone Roses from 1988-91 (oh yes, those were some worthwhile teenage years), can’t see any downside to a future ruled by services like Spotify. What’s not to like? It allows anyone in the world to listen to virtually any music ever released on a major record label for free. All of a sudden, hierarchies built up around record collection disappear, and everyone who loves music can listen to exactly what they want, regardless of whether they can ‘afford’ it. At best, this means that everyone in the world has the chance to become an enlightened listener, freed from the Cowells of the world and able to find the music that they like best without having to be guided by people who basically just want their money. And at the very least, it means a world where music is as free as the air, and those who have to think very carefully about what to spend their money on for whatever reason can have one more way to enrich and beautify their lives however they want, at no cost. Lovely.

And, of course, it allows me to continue to provide an hour’s-worth of lovely music every week for our lovely Pieces fans. Again, what’s not to like? Which leads us very nicely into this week's Piecesounds…

1. Danger Mouse/Jemini – Born-A-MC
2. Walker Brothers – The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore
3. P.P. Arnold – The First Cut Is The Deepest
4. The Bobby Fuller Four – I Fought The Law
5. ESG – Dance
6. Bessie Smith – Alexander’s Ragtime Band
7. Talking Heads – Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On)
8. Nina Simone – Sinnerman
9. Van Morrison – Sweet Ting
10. Björk – Wanderlust
11. Lykke Li – Little Bit
12. Mr Hudson & The Library – Bread + Roses
13. Soul Angels – It’s All In Your Mind
14. Johnny Cash – Dinosaur Song

http://open.spotify.com/user/blownawish/playlist/6nDeyBQ8QQ7BLnu5M8uDzA

What happens to music when there’s nothing to touch? Is my view too rose-tinted and sickeningly idealistic? Let me know.

More next week.

Pieces x