4 Songs per Hour

Not to disparage my friends & family --all fine people, open-minded & frequently indulgent of what I think is appropriate party music. But let’s face it: there’s a lot of Noisy shit on my iPod that’s just not easy to love. & all of it needs to be played loud or not at all. So, alone in the car is where much of my best listening occurs.

Just so you know, I do actually listen to normal music like, you know, a normal person. But I’ve got this one playlist full of the kind of music that, way back when, we used to fondly call Difficult Listening. Total length of this mix is like six hours, even though there are only about 25 songs on it. “Songs.” heh.

Anyway, I’m going to write about some of these crazy pieces here pretty soon. 1^st though, I’m still trying to figure out how to get the JW Player loaded up onto the site. [Clatter having no IT Dept, I have to try to figure this kind of shit out on my own.] The idea though, is to have a couple hundred words about, e.g., “The Diamond Sea” by Sonic Youth (& I mean the Alternate Ending version from the Destroyed Room album, which runs over 25 minutes), along with the song posted right there. So you can conveniently hear what I’m talking about without having to hunt it down. That will be cool, right?

So, yeah, my mix for driving alone in the car is entitled 4 Songs per Hour, & the average piece there actually is about 15 minutes long. The usual suspects are there, but also e.g., some of Robert Fripp’s more out there stuff, Miles Davis from when he got good & psychedelic, Neil Young getting all feedbacky on his soundtrack to the Dead Man movie, some great old African stuff like Fela Kuti, Youssou N’Dour & cetera –it’s pretty much the works. I like to set it to shuffle, then discover what I’m going to hear next.