6:16 PM
josh blog is going on vacation.

It will be a long vacation; regular entries will resume around May 7. This is not coincidentally the Monday after my last week of classes for the semester. I've already unsubscribed from mailing lists and am making (perhaps doomed to fail) attempts to avoid computers until the end of the semester. But my need to do schoolwork isn't the main reason for going on a josh blog vacation - that's just a bonus.

Rather, I'm going on vacation because I haven't been consistently happy with josh blog since the new year. So I am taking a break from writing so that I will feel more comfortable doing josh blog again. When I'm satisfied with how josh blog is going, it seems to be in part because there's a specific kind of casualness to the writing; I don't want to always feel obliged to write things about what I listen to, because that gets me writing a certain way that I would rather avoid.

2:42 PM
I think the Magnetic Fields' Holiday gives me a tiny headache every time I listen to it, but it's getting smaller with repeated listening.

2:50 AM
Oh, and I think I might as well say screw the experiment. Viva la experimental failures. They give us knowledge too, you know.

I think the plan for next time shall involve regular attention over a longer period of time.

2:38 AM
The new Bonnie 'Prince' Billy album is... aggressively pleasant. If I say that will you get what I mean? Maybe not. I mean it in a good way. I haven't played anything else in the 5 hours since I got home tonight. There is still quite a bit of residual darkness - forboding music, lyrics about having killed men, etc., but for the most part there's an even more relaxed feeling to the music than in the past (if you can believe that), and even on the "tenser" songs things seem pretty low-key.

The synthesizers... what to say about the synthesizers. Ripped straight from the 70s and, to be frank, they sound completely out of place. You may recall how some people find the robo-drum on Arise, Therefore off-putting. That's nothing. It has some aesthetic purposefulness, I think. This is just like... suddenly being in an AOR song for anywhere from half a second to an entire solo break, and it's not entirely pleasant being there. But soon this has passed and Will is singing about sticking his finger up his rich happy wife's ass. Like I said. Aggressively pleasant.

2:35 AM
From something I scribbled between math problems the other day:

Listening to Tom Waits' original version of "Downtown Train". Never really noticed the lyrics in the first verse before, about the Brooklyn girls trying to break away or whatever. Once the chorus kicks in all that stuff is irrelevant. Maybe Waits knew that and was just hurrying things along...

3:17 PM
This is not going well at all. I must confess: I have been cheating on my project. In several ways. On my stereo, and on my headphones walking about town. John Coltrane, Morphine, Dismemberment Plan and Juno, Outkast, the new Matmos, and soon the new Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.

Perhaps this is not the best way to go about this sort of undertaking.

4:56 PM
Sole listening most of the day: Rachmaninov's third piano concerto, perf. Vladimir Ashkenazy and the LSO with Andre Previn conducting.

Oh god please give me a beat or some distortion or something. There's this part in the allegro that's really huge, this big, loping Russian-sounding bit, and it's fucking fantastic. But it lasts like less than a minute. Then it's back to, uh, not that. Lots of floaty things. This week is already making me very aware of just how much I need any kind of beat or rhythm at all. In classical music, the rhythm is all smoothed out, and most importantly, far, far far far far far far (I cannot emphasize this enough) less percussive.

This is less noticeable when I am not listening to classical music for a week, though of course I've already made note of it in the past, because I get to switch back and forth. I have moments that feel appropriate to me for classical music, so now I am experiencing a large amount of inappropriateness.

Jesus, one fucking beat, please.

And no, "Rite of Spring" is not enough.

5:45 AM
Hmmm. If I'm going to insist on listening to "Musical Offering" a whole bunch this week, thus negating the listen-more-to-unfamiliar-music purpose of this experiment, I'm going to have to make it harder on myself. So, one way: listen to the bass line or slow line or low line (usually the one I pay less attention to on this because the flutes and violins and such are jumping around and placed a lot more prominently in the arrangement) over the other parts.

1:32 AM
Remember yesterday how I said I was cheating? Well I may just have to allow for Dismemberment Plan-related cheating during this entire project. (The Juno tunes on the EP are excellent reasons to cheat, too.)