Alden Bates' Weblog

I got a DVD in the mail today from Amazon UK - Mike Oldfield's Elements, a collection of music videos from his Virgin era. They're all from the 70s and 80s, using state-of-the-art effects, so of course they're pretty dated...

The 70s vids have CSO all over them. Someone made the clever decision to use yellow CSO during the Tubular Bells performance, and unfortunately the front of one of Mike's guitars was yellow, leading to Invisible Guitar Syndrome.

Some of the 80s vids use computer graphics which are about screen-saver standard these days (seriously, if it wasn't for the live action, I'd swear I'd seen one running on a PC somewhere...)

Almost as fun as the special effects was watching Mike's hairstyle change through the years from his long-haired hippy phase to 80s styles including (at one point) a mullet. Class.

Now, a DVD of his later Warner Music output would be quite nice too...

I went to see a movie today. Before it started (and before the manditory 15 minutes of advertising they make us sit through beforehand) there was piped chillout music.

The song playing when we sat down was a minimalistic piece consisting of a steady beat, with samples of (1) an adult male saying "orange", (2) some small children laughing, and (3) a female voice, possibly computer synthesized, counting upwards. Morgan pronounced it the most irritating song ever.

Of course, good luck googling for it with those lyrics. It's not driving me nuts trying to find out the name and artist. It could have been a compilation album they were playing - the next song was Moby's "Porcelain", but that's still not really a lot of help...

Good luck to Björk, who's nominated for two awards this year for Medulla and Oceania. She was nominated for best packaging on Family Tree last year, but didn't win.

I'm not sure whether this is a good or bad thing. It may prompt more people to buy Medulla, which is good, but on the other hand Medulla is not exactly the most accessible of albums. Even Björk's fans are deeply divided on it. On the other (third??) hand, the first Björk album I heard was Homogenic, which isn't exactly accessible either, and it's still my favourite of her albums.

On a related but tangental topic: Lord of the Rings, and the "Best Song Written For A Motion Picture, Television Or Other Visual Media" award.

2002. Enya, May It Be - nominated but didn't win.
2003. ????
2004. Annie Lennox, Into The West - nominated

I guess Emiliana Torrini isn't well known enough to get nominated. Though I note that one of the nominations this year is Kylie Minogue's single Slow, which she co-wrote.

Moby reports he's finishing his latest albums to be released next March. I have no idea what single he's talking about there though...

The radio at work keeps playing the Maroon 5 song "She Will Be Loved". Apparently they find it necessary to play this song at least once an hour, as it seems every time I finish listening to one of my own CDs, the radio is playing the same damn song.

Is there a dearth of songs, perhaps? Decades of pop music, millions of songs to choose from, and the radio is stuck playing the same group of songs hour after hour?

This is why I stopped listening to the radio. That and the fact that all the advertising and DJ chatter meant that you got maybe three songs in a given half-hour period.

Sony abandons copy-protected CDs

Sony Music Entertainment said it would stop producing the CDs because its message against illegal duplication has widely sunk in.

I am happy I'll be able to buy Sony CDs online without the fear it'll turn up and be unplayable. Hopefully the other music companies will do likewise.

The Sunday Star Times a couple of days ago had a review of Björk's latest album Medulla. I was a bit confused as to whether the reviewer actually liked it or not. "It's called "Where is the Line?", to which most sensible citizens would surely reply, "several hundred yards short of this song"." he says, but goes on to give it four stars anyway...

Meanwhile there was a bit of excitement in Enya fandom, when a Japanese site reported a release date for an Enya album. Sadly it turned out they'd jumped the gun - as enya.com reports, Enya had recorded a song called Sumiregusa for a marketing campaign, and someone assumed it meant an album was on the way. There's a very-choppy streaming version of the song on enya.com.

It's been four years since A Day Without Rain came out with no sign of another album. With a five-year gap before that, only punctuated by the best of, her album gestation periods seem to be getting longer. :/