tecuciztecatl

Articles

RSS

  • Users of Interest

    15 fév. 2012, 15h23m

    This journal is to store user's with interesting libraries, in hopes of exploring some of their albums in a later date. All users on this list will receive notification of their posting. Hopefully i don't offend anyone with this list, not that i think it has the capacity to, but you just never know...

    necrorgasmique
    chyprechypre
    Lire plus 2 commentaires Ajouter un commentaire

  • The best songs of all time...

    21 déc. 2011, 18h04m

    Intro
    To make a list like this would seem pretentious, unless of course the one who makes the list knows the potential of it's pretentious paradigm, therefore making the air of elitism immaterial, as such a state doesn't exist here. So we start back to square one and have to ask "why make such a list?" In all reality it's always been something i've wanted to do, simple as that. The difference between this list and the ones you may find in magazines, tv, and other sources, is that the usual suspects won't be the cream of the crop. Beatles? good songs, but not something that will receive high merit. Radiohead? they're ok. For sure they will be added on this list eventually, but the majority of their songs will most likely be surpassed by other artist like Hirsche Nicht Auf Sofa, Akira Ifukube, and Silvestre "El Rey" Mendez (if you know any of these artist we need to hang out.). In the end though this is for fun, If in fact a treasured song isn't high in this list and you disagree, talk to me, respectively debate about it, i probably won't change my mind and neither will you, but we'll have music to talk about, and this is what this site is all about.

    The second part to address is how the songs will be chosen. Essentially it will be quite arbitrary. I don't have a list of favorite songs to write about. There is little structure involved, so to say it's completely random would be false, but it's unstructured enough to negate complete favoritism as the ultimate source.

    As stated before, this solely for fun, this is not some elite list, nor do i believe that everyone should 100% agree with. It's music and it's unique. We're humans and we're unique. So it's safe to say that we all have a unique taste in music.

    The list goes chronologically, the best is at the top, the least favorite at the bottom. The number beside each track is just to point out when i wrote about them. So, for example, the last song on the way bottom could have a 2 in front of it. It's the second song i wrote about but it's the least favorite of the bunch.

    The List

    1."vamos a hacer un silencio" by Caifanes from the album "el silencio"

    "let us make the sky bleed"- lyrics that are so ambiguous yet so good. This is what Caifanes does best and this song exemplifies it perfectly. A melodic song that incorporates classical guitar elements (i presume) and the saxophone; the best instrument to hint at sexual intimacy. It's hard to recommend a song from the album "el silencio", but for sure "vamos a hacer un silencio"x will be in one of the top three spots.


    3."meshell's dreamland" by Jazz Bigband Graz from the album "electric poetry and lo-fi cookies"

    unorthodox smooth jazz is the best way i can describe this track. Anybody that listens to smooth jazz on the radio will agree on the two basis that I'm drawing my conclusions on. The first is that smooth jazz tracks usually don't surpass the 10 minute mark, the second being that there is usually no lyrical content. Meshell's Dreamland breaks those two rules, and quite beautifully. The 17 minute piece, like most jazz songs, is heavily reliant on the horns and while not complex in a technical perspective deserve respect for being used properly. The lyrical content is about love, like the horns very simple and forward but executed in good fashion. The highlight of it all comes at the end, with first time listeners being in for a surprise of how the end is given a slightly funky sound to compliment this epic track.This is not just a highly recommended jazz song, but a highly recommended piece of music period.


    2."lives" by Modest Mouse from the album "the moon and antarctica"

    A song about the life of us, singular, but implied to everyone. The song is focused specifically on the lyrics and guitar, but it lacks the innovative play of words that Isaac brock is known for, which ultimately makes the whole song suffer. There's no denying that the song put together as a whole with the album, the moon and antarctica is spectacular, and the lyrics does have it's highlights, specifically the part that recites about what is hard to remember. Regardless, as a standalone it pales in comparisons with some of the more better and innovative songs that Modest Mouse has in their vast catalogue.
    Lire plus Ajouter un commentaire

  • History in Songs: Part 1

    15 déc. 2011, 1h15m

    In one of my classes this semester (Fall 2011) I had a writing assignment in which we were to write about two songs that we like. We were to write three 2-page essays, the first; an introduction with autobiographical content. The second and third essays would each be about a song and how it impacted our lives. Being a music addict, i figured it would be best to write solely about music. Overall I was quite pleased with my paper and figured I would share it with the last.fm world. There are a few sentences i wanted to clear up, and a few more i wish i could've added, but I'm opting to copy and paste it without editing it. For this moment I'm only posting the first essay, parts 2 and 3 will be added later on.


    Music is a breath of life, a necessity that few create and many enjoy. The term music explains little on what it means to enjoy it. The old rhetoric of “one man's trash is another man’s treasures” holds close to what it means to enjoy a good tune. For this assignment I will test the parameters of what the standard term
of music is. To the majority of people, popular culture defines what music is
and what it should mean to us. The antithesis to this premise, the music that's
ignored, misrepresented, or rejected from popular society, holds a major
interest to me. My interest in unorthodox compositions can’t be properly
explained without a brief explanation of my upbringing.


    My family came to the United States from Mexico when I was two years old. My brothers and I grew up listening to the Spanish speaking music that my parents
enjoyed; when we started going to school that changed. We were the only family
in our neighborhood that spoke Spanish, so slowly but surely music with an
English tongue found its way to my ears. My interest in music was inherently
diverse yet I was unaware of it, as I liked Spanish Rock and English Rap for the
better part of childhood. This changed in my teenage years with the discovery of
rap in Spanish and a growing affinity for English rock. These two genres were
the predominated choice of mine throughout the rest of my teen years. In my
early twenties I began to listen to college radio stations and this led to the
discovery of post-rock, a genre that specializes in no coherent vocals and songs
that generally pass the eight-minute mark. The biggest imprint in my musical
taste was developed in the post-rock artist Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I didn't
enjoy their music at first but thanks to random plays in my library and leaving
my music on from night well into the morning, I began to love their twenty-minute
epic songs and unorthodox use of instruments. It is at this point that I began to
look for long pieces of music to captivate me in that same manner, slowly creeping
into genres that few dare to get into, such as noise, musique concrete,
avant-garde, experimental, and classical.


    When I first found out about this assignment, I was thrilled. Music is a big part of my life and I wanted to exemplify it by showing some of the songs
that I enjoy. I had a similar assignment in another one of my classes this
semester. I chose a wide array of songs in that class in terms of genre and country of origin. With a funky song from Nigeria, a post-rock song from Canada, a rock song from Mexico, a classical piece from Japan, and a pop song from Iraq. Due to that assignment, I choose to do this paper on abstract pieces as avant-garde has been slowly winning me over for the past decade. I also thought it would be amusing to write about, as it's not something that a majority of the population listen to, much less know about.

    Lire plus Ajouter un commentaire