Posted: June 17th, 2011 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: music | Tags: ipod, listen, mp3, music, playlist | 2 Comments »
Thanks to a combination of iTunes optimization functions and defective cables (and, last but not least, the notorious mistrust for their customers that has always been a distinctive feature of Apple business strategy), I’ve lost all the tracks on my iPod Classic. This means: 70 GB, which was all my music, now that I think of it – nobody carries CDs around nowadays. I’ve so far recovered from heartbreak and reimported a few physical CDs and albums I keep in my hard drives, but there’s melancholy in the whole business because each time I play a track it reminds me of something else – for its mood, its lyrics, the year I fell in love with it, the people I associate it with, the playlist I had put it in (thud! oh, my playlists!) or for no reason whatsoever.
My music was all dirty and messy and so far I could only recover its ghost. Here’s some of it (starting with the word ghost and a bit downtempo because it’s early in the morning).
[Click Play on the first track to hear the whole playlist]
EDIT: I’ve also done the GSFP shot to go with this: the usual emo stuff that got immediately explored. Here it is.
Posted: October 8th, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: music | Tags: absence, critique, emily, gratitude, joanna newsom, junk, miracle, miss, mother goose, music, names of the stars, people, poetry, pop, relations, rock, ys | 3 Comments »
Music and poetry have uttered their first cry into this world together, have shared the same crib, sucked from the same bosom and lived in a marriage of true minds for centuries. At least, that’s what we’re told. One grows up and starts thinking that these are truisms implanted into us from a generation of nostalgic losers. That music has always been accompanied by stock lyrics designed to catch the listener’s ear – the more generic the better. That amid the lines of the lyrics of Neapolitan popular music and the best of pop/rock songs you find just the same commonplace, misogynistic junk about loneliness and being left behind. And yet, for Christ’s sake, at times you get such a punch to the gut when the miracle happens.
For me it was Emily by Joanna Newsom. Time stopped. Who the hell is this Mother Goose voice, blurting out about personal kingdoms and river stones and the order of stars and the surface of the water and meteors and door keys? I found myself in an epiphany, wishing to shake off all the kilograms of skin I carry and stand with all my nerves exposed to the air, in the middle of all my past and my present and my future, part of a large net made up of all those who are related to me, and to whom I’m related. Suddenly all the closeness and the distance were straight before me. And so was absence. And gratitude. A bittersweet dream. It must be the fucking strings – I swallow the bait every time.
Really remarkable.
Let us go! Though we know it’s a hopeless endeavor
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever
Though there is nothing would help me come to grips with a sky that is gaping and yawning
There is a song I woke with on my lips as you sailed your great ship towards the morning
by hey, stupido gatto!
Posted: June 1st, 2009 | Author: Daniela Vladimirova | Filed under: music | Tags: communication, energy, explanation, fly, gig, init, live, mirah, mobile phones, motorola, music, rome, swim, tara jane o'neil, tossing, UFO | 5 Comments »
Went to see Mirah’s gig at Init in Rome, yesterday.
Notwithstanding the opening act le truc und die maschine tried hard to spoil the evening, I’ve really enjoyed listening to both Tara Jane O’Neil and Mirah. Their music is personal, intimate and soft. Tara Jane O’Neil’s vocals reminded me a bit of certain Cranberries ballads. Mirah is precise and measured. The arrangements were impeccable: one or two electric guitars and drums. Simple, charming and sweet.
In between acts, we went out to smoke a cigarette and chat under a canopy – each time I go to Init it ends up raining cats and dogs. But not only that: mobile phones, too. At Init yesterday there was a flying Motorola. It flew for something like 15 metres, just behind me. Its owner then picked it up and spent the rest of the night speaking desperately to the mobile itself, talking wretchedly through the mobile to somebody, texting the same person (apparently) and – eventually – tossing it around again, crying.
At times you still have energy left to try to explain things. If it doesn’t work, it’s tremendously refreshing to catch anything near you and toss it in the air. You simply erase your dignity, gather all your energy, pick up just anything and use all your strength, aiming at the wall, the floor (this is OK for fragile things like glasses or dishes) or – in cases of extreme embitterment – somebody else. Among the objects that have been flying around my house: forks, plastic bottles of water (full), bottles of red wine (empty), keys, brooms, cigarette packets, books, dishes full of “penne all’arrabbiata”, an iBook.
My mobile can fly, too. Or swim, actually. But that was an accident.
Tara Jane O'Neil
