I would have gotten this preview out sooner, but two titles frustrated me in a search for information. Major labels need to be austere these days, which means US fans of artists with bigger international profiles are a second thought. Sure makes my job harder, but you gotta go where the money is.
A few weeks back, I migrated Musicwhore.org from Movable Type to WordPress as an experiment. Although I didn’t really post much after the migration, it did convince me to make the move permanent.
I figured if I’m doing that much remodeling, I should spruce up the look of the site as well. So here is Musicwhore.org relaunched!
For the web developer nerds out there, yes — I’m finally using such modern conventions as rounded corners, custom fonts and background gradients. I’m not an interface developer, so creating a WordPress theme specifically for this site took quite some time and effort. (Time and effort that should have been used posting entries. Ahem.)
I’m hoping all this work will bring me back to the fold. It’s been five months now since I left Austin and moved to Seattle. I’ve gotten into a routine, so I really can’t use that as an excuse for the lack of updates.
Not that I can come up with others …
UPDATE, 5/8/2012 08:22 PT: I mention things like rounded corners and background gradients. What I failed to mention are the supported browsers. Pretty much, this site was viewed on Chrome 18, Firefox 11 and Internet Explorer 9. You probably won’t see the same effects on any browser older than IE9. Also, I haven’t addressed layouts on smartphones browsers just yet.
When news hit that Renée Fleming was recording an indie rock album, my first reaction was:
what
But then I told myself to keep an open mind. It’s not often that an idea as unlikely as this one gets green-lighted, and if Fleming faltered, the album would join a large pile of failed classical crossovers. She didn’t falter, and the album, Dark Hope, became one of my favorite of the year.
When I saw Fleming would perform three tracks from Dark Hope with the Seattle Symphony, I bought tickets, despite some initial reluctance over the price. I wasn’t disappointed.
Of course, I don’t listen to much classical vocal music, let alone opera. So I can’t comment how well she interpreted Maurice Ravel’s Sheherezade, or various arias from Franz Lehár, Charles Gounod or Erich Korngold.
Fleming, however, is a modern music advocate, probably not as fiercely as Dawn Upshaw, but the program she sang at Benaroya Hall on March 16 included works as recent as 2007. On that, I can comment.
It’s a change that’s long overdue, but I’m experimenting with using WordPress to deliver Musicwhore.org. For all this time, I’ve been using Movable Type to manage the content, but using my own custom code to deliver it. That’s an artifact of the days when the content was subsumed in the old artist directory, which I haven’t really updated since 2005.
Of course, the “Hello World” title of this entry is the default that gets generated when creating a new WordPress site. So I may as well repurpose it to say, “Hello, world! Welcome to a remodeled version of Musicwhore.org!”
The plan for now is to soft launch this site — make a few updates, get a feel for how readers interact with it.
Then I’ll unveil it to the rest of the world.
The overriding theme of 2011 could take on a number of guises. It could be the Year of the String Quartet. Or perhaps the Year of New Amsterdam Records. An argument could be made that it was the Year of Spotify.
It certainly wasn’t a year dominated by Japanese rock. Yes, the top half of the Favorite Edition 2011 list is occupied by Japanese artists, but they’re the concentrated minority in a series of lists dominated by string quartets and new music ensembles.
My tastes have been shifting gradually away from Japan over the past few years, but it seems 2011 marks the first real evidence of that wane. Another indicator — new release e-mails I receive from CD Japan don’t actually feature specific albums by artists I like. They’re all compilations now.
It’s almost five months to the day since I last updated this site.
Is it dead? I’d like to think not, but for the time being, it won’t be updated till I get through a pretty major event happening in my life right now — I’m moving to Seattle.
In my mind, I’ve been done with Austin for the last half decade, but I wasn’t in quite the financial or professional shape to justify a move. Now it seems those proverbial stars have lined up. I landed a job with the University of Washington, which I’ll start in mid-January.
So now my life will be occupied with finishing up work projects, packing, organizing a move, finding a place to live — not much time to update a blog neglected for nearly half a year.
And even after I’ve settled in, I question whether this site will continue in its present form.
I haven’t done a new release preview in a long time. I was shocked I didn’t cover anything for June, till I realized I would have only reported on the new Tokyo Jihen album. (I probably could have also mentioned the new discs by John Adams and Nico Muhly.)
But it looks like labels are now lining up their fall releases.
I’ve always been a fan of conciseness.
Where other writers love to pack their prose with florid language, I go for economy. Less is more.
I signed up for Twitter back in Nov. 2006, and I knew right away I would love the challenge of summarizing moments of time within the strict limit of 140 characters. Twitter turns five years old soon, which means I’ve been expressing myself 140 characters (or fewer) at a time for half a decade.
Note that the previous entry in this blog is dated May 1, 2011. I haven’t posted anything here in a month and a half, and I think that Twitter ceiling has affected how I perceiving the medium of blogging. This here entry? Too many words.
It feels too expansive. It takes too much energy. In short, I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing in longer forms. It was that or blame the job for the lack of entries here.
You would think all that time away would allow me to dig up some awesome listening. I think maybe the quality releases were mostly stacked in Q1. Q2 seems a bit more elusive in finding the gems.
Now this is surprising — I can, with confidence, fill most of the slots on the Favorite Edition 2011 list in the first quarter. Usually I’ll find at most five albums that may become year-end favorites, and of course, no rank is guaranteed this early in the year. But after SXSW, I had what felt like an abundance of good listening, and in compiling this list, that sense became more concrete.
For my birthday, I bought myself a smartphone. Talk about toys for grown-ups …
I’ve been hearing about mobile development this and mobile development that, but I couldn’t empathize because the phone I had was state of the art for 2004. You should see me try to compose a text message with a numeric keypad — hilarious!
But now I’ve got an Android phone with Swype and a web browser and Kindle and Grindr … and more storage for music than my 2GB iPod. (I like having such limited space on my iPod, but that’s pontificating for another day.) It’s great.
Until I visited this site on a mobile browser. Yes, zooming would make it readable, but I noticed other sites such as Amazon and Google make sure their mobile visitors have an experience optimized for their devices.
So after a bit of research and a lot more hacking, I’m glad to announce Musicwhore.org has now been adapted for mobile browsing. At the moment, I just tweaked the current template to look decent on my new phone, but in the future, I anticipate actually changing the design to suit mobile devices.
Now pardon me while I go play with my new grown-up toy some more …