Musicwhore.org

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 ...

As much I like my new-ish job -- I've been there for nine months now -- it doesn't have any down time. There's maybe enough time to check news feeds and a smattering of social media but nothing beyond that.

When I get home, I've got other things brewing -- mixing and remixing Eponymous 4 tracks, learning HTML5, Flex and Ruby on Rails, reducing my body fat -- and they eat whatever time and energy I could have spent writing an entry.

And writing takes quite a bit of energy.

So once again I make a half-assed list of all the music about which I should be writing more in-depth.

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"The End of the World" referred to in Murakami Haruki's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is not an apocalypse. Rather, it's a point where "the world can go no further."

MO'SOME TONEBENDER was the end of SXSW 2011 for me. I snipped my wristband on Saturday afternoon, skipping out on the final night of the festival. Part of it was exhaustion, but mostly, I didn't think anything else could top MO'SOME TONEBENDER. And I didn't really want anything else to try.

I've known about MO'SOME TONEBENDER for a long time, but I was too enamored of NUMBER GIRL to pay much attention to them. I wish I had because they fill a void that NUMBER GIRL's dissolution left. Not content just to hammer at their riffs with single-minded precision, MO'SOME TONEBENDER throws in sampled strings, garage rock riffs and sometimes even a dance beat into their music -- sometimes all in one song.

A lot of bands on the Japan Nite bill had impressive sets, but MO'SOME TONEBENDER topped them all. Diving from one song to the next, the band didn't give the audience a single moment to catch its breath, and by the end of it, the only thing that could be said was, "Holy fuck!"

MO'SOME TONEBENDER sold a custom-made compilation for the show, containing that night's set list. Some live bands don't translate well in the studio, but that's not the case here. MO'SOME TONEBENDER has recorded 13 albums and is about to release a career retrospective. That's a lot of music to explore.

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SXSW runs a tight ship -- your set had better be finished in time to set up the stage for the next act. But when you're country royalty like Emmylou Harris, exceptions are made.

Harris was given free reign over her allotted time, and she used it to perform her forthcoming new album Hard Bargain in its entirety. Album producer/guitarist Jay Joyce and multi-instrumentalist Giles Reeves, who did triple duty on drums and keyboards/bass, joined Harris, who informed the audience the trio on stage is the same on the album. Reeves in particular did an impressive job juggling two instruments, keeping time on a minimal drum kit while providing bass lines and pads on the keys.

Hard Bargain puts the focus once again on Harris' songwriting. As she told the audience, she's fond of a sad song, and the quiet set she performed is chock full of songs she loves. It's the kind of aching beauty that permeated Red Dirt Girl, an album that I thought was heavy-handed with the aching and the beauty.

A question for select members of the audience -- why go to a quiet acoustic show if all you're going to do is yak yak yak all through it? I probably could have paid more attention to the music if youth and extroversion didn't combine in such idiotic fashion. Not all of us love to hear you fuckers talk.

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