2012-01-06: Song of the Week

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As of one or two days from now, I will have lived in Arizona for nine years. As I realized this, I immediately thought about the CD I received for my birthday (which was just one day later) that year. The CD was Enya’s Paint the Sky with Stars, a rather popular compilation she did in 1997. I don’t (too) often post my quiet or introspective music here, but I think that a good listen through on the updated The Very Best of Enya CD has been worthwhile(1).

If you haven’t figured it out yet, this week’s post is about Enya! The Culture Database pegs her at just shy of 51 years old, and from Ireland. “Enya” comes from the approximate pronunciation of her given name Eithne in Irish. Have you heard of Clannad? I had heard of them but wasn’t sure what of their stuff I’d listened to them. It turns out that Enya got her musical start in 1980 by joining them. The band is formed mostly of her siblings, by the by. It turns out I have two of their albums in my iTunes and am going to be listening to it all “eventually.” In 1986, music she produced that appeared in a BBC series The Celts helped her achieve some notoriety, and was quickly followed on by her first album: Watermark.

From there, her rise to epic popularity has been steady, and is presently Ireland’s best selling solo musician, and after U2(2) is their second largest musical export.

So, what song specifically have I chosen this week? It’s really hard to do so. My favorites from the album were Orinoco Flow, Caribbean Blue, Book of Days, Anywhere Is, along with Storms in Africa. Even though not every song was my favorite song, the album was one of the first that I could listen to all of the way through. Well, I’ll start with Caribbean Blue — since it’s a song that I could listen to (without noticing) on loop for quite a while. Enjoy this video, which is not the official video:

I had initially received a copy a few years prior to my living in Arizona, and used to listen to it on my main computer at the time, a Macintosh Quadra 840av, along with the glorious display it had, with speakers built in. Looking back on the whole thing, it’s kind of amazing how very 1990s it all was. I had a beige computer with a beige monitor that speakers built in which were far too good for the computer, and while I was using it, I popped in an Enya CD.

Moving to Arizona wasn’t the easiest thing for me, and ultimately, I didn’t really take it very well. That is to say, at first I didn’t take it very well. While at home, I kind of sulked and played on my computer (which, just by the by, had been updated to a PowerBook G4.) It was one of the first times in my life that I’d spent more time sitting around and listening to music than going over to friends’ houses or inviting the friends to mine.

Unfortunately, it seems like Enya (or Warner Music Group) has got the copyrights on her videos fairly well locked down on YouTube. Several of her videos are uploaded to the main WarnerMG account, as well as an account labeled EnyaTV, but even so, none of them allow embedding, which actually makes this post difficult. I would really love to embed most of the songs from the album. In addition to being great songs, her videos are just fantastic, and for me, having just now watched some of them for the first time, there’s an added level of meaning in the songs now.

Enya, as we find out from the culture database, and as we can hear in her videos and see in her songs, loves multimedia. If the Gagaverse is an abstraction of some sort of concept, then an Enya video is an art project, alternating between showing you a painting of some ocean-side scene, and Enya. Storms in Africa is a great example — it shows Enya, some kids who sing the “Na Na Na”s and some storms in Africa. In Anywhere Is, she goes as far as to actually put some of the words from the song on the screen. Orinoco Flow is done up with paint effects, and because it’s a song about the ocean, shows boats and water behind the paintings of Enya.

My first days in Arizona weren’t that great, but I would argue that Enya made them better. Paint the Sky with Stars has the distinction of being one of the first full albums I bothered to store in my computer, and one of the only that remains, in its full sixteen-track form, today. The whole thing (and most of Enya’s albums) is a great listen through, and if you were to bother looking at YouTube for her videos, then you’d be treated to the fact that she (or her video producer) was as much as visual artist as she is an audio artist.

When I listen to Enya, I’m immediately drawn back to my first days in Arizona, discovering the fantastic summer evenings as I used the the album as a backdrop for writing or just for sitting back and appreciating a day well-lived. Today, it works well as the antithesis to some of the more exciting music with which I tend to fill my days. Part of the charm of Enya, however, is that she’s not trapped in 2003 for me. I listened to her before that, I’ve listened to her extensively since, and just this week I’ve logged several hours of her on my Zune Pass. (And locally, on iTunes.)

(1) Especially on a new pair of headphones I’ve got, which have been making all of the difference both while walking around and while at home.
(2) I actually heard a U2 song the other day and am adding them to the queue of things to look at for this series. Yay!

On Riding the Bus in a Smaller City

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Infrastructure, as you may or may not be aware, is incredibly interesting to me. Recently, I’ve been trying to experience as much of it, and as many “systems” as possible. This is for a lot of reasons, but chiefly in an effort to study them. (And also, one of the systems I’ve been using has actually introduced a lot of convenience for me.)

One of the perks of my job is that I get a free year-long bus pass woith the local transit system. Transit in this down isn’t too terribly expensive, but it’s a nice gesture and over the course of a week or month, somebody who rides the bus frequently will pretty significantly benefit. Fortunately for me, the bus system in town is really weird, and over the years, I’ve experienced it in interesting enough ways that I feel like I’m somewhat qualified to talk about it now.

I’ll start by saying that I’ve always wanted to live in a town where I could more or less get around by riding the bus. As a young Cory, it just always seemed rather exciting and I always recognized it as a more “environmentally conscious” choice. I think another part of it (for me specifically) is that the transit system up near Seattle where I had lived before, KC Metro, was… a fairly vast and sprawling network of buses, trams, a monorail, ties into a commuter rail system, among other things.

KC Metro embodies more of these concepts, but even the smallest of transit systems have a lot of really interesting properties that are worth examining. Among them, for me are…

  • Route planning & scheduling
  • Capacity planning
  • Asset management
  • Fleet maintenance & management

KC Metro was a huge, sprawling system with thousands of buses (of five or six types) running hundreds of routes, carrying probably tens of thousands of people every day. Mountain Line, the bus system where I currently live, has less than thirty buses running nine routes, carrying what I’d optimistically call “thousands” of people daily. Additionally, our system only has two or three types of buses, and if I’m remembering my research correctly, our city has outsourced the bus maintenance.

The biggest potential advantage of a smaller bus system like the Mountain Line is that asset management and fleet management can become far more simple when you can do something like get a grant to replace all ten-or-so old buses so they match the new ones. On the other hand, Mountain Line doesn’t have the motivation or resources to do things like give some of it’s services their own blogs, or tell the public exactly why they want a new type of bus.

The Mountain Line suffers pretty significantly from some of the issues that affect smaller transit systems. Chief among these issues is that route planning is a little bit crazy. I ride the Route 4 in from just behind my house to the transfer station, where I can either continue on the 4 to a Texaco station right across the street from my office on campus, or I can take the 10 in to the center of campus, similarly, just a few hundred feet from my office.

Other issues with the small bus system revolve mainly around the system’s inability to handle peak transit times. More than once in the past several weeks, I ended up skipping a bus or being glad to have missed a bus that was completely full. Probably due to budget issues — “peak times” for most routes are from noon to about six. Unfortunately for anyone who is detained at work for even two minutes past 5 p.m., or anybody who needs to transfer buses at all, the 6 p.m. end of “peak” service on several of the routes can be a huge pain in the rump — especially as it’s still really cold here in the evenings.

Because it’s such a large system, KC Metro has to consider multiple tiers of service and think about how they tie together. One of the projects that is on-going is “Rapid Ride” — which is essentially their new bus rapid transit backbone system. Not to be outdone or seen as resting on their rumps, they’ve got a re-structuring program going on for the rest of the system. They’ve even got information about short-term reinvestment they’re doing to improve the service, including such things as  routes that have “too many people standing for too long” and routes that should be revised or deleted.

In terms of actually riding the Mountain Line — it’s a mixed bag. Some days it works extremely well, and some days, I’m not home until 8, even though I started trying to get there at 5 and I would have been home at 6 if I’d just walked. Service in the morning is fairly predictable, especially when I want to catch the bus at 6:21 a.m. (a time when nobody else is even awake yet.)

After a few days of rough riding, I’ve fallen into step with the “public transit way” — at least as it happens in a smaller town like this. I catch the 4 at 6:25 (or so) a.m. which requires that I be up at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. to get showered and head out in time. Once I’m out the door, I wait at the bus stop for a few minutes. I board the bus and see several familiar faces. I actually have no idea who any of them are, and there’s a fairly diverse crowd (all things considered) but I see most of them each morning. It’s both awkward and reassuring to be part of a crowd in that way — both anonymous and well-known at the same time.

The way home is more of a gamble, in part because on different days, I’ll start in different places, and will have a different set of buses to think about. Plus, because I tend to go home right at 5 whenever possible (because staying out any later in January results in freezing to death.) At this point, I usually consider walking home from wherever I happen to be, because I figure that if I’m walking, I’ll at least be burning some calories and getting where I need to be. However, I’m usually stopped by the “that’s effort” aspect, along with a solid determination that I will use the bus, purely for the sake of saying I use the bus.

Examining the operations of the Mountain Line is both fun and frustrating — in part because there’s so little, and in part because they can do things like rearrange a route or replace fully half of their fleet and the effects become immediately obvious. A system like KC Metro, which has apparently been honored as one of the best run large transit systems in the nation, is really interesting exactly because of how large it is. They operate well over a thousand vehicles of different types and different ages on a fairly diverse geography, serving routes of different lengths and purposes.

Here’s another interesting measure: a quick gander at Flickr shows that there are hundreds, nay, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of photos of Seattle’s buses online. Flagstaff fares differently: I was able to find two photos that are definitely Mountain Line buses on Flickr.

2012-01-30: Song of the Week!

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Over the past several years, one of my favorite types of music has been Japanese pop and rock music as it appears in anime shows.

Not all anime features exclusively J-Pop, however — one excellent example is Initial D, which happens to be on Hulu. It crossed my mind recently, for whatever reason, as something I should watch, in part for the music, and in part because I’ve been hearing about it for years and years (it was written as a manga starting in 1995, and aired as an anime on TV starting in 1998.)

While a lot of the show’s music does seem to be composed and performed by Japanese artists, a significant amount of it is what seems to be an Italian disco type of genre.

Here’s a great example of a song that happens to come from the show:

Just for my own vindication, I looked at The Culture Database and found out that Running in the ’90s (which due to my involvement in Ye Olde Computer Forum is my own unofficial theme song) as well as Speed Speed Boy are both performed by an ItaloDisco musician under the guise of Max Coveri.

In fact, a significant amount of my favorite Initial D music comes from Maurisio De Jorio under various pseudonyms.

Italodisco, or Eurobeat, or some combination of the two, seems really popular in Japan. In fact, they’re even willing to Para Para to songs like “Game” by Laurie. (Which may or may not be in Initial D, but I don’t think it actually matters at this point.)

I do suspect that the Japanese are willing to Para Para almost anything, but the sheer amount of eurobeat in the vast land of Para Para on YouTube means a lot to me. (I bet there’s even Hetalia Vocaloid Para Para.)

And so, there you have it. Initial D — good for dance times.

2012-01-23: Song of the Week!

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I’ve been thinking about anime music a lot lately. In part because this past weekend, I binged on Initial D and Cowboy Bebop, and in part because I love foreign music, and in a pretty important way, anime music is really accessible, and it’s (usually) part of a pair of genres (J-Pop and J-Rock) with which I’m more or less familiar. This is especially true given my roommates, a non-zero number of whom have studied in Japan.

A lot of people, when they think of anime songs think of The Real Folk Blues, Thesis of a Cruel Angel, or even the original Pokemon theme, unfortunately (and also fortunately) not every anime theme can be Yoko Kanno or the Pokemon theme. (Even though I wish everything could be the Pokemon theme.)

One of my favorites though, is a song that goes with an anime I’ve never seen: Kodocha. Tomoe Shinohara performs the second opening for the show, which is exciting and excited in every way possible. The song, paradoxically titled “Ultra Relax” has for several years been one of the most exciting and happy songs I’ve got. It beats out almost everything I can think of from Finland (or the other Nordics), and it even (in a lot of ways) beats out a song specifically about irrational exuberance.

Listening to Ultra Relax is one thing, but listening to it with headphones on is a completely different matter. When I first found the song, I was probably listening to it on laptop speakers or the single speaker in a PowerMac G3. (I’ve been listening to this song on and off since 2004 or 2005.) When you put headphones on (and have a proper version of the audio file) it becomes a totally different experience.

I actually remember one of the first times I realized this. It was probably in 2004, right after having received my first MP3 player, which was an RCA Lyra with 64 megabytes of memory built in, which could be augmented with an SD card. (I had a 512 megabyte card full of music that roamed back and forth between the Lyra and my digital organizer at the time — a Palm Tungsten|E. I was totally wired.) I would have been on one of my “more than once weekly” walks which consisted of one or more laps around the 40 acres on which we lived at the time, which amounted to about a mile if you went around the border of the property. I hadn’t listened to Ultra Relax on headphones before, and I remember distinctly being disoriented during and after the first play through of the song.

Tomoe Sinohara, we find out, is probably a bit older than most other Japanese pop artists I usually think of and link to, and has a lot of talents, including (as per the culture database) acting, producing, singing, and being a fashion designer. Although in “the West” (which I think is just code for “not Japan”) she’s known best for Ultra Relax, the culture database suggests that she is a fairly prolific artist in her homeland.

This is actually a lot like Utada Hikaru, who is known extremely well in the United States for “Simple and Clean” — and who has zillions of fans based purely on the existence of that song. And yet, she has such a prolific library of music, many of which is not super hard to find in the US, because she grew up partly in the United States.

On the other hand from Utada Hikaru, it looks like there’s a good chance that a significant majority of Tomoe Sinohara’s music is in approximately the same style. I leave you with the song “Happy Point.”

2012-01-16: Song of the Week!

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Last Week, I lamented the fact that I had accidentally picked a song two times, and that I had noticed only too late to pick a new song and give it a worthwhile treatment. I still think I gave the song a better treatment this time around, but it’s bothersome nonetheless. In the intervening week, I haven’t done much to solve the overall problem of reusing old songs, but I have been listening to music.

In addition to continuing to listen to some John Tesh, and another artist I suspect (but can’t confirm) I’ve already done, I listened to a brand new album from an old standby: Nightwish.

As I’ve probably written about them before, Nightwish is from Finland, and I’ve been listening to their stuff in some form or another since I got to the university in 2006. (It may be that one of the first things I did as a newly minted university student was rip a borrowed copy of Once into my PowerBook G3.)

Since then, I have come to listen to Nightwish (and similar bands) a lot. It’s not usually my first choice, and I don’t usually answer "symphonic metal" when somebody asks me what my favorite type of music is, but it’s always on my iPod (as the phrase goes) and in my iTunes library (the one that I’ve had since early 2005.) I haven’t actually really stopped to think very hard about why, specifically, I like Nightwish (and other symponic metal bands) so much. It might just be the result of one or two songs — Ghost Love Score is high on that particular list, but I like to think that there’s something else, something actually about the music that I really like.

I suspect, a lot of it relates to the fact that it’s good both for active listening, where I sit (or stand or dance or walk) and think about the song, trying to figure out what either of the band’s two lead vocalists is actually saying, or what could be meant by the lyrics, be they deep and meaningful, or completely nonsensical. Nightwish is also really good for passive listening, where I put it on and go other things, be it browsing the Internet, cleaning my house or walking to campus (but where my mind isn’t really on the music.)

Musically, Nightwish (and symphonic metal in general) has a sound I think I appreciate more than I’d like to let on. It’s got some elements of the Celestial Choir or Ponies, and some elements of a faster-paced rock arrangement (such as the ones I favor from Kelly Clarkson and other women vocalists, usually in break-up songs) along with sutle hints of (in my opinion) well-used screaming bits, such as those featured in some of Breathe Carolina‘s stuff, and Retro Stefson’s stuff.

Imaginaerum, their newest album, delivers on everything that Nightwish’s previous work promises. The whole thing is well-paced, has the correct amount of screaming, rock arrangement and celestial ponies (an important part of the mix.) On the whole album, there are really only one or two songs that I like less than the others, and I don’t even actively dislike those songs, I just "like them less."

I’m not the biggest fan of introduction songs, which this album has, but the first real song, Storytime, (video above) is pretty awesome. It’s got the unintelligible babbling, the new vocalist, just a little bit of the celstial choir of ponies, and purportedly a story.

The rest of the album proceeds in much the same way. The only song I really ever skip is Slow, Love, Slow. It’s just too slow — not just slow, but actively depressing. Ghost River is fantastic, in part because of its similarity to Ghost Love Score, and I Want My Tears Back is awesome because it reminds me of one of Kelly Clarkson’s breakup songs. It’s also got some of the best instrumental parts on the album, with the bagpipes (or whatever it is, I’m bad at identifying anything that’s not a piano, guitar or some drums) gets used to create folky sounds that would be just as easily at home in a Scottish or Irish piece.

Scaretale is hilarious because of its creepy use of children vocalists, coupled with the line "the bride will lure you, cook you, eat you." It’s just too hilarious.

The rest of the album is really unremarkable, but in a great way. It’s standard Nightwish, and goes just as well in this album as it would with Anette’s previous album, Amaranth, or as it would with any of the albums they did with Tarja as their vocalist.

Until next time, just remember that I want my ears back after storytime at the ghost river.