Mind Mash

Yesterday I was superenthusiastic about Hecq, and decided to see what else I could pick up from their catalogue. I saw that “Scatterheart” is not available on emusic.com, and is only an expensive import at Amazon, and decided – what the hell – to buy a copy of iTunes. At $9.99 it seemed like a bargain, but when it had been paid for and downloaded I found to my dismay that the bitrate is 128kbps. Why?

Why is the download 128kbps? A very few people might pay for a 128kbps download, and then buy the CD if they really liked it, but to all intents and purposes, if someone pays good money for a download then that is the deal and no more buying will be done. From the point of view of the publisher, some people might be pushed up to a higher priced CD version. But in this case the CD is not available in the US, and anyway, does the publisher really make more money that way? There is certainly nothing in it for iTunes, they don’t sell CDs.

I almost feel like I am being punished for buying music on downloads rather than on CD. “OK, here you are then, here’s your music, but – hehehehe – I’ll just knock the quality down a tiny bit because where else are you going to go – hehehehe.”

I consider my relationship with the music part of iTunes terminated until they clean up their act quality-wise. (Of course there is still the App store – hehehehe.)

A friend at work reminded me that I bought some Stars of the Lid recently on Emusic. I listened again and Stars of the Lid have published some beautiful music: slow, symphonic, with complex electronic, slightly glitchy, undertones.

Now I am listening to music by Hecq, in particular right now, Night Falls. It is very similar to Stars of the Lid. I would give it 6 stars on my iPod if I could. Some of the tracks have very clear references to Aes Dana. In particular, track 11, “Above”, seems to be carved out of “Aftermath 01″ from Aftermath (Archives of Peace).

I salvaged this review, which I wrote in 1999, from IMDB:

A Thin Red Line – Interesting, but much too long, 11 March 1999

Author: Julian Richardson (julianr@dai.ed.ac.uk) from Edinburgh, Scotland
There were parts of this film which were interesting, and parts which were beautiful, but overall the film was spoiled by the fact it is far too long. The last 45 minutes of action and accompanying navel-gazing flowed over me like water.

I cannot understand why the film was not cut down to say 100 minutes. I found the river scene near the end said very little which could not have been said earlier.

I would definitely like to see a “Director’s Cut” of this film which is considerably shorter!

A brief respite from global warming to:

• Find out if you are tone deaf or otherwise test your musical ability.
• Find music using Pandora, a music recommendation service. You can easily find people (“musicians”) who probably have more musical ability than you do (or will (ever (have (possibly)))).