Noun: Sound, esp. when recorded, transmitted, or reproduced: "audio equipment".
nau·ti·cal/ˈnôtikəl/
Adjective: Of or concerning sailors or navigation
Navigating through fields of sound. Rants and raves about Music and life.
Posts is English and Español.
Planet of Sound: Revisiting the 90s through the Internet (Part 2: 1992)
(“CD Wall” a Creative-Commons licensed photo by Dan Kamminga on Flickr)
Been meaning to retake a more frequent posting habit here, and seeing as I still have some years to go, here’s the next of the Spotify playlists I’ve made exploring the music of the 90s. I started putting them up in an earlier post, and there you can really see what the rules and logic behind these playlists is all about.
So without further ado, here’s the playlist for 1992
And its YouTube companion here
Post with 2 notes
Planet of Sound: revisiting the 90s through the internet (Part 1: 1990-91)
(“Music collection”, a Creative Commons-licensed photo by LondonBrad on Flickr)
Caught in a tidal wave of nostalgia for the past few weeks, mostly fueled by reissues of Nirvana’s Nevermind and U2’s Achtung Baby, I decided to look back at some of the awesome Music released 20 years ago. 1991 was a great year for Music: we saw the decline of Hair Metal and 80’s Pop and the arrival of Grunge in the mainstream. Suddenly, “Alternative” was the “buzz” word of the day. Hip hop gained more ground in MTV and radio. In Britain, the sun set on the Madchester scene and gave way to Britpop, and The Scene That Celebrates Itself helped spread the gospel of Shoegaze.
I consulted various lists online and went about to make a playlist of songs that represent some of (what I consider to be) the best albums of that year. In order to look back and listen to the albums that made a difference, I used Spotify as my main tool. This posited a couple of problems: 1. Not every album is available on Spotify (the reason the playlist has no songs from Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magick or Metallica’s Black Album, both landmark albums from that year) and 2. Not everyone has a “free” Spotify account (especially in Puerto Rico!). In the end, though, I kept the music part of the project on Spotify because a LOT of the albums I wanted to include on the lists weren’t available on Rdio or MOG (and for personal reasons, I dislike Grooveshark).
There were also some other things to consider:
- I decided to not include Metal bands (unless I thought their album was a good example of crossover material), and no Country (because it has never been my forte).
- I decided on 50 songs because it seemed like a good, round number, and a fair amount of songs to give a good snapshot of the year.
- I tried to not include songs from albums that were badly reviewed, even though they had good singles. This was a tough call, but in the end I’m glad I stuck by it. (What it means, essentially, is that on a year like 1990 there’s no MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice because, although their hits are very iconic for the year, their albums were really weak, just padding for the 3 or 4 singles that the label know it had there.)
- After completion, I decided to make a visual companion in the form of YouTube playlists for every year (which seemed, in hindsight, like a no-brainer, seeing as most of these songs I discovered through their videos in the first place.)
Shortly after I started listening to the Music, I became obsessed with making these playlists for EVERY YEAR of the decade, and I did. And so, here I share the first 2 years, 1990 and 1991.
First, the 1990 playlist is available here
and its YouTube companion here.
The 1991 playlist is here
and its YouTube companion is here.
If you have a chance to check these out, please drop a comment and let me know what you think.
Coming up soon: 1992 and 1993.
Post with 4 notes
One about cassettes: an introduction
(photo by Erica Marshall of muddyboots.org)
Growing up in the ’80s, cassettes were THE chosen media for music. Multiple-paneled inlays; Transparent shells; 60, 90-minutes (hardly ever above that); TDK, Maxell, Memorex, BASF, Sony, Fuji, tons of brands.
The ability to first play tapes on my own came after my sister got her first radio as a birthday gift: it was a little single-speaker Panasonic radio, too small to be called a boom-box, but to our young ears it was the pinnacle of high definition. I constantly borrowed it to sneak into a corner and listen to Music, sometimes without her knowledge, which resulted in many a fight. Coupled with the fact that I’m not the most careful person (read: clumsy as hell) and practically destroyed my sister’s radio, this prompted my mom to buy a new one for me, identical to my sister’s. I couldn’t be happier with the gift.
Way before we ever had a dual tape deck and could discover the wonders of high-speed dubbing, we would record tapes by putting one radio’s speaker in front of the other’s tiny mic. It sounded like crap and we LOVED IT.
We quickly graduated from cheap-ass tape dubbing to cheap-ass original productions: my sister and I, along with the kids that lived in our street, would gather in a neighbor’s house and do our own audio versions of latin “novelas”, which we barely scripted and practiced, resulting in hilarious mistakes and “actors” who constantly fumbled their lines while trying to hold back laughter.
(Clockwise from top left: R.E.M.’s Everybody Hurts Maxi-Cassette Single; Trouble’s Psalm 9; World Class Punk compilation from ROIR; White Trash’s The Crawl/Apple Pie Cassingle; Tori Amos’ Little Earthquakes; Pearl Jam’s Not For You Cassingle; Smashing Pumpkins’ Zero Cassingle; and a 90-minute TDK)
Later on in life, as I got older and got into owning Music, cassettes remained the preferred way: a Walkman would go anywhere with me, keeping me connected to songs I could listen to over and over again. These would get played until the labeling on the shells were completely erased. Songs would get rewound over and over, until serious dropouts in sound would emerge in places where the tape got stuck on the player’s head, folded or “chewed” by a badly kept portable player. Cases would get replaced constantly, inserts would get their panels taped together when constant reading of lyrics and liner notes made them fall apart.
(Top row, from left to right: T-Ride’s self-titled debut; Aversion’s Fit To Be Tied; Death Angel’s The Ultra-Violence; No Mercy’s Widespread Bloodshed/Love Runs Red. Bottom row from left to right: Life, Sex and Death’s The Silent Majority; Queen’s A Kind Of Magic; Metallica’s Ride The Lightning; and Frehley’s Comet’s Live + 1)
These artifacts made me feel happy, and complete. A new cassette was like a personal concert from a new favorite artist every couple of months (whenever I could save up enough money to buy a new cassette). Sometimes, a friend would lend something that soon became a new favorite. In those cases, a frantic road trip to the nearest store was in place. A brick of blank tapes in hand, that afternoon was guaranteed to be spent dubbing tapes and listening to tunes as loud as I could to make sure the dubs came out fine.
This daily ritual of obsessing over Music was all that I needed in the world. In that moment, it shielded me from the all the crap that was my adolescence. Teenage years made bearable by Maxell. It was life, and it was Memorex.
Cassette memories #1: Life Sex & Death - The Silent Majority
This album. THIS FUCKING ALBUM.
I love this album. Like, insanely LOVE this album. I’ve read a few sites that describe them as “Cheap Trick meets early Van Halen and Sex Pistols with a little Tom Waits thrown in” and that sounds about right.
Their singer, Stanley, had a “gimmick” where he dressed as a bum, smelled bad and acted all weird. Some say it was an act, some say he got all kooky when his dad died. Regardless of what was true about the whole singer thing, it worked for them. In a fair world, this should have been HUGE. Seriously, check it out.
I remember seeing the video on Headbanger’s Ball and being totally pumped about getting their album on cassette. Played it until I wore it out. I think I still have it somewhere laying around. If I do, I’ll include it in an upcoming post about cassettes.
(PS: click on the picture to go to a blog that has the album for download. The album is out of print right now, so this and eBay are the only ways to get it right now…unless you’re willing to pay $99.99 for a sealed, brand-new, still-in-longbox copy on Amazon!)
Post with 4 notes
One about record stores.
(Photo by freeloosedirt on Flickr)
Record stores will be a recurring topic here, seeing as I’ve spent a great deal of time in them during my lifetime. They were always my favorite place in the mall growing up. I’ll get overtly sentimental about them, and at the risk of sounding clichéd, those places were fucking magical. There was a sense of discovery and excitement I rarely found in a physical space back then, and hardly found anymore. Stepping into a well-stocked record store is like stepping into a time machine/history classroom/museum/science lab. Discovering new sounds, new favorite bands, new songs that changed me deeply was, at the time, a recurring thing.
Plaza Carolina is the mall nearest my house, and the one I grew up in. I somewhat proudly proclaim I was a mallrat there, who went from spending insane amount of hours there to working in its stores. To this day, I remember tons of details about how it used to look and where the stores were when I was young. Like that store in the middle of the mall, second floor, next to the arcade, where they used to sell rock iron-ons for t-shirts and back patches and pins for your denim jacket (they would also do iron-on lettering, big thing for the b-boy crews back then)
There were quite a few spots to buy Music from, back in the day. There was Music City (second floor, near JC Penney) were you could not only get records and tapes, but also musical instruments and DJ gear. They kept cassettes in long glass counters along the right side of the store, so this was even before those long plastic keepers (record store employees call them keepers, blisters, safers, clamshells, binks, etc). Other stores used to carry albums (and later CD’s) in the mall, but none seemed as well-stocked in LP’s as Music City. All the big department stores like Sears, JC Penney, and the local one González Padín (R.I.P.) had their record sections, but they all paled against Music City. Come christmas, my family (more about them and christmas in another post) would always go there to buy a new stylus for the house record player, or instruments for parrandas after our Christmas Eve party. Normal shopping days, I would spend HOURS browsing through LP covers and making mental notes about bands, notes that I would later cross-check with the music magazines I would religiously read over and over again: there was Hit Parader and Circus, both basically bibles of rock music when I was growing up. Then, our local Woolworth’s would be the first place where I found RIP magazine, and that became required reading too. It was the first all-color, all-glossy pages rock music mag I’d seen, so that was impressive. Their posters and pages adorned my wall throughout my salad days. I never really read Rolling Stone or Spin until much later in life.
Along with a lot of ’70s rock and hair metal album covers, this is were I saw an Iron Maiden album cover for the first time.
I remember being totally mesmerized by the Run To The Hills/Phantom of the Opera single cover;
being totally scared by the Number Of The Beast and Live After Death;
how the Powerslave cover intrigued me with all its symbolism;
and enjoying how much Maiden outdid themselves with their next album. I still remember how much time my friends and I spent deciphering the Somewhere In Time album cover when it came out (spoiler alert: way to much time).
The spell these stores cast over me would last to this day. I’ve had happy and not-so-happy-but-nonetheless-exciting moments in them, and my first job (and quite a few after that one) would be in record stores like Music City.
Post with 5 notes
The one about the first time.
When I was born, there was a KISS record in my house. Not just any record, Destroyer. You know the cover well, even if you aren’t a fan of the band: their iconic pose, towering over a burning world, all super-hero like. This was my first taste of Music. Of course, there were other instances of music in my life before I heard this for the first time, but that day I knew genuinely LIKED this kind of Music.
In many ways, every important trend, every thing we like, every addiction in our lives can be traced back to single, precise moments. Deep down inside ourselves, we can recognize the one time when we chose one thing over the other, or, in some cases, someone else chose for us. These moments, far remembered, are sometimes mythologized into our life story.
Growing up, there were some aspects of my life that might seem simple to explain now, but affected me deeply and shaped a lot of my world view. One of these was that my mother and father got divorced the same year I was born. Suffice it to say, the day that bomb was dropped on me was a hard one. Knowing it almost made me feel like it was my fault they weren’t together anymore. Mother would go to great lengths to explain that no, it wasn’t my fault, my dad cheated on her, and eventually moved out. My grandmother, however, did everything in her power to remind me that he didn’t even go to the hospital to see me the day I was born. To this day, I’ve never asked him if this was true, because at this point, it really doesn’t matter one way or the other: my relationship with him won’t get better or worse because of it. Truth is: they divorced. My sister and I saw him on weekends, then a weekend a month, then whenever he could get the time. There was an attempt to patch things up with my mother once and he lived with us again for a little while, but then he left again. As it stands, a fairly common occurrence in a lot of lives.
And so it came to pass that, when they got divorced, he left a KISS record in the house. Now this record was part of what I inadvertently created as my life myth: if this record belonged to my father, he must have liked Rock. In fact, he liked it so much he left it to me, as a gift, passed down as heirloom. My mother would have none of it: “that belonged to your father, don’t touch it.” As it usually happens with heirlooms, crowns, jewels, all things real and important, it was out of reach.
Add to that the outside influence/misinformation from a well-intentioned neighbor who at the time was in a Baptist school, and told me something about the album that you can probably be guessing right now: KISS was a satanic group! She went on to explain how KISS stood for Knights in Satan’s Service, and that the album cover represented “four manifestations of the devil, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, ruling over a destroyed land.” Needless to say I was scared (I was probably around 6 or 7 years old when this happened), but it was the good kind of scared, the kind of fear that makes you very, very curious. (You’ve gotta admit, that description was pretty fucking cool!)
So this was the untouchable thing. The one musical thing I was most curious of, I couldn’t even play out of fear of unleashing some kind of bad shit in our house. It all changed thanks to outside influence.
My cousins, which were older than me, did what a lot of teens do to earn quick cash: chores like mowing lawns and washing cars for family members. One time, they came over to wash my mom’s car,while mom and uncle left to go to the supermarket or some other place, and my sister and I stayed behind with the cousins. Mischief abounded whenever they were around as kids, and one thing they went for that day was the LP collection and the turntable. Needless to say, the colorful Destroyer cover quickly drew their attention. I was alarmed! “YOU CAN’T PLAY THAT!” I immediately yelled. And “can’t” being the favorite word for a teen to rebel against, they played it. LOUD. I was scared. Like, really, really scared. And yet, I was also really excited to finally be able to hear it: I fantasized about what kind of sounds would come out from that mysterious vinyl…
…and what came out was…weird, to my young ears.
It didn’t start with any music. In its place were background noises, etc. It sounded like I was watching TV, but I couldn’t see the picture. What the hell was this? Someone was working in a restaurant, hears a song on the radio, then leaves in a car. As the vehicle accelerates, it finally came out, blasting out of those speakers: a guitar riff that exploded into a full-blown Rock song.
I was enthralled. “Detroit Rock City” was blasting out of my family’s Pioneer sound system, all static and needle crackling. And to my young ears, it was glorious. It scared me, and I loved it. Every idea, every preconceived notion, every moment that was spent making me NOT want to hear this, every doubt I had about what I was hearing, faded away. As scared as I was, this was a sound, loud and flashy, that I loved instantly.
To my cousins, it was all games. Meanwhile, I had just started my affair with Music.
Post with 1 note
The one about the new project.
I’ve always been a procrastinator. Well, probably not always. I think that I started “leaving things for later” in my 20’s. Life always managed to give me one more thing to do when all I wanted was to sit back and relax.
As I entered my 35th year on Earth, however, I decided I might start to actually get my shit together and start doing some of those in my back catalog of stuff I’ve always said I would “when the time was right.” One of these was write down fond memories I have of Music in my life: capital-lettered Music, the one that comes and changes your life, the kind that shapes you, moves you and makes you better (or worse).
In between travelling to and from concerts, 1st time experiences with albums and songs, seeing friends make it and/or break it in the “music business”, playing for 5 or 100, heartbreaks and victories, Music has given me a reason to be here and is my constant companion navigating through this planet. Music has made me, an ordinary person, have an extraordinary life.
