Does your taste in music isolate you?

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the few people who have been close enough to me to know what music i listen to, have told me the same basic thing- "you are an anachronism." IOW i belong to a different era.

Yes. And it's very mainstream. But old.

Nah, I'm pretty sure it's the Asperger's that does that.

I'll listen to mainstream music when it's good again. Until then, I'll be turning up Pink Floyd, RUSH, Dream Theater, and Nintendo game soundtracks.

Very much so. Do you know anyone who likes flute bands, mournful ballads, and Greek/Turkish/Eastern European folk music?

That is the majority of bands I listen to, believe it or not. Not so much Greek or Turkish, but definitely Eastern European.

Yes and no. I listen to all sorts of music, although I have a particular taste for prog rock and prog metal. I have a lot of widely recognized stuff in my collection-- stuff like Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Modest Mouse, all things my friends have expressed a lot of interest in as well. Then again, there are some other things I like, which I think are a bit out of their scope of musical taste for some reason. It could be the age of the music (B.B King, Johnny Cash, King Crimson), or the genre (I don't think my friends like heavy metal or rap very much, for example, so I haven't been very forthcoming with them about listening to Metallica and Beastie Boys), or it could just be that it's something no one else around me has ever even heard of. I hear Riverside is quite well-recognized in their native Poland, but, well... I'm not in Poland, I'm in Canada. My friends had never even heard of Porcupine Tree until I got them into it (though they're pretty much all thanking me for it now ).

I think the reason I don't feel as isolated is because I recognize that everyone has his or her quirks when it comes to musical taste. A few of my friends are really into stuff like Bon Iver, Beirut, Iron and Wine, and Sufjan Stevens-- I'm not, so much. Another one of my friends is a fantastic musician, and in addition to listening to her work, I've been shown a lot of the music that really inspires her, which is mostly from video games. I didn't grow up being as much of a gamer as she was, so it's an acquired taste for me. But we all share with each other, and we're not very judgmental with each other-- and sometimes, something one of them plays for me will be on my playlist afterward. That's how I found Bloc Party, and Battles, and the Flaming Lips. And sometimes, something I play for them will be on their playlists afterward, like Animal Collective or the Knife. There's something immensely rewarding about being so open about sharing music with each other.

I listen to a lot of old punk, ska and pop-punk. My tastes are usually too punk for mainstream fans and too mainstream for punk fans. I can’t help it… There’s just something about the rough simplicity of a Ramones song.

I also listen to a wide variety of old Jazz—everything from Benny Goodman to Louis Jordan to Peggy Lee to Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Ramsey Lewis.

…and I also love old country like Hank Williams and Bob Wills and cowboy ballads by Marty Robbins.
I don’t find many people to listen with…

what do you think of benny goodman [and his allstars] 1938 carnegie hall jazz concert? if you find a restored version [the noisy columbia/sony version sounds like crap] you will hear some high-class jazz swing with a rip-roaring drum show by the legendary gene krupa [who is the only drummer that buddy rich said was better than him].



i know how that goes... nobody likes my music either.

I'll listen to Обійми Дощу; a Ukrainian band with neofolk elements, every now and then.

[Youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2NdL3cvJGw[/Youtube]
Good stuff.

Have any sugestions?

You know, I'm sure the first time I heard that concert would have been on my dad's Columbia vinyl... Now, I listen to it on MP3 (most likely ripped from that same source!)

Amazon lists a remastered CD of that concert. Maybe I'll snag it.

There's definitely some legendary drumming on that recording. The drum pounding on Sing, Sing, Sing is an audio icon--even if most people don't know the source.

if it has the tune "if dreams come true" it is either the 1999 sony/columbia remaster [if it is noisy] or a european remaster of that 1999 sony.



be careful. find the AVID set somewhere, it is the best. avoid either sony/columbia version. or if you are not afraid of me, i would gladly mail you a copy of my lovingly restored copy.



in my restored version, the interesting thing to hear are the inner voices freed from all the noise and murk, especially in the great middle of "sing sing sing" featuring the subtle interplay between pianist jess stacy and drummer gene krupa, much of which was inaudible in either sony/columbia version, buried under a welter of obnoxiously opaque grotzl. my version preserves every bit of the drumkit's snap and metallic edge, including the sizzle of the snare drum and the sheen of the cymbals.

^^^ Thanks for the tip on that AVID boxed set! I just ordered it...

When it comes in, I'll have to break out my headphones and have a nice, long listen.

Most of the time I listen to mp3s with earbuds--sometimes I forget how much is lost, even with a good recording!

Technology is not always a friend to music.

PS

Did you restore your copy yourself?

In my late teens early twenties I was quite into heavy metal. Even back then it isolated me from the mainstream top 40 crowd. Just ask my sister...Then I joined the us army and got into punk big time. meeting west coasters really exposed me to some wild (imo) stuff

I still listen to all the "old" stuff including late 60's early 70's good ole rock n roll but also like some that is a bit off.

Really....how many 47 yr olds listen to Gorillaz

and RAP still sukz ! !! !

You say you are into punk. Are you into any '80s/'90's dream pop (Breathless, My Bloody Valentine, Kitchens of Distinction, Chameleons, Joy Division, Cocteau Twins) or hardcore punk from the same era that influenced the former genre? Not metal hardcore, but noisy/avant/protogrunge stuff.

from what i heard, the AVID makes the recording sound quite clean and clear. the technology needs to be wielded with a facile touch, otherwise the music can be butchered. there is a lot of butchered music out there now. i've heard some horrendous restoration jobs. i think a big part of the botched restorations is due to bad quality of the monitoring transducers the restoration techs are using in some cases. for me, i can't use anything lower quality than a pair of sennheiser hd580 precision headphones together with a special sennheiser headphone amp, the pair are well-matched and are suitably transparent for me to hear all the way into the recording, which allows me to hear the tiniest flaws.



yeah, i was too cheap to fork over the duckies for the AVID boxed set, so i took my 1999 sony/columbia remastered version and ripped it onto my puter restoration suite, then went to work on it. several thousand edits later, i have the condensed version that purists would hate but i would take to a desert island with me if that were the only CD i could take with me. in order to squeeze 120 minutes of concert onto an 80-minute CDR, i cut out nearly all the applause, using crossfades so as to not seem to have butchered the concert. i used a CEDAR DCX digital declicker module to remove the lions share of crackle and clicks, then used several software apps to remove the remaining rumble, hiss, groove roar, chuffing and swishing, etc. i used an inverse extraction app to monitor how much noise i was removing to make sure i didn't cut into the music, as a quality control measure. i left out the didactic section early in the first half of the concert [after "life goes to a party"] and also i cut out "loch lamond" and "honeysuckle rose" to fit in the songs i liked the best. i raised some ultra-quiet parts further above the noise floor and using dynamic EQ tamped down some harsh upper midranges on soloist martha tilton singing "bei mir, bist du schön." since the sony/columbia CD originally was sourced from a variety of original and copied-from-original discs, there is a lot of variability in the sound quality/noise level, this was the hardest thing to compensate for, and for this reason i had to use some treble heterodyning in order to make the inferior sourced parts sound uniform relative to the rest. the noise [mainly hiss] i left in [for the purposes of psychoacoustic dither, which made the low-level treble hysterisis less noticeable] is fairly level after all that, which i am proud of accomplishing. then finally, i decorrelated the channels to give it more of a realistic quasi-stereophonic spaciousness one would expect from a tony venue like carnegie hall. i hope this made sense.