Seattle Has Finally Learned to Count in Spanish

Yes, I know, it's been over a week since I said I'd be putting up more pics from the Peacemakers' show, and I'm sure you've all just been dying waiting.  Here they are:



This in no way gives any sense of the sheer awesomeness of seeing the Peacemakers live.  If you get a chance, go do it.  Even if you think you'll hate it.  Even if you don't like that kind of music.  There's a certain quality to a Peacemakers show that transports you beyond all those preconceptions and makes you wonder how you could have ever possibly doubted.

It's been interesting watching the Seattle crowd evolve.  There's still a rather sad dearth of straw hats, alas - it seems Seattle folk just can't wrap their noggins around the idea that straw cowboy hats are practically a requirement for the True Peacemakers Fan.  But at least they can count in Spanish now.  The first show I went to up here, back in 2007, it was truly pathetic listening to these pale Northerners try to chant "Uno, dos, tres, quatro!" What a difference four years makes:



Now they're getting it!

Allow me to do my part to convince my fellow Seattleites that you should, indeed, wear a straw cowboy hat:

Mexico, May 2006

I wear a straw hat now.  Straw hats are cool.

And yes, that is the Peacemakers' logo tattooed to my shoulder.  If you wonder why, just go see one of the shows.  Then you'll understand.

For Roger: Disco Ball

The rapture happened, my darlings.  Well, for me.  Well, rapture in one sense, anyway.  After an early evening in with the new episode of Doctor Who (and what better evidence that this is, indeed, the Tribulation than the fact that we now have to wait two bloody weeks for the second part of this two-parter?), my friends and I headed out to the Peacemakers concert.

It.  Was.  Fantastic.

But it's the Peacemakers, so those of you who know what kind of show the Peacemakers put on already knew that.

I'll have plenty more pics and gushing a bit later, but I wanted to post Roger's disco ball first thing.  He loved that thing.  So here it is, in all its glory:

Disco Ball at Neumos

Roger and Nick with Disco Ball Overhead

Peacemakers con Disco Ball

And, amazingly, video in which both sight and sound are relatively clear:



Have I mentioned lately that I love my camera almost as much as I love the Peacemakers?

If there's a better way to spend the end of the world, I can't really think of it - unless, of course, it's one of their Mexico shows.  But we wouldn't have had a disco ball there, so perhaps this worked out for the best.

Fossil Freeway Redux

So last year, remember, one of the first adventures we engaged in was a little jaunt along the Fossil Freeway.  What?  You don't?  You don't recall every single word I've ever written?

Sigh.

Well, go read that post, then.  And then click this link and listen to the song "I Am A Paleobotanist,"  because yea, verily, it is teh awesome, and you all deserve a chance to get your science geek on with rock and roll.

And for extra science singing madness, if you haven't already, don't miss Christie Wilcox singing "Extinction's a Bitch."  Then immediately go follow her on Twitter, because if she hits 2,000 followers by May, we'll get more songs!

(Tip o' the shot glass to @Laelaps.)

(And yes, for those who were wondering, I don't expect you to recall every single word I've ever written.  It's just that the opportunity for melodrama was knocking, and I answered the door thinking it was Jehovah's Witnesses.  There I was, expecting entertainment... le sigh.)

How Music, Math, Architecture, and Goosebumps Combine

Right at this second, I'm sitting in silence.  It's merely because I'm waiting for my Blind Guardian CD to copy into the computer so I can play it, but it's tough going - while I know in mere minutes I shall have music, the quivery anticipation is combining with my natural abhorrence of silence to make me a little fidgety.

The CD-Rom drive clicks open.  I put the CD away.  I hit play.  And an orchestra takes me up and we're soaring.

There went my hair.  I feel my scalp prickle.  Later, when hearing a particularly poetic verse or an unusual juxtaposition of instruments, I might get chills, lose my breath, find my fingers faltering on the keyboard as sound transports me from this world into theirs.

Turns out you can tell a lot about a person's personality by gauging their reaction to music:

Los Angeles, CA (December 7, 2010) Most people feel chills and shivers in response to music that thrills them, but some people feel these chills often and others feel them hardly at all. People who are particularly open to new experiences are most likely to have chills in response to music, according to a study in the current Social Psychological and Personality Science (published by SAGE). Researchers Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silvia of University of North Carolina at Greensboro asked students about how often they felt chills down their spine, got goose bumps, or felt like their hair was standing on end while listening to music. They also measured their experience with music, and five main dimensions of personality: extraversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. Of all these dimensions, only openness to experience was related to feeling chills. People high in openness are creative, curious about many things, have active imaginations and like to play with ideas, and they much more frequently feel chills in response to music. 

Hee.  That's me.  That's Brian Romans, too, and I'd imagine it's a lot of you, my darlings.

But that little article's a mere warm-up to the other delight Brian found us.  Prepare to think of music in a way you may have never thought of it before - as math and architecture:

WHILE auditing a musical composition class in 1940s Paris, Iannis Xenakis showed his work to his instructor, the great composer Arthur Honegger. "This is not music," Honegger informed the young man, and he was right. It was architecture.

At the time, Xenakis was working in Le Corbusier's studio, calculating the load-bearing capacity of concrete for low-income housing. His interest in music, and his recognition that music and architecture were both manifestations of mathematics, impelled him to see the geometric figures on his drawing board in terms of sound - and to set them in musical notation.

[snip]

 Xenakis's breakthroughs in music and architecture were deeply intertwined. Asked by Le Corbusier to design a pavilion commissioned by the Dutch Philips Corporation for the 1958 World's Fair, Xenakis began by considering the internal acoustics, and realised that the optimal design would be based on hyperbolic paraboloids.

[snip]

The concept, first fully explored in his orchestral piece Metastasis, was to construct the composition on the musical equivalent of the Philips Pavilion cables: straight lines intersecting to define sweeping curves. In place of cables, Xenakis used glissandi, lines of rising pitch each assigned to a different instrument. In both the pavilion and the musical composition, he was "interested in the question of whether it was possible to get from one point to another without breaking the continuity", he later said.

Remarkable, no?  Most of us are vaguely aware of the math-music connection, but I doubt many people could look at architectural drawings and see literal rather than metaphorical music.  Though, if you've ever read a book called Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? you might be a bit more prepared.

Oh, and for those wondering if, oh, say, geology can also be made music, the answer is yes.  Yes, it can:

Mt. Etna is Singing

I love this kind of thing, love seeing disparate things brought together, seemingly unrelated entities merged into a seamless whole.  It makes the world fresh and fascinating.

It even gives me goosebumps, on occasion.

Blind Guardian: Sing Me Stories

This concert almost went the way of Epica: if I'd had a choice in the matter, I would've blown it off to write instead.  Thankfully, I have friends who kept me from making that mistake.  And so, on Monday night, we went to have stories sung to us.

Blind Guardian, Showbox at the Market, December 6th 2010

Blind Guardian, you see, is the metal equivalent of a bard.  They tell fantastic tales.  When I went to see them with Leaves' Eyes all those years ago in Phoenix, I'd been startled by the fact that Hansi Kursch didn't do the normal front-man thing and just babble platitudes to the crowd and introduce songs.  No, he wove everything into a tale we became part of.  Became something of a novel, that night did.  This night, it was a short story collection.

And I knew it would be a good night when Hansi gave his bandmates some gentle ribbing over their World of Warcraft obsessions, got the crowd roaring, and then turned aside to one of his mates and said, "I know how to motivate people" in an arch-comic tone that brought the house down.

Then they reminded me why they are one of my most favorite bands.

For a Friend

She'll know why.  The rest of you are invited to enjoy.

One (or Two) For the Road

Silver Fox has a post up about road songs:

So one day, I'm in the passenger seat of some other geo's truck, being driven from place to place through thick trees and over rutted and roily dirt roads somewhere in central Idaho, in search of particularly fascinating outcrops — any outcrops would do, given the number of trees and lack of visibility — and JS, the geo-type whose projects I was visiting, pulled two of his newly made road tapes out of the glove box. The tapes, filled with road songs, were meant to be played while on the road, any road. Brainstorming while we listened, all the while watching for outcrops, we came up with a million more road songs, and a rather loose definition.

A road song must contain a word pertaining to roads — road, highway, freeway, byway, street, interstate — or it can instead contain words pertaining to cars, trucks, semis, and railroads or railway cars. Travel songs without mentioning the roads or railroads or the vehicles don't count, and airplane or boat songs are generally out. Exceptions to these rules may exist, but I can't think of any.

And it occurs to me, there's a perfect road song she may never have heard:



See? It's even got the word "interstate" right there in the title.

And there's a second song that doesn't quite qualify as a road song, but it's about being a long way from home, and it's wonderful, and so it shall be included here:



Silver, my dear, if you enjoyed those, and wish for just a little bit more, let me know, and a CD shall be on its way to you directly.  The Peacemakers have plenty more where that came from.

Lyrics below the fold.

For My Intrepid Companion

He'll know what I mean.

Ecstatic

Thank you, FaceBook, for making sure I knew!  Tomorrow, when I go to work, the first thing I shall be doing is requesting the night of December 2nd off.

Woot!

Ready for September Now

Okay, not really.  I'd like a little more summer to play in.  But I just found out Kamelot's coming out with a new album on September 14th.

There's only one thing to say to that: SQUEE!!!

Ecstasy

I just downloaded some Kamelot bonus tracks I've never heard.  And now I'm sitting here with that numinous feeling one gets when in the presence of awe-inspiring art.  Epica remains my favorite band of all time (outside of the Peacemakers, but that should go without saying anyway).  However, Kamelot is also one of my favorite bands of all time.  The fact that they so often bring on my favorite musicians of all time as guests, such as Simone Simons and Shagrath, does not hurt a bit.  Now if they'd have Roger Clyne do a song with them, my life would be complete.

Funny thing is, just like with the Peacemakers, I didn't even like them much the first time round.  All I had was "Nights of Arabia" on some metal mix album, and it left me distinctly underwhelmed, just as "Banditos" did.  This is where sites like Project Playlist and friends like Justin are essential.  It's said you're never given a second chance to make a first impression, but that's just the literal interpretation.  When you really hear an outstanding band after having dismissed them, it's rather a lot like a first impression.  With Emperor, they grew on me.  With the Peacemakers and Kamelot, it was a bolt-from-the-blue turnaround.  Heard 'em once, not impressed.  Second time, I might as well have been riding the road to Damascus.  What was that flash of light and why is my arse on the ground?

So join me.  The sound quality ain't perfect - it's YouTube, after all - but the person who put this together got the transition between "Solitaire" and "Rule the World" nice and smooth.



One of the most powerful voices in power metal.  Z.O.M.G.

What I Have Learned by Watching Carmen

Don Jose is an absolute idiot.

*Addendum: It's pretty damned rude for an interviewer to keep interviewing a singer when the singer's bleeding all over the place.  At least get the poor guy a tissue....

Leaves

That's what I'm having to research just now.  Fucking leaves.  No shit.  And yes, it's bloody well important, or I wouldn't be doing it, now, would I?

And in honor of that....

I love you, Century Media. Thank you for not only posting the official video, but allowing us to embed. That means I get to introduce readers to the awesomeness of The Gathering. Now please tell the other record companies that this is an intelligent thing to do...

Oh, hell, while we're at it, here's another:

This is why, if a little girl's unfortunate enough to end up with me as a mother, she shall be named Eleanor.  

And while the sound quality's crap on this version, the intro's utterly enchanting, so click here if you want to have some science-geek with your progressive metal.

Another One For My Bulging Music List

I know the vast majority of you have probably already seen this, but for the handful of you who don't read Pharyngula (for shame!), allow me to commend the following to your attention:



The Ocean, as it turns out, is my kind o' band.  Death metal-ish with some symphonic elements, very solid musically (if, like me, you understand that death grunts are musical), and above all, inspired by Dawkins:

The songs, art and lyrics of this album tell the story of the rise of the heliocentric world view - the idea that the earth revolves around the sun, and that the sun is stationary and at the center of the universe. Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei were the first popular ambassadors of this idea, although ancient greek astronomers like Aristarchus had already posited this theory centuries before.

The journey starts with the creation of the firmament in Genesis 1:6-20 (Firmament) and ancient explanations of the movement of celestial bodies in 1 Enoch 72:2-5 (The 1st Commandment of the Luminaries). It continues with Copernicus and Galileo, the first propagators of heliocentrism who were not yet in conflict with the Church (Ptolemy Was Wrong) and Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake of the Spanish Inquisition for being a heretic (Catharsis of a Heretic). Arthur Rimbaud's's criticism of moral law in his essay Reasons Not to Believe in God and Nietzsche's rejection of fundamental Christian values has inspired the lyrics to Metaphysics of the Hangman. The album concludes with the greatest achievement in the history of modern science, Darwin's theory of evolution (The Origin of Species) and ideas inspired by evolution biologist and passionate atheist Richard Dawkins (The Origin of God, Epiphany).^[3]

Its companion album, Anthropocentric, challenges the views of creationists and other modern fundamentalists who believe that the earth is at the center of the universe.

So there's two more albums I must add to my already-overstuffed music list, which includes Haggard's Eppur Si Muove.  Now I can have a science-themed party complete with science-themed metal.  And if one more idiot tells me death and black metal is only a bunch of idiots in silly makeup screaming at the top of their lungs, I shall be very pleased to inform them that not only can my band beat up their band, but score higher on the SATs as well.

Shameful Admission

I've been listening to, and enjoying, a rap song.  No, not "Fuck You" by Pharoahe Monche - of course I love that song, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.  It's called "Fuck You."  What's not to love?

No, it's not "Fuck You" that makes me scuff my toes and look down at the ground and mumble shamefully "yeahI'vebeenlisteningtoiteverynightsowhat."  It's "Wolves" by Krumbsnatcha that does that to me.

Just thought you all should know in case you swing by the house and hear me shouting "And let the wolves out / let the wolves out / let the wolves out!" and wonder if you have the wrong house.  You don't.  It's mine.  And I'm still metal, damn it.

Also planned to blog a lot of pollyticks, but they've been forced to the backburner by the Muse, who is now looking at me with a meaningful flick of the whip, so I must go.

Had to be Done

Sorry for the dearth of political posting, my darlings.  My workplace decided I was desperately needed, nothing really caught my fancy, and I've been busy.  Got a scene coming up that involves serving an arrest warrant.  And when you are writing a scene about going to serve an arrest warrant, you must have the proper playlist.

These things take time.  Especially when you're searching for shit that reflects the truly fucked-up sense of humor displayed by truly great cops.

Woozle's Got Talent

You know what, my darlings?  I'm glad I posted that silly post about song covers, because this is how I'm starting my morning: Woozle on keyboards.  Woot!

For those of you considering not clicking the link, or maybe putting the link off for later, lemme give you some incentive.  It's a short song, so even if you're busy, it'll fit nicely into your day.  It's got an energetic drumline and Woozle on keyboards.  You know how Woozle's got a talent for thoroughly taking down really stupid people?  Let's just say that his keyboard work proves this is not his only talent.  The singer reminds me of Motorhead, and those of you who love Lemmy know why that is awesome.  And while it seems to be an anti-drug message, which rather goes against the whole sex-drugs-rock-n'-roll ethos, that's quite all right, because it made me want to finish my morning by buying a motorcycle and a leather jacket. 

If we'd had Woozle and his band playing at our anti-drug rallies, I daresay they would have been a lot more fun, not to mention cool.  Alas, all we got was one DARE officer checking the hallway for oncoming school authorities before leaning toward us all and saying, "Drugs are shit," which was the coolest thing that ever happened in our anti-drug activities.  Still pretty cool in a conservative, religious community where people thought "darn" was a little risque, but nowhere near as cool as a rock band.

Now, my darlings, if any of the rest of you have hidden talents you'd like to reveal, you may feel free to announce them in the comments.  Then I can brag about you.

Weird Covers

One of my latest music obsessions is a band called Sunterra, which does a cover of Falco's "Out of the Dark."  It's always interesting, if not always pleasant, to compare covers to the originals, especially when the cover's done by a band that you would never in a billion trillion years suspect of liking a particular type of music well enough to even imagine covering it.  For instance, Sunterra is one of those symphonic heavy metal bands with death grunts.  Falco is, well, not.  Really not.  80s electronica, actually.

So, upon discovering what kind of music Falco actually did (and no, I'd never heard of him before now), I decided that, in the interest of S&G, I'd give a listen to the original.  It's an interesting juxtaposition, and I shall now allow you to share my experience.  I'll understand if you run away screaming.





I think you can all guess which one's my favorite.

For those of you who don't speak German, translated lyrics are below the fold for them as wants 'em.  Thanks be to Aspidites87.

I Need My Chaos Lee

It's been far, far too long since Chaos Lee and I had a long, rambling talk about metal.  I know this because I just had to find out all on my onesie about happenings around some of the greatest metal bands out there.

I love Iced Earth, which Chaos introduced me to many years ago.  Especially love Matt Barlow, their lead, who's one of the best metal vocalists of all time as far as I'm concerned.  But I've been off on a symphonic metal tangent, so I haven't kept up as I should.

So tonight, I'm playing the "If you like..." game with Amazon.  Wanted more stuff along the lines of Visions of Atlantis.  Found a band called Pyramaze.  Nothing like Visions of Atlantis, but some of the most solid metal I've heard in years.  And hell, I'm in the mood.  So I start listening to them on Playlist.  Who should I hear singing a few songs in but... Matt Barlow.

WTF?

A trot through Wikipedia informs me that after September 11th, Matt quit metal to become a cop.  The former front man for Judas Priest, Tim Owen, was just then getting kicked out of Judas due to the Return of Rob Halford.  And off Tim goes to join Iced Earth whilst Matt joined the police force. 

I'd had no damned idea.  And I didn't think it'd been that long since Chaos and I had a chit-chat about All Things Metal.

But Matt's now back with Iced Earth (by way of Pyramaze) and Tim's off doing about six thousand different projects, and things have apparently been very interesting whilst I've dawdled on the symphonic side.

I need my Chaos Lee....  I feel so out of touch...  argh.

Music That Made Me Go, WTF?!

Stopped looking for music for the Duke.  The stuff he likes, I ain't in the mood for.  Turned to Kamelot radio on Last.fm, and found a heavy metal band doing covers of some of the least metal songs in the universe.  You've never heard "Don't Stop Believin'" until you've heard it done metal.  And "I Just Died In Your Arms." "Take On Me." Srlsly, WTF?!

Here's one that wasn't on Playlist, but I just had to track down on YouTube because I knew I wouldn't believe it til I heard it:



It's actually kinda awesome...

For those who like the original:



Searching for music to feed my Muse takes me to some bizarre places sometimes.