RICHLAND WEEK 52.

White Rainbow: Zome. (STUDY)
Yes yes yes.  This shimmering drone and post-spacerock psyche-twinkel soundscape is gorgeous.  Of course anyone who knows Adam Forkner's past spacerock projects understands.  I've heard a few other White Rainbow disks that were just okay, though.  I saw him play live once, basically just creating delay loops, and it was transcendental.  There's some murmuring singing actually, which is very pretty, and subtle enough that I don't get distracted by it.
V M Bhatt: Raga Des (STUDY)
As with the week before, I took another raga that I heard has been proposed to have healing properties.  They probably all do.  I wish I could understand this stuff better, but it's very challenging to approach it, and reading about it would be difficult too. I wish I had some local friends who knew about this stuff, and I could sit and drink tea and listen all night.  I read that you're not supposed to listen to ragas for too long, nor listen to them at the wrong time of the day (this one is a night raga I think), but that might defeat the whole "record of the week" ritual...  Listening to things on repeat causes the melodies to seep in deep.  This has been happening especially lately because I have been fussing a lot with the winamp pluging (Pacemaker, I think) that I use to alter the speed and/or the pitch;  mid-week, after I know the music quite well, I speed it up slightly or slow it down a lot, all sorts of different nuances and variations.  I think that kind of novelty is the spice of our cognitive lives, always learning and relating, remembering.


Pearl Jam: Merkinball. (BIKE)
Pearl Jam: Pearl Jam. (BIKE)
As you must notice, there has been an excess of alternative revival/revisit for my bike music.  I normally don't like music with words these days, let alone the testosterone of rock, but there is something alluring about the aging of the generation that raised me to think differently about myself and the world.  I keep thinking that the leaders of the alternative movement could have been hippies, but things were too corporatized, and the 80s alienated everyone.  It's a shame that it took Eddie Vedder so long to finally make songs like these, and it's also sad to think that such grunge-punk is a thing of the past.  His singing is actually quite interesting, as he has learned to control his growl.  I like a lot of the extra instrumentation, and some of the songwriting and jamming is interesting.  But who am I kidding.  The guy is no Dalai Lama, the band is no Who or Beatles, or even Sonic Youth.  There are some eastern-ish drone elements in "The Long Road" which is very nice, I think to myself, they could have gone where JOMF went, and being good rock musicians, they would have done it well, the way Ween does weirdo music well, or even SY.  Why am I writing so much about this?  The album was good, but it was also "okay".
Robert Pollard: Robert Pollard is Off to Business. (BIKE)
Robert Pollard, now this is getting interesting.  The music is really nothing special.  But then the melodies get stuck in your head.  Like Vedder, the guy has been learning his own vocal inadequacies over the years, and harnessing them.  I want to say that the lyrics contain a lot of poetic elements, but then he can say some total drunk cock chauvinistic stuff that makes me want to turn it off.  For the most part, like Vedder at his best, these old aging Alterna-gurus are great at confessing loss.