Sunday, August 30, 2009

My New Calling




I make fliers...

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

I like music. A lot.

My roommate Scott and I were discussing just how much music I have and how fast I'm getting it. I currently have 25085 items (songs) which would take 99.2 days to listen to and takes up 132.30 Gigabytes of space on my hard-drive. We compared those numbers with the ones I posted on May 13, and then did some generalizations. We figured that I'd been adding an average of 70 songs everyday for the past 100 days. This also means that in the past 100 days I've added 50 days worth of music. That means that I'd have to have music running for 12 hours out of the day with no repeats in order to keep up. But my favorite way to look at it is that I have added as much music in the past 100 days as I have in the past four years...

That's actually kind of disgusting.

Anyhow, that brings me to the real point of this post. I feel that music is like a good book, or an inspirational movie. It can be a powerful emotional force in life and when you are lucky enough to stumble across something worthwhile, it deserves to be shared. There's no point in having all of this music if I can't make other people's lives better.

So, in that vein I would like to introduce you to Sigur Ros (and if I knew how to make letters have accents, the 'o' would have a fun little line above it). I have been listening to them for about three years now, and I love them. They are an Icelandic band and they are national heroes to the tiny island. The music is mostly of an ethereal nature, which is created through some interesting instrumental techniques (such as using a cello bow on an electric guitar, or singing into the guitar's pickups rather than the microphone).

I had seen their videos and I knew they were inspiring, but I revisited them tonight and I remembered just how great they can be. I know that watching three videos can take some time but I really hope that you take my word for it and watch them all. So here goes.

-Von- This re-release is off of one of their newer albums that was accompanied by a Dvd (although a different version of the song had been released on an earlier album). The band was directly involved in the making of a documentary, called Heima, that focused on the hidden beauties of Iceland. It is an absolutely gorgeous film. Here is a great song from the Dvd.



-Glosoli (again those 'o's would totally have accents over them)-This video makes me cry about half the time that I watch it. I love it because there is an amazing build at the end of the song and the cinematography matches perfectly. There is a lot of discussion as to the exact theme of the video, I think you should work on developing your own theory.

(Okay, youtube disabled embedding on this one, so you'll have to click here, entirely worth the click though. And make sure to click 'HD'.)

-Svefn-g-englar- This video makes me cry... always... within the first minute. I love the quotes, I love the song, and I love the respect that is paid to the wonderful special needs theatre group who make the video. I think there is something absolutely angelic about the whole situation. I've tried to think why it makes me cry so much and I think it really has to do with the beauty and the perfection that is shown. It feels like heaven.




Alright. Thanks for humoring me. I may do this once or twice more. I know that this post was more sentimental than humorous, but maybe it brightened your day.

Ratatat | Lex