Imogen Heap - Hide and Seek

Some random reading in Last.fm on Frou Frou and I read (with great surprise) that FF is a duo and not the name of the singer, right. And then I saw this weird name ranked first in a list of ‘Similar Artists’. Imogen Heap, what a name, but no, didn’t ring a bell. But later when I played the Hide and Seek sample track and heard the first notes, bell ringing big time. (If you are an obsessed follower of So You Think You Can Dance, you definitely will remember this track and/or the goose bump-inducing dance choreographed to it with the dancers in heavy mascara and full black outfits. But I digress) and later still, when I did find a tubie and stared at her bony, strong face for five whole minutes, I jumped from my chair realizing she is Frou Frou. The visible half of FF, anyway, so much for my uncomprehending reading activity. And YES, she went solo and has good projects going. I’m trying to get the albums down now, more to come.



Clip of the SYTYCD dance. Low quality but you get the idea. ;-)

maintenance worker blogging

Well I'm done playing truant for now and here's a report: Blogger has come out of beta officially as of today, and besides the long needed tagging function they also dished out a (yet rudimentary) recent comments in sidebar function too! Boy, aren't they aiming to push the other service providers off the cliff! Hoho... don't mean to make this into a lengthy geek post though, just some excited whistles and I'll snap right back to normal. Anyways. a little deserted this place looks, I wonder how everyone's doing...musically or otherwise. ;-) The last two of fish sama on classical music was just...mind boggling otherworldly and awesome, more more! and I say let's revive it rejuvenate reincarnate rewhatever! (and zhu I want to revamp uku, major itch. =$ shall we?)

Last.fm – the social music revolution

Something I stumbled upon the other day and had since fallen head over heels for. Basically it is a comprehensive music service that allows you to sample clips, see what's recommended and popular with other listeners, and the best part is this small software that runs quietly in the background of the computer, collects information of the music you are listening to, send it to the last.fm server so that personal billboard/radio 'charts-like’ thingie are automatically built up, allowing you (and others) to see weekly/overall top listened artists/tracks, who on the network share similar tastes with you, and other tricks I am still continuing to discover. It currently supports wmp and winamp. My (highly rudimentary) chart now looks like this.

Verdict: Highly recommended for index-maniacs and general music fiends. Geek to Live!

Psalteria--the medieval ladies' band

i was playing a small computer game "styrateg", found the background music very very nice. so i checked the "credits" section of the game and browsed briefly online. so it's from a medieval ladies' band--Psalteria. the band's website is very comprehensive, in it i managed to download some sample music and lyrics for the songs. ppl who are interested, pls take a look at the site here: http://www.psalteria.cz/english/set-en.htm

here is the lyrics for the game song. altho i don't get the meaning...

Como poden

Como poden per sas culpas
os omes seer contreitos,
assi poden pela Virgen
depois seer saos feitos.

Ond' avo a un ome,
por pecados que fezera,
que foi tolleito dos nenbros
da door que ouvera,
e durou assi cinc' anos
que mover-se non podera,
assi avia os nenbros
todos do corpo maltreitos.

Como poden per sas culpas os omes seer contreitos...

Con esta enfermidade
atan grande que avia
prometeu que, se guarisse,
a Salas logo irya
e ha livra de cera
cad' ano ll' ofereria;
e atan toste foi sao,
que non ouv' y outros preitos.

Como poden per sas culpas os omes seer contreitos...

Daquest' a Santa Maria
deron graças e loores,
porque livra os doentes
de maes e de doores
e demais está rogando
senpre por nos pecadores;
e poren devemos todos
sempre seer seus sogeitos.

Como poden per sas culpas os omes seer contreitos...


another medieval band: http://www.krless.cz/cz/vstupte.htm
this website is purely unrecognisable due to its usage of a non-english language, but i still managed to download its sample music in its CD section. the song style is parallel to that of Psalteria's. very nice, with a dense medieval air.

Cross-posting again.

mozart's piano quartet in G is quite nice. especially the first movement. i've never been particularly affected by mozart's music, for the same reason why i thought bach was boring. both are geniuses, but there are simply "too many notes" (from movie amadeus). both feel like a kind of show-off, and neither one stirs my emotions very much. such music i would categorise into the group which cannot be appreciated until you take the score and read and enjoy all the craftiness in the structure, and is a delight to perform. but after all is music a craft or an art? the function of art... what's the form for if that art cannot stir?

but the quartet in G is actually quite angry in the first movement, (and therefore sounds like beethoven a little bit). mozart's music is too pretty, except for some of his later works. i somehow feel that this clever man wasn't alive long enough to live life proper. his life ended shortly after the hedonistic youth, which he spent crafting pretty pieces, before he could experience any of the major emotions that he potentially could have exprience had he grown to be 40, 50 or 60. minimal bitterness in his composition. no frustration. not much anguish. nothing too profound. if he'd been through what beethoven did, i'm sure he could have written something brilliant. and it's indeed a pity. nevertheless, he's a genius, and above all, an interesting person, in the world of two categories of people. ah, and all interesting people are hated, all the time.

bach, was simply too successful and rich.

Cross-posting

dawn upshaw singing yanov-yanovsky's lacrymosa is just right. just right. so hauntingly beautiful. my hair kept standing. i would really like to see the score, cos i'm sure there's special instruction for the way the voice slides. upshaw slides on purpose for most of her performances and gets away with it with her celebrity license (and i do like the way she slides.) this piece, however, is slightly different in that she has virtually no steps between any two notes. all is sliding. (ok, maybe except for 2 places.) it's creepy.

fyi, the classical italian bel canto does not allow sliding of voice from note to note, although the central feature of bel canto singing is legato, meaning joining the notes. in fact, legato singing without much sliding is a very difficult technique. i see this a very unnatural phenomenon as most cultures have sliding in their singing (the so called "vocal"-ness in singing and playing). you see, singing without sliding is like mimicing an instrument because most western instruments cannot slide (except for strings). while the western europeans spend that extra effort to sing like an instrument, other cultures try very hard to play like a singing voice. the sliding lines in many chinese, indian, middle eastern and east european instruments, show such tendencies. i used to be criticised very frequently for sliding into and out of my notes, which i then concluded to root in my exposure to chinese music, in which virtually every instrument, especially voice, slides in and out of almost everything. i like it better that way, it gives the music much more room for subtle manipulation. don't you agree. it's beautiful when you have all that pitches in between.

Michael Ondaatje Quotes

On writing and reading

- A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch..
- As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
- I don't have a plan for a story when I sit down to write. I would get quite bored carrying it out.
- I don't see novels ending with any real sense of closure.
- I read fiction, a little nonfiction, a little poetry - as various as possible.
- I see the poem or the novel ending with an open door.
- I tend not to know what the plot is or the story is or even the theme. Those things come later, for me.
- It doubles your perception, to write from the point of view of someone you're not.
- It's a discovery of a story when I write a book, a case of inching ahead on each page and discovering what's beyond in the darkness, beyond where you're writing.
- It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
- It's why you create characters: so you can argue with yourself.
- Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.
- Prose is much more public; I would like it to be as private, intimate, casual, not structured as poetry, not having an agenda.
- Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
- Right now, I have no idea what I will write or if I will write again.
- To write about someone like myself would be very limiting.
- Truth, at the wrong time, can be dangerous.
- When I was writing Billy the Kid, all I had was the question, How do I write this book? That's always the question.
- When you're writing, it's as if you're within a kind of closed world.
- You don't want to write your own opinion, you don't want to just represent yourself, but represent yourself through someone else.
- You want to suggest something new, but at the same time, resolve the drama of the action in the novel.
- You're getting everyone's point of view at the same time, which, for me, is the perfect state for a novel: a cubist state, the cubist novel.
- The last three books are much more a case of a moment of history, what happened almost by accident or coincidence, like being in the same elevator or lifeboat.

On Anil's Ghost

- Anil's Ghost is a pretty serious book, but you do want to have a break.
- Anil's Ghost may be a familiar style to earlier books I've written, but it feels new to me.
- I did not expect Anil's Ghost to go off into a twenty or thirty page section in the Grove of Ascetics when I began, but that seemed to be the way the book should go.
- One of the metaphors was the burial and stealing of Buddhist statues, how they get stolen and buried, unearthed and resold. Like human life, a metaphor for human life.
- That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

On The English Patient

- I do know that film is much more visceral, in terms of its effect on the reader.
- In the book the relationship with Katharine and Almasy is sort of only in the patient's mind.

On being a Sri Lankan born Canadian writer

- I grew up in a country that was very different - the germs of racism were there then, I just wasn't aware of it.
- I'm a Canadian citizen. But I always want to feel at home in Sri Lanka. I'm a member of both countries.
- It's an odd state to be in, blowing the whistle on your home country.

---------taken from here.