jducoeur

One of the best things about getting the huge new iPod for my birthday is that it gives me carte blanche to rip our whole huge CD collection. But me being me, I'm going through it all, listening to each disc as I go and rating all the tracks. I don't actually tend to listen to albums much on the iPod: instead, I have three main playlists titled "Good", "Better" and "Creme de la Creme", based on how each track is rated. I leave the thing on shuffle, and pick which playlist I want depending on whether I'd prefer more variety or higher quality.

My musical tastes have gradually shifted over the years -- I do a lot more electronica and metal than I once did, following my fondness for kicky and loud music. But having inventoried something like 500 discs so far, I find that the head-and-shoulders Best Album of All Time in my book is still Between the Breaks... Live! by Stan Rogers. I mean, I am *very* strict about the Creme de la Creme list, but this one album has four tracks for it (Barrett's Privateers, The Mary Ellen Carter, The White Collar Holler and Rolling Down to Old Maui). The best album by one of the greatest musicians ever, still more powerful and beautiful than just about anything else out there.

(Just to drive home how eclectic my musical tastes are, my number-two album is Aqualung -- not nearly as pretty, but perhaps the best channeling of raw anger I've ever heard in music.)

So turning this into a good Friday conversation: do you have a favorite? I mean, the One Best Album Ever?

Okay -- having now actually listened to it, I can say officially that, while I have no idea how authentic Teribus' debut album is, it definitely rocks. Fun, kicky pipe-and-drum work: nearly all of it is going straight into my Road Music mix...

Thanks to @nazgul for the pointer to Brave Combo, one of the most curious bands I've heard in some time. He describes them as "New Wave Polka", which is as good as any description -- they intentionally flit between a dozen different dance beats, often within the same song. Polka slides into salsa, then over to a bit of swing, and then something rather like klezmer. The linked page has a bunch of YouTube videos of their stuff, which aren't much to look at but give you an idea of their range.

Fun stuff -- I might pick up an album or two.

(Oh, and BTW: the "@foo" notation is Twitter style -- I'll be using it when referring to folks from that side of the blogosphere. I expect that I'll be crossing the lines from one to the other pretty freely, depending on the immediacy and depth of the message in question. Twitter is proving to be appropriate for spur-of-the-moment one-liners that look kind of trivial for LJ; LJ is appropriate when I have more to say than is reasonable for Twitter.)

After *years* of struggling with it, I've finally figured out how to make Django (the program I'm using to transcribe the lute tablature from Caroso) spit out music that actually sounds halfway decent. No one would mistake it for Renaissonics, but it's reasonably pretty, and better than much SCA dance music. This pleases me remarkably.

(And thanks to ladysprite for coming up with a project that made me try a little harder on this...)