Tag Archives: music

Discovering New Music: Yello

I love discovering new music. Sometimes that music isn’t so much “new” as it is “new to me”.

If you’re in a certain age range, you know the group Yello, but you probably don’t realize it.

You’ve maybe never seen the video, but I’m betting you know the song. I encourage you to watch the video. It’s a delightful slice of the early MTV world where, as Todd in the Shadows put it, every music video was an experimental short film [apologies if I inadvertently paraphrased].

(By the way, you might want to check out Todd in the Shadows’ whole “One Hit Wonderland” series. Most of them are fun and interesting.)

But here’s the cool thing:

this

and this

and this

and this

and this

are all from the same band, with the same personnel.

They also have even more experimental stuff, both more ambient and more noise/techno in sound, and more pop-ish/melodic stuff in a couple different styles, but I couldn’t find shareable recordings.

So if you like some or all of the above, you might want to check out a bit more of their music.

 

Why Album Art?

Thought of the moment: I don’t think I’ve ever paid any real attention to album covers.

Even as a kid, when all we had was LPs, I don’t recall ever caring what was on them. And there are only a couple albums whose covers I can summon to mind right now (some from childhood, some more recent). I’ve done the “just listening to an album” thing–not doing anything else, just listening. But it never occurred to me to have a visual component to that activity.

I just sorta realized that the experience I’ve heard lots of other music fans describe–of examining the album cover/liner in detail while listening to a new album–is not something I’ve ever done. In fact, if I really want to listen, it’s in the dark. This is probably why the emphasis on “cover art” in iTunes (and elsewhere) has never been helpful for me. Even before I started buying music digitally, before album art went from a square foot to less than a quarter of that, I didn’t pay any attention to the covers of my albums.

For me, album art has always been a useful-but-secondary bit of information. It’s decoration, not a mnemonic. I keep my music in alphabetical order, and I find an album by scanning the titles, not by looking for a familiar image. (It doesn’t help that often the color firmly lodged in my mind as associated with an album is not the color that’s on the spine of the CD case–and sometimes not actually a significant color on the cover, either.)

Thinking more about this, I *do* pay attention to book covers and cover art. I can quickly pick books out on my shelves based just on their spines, and I can describe the covers of favorite books. In fact, I couldn’t find a book that I’d misplaced on my shelves for months, despite doing book-by-book visual searches of the shelves multiple times, because I was looking for the green of the cover and didn’t realize the spine was white. Somehow I simply skipped right over it, mentally, without ever reading its (very clear) title.

With CDs (and LPs, and cassettes) I read the title to find it, and then I might admire the artwork. With books I use some combo of reading the title and recognizing the art to locate a book. Odd.

Musical Feeling vs Feeling Music

Last night I attended a very interesting Argentine tango lesson. And I actually mean interesting, not “interesting” as a polite euphemism for “bad”. The instructor focused on bringing musicality to the dance, emphasizing the importance of dancing both rhythmicaly and stylistically in tune with the music–and therefore dancing every song (more or less) differently.

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