IN THEORY
We listen widely, here at Mango Pudding Blues. We listen to Italian opera and reams of Bach and old Rolling Stones and Charlie Haden and Beethoven chamber works and Sex Pistols and Talk Talk and Serge Gainsbourg and Burmese chain-gang drummers and Diana Ross and the Supremes and Led Zepplin and so on. And we have arrived, after years of intense audio scrutiny, at a universal theory of musical recordings. It’s this; the best tracks on a musical recording tend to be, by and large, tracks two, seven and eleven.
That’s not to say that tracks two, seven and eleven are all good on every record. But think about it; most of the time the finest pieces on a recording land in some permutation of those three spots. No?
Monday, October 20, 2003
THE COMING WINTER
I was driving to work this morning, slicing through the wet leaves pressed into the streets like sheets. I was driving down the avenue blowing dervishes of leaf particles in my wake like a luxury auto ad. Blasting vast temporary tracks into the palette of red and orange maple leaves bleeding into the pavement in the grey early morning rain. I was driving through the crosstown traffic radio old soul ghost neighbourhood highway when I heard like a high clear bell a premonition about the coming winter. That the coming winter would be different somehow. I don’t know how. Maybe I won’t hate it so.
