Glassy

I'm still finding that I'm listening to music in the car rather more than in other contexts. However, a long weekend looms as a result of Vesak Day falling on the coming Monday and, even though I have plenty of work to do, there should be a few opportunities to reacquaint myself with the finer points of my ears.

I'm just recharging the CD changer for the car which has been filled for the last two weeks with a pleasingly eclectic mix of stuff, including the Zappa I mentioned the other day. The CD that has had most impact on me out of the bunch, for the wrong reasons, has been Philip Glass's 'Heroes' Symphony. I can't make up my mind whether this is a genuinely very fine work or utterly banal muzak (with pretensions to hipness.) It doesn't help that it's played so beautifully - by The American Composers Orchestra - that it never sounds anything less than smoothly beguiling. But I don't want it to. The Bowie/Eno material from which it derives its themes is about as unsmooth as music gets - awkward, edgy, crackling with a kind of manic, uncontainable energy even at its most brooding. Glass turns it into something almost pointlessly beautiful.

Maybe he should have asked Fripp to lay some howling guitar lines across the top - essentially what Eno realised was necessary on the original material. As it stands the symphony is oddly decaffeinated. Oh, and it's not even remotely symphonic. Is that some sort of clever postmodern irony, or just lazy marketing?

Anyway, the original Heroes is going in the car and I'll be rocking out to it sometime tomorrow, if the missus lets me.