Sunday, May 7, 2017

Precious Indeed

I'm in one of those strange periods when there's so little time to be really able to listen to music that whatever I listen to sounds very special indeed, even if I've heard it a thousand times before. This morning, for example, I was mixing marking some of my students' work for assessment with VDGG's Pawn Hearts and the old prog warhorse sounded impossibly beguiling and entirely fresh. In the contest between the two, I don't need to tell you which won.

There's a bonus track on the recording I've got of Pawn Hearts, not on the original, which sounds nothing like anything else Pete Hammill and his merry men got up at that stage in their careers. It's a sort of minimalist drone-like piece that I've often thought would sound good as the soundtrack to a dark play. Fittingly entitled Diminution, this morning it sounded utterly revelatory, an absolutely perfect, logical, necessary composition.

Strange what marking can do for your ears.

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