Tag: music

Review: Jean-Michel Jarre Celebrates 30th Anniversary of Oxygene with Tour

Jean-Michel Jarre – Royal Theatre Carré – March 25th, 2008

The moment I saw that tickets where going to be on sale for the 30th anniversary tour of Jean-Michel Jarre‘s Oxygene album, my heart skipped a beat! And the venue that he chose to play this piece of music surprised me even more. Royal Theatre Carré is not a very big venue, which is a big contrast with the enormous outdoor events that mister Jarre conceived in the past. So this was really too good to be true! A friend of mine even managed to get tickets for the third row as counted from the stage. (Kudos to Mosphat!)

The view we had on the stage was very impressive with a large amount of old, vintage synthesizers in front of us, centered around four performers in total. Mister Jarre of course stood in the center of the stage, completely surrounded with keyboards, synths and organs. Lots of the instruments were at least 30 years old or more. During the short introduction speech, Jean-Michel told the audience that all of these old instruments needed to be handled like “old ladies”. Each instrument needed to be tuned separately, which the performers did live in front of the audience. Can you believe this? Unforgettable!

Continue reading Review: Jean-Michel Jarre Celebrates 30th Anniversary of Oxygene with Tour

CD Review: Moongarden Opens the Gates to Great Music

Moongarden – The Gates of Omega (2001)

As you could have read in one of my previous journal entries I was having quite some trouble getting Moongarden‘s album “Round Midnight”. Because I got a gift coupon for my favorite local record store I decided to let them try and get an other album of this great band called “The Gates of Omega”.

This almost turned out to become a disaster! It took them more than two months to get a hold of a copy. But the good news is that they did succeed! And I am a happy camper now!  🙂

Continue reading CD Review: Moongarden Opens the Gates to Great Music

CD Review: The Sum of Too Much Flower Kings

The Flower Kings – The Sum of No Evil (2007)

Yep, this record is definitely Flower Kings! The fantastic guitar playing, the great keyboard sounds, the magnificent bass chops, it’s all there!

There is only one problem: it’s too much. Far too much! At least in my humble opinion. One epic song I can handle, but not four. It’s just too much prog, too bombastic, arranged too death with yet another section added and another section, and another. Structure is totally lost at some places. It’s just too much.

Continue reading CD Review: The Sum of Too Much Flower Kings

Best Order Confirmation Message Ever

Yesterday I ordered the CD “Round Midnight” from an Italian band called Moongarden. I can recommend this band to anyone who likes progressive rock in the style of bands like Marilion and Carptree.

I started looking for the album at the web stores I usually visit when I order albums on the Internet, but I had a hard time finding it. In the end I had to use Google to find a site that had the album in stock. The search led me to a site called CD Baby where I could finally place my order.

Today I received an e-mail from CD Baby to confirm that my order has been dispatched. While reading the message I almost fell from my chair with laughter! This is by far the most amusing order confirmation I have ever received in my life!

For your reading pleasure I have included the mail in this journal entry.

Enjoy!

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Saturday, July 28th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.”  We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh…

—
Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby
the little store with the best new independent music

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)

Review: Porcupine Tree Performs Latest Album and More

Porcupine Tree (support: Pure Reason Revolution) – Melkweg – June 28th, 2007

My first introduction to Porcupine Tree was the album “Stupid Dream”. I read a raving review about the album in a Dream Theater fan club magazine and got interested in the band. After listening to a couple of tracks in the record store I decided to give the album a try and bought it. I would never have thought that now, eight years later, I would be sitting here writing a review for one of their concerts.

I saw Porcupine Tree earlier once, also in Amsterdam in Paradiso, and they played perfectly that evening. The DVD “Arriving Somewhere…” is a nice memory of this tour for me. You can imagine I was really looking forward to this concert.

And what a hell of a concert it was! What a terrific show! The band played absolutely great and the sound was fantastic! It was pretty loud, but it never got annoying (at least where I was standing in the venue).

Continue reading Review: Porcupine Tree Performs Latest Album and More

Review: Dream Theater Celebrates 15 Years Images & Words

Dream Theater (support: Riverside) – Museumsmeile – June 16th, 2007

Finally I have recuperated from my trip to Bonn, which is almost a 4 hour drive from the place where I live. Yesterday a friend of mine and myself had the privilege to see a very special Dream Theater live show. When we took off on Saturday morning to Bonn we did not have the slightest idea what would happen during that show. I can tell you I was flabbergasted and extremely happy that I was there to experience it!

But what am I talking about here? I think the people that were there and the biggest Dream Theater fans know what I am talking about. To celebrate the fact that “Images & Words” was released 15 years ago, the band played the whole album from start to finish! This was so extremely cool!!!

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Coincidence or the Law of Attraction at Work?

More than a week ago I got a message on my cellphone from a friend of mine: “Guess what’s in my CD player right now?!”

This could mean one of two things:
1) He bought the latest Rush album “Snakes and Ladders”
2) He bought the latest Dream Theater album “Systematic Chaos”

I called him back to find out which one was true. It turned out to be the second option. He was pretty enthusiastic about the new album. I did not know that the new Dream Theater was already for sale in Holland, so after work I drove to the nearest record store and picked up a copy of the special edition.

The new record is pretty good! I have played it a couple of times now and it is still growing on me. When I listened to it the first time, tracks 1 to 4 stuck immediately! Of course I heard their free single “Constant Motion” already and saw the video of “The Dark Eternal Night” already on YouTube, so that may have helped here. The second half of the album took more time to get into, but it’s getting better and better with each spin.

Continue reading Coincidence or the Law of Attraction at Work?

Review: Spock’s Beard Records DVD at the Boerderij in Holland

iO Pages Festival (with Spock’s Beard & Steve Thorne) – Boerderij – May 25th, 2007

This was the fourth time I saw Spock’s Beard live and the first time I saw them at the Boerderij in Zoetermeer. I was looking forward to this concert with mixed feelings. Last year I bought the Beard’s latest album and I did not like it as much as the previous two (Feel Euphoria and Octane). And then there was this guy called Steve Thorne which I did not know what to expect from.

Before the show started we were told by the organizer of the festival that a DVD would be recorded of this Spock’s Beard concert. Wow! This was really good news! That will be the fourth DVD on which I am present in the audience! The other three are “Symphonic Live” by Yes, “Live in Amsterdam” by Toto and “Instant DeLIVEry” by The Flower Kings. Nice! 🙂

Continue reading Review: Spock’s Beard Records DVD at the Boerderij in Holland

Steem Found It’s Way to MySpace

As some of you might know I am not only listening to lots of music most of the day but also playing in a band called Steem. And as you can guess from the subject of this post we finally have a site on MySpace!

You can check it out here:
www.myspace.com/steemband

I have just finished uploading some pictures and demo songs to get the page up and running. It looks very basic at the moment, but I’m planning to add more content very soon.

Since MySpace is pretty new to me, I’m open to suggestions on beautifying and customizing the page. If people have hints, tips or links to pages with good tutorials on editing a MySpace profile and using MySpace’s CSS dialect, feel free to PM me or leave a comment here.

And now it’s time to make some friends!
Come on with those invites!  🙂

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)

Review: Jon Anderson Goes Interactive During Workshop

Jon Anderson – 013 – March 24th, 2007

A friend of mine brought to my attention that Jon Anderson was giving a workhop on the 24th of March in 013, Tilburg. There was only one slight problem: he told me this on the evening of the 23rd, and I had to rehearse with my band that evening so I could not arrange anything or call any friends to go. I didn’t even know if there were any tickets left for this workshop and I was very anxious to be a part of it!

The next day I called a couple of friends but they all had made other plans for the evening. The same counted for me actually, but I was willing to change my plans for this very special concert/workshop.  🙂

I called the venue to ask if there were any tickets left. Luckily there were, so I decided to take my car and a couple of CD’s and drive to Tilburg, which is a two hour drive from where I live. I played Olias of Sunhillow to get in the mood and after that I played the debut album from Pure Reason Revolution, which I can recommend to any progressive rock fan!

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Shuffled Conspiracy Part 2

So I am not the only one who came up with this subject! I found an article by David Braue on the Australian version of  CNET.com in which he describes an experiment he did with iTunes. You can find the article here:

iTunes: Just how random is random?

The first four conclusions from his experiment were:

  • 20 playlists (10 of 25 songs, and 10 of 40 songs) were created from a pool of 100 iTunes Music Store sourced songs, and 20 additional playlists when the pool was expanded to 200 songs using CD-ripped songs. This provided a total of 1300 slots to be filled at random.
  • On average, one would expect each song to appear on 6.5 playlists.
  • Popular, top-50 singles were rotated onto our playlists far more frequently than would be expected. Some artists, having just one song in the iTunes Library, were played more often than the entire 5-song collections of other artists.
  • Artists and singles purchased through iTunes were played more frequently than those that were not.

So how about that one?

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)

Finally 10,000 Tracks!

What to play when you reach the 10,000 mark? Why not play the track that you have played the most since you started scrobbling? That’s what I decided to do.

At the beginning of the evening I only had 12 tracks to go before I would reach the 10,000 tracks milestone. While I am typing this, the 10,000th track is playing:

The Flower Kings – Minor Giant Steps
[Preview/Play on GrooveShark] [Play with Spotify]

This song is the first track on the second disc from the double album “Paradox Hotel”. A magnificent progressive/symphonic rock album and in my opinion the best album that mastermind Roine Stolt and his partners in crime have recorded with The Flower Kings.

For the other 11 tracks I had Paul Simon‘s latest album in mind, which is called “Surprise”. I really, truly love this album. Paul Simon collaborated on this album with Brian Eno. Eno created the sonic landscapes that accompany the songs and co-wrote a couple of tracks. Simon/Eno is a combination made in heaven and I hope they will continue to collaborate on future albums.

Now what’s next on my playlist?

Let’s do the shuffle again…!

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)

Shuffled Conspiracy?

So I like to experiment. On a software level, that is. I have tried all kinds of media players on my computer for example. The regular ones, like Windows Media Player and Winamp. But also the less common ones like VLC Player, Foobar, Quintessential Player and MediaMonkey.

For audio files I am using MediaMonkey most of the time now. MediaMonkey excels in the library and categorising department. I think it is better and more user friendly than Windows Media Player, and especially better than WMP 10, which I really hate. I only use WMP for playing videos because it is fast and does what it should do: play a video when I want to, and that’s it.

Back to audio files now. I use Quintessential Player as an alternate audio player. I use it mainly to avoid scrobbling audio tracks to Last.fm if I don’t want that specific song (or songs) to be added to my profile. When I am rehearsing songs for my band for example, I don’t want to the songs that I play over and over again to be added to my profile. Hence the use of Quintessential Player (or QCD Player).

Continue reading Shuffled Conspiracy?

Review: Geweldige performance van Ilse DeLange

Ilse DeLange – Patronaat – 30 november 2006

Het is alweer bijna een maand geleden dat ik Ilse DeLange in levende lijve heb mogen aanschouwen in het Patronaat in Haarlem. Ik was al een tijdje van plan om een recensie te schrijven over dit concert maar het kwam er steeds maar niet van. Hoog tijd dat hier eens verandering in komt!

Het Patronaat in Haarlem is een prachtig zaaltje om artiesten als Ilse DeLange te bekijken en beluisteren. Naar schatting passen er zo’n 600 man in, wat het niet zo massaal en groot maakt als bijvoorbeeld een Ahoy’ of een Heineken Music Hall. Hierdoor heb je veel beter contact met de artiesten op het podium. Andere vergelijkbare zalen waar ik graag naar toe ga zijn bijvoorbeeld de Boerderij in Zoetermeer, of De Kade in Zaandam.

Voordat Ilse op het podium verscheen, mochten we eerst een goed half uur genieten van het voorprogramma: The Junes. En als ik zeg genieten, dan bedoel ik ook genieten! Wat ik heb begrepen is dat deze mannen normaal gesproken met z’n vijven optreden, maar voor deze gelegenheid pakten de heren het akoestisch aan met z’n drietjes. Ondanks deze setting bleef de muziek recht overeind staan. De muziek was voor mijn gevoel een kruising tussen Keane, Radiohead en Venice. Melodisch heel sterk en prachtig gespeeld, met name door de gitarist die ook de zang voor zijn rekening nam. Wanneer volgend jaar het debuutalbum van The Junes uitkomt, zal ik deze zeker eens gaan beluisteren.

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I Scrobble, Therefor I Am

For a couple of years now I have been the happy owner of an iRiver H320 digital audio player with 20gb hard disk on board. This device has a couple of advantages compared to an iPod IMHO, like longer battery life, no iTunes needed for synchronizing music files and better sound quality.

One thing that is possible with an iPod though that I could not do with my iRiver is scrobbling songs, either by using iSproggler (for Windows) or iScrobbler (for Mac). At least, that’s what I thought!

A while ago I read about Rockbox. This is an open source replacement firmware for MP3 players which is also compatible with the iRiver H3xx series. When I was browsing through the feature list (which is quite impressive by the way!), I found out that Rockbox also supports Last.fm. This is something I have always loved to have on my MP3 player. And because Rockbox supports gapless playback too, I decided to give it a try and install it on my H320.

And I have to say I am impressed by Rockbox! I have played with it for a couple of hours while reading the online manual and I’m still discovering new features each time I boot up my H320. Gapless playback works like a charm and I have had no problems with scrobbling tracks. Rockbox keeps track of the songs you listen to in a logfile that’s maintained in the root of the hard drive. You can upload the songs in a couple of ways. I prefer using the LogScrobbler Windows Client by kernelsanders.

So finally I can enjoy my favorite music anywhere and keep track of the songs I’ve played for Last.fm at the same time!

(Originally posted on my Last.fm journal)