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The Raven Rides The Beam: a musical experiment
A few weeks ago, La-La Land Records released a definitive, long-overdue 3-CD edition of the soundtrack of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and you better believe I snapped a copy of that mother up – it’s my #2 favorite soundtrack of all time (next only to The Empire Strikes Back). Near the end of the third disc is a track isolating the sound of the blaster beam from the rest of the orchestra. Anytime in the first Trek movie you hear something that sounds like a cross between an electric guitar and the gates of hell opening, that’s the beam, baby. … Read more
I didn’t accumulate much of a stash at OVGE this year, because I was worried about spending too much time away from my table where I hoped to be getting rid of the stash I brought to sell. And the past couple of years have really been a bit of a “break even” proposition, because I sold stuff and then turned around and bought stuff. With me out of work, that just wasn’t in the cards this year. I did some horse trading and landed a copy of Super Mario Bros. Wii for Little E (he’s been begging for it since seeing his cousin’s copy of it), I got 
In case you couldn’t tell, this week’s theme is creative endeavours. Even the silly ones. (Sometimes those are the best ones.) As part of that, I’ve undertaken a much-needed revamp of the music page of my blog (as seen in the “music” tab above), which has been mostly broken since the whole indicent earlier this year when my hosting service was hacked into and stuff was deleted wholesale. I’ve now put fresh music files on the server and divided things up by “project”. I’ve done soundtrack projects, I’ve been in short-lived ad-hoc bands of sorts, and I’ve just experimented randomly on stuff. You can now hear bits and bobs from all of these “eras,” including the surprisingly oft-requested music from Phosphor Dot Fossils. I’ll try to get downloadables set up for all of this stuff soonish, since I know the idea of sitting around parked at the page and playing stuff from there is probably a bit behind the times.
dialogue required to understand it. I think it’s actually a cracking good little high-concept science fiction piece that got snuck in the back door in the packaging of a kids’ movie (nicely done, Pixar!). And the soundtrack by Thomas Newman is just this side of brilliant – with the long, dialogue-free stretches of the first half of the movie, Newman has the responsibility of cluing the audience in on the implications of what’s going on.
I really hope that it was the former, because the movie score (and its frequently budget-addled nephew, the television score) is an art form I love dearly, and I’d love to share my knowledge (and sheesh, my library) with him. He’s showing signs that he may just be “getting” music on the same gut-feeling level as his old man, who couldn’t sight-read sheet music to save his life or sing well enough for his supper. If this is an Area Of Interest, maybe some more intensive edumacation – more than what I’ve ever gotten – is something he’d be up for.
… has been made by me, and you can enjoy (or, perhaps more appropriately, endure) it 
