The weekend in music:
I caught about half of one of those All Request Live shows that air on A&E, featuring Blondie. As you'd expect, the requests were predictable, amid caller after caller prefacing their request with fawning praise and stories about hearing a Blondie song with their cousins in 1981. Such over-the-top praise sounds embarrassing when watching the show, but you can't lay blame on the hardcore fans, they're allowed to gush. The hostess had no such excuse, she was dropping names such as CBGB's and asking about the NY punk scene. It had all the makings of a person reciting what they could remember from crib sheets written out for her an hour before the show.

The band sounded great, but Debbie Harry's voice (or perhaps her stamina) has significantly faded in the five years since the last record. It's not that she can't hit the notes anymore, it's that she always sounds out of breath and therefore can't belt out the songs with the sort of energy that she once did. Maybe it was an off-night (although I fear it wasn't), she's still beautiful and remains the coolest 58-year old woman in rock.

-------------------------------------------------------

While flipping through CD's at Sonic Boom today (that place is more addictive than crack), I thought, who am I kidding? I hold out these dreams of somehow making it to MUTEK, but I know it's not going to happen. Even if I had the time and/or the money, I don't think I'm in the state of mind to spend five days (unfortunately by myself for the second year in a row) in Montreal running around to gigs. I've seen very few gigs over the last year, in part due to geographical uprooting (six months spent away from home in one year can really mess up your regular extra-curricular habits), and partly due to being in an extended homebody phase where I prefer to be at home taking it easy and listening to music (which may or may not be partly due to the off-putting effects of the geographical issues). I rarely spin or stir shit up with my sampler either, it's a profound laziness which has taken over, as I prefer to take no active role in music making other than pressing play. I'm sure this is all temporary, perhaps a by-product of the effort put forth to dig myself of the jewel cases that entrap me when at home (and the digital ones on my hard drive).

I've said before that I have more music than I know what to do with, except that it's now become more of a permanent state of being rather than a temporary period of catch-up listening. This is what was going through my head at Sonic Boom -- even though everything is dirt cheap there, it does add up after a while, and maybe, I thought, if I wasn't so enamoured with being able to buy seven CD's for $45 every week then I'd have money lying around to go to MUTEK and not feel guilty about it. Wrong state of mind or not, if an anonymous benefactor were to set me up, "Great Expectations" style, I'd be in Montreal in a minute (barring an unexpected work deadline). If I don't go this year, and who knows where I'll be next year, then the final section of last year's MUTEK report will read like a eulogy, as if I'd given up on the festival and didn't want to tarnish the good memory of 2003, even though that is NOT the case, I do want to go back, I do. But it's the webcasts for me this year, which is a sorry facsmile, but the only possible one.

Finally getting to the point, I was in Sonic Boom (that crack den of hell) and thinking the usual about having too much music and not being able to hear it all, even if I listened to music 24 hours a day. Why just that day, I'd took a spin through some of the previous night's downloads, and kept winamp fully stocked while I killed time around the apartment, capping off the midafternoon with a rousing run through most of Spiritualized's second show at the Opera House last October. I've been on a kick lately, downloading gigs I've seen (stuff from Verve in 1995 to Kraftwerk in 2004), which of course means I'm rolling the dice because you can only hope that these gigs come off as well on tape, years after the fact, as they did when I heard them the first time. I'm happy to say that I've not ruined any memories yet, in particular, that Spiritualized gig was every bit as killer as I remembered it -- far better than the night before or any other live show I've heard from that tour (although I haven't heard the first Opera House show, but I don't really need to now, because I've confirmed the greatness of the second show was not due to familiarity or the smoky substances in the air that night).

Oh yeah, so I walked out the door of my apartment but the music didn't stop as I walked around and did some shopping while Arab Strap's "Monday at the Hug and Pint" played for me, which sufficed quite well until I eventually reached Sonic Boom and my music was no longer required because they had Flaming Lips "Fight Test e.p." on random play. A whole day, to that point, with nearly every action soundtracked to music. Overwhelmed, yet enthralled with music was I. Not enough hours in the day, only twenty-four ...

... hey, wait a minute. It would be an interesting little psychological experiment, to say the least. Music, twenty four hours a day. Sure, it's possible. Is it safe? People who work as reviewers or in shops hear a lot more music than I do, and they seem to live healthy lives.

It would have to be for a meaningful length of time, say one week. Then, it encompasses everything that is regularly scheduled in my life, both work and home, family and friends. It would disrupt a little bit of everything, and it would be impossible to hide from any of my regular contacts. Some rules are in order, of course.

1. Music, 24 hours a day. No breaks. Music plays all the time. If I go to the bathroom, the discman comes with. If I have a meeting, there's an earphone in one ear. If I go out to eat, it's the same. If I go out to a music store, a bar, or any other place where music plays continuously, that is of course acceptable.
2. Background music at work, during every hour at work. If the TV is on at home, music must also play in the background (I already do this frequently).
3. Music plays while sleeping, just load up a bunch of hours onto winamp and let it play. This is not as silly as it may sound. I often go to bed listening to music. Last week, for instance, I was woken up, terrified and confused, by awful scraping noises -- only to discover that it was a live Flying Saucer Attack recording. So we should not assume that no listening takes place while sleeping. Rather than queue enough music to put me to sleep, I must queue enough to last until the next morning.
4. For posterity and scientific purposes, everything must be logged. Regular webpage updates are another obvious requirement.

I may start this on Wednesday night (since I have a meeting that morning where I *really* can't get away with a bud in my ear), and the experiment would run from midnight on the 12th to midnight on the 19th.