Dan Nordquist writes on the internet.

I recently got to hang out with someone who was a dear friend of mine during high school. She lived in New York then, and I didn’t, so this was the first we’d ever met in person. Even though we hadn’t kept in close touch over the past 10-or-so years, it was still fantastic.

She (and, to a degree, her brother who was working for a record label) got me into so much music I wouldn’t have really experienced otherwise. We started from a common interest in They Might Be Giants (who had just put out their fourth album - sheesh), but she insisted I hear the stuff they’d done with Frank Black. They brought Brian Dewan on tour, so she sent me a mixtape including that stuff. I wasn’t familiar with Pixies? She rectified that. This wasn’t particularly obscure underground stuff, or closely guarded rarities, but to me, only just starting to get into what we called “Alternative”, it was mind-expanding.

I made a muxtape of the stuff I still really like from those tapes. Obviously, everything is 15 years old. If it’s the kind of thing you might want to spend 45 minutes with, I invite you to fromscarsdale.muxtape.com.

She told me she doesn’t really keep up with what’s going in music now (unthinkable to me, but she has her reasons), so I started sorting out what I’d really loved from the past 14 years - how I’d explain what I’d gotten into since high school with only 12 songs. That muxtape is up at superlady.muxtape.com. It seems a little arbitrary, even silly, but I think it’s an okay snapshot. I am sure there’s stuff you’ve heard there (particularly if you’ve been following the albums of the week here), but maybe some stuff you haven’t, and you absolutely haven’t heard all 12 songs in this particular order.

If I’d done an album this week, it’d have been the Chinese Democracy leaks from last week. They are sounding fantastic. There’s one song missing from the demos we’ve already heard, and the new songs aren’t quite as sonically dense as the tracks that have been done for a while, but it’s seeming an awful lot like Chinese Democracy will be an album of the week, maybe even in the next six months.

There’s no cover, so there’s no picture. I don’t know where you can get it, and you certainly can’t buy it. So no links. But seek it out if you have access to that kind of thing.

N.E.R.D. - Seeing Sounds

N.E.R.D. is the rock band version of the Neptunes production team, but if I have to tell you that, you probably don’t know who the Neptunes are, so this whole exercise is futile. Coming at it from another angle, super-summery pop-rock with all kinds of chords and hooks is what you’ll find on Seeing Sounds, their third release. Also, they’re really goofy. They lead off with the single “Everybody Nose (All the Girls Standing the Line For the Bathroom)”, which is fine, but I’m more enchanted with the peeping-tom story of “Window” and the simple melody of “Happy”.

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Various Artists - Judgment Night

Sorry if having the store closed last week caused you any great distress. I flatter myself to think you noticed. I was going to recommend a Steely Dan record or something but I’ve seen the light.

Judgment Night is the soundtrack to a pretty dreadful (I am told) 1993 film. It was groundbreaking, though, because they paired a pretty impressive rock roster (Pearl Jam, Sonic Youth, Faith No More, Helmet, Living Colour) with a real who’s who of rap at the moment (House of Pain, Cypress Hill, Sir Mix-A-Lot). If I were feeling really generous, I’d say that a ton of modern rap-rock (or at least the first decade of it) starts here, for better or worse.

cd, $1.38 | mp3s, $8.99
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Rocket From the Crypt - Hot Charity/Cut Carefully and Play Loud

Well, this makes two in a row that are maybe sort of hard to find. Hot Charity was released on vinyl alone in 1993. It fits between Circa:Now! and Scream, Dracula, Scream! in chronology and stylistically. The thing that I hear now (15 years later - yikes) is the intensity - these are close to live performances. All the lyrics are about you or the writer being in danger. Cut Carefully… was another hard-to-find vinyl-only release, but… you know those record sleeves with the hole in the middle, so you can read the sticker through the sleeve? Cut Carefully has the record in the sleeve, with a larger-than-the-hole sticker placed over the hole, so that the vinyl is actually attached to the sleeve until you cut it out. Carefully. This was 1999, so I got the files from Napster and never cut mine. And in 2002, both were remastered and re-released on this one CD, so you don’t have to go through that.

They constitute a best-of, really, because the tracks here are as good as any of their other output. I think it’s probably a decent place to start if you’re not a fan already, but you would know that better than I would.

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Dragonette - Galore

Well, this is awkward. One of my favorite records of the past six months isn’t available in America yet. You can import it on Amazon, where users have given it tags like “fake punk” and “no talent”. So! They’re a slick electro-pop band with a girl singer. Lyrics deal with being a slut and partying your face off, but Wikipedia calls the lyrics “smart and sardonic” so perhaps they’re criticizing actual party-loving sluts. Either way, you should understand that there are better choices for your preschooler’s playdate.

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XTC - Skylarking

You know what? I’m sorry. I am a bad power-pop fan. I know almost nothing about XTC. I was a big “modern rock” guy from 1991 on, maybe a bit past their prime. We even started a little joke last year, when I added an Artist Alert on my XM radio to tell me when XTC came on, whether it would be “Peter Pumpkinhead” or “The Mayor of Simpleton”, because, ha ha, those are the only two XTC songs, right? But They Might Be Giants have been trying to turn you on to XTC for 20 years - they wrote a song about musical taste, “XTC vs. Adam Ant”, appeared on an XTC tribute, and invited Andy Partridge to do one of the first Hello Recording Club EPs. This is considered their best album - I don’t know. It’s my first XTC record. It’s super-Beatley, I’ll tell you that. If you can only scrounge together 89 cents, I’m totally infatuated with “That’s Really Super, Supergirl”. It won’t let you down.

amazon | mp3s
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Black Francis - Svn Fngrs

I confess that it has been a while since a Frank Black - wait, Black Francis - release has been “satisfying”, but this comes close. The songs don’t meander quite as much as they did on “Bluefinger”, which is welcome. They flirt with a kind of maturity, almost, which generally means “inessential” and “forgettable”, but the melodies keep coming back to me at unexpected times. In particular, “Tale of the Lonesome Fetter”, which is almost meditatively slow, can’t be described as catchy at all, but for some reason I really want to put it on mix-tapes and play it on the guitar.

amazon | mp3s
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I’ve owned pzizz for a year and half now. I’m not a big user of pzizz - sometimes I’ll use it twice in a week to get to sleep, but then I’ll go months without thinking about it. In particular, middle-of-the-day “naps” are pretty rare. There was a time when I did sneak out to my car once or twice during work to see how that would go, but I don’t have a nap habit. Overall, I like it, but I’m a little concerned about some of the pseudo-science included in the product.

pzizz appealed to me because I have occasional fits of insomnia, and I’m also interested in taking sleep seriously. You can’t glean much about their product from their wikipedia page, but they’ve been enthusiastically endorsed by Merlin and Gina. The people who put pzizz together appear to share my enthusiasm for sleep, so I was happy to support their work.

It basically just generates audio files. They sell the modules that can generate either daytime “energy” naps or night-time “sleep” soundtracks for $30 each, but it’s $50 for both, and the authors don’t appear to want to branch out into new kinds of modules. The soundtracks, then, are mixes of music, effects, and a guy who talks gently. (We’ll get to the guy.) You don’t have a ton of options beyond how long the program is and the balance of background / guy. You can play the program immediately, export it to iTunes, or generate a file to be burned to CD. You’re supposed to listen to “energy” during the day (although I’m not sure if you’re supposed to actually sleep - there is an alarm at the end in case you do), or “sleep” as you fall asleep for the night.

The background noise is nice: pretty traditional relaxation stuff, with oceans, new-age synth melodies, and jungle noises. I’ve created soundtracks with no guy at all, and burned CDs for the kids. (They didn’t latch on to the idea.) The sound effects as the program goes on are less busy, and this is probably where the program uses brainwave entrainment - binaural beats, claimed by others to be useful in meditation, learning, boosting creativity, and relaxation. Others are skeptical. I imagine the effect is most pronounced if you’re using headphones with the primary audio source, but I’ve read elsewhere that the digital frequencies get all jumbled when the program is transferred to CD, so I’m sure the compression to MP3 ruins the magic, too. It is relaxing, and it’s nice that you can generate another mix when you get conditioned / bored with the one you burned.

My main issue might be the guy. I do find him relaxing: he says that things are really great, if they aren’t already, and reassures you that sleep is inevitable. That’s positive. But he also says things in kind of a stilted way, introducing pretty sensible observations with long-winded clauses that don’t necessarily put my mind at ease. Like, “it’s always a good idea to find a position for yourself that’s comfortable right now.” That’s a gentle, soothing way to say “get comfortable”, but it doesn’t make any sense. He also says things like “dreams are just dreams, they aren’t real…” which is, as far as I’m concerned, creepy.

Why does he go on like that? Because he’s trained in Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is another shadowy pseudo-scientific discovery, embraced by life coaches and self-helpers. (It’s about programming your brain with positive lanuguage patterns, but publicly available details about it get very sketchy / contradictory after that.) It’s possible, I suppose, that the people responsible for pzizz just thought NLP-tuned chat and encouragement would be pleasing in their product, but it’s certainly also a possibility that pzizz started its life as a method for delivering NLP-based self-help under the guise of taking more naps. It would be great if pzizz’s documentation or support site addressed any of this, but it doesn’t.

I don’t want to come across as a critic of pzizz. It’s a good product. I don’t want to say that binaural beats don’t encourage relaxation, sleep, or promote healthy brainwaves in the night, but I’m pretty skeptical about that. I’m very skeptical about NLP, and I’d love to know more about why pzizz is associated with it. And I worry that there’s not a discussion of these topics online, aside from the skeptical chat about the two separate features.

If you get a chance, marry your best friend. Totally worth it.