It takes a very bold person to admit that Rave ‘Til Dawn, one of the first compilations of rave electronica in the 1990’s, is on his favorites list of the last twenty years. Or maybe just realistic. Kottke is just this person.

This is the worst album on the list but may be the most influential in terms of my future listening habits. For a kid who grew up in the country and went to college in a small Iowa city, hearing rave music for the first time was a complete revelation for me. I had no idea people were making music like this, so fast, so joyous, so unlike anything that anyone I knew would enjoy listening to. I loved it immediately and have been a huge fan of electronica ever since.

I remember a few years ago when I was digitizing all my music, selecting certain CD’s that I wouldn’t bother with. I dumped nearly all the post-RTD rave compilations (not sure there ever was a rave album by a single artist) either because it was simply too cheesy or of no redeeming music value whatsoever. But I couldn’t quite let go of Rave ‘Til Dawn — and it certainly fit both those criteria. Maybe I just accorded it some respect for where it led me.

Perhaps the best thing about this album is that I smile whenever I think of the looks that my too-cool fellow DJ’s at the college radio station would throw my way when I pulled it out of my bag. What, no navel-gazing?! How dare ye?!

Having watched the four songs performed by the reunited Pink Floyd at this weekend’s Live8 concert I’m now wishing I hadn’t. Oh, it was nice to see all four blokes on stage at once, sure, but there was no sense of real camaraderie or even musical cohesion. The reunion was supposed to demonstrate something along the lines of “if a rock ‘n’ roll band can work things out, can’t we end poverty?”

Waters seemed more like a devoted fan who has been pulled up on stage to sing a few numbers with the band. He was clearly way more into it, melodramatic even, than the other fellas. And, insult to injury, Gilmour has been singing the Waters lines live for so long that they sound a little odd coming from the original. (I know, I know, Waters performs Pink Floyd live too.)

Maybe Pink should have stayed back at the hotel.

The venerable German quartet Kraftwerk returned to Chicago tonight, the first time in seven years. No single group has influenced my listening tastes more than Kraftwerk and so seeing them live is always a treat.

I was struck by a few things tonight. Though Kraftwerk is praised for its groundbreaking style and influence on hip hop, industrial, and electronica, their style is often denounced (and parodied) as stiff, unfeeling, and immutable. It is true that the energy from the stage doesn’t come from band members doing Townsend windmills. But in fact if you consider Kraftwerk’s output not so much songs as themes (leitmotif seems the most apt word here, ja?) which are reworked and tweaked over the course of decades you see that they are in fact quite dynamic as artists. Consider that there are only a handful of themes in their ouevre — transportation, fame, energy, human-machine integration, computing — and that each has evolved either by incorporation into new songs (Tour de France into Aero Dynamik), by digitization and reworking (The Mix),or by considerable updating (Tour de France into Tour de France 2003). A good example is the way Radioactivity has evolved from a paean to Marie Curie to a polemic against nuclear energy.

The live show is extremely nostalgic. As pathbreaking as Kraftwerk is their live visuals contain long sections of period-specific artwork, vintage video, and command-line-aesthetic computer graphics. In fact, the band has never actually been about the future, though their subjects are often futuristic. Though they are all digital now, the aesthetic of Kraftwerk is still firmly rooted in sensibilities of the past. This is atypical in their musical genre. But then, they pretty much invented the genre, so they’re entitled.

I am embarrassed to admit that after 25 years of listening to Kraftwerk and attending three live shows I only tonight noted the irony that the Most Sampled Band in History actually invented the sample well before digital recording made it possible. Rather than pre-record sounds of everyday life Kratwerk usually imitates them. The clank of a train hitch, the crank of a bike wheel, the Dopplery overlap of horns on a highway — all these things are imitated using sounds and parameters from the synthesizers, rather than samplers. Call it mimetic synthesis, low-fi sampling. Call it royalty-free.

Continuing the recent themes of cover art and interesting uses of web services and open API’s (in the marginalia sidebar), here’s AmazType, a creative little app that creates a word-mosaic of your search term from the covers of books and music at Amazon that are related to the term. So, “Shakespeare” would return that word created from the covers of all the books containing his works.

I consider this a perfect use of technology.

Audioscrobbler continues to amaze me. Profiling your listening tastes and creating a personal stream from that profile is cool, sure, but you soon crave a visualization of the network of relationships that your taste is at the center of. Enter the TouchGraph app for Audioscrobbler. It is pretty basic, plotting relationship maps of artists based on the same algorithm that computes your musical “neighbors.” But you could easily see a more generic app that could take your Audioscrobbler XML feed and continually morph the map (like the Eternal Egypt screensaver, blogged yesterday, does). Clicking on any node might take you directly to a stream of that artist (or the iTunes store). Or maybe there’s an integration point with the attractive (and more info-dense) LivePlasma.

My current thought-exercise, though, is what to do with the links between the music nodes. How could you sonify them? What does the musical connection between, say, Johnny Cash and Cake sound like?

See also: In the gutter

Confession: I am an album art junkie. I can’t stand digital music that doesn’t have correct, decent-resolution album art embedded in it. (In graduate school one of my projects in multimedia design was a website for a future Museum of Album Cover Art. It was, as a recall, not exactly a masterpiece itself.) So, it would make sense that possibly the only real gripe I have with my beloved, unsupported, rapidly-becoming-an-antique Audiotron is that it has no capability for showing album art via its web interface nor does it have a video out to display album art on the TV set. Imagine my horror to learn that the iPod photo — which of course displays album art on its screen, hurray! — does not show said art via its TV out. I don’t want slideshows of my kids, damnit! I want to see the files that I so painstakingly embedded in my MP3 files! This seems so unlike Apple to me. Why black out the TV output when you are listening to music? (By the way, I am still waiting for the album art dongle thing.)

The news isn’t all bad, though. Recently TiVo released an SDK to developers for their Home Media Engine. (Yes, yes, too little too late, but let’s have fun while they implode, OK?) There are already a bunch of alpha-quality apps out there for it, and one of them will synch up with iTunes (on the Mac) and display the album art of whatever you are listening to on the TV screen. Clean, simple, nicely done.

The genre-puréeing duo Lemon Jelly has released its third album, a “retrospective” called ’64-’95. (The dates refer to the years from which the album’s samples were gathered.) I’ve only listened through a few times, but this is good stuff, different enough from the seminal Lost Horizons, similar enough to remind you why these guys don’t sound like anything you’ve ever heard. I bought the tracks online, but apparently there is a well-designed DVD version available too. Fantastic work.

Speaking of trailblazing duos, Autechre will release a new album called Untitled (don’t they already have an untitled album?) in April. They’ll tour globally too. Yum!

I gave my iPod shuffle a try today. Works just like you’d expect: tiny to the point that you forget it is there, no skipping, etc. I didn’t miss having a screen at all. Well, that’s not completely true. I found some new music and wanted to know what the heck I was listening to. Like others I had laughed at Apple’s chutzpah in promoting random play like it was some revolutionary feature. But now I wonder if it is as simple as that. Shuffle does become more important the more music you own since the chances of listening to a track you haven’t heard in a long time (or ever) is inversely proportional to the amount of music you have loaded onto your iPod. In other words, the more music you load the more likely you are to listen to the latest tracks or known favorites. Is it possible that Apple is playing up the shuffle and auto-fill features both as a marketing angle and to remind us how much fun re-discovering music is, further solidifying our love affair with their devices? Eh, probably not.

Maybe?

Certain genres of music seem to age less well than others. For better or worse, they seem more firmly tied to the time of their creation: they feel dated. To some degree electronic music suffers this way. Could be that the heavy reliance on technology — whose pace of change is rapid and discernible even to non-aficionados — is to blame. Could be that electronic music exhibits a higher percentage of amateurism because the barriers to entry are perhaps lower than other genres (got a turntable? a computer? just a tape recorder? you’re good to go). Or maybe it is because the bewildering matrix of sub-genres — trance, sythnpop, nu jazz, gabba, drill and bass, illbient, house, IDM, they grow like fractal screensavers — disallows a unified sound that can transcend the moment.

But I generalize. The best of any genre bubbles to the top, remains fresh, and rewards the listener who lets it age. In 1994 under the name Vapourspace, Mark Gage released the symphonic hour-long Themes from Vapourspace and its 35-minute little brother variation Gravitational Arch of 10. This LP and EP were by far the most important to me of the 1990’s, forking the road in my musical appreciation into a few different branches. Vapourspace showed that one could remain magnetically neutral and musically inventive sliding between the poles of four-on-the-floor club techno and bleep bloop experimental electronica.

Recently Gage posted an excerpt of Gravitational Arch of 10 from a 1994 soundcheck in Switzerland on his website. I was struck by how fresh it sounds, even now. Gage was ahead of his time in 1994, but not 11 years ahead of his time. He just got it right, moved beyond labels, and made a thing of beauty. The original albums are out of print, I believe, so look hard for ’em. This vintage is just maturing.