Ross Palmer

I don’t want to limit myself to just listening to the familiar and comforting, but it’s increasingly tempting to at least stick to a couple of genres just to avoid being overwhelmed!

Especially when, as you say, the coverage of them can be off-puttingly breathless.

This articulates something I’ve been feeling for a while. It’s hard enough just keeping up with new music by favourite artists (or even musicians I know personally!) without finding time to listen to several new artists/releases a week and give them all a fair shake

Something I love about Smiley’s People - mainly talking the TV adaptation here - is how it moves the characters on from Tinker Tailor. Lacon seems less slimy, I think, while Smiley is harder edged, completely out of patience with everyone. See his reaction to basically everything Saul Enderby says.

It has a certain Birthday Party (the Nick Cave type) vibe

It’s listed as Der Blaue Diamant on the soundtrack album. All tracks credited to Patrick Gowers.

YouTube video by Yo Zushi Watertown Carps - "Christmas Bells"

Christmas might be over now ... But New Year's is around the corner. My Christmas song from this year ends with Auld Lang Syne so technically it's a New Year song too... Maybe youtu.be/wqEhaW0EGoY?...

What the hell, here's another one: songsfromsodeep.wordpress.com/2019/06/26/g...

In entirely separate news, here's a completely unrelated post. songsfromsodeep.wordpress.com/2023/02/23/a...

Watched the HBO Yacht Rock thing the other night. It was fun. Much of the discourse around it is so dumb though. Don't want to engage.

Afaik, all streaming services have a compression algorithm, so yeah, no point chasing loudness just to have the edge on the next band’s record. Raw Power-style loudness as an effect in itself is a different story - I’m sure folks still do that, and nowt wrong with that if that’s your aesthetic

I feel like the big difference (and I’m talking really indie/rock/roots/singer-songwriter stuff as it’s what I know best) is how drums sit beneath vocals, and how acoustic guitars sit in fixed audibility at all times. So i think that’s a fashion thing as much as anything else.

Not much you can do as a masterer if someone hands you a sausage, whatever peak value it’s limited to

I think most mastering engineers nowadays default to lower levels than were normal 10-15 years ago. A lot of the issue I have with modern records is more to do with the treatment of sound sources earlier in the process, tending to lead to quite a lot of dynamically flattened mixes, pre-mastering

songs from so deep Songs and sound. Guitars and stuff.

I play music with a bunch of folks and sometimes I write about it too. songsfromsodeep.wordpress.com

Time to unlurk I think. It’s nicer here than the other place.