How can it be wrong when it feels so right?

I haven't written anything about music in a while, but now that I'm working in an environment where I've got headphones on more often than not, I'm in the mood to take another swing at it.

The inspiration? A couple of tracks I discovered after reading a blurb about MSTRKRFT, a remix and dance-rock duo featuring half of the Death From Above 1979 braintrust. The songs are two in number. The first is from an upcoming LP, "The Looks", and is called Easy Love [5.2 MB]. Shades of Daft Punk, although more driving than meandering (and by that, I mean that it's a little faster). I'm not going to vouch for the song's lyrical artistry, but otherwise it is pretty happenin'.

The second is a remix [10.0 MB] of Metric's "Monster Hospital", a decent, if not terribly creative, song in its own right. I was lucky enough to find that link on a blog which I believe to be Finnish. Fans of hand-claps should also find this song to be to their liking.

Both songs seem to pose the same fundamental and existential question: Is it wrong to love the synth this much? My answer is an unequivocal "no". (Although this is coming from a guy who thinks Kylie Minogue's "I Believe In You" is one of the best dance-pop songs of all time). The synth is on the rise, whether it is just for a moment in Snoop's "Drop it Like It's Hot", or fully realized as in the above examples.

My love of synth runs a little deeper. A good psychiatrist would probably trace it back to the opening chords of Van Halen's "Jump", a song that signalled the emergence onto the ice of my then-beloved, now dearly-departed Winnipeg Jets.

My latest adventures in synth-land have just begun with the software simulated synthesizer ReBirth (hat tip to my brother), and it all seems a bit tedious, but we'll see what happens.

Edit: For the sake of history, here is the song [5.6 MB] that started it all, as far as MSTRKRFT is concerned. It is a remix of the Panthers' (who?) song "Thank Me With Your Hands".

Here we go again

I was recently involved in a meeting at work where I was having a hard time paying attention. But I was struck by how often the speaker (via conference call) was using the word "again", and not in its usual sense, but rather in order to emphasize a point, or in a way that conveyed no real meaning at all. So, diligent worker that I am, I kept a count of her "again"s, mostly in order to stay alert.

Here are my findings:
In approximately 2.75 hours, she used the word again at least 284 times (I imagine several times it escaped my notice). People, on average, speak about 125-150 words per minute so, being generous, she spoke about 22500 words. In other words, 1 in 79 words was "again".

That may not seem high, but by comparison, in his recent State of the Union address, a speech nearly 2 hours long, George W. Bush used the word "again" a mere 3 times, out of a total word count of 3900 (1 in 1300). It ranked well behind such words as "(Applause.)" (76), "America" (33), "terrorist" (19), "war" (12), and "destruction" (5).

In Charles Dickens' Hard Times, a novel of over 100,000 words, "again" comes up a mere 158 times (1 in 655).

So, to summarize, said person says "again" way too much.