Welcome To The Working Week

In an effort to bring you at least two posts a week in this thing, a few words about how I spend the 9 to 5 these days, and what gets me through the day.

Currently, I’m spending some time as a research assistant for the Longitudinal Study of American Youth here at Michigan State University. Basically, I take thousands of pieces of data that were collected over seven or so years back in the late80s-early 90s about middle and high school students and run all sorts of tests and analyses on them to try and make them sound useful. While I really enjoy the subject area and the ability to work with such a large-scale data set, the job unavoidably consists of long hours spent sitting at a desk in the peak of summer, typing in code and processing numbers… it gets pretty mind numbing. Fortunately, I’ve got a trusty pair of earbuds and a relatively isolated cubicle, so I can spend my working hours to whatever soundtrack I choose.
The one thing that has above and beyond been a godsend to me in keeping good music flowing thus far has been Pandora, the net radio app from the Music Genome Project, which you need to check out if you’ve not yet heard of it. Rather than just allowing you to specify artists and rate music and then receive recommendations based off the preferences of other users, Pandora actually matches you to new music by measured dimensions of the music itself, from tonality to instrumentation to rhythms to influences and countless others. Oh, and did I mention its ad-free?

Independent of that, however, my obsession at this very moment (yes, I’m blogging in between syntax lines so I don’t forget what its like to write full sentences) is the work of Pittsburgh based music producer Gregg Gillis, better known to the world as Girl Talk. Gillis specializes in mashups, the art of taking two or more often disparate pieces of music and combining them. In this case, there’s emphasis on the “or more” end of that: for his 2006 album “Night Ripper,” Gillis used 150+ samples in the course of a 42-minute CD in which all the tracks just kind of flow into one giant collage of every type of popular music conceivable. As just a small sample of this insanity, check out “Hold Up” posted below, which starts with James Taylor, ends with a Weezer guitar solo, and contains 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” and the Pixies in between, along with eight or so other samples… it all sounds like too much to wrap your head around, but the result is surprisingly fluid.

Girl Talk- Hold Up