rift

i always listen to music on the way to work. for years (and sometimes i still) i have derided the people in our culture who are super-connected to their audio devices - first CD players, now iPods and iPhones and all the derivatives of those that are available - for willfully maligning the real world...for not wanting to engage, for shutting themselves off and immersing instead in yet another selfish pursuit in an already intensely (and psychopathically) selfish and individualistic society. i'm not a hypocrite (for once) for this. i didn't listen to music at all on walks for the first six months that i worked here. i took every possible different (but timely) route to work, noted all the details, took pictures and pretty much absorbed everything. but also in that six months i never once ran into anyone i knew on those walks, never ran into anyone who seemed interested in talking...and after so long even an interesting landscape becomes pretty unchanging.

so i started listening to music. i bought a walkman (my first and only ever, my little blue shoulder-bag buddy) and some rechargeable batteries (which are actually on their way into senility finally after three years of hardcore abuse). because of all the music i write, though 117 percent of listening to music is pleasure for me, a 36 or so percent is also studying, so this was actually in a way "work" time on my walk to and from work. i couldn't walk and read, i couldn't walk and plan my seminar responses or my lesson plan for composition at the same time. but i could study music but just listening while i walked. so that's what i did.

i listen to a lot of mixes, a lot of live music, a lot of internet radio a lot of streams of radio shows...but not a lot of albums. despite the fact that i have about 500 albums, i don't really listen to any of them much. the walkman forced me too. it can't connect to the internet, and even the best soundboard recording doesn't carry well over a walkman > shitty earbuds connection (too much treble, not enough volume; it can be listenable if you remix the show specifically for walkman/headphones, but it's never worth it...the same shows sound incredible on my 5.1 speakers at home or even on my laptop sometimes). so i was "stuck" with albums. it was good; it got me thinking about a lot of things i wouldn't be thinking of otherwise. it also built up something like 900 days' worth of album-listening. which means pretty much everything i put on nowadays i've heard at least once. the newness is gone. but, because my listening selection for any day is pretty much random, i'm still always a little surprised. like today when i pulled out phish's rift. occasionally this happens, grabbing a very seminal album (for me) at random. it's cool. rift is an album that i can listen to and honestly say that had i never heard it i would be a completely different type of music fan, musician, etc. it was a turning point for me. and so being at the point now where i have every note memorized but can still remember the significance of those notes the first time i heard them is sort of like dating someone for five years and then seeing that smile that still flashes you back to how fucking nervous you were the first time you saw it and realized how beautiful it was and the kinds of crazy shit it was going to likely cause you to do.

rift, along with round room is the phish album that most clearly communicates the broad spectrum of phish's ability as a group of musicians, as well as succeeding in putting a reasonable facsimile of their live sound in the studio. at times it's frenetic ("rift", "maze"), at times dreamy anastasio/marshall-style jazz ("fast enough for you"), wacky and multi-layered ("sparkle", "weigh"), sprawling ("horn", "it's ice"), and so on. there's a little of everything, and while some phish albums like picture of nectar and billy breathes might be more accessible at times, this is the first phish album (chronologically) that really shows all of the band's different faces. it's more a primer than an introduction. it's not meant to make your comfortable, it's meant to say "here's what to expect if you care to hear more". and it's great.

i've been listening to orchestral and classical music since i was about seven, and so "horn" was actually the first song that took hold of me from this album. it starts out normal-phish-y enough, but then leads into a reall sparse but effective, atmospheric trey solo that then turns into an instrumental that sounds more like a "piece of music" than a "jam". "rift" is also an easy sell. the first track off of the album, it's constantly soaring, has suitably mythological lyrics, and page's piano playing (the main reason i got into the band in the first place, actually) is top notch.

some of the stuff in the later parts of the album gets a little weird if you're not used to phish yet (like "all things reconsidered", their take on the npr show "all things considered"'s theme music), but again, it's representative of what to expect from this band. also, "mound", with its multi-voice chorus and out-of-context blues intro is, in my opinion, one of the most structurally interesting pieces of music the band has ever come up with.

anyway, it's a great album and changed the way i think about music. gigantically. i was already on the verge of losing respect for cookie-cutter music and artists that refuse to take chances before i heard this album back in 2002, and once i did, i threw out my radio (okay, not literally).

download "rift"

download "pueblo nuevo" from the buena vista social club soundtrack (because it's got a lot of awesome jazz piano in it and i'm nice)