I’m on a roll with these, but I must warn you, this streak may end at any time. Anyway, todays question is from Hiro who asked it to Gabz, and discovered via Robb:

Hiro @hiro@social.lol

@gabz What’s the best music-related experience of your life so far?

2:40 PM • November 1, 2024 (UTC)

Despite attending only a hand-full of concerts in my life — live music is not really my jam — I’ve had some pretty wonderful music-related experiences in my life, both through listing to it or by performing it. Probably my most memorial experience was playing in the pit orchestra for our Year 10 production of Pippin. This was during the last few weeks before the show opened and we attended a music camp for a weekend to do full day rehearsals with the music director. The director had a reputation of being a bit of a hard man, prone to getting a bit angry, and not afraid to raise his voice. It was intimidating to me at the time, but in hindsight I can appreciate that he was trying to get the best from us. And with us being a group of teenage boys who were prone to loosing focus, I think we were deserving of his wrath.

One evening, we were rehearsing late, and the director was spending a lot of time going through some aspect of the music. I can’t remember what was being discussed but it was one of those times where everyone was tired, yet each knew what they were meant to be doing and was still happy to be working. You feel something special during those moments, when the group was doing their best, not out of coercion but because we were trying to “get the work done”.

Probably a very close second was discovering Mike Oldfield for the first time. This was probably when I was 11 or 12, and I wasn’t a bit music listener back then (I mean, we did have a home stereo but I wasn’t listening to a walkman or anything like that). Dad was working one night and I came up to him. He then started playing track 1 of Tubular Bells II, thinking that I would appreciate it. I was more intrigued at first, as it wasn’t the type of music I was use to at the time: long, instrumental pieces. Yet I found it to be decent, and something I could see myself liking the future¹. He then played track 7, and I was absolutely hooked after that.

Here’s my answer to another question asked by Annie for WebogPoMoAMA. This was previously answered by Keenan, Estebanxto, Kerri Ann, and Lou Plummer:

If you could instantly change one internal pattern/thing about yourself, what would it be?

My answer is that I wish I found it easier meeting new people. Not only am I quite introverted, I’m also really shy, and I find it extremely hard to introduce myself to new people in social situations. That is, if I ever find myself going to these social situations. I rarely do, and if I do attend, I usually stay quietly to the side, keeping with company that I know. It was at one time bad enough that I’d find excuses to avoid going out to see those I do know.

I’m trying to get better at this. For starters, I’m no longer staying away from friends, and I am trying to make the effort of going to more social events as they come. It’s still not great though, and I do struggle when being around a group of strangers. I guess the secret is just practice, and maybe trying to make a game of it: setting goals like saying hello to at least one new person every hour or so. I don’t think I’ll ever get over my shyness, but I’m hoping I can find away to at least manage it a little better than I have been.

I recently learnt that the version of Phaedra I’ve been listening to for the past 15 years had not only the wrong track order, but also the wrong track names. This is not entirely surprising, given how this version was… ah, acquired.

But after learning what the order and names should’ve been, I think I still prefer my version. And yes, that’s probably because I’m use to it, but if the official album were to have these names and this order, I think it would actually work really way. I may go so far as to say that if I got a copy of the official album, I’d probably change it to match the version I been listening to.

In case your curious, here’s how the tracks are named in my version:

I’m actually a little surprised that my version of Sequent ‘C’ is officially called Movements Of A Visionary and visa-versa. The name Movements Of A Visionary gives it a more mysterious feeling, which fits well with the small, soft, reverb-filled piece of music that it is. As for the track with has that name officially… well I just assumed the name Sequent ‘C’ made the most logical sense for a piece of music with a sequencer in the key of C. I don’t have an explanation for Phaedra or Semblance other than “long piece == long title,” but Phaedra just feels like a title that fits better for a piece of music that predominantly features a mellotron.

The tracks in the version I listen too are arrange in the following order:

The fact that Phaedra is the first track in the official version make sense, given that on vinyl it would’ve taken up an entire side, but I reckon starting the album with a small, soft piece — acting almost like a prelude — whets the appetite for the heavier stuff. This would be track two, which is 17 minutes long, and is quite dynamic in it’s contract across the piece. You then climb down from that into what I thought was the title track which — given that it appears as the third one in my version — gives the artists an opportunity to have a something simpler to act as the centrepiece of the album. Then you end with a relatively lively piece with a driving sequencer, that finishes with a decisive C(7) chord, making it clear that the album is now over.

So that’s how I’d name and arrange the tracks in this album. I don’t want to say that Tangerine Dream got it wrong but… they did get it pretty wrong. 😀