About these music compilations and their design.
Over the years, in an attempt to share the joys of all the music that my exploratory obsessiveness has lead me to, I have put together compilations of music for my friends – first on cassette, later on CD – covering a wide range of themes and styles. These two-or-three-a-year projects also provided me with a fun, inspiring opportunity to use my graphic art skills to design the packaging, visual expressions to reflect the wonder of the music enclosed.
Click on covers to see details of each collection.
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A little more detailed history . . .
I was born with a love for music. Family legend has me figuring out at an early age how to do a movement – probably akin to an Elvis hip gyration – to move my crib across the floor – to get to the radio and turn it on.
My experience with creating my own has been limited and frustrating, to myself and to those who have heard it. But that didn’t stop me for a long time. I am currently going through the bucket of cassettes that contain my efforts and hope to rescue the least painful bits and put them on a CD… and by sharing lose or gain some more friends. So far I have shared some of my musical montage work – inspired by The Beatles “Revolution #9″ and Karlheinz Stochausen – see
“Beethoven’s Fifth Nightmare” for details, and listen to Hot Dog You Bet! .
It’s always so difficult when people ask me what kind of music I like to listen to. The list for me goes on and on and on…from Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan to Ennio Morricone to The Ramones to Greek music to Franz Schubert to Louis Armstrong to John Lennon to The O’Jays to Benjamin Britten to The Five Blind Boys to Miles Davis to The Rolling Stones to Frank Sinatra to Alan Hovhaness to Kraftwerk to Ben Webster to Gospel to Tom Waits to Dmitri Shostakovitch to Johnny Cash to Ani Difranco to Fado to Bee Gees to Anton Bruckner to The Tiger Lillies to all the things in between all of those and many off to various sides.
Over the years, in an attempt to share the joys of the music that my exploratory obsessiveness has lead me to, I have put together compilations of music for my friends – first on cassette, later on CD – covering a wide range of styles and theme. These have been enjoyed and anticipated by many folks, even travelling to circles where they were praised in the press. (These two or three projects a year have also given me a fun opportunity to use my graphic art skills to design packages for the CDs that reflect the wonder of the music enclosed.)
(I mourn the passing of the open music-sharing experiment called Napster and look forward to new ways for people to share the magic of human music-making, beyond the reach of the greedy bottom-line feeders – a way which respects the artists’ work and dinner plate while allowing the music to be heard beyond the myopic constraints of the radio/television and megastore driven marketplace. And 99 cents a song isn’t it…).