Circadian Shift

October. It's freaking October already.

The start of the month meant another 40 MP3 frenzy from eMusic. My picks this month were:

• The Pleasure Principle by Gary Numan -- scary to think that this album was released over 25 years ago, especially as I remember when the song "Cars" was a hit; after hearing so many current-day electro throwbacks, it was time to return to the real deal, and this still sounds great
• Long Distance by Ivy -- I first heard the track "The Edge of the Ocean" courtesy of a free download from Amazon.com; the rest of the album offers more of the same dreamy pop with breathy girl-vocals (including bonus French accent); there's also a rather charming cover of "Digging Your Scene" by The Blow Monkeys
• Tenor Madness by Sonny Rollins -- classic bebop; back when I went through my "building my jazz CD collection" phase, there were a number of discs that I'd pick up in the music store, look at, and then put back down (too many choices!), and this was one of them (I did eventually buy two other Rollins discs -- the terrific Saxophone Colussus, and Sonny Side Up, recorded with Sonny Stitt and Dizzy Gillespie)
• Steve Reich - Drumming by So Percussion -- a new recording of Reich's 1971 work for "nine percussionists, two vocalists and piccolo"; probably the best way to fully appreciate the intricacies of it is to listen with headphones while lying down in a darkened room
• and, since those four albums brought me up to thirty-nine tracks, I chose for my last one the song "Streets of Your Town" by The Go-Betweens, for a dose of rainy-day late-80s nostalgia

I also wound up buying a couple songs from iTunes -- two oldies from Boz Scaggs, "Lowdown" and "Lido Shuffle" (both from his album Silk Degrees). Both were 70's era MOR tunes that hovered around the periphery of my consciousness back in the day; then, a couple weeks ago, "Lowdown" was playing somewhere when I was shopping and it just smacked me in the head. It was just a matter of time before I gave in and bought it.

In other happenings from the last seven days, excavation work continues at The Hovel, whilst the bane of my existence this week has been the pile-of-crap-masquerading-as-software known as Microsoft PowerPoint. At one juncture, I was about ready to fly down to Redmond, find the idiot responsible for PowerPoint's completely useless and unreliable formatting functionality, and beat them about the head severely with a wrench. Argh.