[music] BEULAH - Yoko Demo (Velocette)

These may really have been pre-album demos, but with one or two exceptions they're full-body acoustic versions of all the songs from Yoko. Which, conveniently, I liked just enough to suspect correctly I'd enjoy hearing it in another form.

Still, nodding my head and thinking "This is pretty good!" may be an exciting outcome when something unfamiliar comes over the speakers at a coffeeshop, but I aspire to more from my personal listening (particularly from Beulah, whose first two albums I loved). I'm keeping this around more in case my tastes shift this way than because I have concrete plans to play it again.

[music] HANS APPELQVIST - Att Mota Verkligheten (Hapna)

Beautiful, beautiful EP of ambient piano intermixed with 'found' conversational vocals in several languages. Each track has a different speaker (or pair of speakers) accompanied by Appelqvist's piano and other instruments. In places the people being taped are obviously performing, as when two Swedish kids break into a song in English; the label's website says the vocals are mostly people telling stories, but I sure wouldn't know.

What you can pick up without knowing Swedish, Chinese or German is the rhythm of speech, and how delicately the music follows along behind the speakers. If you've ever paused for a moment in your life to feel like the scene in front of you "feels just like a movie", and then reproached yourself for how backward that was, you need to hear this... I'm not sure I've run into any music that gave the structural considerations of soundtrack/ambient music (foreground/background stuff, the occasional use of voice -- I don't know, I don't like this kind of thing much generally) emotional weight.

[finder]

I had completely forgotten this, but found a reference to it in my old school papers: for a while in college, I set my UNIX prompt to

Password:

to make people feel more uncomfortable looking over my shoulder.