Alphabet Prime Music: Ada Sings Aie Aie Aie

My Alphabet Prime playlist has 200+ songs that at one point in time, and probably for a lot longer than that, were my favorite songs. It's a playlist of music I listened to over and over that I'm still happy to hear again.

I'm counting up the alphabet a few song titles at a time, adding occasional notes relevant to gaming and travel and stories where they exist. The alphabet prime label at the right will take you to other pieces of the count-up.

The three songs in this installment have two things in common: a) dudes singing; b) many other great songs surrounding them on their albums.

Ada, The National.

I love this album. I'm not sure whether I like it better than their other albums because it was the first album I heard from them, or because it's the best.

Against Pollution, The Mountain Goats.

Music, lyrics, a deadpan transition from the humdrum to lethal violence to the final days. The entire We Shall All Be Healed album feels like some sort of Unknown Armies or Over the Edge campaign, which, given subsequent roleplaying developments from the Mountain Goats, wouldn't be out of character.

Aie Aie Aie, Rachid Taha, Made in Medina

The friend who I was certain introduced me to Rachid Taha doesn't much like him and says she has never had a mixtape CD that included his songs. So my origin story of how I thought I first heard Rachid Taha while traveling with her in Hawaii is probably mistaken. Apparently many theater-goers first heard Taha on the soundtrack for Blackhawk Down, but in line with my ongoing cinematic illiteracy, I read the book and didn't see the movie. Made in Medina is a great album. I'm not sure it turns up later in the alphabet but I know Taha will.

Northumbria's Markland: Music for work, and exploring continents

I've become fond of the Cryo Chamber dark ambient label, available on Bandcamp. My favorite album in the genre, so far and by far, is Northumbria's Markland, the second of three albums focused on Norse journeys to North America. I could type awhile about its moody sweep and beautiful soundscapes, but I'm no music critic, and it turns out that the album was selected by Simon Heath, who runs the Cryochamber label, as one of the label's ten notable productions. He wrote about Markland quite well here, an interview that contains something like two hours of samples from the Cryo Chamber label.

The same interview reveals that Heath started composing music to accompany sessions of the KULT roleplaying game! Years later, after the Kickstarter for the second edition of KULT, Heath found out that it wasn't a one-way relationship: "Talking with the authors [of the new edition], I found that they would at times listen to Atrium Carceri while writing--the loop of inspiration had come full circle . . . . "

Of the ten albums Heath chose for the label showcase, there's a long Hastur piece that comes with a 20 page booklet and an alien visitation album that does not go well for humanity called Visitors, by Eximia, made of field recordings from Eastern Europe. That's another of the albums I listen to fairly often while working. Visitors isn't surprisingly uplifting, like Markland, but sometimes an alien invasion is the write-soundtrack.

Today, May 1st, Bandcamp is giving 100% of all proceeds to the artists! Check out bandcamp.com for a whirling presentation of the albums being sold right now. If you miss today, Bandcamp is still awesome as a way to listen for a long time and decide if you want to buy.

Alphabet Prime Music: A Familiar Thermal

A second batch of songs from my playlist of 224 nothing-but-favorites, this time with a Sesame Street style insistence upon the letter A. As usual, it was the music that got me, the videos are a delivery system.

A Familiar Taste
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross; The Social Network
My favorite song from an excellent dark soundtrack.

A Long December
Counting Crows; Recovering the Satellites
I had a friend named Rob tell me he hated this album because it was too whiny, despite the fact that he'd loved Counting Crows' first album. Therefore I listened to the album that Rob liked and found that it was insufferably whiny. We detected a pattern.

A Pillar of Salt
The Thermals; The Body, the Blood, the Machine
Logan Bonner introduced me to this band. We saw them in concert at least once, but the venue was so bad I'm not sure it counts. This is probably still my favorite of their albums, though More Parts Per Million is close.

A Sort of Homecoming
U2, Wide Awake in America (Live)
More than once, friends who were contentedly playing games or hanging out at my house while this playlist was rolling freaked out when U2 surfaced. I understand their hatred, but can't share it. Maybe they hate it because the song is good to sing in the shower. Or because they heard me singing it in the shower.

Alphabet Prime Music: Numbers

My Alphabet Prime playlist contains 224 (and counting) songs that at one point or another have been my favorite. Everything that comes up is worth hearing again. I can press repeat or just let it roll, knowing that I’ll like the next song just as much, though perhaps in an entirely different way.

I’m going to run the playlist in my blog, serialized a few songs at a time. If there’s a story that goes with a song, I’ll tell it.

I originally created the list working alphabetically by band, but it’s more interesting to move through alphabetically by song. I'm using links to videos, but in nearly all cases, my affection came from the music.  

45

The Saturday Knights; Mingle

Best to say nothing and let this song’s lyrics rumble for themselves! They’re a Seattle/Tacoma group and haven’t released anything recently. The entire Mingle album is great.

100 Years

Vagabon; Infinite Worlds

So new to me I haven't gotten around to checking out her second album. 

6 A.M. Jullandar Shere

Cornershop, Woman's Gotta Have It

The prototype of a song I listen to on endless repeat as I work or do most anything else. In fact I listened to it, and to its slightly longer variation, 7:20 A.M. Jullander Shere, for months while working on QA for King of Dragon Pass, and for weeks before that while designing a flawed-but-interesting Magic: the Gathering miniatures game. That was several years before getting hired at WotC. My design used the five mana symbols as die results that gave different commands to units (Red: charge, White: Defend) as well as activating powers. It was hugely baroque. At the time I didn’t know that simply baroque was too much. But it was the second game system I’d designed and the first from scratch, so the song has many powerful associations . . . .  

99.9 F

Suzanne Vega; 99.9 F

An older tune, back from the years just after college, in my case. I got sick the night a friend had a ticket for me to one of her shows and if you're going to carry regrets, let them be about missed concerts. 

Composing the 13th Age

Here’s a uniquely wonderful experience I never imagined having: spending the last year commenting and kibitzing as James Semple and his team of composers and live musicians created the 13^th Age soundtrack!

James is in his last couple weeks of work on the album, putting all the pieces together. I just finished writing short liner notes for two dozen tracks. Simon Rogers and James will add to the notes, dialogue-style. That’s perfect since to a small extent Simon and I got to talk about tracks all year long as James created and revised . . . and had new tracks spring on him out of nowhere!

Some of the music is meant to be looped in particular moments of play. Other tracks capture the spirit of a particular icon or location. It’s all excellent. As the album has come together, I’ve been thinking about my mom, a talented singer and classical music lover who died a few years ago. Her influence certainly helped me have any opinion worth hearing as James’ music came together, and I have to thank James and Marie-Anne Fischer and all James' other collaborators for the fact that this soundtrack would have been the first product associated with my gaming career that my mom would have enjoyed! I’m not being melancholy about this. I’m amused that work creating a fantasy world finally led back around to a creative effort that would have amused the woman who introduced me to the Lord of the Rings and C.S. Lewis, but didn't have much use for fantasy after that. These songs? These songs she would have loved.

The two pieces I’m linking to now are the first and the last pieces composed, I believe. The 13^th Age Theme is a rousing start, with moments for reflection. Dreams of a Lost Age came out of nowhere at the very end, a lovely piece that may have many different expressions in the various cultures and traditions of the Empire.

I know that James and Simon are working to get the soundtrack published as quickly as possible. I don’t think we have a firm date yet.