one more advantage of using the ipod. tired of your current [song | album]? just jog the dial and look for another. doesn’t require you to get out of your [bed | comfy chair | lounge seat]. doesn’t require a nervously long time to choose the right cd from your extensive cd collection. (the right cd, because you want to make sure you don’t have to bother with it again in the next fifty minutes –give or take).
so i was ipodding away, and finally settled on motives for writing [amazon uk] by wim mertens. even though it wasn’t the first cd i ever bought, it’s the first one i remember so well. i must have played it a million times. if it had any (real) lyrics, i’d now know them all by heart (pretty much like i know all the beatles songs by heart).
i did own cds before that: i received a stack of classical music cds –all conducted by herbert von karajan– from a business relation of my parents. at that time i didn’t have a cd player though, but the gift apparently was incentive enough for my father to get me one during the summer holidays (having performed well at school and all that –ok, ok, so i was a bit spoiled).
i loved the way in which mertens managed to build up a whole climax (which he then overdid by spreading it over three discs with alle dinghe). i could almost see a plot unfolding, unavoidingly leading up to the last track (aptly named the whole).
a slight warning perhaps: it also has mertens singing. some people don’t like it when he sings, but it’s really good. (hint: try out jeremiades [amazon us | uk])
for me motives for writing was what spurred my interest in [contemporary] classical music. after that i was hooked. i bought the soundtrack to belly of an architect [amazon us | uk], which in its turn, got me interested in peter greenaway, which then led me to michael nyman, etc.