I have finally found some new music I actually enjoy. Six albums in all. So I will share:

First off, Herik Jose doesn’t have an album per se, but he sure does have some great music. IDM-influenced with gorgeous vocals and strong melody lines, you can think of him as Postal Service without the bluster and bad metaphors. Free downloads too, by the way.

Jack Penate is a lot of things, but subtle isn’t really one of them. Ballsy dance-rock. “Be The One” stands out on Everything Is New.

I want you to listen to Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit because I they’ve mastered that sort of bluesy slow rock that goes well with whiskey and cigars. Also, great to play along with.

John Paul Keith and the Four One Fives (what’s with all the “and the numbers”?) are throwbacks to another, much more awesome time. Some clear 60s influences here. Awesome music. If it doesn’t force you to get up and dance your legs off, you’ve got problems. Or fewer legs than you should.

Oh dear Kanye West. You’re so ubiquitous that I won’t even link to you. Normally your albums have one, maybe two good songs on them. And then you come out with this. Autotune notwithstanding, 808s and Heartbreak is very, very good. “Paranoid” is wonderful, as is “Love Lockdown”. “Heartless”, though, is clearly the stand-out track.

If you don’t like Ohbijou’s “Beacons”, you clearly have no soul. This is the kind of pop music heaven should be filled with. Perhaps a touch too pitch-perfect, but still. Listen and weep.

Right now I’m part of the worship team at Churchill Meadows Christian Church in Mississauga, and I was part of the Freshwater Christian Church worship team before the two churches merged into on combined identity. For the most part, working with the CMCC team has been absolutely wonderful, and I’m really glad to have the chance to use what skills I have as part of the team.

Being part of the whole thing, though, has led me to some observations about our team in particular (observations that would probably be pretty boring to most people, on the whole) and observations about worship teams in general. The general observations are what I’m most interested in, and I think you might be too.

Most worship teams are awful. Just completely awful. They’re awful for several reasons. First, they don’t have the skill as musicians. Second, they have no concept of what it takes to make a good worship team. Third, they don’t have any concept of good music.

My personal opinion is that if you aren’t any good, you shouldn’t play. You’re going to distract from worship, not aid it. After all, isn’t that what worship bands are there for? It’s an aid, to lead in worship, to help the church as a whole worship God. What form that takes is largely irrelevant (though of course there are excesses I won’t even touch on here). The fact is, if you’re distracting people from worshipping, you’re being counter-productive and should remove yourself from the team, or be removed from the team.

This doesn’t happen often enough because team leaders don’t understand what makes a good team and what makes good music, two things I think are closely related. A lot of bands simply throw as many people as they can must up on stage and get everyone to play their hearts out. Though this might seem like a great idea (what’s better than people playing their hearts out?), it usually isn’t. It takes a lot of practice and a good deal of synergy to work as a team, to understand what each other is doing, and especially if you don’t have a lot of time to practice, to know each other well enough that you can predict the direction of the music.

That becomes more difficult the more people you have in the team. Fewer in this instance is almost certainly better. If you have a guitarist, a bassist, and a drummer who are really tight, you don’t need to throw in a percussionist, a pianist, a vocalist, and some interpretive dance. Not only will this make playing together, really together, harder, it’s going to make everything harder. The more instruments you have, the more setup is involved, the harder it is to mix well, and the worse the band is going to sound as whole. It’s just really hard to have seven people making great music.

Not only that, every song has a different feel and a different way it can be played. Some songs are guitar-driven and should stay that way. Other songs are keyboard driven, hymns in particular, and no matter how you try and spice them up, they should stay keyboard driven. When you have six, seven, eight people, everyone has the tendency to play at once. Not only does this generally make an awful din, it does disservice to the songs you’re playing.

I say this as a keyboardist who finds himself almost always superfluous. We have a lead guitarist/vocalist, a backup guitarist/vocalist, another vocalist, a bassist, a drummer, a percussionist, and a keyboardists. Personally, I think that number of people is absurdly hard to make good music with. The leader of a band of that many people is going to have to be good at arranging music and the players themselves will have to practice a lot. Barring that, people are just going to have to sit out a bunch of songs. The leader is going to have to tell his band that they can’t all play at once, that some people are just going to have to sit out some songs, and that if they want a pleasing sound instead of a jumbled cacophony, they’re going to have to put some limits of who’s playing what when.

Of course, this doesn’t happen for a variety of reasons. It goes back to leaders not knowing what good music is, or leaders simply not wanting to hurt feelings or cause conflict. I mean, sure, it’s possible that you’ll find eight people in your church who can play together naturally and not sound like a bunch of monkeys beating on tin cans, but how likely is that?

Some worship teams aren’t awful, of course. If you do it right, you can make really, really good music and aid in worship at the same time. You can be innovative and fresh without being obtrusive and annoying. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen, mostly at churches who have an artistic vision for their worship teams, who have a large talent pool, and who have leaders who aren’t afraid to tell some people to stop playing or dial it back.

If I could say one thing to worship teams around the world it would be this: Bigger isn’t better. Bigger is almost always worse. Think about what you’re trying to do and do that. Put some thought into it. Make a structure and build around it. Figure out what style of music you want to play and then do what you have to in order to play that music with skill and restraint. Don’t just throw people at a stage and hope that they’ll work well together. Figure out what works and go with that. If something isn’t working, don’t do it. If you don’t know what good music is, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t be in a band. If you don’t know how to co-operate, don’t be in a band. And if you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t lead a band, for goodness sake!

In the end I ask this: Is the tendency toward bigger bands really better than a solitary pianist or a three-piece acoustic band? If it isn’t, why are you doing it?

I’m listening to a first-rate performance and recording of Steve Reich’s “Music For 18 Musicians”. It’s absolutely fabulous still, after all these years.

In any case, I figure if I can subject myself to “The Rite of Spring” at the TSO and have to deal with music that hasn’t any meaningful harmony or structure, the least I can do to achieve balance is imbibe a great deal of music that’s nothing but.

1. This evening Laura and I are going to Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner. It’s a time where people in our church get together and share each other’s food and apparently also get to know each other in the process. I’m making vegetarian past and good old fashioned meat pasta. I can’t be bothered to be innovative for tonight.
2. Again last night… four hour of sleep. This is not good. At all. I went to be at 2300, 2400, 0100, 0200, 0300, 0330, 0400… and the last one was the one that took. But now I’m functioning on nothing more than diet cola and coffee.
3. Laura dropped by the office to say hello and bring me some food. Good wife, that one! And not just because she brings me food.
4. I’m voting NDP this election. I like Jack Layton, I like a lot of their platform, but I especially like their IP stance. Ever since I saw Charlie Angus debating Jim Prentice in the House of Commons, I’ve kind of warmed to the party. But with the Green Party’s current leadership — she looks and talks like a troll and not even a funny GNAA troll or something, plus she seemed out of touch and just a little dumb — looking a little lacklustre, who else to vote for? Certainly not the Liberals, curse their rotten bones. Absolutely not the Conservatives and their Rove-style politics. So there we go.
5. Canadian parliamentary politics is pretty interesting. The only thing that matters in these elections is the PM. All his MPs vote with him on all matter except the rare free votes. All his backbenchers vote with him unless they’re resigned to being backbenchers for the rest of their careers. I don’t like this. What’s the point of having MPs if they can only vote as the PM wills? We may as well just vote for a 4-year dictator and his assorted civil servants: After all, what are the MPs doing but spearheading policy issues for the PM and party brass? The MP voting and selection process is broken and meaningless.
6. I don’t like change any more. I generally don’t like new people. I like the people I already know and the faces I’m already familiar with and the places I’m used to going. Maybe that makes me old or something, but I don’t mind. The only thing I really like is new music. I can get into new music.
7. Oh, and I pretty much hate a lot of worship music. It’s bland, boring, artificial, meaningless junk for the most part.
8. Soon I will be at home cooking a mean. This is good.

• Here we go again!
• One of the great tragedies of the modern church is that we’ve for the most part lost the language of covenant. We still have some of the ideas. But there’s hope. Imagine, if you will, the power of context and the power of covenant wedded to each other; perhaps this is an unholy union of the ancient and the post-modern, but which covenant doesn’t have context? The church and God in the context of his schema of salvation; the covenant of marriage in the context of God and the church’s covenant; these are powerful concepts.
• Share the Well is — and I hate to say this, as much as love Long Line of Leavers — probably the best Caedmon’s Call album ever. So many years and I still love CC. It’s true. I’ve listened to them longer than I’ve been a Christian.
• I’ve heard it said that if God seems distant it’s probably because you’ve drawn away; the implicit assumption is, of course, that God is static and that he always wants to be close. In light of scripture, does this seem true? Are there not many people in scripture who were desperate to draw close to God only to find him still distant? I think when we talk about God we need to remember that he’s also a person, or a Person if you will, who has thoughts higher than ours and a plan greater than we can understand. God’s not static. He moves, we move, it’s the grand danse (as you may have heard said). If God seems distant and you don’t understand why — if you want to draw near and nothing happens — all you can say is that there is a reason. It’s almost blase in its simplicity. But there is a reason. Sometimes you don’t get to understand, sometimes you do, but there’s always a reason.
• It’s hard to synthesise the appalling poverty most of the world labours in and the almost limitless prosperity we enjoy. The question is, of course, at what point does prosperity become a curse? This very blog begs ask that question: I have enough money to buy a computer and enough free time to contribute this ocean of dross that is the internet. How much time do I spend feeding the hungry and how much time do I spend feeding my own various hungers? How much should I?
• Candace is getting baptised on Saturday, which is totally awesome. Baptisms are amazing things, no matter which side of the spectrum you fall on. It’s a powerful symbol no matter how you look on it. I’m a paedobatist by preference, but anyone who fulfils God’s command to baptise is terrific in my books. I have a special bit of confusion for “Reformed Baptist” (decide which side you’re on, you freaks!) who seem to have forgotten that Reformed theology leads inexorably to the baptism of children, but hey, it’s all good.
• It seems to me that a little introspection and self-knowledge is a good thing, but a http://www.aldaily.com/lot leads to confusion. Maybe it’s because people function on a sort of quantum level: You measure yourself enough and you change. Then you have to start over again and it becomes a full-time occupation. And not a fun one.
• Beer is proof that God loves us; dentist are proof he can change his mind.
• I’m less three teeth, by the way.
• You ever have it where you say, “It can’t get any better than this?” and then it does? Yeah. I got that. It’s called marriage. I’m an incurable optimist, it’s true.
• This is probably the best thing I have in my feeds.
• It seems every nation has its legacy to overcome. US, India, China, all the big ones.

• Sometimes when Laura leaves the house to go out and do whatever, I do dishes and listen to post-rock. You know, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Explosions in the Sky, Mono, Red Sparrowes, that sort of thing. Right now I’m listening to This is Your Captain Speaking. It’s good stuff! If you’ve ever listened to post-rock, you’ll know how hard it is to come across truly interesting material, even by those veterans of the genre such as (and especially) Mogwai. TIYCS seems interested in being interesting. That’s good.
• I don’t like megachurches. I mean, I can see where they fit into the ecosystem of Christianity — if it can be called an ecosystem as opposed to a burgeoning, idiotic choas — but I don’t like them. I don’t think I ever will. It’s not simply that they’re generally white, suburban, middle-class and almost always utterly devoted to not offending anyone. It’s that they’re not distributed enough. They’re too centralised. Thus, one pastor boffs his secretary, the whole thing goes under, and your sanctuary gets converted into indoor soccer field. I’m pretty sure churches should be small, efficient, face-to-face, involved, local, community-based, and active. But mostly small. Enough that you can’t hide in the crowds. But also enough that if something goes wrong, and entire faith community isn’t left floundering in the shallows.
• Let me ask you this: Why do you dislike Thomas Kinkade’s art? Is it because his art is bad? I bet it isn’t. I bet you don’t know good art from bad art even if such things exist. What you probably mean to say, instead of, “I dislike Thoman Kinkade’s art,” is, “I dislike Thomas Kinkade“. That would probably be more accurate. You don’t like his commercialising of his art (but when was art ever not commercial?), you dislike his subject matter (though his paintings are quite nice to look at), and you especially dislike the types of people who buy his prints (you think they’re generally the unwashed white trash living in trailer parks somewhere, their floor and ceilings and furniture covered in linoleum). You don’t want to be one of them, because that wouldn’t be… something. Wouldn’t be cool, wouldn’t be acceptable to your peers, wouldn’t truly speak to your sensibilities and your good taste. Maybe what you should say instead is, “It’s not kosher to like Thomas Kinkade… so I don’t like him.” Because at least then you’d be a bit more honest. In the meantime, look at some of his paintings. They’re quite nice.
• This may be some indie music heresy, but you know what’s wrong with My Bloody Valentine? They’re completely and mind-numbingly boring. Sure, they came up with sounds no-one had ever heard a guitar make before, but none of those sounds is interesting.
• I hate modern classical music. I really do. Things started going off the rails in the early 1900s and haven’t gotten back on since. Once I thought, “Why have people accepted abstract art, but not abstract music?” The answer is, of course, that a bunch of different colours splashed on a canvas a la Pollock can be extraordinarily — if unintentionally — beautiful. It doesn’t hurt me to look at. Notes seemingly scribbled on a page at random, however, has the capability to make me — and from the look of it lots of people — wince. (I am abusing my dashes; I know.) Harmony and melody aren’t old social conventions meant to stifle the artists. They are a common framework in which we as Westerners operate. It may indeed be that this only a custom, but that doesn’t matter: It’s ingrained and there’s no point in the composer trying to wiggle it loose. You are literally hurting me with your atonal disasters, your craptastic 12-tone form, and your alternative rhythmic nightmare. Go write some music someone wants to listen to; see if there is perhaps something of value to be found in those old forms everyone seems to have abandoned without a reasonable alternatives. Rediscover, for heaven’s sake, the power of beautiful music. Don’t make it your mission to question what beauty is. It just is.
• My, there are far too many dishes here.

I really wanted to get this down on the hard drive… and I didn’t realise how bad the piano recording was until I had got to singing. So i just gave up and didn’t bother correcting any of the (obvious) flaws in the levels. It isn’t pretty, I tell you.

Scatterbrain – Ogg Vorbis
Scatterbrain – MP3

Everything I record these days seems to have a ringing noise at the high end… anyone have any ideas how to fix this problem?

True story.

I have written the greatest post-rock ever!

Except it’s just me and my electric guitar and my foot pedal and my microphone and Ardour and Hydrogen and Jack on Ubuntu. But it works!

This weekend, someone asked me what my favourite bands are. I didn’t really know what to say, except that I love Radiohead and everything else flows out from there. Today, my curiosity piqued, I began to wonder what, statistically, are my favourite bands?

Last.fm and my scrupulously collected statistics to the rescue. I present for your consideration the top fifteen or so.

1. Philip Glass
2. Band of Horses
3. Sufjan Stevens
4. The Books
5. Boards of Canada
6. Snow Patrol
7. Derek Webb
8. Radiohead
9. Death Cab for Cutie
10. Iron & Wine
11. Modest Mouse
12. Bright Eyes
13. Steve Reich
14. Grandaddy
15. Andrew Bird

That Boards of Canada is on that list surprises even me. I had no idea.

• I don’t get stat holidays. I really don’t. If every person gets a certain number of days off per year for government-mandated vacation, why are there additional days off? I’ll probably understand this when I’m older and slower but for now they just annoy me. They throw a monkey wrench into my normally placid finances (I don’t have much money, but what money I do have is somewhat consistent), throw a hyena wrench into production at the shop (a four day week in which to do five days of work! hooray!), and just generally throw off my sense of time.
• Fourteen hours. I worked fourteen hours yesterday. Just to be clear, I’m not a workaholic, I actually don’t like doing that. But sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, right?
• Why do we make word that end in “aholic” when we mean to say someone is addicted to something? It doesn’t make any sense. It should be “workic”, not “workaholic”. One of those has much less snap, of course.
• Clicking on the tag buttons is much easier than writing out tags. If they had keyboard shortcuts, it’d be even better.
• For the love of all that’s good, don’t keep apologising to me. Don’t be sorry, do your job properly. Then we’re both happy.
• Ever have a night of tossing and turning? I had one of those last night, only to roll out of bed and discover Laura slept like a babe in arms. I suppose that’s okay, though. I’ll give up my sleep for her in one of those mystical marital transactions that seem to happen with some frequency. We’re rarely both sick, or both hungry, or both interested in watching the same film; life is strange that way. People are strange that way.
• I’d like to observe that even lukewarm coffee is better than no coffee at all, which pretty much blows that whole “warm, cold, lukewarm” example of Paul’s out of the water. Of course, he didn’t really have coffee. I try to imagine Paul of caffeine, and I sort of imagine him like, “We’re going to North America, beeyotches!” I think he might get quite annoying, actually.
• Last night Laura and I read from Luke where Jesus talks about the end times, and I have to say that scripture confuses me sometimes. At one point the passage says that the end times (if it was actually talking about the end times) will come when people are eating and drinking and getting married, just like in the days of Lot and Noah… and says that these signs are like vultures gathered around a carcass. Which is nice imagery, but doesn’t help me much, because I see people eating and drinking and getting married right now. Maybe I’m just getting confused about nothing. I just don’t get it.
• I love Talkdemonic’s “In the Machinery of Night”. It’s like they took equal parts IDM, hip-hop drumming, and awesome and mixed it all together to get an amazing song. Note my use of superlatives here.
• The Dilbert comic about the guy who has no skills but compensates by “raising issues” resonates with me this morning. I won’t tell you why because that would be mean.