Makin’ a Racket

I’ve been worrying my flatmate recently, ’cause I seem to have developed a jaunty whistle of late. This is not, as a general rule, the sort of thing that happens around our house, least of all to me.

‘Course, historically speaking, this isn’t actually true. I spend a great deal of my day with little fragments of music running through my head. I always have, one way or another, and I’ve always been fond of having music on while I work. What’s really happened is that I’ve inherited my sister’s stereo with it’s five-CD turntable and I’ve moved it out of my bedroom and into the study where I write, surf the internet, and occasionally play computer games.

Up until this point, all my music had to run on either Fritz the Laptop (which meant he couldn’t do anything else) or play on the DVD player attached to my TV. Neither of these have been particularly optimal, so my music listening gradually whittled down to playing things in my car and listening to the same Dresden Doll’s live DVD while I cleaned the old apartment. Even upgrading laptops to Shifty Silas didn’t help much – he could play audio at the same time as word-processing, but his speakers were…well, lets just say they weren’t designed with audio in mind.

So, there’s suddenly a stereo I can pack with music that floats around the space I spend most of my non-day-job waking hours. Net result: I’ve listened to a lot more music in the last two weeks than I have in the previous two years.

And it’s been freakin’ GLORIOUS.

I’ve largely celebrated this by listening to a stream of classics from the eighties and nineties. If you’re wondering what the interior of my head sounds like this week, it can be captured by the following three youtube clips:

It must be said, all three of these songs benefit greatly from volume. It’s eleven-thirty as I type this, which means I don’t have the freedom to crank the stereo the levels all three songs demand, but you can be sure I’ll rectify that the moment I’m left in the house alone.

It must also be said that I’m a man singularly lacking in musical taste and class, but I’ve had years to get used to that.