Riding the Waves to Eternity: Hangin’ with the Cosmic Surfer

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Celebrating the Banal

Apr 4, 2022 | Dead Water, Legs!, Music

After my previous post, I was reminded of the importance of celebrating the mundane, and that is absolutely correct, although it isn’t as if this blog hasn’t been mundane enough over the years. Anyway, today I have

    • Had a good half-hour ride on an exercise bike testing out a new playlist
    • Been out for a 5K walk, of which I jogged about 1.5K (cumulatively)
    • Revised some old writing in preparation for continuing where I left off
    • Found that I’d sold another copy of Coyote in the Corner in the US
    • Sampled more tunes for said new playlist(s), with mixed results, and
    • Contemplated a new musical project.

The playlists are based on a running rhythm of around 160bpm, which is close to my old running pace 15 years ago. So I made up a 1hr playlist of tunes that play at 160bpm or thereby, and another of 80bpm tunes on the assumption that they should be pretty much similar. In fact, the 160bpm one is much easier to use as a click track, and I’m not sure why that is. As I get more into the rhythm of things I may play with different bpms, but it’s early days.

The playlists are currently on Spotify and, before you throw your hands up in horror at my use of Spotify, I should say that I already own most of the tunes and am preparing to buy the rest so that I can create the playlists on my MP3 player.

For those interested, the 160bpm draft playlist is here:

And the 80bpm draft, which is highly provisional, is here:

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New musical project? What’s that about then Ian? Well: I’ve been considering putting together a list of LPs that had an impact on me in me teens/adolescence in the 1970s and that still have meaning for me, and then writing about them. I don’t just mean good or great records, neither do I mean records that I thought were great then but which I’ve since gone off, and nor do I mean 70s records that I’ve since either discovered or revised my assessment of. I mean ones that were important to me then and remain so now.

My rough list has 27 of them, but I’m trying to distil it down to the core. Three on the list were released in the 1960s but I didn’t hear them until the 70s. Two bands appear twice.

More as I figure it out.

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I saw the following on Twitter earlier and it, together with some private comments on Facebook, set me thinking. More blogging tomorrow, maybe.

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Meantime, from one of those 27 albums – forty-eight years since I first heard John Peel play it, this album still gives me the feels.