A few very random observations prompted by the music in my life these days:

• Keith Jarrett is a bloody genius (dug the Köln Concert’s vinyl boxset last week-end in Koenji.)
• Sometime during the late 90’s, there was a point where it seemed House was about to break into the mainstream: radios started playing House tracks, cross-over successes appeared, major venues featured House acts.
  Eventually, the trend fizzled out and, instead, Hip Hop became the music of choice for the average dance-impaired suburban white kid…

  I take a deep hard look at any random Hip Hop producer on TV nowadays and thank the gods that House never made it to that level of buffoonery…

• My personal theory regarding Drum’n’Bass is that it is a project gone out-of-hand, developed in the Secret Research Labs of the British Dentistry Association aimed at removing patients’ fillings without anesthesia.

  An alternative theory would be that somebody once decided to make a music so caricatural that it begs to be used for one of these 60 Minutes special on The Youth of Today and the barbaric music they are into nowadays.

  Note: My current appreciation of that thankfully near-extinct musical genre is possibly biased by the fact I was just handed such a massively retarded piece of washing-machine rhythm with mission to make the sound “Phat” and to compress the bass more (you stupid tweakhead: if I throw one more inch of compression into that track, it’ll pretty much become one single pulsating bass sound with a few signature d’n’b, motorcycle-on-the-highway, sound effects here and there).

• Also among the insanely cool picks of that last vinyl hunt to Koenji: Cymande, probably one of the best funk band of all times.