Greg Bueno

On the playlist, or anime soundtrack mania!

I was glued to my TV set when [adult swim] aired Death Note and Serei no Moribito, and I've since acquired both series on DVD. After watching them again -- multiple times in the case of Moribito -- I developed a hankering to listen to the music.

The Evil Sharing Networks provided, and for most of the month of June, my playlist was dominated by Kawai Kenji, Taniuchi Hideki and Hirano Hirohisa. I barely paid attention to anything else.

And honestly -- I think they'll continue to dominate so long as new releases in 2010 continue to be a wash.

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Adjustment period

I know I make all sorts of excuses for why I don't update, but this one is pretty major.

I started a new job a week and a half ago.

It's a web development job similar to what I was doing before but different enough to consume a lot of mental energy. I'm going through a lot of training right now, and unlike my previous job -- where I could sneak in quite a bit of writing -- I barely have time to keep up with the news, let alone get through reviews.

I don't know if it will level off because the new office is staffed by eight people, with four developers including myself. And the plate, it is full. I get the sense that once I get up to speed, I'll have more than enough to keep me occupied. (By comparison, my previous job employed 4,000 worldwide.)

I tend not to write on the weekends because that's when I do stuff with Eponymous 4, but I may have to reconsider. The change in work schedule alone has forced me to rearrange a lot of things.

Of course, I'll pop up on the Facebook page if I run across something interesting, so please consider becoming a fan. (Yes, that's antiquated Facebook terminology now, but I refuse to use "like" as an action verb.)

Till then, keep listening!

Favorite edition 2010: Quarter second

Used to be by the middle of the year, my year-end favorite list would have 10 fairly strong candidates. Recently, I'm hard-pressed to even fill half those slots.

Or maybe I'm just getting pickier about what to rank.

Seven slots have been filled for the 2010 list so far, but if I were brutally honest, only the top four have a lock on their positions. The bottom three are just occupying space, and nothing else I've encountered so far warrants filling out the list.

Two more quarters to go, though. It could all change by then.

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Benjamin Britten: War Requiem / Sinfonia da Requiem / Ballad of Heroes (London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Richard Hickox)

War Requiem by Benjamin Britten has always been a work I wanted to hear when I first read about it in a textbook during high school. Back then, CDs were replacing vinyl as the listening medium of choice, and War Requiem was too lengthy to fit on one disc.

For a student on a limited income, a double-disc set was beyond my budget. Eventually, I would forget about it.

Alex Ross devotes a chapter of his book The Rest Is Noise to Britten, which got me thinking about War Requiem again. Armed with 12 eMusic download credits, I finally got to listen to the piece 20 years after learning about it.

So how is it?

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Rufus Wainwright: All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu

This album is one Rufus Wainwright needed to record -- and not because of all the upheaval in his life at the moment.

Between launching an opera and dealing with the illness of his mother Kate McGarrigle, Wainwright was probably not in the position to craft an album with a grand production.

All Days Are Nights: Songs for Lulu is Rufus Wainwright unplugged -- just him and piano. Even without the demands on his time and attention, the downsizing of his sound is a much-needed reaction to the trajectory of his previous work.

If his albums continued to swell, one of them would eventually burst.

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