djproject

Name: Derek J. Power
Home Page: http://djproject.livejournal.com
Member Since: Oct 11, 2005
Rank: 564
Average Vote Received: Correct (3.64, 14 votes)
last 10 days: Correct (3.73, 11 votes)
Rated 631 releases, average: 4.23
Location: Woburn, MA, USA
Profile: For DVDs (including all the music ones), go here

Graduated from the College of William and Mary on 15 May 2005, conferred a Bachelor of Arts with (Departmental) Honors in Music.

Wrote a thesis on Arvo Pärt's Kanon Pokajanen and the relationship between his setting and the thematic content of text, which is an Eastern Orthodox hymn

Played cello for nine years, bass guitar (Ibanez SR400) and keyboard (Yamaha CS2X, Kawai K5000W, Roland Fantom X8 and Novation ReMOTE 61 SL) for nine years, studied drums for three years, worked on music technology for seven years, interned at Cue Recording Studios (Falls Church, VA)

Worked as a DJ for WCWM for four years, establishing an alum presence there.

My income job is not my real aspiration =]

My real aspiration involves Spangle Maker, The ... developing

Seller Rating:

100.0% positive (4 ratings)

djproject's groups (3)

Reviews:

Steve Roach - Dreamtime Return - 21-Nov-08 05:31 AM
It's strange to be writing a review for an album upon hearing it is so indescribable. It's not just trying to describe objectively what's going on without sounding flat, sterile and lifeless. It's also trying to put into words the sensations and emotions experienced whilst listening to it. I believe that everyone experiences it differently but there is an commonality: introspective, healing, awe-inspiring, wondrous, beautiful and immaculate. In short, this is the great aural equivalent of Chartres Cathedral or Hagia Sophia. This is truly art.

Bola - Soup - 30-Oct-08 10:48 AM
It's really hard (for me) to put into words what makes this album so wondrous. Perhaps the best way to describe it is as the best ambient music for those who want to get out of the room/house and take a long walk/drive. It's ambient in that utilizes textures and many layers of sound that appear and disappear at will. But the music never makes you still. It's always moving and in flux: never too slow but never too fast either. Plus the texture spectrum is quite broad: never settling on just conveying warmth or coolness. Nearly every sensation is evoked when listening to the album from start to finish. And while you can pick your favourite point (mine is still the opener "Glink"), you can enjoy every moment of the album. And I do firmly believe it is an album that needs to be appreciated as a whole as oppose to mere separate tracks. All in all, this is an excellent album of sound, atmosphere ... and pure wonder.

Peter Gabriel - Passion: Music For The Last Temptation Of Christ - 30-Oct-08 10:36 AM
I want to say this right off the bat: I have strong theological and spiritual objections to The Last Temptation of Christ, either the Nikos Kazantakis novel and the Martin Scorsese film adaptation. In a nutshell, it's the right struggle but embodied in the wrong person. Now having said that, I can appreciate both novel and film as works of art and can see the craftsmanship of both were executed on the highest order. In the case of the film, a significant part of it is in the score Peter Gabriel provides.

What's wonderful about Passion as an album is that you can listen to it as pure music apart from any film connotations. Of course you can't avoid it if you've seen the film. But this is the mark of a great film score when it can work just as well without the film as it does with it. When you hear it as music, you get the feeling of a spiritual journey and everything that occurs: doubt, uncertainty, melancholy, anguish, fear, happiness, joy and transcendence. And of course the synthesis of many different and distinct elements - various worlds of music especially from northern Africa, the Middle East, south Asia and southeastern Europe, some general ambient tendencies, Western chorales and even some "pop sensibility" through its production techniques and digital sampling - is fascinating. Gabriel allows each part to be its own entity but they all work for the same goal.

The end result is a very moving work that's truly timeless and yet of its time. It's "functional" in that it was commissioned as a film score and yet transcends mere "film score" designation and is something more. (I dare you to hear this and *not* think of the music for the Halo game series). And all in all, it is one of the best musical representations of man's spiritual journey (even if the source of the commission is theologically improper)

Beatles, The - Love - 04-Sep-07 01:22 AM
For me, it's the Beatles compilation album to get if you were not interested in getting merely the collection of chart toppers (1). As far as Beatles songs, they represented the span of their career (regardless of whether you like them or not). But the really creative element was the remixing and rearranging of the instrumentation/recorded tracks to make it both familiar and different. This demonstrates that the Beatles should be remembered as a creative self-contained unit of musicians: performers, songwriters, producers. Through their own explorations in music (especially in the recorded medium), they helped set the stage for numerous other bands after them for the next half-century (and maybe beyond).

William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops - 15-Sep-06 08:17 PM
This is clearly one of the best musical illustrations about life, death and the afterlife. And it was clearly by accident.

To quickly summarize the story: William Basinski was archiving tapes to digital but his archiving process was destroying already ancient tapes and he ended up recording the death of his self-made ambient loops. To add more to this, he ended up listening to the playbacks on 11 September 2001 and it became for him a personal soundtrack for the tragic events unfolding before his very eyes in New York City. Whether you see this as a 9/11 soundtrack, this is without a doubt a moving piece of work ... all four discs to be precise.

The loops themselves are quite beautiful and very much follows the tradition of ambient music a la Brian Eno's Discreet Music and Ambient 1/Music for Airports. Interestingly enough, not only it follows it in terms of theory and sound choice, but also it utilizes a simple set up where the insignator is no longer in control of the output. All Basinski did was push play and record and the machinery did its magic. The process is interestingly very organic. Of course this is due to capturing the disintegration of organic material containing musical information. This is part of its charm. The other part is the loops themselves: using washes of pads and percussion and brass emulators there is a melancholic beauty that permeates the loops. Basinski intended it to evoke pastoral landscapes. But the fun is letting the imagination of the listener take hold ... and this leads into why this release is in the end amazing.

As stated earlier, I see it as an illustration of life, death and the afterlife. Each of us has a life with our own sounds and melodies emitting throughout our time and walk on earth (i.e. the loops). Each of us are subjected to a drawn-out bodily deterioration (i.e. loops disintegrating). But in spite of the process where we seem to disappear, it is the hope that there is an eternal memory and the loops will continue to reverberate, long after we are gone. This is our hope and our prayer at times ... and I think this music is a sign that it very well be the course of nature.

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