the listening room

Tagged by Jill Chan who has a fine interview on Navel Orange called Going Still to Listen. This is a disaster for me – I am far too secretive a person to feel comfortable divulging information of this sort. Anyway ...

The volume of music files on my computer … is unknown. I changed from PC to Mac earlier this year & all the music files I had on the PC refused to come across. So at the moment I just use the CD player. A young film maker I know is going to bring the story boards for his latest short film around sometime soon for me to look at &, as a quid pro quo, give me a tutorial on the finer points of i-tunes.

The last CDs I bought … were a couple of movie soundtracks: of John Sayle’s Lone Star & from a Canadian film called The Hanging Garden, written & directed by Thom Fitzgerald. One is Tex-Mex, the other, Celtic music out of, I think, Nova Scotia. I haven’t seen either movie. But I have just seen Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 & that has an absolutely gorgeous soundtrack to go with the equally gorgeous visuals.

I write listening only to the tap of the keys & the hum of the machinery. But I always have a song in my head & that could be anything. Lately I've been doing battle with Van Morrison's Astral Weeks which will NOT leave me alone.

In the next room … a Jimmy Reed compilation, You Don’t Have To Go; Césaria Évora’s Voz d’Amor; a Brian Eno collaboration with Harold Budd, produced by Daniel Lanois, called The Pearl; Buddhist Chants & Peace Music; and a burn of Chant Down Babylon, Bob Marley songs remixed by his son Steve with invited guests, which, dammit, won’t play.