A little over a year ago, on April 9, 2007, Rock Town Hall proposed a bold, blind CD swap known as Hear Factor. Over the next week, subjects enrolled in this experiment and study methods were fine tuned, as follows:
Rock Town Hall members will be sent anonymous mix CDs lovingly (sincerely) compiled by other Townspeople that may be inappropriate to a recipient’s usual tastes. For 3 days, each participating Townsperson will listen to no other music but the possibly inappropriate mix CD they have received. They will report back to the list. Highlights of their mixes will be posted for all to experience and chime in on.
A press release was sent to major media outlets on April 19, 2007, as anticipation built.
On May 2, 2007, BigSteve and General Slocum reported on their anonymous, alien CD mixes. Hear Factor was off and running.
A year later, we think it’s time to stage season 2 of Hear Factor. If this is new to you, take some time to visit last year’s activities in the links provided throughout this post. If you lived through – and especially if you participated in – last year’s inaugural Hear Factor, feel free to share your reflections with newer members of the Halls of Rock.
Let me know, either in the Comments section of this post, or directly by e-mail (headstache [at] gmail [dot] com) if you’re interested in taking part in this year’s experiment. If we get a dozen or so participants, we’ll take a couple of days to further streamline the process before moving forward. I’m thinking we limit mix CDs to 10 songs or 45 minutes, whichever comes first, to allow participants the opportunity to better focus on a set of possibly alien music. Let me know if you have any questions.
Meanwhile, links to each of last year’s Hear Factor exchanges follow, including selections and full zipped files of the mixes our Townspeople lived with for 3 straight days.
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Beside “point guard” Marty Balin, do the members of Jefferson Airplane even know they’re on the same stage together? Watch Balin try to engage Grace Slick in a give-and-go before Slick drifts off into her own lane. There’s only one rock, Grace, no matter how many vocal mics are set up. Paul Kantner checks himself into the game to sing a verse – or is he performing a different song? Compare and contrast the teamwork of this band with that of CSNY in the previous clip.
Skeptics of Winner Rock take note!
A-1 Steak Sauce!
Gelatinous canned meat.
I look forward to your comments.
It’s too bad that XTC is best known for, among other things, being that once-promising New Wave band with a leader whose severe stage fright caused them to stop performing live, ultimately killing the band’s commercial chances and artistic growth more than any series of Malevolent and Incompetent Managers. From the band’s second album, Go 2, through Mummer (and even the intent of The Big Express) released one of my favorite strings of albums of any band. Those albums still mean a lot to me on many levels, and at their core I’ve always loved their ability to cram super-pop ideas into heavy, sometimes fractured rhythms. The Beatles met Beefheart or Steve Reich or any number of avant musicians.
Just as I was first getting into the band, after seeing the videos for songs like “Making Plans for Nigel” and “Life Begins at the Hop” on the syndicated New Wave video show Rockworld I saw an ad for the band’s upcoming appearance at Emerald City, in Cherry Hill, NJ. The ad featured that Drums and Wires logo, which was reason enough to dig deeper on this band. I briefly considered what it would be like to get into that show, but I was an innocent 16 years old, too young and too naive to attempt getting into this club illegally (you had to be 18 to get into a bar in New Jersey at this time). I probably spent that night staying up late in hopes of catching an XTC video on Rockworld.
About 3 days later, I won tickets on Philadelphia’s WMMR to see some blues-rock band called The Nighthawks…the next night at Emerald City. I knew these guys weren’t XTC, but I wasn’t going to miss my chance to get into a club and see a rock band up close while I was still under age. I thought fast, and my very cool, prematurely gray high school English teacher agreed to escort me to the show. This was all cool with my Mom. I got in without problem. The Nighthawks were pretty bad – and they definitely weren’t XTC. Damn, you mean to tell me I could have gone to see XTC with my teacher a few nights earlier? Here’s the live sound of XTC that was cooking around that time, a taste of what I missed.
“Life Begins at the Hop”
“Real by Reel”
“When You’re Near Me I Have Difficulty”
“Complicated Game”
More bootleg live tunes and thoughts follow.
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There’s a fine line between groundbreaking German disco and…whatever the hell this is.
