Basement Jaxx’s “Crazy Itch Radio” is my latest album obsession. I listen to my obsessed albums (or songs) multiple times per day. This album is following in the footsteps of Elliot Smith’s “Figure 8” and Josh Rouse’s “1972”.
No review for albums, don’t know how to quantify them and if I don’t like it, I don’t listen (a rare occurance given that I left music radio behind a few years ago).
For a while I’ve been trying to liberate our music from the confines living room (it has the receiver and our tower mac with all of our music) into other areas of the house, particularly the kitchen. It’s much better to clean and cook with music than without, after all.
For months we’ve just been plugging an iPod into a dangling headphone connector plugged into Sarah’s old Aiwa stereo up on top of the cabinets. This solution lacked the ability to sync the music playback from room to room and only played back iTunes media: music, podcasts, etc. But it did work well enough to be a long-term temporary solution…until my iPod broke (clicking hard drive and all). Clearly, it was time for a change. True, we still have Sarah’s iPod and two laptops with perfectly working headphone outputs but it was time for improvement.
I considered just buying Airport Express, a nifty wireless network product from Apple that can connect to a stereo and allow you to play music through it. Playing back music in the kitchen would be as easy as selecting (‘kitchen stereo’) as an output. Nifty and wireless, but also over a hundred bucks and with the same restriction on content as the iPod. My ears desired a grander array of audio choices. Why stop at music when I could be playing DVDs and television in the kitchen as well? But how?
Being busy at work I just went with a laptop plugged into the stereo playing Pandora or Last.fm, not too bad. But then came the second catalyst for change: Christmas and, by association, Christmas Music.
Christmas music has always been big in my family. Growing up, we kids always looked forward (some of us more or less than others) to the time of Christmas music. While there were a few cassette tapes in rotation, the two that stand out for me are A Holiday Celebration by Peter Paul and Mary and A Christmas Together by John Denver and the muppets.
When my break from work started on Friday I started pondering a real solution and had a real duh moment. We have a receiver, a receiver with a speaker B option! All we needed was plenty of speaker wire.
Ten bucks and a hundred feet of (cheap) speaker wire later I connected two speakers from Sarah’s old stereo to the ‘B’ output of our living room receiver. Now whenever we want to hear music from anything playing on the reciever we just have to click a button on the remote and the sound is duplicated to a speaker in the kitchen and one in our other living room, nicely spreading sound throughout our first floor.
Behold! The sea organ.
The Sea Organ (morske orgulje) is located on the shores of Zadar, Croatia, and is the world’s first pipe organ that is played by the sea. Simple and elegant steps, carved in white stone, were built on the quayside. Underneath, there are 35 pipes with whistle openings on the sidewalk. The movement of the sea pushes air through, and – depending on the size and velocity of the wave – musical chords are played. The waves create random harmonic sounds.