The year 2025 has come and gone. For some it may have appeared like a breeze as they wonder where those 365 days actually went, while others struggled to get through the weeks and were happy to see the end of it. For those following the record industry, it was also a very long year. Luckily, this was not because of some kind of struggle, but because of the sheer quantity of quality output! As such and in order to hide my hesitation when it comes to making hard choices, I propose to instate a new tradition at Bildingblocks⊠To let the number of albums that I discuss at yearâs end match the last two digits of the date. Totally coincidentally, this means that I can discuss twenty-five albums today, instead of last yearâs twenty.
Category Archives: Music
You Canât Outrun the Clock: A Look at Pink Floydâs âTimeâ
Music can say more than words.1 And regularly, the words that are used in songs are able to communicate so much that a piece of narrative literature of equivalent length simply cannot convey. During the week-end I read a short story where this characteristic of music was used to great effect. In the wholesome tale âLet All the Children Boogieâ by Sam J. Miller, references to the music and lyrics of David Bowie and Iggy Pop were employed with great effect to communicate dreams, emotions, and hope.2 The change of perspective on the world and life that this brief adventure of two young outcasts in the early nineties can engender in the reader was, according to my opinion, in large part due to the use of those musical references. And such a change of perspective â including some of the same themes! â can also occur when listening to our topic of this weekâs blog, the song âTimeâ by the British rock band Pink Floyd from their acclaimed as well as wildly successful 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon.3
Continue reading You Canât Outrun the Clock: A Look at Pink Floydâs âTimeâ
Ecomusicology and Serenading Different Kinds of Nature
A while back we talked about the video game Tiny Glades and how the artifice of the landscapes you could create there showed how ânatureâ is not a faraway sequestered space free of any and all human interference. On the contrary, in our Anthropocene age every environment, every biome, and even every imaginable place on earth is directly or indirectly, largely or in part, shaped by human influence.1 And this makes the topic I selected for this weekâs blog, discussing some songs about escaping to nature, also theoretically interesting.2 Because if nature is not an unequivocally uniform concept, can it even be a shared refuge where all those artists envision themselves going? And it does indeed turn out, that very distinct kinds of nature are serenaded in these songs. Moreover, there is a field we can turn to, if we want to explain these differences: ecomusicology. So let us today survey that field and those songs in order to find out what an escape to nature would actually mean in a world where forests are as much an environment shaped by humankind as your average suburb.
Continue reading Ecomusicology and Serenading Different Kinds of Nature
My Favorite Albums of 2024
2024, what a year! It was, like, a whole 12 months⊠In that time span some artists released records and others didnât. And the former are lucky, because they are eligible to be on the list which relays my favorite albums of the previous calendar year! Remember how I struggled last year to confine this list to ten entries and had to settle for fifteen? Well, this year that did not happen, thankfully. This year I ended up with twenty albums. But before I reveal the list, I would be amiss to not first dedicate a few words on its â naturally painstaking â compilation and on some of the throughlines that can be said to characterize last yearâs music. Because, as you might have guessed, this list is not (merely) meant to display my ridiculously refined tastes but to provide you all with some of the excellent music produced in 2024 that you might have missed and which can hopefully help with a good start of the new year.
Music for the Rut of Everyday Life
Music with a grown-up subject matter is nothing new, of course. The protest songs addressing the various wars of the latter half of the previous century, as well as the many struggles for legal emancipation and social acceptance at the time â which are still carried on today â spoke to the experiences of those living through these events or who found themselves inhabiting the polities involved.1 And the great ladies of country music have always sung about the less than ideal parts of adult relationships â including the affairs, substance troubles, and other setbacks with their significant others.2 But what I mean with the genre â or perhaps subgenre â âmusic for grown-upsâ are songs that speak to the responsibilities that growing up entails and the more mundane happenings that come with it â the less dramatic, so to speak. These songs can be found in any genre. But the last few years I have heard a bunch of relevant tracks and albums that can be said to occupy their own niche and therefore deserve their own label and a blog on Bildungblocks!
My Favorite Songs of 2023
Music is amazing. It can move a person, make them happy or angry, and inspire them to do great things â both the good and the bad variety â while existing as mere sound waves.1 And this should not be surprising, as those sound waves are the work of artists who, in every phase of the creative process, use their experience, their imagination, and other inspirations to fashion this art. They write the lyrics and the music, contemplate the most fitting arrangements, and play, sing and mix the tracks that will eventually reach our ears. And sometimes, sometimes they manage to create songs that are instant classics. As is the case, at least in my opinion, with these ten songs from 2023.
My Favorite Albums of 2023
It is often argued that there should not be quarrels in matters of taste.1 But this is, in my opinion, too negative of a way to talk about taste. Because being confronted with different tastes â whether one quarrels about them or not â can open vistaâs on beautiful, important, and tasteful things that one up until that moment had never considered but which subsequently bring a lot of joy, happiness or poignancy in oneâs life.2 And this is the spirit in which I compiled this list; so the reader can enjoy new music which would otherwise never have crossed their path! As it is a rather cumbersome task to keep up with all the music that is released. And I would have never managed to do this myself if it werenât for the efforts of the editors at the unsurpassed music website Allmusic.com.3 Their monthly recommendations were my guide in determining which music I wanted to try out, and I can recommend this section to everyone. Finally a side note pertaining to this list: These are the best albums out of the oneâs that I have managed to hear in the last twelve months, and it is entirely possible that I did miss a lot of beautiful music.