Sorcery: Stunt Rock OST (Moving Image Entertainment)
Purchased used at Rosie's Records
I know I've written about my use of this forum before: music commentary, a small amount of analysis and musicology, and autobiography. Well, I'm going the latter for a few paragraphs, so indulge me.
I turned in my notice at Carnegie Mellon last Friday. I'd been working there for twenty years. A few people, most notably my wife, knew in advance, but mostly I've stayed quiet about it. It's not a secret now, but I haven't been oversharing on something like Facebook. (Yet.)
The fundamental truth has been: I've been unhappy in the job. Some of is the nature of the position. The majority of my job was teaching a 101-level music technology to anyone: majors, non-majors, even staff. A graduate music major could be sitting next to a sophomore engineering student with no musical experience at all. And it was a mini-course, half a semester in length, fourteen sections in an academic year. I was simply weary of it.
There are other factors, but little else I care to write publicly. I did start to feel frustrated that I wasn't teaching to my particular skills and experience, at least directly. Being part time adjunct faculty, there wasn't the opportunity to create new courses as I wished. Early after I was hired I had an idea for a course/ensemble/seminar in which we'd study and rehearse various existing repertoire involving improvisation, aleatoric and indeterminate techniques; discuss the similarities and differences; develop new works based on those experiences; ultimately perform publicly. An expansion of some of the things I did with my high school avant-garde ensemble, CAPA Antithesis. It didn't take long for me to figure out there wasn't much of a lane for me to create new ensembles and courses as I wished. Just adding a second section of an in-demand course was a laborious task that took nearly a month of convincing the right people.
None of this is intended as a criticism of the institution. It's just the nature of the job. I feel like I was a workhorse for the school, that they got value for the buck from me. I would be shocked if the next person lasts twenty years. They'll probably hire a recent graduate with a shiny new PHD who will last five years.
Okay, that's starting to sound cynical. I don't really know that.
My wife has been calling it my retirement; I've called it quitting my job. I'm not retired, the real work continues. With luck and determination, maybe more than before. But whatever you call it, yes, I'm now retired from CMU. And looking for musical opportunities.
Thank for indulging me that.
This record...
I'd never heard of the movie Stunt Rock before seeing a trailer collection on Tubi assembled by Alamo Drafthouse. I haven't seen the complete film yet, but the trash film fan in me definitely wants to view it. From what I'm reading online, it's part fiction/mockumentary (1978, years before Spinal Tap), part stunt demonstration, part concert film. I guess Sorcery was a real LA band, kind of a predecessor to the Van Halen and later hair metal scene. You can hear their influences pretty directly: some Deep Purple, a bit of Blue Öyster Cult and Judas Priest, and definitely some Black Sabbath. The latter is pretty obvious with songs like "Wizard's Council", "Mark of the Beast" and "Talking to the Devil".
They're not bad. A little silly maybe, they're not that far from Spinal Tap. But you can hear some pre-Van Halen in here too. The vocals seem to be mixed a bit high, though maybe the convention of burying the voice under the guitar sound became more conventional later. I find the singer to be just okay, but then most singers irritate me.
I think I need to see the film!
The reissue from 2000 comes weirdly as a two LP set: standard black vinyl edition, and a second version of the same as a picture disc. Considering the cover is pretty bad looking (and the same on front and back), this seems like a silly move. I listened to the black edition, which was clear and well pressed. I've found picture discs to often be very noisy in the past.
I don't know that I'm going to keep at this blog as regularly as when I started, but I do intend to keep at it more regularly than I have been.
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