Friday 23 April 2004
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Pic of the day: Official album graphics, plus unofficial pig/moon by yours truly. (This may explain why I prefer screenshots and photograps.) An Odd songI bought a new CD, which is rare indeed for years now. Since I don't pirate music (so far), and still buy less and less, I suspect poor quality and insane prices is more to blame than file sharing. Otherwise I would buy significantly more than my online friends, but the opposite seems closer to the truth. Anyway, there is a story behind this purchase, as it is with pretty much any purchase of this size. It all started in the morning, as I was sleeping. But I shouldn't been that. The clock radio was blaring, but I had stayed up playing, taking my farewell with Paragon City and the heroes within. Now I was sleeping soundly, ignoring the radio. Until this song came on. The melody is very catchy, and it keeps speeding up and getting livelier. The text is weird, as you'll soon see. It starts kinda like a lullaby, but develops in the opposite direction. An anti-lullaby? An "yballul"? The song is in New Norwegian, my mother tongue. I have translated it here for your convenience, but the translation does not capture the rhythm in it and does it poor justice. Just believe me that when it was finished, I was wide awake and quite amused.
The pig stands squealing (A couple notes: Yes, the last line is consider rather rude even in Norwegian. We're talking bullshit here, in the metaphorical sense, not a perverse interest in fecal matter. Even so, it is bound to make people sit up. Secondly, the word I translated as "monster" in the pond is not a generic monster but "nøkken", a male version of water nymph, a seductive demon. There are also rumors that exceptional folk music composers have learned from this creature, and this might be what is meant here, I don't know. The melody certainly is good enough that one might suspect such an influence.) The CD is called Luring, which translates as something in between "clever one" and "trickster". A fitting title, since in my humble opinion the first track is the only worthwhile piece of music on it. Even so, I probably saved more money by not sleeping in than I spent on the CD, so it was worth it. ***Incidentally, listening to this song 30+ times over the day also gave me the inspiration for a shounen-ai story to end all shounen-ai stories. OK, not likely, but one could hope. I don't really think there is anything like that in the melody. But sometimes playing the same song over and over can cause a partial trance in which a small thing is magnified in my imagination. In this case, it was the whole running away with friend in the middle of the night that caught my attention. (I guess I should mention that in New Norwegian, the words "vaken" (awake) and "naken" (naked) sound kinda similar depending on context. This just occurred to me now.) It is actually a short story, not a novel for a change: The voice in my head has told it all, and I've made some notes. Not sure whether I will write it all down, though. My target audience is not likely to be interested in boy love (in fact, even I am not normally interested in boy/boy love, although magic angel-elf-aliens help). Oh yes. The name of the composer / artist? Odd Nordstoga. (Odd and Even are perfectly normal Norwegian boys' names.) So you can say it is indeed an Odd song! (While checking the web coverage of the album before uploading, I found a site that purports to link to places where you can download the album for a symbolic fee of less than $1. Hopefully it is an identity theft scam that will take your credit card and other information and use them with gay abandon, while installing a few worms and such on your computer. One can always hope that, at least. Because this song deserves to be bought!) |
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