Music of the week: five albums to bring with me to the desert island
I love music. My family, friends, colleagues love music. I am in quite a few music-related Facebook groups. A returning question everywhere in the past couple of weeks in various wordings was: what are the five albums you would bring to a desert island? This list is of course changing almost each and every year. And also depends on the number of albums, and if live concert recordings, “best of”, etc. albums can be included. So, this is the 2024 January edition with just studio albums :-)
You are what you listen to. I read several articles with this or similar titles. Well, almost all focused on the lyrics of music, and how that is related to the personality of the listener. This approach has multiple problems with me. The majority of music I listen to does not have any lyrics. I prefer instrumental music. And even if a music has a lyrics, I do not care. I can turn of interpreting English almost completely, and even my native Hungarian to a degree. To me the human voice is just yet another instrument. Probably the only exception is The War of the Worlds, but that’s another story.
The first album on my list comes from Vangelis. “Chariots of Fire” was the first CD I ever bought, and it is one of my favorite albums ever since. There were times when I listened to it almost daily. Nowadays I listen to it a few times in a year. I learned only years later that it is a film soundtrack. I also watched the movie. Not bad at all, but its soundtrack is much better :-) After 32 years I still have the CD, and it plays perfectly well.
TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/103208768
The second album comes from Pink Floyd. Many say that the album “Atom Heart Mother” is the odd one out in the Pink Floyd discography. Probably they are right, but that’s why I love this album. The first song, the “Atom Heart Mother Suite” almost sounds like classical music. Oh, and it’s definitely the odd one out on my list: the only album with lyrics. Not that I have any idea what is it about, I just enjoy the music. The last song begins with a couple of sound effects. Listening to those on a quality pair of headphones or speakers can be scary :-)
TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/7909666
If you take a look at my CDs, you will see that the largest collection is from Mike Oldfield. The various Tubular Bells albums are among my favorites. Of course I like the original version the most. But not the original recording. “Tubular Bells 2003” is a rerecording of the original version, and sounds much better than the original recording. It was not always this way. For many years the original recording was so much in my ears that I could hear all the little changes. It took some time before I could really enjoy the added quality of the new recording.
TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/2115739
The most recent album on my list comes from Japan. “Spectrum” by Hiromi is a solo piano jazz album. Most songs are her originals, and show off her virtuosity on the keyboard. The only exception is the song “Rhapsody in various shades of blue”. I hope you can guess from the title where the main motives of this song are coming from :-)
TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/119047902
Last but not least, an album from Hungary. To quote myself from a month ago: “One of my favorite albums is Vedres Csaba és a Kairosz kvartett – Áldott Idő / Blessed Time. It was made by Hungarian pianist Csaba Vedres, who worked together with a string quartet. Their music taught me that string quartets playing alone, with a piano, or with any other instrument can do some fantastic music.”
TIDAL: https://listen.tidal.com/album/27780222
You can also find the CD at the publisher http://perifericrecords.com/hun/catalogue.php?cont=artist&artist_id=1002, together with other albums from Csaba Vedres.
Obviously, this selection is just the tip of the iceberg. With more than five possible albums I would add many others: Philip Glass, King Crimson, ELP, Jean Michel Jarre, Kitaro, Kraftwerk and Rick Wakeman from abroad, or Solaris and After Crying from Hungary. These are just my most listened music, and we did not even mention classical music.
Finally, a question to all the amateur psychologists out there. If the statement “You are what you listen to” is true, what does this selection of music show about me? Am I a scary person or I’m a lovely person? Or both? :-) You can share your opinion with me on LinkedIn, Twitter or Mastodon. My accounts are listed in the top right corner of my blog.