Misophone - Deluded And Obscene

I have so much I want to live for, but nothing I would die for: I concede that sometimes when I was practising this song in my university’s practise rooms, I felt awkward. That is because despite the fact that I am an independent spirit, and my university’s practise rooms belong to an ethnomusicology department where you would expect more open-minded people than the typical if-you-don’t-play-Rachmaninoff-you-are not-in-fact-playing-piano people running around in most music departments, I still realized that whoever heard me playing would inevitably wonder what the hell that barrel organ music was. If people hear you playing in a practise room, your music is most of the time invading whatever activity they are in the middle of, and tends to be accordingly unwelcome, so they will judge the music you play. I know it because I do it myself. Like last time when for the tenth day in a row, someone sat down to play the Amélie theme for an hour straight, and I thought “Enough already, move on to something else.” But despite the Amélie theme as a strong competitor, I am aware that there is probably not much that is lower in the practise room musical hierarchy than what I was playing with this song: A cheesy arrangement/cover song of an unknown song. So it’s a good thing that I am already 28 and I have learned to not care or think too much about what other people think. It is also a good thing that something like Youtube exists where unpopular stuff will only be found by the people who look for it. A year or more may go without anyone ever reading this, but when they do, it must be someone who is either a Misophone fan, or has liked some other arrangement I did and decided to check this one as well. Which is exactly the kind of audience I am doing this for. This song is as much a 21st-century phenomenon as Misophone himself. Misophone stands for everything that is right with the music industry and what the revolution that is the internet really amounts to. Misophone, as I understand, is some random guy (or maybe two guys? Not sure) with a beard somewhere in the UK (Bristol maybe?) who writes tons of peculiar barrel organy music with loads of even stranger instruments some of which he builds himself and records all of this by himself in his presumably dimmed basement room; thanks to the internet, he has got some exposure on internet radio such as Last.fm where I first heard this song, and he has been able to get some of his music out on small labels where people such as me buy them (I have two of his albums). Although it has probably not made him rich nor will in the near future, it is much better than in the past when the chance of exposure for the music of a guy sitting in his basement would have been close to zero because live music was all the music there was (which I assume is impossible in Misophone’s case because of the many sometimes weird instruments appearing in a single song). Misophone’s music works as a whole, that is with the titles, lyrics, album artwork etc. It is conceived as the music of a past – “the music of our grandparents” – and no matter how fictitious this past may be – indeed it undermines all specificity – it makes for a really interesting experience and takes me to a place I thoroughly enjoy. Although transcribing this song took some time because of the thick texture of instruments, arranging it was rather straightforward and the arrangement isn’t too difficult. All in all I hear some percussion instrument, three violins, two guitars and a glockenspiel in this song; in my arrangement the left hand performs the task of maintaining the percussion’s triplet-feel rhythm, which is achieved by combining the long notes of the lowest violin with the chords that the acoustic guitar plays. The right hand is free to wander around and play the rest of the instruments, namely the long notes/melody in the other two violins, as well as the glockenspiel and the clean electric guitar wherever they appear. This was certainly a fun one, not least because of how much I like this song – maybe Misophone’s best among the ones I have heard.