Wireless + Whitlams
Glorious Sunday – two of my favourite things: Whitlams music, and wireless internet.
Yesterday arvo I finally got myself a new wireless router after B’s Airport base station, which had served the House of Bach for many years, headed to its new home at Morling. I headed to DSE Powerhouse, where I’d seen a D-Link wireless router with USB print server for $147 – pretty decent price. Took it to the counter, along with a $20 cable that I grabbed as well, and somehow managed to walk outta there paying $150 for the both and an extra year’s warranty on the router! Thank you check-out people! [They were supposed to discount the router's extended warranty to make both items $150... but instead discounted my entire order - score!]
So this morning, I had a bit of fun setting that up. It was fairly quick and easy… but the internet wouldn’t work for some reason. After much stuffing around, I finally decided to just power-cycle our cable modem… and voila! I guess the cable modem was just a bit upset about being connected to a new MAC address without it being reset.
Anyway… enough of the nerd-talk. Time for the more important bit: music.
The Whitlams released an album this morning; an album that came free with the Sunday Telegraph. It was a live album of their concert they played with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra back in September 2007. At the time, I was flawed by the evening and the music that filled my head. Tim Freedman describes it best on the cardboard sleeve that the CD came in this morning:
You sit in the middle of a symphony orchestra for two hours and you come out feeling you’ve been hit over the head with a velvet hammer. It’s not even that loud up there, but it’s lush and heady and very powerful.
The CD is just brilliantly mixed. The sound that I heard that evening was phenomenal (it was the first thing I’d seen at the Opera House) – I couldn’t believe how amazing the sound was for a live performance. But then hearing the recorded product was just incredible as well. I can’t believe how well they captured that atmosphere and how they managed to mix 100 odd musicians onto one CD and make it sound amazing!
The bonus bit was one track on the CD, and
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for download from Warner’s website, that have been lifted from Tim Freedman’s solo album that is apparently due out in 2009 – Piano / Vocal. Very, very cool indeed. They are all just previous Whitlams’ songs, but re-recorded with pretty much just Tim and his piano. I’ve always very much loved Tim’s playing and his lyrics – so hearing his songs very simple and “bare-bones” as such, will be very, very cool. Looking forward to that album.