A fridge can tell you a lot about the household it inhabits.
If you were to examine five fridges from five different homes, you would know which one belonged to a house full of college students, which one belonged to the family of four, which one belonged to the single middle-aged man. The interior (and exterior, for that matter) of this one appliance can give clues to everything from eating habits to family size to income to cultural background.
Here’s what a kitchen detective could tell you about my household based on my own refrigerator:
- The magnetic letters on the lower-third of the exterior indicate young children. Or very short adults who have not yet mastered the alphabet.
- The movie theatre gift certificate stuck to the upper exterior is a sign that the parents in this family are delusionally optimistic about their chances of getting out more.
- Inside, the ingenious way that eight bags of milk are stored to maximize space demonstrates that someone in the family (hint: not me) is very practical and organized.
- The 18 eggs carefully balanced in a 12-egg rack are evidence that someone (hint: me) sometimes loses track of whether or not we need eggs.
- The co-existence of butter and margarine suggests that an old disagreement, based on deeply ingrained childhood preference, has ended in a grudging truce.
Like the contents of a refrigerator, the contents of Fridge’s 2001 album “Happiness” are varied, unpredictable, and at times delicious.
Each song’s title is literally descriptive of the track’s contents: “Drum Machines & Glockenspiel,” “Long Singing,” “Sample & Clicks”… it almost brings to mind meticulously labelled Tupperware containers. Many of the songs are a bit too drawn out for my tastes, and some are just plain hard to listen to.
But this one is great. It’s like that slice of cake up on the top shelf that you forgot was there.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. The way the piano and xylophone are chopped up so finely, then pieced back together to create something new…it’s basically the musical equivalent of magnetic poetry.
2. The loop you hear in the opening 16 seconds is the same as the song’s main loop, pitch-shifted up an octave, and compressed to be twice the speed. It’s like re-using last night’s dinner to make tonight’s soup.
3. The use of mallet percussion instruments is the signature of one of this band’s members: Kieran Hebden, who is better known for his solo project, which we featured way back in week 5.
Recommended listening activity:
Eating leftovers.