So I was thinking about what kind of music all of us should be thankful for, and incidentally all the music came from what I listened to over the Thanksgiving Break.First is the soundtrack to 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by Stanley Kubrick. The film is within the science fiction film genre for its editing, sparse story, visual experience, and its realism for depicting outer space. The soundtrack guides the story along through man’s voyage beyond the stars. Three famous compositions are used: On the Beautiful Blue Danube by Johann Strauss II, Richard Strauss’s iconic Also sprach Zarathustra in the opening credits and Gy”rgy Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna. Each evokes an incredible feeling of guidance, dramatic proportion and awe — in that order.

Another film I happened to stumble across was A Fistfull of Dollars, the film that established the spaghetti-western genre, directed by the great Sergio Leone. I had never had the time to watch the film, but when one combines Thanksgiving break and Hulu, great things can happen. During the film I noticed the story and editing was insistent and hanging on the action of the music. The music itself contains the soul of the theme, the humor and the drama that, with the cliché style, leads to incredible enjoyment. Upon further inspection, I discovered the incredible composer, Ennio Morricone, who has composed dozens of films and is recognized for his themes from A Fistfull of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, My Name is Nobody and The Untouchables. Dramatic, ironic and ranging through vast styles, Ennio Morricone is hard to ignore and we are blessed to experience his music.

For many weeks I have deliberated whether or not to include my next rant. I have now decided that we should be most thankful for the loud, the great, the exemplary.

DAFT PUNK

Now this may not seem like a huge deal to you, but to me Daft Punk holds the gold, no, the diamond encrusted platinum medal, for being the only group to ensure a perfect and serene sound that completely and totally calms me down and reduces me to either a state of Zen or a state of extreme avidity. We can dance to it, we can sing it, and it kills me that Kanye West did a cover of it. But it doesn’t matter because their sound is wholly singular and incredible. Their repertoire as a group isn’t expansive, but anyone in the electronic world knows the robotic-clad-duo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger and One More Time. Actually, even you, dear reader, probably know it without knowing you do. When their live experience, Coachella 2006, was released, I loved it. They mixed their music together and introduced new tracks made all the more awesome by the fact that it was live. Two years later in St. Petersburg, I discovered the Alive 2007 album had been released. Following in the footsteps of Coachella 2006, I didn’t expect it to blow any rules. Oh how wrong I was.

More intense, more bass heavy, more willing to destroy car windows and shatter wineglasses, Alive 2007 rivals the majesty of DJ Tiesto, Paul Oakenfold and Armin Van Buuren crushed together in terms of best dance album or best experience to produce a feeling of all the awesomeness in the universe being crushed into a black hole simultaneously going thermonuclear.

Oh yeah, they’re also composing the music for Tron: Legacy coming out next year. There, said and done, they rule.