For example, my current book. Listening to Kajiura’s darker/eerier instrumental music makes the words flow for that story, for some reason. For the Philosopher’s Society, on the other hand, the writing goes most smoothly to guitar-driven hard rock and metal (especially progressive-ish metal).

It’s basically like each story has a specific sort of soundtrack that it wants or that suits it best, which is so much cooler than just having a type of music that helps you write. But that might just be me. Either way, I’m excited about eventually discovering the soundtracks for the other stories that are in my writing queue!

What kind of music-for-writing habits or patterns do you have?

I have actually realized recently that she is what one could consider my “musical muse”. I can’t think of a single instance where I was suffering from writer’s block of some sort and listening to something by Kajiura didn’t break through. And for those of you who have a witty retort, I can indeed think of several occasions where the breakthrough did in fact occur shortly after I started listening to her music. So, ha!

I don’t think she’s the best composer in the world or anything of that sort. I’m not that kind of a fangirl, you know! She lacks versatility, for one thing. While, for example, Yoko Kanno can compose music of virtually any style and have it sound amazing, Yuki Kajiura has a very distinct sound. Well, set of sounds, really. But I can instantly recognize anything by Kajiura, and I almost always love it.

Even just looking at her work from an instrumental standpoint, she already hits several points for me. Her work generally features a heavy usage of string instruments, including cello and, if my ears do not mistake me, sometimes a viola. I happen to love strings, especially cello. In addition, she frequently uses piano, many of her songs use an electric guitar either as support or for the melody, and she has a really interesting way of using vocals. She also uses saxophones. I love saxophones. Composers do not use saxophones nearly often enough.

Beyond that, Kajiura has a special feel to her music which is really what catches me. As I mentioned before, she has a few distinct sounds into which you can categorize pretty much all of her music. Some people may count this as a mark against her skills, but I don’t care because her sound is already perfect to my ears. I don’t care if she can branch out into other types of music, because the way the bulk of her music sounds is a sound that I am utterly enamoured of. I could sit and just listen to my favourite tracks of hers for ages.

But when it comes to music, words are simply insufficient. I was going to dig up a few links to YouTube uploads of some good examples of her music, but I found this instead. Someone took the Tsubasa Chronicles soundtrack and put together a set of “previews” with short exerpts from each song. This one has a collection which is, in my opinion, a fairly good sampling.

Tsubasa Chronicles soundtrack previews

Don’t mind the J-Pop at the end, as it’s just the closing theme and not actually by Kajiura.

And now I am going to give you links to some of my favourites!

Duran Shoukan, from Mai-HiME*
break the sword of justice, from Tsubasa Chronicle
breathless, from Tsubasa Chronicle
1 & 0 city, from Tsubasa Chronicle
Contractor, from Pandora Hearts
Will, from Pandora Hearts

There are tons more, but I doubt they’re all on YouTube and I’m too lazy to find them, anyway.

* Whoever decided that this was supposed to My-HiME is stupid. The girl’s name is Mai. Okay? Okay.

I have a music library, and it is a good music library. I enjoy listening to my music very much. I would enjoy listening to it at work very much as well. However, I have no way to do so. Anything like an iPod is out, by the way, for reasons too numerous to comfortably inflict upon your eyes.

So, what I would like is conceptually simple, yet difficult to find. I want some sort of software which will enable me to effectively stream my music from home to my work computer, as per an internet radio. And I would like to be able to queue up songs or even play pre-set playlists. From work.

It becomes marginally more complicated when I inform you that I use Linux at home. Debian, to be precise. Debian squeeze, to be even more precise. And the quantity of decent music streaming software available for Linux (particularly with a GUI but let’s not get into that right now) is less than impressive. I had previously been using gnump3, but the fact that it is more “stream individual tracks on demand” and less “run an automated radio station with a request feature” is making me somewhat hesitant to just use it again.

If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment. Please.