just as a footnote to my post from a couple of days back, anyone interested in what happened to
audiogalaxy should check out
this article from 2002 by a former audiogalaxy programmer. he admits that at one stage, when the audiogalaxy project was struggling for cash, they “began bundling so-called spyware into the satellite installer, simply because they paid good money and nobody else was”. he also talks about how the audiogalaxy programmers spent only 10% of their time working on the technology/code that facilitated peer-to-peer file transfer (and therefore, dastardly evil music piracy), and that they were in truth much more focused on fostering online communities, allowing people to connect other people, recommend each other music and such. i never used audiogalaxy like that, but it strikes me that AG was in many ways a precursor to last.fm, in the way that it attempted to associate artists together, facilitate music recommendations, and also offer artists/labels legitimate means through which to offer mp3 downloads.
– — –
pitchfork has a
rare interview with the king of all view points
cornelius. there is also an
interview with the great man over at judy.se, which you will enjoy if you can read swedish. if, like me, you are mono-lingual, well there are a couple of great photos to look at.
– — –
gotye’s remix album “mixed blood” comes out in a couple of weeks, and my remix of “a distinctive sound” is on there, though i’ve gone and been confusing by renaming it “get acquainted”. what does it sound like? it sounds a bit like a half-drunk
dictionaraoke trying to pick up a girl at a bar, and then at the end i bust out this lame out hud guitar line! yEAH!~ don’t believe me? listen to it at
gotye’s myspace. you may already have heard it, its been given some spins by very kind djs on radio stations.
– — –
speaking of radio stations, melbourne’s
pbs fm is doing its annual supporter drive, so if you in any way consider yourself part of melbourne’s vibrant music scene you should consider showing your appreciation by giving pbs some of your money. you might win stuff too. join online
here.
i’ve been slowly getting to know the skeletons and the kings of all cities new record “lucas” in the last few weeks… its one of the few things i’ve ever heard that i would truly describe as ‘beguiling’. sometimes i feel like i’m close to unlocking it. actually this is what it felt like when i first started listening to sung tongs, i didn’t really understand what the hype was about and couldn’t really connect with that album beyond its most accessible elements. and then, driving around spain in a rental car, the penny dropped and i just got it. sometimes you has to listen to a record 1000 times hey.
“driving around spain in a rental car” - what a wanker!
well if listening to lucas feels like going down the rabbit hole… heading to the
shinkoyo website to find out more about the man/people/label behind skeletons, i feel like i’ve crashed the party next door where i don’t know anyone but everyone is cool and they’re definitely smoking something upstairs. its the annual neuroscience students ball afterparty, there’s jazz on the turntable and people are wearing skivvies. i get the feeling that if i wanted to immerse myself in the shinkoyo catalogue i would have to do so at the exclusion of all other music.
one of the most curious and immediately fascinating things i’ve found associated with the skinkoyo is
ciat-lonbarde, website of mad scientist synth-maker peter blasser who makes analog synths that look like someone has taken your favourite wooden toys from your childhood and screwed pegs and speakers into them.
Oh, it’s like… I think they’re some of the most fascinating instruments that there are. Most of them are like analog synthesizers, but he builds them in such a way that they’re not… they’re not idiomatic. They’re not normal musical instruments. He has tools that you can get… You can buy kits for them and build them yourself. One’s called the “fourses” and one’s called the “fyrall”. They’re basically completely random instruments. They just have a bunch of pegs and a bunch of knobs and he doesn’t tell you what any of the knobs or the pegs do. When you build it, you can connect the knobs randomly to other stuff on the synth. You can build it in a way where you don’t have any idea what anything is at all. That’s the way it’s designed.
says matt mehlan
go to
ciat-lonbarde and get lost, its fun. people from around the world have ordered kits, assembled them at home, and sent peter pictures to
post on his site.
its my birthday today, now y’all know what to get me.
i used to put these tracks on mix cds together. those are lost times, these are like lost songs and i never would have thought that only six years after hearing these songs i’d be listening back to them with this kind of teary nostalgia for old times, twisting in the space where i imagine my ‘heart’, making me uncomfortable and at the same time ecstastic. discovering these songs again after all this time, is like the ghost of a dead loved one appearing, speaking. or, less dramatic, like seeing a photo of a fun time you’d forgotten even having. when memories have been gone for a long time, they feel very strange when they come back. and the disconnect between hearing these songs now and the memories of hearing them then - do i feel weird because i’ve changed so much or changed so little? too hard to figure out.
a real oddity this week, as if they aren’t all odd. this is a rejected intro to ‘hermanns hermans’ which is track 2 from my album entropy begins at home. for a while i was actually going to use this as the album closer, i liked the idea of an album ending (kinda) back where it started. i also wanted to undermine what had come before with a blatant uncomplicated slice-and-dice of the soundtrack to labyrinth. its not rocket surgery! but i like the way the album ends, so now this track exists only as a footnote, and as a borderline-insulting love letter to trevor jonez.
a big shout-out to all-round nice guy
dave for letting me join him a couple of nights ago for a 2-6am graveyard shift on
triple r. we had fun. its got me all in the mood to make playlists, so here’s something i’ve assembled out of free mp3s that are available from last.fm. its meant to be listened to in order! but its ok if you don’t.
oh - if you only check one mp3 offa this list, check out
barrage - super-engaging homepop from melbourne boy. he has a 7″ out, check out that link to hear “only only” another great homebrew pop song… ok.
this is something i posted online a few months ago (before this weekly series started), but its worth posting again now that there are a couple more of you sniffing around this blog… the more i listen to this, the happier i am with how it turned out. it can and will be described as banjo troubadour drama re-interpreted as tribal jam with timbales that shakesdown into sleepy dawn folk. BOOM.
check aleks & the ramps
here. you should also check out
this article on aleks & the ramps at the mess+noise website, which makes for great reading oooooooh
“In the summer of our youth in 1970, in the heat and curiousity of Manhattan, we stumbled through the never-locked door of a semi-abandoned building, up four flights of dark and broken steps, we carried the shadows and brokenness of our young lives… Sincere openness and longing carried us from discussion through meditation into prayer… From this personal awakening we stirred to a shared communion, sounded in spontaneous music, whose mystery and magic defied explanation. Most who took part of the early gathering never wanted to leave, including a cult deprogrammer sent by a worried mom.” from
http://thetreescommunity.com
“Sometimes it was as if thousands of voices were joining and pouring through our own, like several Mellotrons being played at once in different keys, the music liquid, dynamic, ever changing. One night we might travel along a hot, dusty road in Ancient Egypt, with the sounds of donkey’s hooves and clanging pots. Another night we were adrift in a foggy sea, the boat groaning and creaking and a distant bell tolling. We were part of a living, breathing unrehearsed story — a symphony.” from
http://www.somedarkholler.com (the label responsible for re-issuing the trees community’s album “the christ tree”)
i like
last fm. i’ve got
my own last fm profile set as my home page, so every time i fire up the internet, the first thing i see is a chart that tells me what music i like.
computer gives me music and then tells me if i like it! i love you computer!
i got very excited a week or so ago when i discovered that you can now set your “overall top artists” to a “6 month rolling chart” as the default view on your last fm profile. for those who came in late, the basic concept of
last fm is it tracks every single mp3 you listen to and then puts it in a list so you can see which artists are most popular with… yourself. up until last week my “overall top artists” was stacked unfairly with bands that tim liked in 2005 because, well, that was a heavy mp3 listening period to me. but far more interesting - and when i say interesting, i mean interesting to me, and really no one else - is what i’ve listened to in the last six months.
i love stats! STATS! when i was little i used to create my own fantasy sports leagues and populate them with teams, players, and STATS! fun fact 1: i even had a draft! fun fact 2: i still think about it every day! STATS!!
IM IN UR WEBSPACE, OGLIN YOUR HALO 2 STATS (go nismoduck)
well, my latest brush with last fm has been a sad affair that rivals
the time i tried to add myself to wikipedia and was deemed too unimportant. you see, last fm has a feature for artists called powerplay - you login, upload your music to their servers, and then - for a small fee - they mercilessly shove it down unsuspecting last fm radio listeners throats! i had a bit of extra cash because i sold my copy of
star trek: the badlands on ebay, so i thought i’d give it a shot, and set up a little powerplay campaign to test the waters. 100 ‘powerplays’ for US$20! too easy. little did i know last fm would slap me in the face, like a mother might an unrelenting crying baby, with the harsh cold backhand of reality:
OUCH! zero love!
but its ok i still love you last fm
for anyone who caught my chat with nina marie on
pbs fm yesterday and wanted to know more about the music i played on the show - here’s some links. i’m going to be popping in on nina’s show
recovery semi-regularly from now on, pretending that i know anything about music, and making lots of ill-informed generalisations about the internet. woo! pbs fm now has online radio on demand, so you can tune in whenever you like wherever you like.
—- solo andata is: pristine electro acoustic transmissions from melbourne/perth/london/sweden MP3:
Solo Andata - A Ballet of Hands
