dessalles

There was a time (likely just before my college years) when I distinctly remember thinking “you know, the music I’m into now, I could just listen to nothing but this for the rest of my life, I mean, it’s that good.” (it was high school) No doubt I wasn’t the first to pledge such lifelong musical satisfaction. And not unlike myself, the musically-satisfied lives of my predecessors probably lasted like… what? A couple months?

Or maybe not. Maybe everyone is still listening to the same crap (excuse me, I mean music) they listened to in high school or college or whatever (I’m sure it’s still very good and not dated at all). And maybe I was the very first to anull my I-never-need-to-listen-to-new-music-again vows, because, like, the next day the Internet started getting really good at dumping piles of the stuff on my head. And then computers started getting really good at helping people make even more music and, hell, now there’s an awful lot of it.

So wait… what was I talking about? continue reading »

Been messing around with a little web app and I think I’ve finally got it to a point where it’s worth sharing. The code is an absolute mess, featureless bugs infest every function, playback is super temperamental (just hit refresh) and you can’t pause (yet). But it works:

Watch My 45

It’s nothing fancy or particularly useful. In short, you watch (and listen) records uploaded to YouTube by some amazing reggae collectors: firebladerr1, oldwah and mrrk. I first came across this community last summer and what struck me about them was how successfully they’ve been able to digitize the experience of being a record collector. By recording their collections as video, instead of audio, some amount of ownership over the music they’ve collected is maintained. When you watch one of their 45s, you’re very much aware that you’re watching a specific record owned by a specific person. And in so far as that’s the case, I hope some sense of fulfillment as collectors is preserved. Because as much as we talk about property and ownership in information economies and the such, we continually forget to address the emotional aspects of those things. continue reading »

At one point I thought it’d be a good idea to start a music podcast because I like music and the internet is fun. So I took a playlist in my iTunes, cross-faded the living daylights out of it and gussied it up with tags, artwork and the such. At the time I thought “I probably shouldn’t post the first one until I’ve started the second one”, figuring that if I didn’t do so I’d almost certainly end up a one-cast-wonder. Alas, I never really started on that second one so the first has just been collecting dust. Have at it…

I Muke Lisic, vol. 1 (76mb)

1. Triosk – Votosk
2. Apparat – Fractales, Pt 1.
3. Christopher Willits – Medium Blue
4. Four Tet – Hilarious Movie of the 90s (Manitoba remix)
5. Four Tet – Hands
6. Squarepusher – My Sound
7. Kim Hiorthøy – Sane (Kim is Afraid Mix)
8. Caribou – The Barn
9. Chessie – Daylight
10. Bird Show – Ghost the Morning
11. Ekkehard Ehlers – Misorodzi
12. OOIOO – Moss Trumpeter
13. Rothko – Roads Become Rivers (Four Tet remix)

If you want a version with fancy chapters and album artwork for each song, download this one.

In case you’re wondering, the title is a spoonerism of “I Like Music”. I learst firned spoobout anerisms from Sil Shelverstein’s book A Runny Babbit: A Billy Sook – Ich whi reghly hicomend rou yead.

Oh and if you do actually bother listening to this mix and find it agreeable, lemme know. Maybe I’ll be inclined to follow it up.

Unfortunately it’s about 1.5 seasons too early for us northern hemis:

Winter notwithstanding, South African Blk Jks have garnered my undivided attention with Lakeside, yes.

[Image: still from Brent Gustafson's R.I.G.]

Tuesday’s printer freakout got me thinking: Whatever happened to Glitch?

Maybe I’ve fallen off the beat but I’m pretty sure what was once, you know, a thing is no longer a thing. [quick aside: one of my favorite definitions is Krome Barratt's definition for "thing" - something to the effect of "a thing is something which desires a name"] As far as current cultural/artistic movements go, I think Glitch is conceptually ten years too early. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, Glitch appeared first as a sub-genre of electronic music about 10 years ago. It employed the noises, clicks, “glicthes” and other incidental artifacts of errant digital audio as its basic building blocks. The concept was simple: use technology to make something beautiful out of technology’s waste.

[untitled by Oval from Ovalcommers, 2001]
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