Right now, I am enjoying Tettix's wonderful (and free!) Rites, which is a sort of glitched-out reworking of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps. It is excellent. If you are at all in favour of glitchy orchestral/electronic crossovers (and here I include artists like Venetian Snares, 65 Days of Static and Acoustica), you should make your way there ( Read more... )

The playlist on the office iPod has 272 songs.

At a crude average of 3:30 each, that's just under 16 hours.

At 8.5 hours per day, that's less than two days' worth of music.

It's been on all day, every day, for three weeks.

It's mostly Jack Johnson, Café Del Mar and Dido.

I am ready to shoot someone.

OK, question: how come Interpol and She Wants Revenge sound EXACTLY THE SAME, but there is no discernible connection?

I am quite enjoying iTunes' new Genius feature. So far its guesses have been quite impressive, even if it doesn't seem to know about Two Lone Swordsmen. It does seem to be pulling up Juicebox by The Strokes at every available ( Read more... )

On the one hand, I am tempted to download Ghosts, at least the free version. In spite of all the self-deprecatory rhetoric in the press release about this being an "experiment" and the quality being "wildly varied". In spite of touchy-feely-wanky sentiment like "Eyes were closed, hands played instruments and it began". The key word for me here is " ( Read more... )

...say all the people who were at the Muse concert this evening. Well, so one would expect, anyway. I, for one, am very stinky.

BUT OH MY GOD. WHAT A CONCERT.

Basically, better than every other concert I've ever been to. Combined. Every song was simply outstanding. Utterly, utterly amazing.

The pick of my crappy phone-camera photos (still ( Read more... )

“When I read something saying I’ve not done anything as good as Catch-22 I’m tempted to reply, ‘Who has?’”
- Joseph Heller

The buzz leading up to the release of each of the last three Radiohead albums has been pretty much the same: a general air of “maybe this is the album where they stop fucking around with synths and get back to making proper ( Read more... )

Surely, until now, the worst cover of a Smiths track has been Death Cab for Cutie's hilarious version of This Charming Man. But no, this bullshit has blown it out of the water.

Like he says, please. Stop him.

In related but better news, now that I know to listen for Johnny Marr on the new Modest Mouse album, I am totally hearing him, and wondering ( Read more... )

My BitTorrent client has spent the better part of four days downloading a 29-disc set of the complete works of Béla Bartók.

That's two and a half gigs of Hungarian classical and folk music.

A day and a half of listening time.

*puts on headphones*

Journal: Thanks for all your comments and suggestions. Unfortunately I made a rash change just before leaving the computer for about fourteen hours, so most of you saw a very broken version. Hopefully things are back to normal now.

The Frames: Bad idea to make the very first words to the very first song on the very first album I listen to the same ( Read more... )

Good albums remind you of other good albums.

Bad albums remind you of the last album by the same artist.

And so it goes. Shoot me in the comments, but I am regretting buying Year Zero already. I'm not getting anything I failed to get from With Teeth. The Fragile remains my favourite, because I can listen to it and still want to listen to it again.

( Read more... )