Category: Music

Hmm, maybe I’ve found my Christmas present: Talking Heads Brick. The entire Talking Heads catalog remastered in CD and DVD 5.1 audio versions. The original Sire CDs were actually pretty good, so I’m hoping that these better be “revelatory” to justify the rerelease…

naija jams | the naija music blog. Introducing selections of Nigerian music both old and new. Cool!

This will only interest Japanese speakers or those who love Pizzicato Five, but Maki Nomiya now has a blog called “Nomiya Maki Oshare Blog”. Three entries so far, with a little tidbit about P5 and the filming of one of their videos. If your Japanese is rusty, you can get a translation here.

Gah! These chain blog posts! I don’t usually answer these type of surveys, but I was interested in seeing what Phil had on his computer. So here we go:
Total volume of music on my computer
3,222 songs from 1,072 artists, taking up 16.14GB and making for nearly 8.8 days of 24-hours-a-day listening.
My work computer (the playlists rarely overlap)
1,320 songs from 512 artists, taking up 6.05GB and making for nearly 3.7 days of 24-hours-a-day listening.
The last CD I bought
Black Cab’s Altamont Diary, as I’d liked the two tracks I’d found on an mp3 blog. An Australia-only release, I found it used and had to manually order it using back-n-forth email with the shop owner.
Song playing right now
Thievery Corporation playing live with a full band on KCRW’s Morning Becomes Eclectic
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me
That changes every day, so currently it’s:
Hot Chocolate – Everyone’s a Winner
Junior Senior – Itch You Can’t Scratch
Nerina Pallot – Everybody’s Going to War
Parry Gripp – Do You Like Waffles?
Go Home Productions – Girl Wants (to say goodbye to) Rock And Roll
For those in the know, look for these on MILLS2005PTONE
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton
Mostly because I want to know how many gigs they’re using: Peter Nacken, William Mellot, Danny Gregory, Patrick Benny, and Jean Snow.

I first saw James Brown in 1962 at an outdoor theatre in San Diego and it was indescribable… it was like putting a finger in a light socket. He did the whole thing with the cape. He did ‘Please Please Please’. It was such a spectacle. It had all the pageantry of the Catholic Church. It was really like seeing mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Christmas and you couldn’t ignore the impact of it in your life. You’d been changed, your life is changed now. And everybody wanted to step down, step forward, take communion, take sacrament, they wanted to get close to the stage and be anointed with his sweat, his cold sweat.

That and 19 others in
Tom Waits on his most cherished albums of all time

Thanks to William for pointing this out. This BBC Radio doc on John Peel has made me sad all over again. He’s one person for which the superlatives are justified.

Most excellent chronology of Bowie’s most productive period: 1974-1980. And here’s a great quote:

PM: You seem to be fascinated by cities like Berlin…
DB: Berlin, because of the friction. I’ve written songs in all the Western capitals, and I’ve always got to the stage where there isn’t any friction between a city and me. That became nostalgic, vaguely decadent, and I left for another city. At the moment I’m incapable of composing in Los Angeles, New York or in London or Paris. There’s something missing. Berlin has the strange ability to make you write only the important things – anything else you don’t mention, you remain silent, and write nothing … and in the end you produce Low.

A few years ago, I discovered the most wonderful mystery of the Numbers Stations, strange coded messages of a spy agency nature that could be found only at the top reaches of the shortwave radio dial. A year later they would become “cool” (in quotes) after Wilco used some on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I bought a CD-ROM about them, but at the time the holy grail of recordings was the four-disc CONET PROJECT, a loving anthology of the greatest “hits” of number stations: sine-wave jingles, children reading out numbers in German, static, static, static. You could find some copies on the web, but it was at an exhorbinant price. What a surprise then to find that Irdial Discs, who first released the CD, has made it available via mp3 along with the very extensive liner notes.
Choice stuff, folks!

A good defense/appreciation of the Beatles American albums. Either way, it’s good to have these stereo versions out compared to the “mastered on wax paper” 1987 CDs that have still yet to be remastered.

WhatGoesOn.com- New Beatles Capitol box set misunderstood by critics:
It should be noted that in the early sixties, teen albums rarely sold in excess of a few hundred thousand copies. Capitol?s success with its reconfigured Beatles albums containing hit singles changed that. Record companies soon realized that well-crafted rock albums could be big sellers. A few years later, thanks to the Beatles and Capitol, the album replaced the single as the dominant pop and rock music format.