Music

Music is a necessity. Though I focus mostly on alternative/industrial/EBM/electronic styles, my tastes are eclectic and wide-ranging.

Sunburnt, but it was worth it

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So yesterday I had to get up really early to get the U-Haul I’d rented to move all my equipment out to Casey’s wedding back to the shop by 9:30am. Setting the alarm for 8am was a little painful, but I managed to do it, and got the van back on time. And I even got it for a discount — whichever employee had rented me the van had screwed up when they put in the odomoter reading, so rather than charging me mileage for the 70 miles or so I actually drove, I just got charged for 10 miles total — just under $40!

Once that was done, I started taking the bus back home, but as the bus started going by the Seattle Center, I remembered that the Bite of Seattle food festival was going on. So, I hopped off the bus — and happened to get off at a stop right at Rick’s front door! So, I wandered up to his place, grabbed him, and we spent the rest of the day wandering around the Seattle Center, listening to good music and people watching.

Well, okay — girl watching. Summertime in Seattle is such a nice time for finding eye candy, and yesterday was gorgeous — cloudless with a projected high of 88 degrees. Lots of eye candy!

Anyway…(ahem). At one point in our wanderings, we started hearing a group performing “Papa Was A Rolling Stone”, which has always been one of my favorite songs. We headed over to see who was performing, and it turns out that it was an absoutely incredible acapella group called Kickshaw. These guys can make the most incredible sounds with their voices — one of the five of them can even do an astounding (and practically flawless) imitation of a DJ scratching on a turntable…just amazing to see. We ended up staying there and being blown away by the rest of their set, and I picked up a copy of Superstar, the one CD they’ve released so far. While it doesn’t have the energy that their live performance does, and they’ve added a member since it was recorded in 1999, it’s still not bad at all…and I’m looking forward to having another chance to see these guys.

It was a great day — I made it back home at about 10pm, quite happy — and quite sunburnt. Thank God for Aloe lotion…! It was well worth it, though.

I know most of these

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Here’s a fun little read — someone’s made a list of the top 40 gay themes, compiled not (necessarily) by popularity, but by the songs themselves and their relationship to the gay world. More interesting and less campy than I expected at first.

(via MeFi)

ClearChannel sucks

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Listen to the radio much? I don’t — it seems there’s rarely anything worth listening to anymore. Why? Easy answer — ClearChannel owns a ridiculous amount of the radio stations in this country, and seems intent on driving them all down into blandness and mediocrity. The obvious conclusion: ClearChannel sucks.

(via DayPop)

Music industry wakes up

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It’s about time some of the music companies started realizing that, cliched as the phrase may be, “if you can’t beat ’em — join ’em!” According to a story in the LA Times, Universal and Sony will be offering low-cost, unencrypted music downloads over the ‘net. Individual tracks for 99 cents, albums for $9.99 — and they can be freely (and legally) burned to CD once they’re downloaded. Hopefully it will work well enough that the other studios will follow suit….

Faster than a speeding bullet

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Major benefit to having my own DSL connection: because it’s up 24/7, I can run this website out of my own house, off of an iMac I have here.

Major downside to my DSL connection: at the level I can afford to pay for, while my incoming speed is great (1.5Mbps, equivalent to a T1 line), my outgoing speed bites (128kb/s, about twice the maximum theoretical speed of a 56k dialup modem).

This has been bugging me for a while — while my outgoing speed is great for the majority of my site (text and graphics are small enough to transfer quickly), the .mp3 mixes I have available for download on my dj propaganda page take forever to download whenever someone decides to grab one. I was whining to Casey about this yesterday, and he pointed me over to a friend of his.

So, at this point, I’d like to give major thanks to Karim, who graciously let me use some space on dragonshed.org to host my .mp3 files. As dragonshed sits on top of an OC3 connection (155.52 Mbps — insanely huge pipe), anyone who wants my .mp3s will now be able to download them at the maximum possible speed of what ever line they are using to connect to the ‘net with.

So, I’m in the process of uploading all my mixes to dragonshed now. I should have them all transfered over to the new server by the end of the weekend. Thanks again, Karim!

(Update @ 12:48 am Saturday — they’re all transfered over now — woohoo!)

New mixes online

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It took a while, but I finally got two new mixes encoded and available from download. I actually made these a few months ago, before I moved out of my old apartment, but just now found them and got around to posting them. I’m pretty happy with they way they came out, too. Both of them can be found on my dj propaganda page in my DJing category archives — here’s the track listings:

Eclecticism Where Time Becomes a Loop
Dario G Carnival de Paris Goodmen Give it Up Chemical Brothers It Doesn’t Matter Fatboy Slim Song for Shelter Lionrock Are You Ready to Testify? A3 Woke Up This Morning Psykosonik Unlearn Everything But the Girl Wrong Annie Lennox Little Bird Clivilles & Cole A Deeper Love Sagat Fuk Dat Lemon Interrupt Big Mouth Technoclassix In the Hall of the Techno King

Orbital Time Becomes DJ Geek Travelling Erasure Run to the Sun BT Remember Blue Amazon The Javelin ReleveleR Sourpuss Sarah McLachlan I Love You ATB Don’t Stop Aqua Dr. Jones Orbital Time Becomes

Download and enjoy!

Kidney Thieves/16 Volt/KMFDM/Pig

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Well, it took a few days for me to get off my lazy butt and actually put anything up on my page — but the concert I went to on Friday night kicked much ass!

Work let me leave early in order to catch the show, so I took the 6:20 bus back into Seattle from Redmond and got home about 7pm. Laura showed up here about the same time (as she’d picked up the tickets a few days before), and we wandered down to the Catwalk Club right about 8pm. The club is interesting, in a very grungy (as in dirty, not the music genre) sort of way — a sprawling, dimly-lit basement, more or less (there are QuickTime VR pictures of the club available, if you have QuickTime installed on your computer — good pictures, but the club didn’t look nearly that clean to me). Once there, we met up with Rick, Chad, James, Ron, Kim and Kayo.

The KidneyThieves were the first band. Rick turned me on to them back when we were in Anchorage, and had seen them before. They put on a short, but fairly good show — not the best live performance I’ve seen, but far from the worst — much of the problems were more due to sound difficulties (this was the first show of this tour) than to anything with the KT’s performance. Free, the lead singer, is absolutely drop dead gorgeous, which was definitely made watching the band that much more fun — Rick had told me she was, but there’s a definite difference between being told that, seeing pictures, and actually getting to see her in person! After their set the band sat at their merchandise booth and Rick introduced me to Free (he’d met her the last time he saw them) — I made a goob of myself, fairly predictably, but that’s okay. I’m used to it.

Next up was 16 Volt. Not much to say here, except that I’m glad I wasn’t there to see them — most of us spent their set sitting in the bar, talking and having a few drinks. I think Kayo (Kim’s husband) and one of his friends were the only ones from our little group to actually go out and watch them.

The headliner act, though, was well worth the night! Pig and KMFDM took the stage together, and (aside from the aforementioned sound quirks here and there) put on one hell of a show. While I’m normally quite content with staying towards the outskirts of things, this time I was in just the right mood to dive right into the middle of the crowd right in front of the stage! While I did my best to stay out of the pits that appeared, I got dragged/shoved in from time to time…but then, that’s part of the fun right? All in all, I got clocked upside the head a few times (once by an elbow, and once by a foot), got my toes landed on quite a few times, got a good few bruises on my sides from flying elbows — and had an absolute blast!

Once the show was gone, Chad, Laura and I went up to IHOP for breakfast — we waited around for everyone else for a bit, but never did find them (I’ve since found out that Rick went off with James and Ron, who didn’t want to wait for us to come out…Kim and Kayo just disappeared somewhere along the line). After breakfast, time for home and bed.

Great show, though — and they’ll be back in July, so if all goes well, I’ll be able to see them then, too!

Gotta love living somewhere that actually has good shows!

Frikkin’ Major Tom!!!

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I got to go to another concert last night — Peter Murphy! It was an absolutely incredible show. He focused mostly on songs from his most recent album, Dust, but also tossed in a few of his more popular songs from other older albums, including both ‘Crystal Wrists’ and ‘Roll Call’, two of my favorites.

I went to the show with Rick, and while I was there I ran into a friend of mine that I chat online with fairly often, pleasure_lil_treasure_99. She’s been to see Peter four times before this, so after he closed his main set with ‘Roll Call’, she told us that he only ever does one encore. Well, not only did he do one encore, he then proceded to do a second — and then a third! The third was completely mindblowing, too — an absolutely gorgeous cover of David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’.

Altogether, an absolutely incredible show. Too, too cool. Afterwards, Pleasure was kind enough to give me a ride home, and we hung out for a while until she had to pick up her friends and head home…at which point I hit the bed and passed out.

Peeeeeeeetaaaahhhhhhh!

Music, books and other real-world fun

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Back in the summer of 1991, right after I graduated high school, I took a trip to Germany with the Bartlett High School German Club. While there, I was browsing through a music store and stumbled across a band that sounded interesting — Poems for Laila. I picked up two of their albums, Another Poem for the 20th Century and La Fillette Triste.

Unfortunately, over the years, tapes die — especially well-listened to tapes, as these definitely were. I’d never been able to track down any PfL albums over here in the states, and the times I’d looked into trying to get them as imports, it had either been more expensive than I’d wanted to try, or I hadn’t had a credit card available. This week, however, I stumbled across AudioGalaxy (one of the modern Napster alternatives), and have spent the past day downloading PfL .mp3’s like a madman. Not only have I been able to regain both of the albums I used to own, but I’ve also got the entirety of two more albums (Katamandu and I Shot the Moon), plus much of a few other albums that they’ve released since then. It’s great to finally be able to hear this band again — wonderful, beautiful music. So I’ve been cheezing over that.

I also picked up my next book to read — a compendium of the entire Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis. I haven’t read these in ages, and am greatly looking forward to diving back into them again. Should be quite cool.

That’s really about it for now, I suppose. Tomorrow starts the work week again — what fun!

Woohoo?

I wanna go!

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This may surprise some of my friends, as I’m not generally known as much of a country listener (you can thank/blame [depeding on your preference] many of the women in my life for that little quirk), but there’s a show at the Gorge that I really wish I could afford to see, and had the transportation to get to.

Saturday, May 5th: The Brooks and Dunn Neon Circus and Wild West Show, featuring Brooks & Dunn, Dwight Yokam, Gary Allan, Chris Cagle, and Trick Pony (one of the best country bands I’ve ever heard – I babbled about them in March of ’01 when I discovered their album).

Ah, well. Just thought I’d whine for a moment. ;)