Music

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

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. ;)

Beck’s iPod

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Cool ad from Apple on “…the back page of the Sunday NYT Magazine, which had an ASCII-art sillhouette of Beck’s head made up of the names of all the songs on Beck’s iPod, with some marketing copy explaining that Beck has a ginormous library of MP3s from which he loads 5GB at random onto his iPod every day. Then I opened up Kottke.org and there was a link to a PDF of the ad (minus the marketing copy), which is indeed cool.” The PDF file is here, the quoted text is courtesy of Boing Boing.

Buckets of what?

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Times I wish I had a ‘completely bizarre’ category. I can understand being peeved if I had a music video being shot outside my apartment at 4am. But did Britney Spears really deserve to have buckets of urine thrown at her (and…though I hesistate to ask…just why did these L.A. residents have buckets of urine available to throw?)?

Plans always change

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Well, I was going to go see Daniel Ash at the Crocodile tonight, but unfortunately, due to a car crash, that’s been postponed for a month and a half. Bummer. I’ll be looking forward to that show when it rolls around, though — Daniel has at various times been parts of Bauhaus, Love and Rockets, Tones on Tail, and has had his own solo career. Hopefully the crash wasn’t too bad — I’m guessing not, since they’ve already got a rescheduled date of April 22nd, should be a cool show.

So, rather than that, it looks like there’s a fair crew of people heading out to The Vogue. I’m going to meet up with Gail, a friend that I’ve met in Yahoo! Chat and meet and get some food (we were going to meet at the concert tonight, but since that’s been cancelled…). Then, off to the Vogue to meet up with Chad, Rick, and our friend Megan who’s another expatriate Alaskan now living and going to school in Portland. Candice should be showing up around midnight or so after she’s done with a babysitting job that she’s at right now. Should be a fun night!