MP3 dance music. Like iTunes Store for digital DJs. From their site: "Beatport was launched to solve a problem. With the release of so much exciting new DJ technology specifically aimed at the dance market, there was no place for the DJ to find the best dance tracks from the best labels. What was needed was a DJ friendly, digital record store. A store where you can easily, quickly, cheaply and legally buy music…enter Beatport. Enter a digital network created by a group of likeminded DJ’s, artists, promoters and marketers to close the gap and accelerate the dance market into an entirely new realm."
Finally! Holly Palmer's album is out and on sale now at CD Baby and soon on iTunes!
All-In-One iPod & iPod mini FM transmitter, charger, cradle accessory for your car.
Excellent. The Pixies are coming to NYC in December and I have 2 tickets to the Thursday night show.
Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.
The Cure are playing at Randalls Island in New York July 31. The Curiousa Festival is a multi-stage event coinciding with the release of The Cure's eponymously named album. The album sounds like the Cure I remembered. The last album that comes as close to this is perhaps Bloodflowers. But this is, I think, their best since Disintegration.
It's funny for me to consider going to see them at a big festival. I listen to lots of different kinds of music these days, and every once in a while I'll listen to the Cure. They mark my introspective adolesence years, when the black clothes and moody ponderings of goth appealed to me. At that time my musical interests consisted of Goth (Cure and Siousxie), alt rock (REM, Echo) and House Music. I started listening to The Cure in 9th grade (1985?). I started with The Head on the Door and Standing on a Beach and slowly bought up older vinyl at Cheap Thrills and Music in a Different Kitchen in New Brunswick until I bought back through The Glove and Three Imaginary Boys.
I saw The Cure with Love and Rockets, the Pixies, and Shellyann Orphan for the 1989 Disintegration tour that stopped at Giant's Stadium. I remember having a deleriously sweaty and blissed out time there. It was the summer after my high school graduation. So as I listen to the new album, I'm feeling nostalgic. I'm also feeling a bit old to make it to a big show like this, but my friend J and I promised to make it to the Pixies if they stopped in the area, so this isn't much different. Mogwai are going to performing at this festival as well, so I'm into going for them too. Mogwai's space music often invades my workplace and solitary time headphones. So I'm seriously considering going.
Sunday was a beautiful day for the Hudson River Revival Clearwater Festival which was held along the Hudson river at the Croton Point Park, Croton-on-Hudson.
We caught the end of Vance Gilbert and all of Ani DiFranco's performance. I was sad to miss most of Vance. I always love hearing his voice and performance shtick. Ani was wonderful. She played for a little under an hour and did I think 8 songs (4 from Educated Guess) and two poems, including Grand Canyon (which she closed with) and another I hadn't heard before, but found on the web. To quote:
when they said he could walk on water
what it sounds like to me is he could float like a butterfly
and sting like a bee
literal people are scary man
literal people scare me
out there trying to rid the world of it's poetry
while getting it wrong fundamentally
now in the church of 'look it says right here, see?
I like that.
This marked my 4th Clearwater and Lorenzo's first. Robin started going 20 years ago. Yesterday's festival was beautiful. Lorenzo absolutely loved it and thought it was terrible that we had to leave. It's a wonderfully fun time for kids. There's always some music I enjoy, whether it's at the Rainbow or the Dance stage. And you can't beat the gorgeous view of the Hudson as the sweet light of the sun comes in. And with all this you also get to feel good about supporting Clearwater. Hopefully we'll start going again since we have a new reason to. We took the train this time and it was quite easy.
Stick-on CD/DVD labels similar to Avery 5824.
I grabbed singer/songwriter Rachael Yamagata's free iTunes single "Letter Read" (iTunes link) yesterday and then snatched up the Happenstance album. It's bound to be one of the summer albums I will play over and over again. Yamagata's is a wonderful raspy, but smooth voice that's like the texture of unrefined sugar on the tongue. "Happenstance" is a bunch of stories told over piano-driven jazz grooves and ballads.
Next album for the summer will be the Pixies "Bam Thwok". There's a single out now.
Holly Palmer just has one of those voices, sensuously laid over smooth grooves, that makes me flow when I'm painting, walking, driving, working... I first stumbled across her in the iTunes library that shipped with my old TiBook. It was the first release of the software I think, that included a ton of MP3s to get you started. After I heard her, I bought her eponymously titled album and loved it.
After seeing that she and Emm Gryner were doing backup vocals for David Bowie, I went looking for any new albums by HP. I found that she had a couple of singles on iTunes, which I grabbed, but also found that she signed with Warner and had completed two albums, but neither ever got released. Yet another anecdote to build consumer abhorrence for large corporate control of creative media. She had .WMV previews of the tracks which are hot, but for some reason she got trapped in that labels' machine.
Today I see on her blog that she's finally been released from the bonds of the corporate money machine. Luckily she escaped with the rights and masters for the two albums. Fingers crossed and lots of hope that she will get her albums out soon. 'Cause god knows I need help flowing in painting class.