Blogging to an Empty Room

Various Stuff from Hugh

 
how to fake music insider status in a hurry

what is it about music geekery that it gets to avoid the stigma? every other kind of geek is uncool, but if you know obsessivley way too much about some obscure music scene that has as it's twin meccas an unpronounceable midwestern small city and Radom, Poland you are a DJ.

If you are normal (normal in the sense of boring-normal, not should-be-normal), then you may think that there isn't much of a music scene to be a geek of. Geeks, after all, thrive on detail. A quick visit to the listening booths in any medium size virgin record store is enough to absorb all of the detail currently available in what appears to be the modern music scene.

Wrong wrong wrong. Despite the frightening plastic homogeneity of the Crappy with 6 or 7 capital Cs mainstream music scene, there is a paradox at play here. Two contrasting forces, operating in nearly opposite directions, in the same world at the same time. Or perhaps more accurately, one big force operating in one direction in contrast to many many forces operating in many smaller directions. I speak of course of the simultaneous consolidation of the mainstream music industry, which is the face of music to the great majority of western listeners, and the diversification and thrivingness of all of the alternative musical genres and distribution channels. Today, thanks I suspect largely due to the reduction in cost of music recording and distribution technology, there are many successful niche music scenes. Or maybe there have always been lots of them, and I have simply been unaware because of the limited number of distribution channels and/or my own basic ignorance. That would be cool too. In fact, that is almost certainly true, now that I think about it. Ahem. In any case, there is plenty of detail for the modern music know-it-all to make their own.

Now, let's say you would like to pretend that you yourself are deeply versed in the all the 3100 hundred flavours that Baskin Throbbins has to offer the music lover of today. You want to give out that you have your finger on the pulse of the vast and thriving music culture. You want to make like a connected insider. With your finger on the pulse. For chicks or whatever. Easy: just go to these sites: Flux Blog, Tangomonkey's Said the Gramaphone, and download all the songs and read the blurbs and follow the links. There are more sites like these but I haven't yet found any more that are quite as good. I'm sure they are out there by the dozens.

It's a simple but effective concept: the mp3 blog. The author writes a blurb about a song they like/find interesting and post a download link. It's like listening to campus radio except the DJ gets to talk about each song in turn and the sound quality is better and you can listen to the song again and again. And because of the diversity of songs and the care of the bloggers, you can quickly pick up the lingo and spirit for purposes of superficial imitation.

Fer instance, from Said the Gramaphone:

The Arcade Fire don't do chamber pop any more - in fact, they don't do pop - but the rock they play is wild and varied and rich. Apart from nu-"Headlights" and "Alexander [?]", every single song they played could be an indie megahit - heck, maybe even a bona fine Billboard hit, with the right producer. Their sounds-likes circled like frantic birds (from Modest Mouse to New Order to Coldplay), and yet it was braver, wiser than all of this. Like Broken Social Scene with its gloves off (and with lyricists worth their salt); like the Flamings Lips if the Lips had been living in a post-apocalyptic no-dancing dystopia and were only now emerging, high-hats ringing, broadswords raised, to reclaim the Earth for youth and love and dream.

Damn. Go to a party in Rome and say that and see if it don't net you some play or something.

Also, there is this place, which I don't quite get yet but shows up in the discussion of many different music blogs. For slightly better faking, you could burn all of these suggested "guides-to" into mixed CDs and leave them lieing around in your car.

Note that those lists include, along with guides-to "Brit Pop", "French House", and "American Indie-Rock (1990s)", quickie primers for "Queen Street West, Toronto", "Three Chord Feedback Romps" and "Memphisian Hip-Hop". Gettin a little on the comprehensive side there, and growing.

Even if you aren't in it for the frontin', taking a rip through the tracks on the mp3 blogs is bound to net you something that makes you bounce and/or feel plaintive. There's a lot of bloody good stuff in there. All for the taking. Good job, music playing and sharing humans everywhere.
posted by Hugh at 1/24/2004 04:32:00 PM

 
canada a crucible of campus radio?

My music discovery model mostly goes like this: I listen to campus/community radio on the internet (or the radio if I'm lucky), scribble down the names of any tracks I hear that are particularly interesting, then download them and others from the same artist via filesharing. A few tracks later I get a sense of whether I like the artist and should nab all I can or move on.

When I first arrived at residence in Waterloo, my clock radio dial randomly happened to be set to CKMS' frequency, and for a couple of weeks my roommate and I had a morning ritual of waking up to whatever unfamiliar noise would come out of it until someone was awake enough to turn it off. "What kind of f*cked up radio station is that?" we'd wonder before shuffling off to the showers. Eventually there must have been a station ID, because I became aware that all the remarkable, often weird, sometimes beautiful, usually unexpected music was associated with the campus somehow. I've been in love with campus/community radio ever since.

The feeling seems to be mutual. Every university town I've lived in has had a good campus station. After CKMS in Waterloo there was the wonderful CFRU in Guelph and then balls-out KDVS in Davis. It's been such a good run that I came to assume that good, open format, wide-ranging, adventurous radio stations came pretty much standard to campuses. I was a little surprised to hear the orientation-lady at KDVS bad mouthing campus radio as mostly being a willing sop to the standardization trends of the larger commercial radio industry. All the campus radio I knew was nothing like that. In fact, half the time it was too outer for even me to enjoy. How is that commercial, wondered I?

I may just have been having really good luck with my campus radio stations. I've been putting together a playlist of all the internet-broadcasting radio stations I like (more on that later) and as part of my searches I was trolling on Yahoo. Try entering "campus community radio" on yahoo.com - not the Canadian version - and have a look at the results. Of the first 30 links returned, 22 are Canadian. Six are from the wide world (nigeria, india, the netherlands X2, indonesia or malaysia, and australia). A whopping two are American references. I got bored counting at 30, but a quick glance suggests the trend continues through 50 or more.

Granted, I am presumably missing heaps of worldwide stations in non-english speaking countries or places where they don't call it "campus" or "community" radio, but where's all the American stations?

Now I know there are some good US campus broadcasters. California is flush with them. I can't really explain how come none of those showed up in Yahoo. Searching on search engines and counting links is not a reliable survey tool. But I'm suspicous that the results may not be entirely false. I've gone through several lists of radio links now and they all have two things in common: either they're for Canada or California.

Have I been that lucky? Are the only places in CanAm with good campus radio be the places where I have lived?

Is this a sign of intelligent design?

Hello, God?

One things definitley is clear: Canada has a lot of great campus stations. I wonder what that means to our music industry. One trend clearly emerging from the current churning and thrashing of the music industry is that while the "big 4" music companies are suffering because of insert your pet agenda here, indie labels are thriving like never before in the history of recorded music. Some more or less biased folk are claiming that as a win for file-sharing: the notion being that, like me, people are using music piracy as a way to test the waters with smaller acts that they previously wouldn't have had any access to. Once hooked, some percentage of those listeners will then go on to purchase music or tickets from indie-label bands. And while that may not be a big percentage, any percentage of a lot of people is far more exposure than most indie-label bands could have hoped for when the only purchasing options were big corporate stores with homogeneous stock or little independent stores with limited stock.

If (big if) that theory is true and file-sharing is good for indies, and if (another if) other people are, like me, using campus/community radio as their pre-file-sharing step, and if (again with the if) the current trend of Canada being a haven for file-sharing continues, does that make Canada an really good place for Indie labels to do business?

That would be cool.
posted by Hugh at 1/07/2004 09:52:00 PM

 
pictures from the surface of another planet

If this doesn't amaze you in some way you suck. the spirit martian lander/rover is sending back the highest resolution pictures ever taken of the surface of another planter. They're in colour folks.

NASA seems to be publishing them in a few different ways, but the best seems to be this chronologically arranged list of everything that they get.

Lookit that. It's another damned planet.




posted by Hugh at 1/06/2004 11:44:00 PM

 
Anti-Bush TV Ads

If you have a fat internet connection and dislike the Bush administration, you're going to thoroughly enjoy this. MoveOn.org is cranking out yet another ab-fab project: "Bush in 30 seconds". They've launched a competition for best 30-second ad spot damning the current US government and all it's bullshit lieing and destruction. And the entries are grrrrreat.

The first round of voting is over and the 15 top nominees are being submitted to a panel of judges. Boingboing is reporting that the top two picks will be run bracketing the next state of the union address, although I can' find any confirmantion of that on the official website and I'm unsure of the feasibilty of getting the networks to play them then.

So watch them now, watch them all! They run from apocalyptic to goofy, and feature lots of kids kids kids. I busted a gut and got the chills. What more do you want from TV? The only downside to this is that they probably can't get them all onto the air. This is quality stuff.

(you'll need quicktime to watch these. if you don't have it, you can get the official version here or a hacked apple-free replacement here.)

While you're at it, buy a "blood for oil" bumper sticker at www.billionairesforbush.com and have a poke around the moveon.org website. MoveOn is to information-era politics what Greenpeace was to environmentalism in the 80s.

posted by Hugh at 1/05/2004 02:13:00 PM

 
incapable of blogging about new years?

I spent a few days around new years skiing into around and back from the shelter at the top of the Phelix Creek drainage. I don't think I could do justice to the trip by writing about it, and if I did it would be too long an installment to be readable.

I also didn't get any pictures, since I don't have a camera. Some other people took some pictures but I doubt I'll see them, and I don't remember anyone taking shots of the things that really moved me anyway. So the experience may have to go unrecorded except in my unreliable memory. Life is like that I guess.

Too bad there is no way to effectivley share though. At one point, cold though it was, I turned and caught the view over our up-track and with no warning almost started crying. Yep, I almost cried. Later, at the top of Mt. Aragorn, I stood and looked at the view of the mountains on the coast side and did it: I starting balling like a little girl. Yup, I actually cried. Then the wind picked up and it all froze to my face. Life is like that too I guess.

And that's just the skiing (I pulled telemark turns down the sunny side of a virgin-powder-filled slope by the way. Not good ones god knows, terrible terrible ones, but *I* telemark skiied the side of a mountain.) The scene at the hut will stick with me. I wish more of my friends were around these days, but I seem to have stumbled into a good group of other people's friends for now. And they do some really cool things.
posted by Hugh at 1/04/2004 02:53:00 PM