pocketsnacks

Song lyric of the day:
“Strange how you never become,
the person you see when you’re young.”
Where Would We Be
Porcupine Tree
Lightbulb Sun

Recently I have found myself in that awesome position of really digging into some new (at least for my ears) music. I think it sort of started with my over listening to Tripswitch’s Circuit Breaker album, which I still think is just the friggin’ bomb. Anyhow, that kind set my mood for more down tempo leaning stuff than I had been listening too.

That I think led me back to Ulrich Schnauss , who I have been a fan of for a few years now, but never really got sucked into.

Well… I inhaled deeply.

And, man it is some good shit. I even went so far as to BUY some of his CD’s online. I do realize I am some sort of freak for actually doing that, but good music made by good people on small labels deserve our money. (Oh and I was also able to find Circuit Breaker as well. Got it too)

Sticking Ulrich Schnauss into the last.fm player also got me to discover Abfahrt Hinwil and their album Links Berge Rechts Seen.

They are on the Toytronic label, which my friend mr. projectile used to be on as well.

Their music is much more idm/minimal than the other stuff I have been listening too, but still pretty nice.

And then lastly, mr. projectile shared with me a link to a song on Jon Hopkins website, and I was immediately hooked and proceeded to buy his two albums fro his labels (Just Music) site the next day.

And wow… They are great. Simply brilliant stuff. Just tasty as hell. It’s one of those discoveries where you are almost happy you never heard it before, because here it is all new for you to take in.
Contact Note and Opalescent are just amazing. Go buy them now! I will wait…

Oh and if that weren’t enough, Jon Hopkins is going to be performing live in San Francisco on March 21st @ Mezzanine with Four Tet!

I gotta say, last.fm is the shit. It continues to turn me on to new music and keep me mindful of artists I like who are performing near me.

And finally, two of those CD’s I got came from Juno Records.
They are a great online CD store for electronic music and they are FAST. I order two discs on monday night, from England, and they showed up here, in San Francisco CA, USA, on thursday the same week. WTF!? Yes i paid for the FedEx shipping, but it was only like 3 bucks more… but DAMN that is fast.

I have a new idea on how to use this blog better and here it is.

This will be the dumping ground, if you will. The spot to post things posted elsewhere, be they tribe.net, last.fm, livejournal and even possibly stuff posted to luxlucidus.com. Not that there is anyone reading any of that stuff when it is posted to those various places, but I figure maybe one common place is that way to go.

Now if I could only figure how to automate that process better, so things cross-post on their own. I’m not the type of mind that can make that stuff happen, but I certainly can flesh out the idea.

Anyhow… It is yet another idea to attempt. Here goes!

I have been using last.fm since about april of 2005. So for almost 4 years it has been tracking what I listen to, making charts based on that, as well as recommending me new bands, finding neighbors with similar musical tastes, and also creating a number of radio stations for me, based on my listening habits, tracks I have “liked”, etc.  I know lot of people use Pandora, which I did try out way back when it was new, but I just didn’t like what it spewed out at me, plus I just really dig having my own personal charts made out of what I listen to.

Anyhow, the point of this blurp was that recently last.fm held a hack day to see what developers could build in a day using last.fm’s api. One of the cool ones to come out of it was something called songcolours which analyzes your charts and spits out a colored pie graph, a phrase and some songs, broken down by color.

Honestly I have no idea what it all represents, but I found it cool. My phrase was “sky lucy diamonds world river sun”. Admittedly I have been listening to various versions of “Lucy in The Sky With Diamonds” recently.

I assume this with change as newer songs get into my charts, but here is mine.