Experimental Music news roundup for the week of 3/18/2007
Three more blogs
Has anyone invented a term yet for these blogs where the contributors convert LPs and CDs into digital files and post the resulting files on the web? Yes? No?
In either case, here are two such blogs. Of course, the musical selection at these sites are entirely within the genre of experimental music:
1. 194142434445 is an "avant blog for experimental music fans" operated by a fellow who calls himself "over the moon." On his Blogger profile, he lists his favorite music as "experimental classical, minimal synth and choral music."
The most recent three uploads are listed thus:
* MIRROR- Pedestrian/Nocturne 7" @ 280+ kbps - Three Poplars, 2000, UK
* MIRROR- Shadow CDR @ 192 kbps - Three Poplars, 2004, UK
* Christoph Heemann - Time Is the Simplest Thing CDR @ 192 kbps - Three Poplars, UK, 2003
2. Mutant Sounds consists of three individuals. The first, identified only as "Mutant Sounds" has enlisted both Matthew Castille and Eric Lumbleau of New Orleans' Vas Deferens Organization to create a rip and post triumvirate. There's a lot of very weird European stuff from decades previous on Mutant Sounds, plus other interesting items.
These are the titles of the last three posts:
# MARTIN CIRCUS-ACTE II, LP, 1971, FRANCE
# KULTURSCHANDER-FRANZ JOSEF AUF ABWEGEN, TAPE, 1982...
# KEBNEKAISE-S/T, LP, 1973, SWEDEN
Both of these sites us Rapidshare and similar upload services to post .zip and .rar files of all the albums you see. This can be frustrating because many of these sites use crippling tactics to make their free services less attractive than their premium services. But, with a little patience you can get lots of hard-to-find music from these blogs.
Another blog with links to obscure music, plus reviews and interviews, is Disquiet.org. The blog has lots and lots of good material, going all the way back to 1994.
Especially interesting on the site is the "Pessoa's Trunk" area which looks deeply into the work of early 20th century Portugese poet Fernando Pessoa.
What? No! Not poetry! But really, it's good. Check out the page that lets you compare thirteen different translations of the same three-verse poem. Now do you see how slippery language is?
Bluemars.org
Bluemars.org has been back in fits and spurts these last couple of weeks. During one extended period of uptime I clicked on the link for the "Voices From Within" stream for the second time ever and enjoyed a particularly sprited track of Buddhist throat singing. It occured to me that some of these throat-singing monks could probably destroy an eardrum if they wanted to.
Hollow Tree news
I've made some minor tweaks to this page.
1. The "Featured mp3" feed has been adjusted so that it will send mp3s to you as enclosures. I've managed to set up my copy of Feedreader to download these enclosures automatically. Depending on how your system is set up, you too might be able to receive actual experimental music files in your sleep. Subscribe to the feed and see if it works for you. If you have any trouble, I'm just a click away. (Though, I'm most likely still asleep.)
You can also send music to me by tagging it "experimental.music" on del.icio.us. This only works with mp3s, mind you. And if you do this, please add some decent ID3 tags to your files, and put descriptive names and descriptions on the files via del.icio.us. It's helps a lot to have names and URLs if I decide to write about an mp3 or internet album.
And also, I think I may have created a situation where it is impossible to tag anything "experimental music" on the internet without my feedreader sucking it up. It's already far more than I can ever hope to read, but it's on my hard drive which means I "know" it. Just like those medical text .pdf files I downloaded last week qualify me to do surgery.
2. I set up a Quicktopics discussion page the other day. Why don't you use it to converse among yourselves?
3. I also installed Skype a while ago. I haven't really used it yet, but you can try me: zeno.izen
-z
