Yay Again!

After being nearly done in by threat of outrageous CARP fees, brilliant SF webcasting collective Soma FM is back “on the air”. The cliqhop and Drone Zone “stations” (read: playlists) are my favorite, and make life at work so much less painful. Today is a good day.

Yay!

Now I’m all excited: The kind, generous, good-smelling folks at scene.org have accepted my (months-old, given-up-on) application for some ftp space, to host Lichen audio files. For those who may not know, scene.org is a giant electronic archive (based in Finland, with a number of mirrors internationally), dedicated principally to demos and other demoscene-related artifacts. (If you are not familar with the demoscene, this FAQ at Orange Juice is one place to start. There’s also some info and links at scene.org itself, and presumably you know how to google.)

So, what this means for me and you, is that I will soon have plenty of free space to upload pretty much all the music I’ve ever done, and then you will be able to download as much of that as you like. I plan to put all the tracks from “Echolocation” and “Unspeak” up as soon as possible, probably in the next couple of days. And there’s a pretty big new incentive now to finish up some new tracks I’ve been working on. Scene.org has amazed me for awhile now, not only because it’s totally free hosting (no adverts, even), but also because a lot of my very favoritest music has come out of the demoscene. So, it’s quite a blessing to be granted access the resources, but also really an honor to be counted among the company that’s up there. I’m all sorts of pleased.

Instrument

So the best new record, elctronic-ish or not, that I’ve heard lately is actually filled with material that’s as much as 7 years old. It’s this rareities compilation from Christian Fennesz, Field Recordings 1995-2002. I remember being dimly aware of Fennesz’s Hotel Paral.lel back when it came out, but I haven’t had a chance to hear any of his music until now. The thing that really makes this collection worthwhile, for me, is the inclusion of the entire “Instrument” EP, which was actually his first. It sounds to me a lot like if Oval were to do the Ovalprocess thing, but starting with the spooky distant feedback drone portions from Sonic Youth or Velvet Underground records. It’s nice and somehow humanizing to know that the rich tones he’s feeding his computer are coming from his own guitar. And the results are strange and wonderful. What I really like is getting that jittery post-techno thrill, but without the creepy sense of dislocated paranoia that comes off of, say, Autechre’s latest. It’s just gorgeous. I burned a CD with just the four Instrument tracks, and I’ve had it in my walkman all day. I haven’t been this excited about some new music in a looonng time. I actually just scored some live Tortoise bootleg tracks (which, don’t get me wrong, are cool as hell) but found them hard to want to listen to, when I could be using that time to spin Fennesz again. So GOOD!

MS VPC

While it probably affects fewer people than the recent and already (in?)famous Google-Blogger takeover, I’m still kinda surprised that Microsquish’s recent purchase of Virtual PC from Connectix hasn’t seemed to be very big news. I am glad at least to notice that VPC for Mac will fall under the perview of the (generally OKish, in my book) Mac BU. And until today, I don’t think I realized that there was a VPC for Windows. Vedy eenteresting.

Against the carnivals of preachy blathering

Neal Pollack is here to say to both the right and the left: Shut the hell up. [Yes, this is already like number three on blogdex, the day after it came out, so I’m on an already crowded bandwagon here. And it’s probably not even all that good, really. At the moment, however, I like it a LOT.]

Build or buy?

Crap. It is as I feared: I would like to save money by rolling my own sofa, but I would clearly have to spend more money on tools to get the job done (I do not, for example, own a plunge router - much as I might like to) than it would take to just go buy a frickin couch at Ikea or Dania. Hell, I could prolly get a sofa at Restoration Hardware or Room & Board for less than it would cost to make one. The economic realities of mass production have foiled all my plans once again.