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Monthly Archives: April 2004

Risking Our Credit Card with Russian Thugs So You Don’t Have To!

We signed up tonight with the Russian music service Allofmp3.com.
Selection: Decent, not great. Slightly worse than iTunes Music Store. Much less non-pop music, which is saying a lot. That said, there’s extensive back catalogue stuff, including the Beatles (take that Apple Recs!). Lots of Russian stuff (TATU!), which, from my experience, tends to be [...]

Sonic Youth, “Nurse”: First Impressions

It sounds more like Murray Street than those that came before it, but not as hooky.
Quieter, too. Less distortion than before.
Fewer bizarre tunings, too, generally.
Seems solid. If MS was a 10.0, this is probably a 7.5 or 8.
“Unmade Bed” is the first single. It’s got a slow-tempo disco beat right off, which is definitely branching [...]

I like Audioscobbler

Audioscrobbler is a web-service of sorts. It keeps track of what you listen to on your computer (iPod support soon? Hope so!) and uses that to figure out what you may like and all sorts of other statistics.
This is basically what I wanted to do a year and a half ago, but I never [...]

Holy Shit I’m Not Going Outside for the Next Three Months

This Brood X stuff is scary!
To put thing in context, when a fly made it into my room last night, I left the door open and went downstairs for an hour.

So where do the Chinese have sex?

The AP reports on a new poll commissioned by Ikea:

In Sweden and Iceland, 72 percent of respondents said they use their bedrooms for romantic endeavors, while in China the figure was 20 percent. All it said about North Americans was that a fifth - about 20 percent - like to have sex outside the bedroom, [...]

A Thought

A man’s ability to experience beauty is far surpassed by his ability to suffer pain.

Two Things That I Really Dislike about the Grado Headphones that Angie Gave to Me

When listening via my computer or the iPod, bass drums are just super-muddy. Take, e.g., the Flaming Lips’ “Are you a Hypnotist” or Modest Mouse’s “The World at Large.” Why this is a problem? Most small electronic amplifiers are just underpowered. The solution? Buy an expensive amplifier that costs about 10X what the headphones do. [...]

What We Wasted Our Meagre Disposable Income On Today

Modest Mouse - Good News for People Who Love Bad News
Deerhoof - Milk Man
Blonde Redhead - Misery Is a Butterfly
Blonde Redhead - Melody of a Certain Damaged Lemon (which we’ve never owned on CD before!)
Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child… (Ditto; we will also say that this is not our favorite B&S album, [...]

Welcome Home

It’s raining, and so I open the door, drop my things, and back in past the threshold to close the umbrella outside. I slip on a plastic bag and drop the umbrella. My knees land on the wet concrete. My palms take its pattern.
In the front room is a suitcase, and draped on the banister [...]

Theologians don’t know nothin’ ’bout my soul

OK, so I was wrong. The new Wilco album is amazing and totally addictive but for one song (that really long one near the end; the other really long one (”Spiders (Kidsmoke)) is actually pretty wonderful and sounds like a half-tempo Stereolab tune.
Which is perhaps not entirely unexpected: Jim O’Rourke did produce at least one [...]