For my birthday, I bought myself a smartphone. Talk about toys for grown-ups …
I’ve been hearing about mobile development this and mobile development that, but I couldn’t empathize because the phone I had was state of the art for 2004. You should see me try to compose a text message with a numeric keypad — hilarious!
But now I’ve got an Android phone with Swype and a web browser and Kindle and Grindr … and more storage for music than my 2GB iPod. (I like having such limited space on my iPod, but that’s pontificating for another day.) It’s great.
Until I visited this site on a mobile browser. Yes, zooming would make it readable, but I noticed other sites such as Amazon and Google make sure their mobile visitors have an experience optimized for their devices.
So after a bit of research and a lot more hacking, I’m glad to announce Musicwhore.org has now been adapted for mobile browsing. At the moment, I just tweaked the current template to look decent on my new phone, but in the future, I anticipate actually changing the design to suit mobile devices.
Now pardon me while I go play with my new grown-up toy some more …
As much I like my new-ish job — I’ve been there for nine months now — it doesn’t have any down time. There’s maybe enough time to check news feeds and a smattering of social media but nothing beyond that.
When I get home, I’ve got other things brewing — mixing and remixing Eponymous 4 tracks, learning HTML5, Flex and Ruby on Rails, reducing my body fat — and they eat whatever time and energy I could have spent writing an entry.
And writing takes quite a bit of energy.
So once again I make a half-assed list of all the music about which I should be writing more in-depth.
Continue reading »
"The End of the World" referred to in Murakami Haruki’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World is not an apocalypse. Rather, it’s a point where "the world can go no further."
MO’SOME TONEBENDER was the end of SXSW 2011 for me. I snipped my wristband on Saturday afternoon, skipping out on the final night of the festival. Part of it was exhaustion, but mostly, I didn’t think anything else could top MO’SOME TONEBENDER. And I didn’t really want anything else to try.
I’ve known about MO’SOME TONEBENDER for a long time, but I was too enamored of NUMBER GIRL to pay much attention to them. I wish I had because they fill a void that NUMBER GIRL’s dissolution left. Not content just to hammer at their riffs with single-minded precision, MO’SOME TONEBENDER throws in sampled strings, garage rock riffs and sometimes even a dance beat into their music — sometimes all in one song.
A lot of bands on the Japan Nite bill had impressive sets, but MO’SOME TONEBENDER topped them all. Diving from one song to the next, the band didn’t give the audience a single moment to catch its breath, and by the end of it, the only thing that could be said was, "Holy fuck!"
MO’SOME TONEBENDER sold a custom-made compilation for the show, containing that night’s set list. Some live bands don’t translate well in the studio, but that’s not the case here. MO’SOME TONEBENDER has recorded 13 albums and is about to release a career retrospective. That’s a lot of music to explore.
Continue reading »