SXSW Asia posted the line-up for Japan Nite 2008. The featured bands this year are:
Petty Booka
ketchup mania
detroit7
quartz-head 02
avengers in Sci-Fi
Sodopp
Click on the band photos, and a pop-up window links to their various websites and Myspace pages. After listening to the audio samples, I gotta admit — I’m not wowed. avengers in Sci-Fi comes close to sounding distinctive, but you could have easily put Electric Eel Shock or the Emeralds in place of detroit7 and noodles or any Benten band in Sodopp’s slot.
There’s nobody as freaked out as Kokeshi Doll, as brutal as Bleach or as theatrical as eX-Girl. And there isn’t anybody as marquee as PE’Z, Bonnie Pink or GO!GO!7188. I’ve been kind of broke this past year, so if I do manage to go to SXSW, it’ll be a luxury.
Many more bands will be announced in the coming weeks, so maybe something else might draw me in.
Nakamura Koji’s post-Supercar project iLL releases a new album titled Dead Wonderland on March 5, so says Bounce.com. iLL’s first album, Sound by iLL, was an entirely instrumental work, but the new album should find Nakako using his voice again, as evidenced by his last single, "Call my name".
Bounce also reports the release of the Complete single collection by the brilliant green on Feb. 20. The collection includes all the singles the band has so far released, including two new songs. A first-run special edition includes a DVD covering the same ground. the brilliant green’s newest song, "Ash Like Snow", serves as the opening theme for a new Gundam series.
Billboard.biz reports Napster will sell unprotected MP3s in the spring. I don’t know how Napster works these days, but I find it odd Napster would restrict subscribers to copy-protected content, while allowing ala carte customers access to the same content protection-free. Shouldn’t that be the other way around?
Sony BMG, meanwhile, announced it would roll out its digital music cards, which can be redeemed for unprotected MP3s at MusicPass.com. The inaugural titles aren’t terribly impressive, but then again, I’m not the target audience. Buying a card to scratch off gunk to get at a pin number to enter for access to … monku, monku, monku. Just give me a link and a buy button, dammit.
Billboard reports R.E.M. has turned up the guitars on its next album, Accelerate. Nine years ago, the band titled its first post-Bill Berry album Up, and it was anything but. Accelerate sounds like another chance for a mistitled effort. As trusted a source as Billboard can be — that’s you snickering right? — I don’t think I’ll believe R.E.M. has kicked the dreary thing till I hear it.
If I’m wrong, I probably won’t drop money on a CD — I’ll settle for digital (if it shows up on Amazon.) If I’m right, there’s always the I.R.S. back catalog to explore.
I had a lot of stuff I was auditioning to write about on this site a month back, but I had to do a purge and get some new stuff on the playlist.
Sometimes I’ll write these entries and wonder how I can put Kylie Minogue next to Karlheinz Stockhausen on a playlist, beyond the compulsion to alphabetize. Is there some tenuous thread in my subconscious to link the two? No. The point is there is no link. It’s easier to gauge the complexity of Stockhausen’s phrases next to the simplicity of Kylie’s hooks, as much as it’s easier to see the crudeness of Stockhausen’s electronics next to arsenal of effects employed by Kylie’s producers.
Neil Gaiman decided he didn’t want to be a movie critic for the rest of his life when, after watching a particular assignment, he realized he would never get those two hours back. I could spend my time spinning some albums in the hope that something clicks, but I kind of don’t want to give away those stretches of 30 to 50 minutes either.
Over the course of cataloging my music collection, I came across a useless skill: finding barcode numbers of titles between formats.
It’s not a skill pertinent to anything released after the early- to mid-’90s, but it is helpful to fill in gaps for anything released before then. This skill does require some equally useless prerequisites (although they’re probably not useless to the folks who track these kinds of things.)
To demonstrate this skill, I’ll recount my hunt for a barcode number of a cassette I’ve long since let go for a title that’s long since been out of print.
Have you noticed the Amazon MP3 downloads don’t have an option to save to your wish list? I certainly did.
Now that Warner titles are available for download, I’ve been searching for stuff I used to own, as well as albums I’ve been meaning to check out. I’m used to the "Save for Later" feature of eMusic, and I found it odd that Amazon would leave out one of its most versatile features from this particular section of its site.
MP3 purchases are supposed to be impulsive, I guess — iTunes doesn’t have that kind of feature.
Amazon does provide links to CD titles from the download site, and from there, the wish list can be used. It’s rather passive-aggressive, no? "Here," Amazon’s interface seems to be saying, "why don’t you consider getting the CD while you’re at it?"
Well, I consider digital files to be the 21st Century answer to the cassette tape, but, to paraphrase Alton Brown, that’s another entry. Personally, I buy digital for a few reasons:
To hedge my bets. The eMusic subscription model is a cost-effective way to figure out if a CD is worth buying. If I’m not wowed by what I download, then there’s no onus for me to get a CD. The CD is, essentially, a high-quality backup of some lossy files.
To get titles not yet available domestically. Bridin Brennan’s Eyes of Innocence is available in the US through iTunes, and Nina Hynes’ Really, Really Do can be had through Amazon. Neither has been released in the US on CD. BIS titles are notoriously expensive, but an eMusic subscription can alleviate some of that expense.
To reacquire titles I used to own but don’t like well enough to get on CD again. I’ve so far done that once with the Kiss-Offs’ Rock Bottom, and I’ve been meaning to that with Amazon downloads.
In other words, I buy digital when I’m not feeling confident to invest in an entire CD, and yet Amazon attempts (by design or not) to make me consider a CD purchase — in addition or, ideally, instead.
I’m probably seeing conspiracies where there are none, but the inability to add MP3 downloads to an Amazon wish list strikes me as a well-engineered oversight.
When Amazon launched its MP3 store, I waxed philosophic on how the most influential music of my youth was released on labels distributed by Warner, which has been holding out on providing DRM-free content to digital vendors. Until now.
Billboard.biz reports Warner Music Group has begun selling DRM-free content on Amazon. My initial reaction, of course, was glee, but then I read the article a bit more closely. There’s no mention of how many titles would be available — a fact trumpeted by Universal when the download store launched in September 2007 — only that a "range of digital products" would be available. Translation: not as much as you’d think, let alone wish.
My first few searches struck out. No Throwing Muses, the Smiths, Hüsker Dü or Replacements. I did find some Kronos Quartet, Bill Frisell and Steve Reich, as well as 10,000 Maniacs, Freedy Johnston and Missy Elliott. So it looks like the Elektra titles have some presence, perhaps more than Warner and Atlantic.
So using my recently-cataloged collection, I started searching for artists on particular labels. Enya (Reprise)? Nada. Everything But the Girl (Atlantic)? Two titles. The Flaming Lips (Warner)? A bunch of EPs but no real albums. The B-52’s (Warner)? Cosmic Thing and something on Rhino. Emmylou Harris? Her Nonesuch titles but nothing from her 20 some odd years on Warner Bros.
Some higher profile artists had better representation, of course. The big hit Warner albums by R.E.M., Out of Time and Automatic for the People, are available, but not the crufty stuff such as Monster or Up. Just about all the Missy Elliott albums are up there, as well as quite a number of Björk.
No Madonna, of course.
Nonetheless, it’s a first step, a test to see how well DRM-free content fares for the reluctant Warner Music Group. I hope it does well.
UPDATE, 01/01/08: I guess it took a few days for some updates to happen because now there are more titles by Throwing Muses, the Replacements, Everything But the Girl, Enya and the B-52’s. Still no Hüsker Dü nor the Smiths.
I’ve been meaning to get a modified CueCat for a while, and after I got my company profit-sharing check this year, I took the plunge. It arrived early last week, and when my holiday vacation started this weekend, I transformed into man possessed.
I use a music collection database software called, appropriately enough, Music Collector. I bought a license back in 2000, and back then, the program was pretty barebones. I just needed something to track artist, title, release year and label, and the integration with the formerly open CDDB (now Gracenote) was an added bonus. The features over the years piled on to incorporate more sources, and eventually, more recent entries in my database had much more content than earlier entries. At some point, I wanted flesh out those older entries.
I thought I was going to spread that task over a few months. I ended up eating the last four days on the project. All thanks to that damn CueCat.
, I