The "music and .mp3 blogs" are a bunch of the best I've found so far.
Some of the people who visit a place where the columns are often much longer than on most weblogs have no reason yet to know what an .mp3 blog is. The word audioblogs best sums up what they do, without being too technical.
On them, you'll find music, mainly in the good to high-quality format known as .mp3s that any modern computer can handle, to which you can listen with the sound programmes on your machine. You're usually able to download it for keeps as well. For legal reasons, the music is generally in the public domain or has been made freshly available by the musicians.
I don't doubt audioblogs bend the law. So much the better, since they are among the forces that will eventually change absurd legislation now the space is there for them. Like podcasts -- which are really nearly all big .mp3 files -- the underpinning aim of audioblogs is make music more widely known.
Pioneering .mp3 blogs have been around since the turn of the century, but they first became trendy about three years ago because you need a relatively recent computer to make the most of them. Musical activities take a lot of processing power, but the main barrier now lifted has been the space to store it. Realising that and what people are doing, those with a stake in the status quo are throwing money into such space in an attempt to control it.
Bodyglue and brain-busters
The selection here has been on the brew for some months, but got posted a few days ago on account of a painfully interesting diversion elsewhere. I told Marianne it was best she didn't come round as planned after her mother slipped on their polished parquet floor and banged the back of her head on the sharp corner of furniture that so often eagerly awaits a swiftly descending cranium.
They went to a clinic to be sure it wasn't a serious injury, which it isn't. The last time I spoke to Catherine, she sounded as together as ever. All the same, the cut was deeper and longer than either of those two could tell with Cathy's hair and it called for yet more new technology, without even a shave.
"At the hospital, they glued Mummy's head," the Kid informed me. "So she doesn't need any painful stitches."
Bodyglue, no less! I know Catherine's all right because by the time the surgery was done with her, she and the Kid could go to try to weep and laugh the cut open again watching Pedro Almodovar's new film, 'Volver.' It was a good movie, they say, but the wound stays firmly sealed.
If Bodyglue isn't already the name of some band anticipating fame you'll find in an audioblog, I'd be surprised. It was a weekend for getting heads together that gives you such a varied list, ranging from well-known pioneers with the writing calibre of 'said the gramophone' to some people who do almost no reviewing.
Several audioblogs don't deal in many words at all but whip up sound, the pictures and sometimes snarky comments with an ear to the tracks. I've included one or two of these sarcastic buggers if they deserve it for the way they merit decapitation in my less frivolous trains of thought.
Some audiobloggers, like me, have a historical bent, including Tom Ewing, who is one of a team called Freaky Trigger responsible for the New York London Paris Munich site, which was online between March 2000 and the final day of last year. I've listed it for valuable archives.
Tom's still immersed in a major undertaking at Popular, where he says he's currently covered 20 percent of the UK's 1,000 Number One Hits since 1952, "for as long as I can bear to keep doing it."
I can bear to write about music for the rest of my days in possession of any faculties. During a moment of terrible self-doubt, I thought it was time to join the mainstream and write about men much more often, but it took just one all-women podcast and Lilith's hefty swipe to my skull to set me straight.
I'm as yet unaware of any audioblogs given over to music by women, though three contribute to the one called Daughters of Invention. Karen, Jaime and Pamm are a young Toronto trio who help prove that for excellent music and concise presentation of it Canada is a country to watch closely.
Close to my own eclectic heart is a musician in Malakoff, one of Paris's purportedly dangerous Red suburbs, called David Fenech. He doesn't keep a bilingual site, but for French-reading minds open to music from anywhere the world his taste at 'david f presents' ranges from the future -- the string-plucking entry at the top is dated déc 31, 2010! -- to ancient "mouth-organs", as he refers to Thailand's khên.
David finds the sound of the khên strikingly similar on a record to work by Terry Riley and Steve Reich. In the same piece called "l'orgue à bouche (autour d'un instrument: part 4)", David manages to the likes of Bjork and Aerosmith, so he he must have an encyclopaedic brain.
Monsieur Fenech is now off on holiday.
That, in a sense, is where I am too, only dropping in here. Meanwhile, I've planted an increasingly common notion in this entry, which will bear yet more development each time we look at what musicians have done with places like the fearful baron Rupert Murdoch's MySpace.
In spite of such power-hungry individuals greedy for possessions, musicians have already understood how libraries used to be places of knowledge and art for the public to share. Today's increasing ability to use the Internet for sharing our personal libraries opens many avenues to be walked when I'm back from my break.
7:58:57 PM link
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