25 Years of Solid Steel: an oral history of the world’s longest running mix show – FACT Magazine: Music News, New Music.. Long interview with Coldcut. Interesting stuff about the early days on Kiss pirate radio in London
Here’s another fun way to waste time on the web. Choose two artists and Boil the Frog will link them for you. The coder’s blog post tells you how it works. Reading that post explains how it took 14 steps from both Kraftwerk to Professor Longhair AND Roska to Professor Longhair. Each reload gave a slightly different path, mostly using different songs from the same artists. Asking to go from one long tail artist to another quite different long tail artist yields a larger number of steps. Not surprisingly, it took me 23 steps to get from Disclosure to Iris…
Motherboard has a really interesting interview with Christopher Kirkley from Sahel Sounds about his release “Music From Saharan Cellphones”. A remarkable description of alternate music distribution systems. Inside the Cell Phone File Sharing Networks of Western Africa (Q+A) | Motherboard.
Darryl Pandy sang the vocals on one of the first “proper” house record most of us ever bought or heard. It was Farley jackmaster Funk’s “Love Can’t Turn Around”. It was the commercial hit version of the earlier JM Silk track “I Can’t Turn Around” (which itself was a version of an Isaac Hayes track). Sure it was an important track because it was one of the very first house tracks to bust out of the Chicago scene and become an international hit, but for me it was important for a couple of more personal reasons. It was the first…
The excellent Music Machinery (a blog about music technology by Paul Lamere) has worked out the “Mean Time To Katy Perry” over 8 Top 40 stations around the nation. Answer: about 40 minutes. Get the full dataset and mathematics behind the TTKP: What’s the TTKP?
The invaluable Core News brings us a nice clean recording of a recent radio show: Rob da Bank 2010-07-24 Dub vs Dubstep Special with Mad Professor, Adrian Sherwood, Coki & Appleblim A very nice mix of new and old, does just what it says on the box. Post includes a link to the Hotfile download and the tracklist: Tracklist:Slim Smith — Ain’t Too Proud To Beg – TrojanJoe Gibbs — Chapter 3 – LightningKing Tubby — Roots Of Dub – Blue MoonBenny Ill, Kode9 & The Culprit — Fat Larry’s Skank – TempaDubkasm — Reespek I Spek (feat. Levi Roots…
The Sonar festival in Barcelona has become a vital part of the European festival circuit. And by far the most important to the exposure of new electronic-based music. Billed as a festival of “Advanced Music and Multimedia Art”, the booking ranges far and wide (ie. it’s not just banging house and trance, or even just “dance” music) and the organizers ask various luminaries to curate various sections. In keeping with the multimedia aspect of the festival, the BBC has put together a series of audio snapshots of the event. Each picture in the Flash window sits over a link to…
The Beeb has just posted a quick 8 minute video with Mary Anne Hobbs talking to the cats she brought with her to the Sonar Festival in Barcelona – Joy Orbison, Roska and Flying Lotus. Includes footage from the stage also. Of note: Flying Lotus making a point of mentioning the importance, to him, of playing Weather Report in his set. Yes, Weather Report. I knew that I was right to be so confused by his Cosmogramma record.
The UK Christmas Number One Single tradition has lead to all sorts of silly stuff over the years (Oasis vs. Blur for one), but the last few years have been dominated by awful, treacly pop songs spewing from the “winners” (or “indentured servants”, take your pick) of Simon Cowell’s X-Factor TV show. In the last few weeks a strong campaign has developed to make Rage Against the Machine the number one single this christmas. The campaign is specifically targeted at the Cowell machine, so the choice of RATM is particularly apt. The song the campaign has chosen is “Killing in the Name” ,…
He died this morning, apparently of a heart attack. A true hip hop pioneer, one whose show, “Mr. Magic’s Rap Attack“, I listened to religiously whenever I was close to the signal (and sometimes when I wasn’t). Somewhere in the stacks I have a beat up cassette tape of one of his mixes (this is not it, but it’s close) from 83 or 84. Just the damn coolest. You see, kids, many years ago we were not able to listen to everything all the time from everywhere ‘cos we didn’t have no intarwebs. Just the “World’s Best Lookin’ Sound” (WBLS) (who have…