Ahh, lets give this new server a little workout:

• Bombay Gangstarr – Don’t Stop Til You Get To Bollywood (info)

I’ll be able to get some stats soon on how much traffic BoingBoing really gets. 🙂

It’s been a while, so I thought I’d post up some of the more interesting music I’ve been listening to lately.

• Notwist – One With The Freak [3.4MB M4A] (site)
• Mighty Rime – Broke Baroque [2.8MB M4A] – (site)
• Q and Not U – Soft Pyramids [3.8MB M4A] (site)
• Xiu Xiu – Crank Heart [4.6MB MP3] (xiu xiu)

Recently I’ve been indulging my emo-pop-rock tendencies with The Jealous Sound (AMG, Epitonic).

• The Jealous Sound – Troublesome [1.6MiB 64Kbps MP3]

Addictively catchy if you’re into this sort of thing. They’ll be playing at the Troubadour on Feb 11. (Feb 5: Midtown, Feb 8: Nada Surf, Feb 11: The Jealous Sound, Feb 12: Mates of State)

Upcoming Shows:

• 1/14, Troubadour, The Lawrence Arms (The First Eviction Notice)
• 1/16, Troubadour, The Decemberists (Billy Liar)
• 1/17, Troubadour, Mark Kozelek (of Red House Painters, Sun Kil Moon – Gentle Moon)
• 1/21 (Derby), 1/22 (Spaceland), 1/23 (The Echo), Battles (members of Helmet, Tomahawk, and Don Caballero – June Is Finally Here)

In Feb: Midtown, The Jealous Sound, Mates of State, Notwist, SAGE Francis/Joe Beats (Non-Prophets); In Mar: Ninja Tunes (Amon Tobin, Kid Koala, etc), In Apr: Squarepusher

I was just reading the Pitchfork Top 50, and it definitely had me thinking back to some of the music I really enjoyed this year (not all mope).

• Exploding Hearts – Sleeping Aides And Razorblades [3.6MiB] – poprocks at its best; RIP
• Manitoba – Crayon [3.7MiB] – IDM, now w/ 100% less pretension, 200% more warmth
• Explosions in the Sky – Your Hand in Mine [12.0 MiB] – missed ’em live, hopefully they’ll be back
• Non-Prophets – Damage [7.0MiB] – rhymes that just won’t quit
• Prefuse 73 – The Color of Tempo [4.6MiB] – hard to decide whether the original or the outtakes are better
• Benny Benassi – Don’t Touch Too Much [6.0MiB] – remember the power tools video? the rest of the album is as good
• Basement Jaxx – Lucky Star (Jaxx Klub Remix) [64kbps MP3, 1.5MiB] – still kicks ass, still looking for a HQ version 🙂

Other fav albums this year: M83, Broken Social Scene, Weakerthans, Decemberists…

Albums I forgot came out this year but shouldn’t have considering how much I listened to them: Rilo Kiley – Execution of All Things, Cursive – The Ugly Organ, Four Tet – Rounds, The Postal Service (of course)

Yesterday, my Saddle Creek and CDBaby orders both arrived, so I’m swimming in new albums (also, reminded me to drop by EasyNews). It’s been a while since I’ve inflicted the web with my taste in music, and tis the season, right? (no 12yr old lawsuits funded by these albums, 100% RIAA free)

• Menomena – Cough Coughing [4.1MiB MP3] (Official Site, Buy/Listen @ CDBaby, (Pitchfork rave) – these guys are amazingly fun glitch/hip/indie-pop
• Park Avenue – Lachrymose Obsequious Vehement Elated [5.6MiB MP3] – lo-fi indie pop
• The Good Life – The Beaten Path [4.5MiB MP3] – ok, I’ve had this for a while, but thought I’d post it anyway, since it’s *so* good

Some other music links:

• What a Crappy Present – a Downhill Battle PSA; what to do if you get a crappy RIAA CD for a present this season; The company that makes this sued my friend
• Pitchfork –
  2003: The Year in Music News
• Pitchfork – Top 50 Singles of 2003
• Plea for Peace Tour, April-June 2004 – Cursive, Mike Park, Desaparecidos
• Have you bought your RIAA warning stickers yet? (finally got around to ordering yesterday)

I’ve been digging through some of my old music recently, which has been really cool. It’s easy to forget about on some great stuff when you’re constantly going through new stuff. Been listening incessantly to Spoon’s Girls Can Tell. I am your shadow in the dark/I have your blood inside my heart – so frickin’ good.

• Spoon – Me And The Bean [5.2MiB MP3]

I’ve been neglecting the blog recently as classes and work have conspired against me. A quick linkdump:

• resident Bush and the Naked Ladies of London
  

  The WP’s Dana Milbank reports
  that a British reporter of a reputable journalistic outlet asked
  McClellan, “Just to clarify, why has the president chosen to do an
  interview with the Sun? It’s a newspaper which publishes daily pictures
  of topless women.” After detailing the Sun’s bread and butter (not just
  naked ladies – there are stories about natives eating someone’s
  ancestor and “German saboteurs plotted to bomb Palace with peas in
  WW2″), Milbank notes McClellan’s answer, “It has a large readership.”
  Notably, Bush hasn’t given one-on-one interviews to publications like
  the NY Times, WSJ, Washington Post, Time or Newsweek this year (and
  hasn’t given solo interviews to LA Times, Chicago Tribune, and Boston
  Globe ever). Hypothesis: Rupert Murdoch is a billionaire, The
  Sun-owning media baron and Bush is running for re-election next year.
  Ta-da, Bush interviews with Trevor Kavanagh.

• Chasing Bush – in the UK via mobile technology (see also: BBC report)
• Emergants – etech merchandise; the ThinkGeek shirt is still the best blogging shirt evar though
• SprintPCS has gone structural; XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS (also, my Treo finally shipped. w00t!)
• SCO Hints at *BSD Lawsuits Next Year, And More – oh, lordy
• Health Effects of Cell Phone Use – the federal government is funding $10M of further studies; disturbing brain cell results – wifi probably ok…
• Kottke: The redesign continues… – I really like this; the idea of templated data (entry/output) is the next step after categories; the logical conclusion will be to enter all typed data into a reconfigurable knowledge-base; (thoughts: creating a standard set of XML export filters for standard data types; is this orthogonal to arbitrary node-level representation? where are the atomic segments? should base nodes allow complex typing or not? – implement first, worry about design post facto?)
• Spam Sandals – would be a great gift for geeks
• Breaking Up is Hard to Do – Jane write about breaking up and not being able to transfer their saved games. Err, Justin writes about having shingles
• New ‘Mystery Meson’ Sub-Atomic Particle Discovered – wacky subatomics
• Mr. Brown goes to town – Camron writes about MTV’s Made
• Andy just linked to the Uberman sleep schedule – funny since I was just thinking about that; recently, Provigil has recently come up in conversation. I haven’t been getting much sleep lately. Like majorly bad sleeping habits for the past week. This semester can not end soon enough.
• Aaron‘s been making a good sell of Nader
• CryptoPhone – PTP encryption via AES256 and TwoFish, w/ key exchange and source code. Or, if you don’t feel like paying $4,000/handset, try PGPfone w/ VOIP
• Why Linux Is Wealthier Than Microsoft
• Client Quotes from Dreamless, 2000 – some great stuff if you’re a web designer
• WTC Memorial Design Finalists
• snakeversuswizard – whoa, cool band. (EP for $3) [via Eileen]
  • snakeversuswizard – It Will Kill You [3.4 MiB]
• Her Space Holiday – My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend video – nice concept, well done, by Jason Koxvold (having gotten a fair bit of compositing under my belt, it’s nice to be able to confidently say ‘hey, i can do something like that’ 🙂
• LookBetterOnline – headshots for online dating. inevitable?
• Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links – NYTimes on Gawker Media
• Desiderata – great Flash animation
• Audio Lunchbox – DRM-less (MP3) Indie Music (what’s the bitrate)? – killer-app: digital downloads + library/streaming + collab filtering + community/trust tools
• Whoa, sick: PHP.net has a kick-ass autocomplete script
• Macromedia Flex Blog – by Macromedia Tech Evangelist Christope Coenraets
• Andre has been throwing up great media on the ol’ bloog lately. It’s like he has access to some incredible pile of files or soemthing
• ProFont – the ultimate programming font; a bit small for my tastes, personally I like xterm 7×14
• The Irony of Outsourcing
  

  Economically, trade is no different than other technologies. Economist David Friedman
  of Santa Clara University puts it most succinctly: there are two ways
  to make a car — you can either make it in Detroit or grow it in Iowa.
  You already know how to make it in Detroit. You get a bunch of iron
  ore, smelt it into steel, and have an assembly line of robots and
  workers shape it into a finished vehicle.

  To grow it in Iowa, you plant car seeds in the ground (also known as
  “wheat”), wait until they sprout, and harvest them. Take the harvest
  and put it into a big boat marked “to Japan” and let it sail off. A few
  months later a brand new car comes back.

Cursive is quite rocking live. If you’re into hard post-rock, would recommend. (a track from their latest album: Art Is Hard)

SPACELAND PRODUCTIONS PRESENTS
AT THE HENRY FONDA MUSIC BOX THEATER
6126 Hollywood Blvd (at Gower)
CURSIVE TONIGHT!
For those of you who waited until the last minute, or who were not one of
the lucky 3 to win a free pair......
*limited amount of $11 tickets are available Ticketweb.com!*
- choose 'spaceland promo' as the ticket type 
- password:  sierra 
If you miss out on these as well, there will still be $14 tickets available
at the door starting at 6:30pm!

I’ve been listening quite a bit recently to a copy of the new Basement Jaxx album I um… acquired. I noticed a Pitchfork review of the first track, Good Luck, that made me look into it some more and realize the album doesn’t officially come out until 10/21/03. It looks like in the UK at least, Lucky Star is the first single (featuring Dizzee Rascal and an oh so popular Punjabi-tinged backing [to its credit, Basement Jaxx (among others) was way ahead of the curve: see Romeo Me video])

Now, while both the afore-mentioned tracks are great tracks, and quite ‘bangin’ as they say, my current hands-down get-your-ass-moving favorite is track 6:

• Basement Jaxx – Supersonic (feat. Cotlyn Jackson) [7.5 MiB]