Well, 2010 is in the can. I made a lot of posts about music, but what did I actually listen to over the year? This is my first full year of using Last.fm to track my listening, so I can answer that question. The statistics aren't comprehensive as they don't include my Walkman (mostly loaded with goth & post-punk, mashups, nerdcore and metal), songs ( Read more... )

I've spent most of the evening reading Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music, an informative and at times hilarious guide to the subject. It's also given me a new source of writing music in the form of Digitally Imported's streaming radio stations. I'm also a fan of Soundcloud in that respect ( Read more... )

On their just completed visit to Los Angeles, Hooch and lilenigma brought me a care package. It was composed of a packet of Milo, a jar of Marmite (Centenary edition!) and the new Shihad album, IgniteRight from the opening note, the album hits you with heavy guitars, deep drumbeats, and down-tuned treble guitar lines; more so than any of their recent albums ( Read more... )

I started talking about this at a Christmas party on Saturday, but the only part of the Venn diagram that I could remember was Viking, so I had to stop.
The Geek/Jock/Viking Venn Diagram:


( Read more... )

I love music and I love statistics, so I am right in Last.fm's demographic. At the end of every calendar year they run a series of articles on the top scrobbling artists. These articles include graphs of aggregate play information and compare that to your own. This is the first year that I've been using the site for the whole year, so the first ( Read more... )

Everything that this reporter for SFWeekly says about the SF gig on Friday applies equally to the LA gig on Saturday: Peter Hook and The Light perform Unknown Pleasures.
"It was kind of funny, seeing such dark, fundamentally gloomy songs making so many people so incredibly happy, but you can't help but be happy when you're seeing one of your ( Read more... )

While I was excited to discover new material by two of my favourite bands, the greatest musical moment of the weekend was last night's much anticipated concert by a member of one of the most important bands in rock playing one of the greatest albums ever.

Peter Hook, bassist from Joy Division and New Order, played the entirety of 1979's Unknown ( Read more... )

One of the other three exciting musical moments of my weekend was similar to my discovery of the "new" EP from The Nova Echo. This one, however, is harder to gratify immediately, but I think lilenigma is going to hook me up next weekend.

It is, the "new" Shihad album, Ignite. It came out in September, but I didn't hear about it until this weekend when, on ( Read more... )

One of three exciting musical moments of my weekend just happened. I discovered that the unsigned North Carolina electronic-rock outfit The Nova Echo released a new EP, Voyager, in August. You can listen to, and download, all the tracks on their website (in the previous link ( Read more... )

Well, my semester is officially over. I handed in my database project on Thursday morning, gave my Latin class their final exam on Friday, sat my own Syriac final, gave a presentation on my database project on Saturday, and I just finished grading the Latin finals. The whole week was a mixture of achievements and clusterfuckage, but now it's over ( Read more... )