It has been a while....

Hello everyone....I don't know if anyone still reads this blog or still comes by. I personally haven't logged in something like two years so I feel like that is pretty telling. I recently went through all my mediafire links and deleted everything, I was getting wierded out by the Copyright violation emails and warnings etc. So all my links are dead now...sorry. But going through the downloads and seeing how many people had come by and picked up the music I was a little shocked and also a little bit moved by what I saw. SO MANY of you dropped by and picked up the music! I couldn't believe how many people had visited the site, and was very pleased that I was able to share so much music that is so close to my heart with so many of you, and I hope that some of you found something new and unusual that you might not have otherwise.

At the same time, I started to feel a little tinge of guilt as well. As an emerging artist and professional musician now out of the college world, I am starting to see and experience the difficulties of being an artist in the world. We as musicians and music lovers have a responsibility to music--what has been called "the greatest of all the arts"--to be fully and wholly invested in what we do and what we love. I think the popular culture of  our world does not place enough importance on music and does not realize its full potential and value. I do believe in music's power to change every one of us, and I believe in music's power to change the world. Music brings us together, it teaches us how to listen to each other, to compromise, to lead, to follow. It teaches us to be better human beings. It may be the most important thing on earth. I will live for it, and I will die for it. I also think that maybe, after years of downloading and sharing music for free, maybe, just maybe, we should be paying for it. If we don't pay for it, who will? Artists need grant money, they need donations, they need sponsors...they need money to make shit happen. I guess I don't really know what I am talking about but its just a thought. I think from now on I will use this blog as a personal bullshitting space like every other blog on earth.

For now, I will refer you to some blogs and projects of mine and my colleagues:

http://soundcloud.com/picture-frames  (My band)

http://feelingmindthinkingheart.blogspot.com/

http://bloodsausageradio.blogspot.com/

http://about.me/danielthedj

http://tjborden.wordpress.com/

Brian Eno - Here Come the Warm Jets (1974)

GENIUS.

Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Staying very much in the electronic vein here. These are some of my oldest and dearest electronic jams. hypnotic and introspective.

check it

Autechre - Oversteps (2010)

WOAH, I still have a blog? sweet. Anyways I just heard this new Autechre album today. I was a little bit confused the first time through, but after the second listen I found myself liking it more. It is a very dense and abstract piece so one should not expect to be enthralled and completely won over the first way through. It is quiter, and less beat oriented than other work of theirs that I have heard. I get a real sense of introspection from the album, there is a feeling of inner journey and reflection to it. but yeah totally check it out they have some cool sounds and textures going on here. its icy

boom

Daturah - Daturah (2005)

Some of the dankest post rock i've ever come across. three tracks, each of them completely epic and beautiful. this record is truly a trip as the name suggests.

check it out

Papercuts - You Can Have What You Want (2009)

Really nice smooth milky indie dream music thats perfect for a saturday morning when there are mountains of snow all around.

listen

John Cage - Sonatas and Interludes for Prepared Piano (1948)

OHHHH MAN. The piano reinvented. So mind-bendingly original and influential. A little history for you from allmusic:

"Students of music history have probably seen photographs of pianos fitted by Cage with all sorts of foreign objects -- bits of rubber stuffed between strings, hammers fitted with tacks, perhaps even a wooden spoon poking out from the instrument's entrails at an odd angle. The so-called prepared piano, for which the Sonatas and Interludes are composed, provides the means by which a single instrument is able to evoke a wide variety of colors, timbres, and textures...The sound is immediately engaging, and because of the differences between various pianos and the numerous varieties of weather stripping, thumb tacks, and wooden spoons available, each performance or recording is distinct. The work conjures a world of sound that is variously serene, haunting, percussive, and surreal...Each movement examines a particular emotion, with a palette drawn from the Indian tradition that includes heroism, eroticism, wonder, mirth, sorrow, fear, anger, and tranquility."

This music is a head trip of serious intensity. Very exotic, very otherwordly, sometimes beautiful, sometimes frightening, sometimes funkalicious, but always--as allmusic says--surreal. Feast your ears on this shit and feel these unearthly noises resound in your soul. Awesome. This dank performance is brought to you by Maro Ajemian, who premiered the work and to whom it is dedicated.

check it

Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children (1998)

I've been totally obsessed with this for the past few days. Deeply beautiful, haunting, disturbing, powerful, fragile. Every song is so simple and moving, and it is a damn near perfect essay of electronic music in my opinion. Cerebral. Behold the primal power of the beat.

check it

Gkfoes Vjgoaf - Magic Days (2009)

Got this recently off weedtemple i believe. I wasnt really expecting much but I cant stop listening to it. The fidelity is low but the feeling is hiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh. Some of the tracks are very beautiful with droning guitars and chimes and bells with no lack of wierdness. I totally recommend this and look forward to getting more acquainted with this album and his others. You can get them all off his myspace.

space out

Scientist - Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires (1981)

awwwwwwwwwwwwwww ye. chill

Grizzly Bear - Vekatimest (2009)

One of my favorites of '09. Its just such sublime pop music, I think its irresistible. veckatimesatiastkied

Ween - The Pod (1991)

Mankind's brownest record. Doctor Rock

Sigur Ros - Takk... (2005)

Another one of my favorites. There's a lot of shit you can say about this bands' sound but after seeing them live it really goes deeper than just words. If you're in the zone, this album is an enveloping and intense musical experience. i think. sorry i don't mean to get all lame on you but its the truth, this band definitely has got some serious energy behind it and it is definitely some powerful stuff.

i need to visit iceland.

Deerhoof - Milk Man (2004)

Life changing. Ill stake my life on it, im pretty sure Deerhoof is the best band of the past 10 years.

giga dance

Public Image Limited - Metal Box (1979)

Well, I am completely loving this record right now. Bass sounds deeper than the ocean, brutally tight drumming, savage guitar playing sharp as knives--all creating a disturbingly groovy altar of sound for Johnny Lydon's anguished rant/singing. This is definitely avant-garde post-punk in its most twisted and intense form. Dig it.


And while we're at it - here's First Issue from 1979. Also a killer album, and my very first introduction to the band and it blew my mind. jamsassasasassmssss.

Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) - Vignt Regards sur l'enfant Jesus (1944)

Merry Christmas!!!!! My favorite version of the nativity story. Super heavy ultra cosmic revelatory piano playing. This piece is too deep and I dont know how to put it into words but I like how allmusic does:

Olivier Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus (20 Contemplations of the Infant Jesus) are a towering specimen of twentieth century pianism. The work lasts more than two hours on those rare occasions when performed -- as Messiaen intended the pieces to be -- as a complete cycle. Written in 1944 and premiered the following year by Messiaen's wife Yvonne Loriod, whose masterful early performances and recordings of Messiaen's piano works did tremendous amount to bring his music to a wider audience in the 1950s and 1960s, the Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus plunge into the raw depths of Messiaen's Christian faith; the scintillating and frighteningly (but exhilaratingly) virtuosic fast movements prove once again how primal and joyful Messiaen's religion was to him, and the slow movements touch the sublime in ways that perhaps no composer of Western sacred or sacred-inspired music since J.S. Bach has managed with quite the same steadfast selflessness.

In this composition Messiaen created perhaps the quintessential twentieth century Christmas suite for piano. In it, he contemplates virtually all the figures associated with the story of the Nativity, and with many of the theological implications of the same event. Some of the movements are tender; others are full of roaring power, as Messiaen turns his attention to cosmic implications.

The Vingt Regards are brilliantly chromatic music; the work is, for many, the high point of Messiaen's so-called early period (which is usually considered to have ended with the Turangalîla-symphonie of 1946-1948). A number of symbolic musical motives appear throughout the score, creating a basic-level cyclicism; the most important of these is the God theme that we first hear in the very slow No. 1 "Regard du Père" and which then returns to prominence every few movements -- specifically, every five. The Vingt Regards are built as four groups of five pieces, but there are many other numerological schemes employed that overlap with that basic pentastyle design -- Messiaen himself explained some of these meaningful uses of number in a preface to the score. The score falls into two halves, the first of which features the electrifying fugal outburst of No. 6, "Par Lui tout a été fait," and the second of which concludes with the magnificent musical and spiritual peroration of No. 20, "Regard de l'église d'amour" -- a true peroration that recalls and reshapes many of the events of the past two hours, and music of extraordinary power.

And sorry for ignoring the shit out of my blog, ill try and start posting shit again.

Disc 1

No. 1, Regard du Pere
No. 2, Regard de l'etoile
No. 3, L'echange
No. 4, Regard de la Vierge
No. 5, Regard du fils sur le fils
No. 6, Par lui tout a ete fait
No. 7, Regard de la Croix
No. 8, Regard des hauteurs
No. 9, Regard du temps
No. 10, Regard de l'Esprit de joie
No. 11, Premiere communion de la Vierge

Disc 2

No. 12, La parole toute-puissante
No. 13, Noel
No. 14, Regard des anges
No. 15, Le baiser de l'Enfant-Jesus
No. 16, Regard des prophetes, des bergers et des mages
No. 17, Regard du silence
No. 18, Regard de l'onction terrible
No. 19, Je dors, mais mon coeur veille
No. 20, Regard de l'eglise d'amour

hello hello

hey sorry my blog is dead right now...my free time has dwindled to a miserable nothing and i can hardly even sit down for a while and just listen to some jams but yeah. more posts after next week when the semester is over and i can chill a bit.

V/A - New York Noise, Vol.2: Music From the New York Underground, 1977-1984

Picked this up yesterday, and it is beyond cool. A smoldering hot cauldron of afro-beats, funk, punk, jazz, avant-garde composition, disco, new wave, no wave all thrown together in a most chaotic, noisy and awesome way. Really exciting stuff from a very special, unique, and bizarre art scene. check it out.

The Beach Boys - Pet Sounds (1966)

While we're on the subject of ultra-classic rock albums....HAPPY THANKSGIVING! right now im giving thanks to 1966, because holy shit it was a good year for music wasnt it? On any given day over this past summer you could have found me crusin in my blue minivan with the beautiful jams of Pet Sounds blaring. I mean, these songs are nothing short of life changing, some of the most perfect pop songs ever period end of story. I think most of the independent music scene right now is obsessed with trying to recapture this sound. this is the sound of sounds but you all obviously know that blah blah blah.......fuck it

The Beatles - Revolver (1966)

duh.