Neil Young: Are You Passionate? Neil Young's new album is coming out in Germany April 8th but you can already listen to it here at the buzztone site (via stevie nixed). You can skip the first song. With my slow connection at home I only had the time to listen to five more songs. The second is ok but not great, the third one rubbish again, number four is a nice bluesy ballad, number five is "Let's Roll", the famous 9/11 tribute song on the flight which crashed near Philadelphia. The last song I listened to was the title song which is noodling into no man's land. I hope the title of the record is not meant in the way that you have to be passionate to buy this Neil Young album. I have got most of them. Obviously I really did not appreciate someone who wrote on the ILM thread Neil not so Young that the lyrics of "Cortez the Killer", which is one of my favourite rock songs of all-time were dumb. I'd say they are naive which was quite normal in those utopian times in between the hippies and the punks. Though as Ned pointed out in the thread the starting line "He came dancing across the water" is probably one of the most powerful beginnings of a song in pop history.

Mysterons After having followed the ILM thread Portishead - are we fickle or did they deserve to become dated so quickly? and having read Josh's recent post on them I relistened to "Dummy" as well. I was sure that the record would not have the same impact as in 1994 when I heard "Roads" on MTV and was completely overwhelmed by the tristesse and Verlorenheit (forlornness) emanating from that voice, the trembling synthesizer and the slow beats. I hadn't listened to it for a long time and back in 1994 I definitely had listened to it too often so that it had become one of those loved-to-death records. But I had a nice surprise. Especially the first track "Mysterons" with the extremely addictive slow drum machine rhythm which has a drum roll at the end did it for me. Already the start of that song is gorgeous. A guitar plays some ascending notes and the synthie sounds like a quacking duck. First the duck is quite shy and not too loud and then it bursts into some serious quacking which comes from scratching I guess. The song is then dominated by a low synthie sound layer. After a while the theremin (apparently only a patch on a minimoog according to this thread) joins in and produces some long beautiful sounds. They seem to come from the sky and remind me of the whoosh of a fast-blowing wind. Absolutely otherworldly. At the end of that song the drumming becomes very shaky and rolls like a thunder in slow motion. The less poetic technical term for this is reverb I think.

Give me a reason to love you. Give me a reason to be a woman. (Portishead - Glory Box)

• A German weblog update tracker: Blogscout. You can register your German weblog there.
• Another weblog tracker: Blogtracker
• Automatic classification and summary of news: Columbia Newsblaster (via perlentaucher)
• On average we laugh 18 times per day. Want to know more about the repeated emission of 75 milliseconds long vowel-like notes? Telegraph: Laughter? It's a funny business (via a&l daily)
• On the worldly aberrations of a zen roshi. The passage I liked most was about the purchase of a 7 series BMW for the roshi: "A smaller car, wouldn't allow him to sit in zazen posture while driving." New York Review of Books: Zen & the Art of Success (via a&l daily)

Blogger resources Blogger is the most widespread tool to write weblogs on the net. Some useful less known resources concerning the use of and news on Blogger are:

• the Blogger FAQ blog. A Blogger FAQ must be a blog. That makes sense. The syntax of Blogger is explained in detail by Phil Ringnalda. The last post on template tags is from Sunday.
• Status.Blogger.Com is a blog by Evan Williams on the latest news and developments at Blogger. If something is going wrong the answer why is usually posted there.
• Philringnalda.com is on more general weblog subjects like PHP, pinging, CSS, weblog hosting etc. On the site there is also another less often updated blog bloggertech with more technical posts on javascript, archives, comments etc. Phil Ringnalda is always worth a read.
• the Blogger Pro FAQ is on Blogger's premium blog service. Phil Ringnalda is the author once again.
• Evhead is Evan Williams' (Ev.), who is the CEO of Pyra Labs (the creators of Blogger) personal weblog. Occasionally he writes about weblogging issues. A must read.