Nobody says nothing in such a clever and funny way as Brad Zellar: All The Stories Have Not Been Told, But Those That Have Not Been Told I Do Not Have

Two blogs which have made me start my own weblog thingy have disappeared or are on hiatus.

Firstly Jorn Barger from Robotwisdom (cannot find server?) who physically disappeared and didn't update his page for more than three months. His beard grew quite long according to the photo in this Wired article which gives details of his whereabouts now. Barger started his site in 1997 and was one of the first webloggers. I have always found his internet approach interesting and instructive. He constructed some useful flat portal pages with lots of links to his favourite writer Joyce and also to Joni Mitchell, my favourite songwriter. He also thought a lot about language, artificial intelligence and the internet as a meeting-point of the two. On the other hand he was a little bit of an obsessive. The end of the Wired article shows that his common sense does not seem to be extremely well developed:

Josh Kortbein was the first music blogger. He started his Josh Blog end of 1998, I discovered it about a year later and have been reading it since. It has always been a difficult read with few links to the outside world. Music was often analysed from a theoretical viewpoint. In the past years the blog has been leaning heavily towards philosophy, especially Wittgenstein. On Christmas last year Josh wrote something personal in his blog which has always been a very rare thing. It was on depression and touched me and I wanted to mention it as this is a feeling I know but I forgot about it. Now his blog is on hiatus with the message

on top of the screen. I hope he gets better and I also wish that he will start blogging again soon. Here is the personal post which I lifted from the Google cache:

I know that my English is crap but I prefer to write in English as my German is even worse. It's a way of hiding the fact that I cannot even write properly in my mother tongue. I am joking but there is a grain of truth in this.

Inspired by this thread I am relistening to Roxy Music's Avalon. I still like some songs of it but overall it is a little on the shallow side. It's a nice chill-out album though. Outstanding tracks:

• Avalon (#3) for the coolness and the cheering girls in the background
• While My Heart Is Still Beating (#5) for Bryan's yodeling in the beginnning and the sad saxophone line
• Take a Chance with Me (#7) for the late start and the bouncing guitar
• Tara (#10) for the lyrical saxophone, the absence of Bryan's voice and the sweet shortness

Vorhin im Radio ging es um RFID (radio frequency identification), die chipbasierte Nachfolgetechnologie des Barcodes. Ein Datenschutzexperte sagte etwa sinngemäß, dass Big Brother heute kaum zu fürchten wäre, da die Staatsbediensteten sich als kaum kompetent bis völlig unfähig bzgl. neuer Technologien erwiesen hätten.

Ich schätze mal, es kommt eher umgekehrt. Die sollten sich warm anziehen, sonst können wir die Beamtenschaft morgen alle im Internet beim Büroschläfchen live beobachten.

Apparently there is a new Stereolab album out on February, 2nd. It is titled Margerine Eclipse. I suppose Margerine stands for Mary Hansen, one of the band members who was killed about a year ago in a car/bicycle accident. Strangely enough Stereolab's label Duophonic does not have anything on the new release on their website whereas the album has leaked to the p2p networks a while ago. That's the modern times. The consumer is more up-to-date than the distributor.

I found an mp3 of the song Margerine Rock at Kingblind. Somehow Stereolab had lost me quite early in their career around 1995 or even before when they started integrating film scores, Brazilian music and other stuff in their music. Their sound carpet which used to be low-fi and simple became too thick and colourful for my ears.

Now this new song is very much in the vein of their early records around Peng! when Mary Hansen wasn't yet in the band. It's joyful repetitive minimal pop with its roots going back to Neu!, Velvet Underground, Beach Boys etc. And Lætitia Sadier's voice is sexy as ever. I think this will be the first Stereolab album in ten years that I will get for myself.

P.S. Paul at The Rub also wrote on this album recently and there is a detailed track-by-track anaylsis here at Amazon UK (It's a disgrace. Amazon still doesn't respect customers enough to offer their reviews a permalink.)