• Waits, Tom – Blood Money 16,5
• Rocket from the Tombs – The Day the Earth Met the Rocket from the Tombs 14,5
• Woven Hand – Woven Hand 14,5
• Laurie Anderson – Live at Town Hall 2 CDs 20
• Neu! - 75 13,75
• Grandaddy – The Broken Down Comforter Collection
14,25
• Ryan Adams – Demolition 15,5 (LP 11,25)
• John Convertino – Sack of Cement 5
• Calexico – Spoke 12,25
• Ani DiFranco – So Much Shouting, So Much Laughter, 2CDs 20
• I Am Spartacus – Forward! 14,75
• Giant Sand – A Cover Magazine 14,5 (LP 10,75)
• Black Heart Procession – Amore Del Tropico 15,5
• No-Man – Heaven Taste 16,5
• Sonic Youth & ICP & The EX - In the Fishtank 9,75
• Mountain Goats - All Hail West Texas 16,5
• Laura Nyro – Eli and the Thirteenth Confession 12,25
• Piano Magic – Writers without Home 16,5
• Radar Bros. – And the Surrounding Mountains 16,5
• Uncle Tupelo – 89/93 Anthology 16,5
• Low & Dirty Three – In the Fishtank 9,75
• Nada Surf – Let Go 16,5
• Grandaddy – The Sophtware Slump 16,5
• New Order – Back to Mine 17,5
• Hayden – Skyscraper National Park 15
• My Morning Jacket – At Dawn 14,25
• San Francisco: A Music City Compilation 1998, 2CDs 6,5

The Onion A.V. Club asked and many VIPs answered. My favourite responses: John Leguizamo:

Laurie Anderson:

Herschell Gordon Lewis:

Clive Barker:

William Shatner:

My favourite answer of all time has always been the one by Bertolt Brecht in his brilliantly to the point Geschichten vom Herrn Keuner (Stories of Mr Keuner):

By the way long before Brecht Nietzsche wrote something very similar but less mysterious in the second volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (Human, all too human), aphorism 225 in a free translation by me:

P.S. There is a very active profound discussion on this big question going on at kuro5hin: Is there a God? Introduction:

Many people, especially the older generation, say that the internet is full of rubbish. That it is more about misinformation and rumours than information.

In a way this is true. As anybody can write something on the internet the average quality of pages published on the internet is inferior to articles in classic media like newspapers and magazines which are written by professionals.

On the other hand the upside of the internet is that it is a democratic medium which assembles much more knowledge than all of the old media together.

The biggest advantage of the internet in my point of view is nevertheless the freshness and the interactivity which manifests itself most in the discussions taking place in the newsgroups and forums. Everything written in one of these discussion groups can immediately be questioned by potentially all internet users. There is a self-correcting mechanism at work which usually separates the wheat from the chaff quite soon.

More or less starting from 9-11 I have been relying a lot on Metafilter for up-to-date information. MeFi is an online community or collective weblog with currently 16,549 members. As you have to register to participate it is quite easy to evaluate contributions by other members based on their past contributions.

On Tuesday Metafilter pointed me to an article in The Weekly Standard about a punk rock festival in California. This article was also referenced by the OpinionJournal, a part of the Wall Street Journal family. The author, a certain Larry Miller, wrote about a friend of his named Jack Burditt who went to the festival with his daughter. The relevant bit started with Miller stating to his friend that he had never heard of a band called Buzzcocks and goes on:

The strange thing after that post is that the people just continued posting as if nothing had happened but after another comment by a festival goer it became obvious that the story was totally false:

So that is why I trust 16,549 people online more than any newspaper or tv station in the world.

There is no one here anymore My new blog is called close your eyes. I hope it loads faster than this page.

(last post from old blog)

A sign of life I am about to move to antville. Please stay tuned. Details and link later.

(from old blog)

Mark Tranmer and Richard Roger Quigley from Salford near Manchester have created another chef d'œuvre of wistful reserved chamber pop. Their first album Seventeen Stars drew me in immediately after ten seconds of listening to the song pro-celebrity standing around and I wrote a glowing review for amazon.de which I later translated here in my old blog sax & sunshine.

The World Is Flat is full of outstanding tunes and lyrics (please feel free to suggest corrections, I didn't get all of them). It has a perfect flow. Up to now my album of the year. By far by the way.

In the past months I was a little fed up with current music and wanted to stop buying CDs. This album has kindled the fire again and now I am back into music.

The World Is Flat is a soundtrack to a film on a love gone wrong. Extremely romantic and irresistible for me. In one word: precious. Everything is simple about this music:

• the magic minimalistic tunes
• the sensitive striking words
• the soothing and captivating voice of Quigley

An intimate tender record I prefer to listen to with people who are very close or entirely on my own. Listening to it with strangers seems to be like an intrusion into emotional private territory. Almost frivolous in a sense.

It is one of those CDs I am afraid of ruining by playing it too often. I don’t mean the physical CD trace of course. Like all really good things in life be it sex, drugs, food or whatever this music has to be consumed in moderation to appreciate it for a long time.

The voice of Quigley and his lyrics are a very important part of this music. Gnac, ie Tranmer doing ambientish instrumentals on his own is not as thrilling.

The melancholic mood is close to Belle and Sebastian and Nick Drake but more mature and calm. If Nick Drake had lived a little longer and had had a broken up love story to sing about it would probably have sounded very much like this record.

In places the Montgolfier Brothers make me think of the baroque pop of Divine Comedy though their music is not as lush and orchestral. They don’t suffer from production overkill.

Purely instrumental music in a similar vein was made by Durutti Column though Vini Reilly doesn't have the tunefulness.

Beck who covered similar ground this year in Sea Change in comparison sounds tired and lifeless. A syrupy and sticky album, over-produced. Music just passing by, not holding the attention of the listener. A failed attempt to redo Harvest.

Coldplay, another inhabitant of this part of the musical landscape are even paler in comparison. I will never and actually don’t want to understand how a band with an insupportable falsetto singer with empty embarrassing lyrics and average tunes can have such a success as Coldplay. Whereas a nice intense voice coupled with simple but profound lyrics about relationship and breathtaking melancholic melodies stays an insider tip. That again reminds me of Nick Drake so much. I nevertheless hope and think that unlike Drake Tranmer and Quigley can live with their non-success.

A song by song account:

1 2.55 newbury It all starts with street noises again which segue into Quigley humming a light and sunny melody and the guitars and ambient synthesizer/keyboards slowly joining in. At the end a young woman with a strong Northern accent says

2 the understudy This is already slower and sets the theme of the album, the ending of a relation which was doomed from the beginning.

3 be selfish One of the highlights. It has this Cocteau Twins otherworldly night music feel. I find it astonishing that the melodic line is so simple and repeated about a million times without ever getting boring or annoying. In the beginning the guitars have this liquid cembalo sound. Together with the dominating piano they breathe a lightness into the music which is confronted by a certain gravity coming from the bass and synthesizer. The Montgolfier Brothers take all the time of the world to create a relaxed beautiful sentimental tune with a forward looking optimistic take on the situation.

4 the world is flat The title track and centerpiece. It starts as a calmer more settled guitar song. Rather down to earth and rational. Quigley sings of how the relation was meant to be.

5 the second takes forever A meandering instrumental. The piano plays a sort of scale up and down. The atmospheric acoustic guitars are wrapped around.

6 swings and roundabouts This is something like a crossover of a lullaby and a ballad. It starts with this simple musical box theme and then the bass kicks in and this daydream chorus comes on:

and it finishes with these rather mysterious lyrics with new age keyboard background

7 dream in organza Another intermezzo instrumental. An instrument sounding like an electric xylophone and later the piano are like colour blobs in a repetitive soundscape. Very nice background music.

8 i couldn't sleep, either A bukolic nostalgic song about the end of the relation. All which is left are memories and the question what went wrong.

9 think once more One of the most impressive instrumentals I have ever heard. Calm and with a simpleness of the melody reminding me of Satie though it has a very melancholic undertone. It must be one of the musical pieces with the most chord changes. In the first two minutes I counted about fifty. They sound like a briefly screeching door and add a human almost painful touch to the track. The repeated chord changes are like a never ending hiccup.

10 inches away A worthy closer in slow motion. The album condensed into one song. It sounds like watching a rose opening its petals in the morning. Beauty unfolding very slowly. Music and lyrics can only be referred to as perfect. The metronome which can be heard throughout the song gives the song this transient character. After the end of the lyrics the song turns into an instrumental with the tune blossoming in full bloom.

I have to quote the complete lyrics as they can't be split. A love song to the beloved who leaves you.

Most American Bands Excerpt from a discussion on I Love Music from today, September, 11th, 2002:

The most Un-American band would probably be The Dead Kennedys, I guess. They used to be 15 years ago at least. (alex in mainhattan) How so? They sang almost exclusively about America, and their sound is based firmly on Garage Rock and Rockabilly, American music. Jello even made a C&W record. What you're thinking of is "anti American", which the DK's weren't, either (unless you think disapproving of Reaganomics is anti American, in which case Springsteen is anti-American, too.) -- Daniel_Rf (daniel@cul...), September 11th, 2002

All right then Daniel, but you must admit that they are not a band you would associate with American patriotism, American consumer society and American roots music. They stood apart. I always heard their music more as punk than as c&w. -- alex in mainhattan (alex63@big...), September 11th, 2002

"Patrotism" has become a really idiotic word after 9/11- it's now synonymous with "following your government blindly and beating everyone up who disagrees". The cynic in me would now say that this is, indeed, very American, but America also has a great history of protests and interest in social change. The DK's sang about what they thought was wrong with their country and tried to do their bit to change it. I think that's very patrotic indeed. As for the roots music, you're right that the Dead Kennedys stuff isn't C&W (I was talking about a Biafra solo album where he went Country), but: 1- Punk's roots lie in American roots music (Sex Pistols -> The Stooges -> ? & The Mysterions -> "I'm A Man" by The Yardbirds -> "I'm A Man" by Bo Diddley -> "Mannish Boy" by Muddy Waters) 2- The DK's brand of Punk was a lot more brutal and less melodic than the classic UK Punk bands. The fact that the other members of the band have now sued Jello because he didn't want "Holidays In Cambodia" used in a Levi's ad also places them smack dab in American consumer society, but really, does one have to be a symbol for that to be "Most American"? I think you're selling your country short. -- Daniel_Rf (daniel@cul...), September 11th, 2002 ... All right then Daniel, but you must admit that they are not a band you would associate with American patriotism, American consumer society and American roots music. They stood apart. Bush's (and Reagan's) versions of American patriotism & consumer society -which I think are the versions that you're saying the Dead Kennedys are in opposition to- are not the only versions. Daniel's point is excellent about reading what "patriotism" means today. -- lyra (lyra63@spe...), September 11th, 2002

I think you're selling your country short. ??? I am German, so this doesn't really apply. I am using the word American in a very lazy way. It is more the image America gives to the outside world I was thinking of. But I 100% agree, Daniel, that this is only a part of America and that there is a tradition of protest, free speech and social movement. Unfortunately it doesn't show too much nowadays. Especially for the Europeans. Maybe we are a little blind on one eye concerning America. -- alex in mainhattan (alex63@big...), September 11th, 2002 ... I am German, so this doesn't really apply. You are?? So am I (albeit living in Portugal)! Sorry, I misread your user name for "Alex in Manhattan". Mea culpa. I insisted on this point because 20th/21st century popular music has always represented to me everything that's good and righteous about America, and I think that it's tragic how Americans are led to believe that being proud of their country must always go hand-in-hand with a jinogiostic, right-wing nut attitude. -- Daniel_Rf (daniel@cul...), September 11th, 2002

2 germans (one in portugal) good-naturedly arguing over who the most american band is! the ILM global village rulez! -- Fritz Wollner Tue Sep 10, 03:15:05 PM . Alexander F***

(from old blog)

Awesome cover page of Libération today A projection.

Dandy Warhols I have always liked this eclectic band from Portland. Though the singer is supposed to be an arrogant asshole on stage and their drug consumption shows in their psychedelic music. They do lots of drones, they have a certain relaxedness and coolness around them I adore. I am listening to five mp3s which were available on their site recently:

• Hells Bells: great AC/DC cover on sleeping pills, in the melodic Dandy version which uses a nice horn section this song reminds me a lot of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven.
• Ohio: one of Neil Young's most popular and best songs, in a synthesizer-heavy version, with the usual detached mumbled vocals. Rather spooky.
• Bohemian Like You: grooving instrumental, weakest of the 5 tracks.
• Dub Song is a chaotic hypnotic dance track reminiscent of The Happy Mondays in their heyday. Primal Scream's Screamadelica comes to mind as well.
• Retarded: nice powerpop tune, sparkling and light, Beach Boys meet Velvet Underground.

Unfortunately only Retarded and Dub Song are still in the mp3 section of the Dandy Warhols homepage but there are eight other songs which I didn't listen to yet: Head, One, CCR, White Gold, The Wreck of Edmund Fitzgerald (Gordon Lightfoot), Free For All (Ted Nugent), Kinky and Phone Call.