to some early industrial highlights over at EuroRanch from Vienna, my favourite listening log with real audio streams:

Cabaret Voltaire - 3 Tracks von "The Original Sound Of Sheffield '78/'82. Best Of

Dan Emerson on The Beatles Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in his music/film blog Restate My Assumptions. He presses some more juice out of one of the most squeezed out releases in pop history. Personally I always found that album together with its older brother, the Beach Boys Pet Sounds totally overestimated (Dan anticipated this stance of course). The only memorable things about Sgt Pepper's in my book are the new production methods and the last song: A Day in the Life. Have a look what Dan writes about it:

Olav Bjortomt in his well written music blog It Makes No Difference... on Gillian Welch's long beautiful ballad I Dreamt a Highway (November, 28th). I have to agree especially to this passage:

Pjoe (a kind of link log to his own music writing and other stuff) has a couple of articles based on interviews online of some excellent bands from that decade. Very nice insightful succinct interviews you don't find a lot today anymore:

• Catherine Wheel 1995 (Happy Days)
• Eleventh Dream Day 1997
• Low 1996 (The Curtain Hits the Cast)
• Luna 1997 (Pup Tent)
• Silver Jews 1994 (Starlite Walker)
• Tortoise 1995
• Yo La Tengo 1997 (I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One)
• Yo La Tengo 1999 (And then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out)

• Aerial M 1998
• David Grubbs 1998
• Lilys 1996
• Rachel's 1997

Mike from Troubled Diva offers mp3 downloads of three interesting Scottish bands from the early eighties. I hadn't heard any song by any band before. Josef K and Orange Juice (led by Edwyn Collins) who both were on the mythic Glaswegian Postcard label made jangly pop-rock whereas the Fire Engines did funk-punk quite similar to the Pop Group:

Josef K - Sorry For Laughing (1981) Orange Juice - Poor Old Soul (1981) Fire Engines - Get Up And Use Me (1980)

Hurry up! I guess they will only be online for a couple of days.

An mp3 of Chan Marshall's He War (via ToT) from her new album You Are Free which is scheduled for release on February, 18th, 2003. A return to form after the rather disappointing Covers Album? This track is less depressive and more upbeat than her usual songs.

An older review of her concert in New York, October, 3rd from Glorious Noise:

Steve Sabo from No Matter What You Heard (a fine music blog I discovered today via blogcritics) about Black Heart Procession's Amore del tropico with two mp3 links to songs on the album:

A lazy day today to do some audio link recycling. Tomorrow I probably won't post as I am in Birmingham on the motor show.

• 8 unreleased new songs by Morrissey with lyrics, 5 of them live in Arizona (via null device)
• Links to Smiths and Morrissey download sites
• A cupful of rare versions of Television, Talking Heads and PIL tracks Television: Last Word is the Lost Word - Sounds (via the always clickworthy wisdom goof)
• Some good 80s esp. C86 stuff, e.g. My Bloody Valentine, Soup Dragons, Shop Assistants, Bodines, Primal Scream, Pastels, Motorcycle Boy etc.
• Links to representative mp3 or streamed tracks from albums reviewed by The Wire, provided for the purposes of aiding listeners in their record-buying decisions. Examples include Anthony Braxton, David S. Ware, Wayne Shorter, Sleater-Kinney, Merzbow, Tom Waits etc. Unofficial _The Wire_ Audio Companion (via url)
• Over 40 concerts from 1998-2001 by among others Dismemberment Plan, Modest Mouse, Pavement, Pedro the Lion, Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Yo La Tengo: Live Indie Rock Music

Some good music to download Planet Claire is a radio programme of the French private station Aligre FM 93.1 from Paris with live radio session songs in mp3 format by Piano Magic, Radar Brothers, David Grubbs (real audio), Jane Weaver, Kat Onoma (the French Joy Division), 16 Horsepower, Mary Timony, Kings of Convenience, Cat Power, Field Mice (10 tracks) etc.

Link sidebar update This was long due. For now I only did the music blogs. In detail: In

• waking ear with good concise writing on music I like, e.g. Wilco, Sonic Youth and Interpol.
• vain, selfish and lazy: Fred Solinger with some interesting condensed link rich posts.
• monosyllabic: a mixed bag of private and indie music posts. Excellent reader-friendly design.
• shazam: David Howie needs some more readers.
• technicolor: Jess Harvell with a new blog on indie. He has been posting like hell recently.
• no rock and roll fun: Loads of music news daily, mainly pop.
• the rub: page title - the unbearable lightness of boring. The post length is perfect for my attention span.
• restate my assumptions: Dan Emerson is 17 and from the UK and writes on music and film.
• stumblings in the dark: Australian blog on electronic music mainly.
• double americano: Brandnew blog by Wendy K on UK indie, alt.country etc.
• land of a thousand dances: Mike Daddino currently listens to Merzbow.
• flaskaland: Barbara compiles the best online articles on music.
• fluxblog is a return to form. Radiohead seems to be a favourite.
• popshots fakebook: Sometimes I am an idiot. Out
• alacran: sorry I don't speak Dutch.
• listen missy: not my cup of tea really. - popshots: what happened to the music David?
• mostly music: I never read this classical music blog from Brazil with loads of private stuff.
• the modern age: Strokes, White Stripes, Sigur Ros etc. are bands I almost hate.
• den of ubiquity: the posts are too long, my attention span is too short.
• musicrag is on summer holiday.
• instant enemy is an empty page.
• gygax is coming soon.
• soft music for stupid people doesn't update enough.
• jiffysquid, quicksilver shapeshifter, in review, let's build a car, sink and collating bones are on hiatus. I hoped to have less music blogs in the side bar than before the operation and it worked! They are even in alphabetical order now, like my CDs. There are 55 of them. Keep on bloggin'! P.S. Most of the music weblogs (plus some other non-pinging music sites) can also be accessed via my handy blogroll powered by freshblogs (last updates on top).

Further reading

• Five IQ Tests (via daypop top 40). If you score 126 or more in one of the tests you can become member in the elite club called International High IQ Society.
• Great idea to connect blogs and to understand where they came from: BlogTree.com - Weblog Genealogy. My inspiring parents were Robot Wisdom, not.so.soft, wherever you are, josh blog, badgerminor, Wortwerkstatt and sofa blogger (via daypop top 40). As I just found out on my blogtree page I already have a child: largehearted boy.
• videos.antville.org: links to cool music videos (via daypop top 40)
• A stupid question Beatles: Classic or Dud?
• Which obscure band are you? (via parallax view) I was Mouse on Mars, to which I have hardly ever listened.
• Some very good writing on music at Waking Ear (via Stevie Nixed). My favourite of Murray Street was as well Rain on Tin. The concert version was especially brilliant and went on forever.
• An open knowledge project like everything2 but music centered is rootnode (via waking ear). Another good open internet music site where everybody can contribute is - The Ectophiles' Guide to Good Music organised by artist which I found when looking for Robin Holcomb who was compared to Joni Mitchell in the book I read about her.
• The Church Of Me (scroll down the entry is called Who's a Liar, Marcello's permalinks don't work) on the postpunk band Gang of Four of which I still haven't got any of the early albums. The album to buy seems to be A Brief History of the Twentieth Century (The EMI Compilation) which apparently contains everything interesting they have ever done.
• Better late than never. I discovered Mark Sinker's interesting long essay on noise & music: The Noise Piece (Director’s Cut) and The Noise Piece (Director’s Cut Part Two)
• Recently I mentioned a story in German about a physics exam with Niels Bohr as the clever candidate. Apparently it was all false according to Urban Legends Reference Pages: College (The Barometer Problem) German:
• Ist Pi völlig "normal"?. Höchstwahrscheinlich sind die Nachkommastellen von Pi gleichverteilt. In der interessanten Diskussion geht es darum, ob Pi als Zufallszahlengenerator brauchbar ist und darum, dass alle Werke der Weltliteratur incl. meines Weblogs irgendwo in Pi vorkommen.
• smi ist ein sehr lesenswertes Metablog. Die Posts sind häufig recht lang und zitieren meist aus vielen anderen Weblogs, da steckt eine Menge Fleiß-, Surf- und Lesearbeit dahinter.