Links

• The new Aimee Mann album Lost in Space can be streamed at her home page until the release date August 27th (via elements of surprise). Bachelor #2 was one of my favourites in 2000. Aimee Mann always reminds me of Joni Mitchell whose subtle melodies and personal lyrics captivated me a lot during my studies in the 80s. When I heard Aimee the first time I thought she was Joni reincarnated only twenty years younger, a similar crystal clear warm voice and the same looks: slender, fragile with long blond hair.
• Tom Ewing writes on the best-of 21 Singles by The Jesus and Mary Chain. I never really got into that band but I loved the trashy primitive guitar sound very much influenced by the Velvet Underground around White Light/White Heat.
• Strange Fruit has some news on Austin's American Analog Set splitting up as their singer Andrew Kenny is going to attend grad school at Columbia University. Their gig in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago was my favourite concert this year up to now. Even the Sonic Youth concert in Cologne could not come close to that intense mind-blowing set.
• Ten songs Radiohead played at the first gig of their European Tour in Lisbon on Monday of which the new ones were described as more 'immediate and melodic' than their stuff on Kid A and Amnesiac as mp3s here: punch up at a wedding, myxomatosis, we suck young blood, i will, sail (you) to the moon, karma police, up on the ladder, scatterbrain, there there and lift (via parallx view). I also found Joseph Tate's on-going investigation of the music and art of Radiohead in the form of a weblog: pulk-pull* (via eclogues).
• German: Bekenntnisse einer Frau, die es liebt Männer im Mund zu haben (kam mir anfangs wie ein Fake vor, ist aber in any case lesenswert).

From the link archives, pt. 1

• Maybe I should try this. Another way to stop smoking: YPL: Nicolaxx Nicotine Anal Suppositories (via ap-project).
• The Big Book of Sign Language by rotten.com's The Gaping Maw (via daypop).
• Google Zeitgeist now with the most popular searches broken down by country: the UK and Spain were recently (about a week ago) obsessed with Big Brother (Gran Hermano) whereas France looked for Britney Spears and Germany was into the Muttertag (mother's day) (via Mefi).
• Slashdot discussion on Two Books from Haruki Murakami (via monkey puzzle).
• A nice new feature at the New York Times (free registration): audio music reviews (via fimoculous). The critic reads his review in between music extracts. Examples: Sonic Youth - Murray Street and Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
• Did I already link to Strange Fruit, a rather new well-written music blog I discovered via badger?
• Mefi: info and links concerning Harry Smith , who compiled the Anthology of American Folk Music, which saved traditional American music from oblivion and influenced so many musicians to come. Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes are unthinkable without the Anthology.
• [parallax view] (July, 10th) on Cinerama's (not so new band by Chief Weddoe David Gedge) new album Torino: "But rumours of a return to form, a darker more guitar-oriented sound and Steve Albini helping out on production tempted me to try out Cinerama's third album 'Torino' and I glad I did. It's basically The Wedding Present 'with strings attached' and the guitar squall on tracks like 'Starry Eyed' could have come off 'Seamonsters' (hmm...now there's an album that merits inclusion in my soon-to-be-resumed Lest Ye Forget series)."

Feeding the mice

• David Keenan's 100 essential albums. On first looks an interesting wide-ranging selection. The first ten records are: Springsteen's Nebraska, Throbbing Gristle's Heathen Earth, The Stooges Funhouse, Belle and Sebastian's If You're Feeling Sinister, Kiss Destroyer, The Boatmen's Call by Nick Cave, John Coltrane's Meditations, Odyssey and Oracle by The Zombies, Sonic Youth Sister and Liege and Lief by Fairport Convention (via douze lunes). I own 25 albums of the list. There are several under those I mainly got as they were on other best of lists. Of those there are some albums I never listen to as I find them rather dull and overrated, for example Nico's Marble Index (depressive in the worst sense), Van Morrison's Astral Weeks (ok, but no masterpiece, except maybe for the lyrics which I don't understand), The Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (unlistenable and annoying) and Grateful Dead's Live/Dead (aimless dated noodling). Neither Joy Division nor New Order feature on the list. And where are two of the foremost songwriters: Joni Mitchell and Nick Drake? For you to judge...
• Long ten page interview with Thurston Moore at Nude as the News on Murray Street, the album, the street and the studio. Other topics are the way Sonic Youth compose, what Jim O'Rourke adds to the band etc. (via fluxblog)
• I participated in a thread on Nick Drake on I Love Music where the thread poster asked for good reasons why Nick Drake is considered so highly. I lost the URL as ILM is down again. The skeleton of a new ILM forum outside of Greenspun where posting is possible already is here. For ILM discussion on mainly technical issues concerning the new ILM there is the Yahoo! Group 12 ft lizards (free registration required) which is quite active when the Greenspun hosted ILM is down. P.S. The Nick Drake thread is here: Nick Drake: why???
• Stylus Magazine's Chris Smith writes on each song on the Nuggets box (via badger). By the way after the Sonic Youth concert last Thursday an acquaintance made me discover a wonderful almost forgotten late sixties psychedelic band from Boston: Ultimate Spinach (AMG entry). I think they recorded three albums and disbanded because of drug problems. I listened to their 1968 album Behold & See which is somewhere in between Jefferson Airplane, Love, The Strawbs and Fairport Convention. In view of this crossover between West coast psychedelia and British folk-rock the label Bosstown sound referring to Boston makes a lot of sense. The stand-out track is called Mind Flowers and when listening to it in the right mood you can watch the flowers blossoming in your brain.
• The music weblog vain, selfish and lazy is back after an 8 months hiatus, Fred Solinger starts with his 100 fave albums.
• Two music weblogs I found via Wisdom Goof: modern music from the UK which is indie-oriented and more or less daily. It features news, links and personal opinions. Swordfight from Halifax, Canada is full of humour and offers you the phantastic blogrock feature. You link to Swordfight, e-mail Philip and he makes a song about your weblog which you then upload on your site.

I Love Music threads

• 'Marquee Moon' LP is overrated: Me too I think that Television's debut is a little overpraised. It has its moments but there are not enough of them to fill an LP.
• Their voice gets in the way on rock singer voices people can't stand.
• Forthcoming Albums - Second half of 2002, What you looking forward to?: a very long list by dj martian which is completed by the ILM contributors.

Business as usual

• Discussion on How to Read Quickly Without Really Trying at kuro5hin. Some tips on how to accelerate your reading skill and how to read more efficiently.
• FilmWise is a site with a weekly quiz on movie stills. You can guess eight movies per week, the persons are taken out of the stills so that only the clothes can be seen. Quite surreal with the dresses hanging in space and rather difficult (via dekaf).
• Review of Sheila Hale's book The Man Who Lost His Language on her husband John Hale: "When a great historian lost his speech to a stroke, what remained of him?"... "The mystery is that the huge physical insult to his brain seems to have changed everything about him except who he was. His spirit, as we might once have called it – or his "personality" if we feel we no longer can – survived the general devastation." (via wood s lot). Another review of the book in The Economist.
• ILM discussion What's up with hating on the Doors where I tried to defend the music of The Doors and Jim Morrison against a huge majority of Doors dispraisers.
• Via the excellent music weblog Wisdom Goof which is updated daily now and featured the Doors reunion on Friday I found a great music blog called Slow Thrills with another review of Yo La Tengo's Sounds of Science score to the old underwater short films by Painlevé. I'd like to read more of Slow Thrills but a bright font on black background is so awful to read... That really is an attack on my sensitive eyes. Catherine's pita and the Stylus Magazine's blog (in an incredibly small font) are doing the same. How can someone choose a dark colour background scheme? Something to do with Netscape? I use Internet Explorer and these pages turn out almost unreadable. Or are these people night cats?
• Monosyllabic :: the rotation is an indie music blog worth your attention (via badger).
• The Rub is another music blog (via somnolence who has redesigned).
• German: 40.000-Zeichenerguss über den Aufenthalt in einem Swingeretablissement.

Connecting

• After Napster its successor Audiogalaxy bit the dust as well. But there is no reason to worry. Loads of other P2P services are ready to take over. Who will win the race? Pitchfork: How To Survive Without Audiogalaxy: A Guide to File-Sharing Alternatives. The competition will be fierce as the other side is not sleeping neither: Music labels go after song-swappers.
• Very good Keith Jarrett site with questions & answers
• Did you know that Camper van Beethoven covered Fleetwood Mac's album Tusk, the follower of their biggest selling record Rumours, in 1986 (via robotwisdom)?
• I started the still almost virgin thread on Michelle Shocked: Search and Destroy on ILM. I also write in this thread: Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. According to the fellow forum participators I am stretching the Wilco-Beatles comparison a little.
• Douglas Wolk, who usually reviews music, writes in Salon on the classic bestseller Joy of Cooking written by a supposedly terrible cook
• A board game blog from Salisbury, UK: nimrods. I still haven't found a chess blog.
• You want to meet fellow bloggers near you? Try blog.meetup.com!
• Times Online on Alain de Botton's new book The Art of Travel on how travelling and literature can fecundate each other (MeFi discussion on the perfect combination of a book, a destination and a way of travelling).
• New fast indexing search engine with cache: openfind (via dj martian). It comes from Taiwan and is still in the beta phase.
• German: Revolutionslieder und Protestsongs wurden gerade beim Sofa Blogger diskutiert.

Miscellaneous

• Marjorie Kelly's critic of capitalism and especially the shareholder value becomes more and more relevant in view of the falsified balances of Enron, Worldcom, Xerox etc.: The Divine Right of Capital
• The European knowledge test (via prolific). Not very difficult as I got 19/20.
• The new Flaming Lips album is streamed on their site (Mefi discussion).
• Everett True on Ed Kuepper, the great rather unknown Australian songwriter: The Cornish Arms - Artists' Biographies (via monkey puzzle)
• Tom Ewing on the Talking Heads Fear of Music and Remain in Light and the Byrne/Eno collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (I have to relisten to that album. In my memory a brilliant experimental record): It's nearly Africa (ILM discussion)
• I Love Music: did we ever have a Keith Jarrett thread?
• 'Deep in a Dream': A Life of Chet Baker, the Popularizer of Cool. Extract 'Deep in a Dream' (free NYT registration required)
• 'Anything Goes' (free registration required), the new novel by Madison Smartt Bell is about a 20-year-old traveling with his band across the South. Excerpt: "Kurt Cobain was teaching me how to play "Lithium." One of two songs off that record I ever liked well enough to care to learn it. How the changes were just so brutally stupid, like they went out of their way to pick the exact wrong chords. The funny thing was I was playing guitar. Kurt was explaining to me–you got to keep it rough. Which it seems like rough was built into the chord progression anyway but maybe it wasn't quite so simple as I thought. So he was reaching for the guitar to show me what he meant but somehow the guitar sort of went tilting away from both of us and that's how I woke up." (via wood s lot)

Musical links

• The documentary film A Skin Too Few - The Days of Nick Drake according to Pitchfork does not reveal anything new about the most gifted suicidal songwriter of all times. The memories of his sister Gabrielle seem to be the most interesting part.
• Article in the LA Weekly on a big fan of The Doors who happens to be one of the foremost rock critics: Richard Meltzer (via freezing to death)
• Pitchfork on Sonic Youth: Murray Street. Rating wise from zero for their last album NYC Ghosts and Flowers to 9. Only the Flaming Lips going from 0 for Zaireeka to 10 for The Soft Bulletin have received the two opposite extreme ratings from one album to the next at Pitchfork. Though I ask myself if those two numbers were not confused.
• Another positive review of Murray Street by Marvin on the Aussie site Delusions of Adequacy. My review on this phantastic album is in the makes, promised.
• There is also a positive review of Pere Ubu's latest St.Arkansas by Patrick at DoA. I loved the last album Surf's Up of David Thomas and Two Pale Boys. Truly great haunting and weird atmospheric stuff.
• Jim O'Rourke who seems to be the bête noir behind most great albums this year (Wilco and Sonic Youth) has been releasing loads of albums himself recently. The five releases I'm Happy, and I'm Singing, and a 1,2,3,4, Insignificance, Halfway to a Threeway EP, Eureka, Bad Timing and Happy Days have been reviewed very positively at Tiny Mixtapes Gone to Heaven
• I even started a thread on ILM: Jim O'Rourke S/D. Forget what I wrote on Tortoise's Djed there.

I have changed the name of the blog again, the pronunciation is the same

• Longish account of Brian Wilson's concert in Nottingham by Mike from troubled diva. Apparently a great concert after a difficult start. A moving performance in between karaoke and sincerity.
• ILM discussion: Which other music is similar to "Unicorn" by Bel Canto and "Heaven or Las Vegas" & "Ivo" by Cocteau Twins?
• Ein Hamburger, der inzwischen tibetanischer Mönch ist, läuft zu Fuß durch Europa, er ist gerade dabei, die österreichische Grenze zu überschreiten, nachdem er Deutschland hinter sich hat und schreibt darüber im Internetz (via mosaikum). Das Ganze ist ein Friedensmarsch und soll dazu dienen, den Leuten in Europa das schwere Schicksal der Tibeter näherzubringen. Noch ein alter Reisetraum von mir. Zu Fuß um die Welt oder zumindest ums Mittelmeer.

Links

• Think positive. Only good news on the Good News Network. A good example: Palestinians and Jews. Working Together.
• ILM: A seemingly thorough interpretation of Gillian Welch's latest album Time. The Revelator and its refutation.
• Where's a good place to start with Wilco? After having read that thread I still don't know which will be my second album of theirs. The eclectic double album Being There or Summer Teeth full of violins?
• PLAYLOUDER | review - Murray Street by Sonic Youth: "The way they manage to weave the songs into the whirling improvisational playing, like on 'Disconnection Notice', is seamlessly brilliant, and there is just enough balance between the tune, and the unexpected jazz chords, ear-splitting squeals, and lovely harmonic noises to make it forever listenable. This is unique to Sonic Youth and one of the reasons they have remained so relevant for 21 years. 'Murray Street' is mint."

German section

• Philosophiefragen kann man hier stellen und beantworten: WERTSCHRIFT.NET - das online-tool der philosophie
• Habe zwei Mal vergeblich versucht, mit dem Rad nach Indien zu fahren. Einmal war in Griechenland, einmal in Kappadokien Schluss. Zwei Studenten haben es kürzlich gepackt. Mit dem Fahrrad in die Uni: von Berlin nach Bangalore und weiter nach Seoul (Kurzfassung im UniSpiegel).