Lost in cyberspace

• Sonic Youth article in the LA New Times on their status as indie rock's foremost band (via stevie nixed blog). On their site they announce that they have finished their new album with Jim O'Rourke which is due June 6th. I am less excited than ten years ago but I feel that they can still have a surprise in store.
• Great long artist-by-artist account by Jeff LeVine from lost for life on the four days of the All Tomorrow's Parties stretch at UCLA. Sonic Youth had chosen the bands and closed the festival on Sunday. Cat Power was out of herself again.
• Music blog by Mike with a wide spectrum from prog to indie via alt.country: troubled diva. Mike wrote on 40 episodes of his life during the last 40 days before his 40th birthday, a great feat I'd like to repeat. Luckily I have another year to think about it: 40 in 40 days project
• Hydragenic is a very well written relatively new blog by someone who fights with nicotine as well and who choose "what doesn't destroy me, makes me stronger" as motto (all three via wherever you are)
• Stevie Nixed succinct listening log
• Another fine music blog oriented towards indie: e-moo-la-tion
• Tiny mixtapes like the latest A Silver Mt Zion... (8.9)
• Ryan Adams the ingenious rock'n roll chamaelon in a short interview with the NME (via badger). What to think of this: he just covered the Strokes album as a blues record. Soon Ryan will have more albums in his drawer than will ever be released during his lifetime. At least he is not too full of himself: he labelled his output to date as "a bunch of singer/songwriter crap".
• Encyclopedia of Percussion via ILM

Are we just ghosts here waiting to hatch? (Howe Gelb)

• Oligarchist Home Journal on The Mountain Goats All Hail West Texas (6.5/10)
• MP3's: Rare Slowdive and live in Oslo 1993
• Momus, The Elder Statesman (11th March performance review)
• New pop-oriented music blog october's musings. Thanks for the link DJ Oktober.
• Pitchfork on Giant Sand's Cover Magazine: 7.3/10
• Globe of blogs, a new blog directory by location, title, name, sex and birthday (via wannabe girl)
• US bureaucracy not so fit: Terrorist Pilots' Student Visas Arrive
• Paint your photofit picture (Phantombild in German): Ultimate Flash Face via netbib. I did not succeed. Couldn't find my eyes.
• The New Yorker on a book on Poker (via a&l daily)
• A library like in paradise. The books are sent to your place for free. You can keep them as long as you like. Even the return postage is already paid. There are still nice people out there. Booklend: A Lending Library By Post (via netbib)
• An unbelievable conspiracy theory by a frog: 11 Septembre : le grand mensonge des Etats-Unis (discussion at mefi)
• Businesshessisch (via wortmetz)
• My current blogdex stats. Rank: 1,695 (of 14,690), i.e. top 11.5%. Relative link popularity: 33 links to site / 833 links from site = 3,96% (in comparison evhead has 621/604>100%). I am not sure how to call this ratio. The inverse ratio could be called link popularity price as it measures the average no. of links you have to put on your site to receive an external link in return.

I'd rather be thin than famous (Kerouac)

• Lots of mp3 files of a band I have to check out: Hood
• Pitchfork did not like Brian Jonestown Massacre: Bravery, Repetition and Noise.
• Google News search (beta) of 100 sources which are scraped once per hour via researchbuzz
• Microcontent News: Weblogs, email digests, Webzines, personal publishing, content strategy, Microads. Corante. This site is getting very popular in weblogger circles. They write a lot about Google and how we can influence the search results with our little weblogs.

Misc.

• Delusions of Adequacy on Xiu Xiu's debut Knife Play: "Although the band is dark in the vein of Joy Division or Pere Ubu's Dub Housing, the band's songs aren't as melodious or even listenable as were theirs'."
• The Oligarchist Home Journal on Giant Sand's latest album Cover Magazine (see music reviews recent - March 8th).
• Uncertainty About the Uncertainty Principle - Can't anybody get Heisenberg's big idea right? (via arts & letters daily)

Surf's Up

• ILM threads: Pavement ,Classic or Dud? and Tindersticks - supper club tosh? and do you ever feel like you are getting too old to be a music obsessive? (that is a very relevant question for me, that's why I haven't answered yet)
• Beck Entering Studio To Work On Acoustic-Based LP
• Movie on Nick Drake announced: A Skin Too Few: The Days of Nick Drake
• Joel on Software - Nothing is as Simple as it Seems. Even apparently simple things like copying a file are complicated tasks for the programmer.
• Is there a website with a Google pagerank 10? (the Google pagerank of a website is a measure of its link popularity and is calculated from the number and importance of websites linking back to it) I found three (backward links): Yahoo (1,020,000), Google (354,000) and Adobe (116,000). Any more? What is with Microsoft which has 136,000 backlinks? It only has pagerank 8. Why? Could it be that most of those backlinks come from Microsoft itself? And that Google does not take interior links into account to calculate the pagerank? Concerning the weblogs my little blog has pagerank 5. The Schockwellenreiter has pagerank 6. Evhead and Metafilter have 7 and Kottke and Slashdot have 8. By the way I did not find a website with a pagerank smaller than 3 (sorry Henner).

Potpourri

• David Raposa does not join into the hype on ...Trail of Dead. In the Car he writes on the new Relative Ways EP. After having heard a couple of songs of them I must admit that my interest in them has decreased by close to 100%. "Alter Wein in neuen Schläuchen" (literal translation from German:"old wine in new tubes", don't know the idiom in English) again.
• Sounds like a great idea, but I doubt it has a future: a weblog consisting of speech audio files, it is called audioblog (via alvin). Main problem: How do you link from an audio file to a web site, to an image or to another audio file?
• British music etc. blog I missed up to now parallax view. An interesting interview of my favourite music zine from Amsterdam kindamuzik with some members of Lambchop (via parallax view).
• Another indication that most Pitchfork writers do not know apparently have problems to distinguish good from bad music (or should I have said relevant from irrelevant?). The newest Lambchop gets 5.8/10 ("average") from Rob Mitchum. Though he is not very sure of himself:"A small ass-covering caveat: Is a Woman sounds threateningly like a 'grower' album, ...If this is indeed the case, I'm sure I'll soon be run out of Criticsville by a torch-bearing mob, this embarrassingly short-sighted review preserved for all eternity in the Pitchfork archives". More on Lambchop's newest album tomorrow.
• Stevie Nixed on the Strokes/BRMC live. I have to agree 100%. Boards of Canada are much more exciting than those two boring retro bands.
• Giant Sand in New York. The line up at Joe's Pub was like an alt.country supergroup: Besides Howe Gelb, John Convertino and Joey Burns there were Kurt Wagner from Lambchop, Evan Dando from the Lemonheads, Will Oldham from diverse Palace incarnations and Vic Chesnutt. I wish I had been there...
• Pepys project: weblogs and journals by country and region with rating option
• 'What Drug Would You Be' Quiz: shit I was smack.

Music

• Some people are getting very excited about And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead (they at least succeeded in overtaking GYBE! in terms of length of the band name). Matt LeMay from Pitchfork gives their album Source Tags and Codes a smashing rating of 10.0/10. Andrew Womack at neumu gives the top rating as well and they are on the latest SPEX cover. Never heard of them myself. "Mistakes and Regrets" from the older album Madonna at epitonic does not sound revolutionary but it is solid indie rock with a good noise factor. Discussion on them at ILM here.
• Soft music for stupid people on the Mountain Goats: "The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton"
• BeatBlogging: not so sure what this is about. Clips of electronic music can be downloaded as mp3s. Phil writes: "But what would happen if a culture did try to blog music, to create little fragments of rhythm and melody, to hyperlink through them?"
• Musicrag: good alternative music blog with many concert reviews
• Popshot Magazine says Punk Rock = Capitalism. I have only glanced over the article. It sounds interesting. The subtitle is: "the 'Anti-Capitalists' Have It All Wrong".

Surfing for music news

• The Weezer blog on all things Weezer, you know this small neglected power pop band.
• Johnny Cash's new record announced. In American IV he will cover John Lennon and Trent Reznor (scroll a little down on the page).
• Article on Keith Jarrett who is on tour in the US.
• Winter in England - 20 albums for the coldest season: my personal favourites in Wisdom Goof's well commented list are the first Tindersticks album, Teenage Fanclub's Bandwagonesque, Felt's Absolute Classic Masterpieces and Joy Division's Closer. Though I only know half of the albums by name.
• Pere Ubu release new album St. Arkansas May 8th (I really liked David Thomas last album Surf's Up with the Two Pale Boys).
• Neumu's Michael Goldberg on All Hail West Texas the latest album by John Darnielle's Mountain Goats: "Lo-fi. Unique voice that is about as far from slick as you can get. Rough guitar playing. Amazing lyrics. Amazing melodies. And so intense."
• Brian Jonestown Massacre live in Chicago (by Phil from Glorious Noise): "In a world where digital manipulation of tones and click track drums can suck the soul out of any song, the Brian Jonestown Massacre slugged its way through perfectly crafted pop tunes and space jams and for two hours last night saved rock and roll."

Blindtesting The I Love Music listening chamber is a great idea to discover new music of performers you have never heard of. Per day a maximum of one music track in mp3 is posted there. The artist and album is not revealed for about a week. Discussion takes place in the respective thread at ILM. You are not supposed to name the artist if you know him. Up to now seven tracks have been posted. The first two have been revealed already. Chamber #2 (forum) is definitely worth a listen. I also liked the two most recent chambers #6 (forum) and especially #7 (forum). I sent a track via e-mail today. Will it show up tomorrow?