et cetera

If I rhymed about home and got descriptive, I’d make 50 Cent look like Limp Bizkit.

Somalian-born MC K’naan, from “What’s Hardcore?” (via Fat Planet).

Brooklyn based record label Apestaartje have just added a series of tracks to their website, one per release. These can be found on their catalogue (strip the .m3u extension from the links to download the tracks rather than stream them). The underlying sound of the label is an organic, field-recording oriented minimalism, and taken together [...]

Lovely 45 minute mix just posted by Walkman from Sutemos, staying mostly within the confines of the Arovane sound. The tracklisting is:

Phonem – MainframeArovane – NacrathAutechre – Second ScepeGimmik – Powder PuffNautilis – Blix2Arovane – auBern vor [amx]Plaid – OlMum – On The Old Mountain Radio (Christian Kleine Mix)Kettel – Kinny The KowArovane/Phonem – (Fard) [...]

42. a track from an egyptian cassette with a monkey dressed up as a sailor on the cover, sorry, still can’t read arabic

From Mixed Live by Maga Bo in Fez, Morocco 2005. (Full tracklisting and download).

These days I don’t listen to too much music oriented around guitar and vocals, but these four tracks from Seaworthy (not the Australian band, but rather a one-man act from the US) blow me away. They have the low crunching guitar of Sebadoh, the tense looping structure, with excursuses, of Slint, and the subtle [...]

“9 Beet Stretch consists of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 9th Symphony stretched to 24 hours, leading it closer to eternity than ever”—the finished product is beautiful, cavernous, sprawling. Download it here.

Leaf turned 10 in 2005, and the BBC celebrated by posting a lovely showcase mix [RAM] on their website. The tracklist and some other tracks for download are here.

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I have upgraded et cetera to WordPress 2.0, so if you notice any glitches over the next while please let me know.

Word Browsing

While on technical matters, I can’t recommend highly enough the Word Browser Plugin for Safari. People shouldn’t be encouraged to post Word files to the internet of course, but those files such as [...]

This afternoon Rob Hatch-Miller (formerly of Didjilution on WNYU) played a 2005 wrap-up show on WFMU, and among all the eclectic goodness were two tracks that I thought were phenomenal—the Tape track “Exuma”, and the Mountains track “Paper Windmill”. I would have bought the Tape album Rideau immediately, but Klicktrack is undergoing server [...]

But suddenly I was 29, earning my living as a freelance public-relations writer—an activity I can recommend to no one—and it was increasingly clear that I had better write a novel soon.

(Richard Yates, “Some Very Good Masters”, in The New York Times Book Review, 19 April 1981).

I’m currently reading Blake Bailey’s Yates biography, A Tragic [...]

N and I recently have been spending some time with Jonas and Jennifer, artists from Amsterdam, and Jonas was kind enough to ask me to play some music at their opening the other night. It was mostly drowned out by the rather loud (but fantastic) video installation next door, but here is what I had [...]

New York is pretty different from Lower Hutt. In a lot of ways. But that doesn’t mean New York is BAD… its just ‘different’, y’know? I was down the Lower East Side recently with the guy from Sonic Youth. He was as cool as he looked in Rip It Up magazine! We tuned our guitars [...]

Anyone looking for an introduction to the Warp sound, look no further than the mind-blowing Watch and Repeat Play mix by Buddy Peace and ‘Zilla, released with WarpVision, the recently released anthology of Warp music videos. It’s amazing that the label has stayed so consistently revolutionary over all these years. See the tracklisting here.

Marco Fusinato is no minimalist.

Etcetera Records presents ETC 000-000: MARCO FUSINATO – “0_etcetera remix edition” (0LP) limited to 0 copies.

Ok, let’s face facts. What we are presenting here is zero records, zero records at once. Sold only as a set. No seperation here folks. You are either with us or not – simple. Within these [...]

Via interbreeding.

Total volume of music files: 2566 songs, 9.2 days, 15.82 GB. (Not including CDs and records, which I don’t tend to copy onto the computer).

Last record: Hard to measure, but recent acquisitions, all on vinyl, are Autechre, Confield; Mono, One More Step and You Die and New York Soundtracks; Prefuse 73, Surrounded By Silence; [...]

Sydney boasts an utter dearth of record stores stocking anything for anyone whose brain hasn’t yet been blasted away by dancefloor four-four. So thank God for whoever is behind Sound and Fury, the new record store just off Taylor Square. I walked out the other night with Autechre’s classic Confield and the two recently pressed [...]

It’s not easy to track down the early works of Steve Reich, but I’ve just stumbled across a fantastic recording of a live performance of four early works (“Four Organs”,”My Name Is”,”Piano Phase” and “Phase Patterns”) from the opening of the University Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, on 7 November 1970. The quality [...]

For those with both ears and a brain (I am reminded of novelist Amy Tan, who upon being asked who she would vote for, said Kerry, “because he has a brain and so do I”), I’ve updated Radio for Empty Spaces to reflect the change to daylight savings here in Sydney (we’re now GMT +11).

So the Ig Nobel prizes have just been awarded, including one for a paper which argues that places with a lot of country music on the radio also have higher suicide rates. See Steven Stack and Jim Gundlach, “The effect of country music on suicide”, in Social Forces, Vol. 71, No. 1, September 1992, [...]

Title of the Day
“I will not deny, though my memory is uncertain and indistinct, that this witness of yours may have seen us together as he says, on the Gainesville pike walking towards Big Cyprus Swamp, at half past eleven on that awful night. That we bore electric lanterns, spades, and a curious coil of [...]