2008 March | Musical Taste Blog

An explosion of interest and blogging in the last couple of days for http://muxtape.com/, and you can see why.

It’s a simple idea (make an online mixtape) that takes advantage of some nice accessible technologies and makes you think - sure - I’ll do that.  Hey presto, you have a really nice music site up and running within a few days!  I made one but there are only a few tracks on it now.

The owner is doing some really quick development, adding new features daily.  The front page currently has some randomly (?) picked links to users, much like the first Musical Taste homepage did.  Except on Musical Taste you couldn’t listen to tracks, which is a big difference!

Muxtape is so elegant and appealing that it’s hard to imagine anyone kicking up a stink about it, but hang on a minute - 99% of the MP3s people are uploading are copyrighted!  So - it remains to be seen if Muxtape can pull off a YouTube and somehow deal with the legal problems later. I hope it can. I guess the more users it gets, the more likely that is…

Footnote: I had a similar idea once!: compare Radio Delicado with my muxtape…

I went through a period - I guess it was 1993 to 1997 - of buying CD singles all the time. Why? I guess they were cheap - at that time record companies had a policy in the UK of making them 99p or 1.99 when they were first released. So it was a relatively pain-free way of checking things out. And there was the added bonus of getting B-sides or remixes that you might never hear otherwise - CD singles tended to go out of print and become hard to find within a few months. eBay wasn’t what it is now.

I guess the still make CD singles now but since the whole CD single was less useful as an object than say a record or a full-length CD, it’s understandable that downloads have taken a lot of their ground.

Anyway, the vast majority of my stash of CD singles has been safely tucked away in my parents’ garage for several years, but they dumped a box on me recently. The low level of interest and value is slightly sad!

That said, some things have aged pretty well. Here’s the verdict from what I’ve picked out so far (really familiar things to me like Smiths/Morrissey/Nick Cave I’ve left in the box):

Hit

The Legendary Jim Ruiz Group -My Bloody Yugo (1995)
- This has a pleasant sound - a mix of Specials, Bossa Nova and Sarah Records. All four tracks are actually pretty good. It has aged quite nicely (I remember this being in a lot of bargain bins at the time)

Pale Saints - Throwing Back the Apple EP (1992)
- This is pretty fantastic. Probably about the last really good release they did I have to say. Included are their cover of Blue Flower (initially pretty weedy compared to the Slapp Happy version but it gets going) and a re-recording of Half-Life Remembered. Reflections from a watery world is good too. A nice thing to have.

Mick Harvey & Anita Lane - Harley Davidson (1996)
- Picked up for a bargain 49p! This is really cool. Most of the tracks are on Harvey’s ‘Intoxicated Man’ I think, but possibly not all of them. ‘Song of Slurs’ (Chanson des slogans) with its beautiful string arrangement is a particular highlight.

Cocteau Twins - The Spangle Maker/Pearly Dewdrops Drops
- I may never tire of this. In fact I think I had bought an extra copy to replace this one

Miss

David Devant and his Spirit Wife - Cookie (1996)
- I remember enjoying this band live. This single isn’t so hot though!

New Order- Ruined in a Day/New Order - World (price of love)
- There’s really nothing to recommend these, I have to say!

Undecided

Julian Cope - I come from another planet baby (1996)
- the B-side - ‘If I could do it all over again I’d do it all over you’ - is a sprawling, psychedelic piece full of spoken word nonsense - quite fun. But thetitle track and other B-side are pretty underwelming

Kitchens of Distinction - Now it’s time to say goodbye (1993)
- This is almost really good (the title track, that is). The b-sides include a particularly weedy version of Jackie Lee’s ‘White Horses’ which I’m not too hot on. I guess the highlight for this band for me has to be the earlier track ‘the third time we opened the capsule’ - it went a bit downhill after that.

Teenage Fanclub & De La Soul - Fallin’ (1994)
- An unusual combination! The main track is quite pleasant although incredibly unhip sounding. The b-side, ‘judgement night’ by Biohazard and Onyx, used to be a great one for bothering the upstair neighbours.

Gretschen Hofner - Crow in Heels (1997)
- This re-released version doesn’t sound quite as good as the first release to me. And really the way to experience this band was live - the swagger and the twang. But it’s quite good.

I’m guessing if you’re new to these groups and you want to get these tracks, you can do so via either ITunes or a p2p network now, right? So I guess all my 99ps and 1.99s were pretty much wasted. Oh well - it was fun at the time!

Not that I’ve ever found it easy, but I do seem to find making music more and more of a challenge. I can still do it and I’m still happy with the stuff I write and record.  But it’s definitely not as easy to create songs as it used to be when I was say 17.  I guess it goes without saying - I have a lot of other things going on in my life now vs then.

But in a weird way I *want* to be writing music much more now than I did then. This probably just makes it harder. Anyway I just wrote a song so I’m feeling more upbeat about the whole thing!

Hello friends and visitors. I decided to make this Musical Taste blog for a few reasons:

• Encourage a bit of discussion about the direction of my (recently semi-dormant) site
• Provide an outlet for a look at the increasing number of ways to discover music that there are on the internet

I haven’t historically been the most prolific blogger in the world. Yikes - whole years went by there! But to be fair, things have changed - the quality of the tools available for blogging has gone up quite a bit, and so right now it just feels an easier and more natural thing to do.

The Musical Taste site is now incredibly more than 7 years old.  Most of those 7 years have gone by in the blink of an eye! There’s no getting away from the fact that various other projects and activities have dominated my attention for the last few years.  I remember planning and even partially building some features about three years ago that I never finished off. This is a shame but I now hope to spend a bit more time bringing the site up to date. Wish me luck!

Last.fm have a cool new tool - enter your last.fm username and it will suggest which bands you should go and see at the SXSW festival.

Recommended (pretty accurately!) for me:

• The Cowsills (this makes me sad because one of them died in the New Orleans floods)
• Friends of Dean Martinez (I saw them I think 12 years go in NYC. They were amazing. I liked their later records less, but their first couple really got that late night moody twangy cinematic thing across well)
• Jens Lekman (Yes, I think he’s pretty cool)

I think all their tool is doing is presenting you with direct hits (ie bands playing who you have played tracks by) and near misses (bands it thinks you will like because it thinks they sound like something you’ve listened to).

Still, pretty cool. Shame I don’t have the time to make it to Austin, TX!