We’ve been having fun with Googlism, a website that filters descriptions from Google to tell you what Google “thinks” of you. For example:
princess stomper is normally represented as a small pink bunny
princess stomper is a former magazine contributor and music researcher
princess stomper is making way too many assumptions in this article Continue reading
Written for Collapse Board
Before they switched off Pandora in the UK, I found its deliberately anti-genre stance interesting because it would place frivolous ‘pop’ songs next to ‘credible’ artists. It’s probably stretching it to call any of these ‘rock’, but they’re of the type admired by people who don’t generally buy records by Beyonce, etc.
Stripped of the genre tag, note for note, there’s really not much difference between the songs. Wallace Wylie pointed out what’s wrong with the package of pop. If you take that away, you’ve got some great music that the middle-aged chin-strokers would probably like if they just started thinking of it as music. For example: Continue reading
This would have been yesterday’s selection. It’s my current favourite from Make A Scene, though frankly it could have been on Depeche Mode’s Violator.
It’s that time of year again where we reflect on the best of the year’s new music. Here’s some of my favourite songs of the year, with download purchase links for the songs you’d like to keep.
Oooh, tricky one. OK, here’s one. I don’t remember “first hand” industrial music prior to the late 1980s – anything I heard that dates back further I heard many years later. There were many sub-categories, of course, but broadly if you asked me what “industrial music” sounded like I’d have said something like this: Continue reading
There’s a bit of AutoTune-style processing on the beginning of Revolution – just for four bars or so – before Sophie dispenses with such shenanigans and lets her distinctive, slightly hoarse voice shine through. We get the point: she knows what’s going on in the charts. She just doesn’t much care.
1. Terminator 2, and other remixes
Pogo: “Comprising nothing but small sounds recorded from Terminator 2, Skynet Symphonic is my tribute to one of the greatest action features of all time.”
I’ve also included a few of Pogo’s other innovative “remixes”.
Read My Lips is the album I listened most to in 2001/02. It’s a surprisingly sophisticated blend of old-school disco and 80s-style adult oriented pop, and spawned four top 20 hits. Apparently her old band theaudience were formed as part of a bet with Everett True that they could be famous or something.
Sophie releases her fourth album in April.
Unknown David Bowie compilation
First heard: Age 3
I must have been about three. Lying in the back of the car, half-asleep, listening to Ziggy-era Bowie through the back speakers. I particularly remember Aladdin Sane and Starman, and I think those are the ones that have shaped me musically the most. The other bands I was exposed to at the time were Queen and Abba, so ever since, the music I have loved has been a combination of clever minor-key concept album noodling, punchy rock hooks and hard, funky disco. Not much of a surprise I became a NIN fan, then.
Pink Floyd – The Wall
First heard: Age 10
I liked a lot of cool music as a kid, along with some truly terrible music, but until the age of 10, everything I loved was informed by what my parents or sister were listening to. Then my sister played me Pink Floyd’s Wall album, and something just clicked. I dimly recalled Another Brick In The Wall Part 2, which had been the Christmas number one when I was three. Hearing the album in its entirety, though, shed a very different light on the track. It had mystified me – still does – why the song had been so popular, with its puerile shouty “we don’t need no education” refrain, but put into the context of preceding track The Happiest Days of Our Lives (the song doesn’t really work without it), it suddenly revealed a new concept to me: angst.
It seems funny to me now to think of myself as a child, debating the meanings of Syd Barrett songs with my rebellious best friend, Jym. We were absolutely obsessed – making our own Floyd-themed t-shirts, picking up sheet music to learn it on the piano, and just lying out in the sun in his back garden listening to Relics and Meddle. Jym would take mushrooms and smoke pot, but I could enter an altered state just meditating on the music. He got expelled from school a year or two later. I never saw him again.
Reinspired 