Dolmot

Shall we play "spot the Ultimae row"?

The death of CDs (and books and DVDs) also means that people are dumping loads of their old furniture. You can try checking your physical and virtual second-hand marketplaces. That's where I started when trying to bring some order to my previous chaos. However, it can be quite difficult to find a single, large enough solution or matching pieces second-hand. I didn't want yet another mish-mash of mismatched bits when planning this thing from the scratch. Although I tried to give the local suppliers a chance, everything there was tiny, inconvenient and/or expensive, so the evil Swede it was. Currently my CDs are in Bestå shelves. The 60x20x38 cm (WxDxH) basic unit is about 20e with one separating horizontal shelf. At least earlier there was also a 120cm wide double version. One 56x15 cm slot (two of them in the small unit) holds about 50 CDs with not much space wasted. There's a bit of extra height, which comes in handy for oversized boxes and cases. The units are small enough to be moved around easily, and you can stack a few on the floor or on top of other (sturdy enough) furniture like in my configuration. (As you can see, there are currently some extra rows held by bookends, and piles of incoming/outgoing stuff. I should sort everything again and maybe buy an extra unit whenever I manage to start my holidays. Assorted lower priority CDs are piled in the canvas boxes.) Of course, the instructions state that you should screw everything to the walls. However, unless you have very unruly pets or family members, it's hard to get killed by a falling 38cm high shelf in the floor configuration. I don't claim that this would be the best solution, but it was reasonably affordable, simple and well available.

Well, personally I wouldn't have spotted a tiniest bit of psytrance in that particular track unless someone told me. It's so far from the centroid of this genre that we could debate whether it even belongs there. Anyway, the legend has that many members of the early goa community were Israeli soldies who wanted to take a total break from the rough life of war, politics and religious conflict in the Middle East. That was achieved with a combination of physical distance, slow life, recreational drugs and cosmic music. The hippie scene in general had similar goals. For that purpose, eight minutes of trance works better than two minutes of punk. You could argue that a major point of the genre is avoiding boring or stressful everyday matters and replacing them with something more vague or universal. Come to think of it, you don't hear much politics in any kind of rave parties. Typically the most mundane message you can spot there is "love is totally great, right?" or "I hope this party doesn't get busted". Other genres take care of the particulars of that tragic reationship with Annie and how much the current government sucks. Party-goers prefer happy thoughts and distant concepts, where you can fill in the details yourself or just ignore it all and keep dancing. But you can't control the content of any genre. Sometimes they get totally diverse over time. For example, many people think of reggae as "that laid-back beach party music", but in reality it has covered jolly ditties, slavery, the judgement day, gang fights, gun lyrics, slackness, heavyweight dub and how the singer's car is crap. Eventually all sorts of variants turn up when the base version is getting too repetitive. The audience decides whether there's any real demand for them.

Looks good. I think I already have most of the vinyls but it's definitely convenient to have their digital equivalents too. The live part should be a must-have even for everyone with the original release. Just out of interest, is there a reason for the original album being disc 2? Typically re-releases and expanded editions start with the original title and then pad it with extra content. Obviously this is just a matter of choice and anyone can reorder the discs (or playlist) as they wish. I'm just curious about the motivation. Slightly related, have you already decided the exact title of this release?

Ah, 2004...when gamers complained that publishers only care about the graphics...

There's a presentation/gameplay video of upcoming Doom from E3. It has action. The community reaction seems cautiously positive. Do I have to tell you that it has some violent bits too?

Annoyed? Sure. Calling it a scam? Maybe not. After all, I had received about three orders before with no problems whatsoever.

I'd say about 95% of vocals, chants and voice samples in this genre come from sample CDs, movies, TV, other tracks and whatnot. The producers just don't have the training, proper studios and talented Indian vocalists at their disposal. More likely they're just hammering a PC alone in some basement in Brixton. The extent of clearing and crediting the samples varies. People have become disillusioned by learning about the sources of Daft Punk hits too... (We can have another topic for this. The database shouldn't be that full yet.)

Well, I got mine this week too. It took four months but they do deliver so at least some knickers can be de-twisted.

So I found a copy of Material - Hallucination Engine on my HD with no idea whatsoever where it came from and when. Then I got all the way to Words of Advice and noticed something familiar. What could it be? (The monologue is older than that, but I found this particular version interesting.)

Just weird or very weird?

Give him one!

To make them available (legally, first-hand) for under 50e, maybe? But hey, I definitely won't complain about including extras too, especially like those announced.

It's been a busy spring. I think I haven't bought or downloaded a thing since January or so*. Now I could place a couple of orders so any ideas of stuff I've missed, up- or downtempo, would be welcome. Free downloads also count. Titles and quick blurb, please, not vids. *OK, I got Nervasystem 3 & 4, The World Beyond and Kolovrat. Etnica in Dub, Doof and the Suntrip stuff I happen to like are already on the shopping list, but what else?

http://imgur.com/r/gif/aiEJH

Well, I placed orders to Anjuna and Zion in January-February, even got quite genuine appearing promises of re-shipment from both, yet nothing has arrived from either label. I think there are some fundamental problems over there. I don't feel like blaming anyone in particular. Nevertheless, as the outcome is money paid but no items received, currently I cannot recommend direct orders from that corner of the earth, regardless of the reason.

Why not for them as well?

It has similarities to Chemical Trance...but differences too? Then again, many of their early tracks shared similar elements. Anyone got more free time to compare?

This whole "live" thing is a bit odd in many electronic genres. (Regarding terminology, it seems to stand for "a bloke playing his own music" and that alone without too many expectations of the technical implementation. You are allowed to dislike the fact but don't expect it to change any time soon. Every producer is a live act when it comes to party posters.) But isn't it actually somehow weird to expect that any knob-turning would be involved? I mean, nowadays probably more than 95% of trance etc. is produced with no real-time manipulation whatsoever taking place in the whole process. Why should producers start performing something they simply don't do? (Well, obviously for the entertainment value as suggested here several times, but please try to follow the original train of thought for a moment.) Isn't it like inviting an animator to a film festival and then expecting him to perform the film in real time using paper cutouts? OK, that may be a crap analogy but hopefully you get the point. I enjoy many pieces of electronic music because they're something "unreal", that is, hard or even impossible to perform live with any equipment, obviously excluding pre-recorded media. Unfortunately, when music sales are minuscule, the only way to get paid is getting on the road and performing, even if it's sort of unnatural considering the production methods. Didn't we have DJs for that part? In short, I have some sympathy for producers who are doing great job in the studio but then get pushed on the stage to fake a performance just because the crowd wants to see a "live" act. Heck, many of them don't even have any kind of DJ experience, let alone playing synths and such live. I have discussed with some fine studio artists who confessed that just having something playing for a whole hour was a real struggle, because that's not how producing works. The previously given description "when we got together as a band we already had between us a fair bit of experience with live electronic music" simply doesn't generalise particularly well.

Vocals and live gigs with guitars help a lot. That's what large crowds want to see, not a bloke behinds his laptop playing no-name tracks for 2 hours straight. (Some of those can be successful as well but it's less likely.) The guitar doesn't have to be plugged in anywhere as long as the act is entertaining. Ambition and willingness to turn it big also help. Some artists prefer keeping it at least somewhat underground or just don't care about popularity.

Carlos Siliceo of Sharigrama Torakka

As someone who does audio signal processing for a living, I could... Ah, nevermind. YOUR MOM IS GAY! CHECKMATE! Stay classy.

Visiting Australia and wondering why everything is upside down.

Listening right now...but is there a reason why this one is in 22 kHz?

Tristan - Face to Face?