My new favorite Band, Black Mountain with images provided courtesy of one of my favorite films, "Wings of Desire". Read More...

I love a good list. Theirs is very helpful. It's here. Read More...

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Nina Gordon was in the band Veruca Salt and left for a solo career as a Singer, Songwriter. I like this kinder gentler version of the song which gives it a different context. Read More...

Listen to your iTunes library from any web browser using Anywhere.FM, a slick webapp that hosts and streams your music with its web-based player. The Anywhere.FM beta is almost too good to be true right now, with free unlimited uploads and listens (but the service may charge in the future).

Download a free Anywhere.FM iTunes uploader application that will detect your library and upload all your songs to Anywhere.FM for you. Read More...

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Shown here is "You Are The One" by The Sugar Bears, it was a cereal box cutout I had when I was 8. Frank LaRosa has collected some great MP3s and information about some really obscure records. Big fun. Click the Sugarbears for more. Also be sure to check out "The Monsters Go Disco" where BooBerry, Frankenberry and Count Chocula get down to a disco beat.

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The site author says,

"I started collecting records many years ago. The problem was, there were so many other "collector nerds" where I lived that finding "good" records at thrift stores & garage sales was next to impossible. No matter how early I got to the sale, there was a bigger nerd who was there 15 minutes earlier and bought all the so-called "good" stuff.

I noticed that when a collector nerd looks through a box of old records at a thrift store, he will often pull out some 70's religious disco exercise record, make some sort of witty remark about it's lameness to his bored girlfriend, and toss it back while grumbling how you can't find good records at thrift stores anymore.

I began to notice that often these "rejects" were just as good as the more widely sought-after items. This is what I started to collect!"

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Shoegaze Psychedelia. Sublime. Read More...

Nice version of this great song made famous by an episode of Scrubs. Read More...

The quartet's textured melodies capture the hypnotic dream pop threads of My Bloody Valentine and pop bitter sweetness of Earlimart amd Pavemant... and such a blend has wowed their native L.A. since 2005.

here they are on Letterman




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I remember seeing this on the Grammys one year... good TV! Read More...

Craig Finn (the singer) is the lovechild of Bruce Springsteen and Warren Zevon. I especially love it when he gets pissed off. Excellent guitar playing when it gets going. Read More...

Just feeling the videos this week... I love this band. So unexpected. Read More...

Will Oldham is a freaking crazy indie rock genius. He's like an autistic world weary banshee of loneliness. He performs and records as "Bonnie Prince Billy", Will Oldham, The Place Brothers and sometimes Superwolf. Read More...

video of this great song off their excellent album "Shine On". Nic Cester (the singer) wrote this for his father who died a couple years ago. Read More...

the mix isn't great, but it's clever. I personally prefer Petra Hayden sings The Who sell out", but this is interesting. click the video to play. Read More...

I found this random folder of music via a badly typed search... there are about 30 or so albums of varying interestingness. Read More...

People sort of know this Flaming Lips song, which was written by Wayne Coyne who is from Oklahoma after the Oklahoma City Bombing. Read More...

pretty live version of this great song, Sam Beam (who is Iron and Wine) is an excellent songwriter. This one is about the sad truth that one of always dies before the other. Read More...

Noah Vawter from the MIT Media Lab has invented a walkman synthesizer mash-up that creates ambient music from environmental noise. The Ambient Addition, as the video explains, is a device that not only changes the way you listen to music, but how you look at the world. It is completely interactive and it is insanely creative. Noah Vawter further explains the purpose behind his invention and how it works:

Ambient Addition is a Walkman with binaural microphones. A tiny Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chip analyzes the microphone's sound and superimposes a layer of harmony and rhythm on top of the listener's world. In the new context, some surprising behaviors take place. Listeners tend to play with objects around them, sing to themselves, and wander toward tempting sound sources. With Ambient Addition, I'm hoping to make people think twice about the sounds they initiate as well as loosen up some inhibitions. Read More...

When prominent scientist Stephen Wolfram published A New Kind of Science in 2002, it was immediately hailed as a major intellectual landmark. Today the paradigm shift that Wolfram's work initiated is starting revolutions in a remarkable range of areas of science, technology--and the arts. WolframTones is an experiment in applying Wolfram's discoveries to the creation of music.

WolframTones works by taking simple programs from Wolfram's computational universe, and using music theory and Mathematica algorithms to render them as music. Each program in effect defines a virtual world, with its own special story--and WolframTones captures it as a musical composition.

It's all original music--fresh from "mining" Wolfram's computational universe. Sometimes it's reminiscent of familiar musical styles; sometimes it's like nothing ever heard before. But from just the tiniest corner of the computational universe WolframTones can make everyone on Earth their own unique cellphone ringtone. Read More...

His & Hers ~ Love the design... from the Garden State music supervisor, Amanda Scheer-Demme! Oasis, and The Dandy Warhols to The Postal Service, Daft Punk, Goldfrapp, and Nina Simone. Read More...

I want a wallpaper suit! Read More...

it's a podcast, it's a music showcase, it's a streaming internet radio station...

from the site: Our aim is to expose you all to deep beautifully strange music that will help you in the every day, as you view the world around playing out like a silent color film, the music soundtrack in your ears. Your on your way to work on the subway or bus, waiting at an airport or just walking down the street, maybe your standing looking at the most inspiring view as you reach the top of Ankor Wat in Cambodia, as you watch the sun set over a tropical beach or ride around on a bike at Burning Man. There are those moments in life that you attach to music, that help you remember them many years later, we like to call it "Music For Strange Moments." Read More...

An online musical keyboard with 14 professional soundbanks. Make your own club, hiphop, trance, reggae or even jazz and samba. And do it live! No tricks: you start the samples and the loops. Learn all about timing, "building" a song and creating a dance track.
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Share your iTunes. The service is basically Slingbox for your iTunes Library. It's a good idea, I give them 6 months before they are shut down. Read More...

Zach Braff put Joshua Radin's song "Winter" on an episode of Scrubs, a move that eventually led to a recording contract with Columbia and his debut, We Were Here, much to the excitement of thousands of female fans. Radin plays the role of the quiet, romantic, sensitive guy, obsessed with his own heart and that which surrounds it, and does it all pretty convincingly. His songs are intimate, vaguely postmodern (his frequent references to the entity of a song within the song itself) affairs about love, addressing an unnamed woman and contemplating the state of their relationship over quietly picked acoustic guitars and the occasional bowed accent. His voice is soft and airy, timid and gentle to the point of fragility (it is extremely hard to believe when he sings "I scream that I wanna be anyone but me" in "Amy's Song" that he's not being hyperbolic), and his songs are layered in a similar way to the work of Elliot Smith.

The late singer is definitely a huge influence for Radin (he's even thanked in the liner notes), but while Smith was able convey emotion not just through his words but through his voice, Radin is mostly expressionless (besides the occasional breathy sigh), that even the happier pieces can still sound as if they're being sung upon his deathbed. And while he does have some good lines ("There's a hole in my pocket that's about her size," "I keep your picture in my worn-through shoes"), many of his rhymes seem a little forced, almost corny ("Photographs and brightly colored paper/Are your masks you wear in this caper," he whispers in "Closer"), which greatly takes away from the profundity he's apparently trying to reach.

Worth a listen and I think his next album will be a big positive evolution. Read More...

I love lists, and I love music. I don't agree with everything on these lists, but if you are looking for a nice starting point to dig in to good music from 2006... this is a good square one. Read More...

Songbird™ is a desktop Web player, a digital jukebox and Web browser mash-up. Like Winamp, it supports extensions and skins feathers. Like Firefox®, it is built from Mozilla®, cross-platform and open source.

I love this application because it's going to force iTunes to sharpen it's game. Better radio station choices, a nice interface and a sense of humor combined to make one of the best music applications out there. Read More...

One of the most polarizing music Web sites online, Pitchfork is more of an online magazine rather than a blog. What you'll find on P4K, as it's affectionately referred to, are a ton of bands — from indie to electronica to hip-hop — you've never heard of, and a few that you might know. They strive to introduce new and experimental bands to their audience, and they thrive on controversy.

Reviewers will often pan an artist just because they're becoming popular, and will likewise fawn over a totally unknown artist so they can boast that they were the first to "break" a band into popularity.

If it sounds a bit pretentious, well, it is. But the P4K staff are also incredibly knowledgeable, if not a bit verbose. Spend some time with Pitchfork, and you'll be sure to find something new that grabs you by the ears and won't let go. Read More...

Robert Seidel directed this low-budget video which was done within just 2½ weeks for the planned DVD of Zero 7’s “The Garden”. The video visualizes crushed objects representing a diffuse future of wishes and desires which shape over time. Visible artifacts and the rough synchronisation add subtle emotions to the uncertain process… Side note: Another video for the song was commissioned and got directed by Duckeye, as this one was too uncommercial... click the pic to go see the original video Read More...

Ange, designed by Danielle Wilde, is a bodily mounted series of “ribs” with electronic sensors that enable a user to play different sounds, including breathy notes, a gong, rushing water, drums and an oboe. The notes respond differently to pressures. The idea is to use the body as an interface and allow the user to metaphorically touch and “play” the body of the wearer.

The design is inspired by an 18th century engraving, Ange Anatomic by Jacques Fabien Gautier d’Agoty. Read More...

With half its members residing in Texas and the other half in northern England, the Earlies bridge the geographical gap with the wonders of technology and the group's shared love of prog, psychedelic, country, and electronica. The band's "musical pen pals" approach started in the late '90s, when Lapham met Madden at a sound recording class in Manchester, and also met Carr at a record store in Texas. Acting as the link between the other members, Lapham handed out DAT tapes to Carr, Hatton, and Madden, and this way the group slowly built the songs that they began releasing in 2002 on EPs such as Bring It Back Again. In 2004, the band released These Were the Earlies, a collection of their previously released work, in the U.K. That year also marked the first time that all of the Earlies met each other in person, for a tour that expanded the band's ranks to a small army of 11. You can get it used for about $4.50, click the pic for a bargain on a great album! Read More...