andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

This business of just linking to stuff is going to get old very soon, but stick with me and enjoy the wild ride into… The World of Interweb Kevin and his 802.11g connection to the world!

Me, striding manfully up the beach at Wexford a week ago. I should have been on Baywatch, or Celebrity Love Handles. Click image to view larger version…

The last chunk of new music I got my hands on was an album by ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’ by none other than ‘Clap Your Hands Say Yeah‘, a band who made their name by self-publishing and getting rather famous by being good and getting talked about on the Interweb (as opposed to shagging a music executive and having huge amounts of money poured into advertising their album). Kenny had been going on about them for a while, and then my brother Conor got me the cd, which was good. Very good.

Now, I was biased because I hadn’t listened to anything new in a while, and I tend to get blown away by any music that I haven’t listen to over and over and over on my iPod, several times a day for the last four years. This is actually slightly peculiar since I have something like three thousand tracks available to me, at least a thousand of which are not stupid sound tracks or incredibly crap, so I should be able to go and explore some of these. More over, a lot of those are actually sets from full albums (Don’t worry IRMA, I own them and paid far too much for them, as you well know, you cunts.) and I haven’t even ‘ripped’ a lot of my other albums onto my iPod either. Sometimes I even take out my portable record player to listen to my cds; it’s great, having these big plastic disks which you have to swap when you want to hear a song by a different artist. Anyway, I don’t do these things, for whatever reason, and my mind is starved of new music, which is why I get very excited by hearing something new and good, and then I get obsessed with it for about two to three weeks before I go back to listening to the hundred or so songs that I feel comfortable with (You can take that as being too lazy to set up a new playlist. Yes, apathy, my friends!).

A good manifestation of this effect was after I went to the Castle Palooza festical and came across ‘8 Ball‘, an up and coming band with a good sound; I located the website, downloaded the samples, and then listen to the samples over and over and over like some sort of crazed, obsessive loon. I am, possibly, a crazed obsessive loon; that’s not the point. It’s just not healthy and it was clear that new music was required. Also, their album is apparently not available, or out of print, or banned or whatever, one of these things you have to do leg-work for and then be bitterly disappointed.

Before I get to the explanation of where all this is going and the subsequent linkage, there’s something I need to point out (and I do so love a good pointing) which is that I have a habit of endorsing enthusiastically whatever I’m into, or doing at the moment. Five a Side Football, learning Romanian, contracting, premature baldness, masturbation, whatever it is, if I’m doing it then I’m convinced that everyone else should be doing it too because you’ll all enjoy it at least as much as I have. But you knew that, because if you’re reading this then you know me, right? Yeah, I have a post for you on that subject shortly. The net effect is that if I find something I like then I have to tell everyone to get onto that too. If this blog ever started getting read by more than five or so people (make that a tentative six, since we may now reliably have Aideen onboard; time will tell.) then I could make a living out of doing things and then endorsing them. Somehow.

So I needed some new music, and at the same time I have difficulty with going out to a music store, because of all the hassle involved in trying to find a cd, comparing prices, all that. The iTunes online music store is not bad, but it’s a swindle because they’re charging the same as I’d pay for a cd in a shop, but without all the bells and whistles. Some cds, notably a few from Sony, have copy protection, whereby if you put the cd into your Windows PC it installs some software which opens your PC to virus attacks (I’m simplifying here) and then prevents you from copying the music onto your PC, and then onto your mp3 player. So you still need your portable record player, thanks to those stupid cunts. Buy a Mac instead, which allows you to carry on as usual and looks nicer. I want my bells and whistles if I’m paying for them. Or I can go to Amazon or somewhere like that and again, try and get it cheaper by searching around a bit, and then wait a few weeks while they figure out how to get it to me and An Post (our beautifully hopeless local postal service) loses the delivery.

Or I can go here:

AllOfmp3.com
Cheap music to download from Russia!
http://www.allofmp3.com/
Yes, I finally decided to take the plunge and try this site. It sells music (Not quite everything, but a damn good selection.) in almost any format you can think of, and it’s legal. In Russia. So, I went to Russia on the Internet, bought credit, selected the music I wanted, it sent me an email when the site had processed my request and put the files up for me, and I downloaded them! I organised them and put them on my iPod! It was cheap and easy! Ok, almost too cheap, Russia isn’t known for being the most secure place to do business with a credit card (Possibly less safe than Finglas West.) and I was a little disconcerted when the credit card company rang up a few hours later to check if I really intended buying the fissile uranium from Uzbekistan, to which of I course I said maybe, depending on the quality. The site is easy to use, well-designed and clearly secure (You only get one shot at every download, but it hangs on to them until it knows you were successful and only charges when you complete the download) and I’m totally comfortable with using it. This is the way this should work.

I’ll say it again, because I love repetition and over-emphasis: This is the way this should work.

It was cheap, the cost is basically calculated by file-size which is dictated by the quality and format of the files, so an album might work out to between two to five euro, and the processing (they generate the files on demand, depending on if you request a popular format) is fast. The site is something that so many other similar businesses could learn from; it looks great and still delivers the goods. It even has decent preview samples!

I would actually pay even more per album, and with that I’d like a PDF file of the cover and sleeve notes, but the basic principle is great, and this is the way it should work. Everyone could make money off the deal, especially the recording artist, and the losers would be the people who are currently making money by having a big office and a sharp suit; yes, these are also the people who are opposed to a better way of doing business and who will sooner or later find themselves having to adapt to having to work for a living. I mean, it’s a model that works for the guys at the top of the pile, but there will over time be more bands who will move into the new model which makes use of the Interweb and new technologies.

The next discussion would be, how about myspace.com getting into selling music for unsigned bands? That is the begginging of the new model, and they have the money to push it. Bring it on.

Oh, and the music itself.

• New Order
  Yes, the obsession continues, and my therapist says that listening to some actual albums light help. They don’t need any further introduction.
  • Waiting For The Siren’s Call
    Bloody excellent. Krafty is particulary good, and is why I wanted this album. It’s very good indeed.
  • Power, Corruption & Lies
    Not bad, although a lot of it sounds like variations on ‘Blue Monday’, so I guess that was the sound of the day, or maybe the sample was broken or there was a sort of concept there or something.
  • Substance
    Great stuff in there. Yes please. All the collected singles up to 1987.
• Goldfrapp
  Didn’t hear too much of their stuff, but apparently they are where it’s at and I decided to taste a bit. They generally seemed to get good reviews, and they have a very reclusive, shy lead singer after whom the band is named.
  • Black Cherry
    Great stuff. Touch of the Gary Numans about it, but he was always top notch, if a bit of a whinger. She really has an excellent voice and it’s great stuff. Harsh electronic sounds with a good beat. It’s definitely ‘different’.
  • Supernature
    The opening track, ‘Ooh la la’ is what sold me on this, and the rest of the album is as good. Fantastic stuff. The sound can be a bit repetitive at times, and it seems intentionally a bit retro. Some great dance tracks, which I like.
• Snow Patrol
  Oh dear! Material for another post! This is because I went to see Snow Patrol a couple of weeks ago with the Jennifer (I got her tickets some time ago, to cheer her up; she’s a big fan. A very big fan.) and heard the music for the first time. Not bad, and a great live act, which always does it for me.
  • Final Straw
    Good music, but miserable stuff. It’s an album of misery, although the music itself is chirpy enough; I decided to actually listen to the lyrics because Jen talks about it a lot and it seems to have made a big impression on her. Man, I’m going to think long and hard before I buy her an album again, it gets me into all sorts of trouble.
• Blondie
  Again, if Blondie needs an introduction then you need to get out from under your rock more. Seriously now.
  • The Platinum Collection
    A collection of all the singles, the hits… Forty-seven tracks. It’s probably every piece of music, every squeak, every burp and every fart they ever made. Dear God, what was I thinking. Some great stuff in there though.

Now I’ll have to listen to it all, compile some new playlists, and worst of all clean out the crap. There is a lot of it in there, believe you me.