“Like a lot of music critics, I feel a special kinship with you, because we are you. Or, rather, you are a better, smarter version of us. The relationship music critics have with you is similar to what film critics have with Quentin Tarantino, who, like you, started out as a know-it-all fan who, unlike most critics, took all the trivial, microscopic specificities he absorbed from every corner of his fan experience and found a way to create something new with it. But even if you guys are big-shot artists now, you’re also still critics at heart; you did it like Godard, critiquing art by making better art. Any time you’d take pains to find just the right detail to make a track really snap—a crisp snare, a squiggly synth, a warmly bouncing bassline—you were both nodding to the records you felt did it correctly, while also making an argument against the relatively chilly, slapdash way music is made in the point-and-click ProTools era. They say writing about music is like dancing about architecture, but your records actually were architecture, built from the spare parts of closely observed sounds you deconstructed and recontextualized from countless songs in your impeccably curated collection.”

Honolulu expat Alex Hungtai put up this mix a little while ago. Good collection of gospel, old rock-n-roll, funk, some hip-hop and jazz. Fi is very lo. A great glimpse into the inspiration behind the new Dirty Beaches album.

Tim Quirk tells the story of the Walkman, and how it’s “changed the way we listen, and what we listen to.”

Nitsuh Abebe on Odd Future's energy, and their unfortunately exclusionary lyrics.

My friends' band interviewed by Sabrina Velazquez about their upcoming recording. I am excited to hear that recording.

“And playing live is a different process to DJing, which is more about getting on a train, arriving, meeting some guy you don't really know and going to a place you don't really know. Actually playing is the best bit because you get to connect with people for the first time in 24 hours. Parts of it are really good, but it's just a lot of time on your own. You can reflect. I write lyrics in those moments when I haven't got anything else to do. Those are probably just the moments when I start being a bit, you know, sad [he smiles].”

“A year ago, when nobody knew who they were, the demonic L.A. skate-rat rap collective Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All cranked out music at an alarming rate. And now that nobody will shut up about them, they’re still doing the same thing. Since 2008, Odd Future have released no fewer than 12 full-length albums, as well as assorted between-releases singles — all available free on their Tumblr. Some of those releases are brilliant, paradigm-shifting works of violent vision. Others are entirely forgettable. Almost all of them are worth your hard-drive real estate, and almost all of them will confound you in one way or another. Below, you'll find a guide to every single one of those albums, from their introductory 2008 ‘The Odd Future Tape’ to Frank Ocean’s ‘Nostalgia, Ultra.’, the experimental R&B tape that the crew released just a few weeks ago.”

Too Much Joy’s Tim Quirk tells the story of his band’s jingle for Budweiser in the early 90s, and how he feels about bands and advertising then and since. A good companion to Matt LeMay’s ‘Art vs Content’ post from late 2010 (http://www.mbvmusic.com/2010/10/19/living-in-the-age-of-art-vs-content).

From the first EP to the soon-released LP, how it all happened.

By Matthew Perpetua.

‘Ian Roger’s presentation from New Music Seminar Los Angeles, February 2011.’ A great overview of how bands have used Topsin and online marketing to great success. Some good takeaways here: a) Don't sell anything until you have a few thousand people on your mailing list, b) Until that point, focus most of all on getting known, c) Do something small every week and something big every month, d) Communicate honestly and treat your fans well.

“In early January, President Barack Obama signed the Local Community Radio Act of 2010, which is expected to create hundreds, possibly thousands, of noncommercial FM stations.” A good overview of LPFM and how the recent legislation happened.

My new friend-through-friends and fellow musician Sabrina interviewed me for her blog on Honolulu Pulse, the Star Advertiser's online nightlife section.

”…the tweets offer a funny reminder that one kind of center really does hold: That no matter how dominant and predictable something might be in your world, it is still a weird, marginal thing to most everyone else.”

“Beets is the media library management system for obsessive-compulsive music geeks. The purpose of beets is to get your music collection right once and for all. It catalogs your collection, automatically improving its metadata as it goes using the MusicBrainz database. It then provides a bouquet of tools for manipulating and accessing your music.”

“Develop applications using radio now playing information gathered from thousands of broadcast and online stations.”

Nitsuh explores the Black Eyed Peas iPad app, and why so much party pop music — which is so often aspirational — has been sounding “rote and blanched of purpose”.

Mike Powell takes on ‘Kaputt’ to grand results.

“I set myself a half-day project to write music specifically for shuffle mode — making use of randomness to try and make something more than the sum of its parts. Over an hour or so, I wrote a series of short, interlocking phrases (each formatted as an individual MP3) that can be played in any order and still (sort of) make musical sense.” The reference points here to electronic music (glitch and dubstep, obviously) are interesting, as are his integration of skipping noises as percussive elements and how the skip itself can be used as a musical device. Hat-tips to and reminders to look further into the work of pioneers La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Brian Eno, and John Cage.

On why Altered Zones is Pitchfork’s *younger* ‘sister site’, and the fundamental difference between music producers and consumers who don’t remember music before the web, never knew it was something you paid for, and aren’t as concerned with the rating of certain music as ‘bad’. I like this, but I have some big issues with this and want to return to it: 1. Altered Zones has its own set of problems, heavy among them the double-standard to which they hold DIY music. Baby bands at AZ get heaped with over-the-top praise, which at once unfairly removes them from helpful critical influence and subjects them to fame for which they aren’t prepared. As a result many are left in the dust of the Next Small Thing. 2. These music producers and writers don’t remember music before the web? I think this is patently false and that they absolutely do remember it; they generation that doesn’t isn’t reading Altered Zones yet. And what about those music producers sampling and being influenced by music that happened before the web (the 90s, the 80s)? 3. I don’t think Pitchfork is incapable of critically assessing the bands on Altered Zones; they just don’t have the time and energy for it. Which argument means I also don’t believe Altered Zones is not a filter for Pitchfork. How many bands debut on AZ or an AZ-affiliated blog, move on to the Forkcast, get a feature, and then get a bona fide Pitchfork Review? Several. Pitchfork’s own ‘The Week at Altered Zones’ pretty much is a filter by definition.

Why the controversial singer/rapper had such a difficult year in 2010, and — after a new mixtape and remix EP — 2011 looks better.

“It always feels a little silly to get too aggressively bereaved about the loss of a musician you liked — a person whose work you felt connected to, but never in the least knew. Still: Read over interviews with Keenan, and you see a thoughtful, dedicated, curious person, the kind of artist who cared enough about what she was doing that she’d actually set herself writing exercises. (One song a day, a song in a half-hour, that sort of thing.) She’d begun writing poetry and fiction, as well, and given the wealth of ideas and emotions she brought to Broadcast’s songs, I’d always wondered where that might lead — what might happen if she reached the age where music became a hassle and it was more attractive to sit down with a pen. But the work we do have from her is, for some of us, memorable enough, and well worth visiting.”

One of those reviews that serves as a great introduction to entire genre.

A good overview, with plenty of arrows in other directions.

“The whole joy of hearing Minaj swoop through a bunch of different registers, for me, in this verse, is that all of them are the same person making the same point. They’re not in dialogue with one another!”

MC Chris tells the story of his show at The Gathering of the Juggaloes and the G.I. Joe film screening that followed.

“Both albums are like brainwashing, insular symphonies to a painfully reactive public awareness. The music doesn’t drive outward but, instead, falls inward, bouncing along the various fractured feelings of its singer and his mates. While ‘The National Anthem’ may suggest that ‘everyone is so near/everyone has got the fear’, the reality is that Yorke feels like a misidentified Pied Piper, the ‘rats and kids follow me out of town’ tenets of the Kid A title track pleading his case to be set free. This could be the main reason why the reaction to its release was so incredibly strong. Newness and novelty can help, but there is more to it than a differing direction. Kid A sounds like the start of a surreal psychological dissertation. Amnesiac occasionally comes across as whining.”

Yeah, this is that nagging thing about MBDTF. “On Monday Mr. West, who is 33, will release his fifth album, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy’, and it’s terrific — of course it’s terrific — a startlingly maximalist take on East Coast rap traditionalism. And yet that doesn’t matter nearly as much as it should, at least partly because of Mr. West’s insistence on his own greatness. By not allowing for responses to his work other than awe, the value of the work itself is diminished; it becomes an object of admiration, not of study. Instead the focus is on the whole of Mr. West’s persona and character, which is more fractured, and subject to a far wider range of responses. The result is that Mr. West becomes a polarizing public figure who happens to be the most artful pop musician of the day, not the other way around.”

A nice abstract followed by and a very nice collection of tracks centered around the recently accelerating trend of breaking down, re-assembling, reinterpreting, and re-imagining the possibility of vocals in music. Every track mentioned here is a gem. I was trying to think of who they missed here. DJ Nate, DJ Roc, and the rest of the Chicago juke scene come to mind, but that is not ‘atmospheric’ music like most of this list. Avey Tare. Aphex Twin.