Touring by playing performances in people's homes. Free room and board, and it's actually profitable. Everybody wins. Problems with this are: can be noisy, and you'll need a PA if you're not an acoustic band.

On whether Best Coast's guys-treat-me-like-shit-but-I-just-keep-crawling-back lyrical content is hindering the female experience. Read all of the follow-up Tumbls and comments to get the full perspective. It would be interesting to hear Bethany herself comment on this.

A simple theory on how we interpret music.

Great free releases. Post-pop, lo-fi, experimental, etc. etc.

Fantastic collage/ambient label whose releases are mostly free.

A fun tenori-on sort of musical instrument.

Nitsuh Abebe on exactly why people need to stop talking about how "white" Vampire Weekend are.

This is brilliant music blogging. Details are what make me love music.

The last paragraph hits every nail on its head.

"But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around."

"I would prefer to go to a different world and the closest we have to that besides space travel is an inner world. It's not so much that I really love the act of sleep, but that I love that escape from reality, the potential for the impossible, removing myself from the stress of today’s culture world, from people talking all the time, etc."

"The most immediate revelation, of course, is that at some point next year revenues from gigs payable to artists will for the first time overtake revenues accrued by labels from sales of recorded music."

"When these rappers say 'no homo,' it can seem a bit like a gentleman's agreement, nodding to the status quo while smuggling in a fuller, less hamstrung notion of masculinity. This is still a concession to homophobia, but one that enables a less rigid definition of the hip-hop self than we've seen before. It's far from a coup, but, in a way, it's progress."

This is absolutely 100% true and if you don't realize it, you are dumb.

A mention of Clones of the Queen, the band I'm in.

A great selection of VST and AU audio effects plugins for free download.

This is absolutely beautiful. "Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun's finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies."

Everything is going to be okay.

230 songs across ten discs, all from 1981. Free for download. Lots happening then.

"A collaborative music/spoken word project." A collection of YouTube videos of people playing various instruments all in the B-flat key. Start and stop and fade them each in any way at any time. This is awesome.

We do love trouble.

Anticon beatmakers Jel and Odd Nosdam have forty dollars to spend on records at a thrift store and an afternoon to make a song from them. Links here to a short video of them finding the records, taking samples, and piecing them together. The track isn't half bad, even though this is slightly akward and gimmicky. In fact, yeah, just skip the video and download the exclusive so that you have it forever.

On the place of an "innocent reminiscer" in today's indie pop-rock landscape, and how it all began with Jonathan Richman.

This! This is so good. This is what I want to be writing.

Sifting through HRO's sorta-haughty satire is worth it for the occasion post like this, where whoever Carles is gets tired of mocking teenagers and writes something true and intriguing about the state of the music industry and popular music culture (at least for the indie set).

Worth consideration. "SXSW is an extraordinary and well-run event. I simply wish that it would give something back to the artists who have made its existence possible." On the other hand, shouldn't artists have to fight tooth-and-nail for attention and acclaim among thousands of others, be poor and go back to the drawing board sometimes? Getting to the point where one can play at SXSW is a feat in itself; shouldn't it be enough of a reward? But then, shouldn't SXSW help these bands as much as it can, as much as it claims to want to?

Small MIDI controllers. Glorious.

A fantastic music blog, with expertly crafted thematic mixes, often centered around certain periods in music. A great source for inspiration and knowledge for the music-obsessive.