Music Geekery

From somnolence.org, my newest daily read:
‘I do think that the AMG is a useful resource, despite the whole “Like This? Try That!” tool being a waste of time. For example: Like the Red House Painters? Want something “Colder, Firmer”? Try… Henry Rollins!’

Jokes aside, I agree. At Pitchfork, Mark Richard-San writes about pre-Internet record hunting, and how searching through record bins remains more appealing to him than downloading songs. I can see where he’s coming from, but my personal reaction to it is that for me, the Internet was a godsend. Growing up in Singapore, none of my friends shared my tastes in music. We have no alternative radio stations. We had only one local magazine that reviewed albums other than the latest Mariah Carey, and I remain a regular purchaser of BigO even though I now get most of what I need from the Net, simply because it fed my hunger for something different when I had nothing else, and I remain grateful.

Anyway, once I got Internet access, everything changed, and the AMG was one of the sites I used to spend hours trawling. I’ve written about this before and I don’t need to go into it again, but I guess my basic point is that for me, finding out about Neutral Milk Hotel and Amon Tobin and even the Smashing Pumpkins (before Mellon Collie) was the result of me spending hours on the Internet, because I simply had nowhere else to go to find what I wanted. And the AMG was, and remains, a big part of that, so thanks, AMG. I owe you.

Agaetis Byrjun is everything I hoped it would be and more. It is gorgeousness and gorgeosity made flesh (brownie points for anyone who can identify the quote, which is from a book I’m rereading right now and loving even more than I ever did before). Thank you thank you thank you to Terry, who now joins Jeremy in my extremely short list of musical benefactors (people who give me albums which would be problematic or rather expensive to obtain otherwise).

This is all the fault of WinMX and Epitonic, but I link them here so that you can meet, love and then hate them too.

Just downloaded: Ambivalence (Embellish), a charming little pop ditty, but don’t sing along to the “So get down on your knees and let me penetrate you deep from behind” line in the chorus in public places.

Now downloading: Fear Of Fireflies (Calla), from their Scavengers album, which I’m researching with purchase in mind.

Now playing: Strange Fruit (Billie Holiday). Classic.

Joy, I’m at that point where the amount of new music and new books I have to devour exceeds the amount of slack time I have in the day, such that every time I’m trying to choose what to listen to or read, there’s unexplored territory there for the taking. It’s a feeling of satisfying saturation.

After coffee on Sunday with Vikram, Walter, Ashraf and Gaurav, venturing into Borders started off as a diligent attempt to purchase Hart’s The Concept Of Law so that I could start (ha) on my jurisprudence summer assignment, but I came out instead with Painful (Yo La Tengo), Bossanova (Pixies), and No Other City, an anthology of Singaporean urban poems.

Today’s trip to the library yielded Life After God (Douglas Coupland), The Sportswriter (Richard Ford), Anil’s Ghost (Michael Ondaatje), Galapagos (Kurt Vonnegut), Underworld (Don DeLillo; I got through 80% of it before I had return it to the UCL library), and Regeneration (Pat Barker).

Wow, I did it. I’m listening to Coldcut’s Solid Steel radio show on BBC London Live at the painful hour of 7 am on a mercifully overcast Singapore Tuesday morning.

I’m exhausted, my eyes are bloodshot and Samsonite-bagged, I’m incapable of carrying out a coherent conversation or walking in a straight line, but they just played a smashingly good mix of Get Ur Freak On, and goddamit I’m dancin’!