So, it's not just affectation or hyperbole. I really do love vinyl records. Maybe it's that I've been collecting and spinning them for over eight years now, making wax-fondling my oldest and best-honed skill. I just don't think any sort of digital sound-manipulation can beat it. The level of instantaneous and direct control over the sound is unbeatable by any kind of DSP trickery or USB knob-twiddling. I'm almost convinced that the simple isomorphism between the physical groove traced by the needle and the sound waves flying out of the speakers is significant not only conceptually, but also physically, that there is a resonance there that no software frantically decyphering digital harddrive hieroglyphs could match.

Unfortunatley, as I've resumed music-spinnery over the past several months I've realized that using vinyl as my sole soundsource has become completely impractical.

Vinyl is extraordinarily heavy. after eight years of hauling multiple fifty-pound crates of plastic from bedroom to studio to frat-house, I am sick of it.

Vinyl is extraordinarily fragile. when I moved to DC, I left my second-tier records (important but non-essential) in my parents' supposedly-climate-controlled basement. One year later-- a quarter of them were garbage.

Vinyl is hard to find. It's just not possible to run a physical record store as wide-ranging as Bleep or SC:Digital or The Pharmacy. Let alone Soulseek, Gnutella or Bittorrent. Never mind all my friends' hard-drives.

Of course the most compelling argument against illegal music sharing is that it deprives the artists of money-- but 95% of the records I buy are 'used' anyway, so that's not really freaking relevant here is it?

Vinyl is expensive. Nuff said.

Turntables suck. All of the above can be said for vinyl's necessary counterparts, turntables and needles. Heavy, fragile, hard-to-find, expensive. Why, just two weeks ago one of my needles snapped in two in mid-party, basically incapacitating me for the night. (Toneland grants The Serious DJs 'favorite DJ savior' status for the rescue.) I placed an order with TurntableLab the next morning for their not-inexpensive M477-g replacement stylii, and have been waiting ever since for them to restock.

All that being said, I'm not yet a fan of any of the numerous Digital DJ Solutions being feverishly marketed to every sucker-DJ hipster on the planet.

This article documents a current event. Information may be blogged rapidly as the event progresses.

Thom Yorke, on why Radiohead decided not to sign a new record contract:
"Why would you want to sign a six-album deal with a business that is imploding?"

More:

Radiohead hasn't resolved the question of how to release its new material. Although it seems that every last one of Radiohead's American and European fans is online, Mr. Yorke ruled out purely digital distribution because fans elsewhere — Russia or South America, for instance — are not so well connected. A company still needs to press CD's and get them to stores. "The truth is that the traditional medium is still there, and you need it," he says.

linkydink

Oh man, I had forgotten how much better press-coffee is than drip-coffee. It's like a latté without the milk. (Gabe disagrees with this assessment, and I have to admit I don't actually have the latté-knowledge necessary to back this up.)

Writing today from Lake George NY, a stopover with some old friends en route to Cazenovia. It's July 4 weekend and so all of the trains and planes seem to be full up of travellers. Tomorrow I'll brave a Greyhound bus to Caz and hope it's not too overly full of sweaty independence-celebrating humans.

There's a new podcast/mix from Subvert Central this morning, which is great. If you, like me, enjoy tricksy frantic/melancholy jungle breaks, then I cordially recommend this one to you. It basically won me over right away by leading with Breakage's Drowning, which is probably the most engaging single new piece music of music I've heard this year.

Back in March, Jess Harvell said this of jungle in 06:

...many fans are bedroom DJs, and it can seem like there are as many producers and DJs as fans. There's no local circuit of clubs, unless you consider Belgium to Shoreditch to NYC to the Russian tundra "local". Sometimes being involved with leftfield drum and bass can feel like receiving SOS telegraphs from halfway around the world...

It's true! Has the world ever seen a completely delocalized music scene before? I think this is ultimately why I continue to compulsively blog about music; How else would you communicate about this stuff?

This also reminds me of how someone told me that Animal Collective got their start as a geographically-diffuse group of friends sharing recordings by email and producing brilliant finished tracks before many of them had even met each other in person. Now, this turns out to actually be completely false, but still, it's an awesome concept.

It's just past the one-year anniversary of the Wired Magazine "PODCASTING" article, so that must mean it's time for a new obnoxious mind-numbing marketing buzzword. And I do believe I've found it.

These are the Young Creatives -- smart, innovative and entrepreneurial. They're not only sought after by companies, they start their own... Two-thirds of yo-creas choose where to live before worrying about a job. So if cities provide that fertile field, they'll come to develop ideas for everything from scooter wear to open source technology."

Further: Yo-creas are "a new breed with money to blow." Awesome. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must hurry away and hawk scooter-wear to my fellow hipster professionals before Madison Avenue beats me to the punch...

I want to make sure everyone has a chance to check out the latest episode (aka EPISODE SIX) of Diplo's "Mad Decent" podcast. Nothing flashy here, just 15 minutes of brilliantly fresh and weird and catchy tracks. Really, you could stop listening after the first two minutes of adorable eight-year-old didgeridoo MCs and still be happy.

Listen by web or iTunes.

In case you haven't seen it,

Had a killer time on the west coast. Highlites:

1. Visiting Emperor Norton's grave. A longtime goal achieved.

2. Amoeba Records. Necks Move and Songbook on vinyl for $5!!

3. Movie theaters that give you dinner.

4. Bakesale Betty's

5. Hyphy.

6. Kids playing on a giant plastic DNA molecule-replica in Berkeley.

7. Brick.

8. Biking.

9. Memorial Day Oregon Vineyard Tour! Especially Archery Summit.

10. Portland.

#2: Air by Geoff Ryman
#3: River Of Gods by Ian McDonald

Blah blah blah, soon we will all be turned into the internet. I am so sick of scifi.

1. Surprise #1: Holy crap, Lamont gets to fight Lieberman in a primary! Amy has the NPR coverage. Paul Krugman explains succinctly why this is so cool.

2. Surprise #2: Malloy beats out DeStefano for gubernatorial candidate! It's not over yet, but this is still a real upset-- A few months ago, DeStefano was conventional-wisdom's surefire winner, with Byceiwicz out of the race and Malloy reeling from corruption charges. That being said, Rell is still the nation's most popular governor, so this all may well be elementary.

3. My man Chris Dodd may be running for president??! (If it's true, it's the 08 race's first Drupal-powered candidate, wooooo.)

For about a year or so, I've been enjoying reading CMoore's progress through a blog meme called FIFTY BOOKS! (Emphasis mine.) The instructions for this one are pretty straightforward-- read fifty books and blog about each of them as you go. I've decided to give this ritual a go myself, beginning with the couple books I've finished in recent weeks.

Book #1: Heads, by Greg Bear

This is a tiny 120-page story Emily and I found at a used bookstore in Adams Morgan.

Bear is crazy prolific and gets lots of Critical Praise for blending scifi's classic hallmarks (humanism, robots, epic space-adventure) with all its recent tropes (transhumanism, artifical intelligence, dystopian cyber-intruige).

A lot of what he writes is kind of muddled and feels made-for-TV, but Heads is an exception. It is really sharp and good.

Spoilers and synopsis: 200 years in the future, a nepotistic lunar syndicate-family purchases 140 severed and frozen human heads and begins working to scan their brains and create audiovisual reproductions of their memories. Inexplicably, The Scientological Church attacks- chaos ensues. In the climactic final scene, we learn that one of the heads in fact belongs to L. Ron Hubbard, and a subplot wherein a mad scientist has been attempting to achieve Absolute Zero on our moon-base causes space-time to collapse and generate a deeply-trippy six-page out-of-body experience for our protagonist, during which he is infected by the undead memories of all 140 deceased heads.

footnote: ok, yes, scientology and hubbard are referred to only by thinly-veiled pseudonyms, but it's pretty clear what's going on here when you read it.

Highly recommended, except that I just gave the ending away.