Music

Over the last few days I have had some old hardcore punk records on my turntable. Although I have started listening to this kind of music again a couple of months ago, I hardly listened to old records rather bought some new ones. Stupid me, right? Always buying new stuff but hardly listening to old and loved tunes. However yesterday a real classic was spinning on my turntable:

Discharge - Hear Nothing, See Nothing, Say Nothing

The record is from 1982 but still sounds fresh and aggressive; it made me smile all day. In case you are not familiar with old Discharge - the band went metal on later albums - the music is simple, hard three chord punk that’s played rather fast. No melodies, no breaks. Lyrically the band didn’t add much content either. Mostly short lyrics about war and crimes against humanity. Sometimes the lyrics are as short as this one:

In Agony They Cry And Scream
And Children? And Children. And Children? And Children.
Skin Peeled Hanging In Strips

Though despite all this simplicity the band had been influential to a lot of other bands, not only musically but also lyrically and graphically (black & white record covers, anti-war images,…). The influence went even further with many band names starting with Dis (Disaffect, Disrupt, Disfear,…), most of them appearing on the scene in the early 1990s. But hardly any of them came close to the power and impact of Discharge. Definitely a classic record I will never sell.

Over the last two weeks a new music search engine - Songza - has been generating some buzz in the blogosphere. People praised its user interface and the ease of finding and playing music. So being slow as usual, I have eventually decided to have a look at it as well.

The Interface is great

Actually the user interface is very slick and much thought has been put into the design and functionality. There is a simple search box to search for an artist or title. Results come in quickly and are listed below the box. When clicking on a title you will see the interface shown above. Well done! There are the usual links to embed the title, send it to a friend, rate it, and add it to a playlist. Those playlists are very fine examples of AJAX done right, by the way.

It’s just YouTube

Well, those are the plus points of Songza. There are negative ones, too. First, users cannot save playlists; well, actually that’s because you can’t create an account on Songza. So if you delete the cookie playlists are gone. The links to the discography of an artist and to purchasing the title are pretty much worthless. They link to Google Music Search and Google Checkout without showing relevant results.

So where are the music titles from? Well, quite simple: directly from YouTube. Yep, Songza makes use of the YouTube API. So essentially you’ll get music from YouTube without the videos. Funnily enough there is a link to watch the title on YouTube as well.

Conclusion

The user interface is simple, clean, and a pleasure to use. Many web applications could learn from it. However I can’t see why I should use Songza for playing some songs when I get the same service on YouTube. Songza looks like a prototype of an application that could be much more powerful. On the other hand Songza might as well be just a promotional application for other services by Humanized, the company behind it that is run by Aza Raskin, son of Apple Macintosh founder Jef Raskin.

I haven’t been listening to electronic music a lot this year, let alone bought much. Mostly it’s been jazz, punk, whatever. However I bought Burial’s new album Untrue last week. I was impressed by his first album which was released last year. It was a very good album and has been one of the reasons I got interested in dubstep a little bit. However apart from buying a couple of early DMZ, Hyperdub, and the like from Bleep.com I have lost interest rather quickly. It’s not that those releases were bad - quite the contrary actually - but that period marked the beginning of my distaste for electronic music.

So now that I haven’t been buying or listening to new dubstep tunes for over one year what can be said about Untrue? Well, it’s simply phantastic, even better than the first album. It is very moody, melancholic even. Though I can’t decide if it’s warm or rather cold sounding. Strings are used throughout the entire CD and vocal samples echoing from the background add to an ambient atmosphere. The underlying dubstep beat and the huge basslines are still there, though the overall impression of Untrue is that it seems to be produced rather for home listening than clubs.

I am not sure what the dubstep crowd thinks of the album. Maybe it’s too much in home listening and IDM territory for them. Though if you’re into good electronic music you should give it a try. One of the top albums of 2007 for me.

Have you heard about the English city of Sheffield? What are you associating with it? Coal mining and steel factories? Bomb raids during World War II? All true but ever heard about Factory Records and Warp Records?

If you’re interested only a little bit in modern music, you know those labels. Both labels were based in Sheffield (though, Factory is defunct and Warp has moved to London) and have been major strongholds of the post punk, new wave, synth pop, and techno genres, influencing music worldwide. Artists associated with those labels are Human League, Autechre, ABC, Cabaret Voltaire, Black Dog,… Many being from Sheffield as well.

Damon Fairclough of Noise Heat Power has compiled an intriguing mix of some of the best music originating from Sheffield. The 70 minutes long mix isn’t consisting just of Factory and Warp bands, though; other bands like Pulp are thrown in for good measure making it a very enjoyable trip down memory lane.

It is highly recommended to everyone who wants to be reminded of great music. And if you like the mix go and buy some of the albums and 12″.