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Music and stories from life. This site is continued at andrewdubber.com See you there. [ 2 comment(s)] Tuesday, July 10, 2007 I've been meaning to blog this one for a while. I took a trip down to Oxford with my friend Sam (another kiwi) whose mate Andy used to pick the choons at XFM. These days, among other things, Andy's the manager of Joff Winks Band. Joff's a talented popsmith with one foot firmly in the jazzier end of Steely Dan's repertoire, a fondness for time signatures, an appreciation of complex chords, an ear for a good pop tune, a great vocal register for this kind of material and a kick-ass tight band.
They were great live, and they've been working on their website (I took about half of the photos in their gallery). Joff and Andy said it was okay to put Milo up on The Wireless for you to download. Not my favourite song on the album (though it's my second favourite chorus) -- but live, it blew the roof off. The story goes that it's about a young teenager flicking through the mass-produced pop trash on his mp3 player, and thinking 'Hold on -- there must be something else'... before (somehow) stumbling upon a Mahavishnu Orchestra track, thereby opening his eyes to a whole new world of musical possibility. Download: Milo - Joff Winks Band truth about enzyteHave a read of the article in Nightshift magazine [pdf link], which is renowned for it's cruelly and hilariously cutting reviews. Joff and co. come out pretty much unscathed. It's a really smart and good-sounding record -- a bit of a grower too, which is a good sign -- and you can get it on iTunes. Just wish they'd come up with a better name for the group. Labels: jazz, pop [ 2 comment(s)] Monday, July 09, 2007 Okay, so this is out of step with my occasional mp3 posts, but you can start to expect a few changes to this blog (yet again) soon, so let's call this a toe in the water. I've been messing with iTunes this evening, as I do from time to time. I really love what you can do with the smart playlists, where you can invent your own rules and just generally mess about with the whole thing. Set up the conditions, light the fuse and stand clear. One that I'm listening to tonight, which I sort of developed by accident, uses a number of conditions to make a really pleasant and surprising collection of songs... and sort of resembles the way I used to listen to records on a particularly attention deficit evening in my teen years (though without leaving record sleeves all over the lounge floor). I've chosen just three of my 20-odd genres: Rock, Pop & Indie. I've left the jazz, r&b, funk & soul, reggae, ambient, electronic, hip hop, reggae, classical and everything else aside for the moment. I've chosen songs that are between 2 and 5 minutes long. Songs must be from artist's albums, not compilations. Songs are from Disc 1 if from a 2-or-more-disc set. Songs are all track 1 on the album. Nothing before 1970. Nothing less than 192kbps. What this does is it means I get only one song (the first track) from 'legitimate' (non-compilation) records, and only then if I have reasonable quality versions. I wasn't after too much eclecticism tonight, so I kept it rock/pop flavoured, but even so, as you'll see, I still managed a bit of diversity. I couldn't work out how to get only one album from each artist -- though I'll give the matter some thought. For the moment, I'm just skipping artists I've already heard from tonight. Surprisingly, only 700-odd tracks fit the criteria, so that playlist might find its way onto the iPod. Although I'll lose cool points left, right and centre here, the resulting playlist was actually very pleasant. This has been the soundtrack of my quiet Monday night: Touch Sensitive - The Fall (The Marshall Suite) Not songs you'd probably put together deliberately, but as with so many of these seemingly randomised collections of music, they speak to you, because they reflect back little microcosms of your own musical history. The computer's ablilty to pleasantly surprise within very specific and rigorous guidelines is one of the best features of a piece of software like iTunes. It's the sort of enjoyment I think I used to get from music radio before everyone became frightened of surprise and delight. Labels: playlist [ 1 comment(s)] About The Wireless: Hi. I'm Andrew Dubber. This mp3 blog is designed to introduce people to music that they might not otherwise hear. If you are the rights holder to this music and would like for it to be withdrawn from the site, then please send me an email and I will happily oblige. Free Delivery via RSS: Simply enter your address here:
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