I’ve been looking for an excuse to do a gun-related blog post for a while. That photo above, taken on what may or may not be a typical Monday night for my roommates and I, gave me that excuse.
We’ve finally got some good weather here in the The Big Smoke AKA The T-Dot AKA Toronto, and I’ve really been digging the Waves ≠ Raves collection of mixes by the Gotta Dance Dirty Crew. All these tracks remind me of the time I was traveling in South East Asia and listening to nothing but great house music.
Here are a couple of my favorite tracks off of their recent editions:
I have to admit that I didn’t really become tuned into the phenomenon that is Katy Perry until she appeared on The Simpsons a few weeks ago. Since then, I’ve become a Katy Perry awareness sponge, absorbing the ways that she has permeated our culture. I mean, do you have any idea how many chicks rocked the blue wig on Halloween? I thought it was just some sort of fad thing at the time.
Anyways, here’s the KP fix you’ve been jonesing for.
As I Tweeted earlier, this trailer for The Electro Wars (a documentary about electronic music) has me absolutely stoked about the state of music today. From the film’s decription:
“It seems that every other day a new remix is popping up on the blogosphere, how does this affect marketing for other independent artists? Do they welcome the remixes or oppose them? Is music overload possible? What will eventually happen when all these budding producers grab a hold of a Pro Tools tutorial and develop their own remixes week in and week out? Will the remix itself become obsolete? Will original tracks have to step up to the forefront rather than recede into the background? Themes of this nature are explored in the film.”
The trailer seems to answer most of these questions, and all the artists interviewed seem to agree that it doesn’t matter what category music is in anymore, and that it is all amazing and all in one stream, and that there is a place for everything.
At first glance, Dr Hollywood and The Girls Can Hear Us come across as pretty similar -they both produce totally danceable, electro-rap and they pretty much look like the same guys in their promo shots.
I guess the major difference is that while Dr. Hollywood is from the sunshine state, The Girls Can Hear Us rep London, Ontario.
Although I’ve been listening to that We Run LA track on my iPod almost non-stop this week, I think The Girls Can Hear Us edge them out for having also done a remix of Wouldn’t It Be Nice
The Girls Can Hear Us on Myspace and their official site
I’m about 500 pages into the first book, The Reality Dysfunction, of Peter F. Hamilton’s “The Night’s Dawn Trilogy” and so far I’m loving it.
Part of the reason I like it is because some of the main characters, the “Edenists” are similar to the post-human Culture of Iain Banks’ books. One of the key differences is that instead of having their main technologies be based on computers, the Edenists grow their sentient starships and habitats out of a substance called “bitek” (that I can only assume is short for “bio-technology”). This gives both their habitats and ships personality and sentience, with the Edenists connected to them via a telepathic affinity bond.
Like a lot of the sci-fi I’ve been reading lately, its full of huge ideas and takes place on an epic scale. Reading it, I feel the same way that I do when I look at that picture of the astronaut floating above the earth.
I added the tracks from the XX below because they definitely have a spacey-feel. If you listen closely to the lyrics of “Shelter,” it almost sounds like they were written about the Edenists and their living technology. The original version of this track is pretty good, but I really like the the rework that Death to the Throne gives it.
