the iphone version of simplify media now lets you stream to last.fm! sweet.

my word of the day: obstreperous

1 : marked by unruly or aggressive noisiness : clamorous
2 : stubbornly resistant to control : unruly

this is my annual post where i explain to out of town electronic music fans that you really ought to come visit us in september for the decibel festival. there's lots of sleeping space at our house and in past years when my friends from the intarwebs have come to rock out with us it's been super, super fun.

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Previous highlights over the years include: Richie Hawtin,
Trentemoller, Diplo, Boys Noize, Green Velvet, Switch, Monolake, Autechre,
Justice, Derrick May, Modeselektor, Gui Boratto, Matmos, Simian Mobile
Disco, Robin Guthrie & Harold Budd, Ellen Allien, Fennesz, Murcof, Apparat,
The Field, Isolee, John Tejada, Speedy J, Michael Mayer, Chris DeLuca vs.
Phon.o, Stars Of The Lid, Matthew Dear, Nortec Collective, Akufen, Tim
Hecker, Claude VonStroke, Sascha Funke, Styrofoam, Lusine, Jeff Samuel, The
Dead Texan, Smash TV, Marcus Nikolai, Vladislav Delay, T.Raumschmiere,
Loscil, Robert Babicz, Christopher Willits, Kangding Ray and Deadbeat.

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friday night i watched no country for old men. i wasn't expecting much despite having heard good reviews, but i liked it a lot. someone should've told me sooner that everyone was tormented and there was no cliche happy ending ;)

on saturday i woke up unbelievably early to go to snohomish to get my new bed. i went to the university district farmer's market to get presents for my helpers. i should really start going to farmer's markets every weekend. it feels so much better to buy products from a person who was involved in growing/making them. it doesn't cost any more than buying organic produce from the co-op and in many cases it's cheaper.

craigslist = always an adventure. the woman who had the bed lived in a crazy log cabin house where you could swing from the ceiling by a rope. her boyfriend's a dog trainer, so between the two of them they have 34 dogs. the dogs barked maniacally as we approached. i can't imagine being able to sleep at night when there are 34 dogs who might begin commenting on something. she's a graphic designer. apparently she had a project for high times and got put up in the w hotel in san francisco. she fell in love with the mattress on the hotel bed and bought it.

i can see why. it is completely awesome. each of my roommates laid on it and exclaimed about it. i am a terrible light sleeper and have slept better the past two nights than i have in a long time. that isn't to say i necessarily got more hours of sleep, though ;) i just didn't wake up every hour like clockwork to stare at the ceiling and obsess about something.

saturday night i went to kinetic with stereo99 and brumal. he left the party to drive and pick us up because he is awesome. i always love the pacific science center parties. it's very fun to alternate between dancing to house music, listening to bizarre chickenhed concoctions and drawing strange patterns with your body on the shadow wall. the night turned into an afterparty with enth and chris and others that resulted in me not sleeping 'til 7:30am. very worth it, though.

sunday i tried to be productive, but it mostly disintegrated into eating a delicious brunch of migas and bloody mary, catching up on daily show/colbert report, and tasting peach lambic and ice cream concoctions. i did manage to get a few pieces of art hung on the wall which have been lying dormant since i moved in to zhouse in august, so that's something. someday i'll have a normal bedroom where you can walk around without shoving objects aside with your foot. also, glueslabs came over and ate, drank & smoked us out of house and home. at least i managed to get him to help put my bed together and fix a problem i was having with my nerdphone ;)

movie night is happening much earlier than normal tonight (starting at 7:30pm vs. the normal 9pm) because of the justice show. hope you can still make it ;)

last night i got frustrated by the inability to walk, move, or find anything in my room and began attacking the balloons with a knife. it's very fun to throw them up in the air and stab them. especially if other people are in the room, because the resulting air blast sends the balloon remnant shooting at them.

i only popped maybe 1/4 of the total amount of balloons, just enough to get around a little better. at around 3am i was yelling out loud because balloons kept bouncing off my head when i was trying to sleep, or popping loudly when i rolled over, or making those squeaky rubbing sounds.

this morning kyle made delicious omelettes with cherry tomatoes and homemade pesto. apparently this was to give me the strength to face what had been done to me at some unknown point during yesterday afternoon/evening. when i came out in the morning to go to work, my entire car had been refilled with new, freshly blown up balloons.

today i bought tickets to some shows: beach house, autechre, and daniel johnston.

i'm going to try to start tagging my lj posts again.

we went to a fun party at skoiboy's house this past weekend and i spent the majority of the time sitting behind ari staring at this dexter / lemur thing and trying to withhold drooling on it. apparently daft punk used these @ the grammy's. i have absolutely no justification for having one of these in my life, but it's so gorgeous that i really want to come up with one.

as most of you know, i'm a big fan of dodgeball.com but i've never really used twitter. i signed up and then it just sat there. but maybe i'll start using it. you should add me. ma.ke.it-funky.now at g.mail d.ot com minus the odd dashes & spaces. =]

this new el-p i'll sleep when you're dead album is really great. plus it has cat power, trent reznor and some people from the mars volta, yo la tengo, tv on the radio, and other good cameos. the black dog - dogma release is good too.

i renewed my better world club membership and only afterward read that geico had similar services and is cheaper. d'oh.

the anti-marriage article that i was interviewed for is out in this sunday's seattle times. here's part one and part two.

my mom hates my new owl necklace. "that looks like something your grandmother would give you." (this is not a compliment. my dad's mother likes to give me jewel-encrusted horrors.) i got her back by saying that next weekend i'm going to come over and photograph her jewelry. she makes awesome jewelry and my dad makes lovely wood carved boxes, so i've decided to start an etsy store to sell their stuff online. the name has to reference parents in some way. so far i'm considering yomama-yopapa but if you have any better ideas post 'em up =]

my second class audio project is musique concrete (aka my dream come true, since ultimately i want the majority of my music to come from field recordings). i decided on 'ode to caffeine'. it has an accompanying statement about how caffeine fuels conformity. students/workers suffer from sleepdep and caffeine enables them to continue fueling the economic machine (or preparing to). most of the sounds i recorded with a minidisc & microphone. i began recording while trying breakfast at macrina (verdict: quite tasty but too expensive for me.) lele appeared at the adjacent table to giggle at my non-progress.

when i was in middle school, i started the tapers club. my friends and i would drag handheld cassette recorders everywhere we went. we made audio letters... a combination of field recordings, our ramblings, and whatever pop music we liked at the time. usually we pretended to be radio djs. if we played music we often threw in commentary and jokes. i recorded myself talking in my sleep too. having the microphone with me all the time reminds me of one of the few happy memories of that era.

i have searched some sample sites to see if there's anything especially wonderful that must be used for the project. i won't be using either of these, but i certainly enjoyed them:
"the sophisticated taste of taster's choice"
"here's an impression of me on coffee"

what are your favorite sample sites?

there ought to be a group dinner at ballet before all the festivities on saturday evening. i struggle to arrive anywhere before midnight, but the promise of free tasty desserts and free vodka if you show up early to the akufen show has convinced me. so! 8pm dinner. comment if you may attend ;)

somebody go to the seattle zombie walk on sunday and take pictures. i can't go and need a report.

stupid comcast. internet's been down for 3 weeks. every time i call them and set up a service appointment, it comes back up shortly thereafter. then i cancel the appointment, fearing that they'll charge me $50 and say nothing's wrong if they show up at the house and it's online. then it goes down again. so i call and set up another appointment, but the first they have available is inevitably at least a week away again. i'm considering just cancelling it entirely 'cause this is driving me crazy.

i just learned uniting souls is doing a dj party in the park at golden gardens on sunday. yay! i will drag the hula hoop to embarass myself in the name of entertainment.

i was informed that i need to see quintron next wednesday. do any of you know about this person? i enjoy the allmusic description: "Aside from his organ playing, Poggi is a multi-instrumentalist who performs on traditional items like guitar, drums, and trumpet, as well as homemade inventions such as the Disco Light Machine, an attachment for drums where light is triggered by sound; the Spit Machine, a drum machine powered by saliva; and the Drum Buddy, which contains five oscillator circuits that create drum sounds when exposed to light. He has been known to pull such stunts as showing up for interviews in wheelchairs claiming he suffered injuries from falling out of a roller coaster."

films enjoyed recently: wilbur wants to kill himself & palindromes

albums enjoyed recently: new buffalo - last beautiful day, rhythm & sound - see mi yah, wrens - meadowlands, safety scissors - tainted lunch, donna regina - slow killer.

who wants to go skiing some weekend in december? i've been cross-country skiing once and never downhill, so i'd be on the bunny slopes.

herbert's plat du jour fucking rocks. i love that i can recognize the origin of a lot of the sounds without looking them up. i esp. love that i started listening to it while grocery shopping 'cause it was very apropos.

safety scissors - tainted lunch
liked it a lot. apparently vladislav delay/luomo had something to do with producing it. it also has guest vocals from erlend oye (kings of convenience) and francoise cactus (stereo total) among others.

it - low income housing
i agree with this review - i like the beats, but am not all that inspired by the lyrics.

audion - suckfish
on first listen i was quite fond of it. but it hasn't kept it as well after repeated listens. i still like it better than stuff recorded under matthew dear though.

quasimoto - the further adventures of lord quas
any album which makes me laugh gets kept, even if it has some off moments.

kano - home sweet home
i dunno why i keep downloading 'grime'... it's one of those uk things, like 2step, that i never really seem to get into.

royksopp - the understanding
yuck. blech. pee-yew.

i had one final this morning and another tomorrow, so this 'rare, remixed & b-sides' new lali puna album couldn't have come at a better time.

still haven't found time to listen to the new four tet, everything ecstastic..

the history of sampling is an interesting way to navigate through classic albums and who used samples from them..

i'm trying out podcasting (and no, you don't need an ipod to do it.) anyone have any recommendations?

i'm not a huge psytrance fan, but the one group i do like is x-dream. their music is interesting and diverse and techy and defies a lot of the anti-trance stereotypes. they're playing here saturday night. i may just have to stop by after the eluvium/mono show.

(updated with a link to x-dream's discography for clarification ;) x dream = east coast dj, x-dream = group of producers from germany).

i just bought download privileges from soulseek again.

Poll #460688
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

what tracks/albums should i check out next?

it surprised me to learn that less than 1% of soulseek's users had ever paid for it. i find it odd every time i remember that the percentage of paid livejournal users is low, too.. i think 5% or less?

i don't know why that surprises me since i run a nonprofit site and hardly anyone has ever donated. i just think it's weird. why wouldn't you donate to something that you use every day? (assuming you're not crazy broke and subsisting on top ramen.)

finals = over. phew. now i wait to find out whether my attempt to teach myself javascript in an hour was sufficient.

agf has a new album produced by luomo/vladislav delay called explode.
it's my favorite so far. i emailed her to ask if it will be available on vinyl but apparently not :( the other album i've been listening to nonstop is masha qrella's unsolved remained. i've also decided that i am a fan of henrik schwarz.

i got in the car this morning and a timbuk2 bag was sitting next to the passenger's seat. my brain doesn't process information very quickly in the morning, so i opened it. inside was a cubase book, audio cables, and an iriver. ohhhhh.. i realized.. this must be imonk's bag since i gave him a ride back from work last night.

i cannot resist someone else's music library. first i listened to smash tv, which i'd been curious about due to their upcoming show. i wasn't into it, but now i know. next was sten - 'leaving the frantic' which i really liked. then i discovered that sten = a lawrence alias. i liked terrestre 'secondary inspection too and then found that terrestre = murcof.

i need to drive more people around so that they leave their mp3 players in my car.

my dad bought tickets for my mom & i to the vienna choir boys show at benaroya tonight. it's not really my thing. but i'll be glad to talk to my mom; it's been a long time and she's been going through some tough shit. after that i'll bring my temporary musical friend to the lower level show and return him to his rightful owner.

while everyone danced and enjoyed themselves to michael mayer, i sat in a corner writing a paper about forced socioeconomic desegregation as a means to assist the states' failing educational system. i saw condor but didn't talk to him. i saw a lot of people but didn't talk to them. i gave thumbs up to a guy wearing an i <3 acid shirt from the luke vibert tour and he looked confused.

i didn't enjoy it as much as the last time i heard him play (in cologne in 03). that set was a continuous throb. this one employed a lot more melodramatic breakdowns, some of which succeeded but others of which just peeved me. i liked most of the track selection, though.. but the continuous ebb and flow became frustrating. i don't know why i cared since most of it i spent sitting down and only occasionally tapped my pen on the table in time. i did not enjoy the addition of nirvana which i heard while leaving the venue. why do so many visiting djs have to drop a nirvana track when visiting seattle? cliche! rwargh.

deacon808 has kindly volunteered to help with my seattletechno flyer project. i have literally boxes of club/rave flyers from ~1990-present and my goal is to have as many as possible scanned for the new seattletechno.com site. hopefully i'll find time to make it to polygraphic tonight to bring flyers.