Hello and welcome to my latest journal entry. I've got a lot of catching up to do (by which I mean I have a lot of albums I've purchased or otherwise obtained in the past month or so), so I'd better start writing about them. I think I'll do four today and four tomorrow, which will leave me with only eight or nine more albums to write about next weekend, plus whatever I get in between now and then, which I guess can be put off 'til later.


Uusitalo: Vapaa Muurari Live
Uusitalo is another name for Vladislav Delay. I've heard this album a lot on the Last.fm radio. Enough to make me recommend it before I even bought it. But now I have bought it. I'm not exactly sure of the story about this album, but I think it recorded "live" (as one might guess from the name, although I'm not sure if it was in front of an audience or just recorded in real-time) using pieces of his previously released works. That explanation makes sense to me, since I definitely hear parts Luomo's "She-Center" in the second grouping of tracks. The easiest way for me to describe it is as a mixture of the house sound of Luomo with Vladislav Delay's ambiance, although that wouldn't be entirely true, since there are also bits that sound like the Sistol album that show up here and there. I feel dumb dropping all these pseudonyms though, so I'll just try to describe the album without making references to any other artists. It's like a broken down machine that can barely barely lock into an unstable groove, each hit of the snare drum inflicting damage that could cause it to fall apart but never stop running, maybe it will keep going while screws come loose and a belt falls off leaving some parts to slow to a halt while other parts keep going without even being aware. At least that's what it makes me think of.


Frank Bretschneider & Taylor Deupree: Balance
I'm keeping up with my trend of linking to Taylor Deupree in every journal entry I make. Anyway, this album was released on Mille Plateaux and is the result of a collaboration between two artists I've been interested in lately (just look at my past three or four entries), and based on these artists' earlier output one would expect this album to be very much in the clicks_+_cuts genre that was pretty popular around the time of its release. I'd say it does fit into that category fairly well, but it also has an almost organic, or "tribal" quality, especially on the first track, sort of similar to Richard H. Kirk's Virtual State. After the first track this feeling dies down a bit but is still present. Like all of the Bretschneider albums that I've heard this one is continuously mixed with all the tracks flowing into each other, but it's really not what you'd expect from either of the artists. It's almost like the Artificial Intelligence (<- subtle group spam here) sound updated for the glitch era.


Various Artists: Decay Product
Who is Various Artists? Various Artists is Torsten Pröfrock, perhaps better known as T++ or a current member of Monolake. Unfortunately he hasn't been showing up on my charts because, well, I don't know. Because of filters. Because I hate Last.fm and MusicBrainz. That's why. Decay Product is one step closer to my goal of obtaining every Chain Reaction CD release (and I'm actually pretty close now, only three more to go) and it stays true to the label's sound. I want to say it's similar to Fluxion, but but Fluxion's releases on Chain Reaction both came well after this one, so maybe it's more accurate to say Fluxion is similar to this. I think it would be a good introduction to the label's sound as it's a nice mix of sort-of ambient music and beat-based (but not too beat-based) stuff, some stuff that sounds like Fluxion's underwater techno and some like Vainqueur's metallic rhythms, but I wouldn't class it as one of the best Chain Reaction releases. It's still very good though.


Coil: Love's Secret Domain
(Disclaimer: I haven't even begun to pay attention to the lyrics on this album, so I won't even be mentioning them. It's typically something I do much later in my listening to an album.) It has been said multiple times that Love's Secret Domain is the best introduction to Coil. Well it wasn't my introduction to Coil, it's my second CD by Coil. Like with Worship the Glitch (which, by the way, has grown on me a bit since I wrote my journal entry about it), I was a little surprised by the lack of consistency between the tracks here, so maybe it's best to think about the album on a track-by-track basis like Jester-NL has been doing in his Coil reviews. I don't have the patience to go through every track, however, so I'll just mention three of my favorites. "The Snow" is a pretty "conventional" track compared to a lot of the others here, and it sort of reminds me of a chase sequence in a game or movie. I might call it "dance music" for its drum part and acid line. Immediately following it is "Dark River", another one of my favorites, which has a nice melody played on (what I assume is a) synth that sounds sort of like bells or harp or something. I also like "Windowpane", which is a vocal track. Something about the track that struck me is the little melodic bit that first appears around 2:50,which reminded me a lot of a part in the track "(They Call Me) Jimmy" by Tim Hecker. I wonder if this track could have been a direct inspiration for that. Probably not, but I found it interesting.

For this journal entry I've also copied an idea of klaashermans and made a radio station out of this journal. Unfortunately not everything I wanted was available to stream (most notably the Bretschneider and Deupree album), but I've also thrown in some vaguely connected stuff. Click here to listen. I think that will work for everybody since I'm a subscriber, but I was playing it for a while and quickly hitting the next button to see if the right things would come up (they did), but after a while it gave me the "not enough content error", so I'm hoping that's just some licensing restriction and other people will be able to listen.

And what's up with this journal writing page? I have a really tiny window here with a whole lot of white space to the right, and the connection list is under the input window for some reason. And, as usual, it's making my browser go really, really slow (about 100 MB memory and 100 MB VM being used). I hate Last.fm.

I've been buying CDs too rapidly lately (I think it's something like 7 in the last 4 days, and one of those is a 4-CD set), so I must do at least a quick journal entry now to try to catch up...

Also I want to do a bit more spam for this site lala.com I signed up for recently. Yes, I already talked about this in a previous journal, and yes, it is pretty lame to advertise from some web site, but so far my experience with them has been excellent (which I shouldn't really say, since I haven't actually received a CD yet). The basic idea behind the site is trading CDs you don't want for ones that you do ($1.75 for each CD you receive). For each CD you send out to someone from their want list, you are then able to receive a CD from your want list. About a week ago I joined the site, and then a few days later I added my credit card information. Then on Friday I got an email saying someone was sending me Love's Secret Domain by Coil, which was pretty cool because it's sort of hard to find, and at that point I hadn't even sent anything out. Then yesterday I decided to look through my albums for anything I would be willing to get rid of, and I sent out an old CD that I never listen to. Less than an hour after that I got another email saying I was getting another CD from someone, this time Neptune's Lair by Drexciya. The main things about the site I don't like are it's design (yeah, it's really neat to have stuff sliding around and popping up all over the page, but when it won't even show up on a non-javascript browser, something's wrong) and a few issues that need to be worked out regarding artwork, digipaks, CD sets, etc. So I've still have a CD by Fluxion (Vibrant Forms, it's scratched up but it plays and rips without error) sitting on my Have List waiting to be sent out, sign up and it could be yours. Actually any American (yeah, it's US-only at this time) who still buys CDs and has unwanted ones to trade should sign up. And if you sign up by me inviting you (I'll need an email address) I'll get a free T-shirt!

Sorry about that... Now for the music?


Atom Heart, Tetsu Inoue & Bill Laswell: Second Nature
I think Second Nature is actually the first album I own from any of the guys involved in it. (That's a lie, I own a couple albums from a different alias of Atom Heart.) The album was first released in 1995 on Fax (I got the 1996 Sub Meta version) and it is composed of four tracks that decrease in length from track one to track four, starting at a rather long twenty-nine minutes and going to to a relatively short six. Now I don't know very much about this style or era of ambient music, and I might be laughed at by its hardcore fans when I say this, but the music on this album reminds me a bit of The Orb (the first two albums, mostly). Which is a good thing. I think it's the way that samples are used and rhythms come in sort-of unnoticed. Recommendations on similar stuff or thoughts about this album from experienced listeners are welcome. I'm guessing, and I could be completely off, that labels like Fax and em:t are where a lot of similar music comes from.


Pole: 3
This was one of my low-priority-but-I'm-going-to-get-it-eventually CDs. I got it. This might be a small classic in electronic music, I'm not really sure, but I do know that it is quite good. I already had 1 (still have to get 2), but I think 3, while very similar in style, is a bit better. Mainly because of "Taxi", which I've loved since I first heard it on Last.fm radio a long time ago. It's probably the most "accessible" track on this album though, so I'm sure I'll eventually grow to love some other as much as it too. Not that the others are bad. They're all excellent. It's just that "Taxi" is better than them, to me, at this moment in time.


Taylor Deupree & Savvas Ysatis: Tower of Winds
I just realized I've made connections to Taylor Deupree for my past four journal entries now. And I probably will for my next one as well. (Yes, I've got Balance by him and Frank Bretschneider in the post. Now that I think about it though, that would have to be a 7+ album entry, so maybe not.) Anyway, this album is not what I had expected from Mr. Deupree based on the previous two albums I had heard from him, which I'm sure is partially due to the fact he's working with Savvas Ysatis and partially due to the fact this was recorded a while before either of the other two albums. Ysatis, I believe, is a Greek artist who now produces tech-house (according to Discogs, at least, and "now" is a bad choice of words since his last release was in 2001). I suspect both artists had similar starting points, though, so this collaboration shouldn't especially surprising. The music on this release is an odd form of electronic music that I can't really describe or give a genre name to, since I don't think it has one. I think it might be made up of non-electronic instruments arranged in loops and slightly electronically manipulated, although I'm not sure at all. It has a very organic feel, and I wouldn't be surprised if every single sound here was sampled. It's a pretty weird album. It reminds me of stuff that's old but not quite right, whatever that means. There's also some sort of architectural theme going on, relating to a thing called the Tower of Winds which is located somewhere in Japan, which I don't fully understand, but the work of architecture that this CD really reminds me of is a place called the House on the Rock located somewhere in Wisconsin. I'm writing way too much here and going off in every direction, so I'll just end now with some "news": According to the 12k blog, Taylor Deupree is currently working on a new album with Savvas Ysatis.


Frank Bretschneider: Curve
This is the second CD I own by Frank Bretschneider that was released under the name Frank Bretschneider (the previous being Looping... from 12k). The CD Curve was released on Mille Plateaux in 2001 and it is indeed a bit less experimental that the other album I've talked about. Like that album, this one is also mixed continuously, with tracks flowing into each other, although the tracks here tend to be a little longer. Parts of the album are very minimal, in the style of some of Alva Noto's work, complete with the clicks and high-frequency tones, while occasionally hints of dub-techno will surface. The title of this journal is from the song "Tones".

That's right, free music from big names. What a lame title (again). It's true though, I guess, depending on your definition of big. Sometime I was going to do a larger journal entry about why I don't like the new version of the site but I decided to skip that since I'm sure nothing is going to change. I also won't be talking about any actual physical releases I bought recently since, well, I don't know, but I feel it's my duty to inform everyone about this great free music. I was hoping to have a CD by Neina by now but it seems that it's either been lost in the post or it hasn't actually shipped yet (although it is marked as shipped on the site I ordered it from). Anyway, I'm sure everyone's excited about the free music so let's get started.

Monolake: Generative Ambient
I noticed one of these posted on monolake.de a week or two ago, then I checked back a few days later and there was another one. They're exactly what you'd expect from the name. The first track is about an hour long and it sort of reminds me of the music made by a machine that they have at the Science Museum in St. Paul which uses seismic data to play notes on some sort of chimes or bells. At least I think that's what it sounds like. The second track is shorter (about 14 minutes) and uses more typical Monolake sounds like those found on Polygon Cities and the recent Depeche Mode remix. Keep an eye on this page, I suspect there will be even more generative ambient tracks added eventually.

Pimmon: Assembler [MP3s]
Ten one-minute tracks of experimental music or non-obnoxious noise. I think these are Internet-exclusive tracks that are meant to accompany the Assembler album, which was put out on Fällt (click "web only mp3s" on the sidebar). I haven't heard the album, but I think these short tracks are nice and hold my attention with a wide palette of sounds.

Taylor Deupree/Kenneth Kirschner/Various: Post_Piano 2 Open Remix Project
A release from the 12k-affiliated netlabel term. which features a lot of artists, most of which I've never heard of, remixing/editing a track from the Post_Piano 2 album (which I also haven't heard). I don't think the Taylor Deupree connection should even be here since I believe the remixers here are using the same source material he did, which is a piece played by Kenneth Kirschner (wow, the wording in that sentence is really awful). Editing piano pieces seems to be the big thing these days. All the tracks here are good though, put them on if you want to relax or something. I'm sorry this paragraph is written terribly.

Various: Flow.ers
I downloaded this a really, really long time ago and had it sitting on my desktop forever. I had to search on Google to figure out where the hell I even got it from. I found that you can get it at the netlabel Sutemos. It's a compilation of ambient dub techno from artists like Octex and Rob Modell. Everything is great, especially the track from Octex.

While I'm on the topic of dub-techno, I'd like to unleash a bit of spam upon Last.fm. You see, about a week ago I noticed there was a copy of Fluxion's Vibrant Forms listed on Amazon for only one cent. I already had the CD, but how could I pass it up when it was so cheap. Even it was so scratched it couldn't be played, I'd only be losing $2.50 including the shipping. And what did I plan to do with the CD? Why, I planned to trade it on a new CD-trading site I had heard about called lala.com. So now I've got a CD by Fluxion listed on la la but nobody wants it. I assume somebody will come along eventually, since it is a fairly hard to find album and the site only charges you $1.75 to receive a CD (actually I'm still not sure exactly how it works), but to speed up the process I'm posting in this journal to urge anyone who wants the album to sign up for the site. Don't just sign up on the main page though, because I've got 10 "invites" and if someone I invite signs up and successfully makes a trade I get a free T-shirt. And I need a new T-shirt, most of mine have holes in them. PM me with your email if you to help me get a free T-shirt. Or you could just be a goddamn son-of-a-bitch and sign up on the main page. Oh, the site is only open to people in the US. You can also sign up if you want to see an even bigger Web 2.0 nightmare than the current Last.fm beta.

(Sorry if there are any typos, grammatical errors, etc. The most I'm going to do today is copy it into OpenOffice and check for spelling errors.)

You know, I've titled my last two journal entries with words from some of the songs from the albums I talk about, but this time it was sort of hard to find anything good, so please excuse this post's awful name.


Taylor Deupree: Occur

This CD had been tempting me at a certain used CD shop for at least a few months, and I finally gave in and bought it. It was $9.00, which is just a little on the high side for a second-hand album by an artist I don't know much about, but it guess it's out of print and sort of hard to find (sold for $22.64 on eBay). Enough about that though. The music is quite experimental; on the insert it warns, "This recording contains frequencies, both high and low, that may not be audible, or distort, on conventional home audio systems. Professional monitoring or headphone use is recommended". Well I don't have any professional monitoring equipment and headphones are really too much of a hassle for me to bother with, so I just listened to in on my computer. The most important thing I noticed about this album is that it demands your attention. (I actually watched a lot of it through a spectrum analyzer.) The explanation given on the 12k site helped me to understand it more: apparently the theme of the album is sporadic and non-repetitive events of the city. That said, there is still quite a bit of repetition involved here; it's just less obvious than, say, a techno beat. The closest thing I've heard to this album is some of Cordell Klier's work, which is probably a bad comparison because it's even more obscure. Being as experimental as it is, this album isn't something I'd want to put on every day, but I like it a lot and it's probably good to come back to once in a while for an interesting listen.


Silex: Alphabet

Silex is Konstantinos Soublis, better known as Fluxion from Chain Reaction, and this is actually his most recent album (it came out in 2002). I found Alphabet at the Electric Fetus in Duluth. Honestly it's a little disappointing compared to how great both of the Vibrant Forms releases are, but it's still a pretty good album that's quite a bit different and anything released under the Fluxion name — it's basically mid-90s style IDM similar to Tri Repetae-era Autechre with hints of Artificial Intelligence ambient techno (but that's already in the Autechre so I guess it's redundant). Overall it's a little generic and not nearly as coherent as the releases as Fluxion, but nice if you just want some some old-school IDM.


Z'EV: Ghost Stories

I bought this on a whim and I really don't know what I think of it yet. It's easily the most abstract album in my collection. One 68 minute track of what might be described as "experimental percussion". I don't think I'm really qualified to judge it yet, I need to listen to it more, but right now it mostly sounds like a guy banging on home-made instruments (this is what I've read) without really doing anything deeper than that. I guess that the performances are a big part of the act, so maybe a lot of it is lost by just being an audio recording. If any Z'ev fans happen to be reading this feel free to post what you think.


Produkt: Stretch, Tol: Trap

Two CDs I got off eBay, received them a few days ago. From what I can tell Produkt is mostly Frank Bretschneider (aka Komet) with some occasional appearances from Noto, Byetone, and Tol. Stretch is a very nice album of minimal techno, sort of like earlier Pan Sonic but more melodic, or maybe like earlier Plastikman but more "pure" and sparse. Tol's album Trap is similar in style, but shows a much stronger dub influence, especially on tracks like "True". The Raster-Noton website says it's one of their most accessible releases. The Produkt album is also pretty easy to get into, and both are really solid.


Bohren & der Club of Gore: Gore Motel, Midnight Radio, Sunset Mission

I was lucky to find three used Bohren & der Club of Gore at the Electric Fetus in Minneapolis a few days ago. I've been on the lookout for stuff from this band since I first heard a few songs from Sunset Mission last summer on the Last.fm radio. They're called "jazz noir", which I think fits them well. These are the band's first three albums, and it's interesting how you can hear their style change over time. Apparently they started out as a metal band, and you can hear similarities to bands like Sunn O))) and Earth (actually I don't know very much about these bands, neither of them are even in my top 300 here, so I might be completely off) in the bass playing on most of Gore Motel. The jazz influence is less apparent, and there is no saxophone like in the more recent material. Midnight Radio is a two-CD set and it sees the band get more minimalist in their song structures. There's not a single song under ten minutes long here. As a fan of minimal techno and minimal music in general this album might appeal to me more than other people, but I think it's almost as good as Sunset Mission, the album that first got me into this band. On that Sunset Mission, of course, Bohren added a saxophone player and really completed the jazz noir sound. It's just really, really beautiful. One of very few albums that I would give a 99% score to (and I don't think I'd never give a 100% score to anything; Pobody's Nerfect is a book I used to read as a kid). Really, Sunset Mission should be required listening for everybody, no matter what kind of music they're into. It's that good.

Some time recently I reached the 50000 plays on Last.fm/Audioscrobbler. It might have been yesterday, but I'm not really sure with the way my track count is updating. If it was yesterday, my 50000th scrobbled track was Paz Suite 4. I don't really think my 50000 playcount is honest as to what I've actually listened to though, since pretty much every night I make a playlist of music to listen to as I fall asleep. Is that cheating? I don't know.

But what I've decided to to in this journal entry is to go through all my weekly top artists since I first signed up and see if there is anything interesting to say about them. If there is something interesting to say I'll say it. If there isn't I'll say something uninteresting. So I guess I'll start now...

13 February 2005: Autechre (34)
What is there to say about Autechre. They've been my #1 artist here since day one, and they probably will be forever. Maybe. In my early days here it seemed like Autechre was on the top of the weekly chart a lot more than they are now. I think it's because back then I played music on random mode a lot more (by loading every song on my computer into Winamp just listening to whatever came up), and Autechre probably has the most songs in my collection. Since then I listen to albums and smaller playlists a lot more than I used to, but Autechre's playcound has been increasing fairly consistently.

20 February 2005: Autechre (31)
I first heard Autechre on their "Radio Mix", back when Warp had it streaming from their website. I think the first track was a remix Autechre did of Gescom's "Mag". I think. I'm not sure. It's a super track, better than the original (although I've only heard the original once, but I remember thinking that the Autechre mix was better when I heard it). After I listened to the mix from Warp, I went out and bought Confield at Best Buy. It must have just come out around then. One can imagine that it took me a while to get into it, right after hearing the much more accessible Radio Mix.

27 February 2005: Tiki Obmar (58)
Tiki Obmar is (was?) a local band (although I've never been to any of their shows; I don't really ever go to any shows). They got to the top on this week because I purchased the CD Seasons, which is mostly a remix album with a few new tracks thrown in as well.

6 March 2005: Aphex Twin (25)
Aphex Twin is the artist that got me into IDM. Well, actually it might have been Mouse on Mars, depending on where you draw the boundary of IDM. When I was first getting into electronic music (or music in general, for that matter), I decided to join the Columbia House Music Club and get some cheap CDs. I was looking for electronic music artists so I just decided to search for "electronic music" in the Yahoo directory (this was back when Yahoo still placed emphasis on the "directory" instead of Google-style searches; remember that?). Two artists that came up were Aphex Twin and The Prodigy. I ordered Aphex's Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II and the Come to Daddy EP, as well as Music for the Jilted Generation by The Prodigy. A while after that I was at Barnes & Noble with a gift certificate. They had both Drukqs and The Prodigy's Experience: Expanded, but I only had enough money to buy one of them, and I chose Drukqs. I now think of that as sort of a "fork in the road" when I was forced to make a choice that could alter what music I would listen to later in life. Or something. (I did buy that Prodigy album later though. I like it.)

13 March 2005: Autechre (46)
I've found that with Autechre, I seem to go through "phases" regarding which albums I like best. Recently I've been listening to Amber a bit more than usual. Until now I haven't really appreciated it as much as I should have.

20 March 2005: Autechre (141)
Wondering why the Autechre playcount is so high this week? For some reason Audioscrobbler decided to change my total plays for Autechre from about 100 to about -40. So for a day or two this week I just let Autechre play on my computer non-stop to make up for the lost statistics. To this date I have no idea why they just dropped down to a negative number, though.

27 March 2005: Landau (50)
Landau is a Merck artist or band or something, and I got the album Thepicompromise this week. It's got some very nice songs on it; I especially like "Independence".

3 April 2005: Aphex Twin (62)
As time goes on I've found that I'm listening to less of Aphex's later material and more of the earlier stuff. Maybe listening to so much minimal techno lately has had an effect on me because I rarely want to listen to the Richard D. James Album or Drukqs, but I still regularly listen to both Selected Ambient Works albums. I think I might be looking for a more consistent or "pure" sound. Or maybe I'm just boring. That's probably it.

10 April 2005: Autechre (30)
I'm determined to continue writing something under every week, even if the artist has been repeated several times before. So I'll continute saying random things about Autechre. Last year I missed the opportunity to see Autechre and SND live, because I'm too scared and shy to go to concerts. And also I don't think anyone I know likes Autechre. I did go to a large concert once... It was a "Weird Al" concert, when I was a younger. I went with my brother and my neighbor's family. It was loud.

17 April 2005: Lusine (63)
This is the week I got Lusine's Serial Hodgepodge. It seemed like at the time a lot of people were giving it a lot of praise. I don't really see anything special about it though; it's pretty generic I.D.M. to me.

24 April 2005: While (121)
I got two CD's by the artist "While" in the mail this week: Lock and Even. It's sort of funny because I just complained about Lusine being generic IDM in the week above, but this is just as generic and I still like it a lot. It must be because While seems to be very influenced by something I like a lot (Autechre's Tri Repetae album, in particular), while Lusine's music reminds me a lot of Prefuse 73, who I don't care for that much. I'm not really sure if the whole album sounds like that, but the first song definitely does. Actually that first song almost seems to be directly ripping off a technique used on the Delarosa & Asora album (the track "Paz Suite 1"). But what am I talking about. It's certainly not While!

1 May 2005: Autechre (29)
Several years ago I had an "Autechre Week", where all I listened to was Autechre. I must have been such an I.D.M. nerd.

8 May 2005: Mouse on Mars (95)
Haha. Mouse on Mars is so high here because I accidentally left the track "Mine is in Yours" playing on repeat for quite a long time. I first heard Mouse on Mars when my uncle gave me a burned copy of "Iaora Tahiti", which might have been my first exposure to IDM. I still haven't bought an original copy yet. I probably should sometime.

15 May 2005: Ilkae (40)
Is this when I got Bovine Rearrangement? Honestly I didn't like that album much at all. A lot of the remixes just sounded like the original song with some other stuff on top, and longer. Pistachio Island is much, much better.

22 May 2005: Autechre (92)
This must be when I finally bought Untilted. I still haven't really gotten into that album.

29 May 2005: Lali Puna (84)
From when I got Faking the Books. It's a good album, but it gets old quick. I hardly ever want to listen to it now. That's the way it is with most popmusic, though.

5 June 2005: Autechre (35)
It's getting hard thinking of stuff to write about Autechre. The second Autechre album I bought was Chiastic Slide. I bought it at Sam Goody at the Mall of America. I used to think that was such an awesome store just because they had a "Techno" section. Eventually I realized they hardly had anything good at all, and it was mostly compilations put out by labels that need to put pictures of naked women on the covers in order to sell records. (Well, that hardly had anything to do with Autechre at all. I'm just tryin to use them as a starting point, then going into some stream of consciousness crap.)

12 June 2005: Mark Fell (122)
This is the week I received Mark Fell's Ten Types of Elsewhere from Forced Exposure. I read a lot of good things about this album made by half of SND on various places on the Internet. I like it a lot, but it's much more experimental than SND's music and not something you listen to every day. I also got Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records by Jan Jelinek in the same shipment. Both albums are very good, but I like Jan Jelinek's more. The main reason Mark Fell got on top here is simply because his album has a lot more tracks.

19 June 2005: Oval (58)
I think this is the week I got Oval's Wohnton. What a strange album. It's different from all of Oval's other stuff because it contains vocals. And the vocals are pretty bad. Still, I like this album. There are some really good tracks on it. It was made in 1993, but parts of it remind me of music indie kids would be obsessed with today.

26 June 2005: Oval (53)
Oval is on my list of artists I need to eventually buy all the albums from, but I'm not really in a rush to do so because they've all been released on a fairly large label. The first Oval album I bought was Dok, and to this day it's still my favorite (I only have three albums, though). It's a near-perfect ambient album to me, I'd give it at least a nine out of ten.

3 July 2005: Them (85)
This week I got the album Them by Them (from Anticon), who I have retagged as Themselves now. It was the first time I heard Dose One. I'm listening to "Directions to My Special Place" now, and it's really amazing. I actually like this stuff that is more closely related to hip-hop more than the more experimental stuff like Subtle and the collaboration with Boop Bip. The production is excellent too, it's so quiet, almost alien.

10 July 2005: Farmers Manual (75)
I must have listened to Explorers_We this week. It was actually the description of this album that got me interested in Farmers Manual. I read it on the Warpmart site or somewhere: "It's the first glitchwerk masterpiece. The more you listen to it, the better it gets." I agree.

17 July 2005: Dorothy's Magic Bag (45)
Dorothy's Magic Bag makes 8-bit sounding music. This week I downloaded a bunch of his stuff (legally, of course; most of it is released on netlabels). I first heard is when "Bakkapuru" played on the front page of some site called Micromusic. My favorite release is What's Inside the Magic Bag?, though. It's right here.

24 July 2005: Autechre (68)
Should I just start going in order here? The third Autechre album I got was, well, actually I don't remember. It might have been EP7, which I bought at a little store called CD Warehouse. It's a chain store that sells used CDs. I don't go there that often, but it's pretty decent. I just like browsing to see if they have anything good. If anyone reading this is from the Twin Cities area and into the Chain Reaction label, the last two times I went to the store in Maplewood they had the somewhat hard to find Chain Reaction ... Compiled album for seven dollars. Although I already have it, I thought about buying it to sell on eBay for a profit, but decided it wasn't worth the trouble. So now if anyone is reading this and they still actually have the album, you can go there and get a rare album cheap. (I'm not guaranteeing that they still have it in stock, though!)

31 July 2005: C-Rayz Walz (83)
I bought Ravipops this week. The production on the album isn't anything to get excited about, but what I really like about C-Rayz is his honesty. It might be called "positive", but tracks like "We Live" are really depressing too.

7 August 2005: Christophe Charles (21)
I'm not sure how this got here, since I don't think I bought the only album I own by Christophe Charles (Undirected 1986-1996) this week, but whatever. I never really got into the album until recently though. I bought it because I found it used and it's on Mille Plateaux, and Mille Plateaux albums are sort of hard to find. When I finally sat down and listened to it in detail I realized that it's actually a very nice abstract album. By the way, Christophe Charles is the guy who collaborated with Oval on Dok.

14 August 2005: People Under the Stairs (98)
I bought this one (O.S.T.) on my last day of Summer work. I actually bought it before I started working for the day, since my professor wouldn't be in until later that day (I worked at my school doing a project over the Summer, mostly sitting at a computer), so I listened to it then. It's a decent album of modern old-school hip-hop, but nothing mindblowing.

21 August 2005: Curd Duca (138)
After my work ended I went on a short vacation to Duluth and Grand Marais. In Duluth I went to the Electric Fetus and bought some CDs: Elevator 3 by Curd Duca, Sea Biscuit by Spacetime Continuum, and Underling by Jake Mandell. Elevator 3 is an excellent album of really short tracks (I want to call them "sketches"), Sea Biscuit is a classic (I think) ambient techno-ish album, and Underling is an album of three ambient drone (or something) tracks. The Curd Duca album was at the #1 spot because it has a lot of short tracks.

28 August 2005: Claude Debussy (36)
I stole some of my mom's Debussy CDs and copied them to my computer. He's my favorite classical composer.

4 September 2005: goodhands team (46)
An electronic music artist (or band) that has some music on the Internet. I downloaded a lot of it and listened to it. It's good. I think he (or they) won the Autechre remix contest at Xltronic.

11 September 2005: Farmers Manual (59)
I was just browsing their website. There's a lot of stuff, strange connections to other similarly designed sites, etc. Weird.

18 September 2005: The Conet Project (190)
The Conet Project is recordings from some sort of secret shortwave numbers stations used by spies, or something. The reason the number is so high here is because there are a lot of tracks (4 CDs worth, but I just downloaded the online version). It sort of creeps me out to listen to them at night. During the day they don't really have any effect on me and I usually just skip the tracks when they come up.

25 September 2005: Random Factor (47)
During this week I went to the "World's Largest Garage Sale" and bought a lot of CDs. The best of them this one Convergence by Random Factor, aka Carl A. Finlow, aka Silicon Scally. When I bought this CD I actually had no idea what it was, I just thought the cover art was interesting. (You can do that when CDs cost $0.125-$2.00.) When I listened to it was surprised that was actually good house music. When I started looking up information on the artist I was even more surprised that it was the same guy as Silicon Scally, an excellent electro artist I'd heard on Last.fm earlier. After I got this album I bought Electrocide, Mr. Machine, and Electrilogy+. I'd love to pick up the earlier Random Factor album (Too Fast Into the Future), but it's pretty expensive most places I see it on the internet.

2 October 2005: Adam Johnson (68)
What a surprise it was finding the album by Adam Johnson at a used CD store. I had been thinking about buying it for a while. And I think it was right after the announcement of Merck's closing, too. And he's even a local artist. I first heard Adam Johnson (the track "Traber") on the Warpmart Issue 1 compilation. The music itself is sort of hard to describe; I don't think it fits into any particular genre. He's definitely my favorite artist on Merck, though, along with Deceptikon. Oh, and I heard somewhere that he'll be taking control of the Narita label when Merck shuts down.

9 October 2005: Tim Hecker (22)
Not sure exactly how this got here, but I guess the play count is low. Tim Hecker is one of my favorites though, especially Radio Amor. It would probably be one of my "desert island discs". It's pretty near-perfect.

16 October 2005: Non Phixion (86)
This week I bought Non Phixion's The Future is Now (Platinum Edition). It's a pretty good album, but lately I've found that I'm rarely in the mood for this style of aggressive rap.

23 October 2005: Pan Sonic (102)
What happened this week? I must have bought Pan Sonic's Kulma. I like a lot of the stuff they've done, but sometimes it's too minimal for me (the A album, mostly). I recently got the live in New York album, and it's my favorite thing I've heard from them so far. I haven't heard their two latest albums, though (Aaltopiiri and the four CD set, Kesto).

30 October 2005: Audion (62)
I got Suckfish this week. A great techno album with greater cover art. It was a bit of a coincidence that right before I went to the used CD shop I was reading good words about this album, then when I got there they had it. For cheap!

6 November 2005: Aphex Twin (21)
It's sort of interesting that when I first started scrobbling Aphex Twin and Autechre were staying about equal in their positions for a while. I think Aphex even overtook Autechre for a little while. But now they've diverged by more than 400 plays.

13 November 2005: El-P (76)
I think I purchased the Cannibal Oxtrumentals album this week. I still haven't heard the vocal versions (OK, I have, but not really as an album). Even alone they are really great though. There should be more people in hip-hop like El-P. I sort of feel guilty or unsure about how I have these songs tagged though. Should they be El-P, or should they be Cannibal Ox, with "(Instrumental)" slapped on to the end? Well, Freedb had them like I have them, so they'll stay like that for now.

20 November 2005: Silicon Scally (143)
This must be when I got my two Silicon Scally CDs, Electrocide and Mr. Machine. Both are amazing electro albums (I prefer Electrocide). I got them for really cheap (for being shipped, new, from the UK) from Boomkat. I think they're still on sale there. Another great discovery thanks to Last.fm.

27 November 2005: Matrix (111)
My first Chain Reaction album. I actually got this from Wal-Mart, of all places. After I got this one I started my quest to buy all the Chain Reaction albums. I'm more than half done now, but most of the remaining ones are the harder-to-find metal box CDs. It was this album that really got me into minimal techno. I'd bet nearly half the CDs I've bought since I got this one fit in to that genre. Or maybe not. I'm not sure.

4 December 2005: Matrix (125)
Matrix is still on top this week, but just below at 120 plays is Hallucinator, another Chain Reaction artist. Hallucinator is probably the weirdest of them that I've heard so far. A lot of the sounds are sort of "ethnic", or something. And then there are those experimental "Wipeout" tracks.

11 December 2005: The Album Leaf (76)
This week I got One Day I'll Be On Time. I call it "pleasant music", because it's not really challenging or anything, just pleasant to listen to. I don't know. There's some boring guitar stuff here, and also some nice melodic tracks. My favorite is "The MP".

18 December 2005: Boards of Canada (22)
How did Boards of Canada get here? I don't know. Like getting Matrix from Wal-Mart, I found Boards of Canada in a pretty unexpected place as well: the Columbia House Music club. They weren't even signed to a really major label (Music Has the Right to Children was released on Matador in the US, which I always thought was at least sort-of independent, but looking at the history on Discogs, it looks like in 2001 or so, the time I ordered it, Capitol Records had a lot of control over the label; so maybe it wasn't such an unusual place). I guess Boards of Canada is sort of "pleasant music" to me too. I have yet to hear their newest album.

25 December 2005: Sutekh (79)
Christmas. I got a lot of minimal techno stuff, and it looks like Sutekh came out on top this week. The album is Periods.Make.Sense. It's all I have from him, but it's a good, dark album. It's very "sparse", I'd call it. On Christmas, I fell asleep at my Grandma's house while listening to this play on the PlayStation and watching the visualizations. I was sort of sick on Christmas, and now I think this album might make me feel ill whenever I listen to it.

1 January 2006: Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto (18)
I found the album Insen in a used CD shop right after I was reading good things about it on the Internet. I think it's a good album, but not especially outstanding. I mean, a lot of people before this have done similar things. Aphex Twin manipulated piano on Drukqs, and Tosca did it subtly on the bonus disc of Dehli 9. And those are just modern examples. I do like this album more than either of those, though.

8 January 2006: Fluxion (270)
Fluxion was the artist of the first quarter of 2006 for me. I was lucky enough to find both of his Chain Reaction albums online in one day (and they even showed up on different sites!) for less than $15 each. The music is amazing. Underwater ambient dub techno, or something. If I make a "Best Things I Discovered in 2006" list at the end of this year, Fluxion will have to be towards the top. He went from nothing to #4 on my top artists list in three months. I need to buy Spaces soon.

15 January 2006: Fluxion (63)
Fluxion on top for the second week in a row. I think that, like many of artists that I have listened to a lot lately, I first heard Fluxion on the Last.fm radio. Actually I think I got into the whole Chain Reaction thing through Last.fm. It's too bad their CDs are so hard to find.

22 January 2006: SND (41)
SND was able to knock Fluxion off his top spot this week, and I'm not sure why. I must have been listening to Tenderlove a lot this week.

29 January 2006: Vladislav Delay (62)
This was the week of my birthday, and a lot of excellent artists got on the top 10. It looks like Vladislav Delay, with Demo(n) Tracks got on top. My first exposure to Vladislav Delay was actually through his Luomo pseudonym, and I still think Vocalcity is the best thing I've heard from him, but Demo(n) Tracks is a good album as well. It might not be the best track on the album, but "Demonit" is definitely a standout track. It has a physical effect on me. The way the extremely deep bass comes in over and over and everything else goes out. It changes the pressure in the room or something. It's powerful.

5 February 2006: Safety Scissors (90)
This week I bought Tainted Lunch by Safety Scissors. It's very different from everything else on ~Scape. It's fun pop music, but like all pop music I don't listen to it much after listening to it a lot at first.

12 February 2006: Binärpilot (71)
A netlabel artist gets to the top this week. I downloaded You Can't Stop Da Funk from Candymind. I don't know much about the artist but I know that these songs are awesome. They're sort of 8-bit-something-or-other, sometimes with vocals. It's rad. Especially "Destroy the Popollution". I tried to burn some Binärpilot tracks to a CD to listen to in the car, the burn failed (what?! Does that ever happen?). I should try again.

19 February 2006: Subtle (56)
Dose One and crew make another appearance on the top this week. I bought Subtle's A New White. My favorite track is still "F.K.O.", which I first heard on the Lexample Blue sampler CD. I hesitate to call this hip-hop, because it's really not, at all. It's more "music that defies classification", but whatever.

26 February 2006: Ms. John Soda (29)
I got Notes and the Like cheap. Honestly I don't really care about it at all. The music's not bad or anything, it's just that I listened to one Lali Puna album and then got tired of the style. It's sort of a cliché, I think. I like "Outlined View", though.

5 March 2006: MF DOOM (111)
You know, I'm getting up to the point in time when I feel like I just wrote about this stuff in a previous journal entry. Probably because I did, only about a month or so ago. Anyway, MF Doom is #1 here because I got Mm..Food. It's a great album. I could write more stuff about how I wanted to buy it but I procrastinated for a while, then it went out of print, then I finally found it used, but I already wrote all that in a previous journal. Mm..Food is my favorite hip-hop CD I own.

12 March 2006: Thomas Brinkmann (60)
This week I received a few CDs in the mail, one was Klick by Thomas Brinkmann and the other was Makesnd Cassette by SND. It looks like Brinkmann came out on top, although now I think the SND album is better. Brinkmann is one of my favorite minimal techno artists though. I first heard him as Ester Brinkmann on the Clicks + Cuts compilation (the track "Maschine"), many years ago. It's still my favorite track by him. "Erika 2" might be a close second.

19 March 2006: Biosphere (111)
I got five or six CDs this week I think, Biosphere's Substrata was #1. I think it deserved the spot, though I do still think it has some sort of weakness. I wrote about it in an older journal that a lot of people commented on. I've put this artist on mental "watch list", or something, where I'll keep an eye out for cheap albums to pick up.

26 March 2006: Monolake (30)
Monolake must have reached this spot by chance, since I don't think I got any new CDs this week. But since I haven't written anything about Monolake in this huge journal entry yet, I'd better put something here. One thing I regret is not buying most of the Monolake albums when they were pretty easy to find. I remember several years ago they were all (with the exception of Hongkong, probably, and of course the ones that hadn't been released yet) on Barnes & Noble's top selling albums in the "experimental techno" category. I didn't take much notice of them because they were mixed in with a lot of the boring stuff people call "indietronica", so I just assumed it was the same kind of music. And at that time I was a lot more into the "fucked up beatz" stuff than I am now. So what I'm saying is that it's unfortunate that EFA shut down and seemed to take a lot of German labels with it. Although I don't really know the story about that.

2 April 2006: Jeff Mills (127)
I got two CDs by Jeff Mills in the mail this week. And another one by Scan 7. So it was a big week for Detroit techno. It's sort of funny because a lot of artists I listen to use elements of Detroit in their music, but not until recently have I begun getting into the "real thing". My favorite track is "Random Soul" by Scan 7. Oh, and since I haven't made a journal entry about it yet, I will also add that I got the pretty rare CD Bl_ck B_st_rds by KMD in the same shipment. And the CD only cost $3.50. And it was pretty much new. I got lucky with that, I guess. MF DOOM's style has certainly changed a lot since 1994 or whenever it was recorded.

9 April 2006: Fluxion (73)
For several nights on this most recent week I've just been loading up some Fluxion tracks in Foobar2000 to fall asleep to.

And that's it. Next I'll have to do one for 100000 tracks. I'll start on 16 April 2006.

By the way, these are the albums I bought since my last journal entry:

(Don't think I spend that much on CDs; most were used and the total cost for all was less than $60, and the KMD one probably could fetch about at least half that on eBay, not that I'm going to sell it or anything.)

I normally don't participate in these trends that go around here, but this one seemed fun enough. Basically you just post some lyrics and people guess what artist/band and song they're from. Don't use a search engine because that is CHEATING. I'm also adding connections to the #1 "similar artist" for every answer and also my top 5 artists. A couple of the "similar artists" I haven't even heard of though.

1. "The reason for the story is to give away your last chance"
Hint: This is from the first CD release (not vinyl, though) by an electronic dance music sublabel.
Found by basscad: Matthew Dear - Dog Days

2. "Don't memorize the leaves, they're colored to deceive"
Hint: It's from an EP released by Warp.

3. "We can be invisible, there wouldn't be an indication"
Hint: This track is by an electro artist who usually doesn't have vocals.

4. "You're so beautiful, you came back to me"
Hint: The artist is Japanese.

5. "You have to bend your sound and make love to metal"
Hint: This song was released by a netlabel in 2006.

6. "I respect a man who uses cardboard"

7. "Don't have a PC, or MTV, or HIV, or an SUV, or any CD by Master P"
Hint: White guy rapping, I think. It sounds like it at least.

8. "I'm a caveman, your modern ways frighten and confuse me"
Found by decklin: El-P - Deep Space 9mm

9. "A bassline is subbing under a fat-faced, acned moon"
Hint: The artist once released a split album (under a differerent name) with a Chain Reaction artist.
Found by Retrovertigo: The Bug - Night Steppa

10. "You used to play my favorite tracks, those basslines and synthetic claps"

11. "This airship is a piece of shit"
Hint: This is from a 2005 album that was a bit of a departure from the label's usual style.

12. "Japanese girls masturbate for my dial tone"
Hint: This track was co-produced by an artist who has released on ~scape.

13. "Don't pull the roots, they are nourishing"
Hint: It's from an EP by an artist or band in my top 10.

14. "Welcome to futurama, where the cyborgs will shoot your mama"
Found by weston24: Non Phixion - Futurama

15. "By pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody"
Found by decklin: Kraftwerk - Pocket Calculator

16. "Your hand in my trousers, I wish it would be true"
Hint: The artist name contains the name of a country's capital city.

17. "Probably still be speakin' in rhymes as a old fart"
Found by tom_dissonance/weston24: MF Doom - One Beer

18. "Floating over the city like a Goodyear blimp"
Hint: It's a line from a song by a hip-hop duo.

19. "Your life's colors, black and light black"

20. "It's just that the world ain't enough, and it never was for the two of us"
Hint: This song is from what is, in my opinion, one of the best house records ever.
Found by klaashermans: Luomo - Tessio

If anyone bothers to reply with a correct answer I'll eventually add the solutions in hidden white text. I might give hints after a while too.

Connections: Animal Collective, Aoki Takamasa + Tujiko Noriko, Aphex Twin, Autechre, Blackalicious, Boy vs. Bacteria, Break 3000, Cannibal Ox, Depeche Mode, DJ /rupture, Eglantine Gouzy, Farmers Manual, Fluxion, Ill Bill, Labtekwon, Lowfish, Madvillain, MRI, Ovuca, Polygamy Boys, Ricardo Villalobos, Squarepusher, Stereolab, Venetian Snares vs. Stunt Rock, Yo La Tengo

I've noticed some people are doing journal entries on their weekly charts to discuss what they're listening to and why. I thought it was a decent idea (at least way better than that A-Z bullshit) so I thought I'd give it a try. Of course, if this sort of thing becomes a trend it will without doubt turn into another listing game thing (the first A-Z journals I saw actually had descriptions and stuff on them, but now most of them are just lists). I'm not going to make an artist connection to artists I don't have anything to say about.

1. Fluxion (+14, 270 plays)
Fluxion definitely dominated the charts this week, and the reason is that I received two of his albums in the mail -- I found Vibrant Forms on Half.com for about $13.00 and Vibrant Forms II (which is a 2-CD set) on Amazon Marketplace for $15.00 on the same day and ordered them both immediately since they're pretty hard to find. Classic Chain Reaction ambient techno, perfect for driving at night, slowly drifting into sleep, or just listening. Not very good for reading though; it's far to difficult to concentrate.

2. Bangkok Impact (new, 89 plays)
I bought three albums at the Electric Fetus this week: Thomas Brinkmann's "Rosa", "Harnessed The Storm" by Drexciya, and this one, "Traveller" by Bangkok Impact, which is my favorite of the lot. It's just fun electro-disco-funk-whatever music. How could anyone not like "Crowdpleaser", unless they're some sort of elitist fun-hater.

3. Thomas Brinkmann (+114, 50 plays)
Minimal techno. I actually bought "Rosa" new and paid full price on a whim (something I hardly ever do), and I'm still not sure if it was worth it. I need to listen more, but right now nothing reaches the same level of awesomeness for me as Ester Brinkmann's (who is the same person) "Maschine". I'm probably going to order Ester's "Der Übersetzer" (used) online later today.

4. Drexciya (new, 24 plays)
The cover has a sticker that says "Detroit Elektro". I have to admit I was a little disappointed by this album ("Harnessed The Storm") for most of this week because of a lack of memorable melodies, but a few days ago I was listening to it in the car and I finally began to "get" it. It's weird how "delicate" sounds are used to make up the songs, most of which I think of as pretty "hard".

5. Aphex Twin (+10, 23 plays)
Aphex makes a showing on the top 10 this week because I listened to Selected Ambient Works II. I spent some time this week tagging some songs as "underwater music", a sound which I'm having trouble coming up with more examples of. The big three, in my mind, are Aphex's "Matchsticks" (the last track from SAWII), Matrix's "Red Film #2", and Tim Hecker's "7000 Miles". A lot of Mr. Hecker's music could be put under this category I guess, but none do it as well as "7000 Miles". It's the sound of dark and unknown underwater areas. I associate it with this place called Underwater Adventures (formerly Underwater World) in the Mall of America, if anyone reading this has ever been there.

6. I Am Robot and Proud (new, 19 plays)
At the end of 2005 I ordered "You Make Me This Happy", which is a album of remixes I Am Robot and Proud did of other artists, from Piehead Records (a CDR label that has now ceased to exist). My favorite is a remix of a song called "Osaka" by an artist/group (?) called "Girls are Short". Robot and Proud got on the list because I also listened to his other albums ("The Catch" and "Grace Days") this week.

7. Spencer Nilsen (new, 15 plays)
Who is Spencer Nilsen? He's the guy who did the music for Ecco the Dolphin on Sega CD, a game whose music I've also associated with the "underwater music" I mentioned above. I ripped the tracks directly off the game CD and listened to them on my computer, but a lot them seem sort of cheesy like Tangerine Dream. I guess you don't notice it as much when you're playing the game.

8. Loscil (+60, 14 plays)
Loscil is on the list because of his recent release "Stases" on a netlabel called one. It's really, really ambient music and I like it a lot. If you like ambient music (the press-release calls it "drone" but I'm not exactly sure of the definition of that genre) you should check it out here.

9. Autechre (+6, 12 plays)
Not much to say here, I think they just got on the list from shuffle mode.

10. Sistol (-7, 8 plays)
Sistol is Vladislav Delay, but a bit more straightforward minimal techno than his work under different names. You can still hear the strange clicks and echoes that seem to fill the background of most of Ripatti's work. I got the self-titled (and only) album for Christmas.