[updated: added links to mp3 previews for each track]

Yea, I was not kidding when I said blogging rate was gonna be substantially lower for the weeks to come…

Just thought I’d come by and dust off the the place a little…

And since I do not have time to commit one of these mind-blowing pieces of apical intellectual content you have grown to expect from this blog, I have instead decided to shoot for the other extreme and stoop to an all time low in my personal blogging ethics: let me introduce our new “Playlist of the Week” feature.

Because the mere idea of joining the plebeian blogging masses by use of this all-too-common content filling artifice makes me physically ill, I have added a twist to my approach. Instead of vainly trying to slim down my rich musical tastes to a clean and ordered Top 10, I decided to make use of that crazy feature every iPod comes equipped with: Shuffle Mode!

Hence, the 10 songs listed below are randomly fetched by my iPod out of the rough 2500 it contains… which, if I may say, is quite a brilliant idea (I’m surprised I haven’t seen it anywhere else so far, but I can see it becoming a trend).

Why brilliant, you ask?

Well, because:

1. It will bring a refreshing change in the styles of music usually discussed here: while most of my vinyl collection is focused on a few very specific musical genres (the ones my parent still categorically refuse to call “music”), my iPod collection more accurately reflects my eclectic musical background, registering all over the musical spectrum, from ABBA Mozart to Ayumi Hamasaki John Coltrane, and beyond…
2. I am lazy. And this is one damn easy way to fill this site while flaunting my ostensibly impeccable musical taste (you don’t think I will honestly tell you if, by some quirk of fate, my iPod ends up selecting one of these Christina Aguilera CDs I keep hidden on it, now do you?).

One last note: in a pathetic attempt to ride this beaten horse for what it’s worth and also to defend what might appear like questionable musical tastes to the untrained eye, I shall be commenting each track. What I won’t do though, is engage in futile discussion on what these tracks “sound like”… That’s what the internet is for (Apple iTunes’ preview, for the most clueless honest among you)..

So here goes (Track title – Artist – Album, links to iTune’s Music Store previews. No, I don’t get any kickbacks on these)…

1. Salga la Luna – Mano Negra – Patchanka: Would you know it (no cheating yet, I swear!), probably one of the favorite rock bands of my teens… Mano Negra was what I listened to when I was 15, drinking lots of beer and bumming around Europe. They made lots of good bouncy stuff, with a sound halfway between Latino street musicians and Parisian bistro… This track is nothing extraordinary, but I guess Mala Vida or Indios de Barcelona would be a good way to discover them. Oh, and btw, you might not know Mano Negra, but if you hang out around the trendy bobo crowds, you most likely know the singer in his solo efforts: Manu Chao. Be warned that Mano Negra is much less about nicey world-music and more about garagey rock sound, though.
2. So Com Voce – Thievery Corporation – The Mirror Conspiracy: Talking about bobo world-music… Well, yea, it is ostensibly trendy lounge music and sound like it’s been made by running a needle over glossy covers of Wallpaper* magazine… But it’s unarguably talented. And it sure beats Bob Marley as the soundtrack to your quality time spent with fellow alumni of Kingston State University (no offense Bob, just need a change sometime).
3. Barracuda – Moby – Barracuda 12″ Version: probably not the Moby you’ve heard. That’s Moby from before, when his stuff wasn’t used to sell compact cars to middle-aged yuppies. [insert jaded ‘but I was there’ comment here]. I first saw him at some Eastern European party, about ten years ago and, despite everybody assuring me otherwise, was fiercely convinced he had to be on some incredibly potent mix of hard drugs, given the way he kept jumping around the DJ booth like a chihuahua on crack. Turned out he was indeed completely sober (and so was I, incidentally, would you believe it). His music most definitely wasn’t. That was also the one time (well, the first of two, actually) where I landed in a Czech jail… but that’s a whole other story.
4. See Emily Play – Pink Floyd – Piper at the Gates of Dawn: originally more a The Wall kind of guy (duh: I was a teenager. in a boarding school, not like I even had a choice), I progressively veered toward their more experimental stuff (Careful with that Axe, Eugene is still my all time favorite to play real loud when I feel like freaking the crap out of my neighbours).
5. Seconde Gymnopédie – Éric Satie – Éric Satie by Michel Legrand: At last… I was starting to worry that none of the classical stuff would come up (I need my trendy-electronic-musician-with-old-fashioned-intellectual-tastes creds). Good interpretation (Legrand himself is quite famous as a composer of many seminal film sountracks). I’m no unconditional fan of Satie (when I go classical, I’d tend to go for much older guys), but his stuff is pretty decent, and he had some sense of humour, which cannot be said of most of the wankers who have been making “contemporary” classical music ever since.
6. Funky Shit – Prodigy – the Fat of the Land: What can I say… wicked track, brilliant album. Probably among the most important of the decade. Didya know the name of the album was taken from a quote by Hermann Goering (yea, you probably did, if you lived anywhere near civilization in the 90s).
7. C’est comme ça – Les Rita Mitsuko – ?: maybe one of the only decent thing to have come out of France in the eighties, music-wise… Actually, Ricardo, my roommate in SF, really dig them. They sure do not sound like Maurice Chevalier or Edith Piaf. Along with C’est comme ça, my favorite track would probably be Le Petit Train where Catherine Ringer’s demented singing is in full effect.
8. Unloading Rails – Alan Lomax – Negro Work Songs: I bought the full John and Alan Lomax’ set of recordings a while ago. I could tell you I’ve always adored the authenticity and amazing melodies of these deep south folk ballads. Truth is, I was probably looking for some good samples to pillage that had not yet been used twenty times. In my defense, it must be said I bought it before Moby had the same idea and made a few million bucks out of it.
9. I wanna be your dog – Sid Vicious (& Friends) – some bootleg: Barely audible recording of Sid shouting unintelligibly, with some random guitar riffs playing in the background. the term music cannot even loosely be applied to this, no matter how you look at it. Yet, it’s kinda neat, in a useless punk kinda way. I guess it’s mostly sentimental value…
   While we are on the topic: let me assure you there is a special spot, down there in the 5th circle of hell, already marked for the likes of Green Day and Avril Lavigne, where Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen and Dee Dee Ramones, amped on the finest smack Hell can buy, will riddle their whole body with rusty safety pins while repeatedly bashing their heads over with their own skateboards.
10. Black Plastic – Ladytron – Light and Magic: I really like Ladytron. It’s electro(clash?), but unlike most other acts of this nostalgia-fueled sub-genre, it can sustain itself on a full album. Most of their stuff is worth checking… Cease2Exist and Playgirl are usually on heavy rotation on my faves playlists.

And that’s it. Let’s not overdo it for a first one…

But that was fun (for me, of course, not for you… but who cares: my blog, my therapy. deal with it). And required minimal braincell activity, which is always good these days: they are way busy enough as it is. So we shall do it again…

Feel free to follow the highly marketable “iPod Shuffle Top 10” concept (just don’t forget the wire on my swiss account, thanks). If you hurry up, you can be one of those who will say “I was there”, when the trend will have reached the same epidemic proportions as the iPod itself.