Month: December 2016

  • ‘Alive 2007’ by Daft Punk

    ‘Alive 2007’ by Daft Punk

    The first of three epic recommendations for December: perhaps the most important album in electronic dance music in the 21st Century.  Inspired by a recent conversation with some friends about whether the hype about Daft Punk was justified.  They were both Kanye West fans and so knew the ‘Harder Better Faster Stronger’ sample from his ‘Stronger‘ track.  I was trying to explain why they’ve been my benchmark of cool since the mid 90s, but seeing as we were all drunk and it was the middle of the night I thought I might need to do it a bit more coherently.  So, Messrs Mitchell and Taplin, here we go… (more…)

  • New Year, New Website

    New Year, New Website

    It was high time, really.

    I noticed that one of the designers responsible for this website’s design has quoted on his profile somewhere that he’s motivated by ‘bad memories of MySpace’.

    I actually liked MySpace.  (In its heydey, at least.)  I thought it was great that you could have this information in one place, in a standardised format.  And it really didn’t hurt that everyone could customise sites how they wanted: as the quickest of glances at a band’s MySpace page could probably tell you more about them than their music.

    Of course, whatever you did it looked ugly as the proverbial fuck, but that was the days before everything had to be clean and shiny.

    But everything has to be clean and shiny now, which is a trend that I myself have succumbed to.  And I was conflicted about it.  Part of me wanted to make a really dirty website.  White on black, with strong primary colours and everything in a small Verdana typeface.

    I still might, actually, depending on whether all that beauty and that style gets kind of smooth after a while.

    But right now, I’m actually very impressed with the beauty and the style of the AudioTheme websites, and I’d highly recommend them to any other musicians who just want something that’s fairly simple to use which can hopefully free them up to make some actual music.

    And yeah, it’s a lot better than MySpace.

    P.S.  For anyone who doesn’t know how MySpace met with such a disastrous end, this is a fascinating read:

    Financial Times: The rise and fall of MySpace.

    Photo by Quinn Dombrowski (CC BY-SA 2.0)