The only social networking site my brother has ever been on is Miitomo.

The Stone Roses

David Saavadra writes for El País about the rise and fall of the Stone Roses, a band many had pegged as the saviors of britpop at the end of the 80s.

Why did U.K. music critics place so much hope in them in the late 1980s? “Everything was exaggerated, because it was a time when the media was looking for someone to occupy the throne that the Smiths had left vacant,” notes music critic Carlos Pérez de Ziriza. “They had the merit of fusing, like no other group, the British pop heritage of the 1960s and its most exquisite melodic tradition with the new rhythms emanating from Manchester, favoured by the rise of rave culture, acid house, and that new lysergia that had driven the second summer of love, that of 1988.”

noise

Austin Kleon has a post on Dave “Big Dutch” Nally, whose deceptively amateurish art looks like a cross between something that would have been created by Daniel Johnston and the liner notes of a Pavement record.

A little quiet storm feels perfect for this Saturday morning after a busy week.

Disc Maniac

I disclosed my most fondest Christmas wish list item to my lady friend last night — a FiiO DM13 portable CD player. She laughed at me. You want a discman for Christmas?

How can I explain my love of single-purpose devices and high-fidelity to someone who lives on their iPad and sees no problem with lossy streaming music? I want something that doesn’t have a screen with which to focus on music and, for goodness’ sake, some time to part with my phone during the day.

tech

Nonstandard Sunflower

The election is, whether mercifully or unmercifully, in the rearview mirror. Like some others, I want to turn my attention away from the day’s news, so closely coupled as it is with political events. Before I read about Kid Rock being appointed ambassador to the U.N., I mean to spend some time with my head in books. 

Standard Ebooks has inspired me by making the barrier to reading well-produced classics low and ebooks free to obtain. From the site:

faith

My mom asked my brother where he gets his news. He listed WRAL (a local news channel/site), IGN, Kotaku and Nintendo Direct Mini. In the past, I may have scoffed at this. Now, I think he may be onto something.

On Dark Horses

Recently, I had a conversation with a colleague about music. I had gone to see one of my direct reports’ bands, and they were really genre-hopping. I told her about the experience and mentioned that they blended such far-flung musical styles as punk, hip-hop, and shoegaze. She said she loved shoegaze, but when I asked her if she was going to the Slowdive show, she confessed that she hadn’t heard of them. I was a bit shocked, since I would consider them just below My Bloody Valentine in the pantheon of shoegaze progenitors. I asked her what shoegaze bands she was into and she mentioned Emma Ruth Rundle, whom she described as metal/shoegaze.

The conversation caused me to make a mental note to check out Rundle. I had heard of her playing a metal festival in Asheville (which was postponed after the devastation of Hurricane Helene). What I heard wasn’t what I had expected, since it sounded to me more like post-rock than anything. The first album I looked at, EG2: Dowsing Voice had song titles like “Brigid Wakes To Find Her Voice Anew. The Little Flowers and Birds Show Themselves.” It was like a game of how to tell me your music is post-rock without telling me your music is post-rock. Next, I came across the On Dark Horses album, which really connected with me. Rundle often seems to do more acoustic psyche-folk these days, but this album was different.

noise