tom moody
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Belatedly came across an on-again, off-again feature on Slate called "Mixing Desk"--the latest installment is a tribute to the wacky Moog synthesizer. Mingled in with critical writing you find little clickable speaker icons that say, for example, "Listen to Stereolab's 'Eternal Life of the Proletariat.'" You think, "Hmmm, Slate's getting on the mp3 blog bandwagon, well, cool, at least the music's getting out there."
What a bunch of crap, though. When it says "listen to..." it means "listen to a 29 second excerpt in Windows streaming format." They're so beholden to commercial interests they can't even give you one song to connect the criticism to--just a little taste so you'll go buy the goddam thing. Wondering how electronic dance music critic Philip Sherburne, who did an earlier installment on German techno, agreed to participate in this garbage. He has a blog, for cryin' out loud.
"Gridbug Variation" [mp3 removed]. Minimal dub techno. All beats. Kind of warm and fuzzy for the genre, and not totally humorless. A volume bump or pair of headphones is recommended--to keep the echo-spikes from clipping I had to lower the overall decibels, and that was with compression. I need a professional to mix these things now. Update: Forget what I said about the volume. It's fine--it would help if I remembered to turn up the bass on my mixer.