Radio has ramped up its opposition to the act,  claiming that the act will cost thousands of jobs and millions in tax revenue.  Somewhat ironically, the site also claims that the act will hurt music diversity on the radio. 

Um…?

Just saying…

2 Busy Signal Remixes, Some TOK, Tarrus Riley, Derrick Laro, Shinehead and Olly Buck to round things out.  Enjoy

Still trying to find a direct download.

The king is dead, long live the king.

Now that the weather is starting to cooperate, I’ve been working on figuring out the best way to access my music library from poolside.  I wanted to get it done without wasting any money on a unitasker media playback system like a squeezebox nor did I want to be stuck using apple’s stuff with an airport express.  Here’s my setup.

Hardware:
Onkyo TX-SR605 Receiver
3 Sets of rock speakers    Snagged these for 25 bucks a pair a few weeks ago.  Mega Score!
A/B Switches
Old Dell Inspiron Laptop
Logitech Harmony 880 Remote Control
Iphone

Software:
Songbird
Songbird Remote Pro Iphone App
NTFS Link

First step: Route everything through the receiver.
Easy enough.  The onkyo badboy has a “zone 2″ option that allows me to play two different zones of speakers at the same time (because you know, the name isnt self explanatory), so the outdoor speakers were all connected to zone 2.  I have an a/b switch that allows me to choose which speakers get music outside.  Not much to explain there either.  It’s a big yard so being able to turn off certain areas (like the ones close to the neighors) makes life easier.    I added an activity to the harmony remote that allows me to control the volume level without having to be in the line-of-sight to the receiver.  That’s kinda clutch. 

Step two: Control the Library Remotely 
I wiped the laptop a few weeks ago in order to make it work as a little media server.  The music, is scattered across a bunch of other PCs, external hard drives, etc. across my house.  I needed a program that would let me pull from all the different sources in order to manage the library, and one that had a suitable remote interface for the iphone.  Itunes got knocked out real fast.  It’s a evil monstrous resource hog and it doesn’t support watched folders and has issues with networked tracks and it doesn’t update the library when things are removed and… well fuck itunes.  That’s enough.

The other two options, then, were media monkey and songbird.    I’ve been using media monkey for a long time and love it to pieces.  It’s far and away the easiest way to manage a big library across a network, so it was a solid and obvious choice from the outset.  The only problem – the remote.  iMonkey is a fully featured remote app for Media Monkey, but it’s frigging ghastly, expensive, and a pain in the ass to set up.  I don’t want to have to run separate software on my computer in order to control my media player, and if I do, I don’t want to have to fiddle with ports and IP addresses and sundry every time I try to get it up and running.  Sorry media monkey, I love you but for this one you lose. 

That brings us to Songbird.  I had fiddled with an early release of the program but was turned off when I couldn’t use it to manage my iPhone like i could with itunes and media monkey.  For this, though, it’s more than perfect.  The one thing I found tricky was getting it to watch multiple folders.  In order to do this, I had to install NTFS Link and create a special folder on my desktop pc with NTFS junction points.  What that does is trick songbird into thinking that every junction point is a subfolder in the main folder, and it then goes and watches and indexes every one of the folders.  Sneaky!

Getting the remote app up and running was a breeze.  Just a simple extension install within the program and I was on my way.  The ui is beautiful, and it pulls info from mashtape to do photo slideshows and artist information along with album art et al.  It’s a little tacky to have to pay $4 to control an open source application properly, but whatever.  It is what it is.  I’d also like to see search integrated into the app but whatever.

Now listening to my music outside is a breeze.  If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go out to my pool and sip a lemonade, read Brillat Savarin’s Physiology of Taste and listen to the new Fat Freddy’s Drop Album.   I recommend you do the same.  At your own pool, not mine.

Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears – Tell em What Your Name is. 

I run the risk here of falling headfirst into #116, but I don’t give a damn because this is a great great album.  It’s not blues, it’s not rock, it’s not soul, it’s not funk.  It’s some crazy bubbling amalgamation of all of the above.

Basically, if they redid animal house tomorrow, Black Joe Lewis and the Honeybears could stand in for Otis Day & the Knights.  The whole album has that rip-roaring juke joint feel to it that makes you want to drink like a fish and run off and do questionable things with questionable people.  I can’t speak to the authenticity of Joe’s lyrics but I also don’t think that really matters.  It’s not a cerebral album , it’s a fun one. 

It’s an absolute steal right now for 5 bucks on Amazon.  I can’t praise this enough.  Go get it and let it power your more raucous summer evenings.

RIYL: Michael Mcdonald, Otis Redding, Kraak & Smaak, Quantic

I hate the term northern soul.  It’s one of the few terms that has less to do with where the music originated and more to do with the audience it later garnered.  It’s a strange anomaly.  That being said, Smoove and John Turrell made names for themselves in that whole little scene and have transcended it with this new album.  Jalapeno is always stronger than strong but this latest offering goes above and beyond.  It’s a great, funky, soulful piece of music that, even with its fair share of covers and samples, doesn’t come off as too derivative or forced.  Be sure to check out “The Difference” which takes the Second Crusade sax sample from Queen Latifah’s U.N.I.T.Y. and turns it into an updated doobie brothers song; and their driving, funked up cover of 80s acid madness “Don’t Go” by Yaz.

There’s a metric fuckton of good music coming out lately, and lots of it can be related to other artists.   I figured I’d take a second and shed some light on the stuff i’m digging the most right now.  I’ll be doing this all week.

 Boxcutter – Arecibo Message

RIYL Burial, Squarepusher, Tipper

Now I’ve made absolutely no secret of the fact that I am decidedly not a dubstep fan.  I don’t get the appeal, but I know great music when I hear it.  This is great music.   All the artists I listed up top are wonderful, groundbreaking musicians, but they can get a little bit too “intelligent” from time to time, which makes the music a bit less palatable.  The same could be said for boxcutter’s earlier work.  This one is much more down to earth and is just a great, listenable album with a variety of different shapes, tempos and moods.

Great piece of music right here.  Jimi Tenor’s a Finnish musician with a rather extensive discography.  For his 18th [jeez] album, he teams up with German afrobeaters Kabu Kabu to churn out a hell of a release.  Jimi’s got a very distinctive, whiny voice that somehow doesn’t get annoying. Grind! is a particularly killer cut that’s an early favorite for me. The album’s yet another disconcerting instance of German’s droping the funkiest of the funky.  But hey, whatever works.

Check out jimi’s track-by-track breakdown at his site (note that he plays the sax, flute, string machine, synth, noise box, and organ on the album) then download it at amazon.

Tracklist:
1. The Foreign Exchange – Daykeeper
2. Freddie Cruger – Keep on Knockin
3. Nicole Willis – Blues Downtown
4. The Bamboos – Move On
5. The Sweet Vandals – Nites Lites
6. WAR – The World is a Ghetto
7. Lee Sankey – The Man (Abstrakt Knights rmx)
8. Jon Kennedy – 110%
9. DJ Day – Manha
10. Lizzie Parks – Ode to St. Cecile
11. The Natural Yogurt Band – Chapter One
12. Luniz – I Got Five On It
13. Hardkandy – My Morphine
14. The Ranjahs ft. CeeLo- InspHERation
15. Aldo Vanucci – What Would I Do (JP’s Edit)

download it here

Technorati Tags: downtempo, dj mix, jp001

I prepared a special guest mix for di.FM’s Exposure NYC radio show that will be airing tomorrow, March 3rd, at 2PM.  It’s an hour of old and new deep funk and mellow soul with some other choice downtempo goodies throw in.  Big shout to DeepSpell for giving me the opportunity.

More details available at  http://www.di.fm/exposurenyc/

Tracklist coming tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: dj mix, di.fm, downtempo, funk, soul

New Kids on the Glock is a side “project” of phenomenally talented MPLS djs Mike the 2600 King  and Bitch Ass Darius. You may also know Mike for his sick design work .

Anyhow this is what happens when they get glockenspiels and set off to recreate the work of some other famous duos.  Namely Hall + Oates and Justice.  It’s so wacky that it just plain works.  Hit the jump afterward for two more.

Hit the jump for two more.

Real quick because I have a few pressing concerns to deal with, but Etherea Records, a dope little record shop with a phenomenally curated selection, will not be going out of business after all.  Their manager managed to scrape together a few investors in the 11th hour and will be staying open!  Details are sparse at the moment but you can follow the story straight from the horse’s mouth over at everyone’s favorite vitriol filled nyc clubbing site.

Technorati Tags: etherea records, closing, nyc, record store

The Foreign Exchange – Leave It All Behind

Phenomenal R&B album from Phonte of Little brother.  Dude also recently did some excellent work on the new Jazzanova Album, Of All The Things

Also – how in the fuck did a bunch of geeky german dudes become so awesomely soulful? It defies logic.

Hardkandy – Second To None
Basically imagine if Curtis Mayfield was still alive and got a 21st century update.  That’s what this hardkandy album sounds like.  Love love love love love it.

And here’s a freebie cuz you know I love you all.
Ceos & Arcee – Seachops of funk -  My pals from downbeat productions have a new promo mix out.  It’s tasty angry nuskool breaks business.  Good for gym etc.  Check them out over at http://www.downbeatproductions.com

  Technorati Tags: youtube, warner, muting, copyright, law

The articles are a trifle hard to grasp, so I’ll explain what’s going on in layman’s terms.  Under the current US copyright scheme, each song has two separate copyrights – the composition and the sound recording.  The composition copyright is held by the songwriter.  The sound recording copyright is the protection afforded to the performer(s) of the underlying composition.  Let’s take Baby, One More Time for example.  Britney Spears didn’t write the song.  Some dude named Martin Sandberg did.  Thus, Sandberg owns the composition copyright.  Britney (or more specifically, her record label) owns the Sound Recording copyright.  Under the current licensing scheme.  They both get paid whenever someone buys a copy of the song.  However, only Sandberg gets paid when the song gets played on the radio.

The original logic behind this concept was that radio was nothing more than a promotional vehicle and wasn’t making enough money to recoup double.  Nowadays, though, this is CLEARLY not the case. As the variety article points out, there are tons of stations that are based entirely around old catalogs of tunes.  Clearly the Who’s Tommy needs no more promotion at this juncture.  By the same token, internet broadcasters are all paying performance royalties despite the fact that they’re barely squeaking out a profit.  Clearly there’s a discrepancy here.

Broadcasters are obviously not fans of this new proposition, since it will basically siphon about $500 million in revenue away from them and back to the record labels.  They’ll argue that they’re getting hit just as hard in the economy (Clear channel just laid off close to 2000 people).  The reality is, though, that there’s no reason for this scheme to exist any more.  It’s one of a multitude of copyright issues that no longer stand up in the 21st century.

It seems like the Recording Industry is turning over a bit of a new leaf to start 2009.  They’re finally using their strength to get PROACTIVE things done in congress.  Suing file sharers was basically the modern equivalent of a jaywalking ticket.  They didn’t win a single case, spent tons of dough, and saw nothing but a decline in their market share because of it.  The future of music is in licensing.  But that’s a post for another day.  If you want a more intellectual view of this whole performance royalty thing, I encourage you to check out John Kettle’s law review article on the subject. Kettle was my professor in law school and largely got me to the point I’m at now.  It’s a bit dated but still very relevant to the subject at hand.

Technorati Tags: music, law, royalties, licensing

Hatchback – Colors of the Sun

Lo Recordings, purveyors of all things cosmic disco, released this badboy back in september.  Sam Grawe does a great job of blending the electronic and the organic here, resulting in the perfect music for cruising.  I had this pumping in my ears while skiing earlier this week and it helped make sitting on the lift a little bit more bearable.

Jalapeno Records and Funk Weapons Present: The Raid Part Deux

The raid is a compilation series wherein Jalapeno records highlights the back catalog of like minded albeit smaller record labels.  The first in the series focused on the DC funksters Fort Knox.  The second installment sticks to the beltway and takes on the All Good Funk Alliance.  The cd features original tracks along with remixes from jalapeno artists.  The whole album is about as solid as it gets.  Highly recommended.  Also, if you’re in NYC, they’re playing at APT with Ursula 1000 this friday.  I picked the wrong weekend to go to Vermont, but whatever.

DJP – Hot Winter (Direct Download Link)

Here’s a free one for you guys.  Fueling my strange obsession with dancehall reggae this week is DJP, a Costa Rican (WTF?) dancehall dj and remixer.  It’s a pretty solid mix, not mindblowing, but hey it’s free and I figured it’s poignant this week since it starts off with an Obama song.

Enjoy dudes, I’ll be back with more soon.Technorati Tags: hatchback, all good funk alliance, lo recordings, jalapeno records, dancehall, djp

New Freeland album in April.  Hopefully it’ll be decent.

	Daft Punk vs Adam Freeland – Aer OBAMA
	Found at bee mp3 search engine

I’ve gotta hit one of these up soon. It’s not every day that you get invited to a legendary musician’s place to cook a vegan meal.

For good measure, here’s bellhead by liquid liquid, which is to this day one of my favorite records.

Liquid Liquid – Bellhead

http://techdailydose.nationaljournal.com/2009/01/oba.php

Sure, the industry is a disaster right now and there was no other option for a while, but to reward the guy for pursuing a flawed course and costing the music industry, the courts, and individuals millions of dollars does not sit well with me.  I bet this is Biden’s fault.

Impressive turnaround time:

Then there’s this incorrigible nonsense:

So much for that whole no more gay bashing thing.   Jesus.

God this is so fucking good. 9 minute dub blues workout. The full album drops in November. Can’t wait can’t wait can’t wait!

Chorizo-poblano-zucchini frittata fresh from my garden.

Thief Playing on the speakers:

Cup of green tea in my hand.

Sun shining down on my face.

Best friend at my feet.

Life is good.