"a Simon Reynolds level culture blog" ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^"my brain thinks bloglike"
Friday, June 23, 2006
Wednesday, June 21, 2006
i wrote about being approached to participate in the following a while back, back when it was in development and under wraps... well they've gone public now. here's the press release for an online "community" that rejoices in the name MOG:
Goths. Metal heads. Emo hipsters. Gangstas. Deadheads. Ravers. Classical aficionados. Jazz masters. MOG is where music lovers of all stripes come to quickly and easily show the world what they're listening to, express their musical tastes, and discover people through music and music through people. MOG is completely free and is available to everyone at www.mog.com.
"Thanks to bleeding-edge technology and ridiculously easy tools, MOG takes the work out of showing the world what you're about musically and connecting you with others with similar musical tastes," said David Hyman, MOG CEO & president and self-proclaimed music freak. "We use all of MOG's smarts to point you in the direction of people like you, based on the music you're into NOT to pretend that a computer really knows what you like."
MOG-O-MATIC: It's Automatic
MOG's cutting-edge MOG-O-MATIC technology automatically creates a MOG page, so anyone in the MOG community can instantly see what's in your music collection and the artists, albums and songs you actually listen to; Not since the original Napster, have you been able to see what's in other people's digital music collections. As you collect and listen to music on your computer and iPod, MOG-O-MATIC automatically keeps score, so your profile is always fresh and up-to-date. "At MOG, people still matter most," explained Hyman. "We see our technology as an enabler, but MOG's users are the definitive. That means we allow you to edit anything in your collection from adding CD's you've been listening to in your car or vinyl you've been spinning at a recent party to deleting those embarrassing Olivia Newton-John tracks."
Express Yourself
MOG has developed some of the easiest and most powerful tools for online self-expression to help you show the world who you are as a musical human being. MOG-O-MATIC-powered automated widgets instantly display what you're listening to now. Slice and dice the information any way you want and let the world know your top song of the week, top songs of the month, most recently played songs and more. Or, easily create customized widgets that reflect what you're into from last shows seen to favorite love songs to top hip hop movies you name it.The simplest music-focused blogging tools and customizable skins designed by pop-artists, including Kinsey, Frank Kozik and Coop, make it easy to turn your MOG page into an extension of your musical soul. MOG provides you with the tools (and music clips) to write your thoughts on music and embed audio samples, video clips and links to the MOG community. Drag and drop technology means it couldn't be simpler to create your own music blog. You can even add MOG to your Blog or MySpace page.And with dedicated pages for artists, albums, and songs, MOG is a springboard for delving deeper into the music you love.
Discover People Through Music
Powered by robust collaborative filtering algorithms, MOG can automatically show you other MOGGERS with a taste in music that most resembles yours. Until now, social networking sites have only been able to connect people based on uninspired criteria, like zip code, gender, and age. MOG's state-of-the-art technology connects you with people based on your musical taste one of the most powerful indicators of your style and personality. And you can search by all the other stuff too. And Discover Music Through PeoplePeople are just better at making recommendations than machines as anyone who's ever received a recommendation from Amazon knows. MOG makes it easy to discover new music you're going to love by connecting you with people with similar musical taste and then showing you what's on their iPods and hard drives. To further enable music discovery, MOG provides 30-second sound samples of every song as well as direct links to iTunes and Amazon for download and CD purchases."Like an older brother that plays you Miles Davis for the first time or a favorite musician that turns you on to an unexpected influence, MOG helps people connect with trusted voices to expand their musical exposure," Hyman continued. "Computer generated recommendation models tend to be self-referential in nature and don't account for the fact that taste is complex and ever-evolving."
And we're not the only ones who believe in the power of consumer-driven recommendations: In his December 2005 report, "Consumer Taste Sharing is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture," Gartner Research VP, Michael McGuire, states that consumer driven recommendations will play a critical role in the future of online music, predicting that "By 2010, 25 percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer taste sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and ranking tools built into online music stores or external sites with links to stores."
About MOG
Employing state-of-the-art Web 2.0 technology, MOG is an online destination where music lovers can quickly and easily show the world what they're listening to, express their musical tastes, and discover people through music and music through people. Completely free, MOG was started by David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote, former SVP-Marketing at MTV Interactive, co-founder of Addicted to Noise, and self-proclaimed music freak. MOG, which has raised $1.4 million dollars in Angel funding to date, was founded in June 2005 and is headquartered in Berkeley, CA.
For more information go to www.mog.com.
I'm not going to comment, you all know where my head's at, i'm sure you can work it out for yourself...
Goths. Metal heads. Emo hipsters. Gangstas. Deadheads. Ravers. Classical aficionados. Jazz masters. MOG is where music lovers of all stripes come to quickly and easily show the world what they're listening to, express their musical tastes, and discover people through music and music through people. MOG is completely free and is available to everyone at www.mog.com.
"Thanks to bleeding-edge technology and ridiculously easy tools, MOG takes the work out of showing the world what you're about musically and connecting you with others with similar musical tastes," said David Hyman, MOG CEO & president and self-proclaimed music freak. "We use all of MOG's smarts to point you in the direction of people like you, based on the music you're into NOT to pretend that a computer really knows what you like."
MOG-O-MATIC: It's Automatic
MOG's cutting-edge MOG-O-MATIC technology automatically creates a MOG page, so anyone in the MOG community can instantly see what's in your music collection and the artists, albums and songs you actually listen to; Not since the original Napster, have you been able to see what's in other people's digital music collections. As you collect and listen to music on your computer and iPod, MOG-O-MATIC automatically keeps score, so your profile is always fresh and up-to-date. "At MOG, people still matter most," explained Hyman. "We see our technology as an enabler, but MOG's users are the definitive. That means we allow you to edit anything in your collection from adding CD's you've been listening to in your car or vinyl you've been spinning at a recent party to deleting those embarrassing Olivia Newton-John tracks."
Express Yourself
MOG has developed some of the easiest and most powerful tools for online self-expression to help you show the world who you are as a musical human being. MOG-O-MATIC-powered automated widgets instantly display what you're listening to now. Slice and dice the information any way you want and let the world know your top song of the week, top songs of the month, most recently played songs and more. Or, easily create customized widgets that reflect what you're into from last shows seen to favorite love songs to top hip hop movies you name it.The simplest music-focused blogging tools and customizable skins designed by pop-artists, including Kinsey, Frank Kozik and Coop, make it easy to turn your MOG page into an extension of your musical soul. MOG provides you with the tools (and music clips) to write your thoughts on music and embed audio samples, video clips and links to the MOG community. Drag and drop technology means it couldn't be simpler to create your own music blog. You can even add MOG to your Blog or MySpace page.And with dedicated pages for artists, albums, and songs, MOG is a springboard for delving deeper into the music you love.
Discover People Through Music
Powered by robust collaborative filtering algorithms, MOG can automatically show you other MOGGERS with a taste in music that most resembles yours. Until now, social networking sites have only been able to connect people based on uninspired criteria, like zip code, gender, and age. MOG's state-of-the-art technology connects you with people based on your musical taste one of the most powerful indicators of your style and personality. And you can search by all the other stuff too. And Discover Music Through PeoplePeople are just better at making recommendations than machines as anyone who's ever received a recommendation from Amazon knows. MOG makes it easy to discover new music you're going to love by connecting you with people with similar musical taste and then showing you what's on their iPods and hard drives. To further enable music discovery, MOG provides 30-second sound samples of every song as well as direct links to iTunes and Amazon for download and CD purchases."Like an older brother that plays you Miles Davis for the first time or a favorite musician that turns you on to an unexpected influence, MOG helps people connect with trusted voices to expand their musical exposure," Hyman continued. "Computer generated recommendation models tend to be self-referential in nature and don't account for the fact that taste is complex and ever-evolving."
And we're not the only ones who believe in the power of consumer-driven recommendations: In his December 2005 report, "Consumer Taste Sharing is Driving the Online Music Business and Democratizing Culture," Gartner Research VP, Michael McGuire, states that consumer driven recommendations will play a critical role in the future of online music, predicting that "By 2010, 25 percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer taste sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and ranking tools built into online music stores or external sites with links to stores."
About MOG
Employing state-of-the-art Web 2.0 technology, MOG is an online destination where music lovers can quickly and easily show the world what they're listening to, express their musical tastes, and discover people through music and music through people. Completely free, MOG was started by David Hyman, former CEO of Gracenote, former SVP-Marketing at MTV Interactive, co-founder of Addicted to Noise, and self-proclaimed music freak. MOG, which has raised $1.4 million dollars in Angel funding to date, was founded in June 2005 and is headquartered in Berkeley, CA.
For more information go to www.mog.com.
I'm not going to comment, you all know where my head's at, i'm sure you can work it out for yourself...
Sentence!
(the competely unexpected resumption of an irregular series applauding well executed sentences)
Opening sentence of Tim Finney's Pitchfork review of Burial:
"The past 12 months have witnessed a flurry of reminders that dubstep can be more than just an intricately sculpted deathmask for UK garage's sarcophagus"
Ouch!
Especially as "the flurry" boils down to Skream's "Request Line" and something by Pitch and... the Burial album basically!
But he gives the latter a qualified thumbs-up. Oddlly underwhelmed by "Southern Comfort" which I think is Burial's idiomorphic classic, his "Born To Be Wild". And says there's an immaculate EP struggling to get out of a patchy album, which has a grain of truth--that perfect EP could almost be the EP that came out at the end of last year, "South London Boroughs", two of whose four tracks are also on the album, right? And are two of the best things on the album, one of them being the aforementioned "Southern Comfort". When I first heard it--that track, and the EP as a whole--I distinctly remember being agreeably reminded of gloomcore at its most morosely majestic, things like Reign's "Hall" and "Skeleton's March". Going back to it after getting the advance CD-r, though, I couldn't quite recover that sensation, couldn't quite work out what made think of the gloomcore squad, except for a certain woozy mournfulness--those sensuous canopies of sorrow-sound--a sensation of resolutely marching through an endless mental fog of despondency. What that classic Burial sound reminds me more of now is Konigsforest and Zauberberg by Gas--Mike Ink sampling refrains from German classical music and looping them over a muffled, changeless 4-to-the-floor beat, the shimmery, shivery reverberance of the original recordings adding an airy vastness and feeling of altitude.
One of the tracks from the EP --"Night Train"--that didn't make the album has a Michael Jackson sample on it, if i remember right. "Let the rhythm get into you", I think. Nice.
The other thought I had about Burial in particular, and dubstep in general, is that it's basically
Macro Dub Infection meets Isolationism, if you think about it. Actually one of the best tracks on Isolationism is David Toop & Max Eastley's "Burial Rites (Phosporescent)" and the duo did a whole album called Buried Dreams, right?.And the big isolationist dude in those days (93-94) was Thomas Koner who via Porter Ricks and the whole Chain Reaction/Basic Channel/Rhythm & Sound nexus connects up quite nicely with dubstep. And fuck me but don't the Berlin contingent actually have a sub-label called Burial Mix. (And how come no reviewer i've seen has yet mentioned Nuum-ancestral tune "The Burial" by Leviticus, or indeed the whole burial tune ,sound-system-finishing-off-its-rival killertrack connotation?).
I wrote a piece about Isolationism back in '94 and said it was very interesting but (more to have an angle than as a real critique really) had a bit at the end saying "but it's a bit white, though", pointing to similar doomy and chiliastic vibes in trip hop (tricky with "aftermath" and "ponderosa", DJ Shadow's elegaics, the darkside of jungle, etc). Dubstep, fusing the abstract atmospherics and emptiness of isolationism with the foreboding bass-pressure of the reggaematic UK sound system-influenced Bristol-London 'Nuum , could almost be an answer to that last paragraph.
The key difference between Isolationism and dubstep isn't just a matter of the first having no rhythm or groove, though, it's a subtle shift of emphasis. Isolationism had this monastic/hermetic impulse to seek out empty space, depopulated vistas (sort of ECM album cover but without the Bachelard-esque "intimate immensity", more like an aloof inclemency, an utter indifference verging on hostility to the human).... Koner with his series of albums inspired by Antarctica, or the way the other artists on Isolationism induced mind's eye reveries of deserts, tundra, subterranean grottoes, virgin planets; extremes of climate or temperature, like the polar twilight in Siberia, or the interior of the Sun. Whereas dubstep (and again Burial specifially) is very much about built-up areas, urban space, places that should be bustling with life.... but are now uncannily, eerily empty. Either that, or just lonely-making. Dubstep is desolationist.
(the competely unexpected resumption of an irregular series applauding well executed sentences)
Opening sentence of Tim Finney's Pitchfork review of Burial:
"The past 12 months have witnessed a flurry of reminders that dubstep can be more than just an intricately sculpted deathmask for UK garage's sarcophagus"
Ouch!
Especially as "the flurry" boils down to Skream's "Request Line" and something by Pitch and... the Burial album basically!
But he gives the latter a qualified thumbs-up. Oddlly underwhelmed by "Southern Comfort" which I think is Burial's idiomorphic classic, his "Born To Be Wild". And says there's an immaculate EP struggling to get out of a patchy album, which has a grain of truth--that perfect EP could almost be the EP that came out at the end of last year, "South London Boroughs", two of whose four tracks are also on the album, right? And are two of the best things on the album, one of them being the aforementioned "Southern Comfort". When I first heard it--that track, and the EP as a whole--I distinctly remember being agreeably reminded of gloomcore at its most morosely majestic, things like Reign's "Hall" and "Skeleton's March". Going back to it after getting the advance CD-r, though, I couldn't quite recover that sensation, couldn't quite work out what made think of the gloomcore squad, except for a certain woozy mournfulness--those sensuous canopies of sorrow-sound--a sensation of resolutely marching through an endless mental fog of despondency. What that classic Burial sound reminds me more of now is Konigsforest and Zauberberg by Gas--Mike Ink sampling refrains from German classical music and looping them over a muffled, changeless 4-to-the-floor beat, the shimmery, shivery reverberance of the original recordings adding an airy vastness and feeling of altitude.
One of the tracks from the EP --"Night Train"--that didn't make the album has a Michael Jackson sample on it, if i remember right. "Let the rhythm get into you", I think. Nice.
The other thought I had about Burial in particular, and dubstep in general, is that it's basically
Macro Dub Infection meets Isolationism, if you think about it. Actually one of the best tracks on Isolationism is David Toop & Max Eastley's "Burial Rites (Phosporescent)" and the duo did a whole album called Buried Dreams, right?.And the big isolationist dude in those days (93-94) was Thomas Koner who via Porter Ricks and the whole Chain Reaction/Basic Channel/Rhythm & Sound nexus connects up quite nicely with dubstep. And fuck me but don't the Berlin contingent actually have a sub-label called Burial Mix. (And how come no reviewer i've seen has yet mentioned Nuum-ancestral tune "The Burial" by Leviticus, or indeed the whole burial tune ,sound-system-finishing-off-its-rival killertrack connotation?).
I wrote a piece about Isolationism back in '94 and said it was very interesting but (more to have an angle than as a real critique really) had a bit at the end saying "but it's a bit white, though", pointing to similar doomy and chiliastic vibes in trip hop (tricky with "aftermath" and "ponderosa", DJ Shadow's elegaics, the darkside of jungle, etc). Dubstep, fusing the abstract atmospherics and emptiness of isolationism with the foreboding bass-pressure of the reggaematic UK sound system-influenced Bristol-London 'Nuum , could almost be an answer to that last paragraph.
The key difference between Isolationism and dubstep isn't just a matter of the first having no rhythm or groove, though, it's a subtle shift of emphasis. Isolationism had this monastic/hermetic impulse to seek out empty space, depopulated vistas (sort of ECM album cover but without the Bachelard-esque "intimate immensity", more like an aloof inclemency, an utter indifference verging on hostility to the human).... Koner with his series of albums inspired by Antarctica, or the way the other artists on Isolationism induced mind's eye reveries of deserts, tundra, subterranean grottoes, virgin planets; extremes of climate or temperature, like the polar twilight in Siberia, or the interior of the Sun. Whereas dubstep (and again Burial specifially) is very much about built-up areas, urban space, places that should be bustling with life.... but are now uncannily, eerily empty. Either that, or just lonely-making. Dubstep is desolationist.
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