How's it feel to be The Man?
 

UPDATE: Sorry if I'm a bit scarce of late - it's been a real crazy couple of months.

No music this time - just old man fuddy duddy news.

At the start of the summer all was as usual. I was my typical anarcho-syndicalist collectivist Creative Commons techno-utopian self without little activity on the Federal radar.

And then I proposed. Suddenly, I was becoming an institution of sorts.

And yesterday, I signed 144 pages of a mortgage agreement with over 100 data points pulled by various credit bureaus and Federal agencies to make sure I was really me and not some bearded yahoo who escaped from El Salvador and was hiding out until the coup is complete.

So in a few months' time I've gone from anarchism to a tax-payin' home-ownin' man of the town. Never in a million years would I have called this one.

My converted 1920s hotel post-collegiate apartment was affectionately known as "The Lair." I soon upgraded to my current residence - a 2nd story flat in an old house which we call "The Manor." Clawfoot velvet furniture, Victorian antiques and vintage sound equipment in every nook and cranny... we'd really done everything we could to make our first apartment together like a home.

Our new house is much in the spirit of our shared tastes - a bungalow built in 1926 with gorgeous hardwood floors throughout, great mantle and bookcases and an updated gas-lit marble-framed fireplace (above which I'll hang my favorite H.G. Wells painting).

It has all the charm of a '20s bungalow plus all the modern amenities to make it comfortable - new windows, new tear-off roof, new high-efficiency gas furnace, new hot water tank, new electrical, new copper piping, a shaded porch and garden, and all that.

We'll need a proper name for the joint, but I'll have the next 60 days to work that out while the bank does it's thing.

Man, it's been a busy three months.

I have no idea how appropriate this is for your home, but how about "Inner Space"? It'd make a nice plaque on the doorway.

An excellent suggestion. Thank you! Regarding its origin, the phrase "innerspace boy" was uttered in a stream of consciousness spoken word lyric by Karl Hyde of Underworld in their best-known anthem, "Born Slippy.NUXX."


Inner Space was the name of krautrock legend Can's recording studio as well as the title of one of their LPs.


I also recently discovered that the term was used in the title of Stephen Hill's book about his Hearts of Space radio program - The Hearts of Space Guide to Cosmic, Transcendent and Innerspace Music.


Thanks again, Frown! Any other ideas?

I'm rather fond of the sign "We shoot every third [insert annoying caller -- salesman, Jehovah's witness, pre-pay power agent ---]: the second just left!" :laughing:

I'm fond of this novelty tee as more of a passive-aggressive approach -

http://i.imgur.com/dXRBXQc.jpg

Electronic Meditation
 

Settling in for tonight's marathon - Tangerine Dream. (There'll be another night solely for Klaus Schulze.)

Pictured are my TD LPs as well as the magnificent 178-disc FLAC+LOG HQ Dream Pack.

If you're looking for a lossless archive of their work, The Dream Pack is unparalleled. It includes all soundtracks, solo works, albums, remasters, live albums, Bootmoon sets, and singles released between 1970 and 2009, plus an Accuraterip log verifying the integrity of each rip. The discs are organized first by category and then by date of release. This is archival audio done right.

I'll likely showcase other large libraries in the days ahead. Each are the finest digital archives available to the public for their respective composers. Stay tuned!

The Psybient DVD Pack
 

Project of the Day: Constructed a Visual Map of the contents of the Psybient DVD Pack - 8 audio DVDs compiling every major recording of the psytrance genre.

While the uptempo psychedelic album, Twisted by Hallucinogen is perhaps the most popular of these 372 albums, I personally prefer the more ethno-ambient stylings of Shpongle or the intelligent d'n'b sounds of Big Bud.

Regardless, this archive expertly encapsulates the psytrance genre into a well-organized portable 35GB archive.

Journey Inward into Jazz
 

Tonight's audio excursions - The Intelligent D'n'B sounds of producer LTJ Bukem. This library comprises the 94 LPs released by Good Looking Records including the Earth series, Ingredient Steps, Logical Progression, Looking Back, Points in Time, and an array of jazzy, downtempo artists working under the GLR label.

Now listening to the double disc that started me off down this path in 2000 - the intimate and jazzy solo session, Journey Inwards.



The album isn't on Youtube but there is a copy on Soundclound. Enjoy.

A bit of rope for the web
 

Today's listening library - The first 150 releases on the epic Ninja Tune records label. I've several of their stand-out classics on vinyl - like Skalpel's self-titled record of Polish jazz unknowns, and Cinematic Orchestra's film-score-styled Motion LP.


Also enjoying the 2014 official release of Fripp & Eno ‎– Live In Paris 28.05.1975 (Opal Records ‎– DGM3101)



and DJ Food - Raiding the 20th Century ~ Words & Music Expansion (Ninja Tune Internet-only release from 2005).

Tonight's Nugget of Joy -

This weekend my fiance introduced me to the swingin' sounds of Man or Astro-Man?, who I'd previously only known as the-band-who-wrote-"Satellite of Love" (cheers to the MSTies out there!)

I dug their instrumental surf sound and their use of obscure sci-fi samples, but I was totally sold on them once I heard their more experimental LP, A Spectrum of Infinite Scale.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...nite_Scale.jpg

While fans might favor the album's absurdly long titles such as "Many Pieces of Large Fuzzy Mammals Gathered Together at a Rave and Schmoozing with a Brick" and the album closer, "Multi-Variational Stimuli of Sub-Turgid Foci Covering Cross Evaluative Techniques for Cognitive Analysis of Hypersignificant Graph Peaks Following Those Intersubjective Modules Having Biodegradable Seepage," I instantly fell in love with "A Simple Text File."

"File" is a moment's pause from the surf guitar and sci-fi sampledelica, instead giving an Apple ImageWriter II printer center stage. We are treated to the sound of the printer printing a text file and it is wonderfully entrancing stuff! Anyone who has ever operated a dot matrix printer will have their mind racing back to those bygone days of screeching printer heads and their curiously rhythmic tonalities. And just what does the text file say? The listener is left to ponder that question as "Text File" plays out.

Here it is for all to enjoy.

The Superman Drive: Escaping Windows and Embracing Linux
 

Today's entry is a break from the usual music news. As you're undoubtedly aware, media servers occasionally require a bit of maintenance and today was that day.

For days the Windows 10 free upgrade offer had been calling to me from the bottom of my screen. After nearly a week's hesitation I gave in and accepted the offer. Of course, this was a Microsoft upgrade, so it wasn't going to be a smooth ride. Three failed attempts and a non-responsive Windows Update later I found myself once again growing tired of Windows issues.

Curiously, my fiance was experiencing similar difficulties with her own machine - her latest Windows Update had run for an eternity with no response. Manual installation attempts were fruitless so we gave up and ran the full version installer.


The full version offered an opt-out for updates, but problems persisted when the installer failed to complete due to my multi-boot configuration.

Worse still an attempted removal of the secondary partition resulted in a corrupted MBR. I'd really had enough. Now the system was locked in an infinite booting loop with a dodgy partition. This called for drastic measures.

I raced to the nearest office supply store and snatched up a $9 novelty 8GB flash drive shaped like Superman. At the checkout, I asked if the store had a resident Linux guru and was directed to a scruffy fellow with a yeard (clearly qualifying him for the task). I asked if he knew whether a bootable USB Linux distro would be robust enough to repair a damaged MBR. He wisely responded, "well... it IS shaped like Superman."

And so I went to work. A quick bit of research produced a boot-repair-disk 64bit Linux distro and pendrivelinux.com's UUI software. I had previously left Linux behind in favor of a few Windows-based music management applications a few years ago, but this incident was a wake-up call that I needed to get back to Ubuntu.


After a successful system repair and a bit of research I successfully identified Linux alternatives for two dozen of my most-used applications and worked out the necessary Terminal commands for each of their respective installations.


And with that harrowing experience behind our intrepid hero, Innerspace Labs and our media server are now operating 100% in a Linux environment. It was long overdue, but it feels great to have made it to the other side.

Nice Weather for Ducks
 

It's a fantastic weekend so what better to spin than my Lemon Jelly favorites!

Pictured:

- their EP collection - Lemonjelly.ky

- their first LP, Lost Horizons

- the unofficial gold disc in a hessian "burlap sack" single - Rolled Oats (which does not bear their name due to uncleared samples)

- the '64-'95 DVD

- post-LJ bootleg "The One You Call On" by Fred Deakin performing as "Frank Eddie" due to further sample robbery

- a similar boot, "Stay Another Day" which served as the farewell from their graphic design team, Airside

Also pictured are limited ed. singles by Jelly-buddy Hamstall Ridware's band, Sundae Club:

- One of the 50 copies of the autographed charity single for Haiti earthquake relief - a wonderful remix of "Angels in the Sky" from 2005

- Copy 6/250 of the "Everything is Fine" single feat. Matt Berry, along with the center labels designed for the limited 78RPM version of the single

Happy weekend everyone!

I've found paradise.
 

UPDATE: The final task in my transition to a Linux environment was to customize a powerful music library manager and player to work for my needs.

The most intriguing contender was gmusicbrowser - a robust utility with impressive handling for libraries in excess of 100,000 tracks, and best of all - a fully-customizable interface.

This evening I came upon a magnificent library of gmusicbrowser interface layouts from vsido.org with an accompanying step-by-step installation guide. After about 30 minutes of perusing the 40-odd layouts bundled in the collection I came upon one which wowed me. A few minor tweaks later and I found myself with a large library manager and player with an incredibly powerful interface which permits me to fully-indulge my metadata fetishism.

Have a look - this is better than anything I had Windows-side! Highly recommended for Linux users with archival collections!

The Sound of Noise
 

Last night's music-related film: The Sound of Noise. (2010)


It's a French film by writer/director Ola Simonsson who you likely know from the film short Music for One Apartment and Six Drummers (2001)

Here's the original short:


(Frownland is likely familiar with this one.)

The feature-length film unites the concepts of anarchism, Luigi Russolo's classic manifesto, and the spontaneous performance art of Cage's Theater Piece No. 1 from 1952 and the Happenings which followed throughout the 1960s. The result is an engaging and enjoyable film.

Here is the film's trailer. Enjoy!

The Challenge: Best Strategies for Navigating the Waters of a Large Media Library
 

In recent weeks I've found my listening habits growing stagnant as my artist and label discographies are slowly exhausted. The challenge for users with large media libraries is the task of finding yet-unexplored territories and developing strategies to facilitate the charting of those new waters.

One of the caveats of my otherwise-stellar media server software is that there is no way to browse by genre. I realized this evening that queuing a chronology of albums from a given genre would be a wonderful way to explore new sounds within my library so I went to work straight away and by nightfall the project was a success.


Using the genre text cloud feature in gmusicbrowser I constructed .m3u playlists of several intriguing but unfamiliar genres within my collection. Each list contained 10,000 to 17,000 of the tracks best-representative of the genre based upon RYM data and discographic libraries from the genre's most prominent artists and composers.

I ended up splitting the Jazz list into two subsets - early jazz recordings from 1924-1958 and modern jazz recordings from 1959-1979. This will help make the listening experience more uniform and will be an easier load on my mobile devices when spooling the lists.

With the task completed, I'm now ready to queue up thousands of hours of quality content from an array of genres I'd only explored superficially when I first acquired the recordings. I'm looking forward to new discoveries and to the wonderful soundtrack it will provide for my days at the office!

The first batch of playlists are as follows:

• Hot on the One - A Funk Odyssey
• Ambient Worlds
• Anatomy of a Murder: Film Noir Soundtracks
• Beatless Space - Pure Drone
• Beautiful Noise - 90s Dream Pop
• Friday Nights - Intelligent Drum & Bass
• 30 Years of Music from the Hearts of Space
• Ninja Tune - The First 150 Albums
• Psybient Dreams
• Cinematic Soundscapes - Music for Films
• The Chill Out Room - Downtempo Classics
• The Imaginarium - Early Gypsy Jazz
• The World of Jazz (1924-1958)
• The World of Jazz (1959-1979)

Time to start listening!

Moving Day Playlist Countdown
 

I've completed the final phase of my playlist project with 27 in all and commenced the listening process.

Now that all my LPs are boxed up for the big move I'll be fully-indulging my digital playlists for the duration of the transition.

So here goes...

Day 1: ANATOMY OF A MURDER: Film Noir Jazz.

Quincy Jones' "Shoot to Kill" from the 1965 film, Mirage is a classic example from this list.

The list also features the Crime Jazz and Crime Scene USA collections. Great stuff.

http://i.imgur.com/cDhNHfE.png

(Supplemental) This was followed today by Cinematic Soundscapes: Music for Films.

This list features some of my favorite album selections from my vinyl catalog with all the convenience and portability of my music server.

Now playing: Philip Glass' scores to Koyaanisqatsi, Powaqqatsi and Naqoyqatsi as well as the follow up trilogy of Chronos/Baraka/Samsara each scored by composer, Michael Stearns.

Also included are other vinyl favorites like Louis and Bebe Barron's groundbreaking score to Forbidden Planet, various scores by Ryuichi Sakamoto, Clint Mansell, and of course the many incarnations of Vangelis' music for Blade Runner.

http://i.imgur.com/WAZjbw0.png

The Long-Awaited Soul Coughing 180g double-LPs have arrived!
 

The latest news from the 5 Percent Nation of Chocolaty Delicious: It comes down to THIS!

The long-awaited and much-anticipated Soul Coughing 180g vinyl issues have arrived!

MusicDirect lists the official ship date as 08-31-15 for the Sept street date but pre-orders shipped in advance from their Chicago distribution center and arrived in NY this morning.

If you missed the pre-order and still want to grab these for your collection, each of their albums are still available at the regular price from MusicDirect here.

This is the very first time Ruby Vroom has ever been made available in a vinyl format. If you're a fan (or if you had a pulse in the 90s) this is the time to claim some SC love for your own.

"And it booms as cool as sugar free jazz"

http://i.imgur.com/iSe0Hk0.jpg

Days of the Lords: 1976-1997
 

Weekend Update: Saturday Afternoon Project

Born in '81, I was just a few years too young for some of the best music of the 80s. This afternoon I dedicated some time to rectifying that issue.

I collected all of the genre-defining albums of the era from RateYourMusic.com and assembled a 175-hour playlist titled Days of the Lords: 1976-1997 comprising 55 artists from the period's most prominent genres:

• Ethereal Wave
• New Wave
• Dream Pop
• Gothic Rock
• Shoegaze
• Post-Punk
• Jangle Pop
• & Noise Pop

All the major players are here. Neoclassical darkwave and goth rock mainstays like The Cure, The Church, The Cult, Joy Division, The Smiths, Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins. Plus post-punk artists like The Chameleons, Cabaret Voltaire, Chrome, Einstürzende Neubauten, Jesus & Mary Chain, Swervedriver, and Fad Gadget.

All the shoegaze giants made the list, from My Bloody Valentine to Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized, Soda Stereo, The Boo Radleys, Brian Jonestown Massacre, Slowdive, Chapterhouse, Belly, and The Catherine Wheel. I've really done my best to assemble all of the artistst discographies that defined their generation's sound from 1976-1997.

Here's a preview of the completed list in action. I've got a lot of listening to do!

http://i.imgur.com/OmVedfZ.png

Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio – Legends of Krautrock
 

Sunday Playlist of the day - Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio - Legends of Krautrock.

450 of the greatest kosmische musik albums from 77 German artists.

Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio

Spanning 1969 to the present, personal favorites among the list include discographies from:

• Can
• Faust
• Kraftwerk (particularly the pre-Ralf und Florian LPs)
• Amon Duul I&II
• Neu!
• Popol Vuh
• Harmonia
• Tangerine Dream
• Klaus Schulze
• Manuel Gottsching
• Cluster
• Ash Ra Tempel
• Embryo
• La Dusseldorf
• The Cosmic Jokers
• and A.R. & Machines

The list also includes modern artists who celebrate and revive the genre, like London's Public Service Broadcasting.

Album now-playing: Cosmic Jokers' s/t - the band that never was.


Their albums were acid party jam sessions recorded and released without the supergroup's knowledge. Participants included Manuel Göttsching and Klaus Schulze of Ash Ra Tempel, Jurgen Dollase and Harald Grosskopf of Wallenstein, and Dierks. Regardless, it's wonderful stuff!

http://i.imgur.com/d7kYGyA.png

Bilateral Motion: Abstract Minimal Ambient Dub Techno
 

Last night around 9pm I saw a post from a fellow member of a music community I follow. It was a curious photo of an LP he was spinning at the moment with a minimal, text-only label which read, "Fluxion - Vibrant Forms. A."

http://i.imgur.com/FGgy3SC.jpg


From the color of the label and the sans serif typeface I hypothesized that it was likely some sort of minimal electronic music, so I hopped over to Youtube and keyed it in.

I was delighted to find it was reminiscent of Wolfgang Voigt's ambient, minimal techno under his legendary Gas moniker. Whatever this was, I wanted to hear more!




A quick survey of the artist page on RYM revealed that it was filed under Dub Techno. Where I'd previously exhausted all artists under the Ambient Dub heading (dominated primarily by The Orb), the highest-charting Dub Techno LPs were almost entirely new to me. A few names were familiar, namely Woob and Yagya, but the rest were off my radar. Jotting down the artists from the RYM top 10 LPs I went to work straight away.

The list included:

• Andy Stott
• Deadbeat
• Paul St. Hilaire
• Deepchord Presents Echospace
• Fluxion
• Monolake
• Porter Ricks
• Purl
• Woob
• and Yagya

I spent the remaining few hours of the evening compiling 45 albums from these artists - a solid introductory set to familiarize myself with the genre.

Today was spent taking it in - a playlist I've dubbed,

Bilateral Motion: Abstract Minimal Ambient Dub Techno.

Fluxion's Vibrant Forms I and II are excellent highlights from the set. Big thanks to VMD for the inspiration!

[UPDATE] I've been commanded to add Pole, Vladislav Delay and Rhythm & Sound to the list, which I'll work on this evening. Other recommendations are welcome!

http://i.imgur.com/m8KMoJm.png

Playlist of the Day - Flea Market Funk: Funky Soul & Rare Grooves
 

All the expected discographies are here - catalogs from James Brown, PFunk, the Meters, the JBs, Skull Snaps, etc.

But the deeper cuts are the best - DJ Prestige's killer Flea Market Funk mixes, the Saturday Night Fish Fry New Orleans Soul compilation, the Stone Cold Funk collection, a comp called Voodoo Soul: Deep & Dirty New Orleans Funk, and an awesome 25x7" singles box set called WHAT IT IS!

NP: Episode 1 of FMF - the set that got me into the groove. The attached DJ pic is Prestige diggin' through his personal collection for funky sounds to share.

http://i.imgur.com/3SjubWj.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/dSAme1O.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/u6EondH.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/b2TUVvI.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/wrY5bq1.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/FJgZqoj.png

Playlist of the day - Kelly Watch the Stars: Downtempo Classics
 

Playlist of the day - Kelly Watch the Stars: Downtempo Classics.

Over 700 of the best downtempo albums ever recorded. The list includes several large discographies like the 108 albums and EPs by Lemon Jelly and 56 funky jazz break LPs and mixes by DJ Food. Several NinjaTune artists are featured, as well as a number of downtempo compilations like Hi-Fidelity Lounge, Cafe Del Mar, and an archive of WRUR Rochester's Plasmonic Lounge broadcasts.

Music to beat the heat.

NP album: Public Service Broadcasting's The War Room EP.

http://i.imgur.com/meLseze.png

Mentalism - Psybient Dreams
 

Today's playlist is Mentalism: Psybient Dreams, a 400-hour archive of psybient space music.

The list features ~450 psychedelic ambient / psychill artists including Spacemind's monumental mixes and veteran artists like Carbon Based Lifeforms, Shpongle, Hallucinogen, and Solar Fields.

NP the track that initiated me into the genre: Cell's "Audio Deepest Night."

http://i.imgur.com/EIUK6M2.png

Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds
 

Checking in for the Playlist of the Day!

Tonight - Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds.

The list comprises the work of 1300 artists and clocks in at 2,794 hrs 29 mins. It's a collection of the finest LPs from nearly a century of ambient music.

NP: Fripp & Eno's "The Heavenly Music Corporation (Reversed) Pt 1"

http://i.imgur.com/eST27NA.png

Do you listen to any Emeralds, or Mark McGuire's solo stuff? They seem up your alley.

Emeralds is a bit too heavily compressed for my tastes. I know that's specifically what they're going for, but I love dynamic range and if I do listen to lo-fi music, it's usually field holler or similarly acoustic works.

But I'm digging Mark's stuff and will definitely look into it further. The guitar loop work from "Let Us Be The Way We Were" instantly brings back a memory of a major ambient techno club track from the 90s... it had a pitch shifted throat singer (but not the sample from Chill Out) and an islander melody quite similar to what Mark is doing in this track. Could have been a major artist like the Chemicals, Moby, The Orb or Orbital, but I can't put my finger on it.

Thanks for the suggestion!

The Last.fm Project
 

My server is down for maintenance for the next 16 hours. It was a perfect opportunity to begin my next long term music project.

When Innerspace Labs first switched to the cloud, I used the web-based RacksandTags service through my OrangeCD DB to create an index of all track information from my library. Collections on the service can be searched by artist, album, or track, but lacks support for 2nd level organization like genre clustering, playlists, and other more valuable data points.

http://i.imgur.com/nGv0qhy.png

I later switched to Discogs.com. Discogs offers real time market value assessment of your collection, but only supports physical media. I was also disappointed to find that user-generated category folders are not presently shareable with other users.

http://i.imgur.com/Cybv2Ea.png

As I prepared for the downtime last night, I realized that I hadn't given Last.fm a shot since I wiped my account clean in 2014. That year I scrobbled 30,000 tracks, but was frustrated that there was no way to submit all my library's data without playing every track in real time.

My goal was to explore the service's recommendation engine, and my library data would likely produce some valuable results.

So last night, I went to work. I quickly realized that the best approach would be to queue all 100,000+ tracks and to scrobble them in order of ascending track duration. I organized the songs into four pools of nearly equal size. Below is a map of my library based upon these four classes - less than five minutes, less than ten minutes, less than thirty minutes, and up to 24 hours.

http://i.imgur.com/UPUVvvF.jpg

As the largest batch was that of the shortest tracks, there would be the greatest (and fastest) return from scrobbling these first.

I charted the play duration of each of these groupings to see what sort of timetable I'd be looking at for project completion.

http://i.imgur.com/sS6Dv3d.png

Graphing the duration of each grouping clearly demonstrates that this was in fact the best course of action.

http://i.imgur.com/yBMluVX.jpg

I began scrobbling immediately for the first time in a year. Once the project is complete I'll share some of the resulting recommendation data Last.fm provides. I'm looking forward to it!

Happy Labor Day weekend everyone!

At what point does music stop being fun and turn into work? Jesus.

I'm an odd duck. Data management and analysis are among my favorite pastimes. Remember: I study analytical texts of Finnengans Wake for pleasure. The act requires a certain degree of insanity.

Thanks for reading the entry!

The End of Scrobbling - A Farewell to Last.fm
 

Digital music has been a fascination of mine since the turn of the millennium. Audioscrobbler came into being in 2002 while I was in college, and the thought of sharing my listening with a global network of musical peers was exhilarating.

Audioscrobbler merged with Last.fm in 2005, taking the social element of music to a whole new level. There were forums to discuss listening trends, metadata analysis and recommendation engines... all while independent blogging exploded onto the scene in a flood of obscure music fetishism.


In the years since I admittedly lost touch with the service and dropped off the scrobbling radar to focus on personal relationships, collecting unscrobbleable LPs, and developing my career. As the summer of 2015 came to a close my life was settling up nicely - I left Windows for Linux, I have a fiance, a fantastic career, and I've just purchased my first home.

With these stations of life secure, my mind returned to the world of scrobbling and the possibilities of merging big data and my own hyper-specific musical tastes. I developed a ~500 day plan to scrobble every track from my library 24 hours a day for over a year to submit every title toward Last.fm's recommendation engine. Surely a library of over 110,000 tracks would produce some intriguing results!

But this evening, I logged into Last.fm and looked around to find that the site has retired all of its original functions. The social forums are closed. The "neighborhood" of your peers is now inaccessible. The homepage offers only a most-popular-globally-this-week roster plastered with "Uptown Funk" and other predictable tracks.


The Wikipedia spelled out what I'd missed - CBS had acquired Last.fm for £140 million in 2009. Wasting no time, in February of that year the service handed listener data over to the RIAA over concerns about a then-unreleased U2 album. By 2010 the service closed the custom radio feature, (again over licensing issues) and in early 2015 they partnered with Spotify, further crippling the usability of the site.

But the nail in the coffin came in August of this year with their fully-overhauled website. It received almost universally negative criticism from its users, who cited broken and missing features.

Given the new light of this information, I'm terminating the full-library scrobble project and saying farewell to Last.fm. Still, I shall not mourn the loss for long. The social function of digital music has experienced a parallel evolution in the world of private forums and closed groups on social media sites like Facebook.


Every morning I'm greeted with "now-spinning" rare vinyl treasures and independent music reviews which top anything you'd find from a recommendation engine. One user from South Korea offered nearly 40 daily installments of records from his Tangerine Dream collection, each accompanied by a custom write-up on the featured release.

Private tracker communities, classic bulletin board systems, and other social structures of the web continue to serve as a brilliant resource for musical discovery. Last.fm served us well during a pivotal time in the age of digital media, and it will be missed, but we'll carry on.

Ambient Sound for Study or Sleep
 

As I entered the final days before I move into my first home, I began to contemplate the changes to the sonic space of my studio. I anticipated that the new space would likely be devoid of external noises and the familiar nuanced sounds of other persons moving about in the residence. I also considered the longing I'd felt for the bustle of a metro village cafe - something I've yet to find locally befitting of an eccentric like myself.

So it appeared I'd a new project on my hands - to archive a bank of ambient noise to calm me and to promote productivity in my new home. Astonishingly, (as I'd never searched YouTube for ambient field recordings before), there was an incredible bank of 6-10 hour environmental recordings available, and all of it for free. I extracted the audio from each, archived my favorite selections, and put together a playlist for my readers to sample for themselves.

The playlist includes:

• the sounds of drafting a dissertation in a university library
  
  
• various intensities of rain in a variety of environments, from city streets to the inside of a vehicle in evening traffic, and from a tin roof to the inside of a camper's tent
  
  
• room-expanding noises from several coffeehouses
  
  
• and it ends with a soothing, 8-hour train ride

Explore my playlist below. I'd welcome further recommended environments if you have any to share!

And as the [ytp] and [ytplaylist] codes don't appear to work, here is a good old-fashioned hyperlink.

88 hours of ambient soundscapes

Fall 2015 Megapost: The Playlist Project
 

This summer brought many changes to The Innerspace Library. First we started fresh with a Linux OS and finally said "farewell" to Windows. There was a brief period of limbo as I tested various open source media management software to find the right fit for my collection. I finally settled down with gmusicbrowser which outperformed Clementine and other major players in its handling of large libraries and in the incredible versatility and customization of its GUI.

This was the very first time since the launch of Winamp 5 (the amusing successor to Winamp 3) that I'd explored the power of music metadata to organize my library dynamically across multiple data points. (I'd never really saw the need during my years with MediaMonkey Gold.)

But as the summer drew to a close, I was still irked that my Subsonic media server lacked the function of genre browsing. I'd previously sidestepped this issue by generating mammoth genre playlists to serve as my personally-themed radio stations, each with hundreds or even thousands of the finest albums of their respective genre.

But it was this fresh start in the last few weeks that inspired my refinement of those playlists into distinct album libraries which would zero in on a specific moment of music history. The aim was to bring a semblance of order to the hundred thousand plus tracks in my file library and to give me a set of starting points to really explore the neglected and unplayed folders of my drive.

I'm proud to declare that this evening, the project was a complete success. I've created 100 all-killer-no-filler libraries showcasing each of the largest collections in my catalog. I found that 68% (9,300 albums) of my music library fell neatly into one of these 100 categories.

The following is an index of these 100 playlists, sorted by number of albums. This roster effectively summarizes and gives order to what is otherwise an insurmountable archive. I'm going to enjoy exploring these playlists throughout the fall and into the winter months.

Playlists with 1000+ Albums

• Midnight on Mars: Ambient Worlds - 2,986 Ambient Albums
• Hearts of Space: Innerspace Journey - 30 Year Complete 1,069 Broadcast Archive

Playlists with 200-999 Albums

• Kelly Watch the Stars - 607 Classic Albums of the Downtempo Genre
• Mentalism: Psybient Dreams - 545-Disc Archive of Psybient Electronic Music
• Echowaves: Intergalactic Radio - 450 Legendary Krautrock Albums
• The Shape of Jazz to Come - 387 Modern Jazz LPs (1959-1979)
• Just Gimme Indie Rock!: 379 of the Greatest Indie Rock Albums (1988-2014)
• Underworld: Dark & Long - A 35 Year Chronology - 339 Albums from Screen Gemz to Eno & Hyde
• Old Time Radio: Dragnet (298 Broadcasts)
• Salute to Birdland - 259 Classic Jazz Records (1924-1958)
• FAX +49-69450464 Label Archive: The Legacy of Pete Namlook 254 Disc Catalog
• We Came to Funk Ya - A 227 Album Funk Odyssey
• Ninja Tune: Turn Me Loose - 204 LP Archive of Ninja Tune Records

Playlists with 100-199 Albums

• Days of the Lords: 195 Album Archive of Ethereal & New Wave, Gothic Rock, Minimal Wave, Post-Punk, Jangle & Noise Pop (1976-1997)
• The KLF: Abandon All Art Now - 189-disc Catalog of the Justified Ancients of MuMu
• Shirt Tail Stomp: Swing & The Big Bands - 181 LP and Broadcast Archive
• Tangerine Dream: Journey Through a Burning Brain - 178-Disc Chronology of TD & its Side Projects
• Old Time Radio: The Adventures of Superman (171 Broadcasts)
• Night Lines - 140 Album Archive of Deep House Sessions
• Light Patterns - Jazz of Tomorrow - 139 Future Jazz Albums
• Heaven or Las Vegas: 30 Years of Dream Pop & Ethereal Wave (134 Album Archive)
• Max & Dima: Sapovnela Studio Sessions - 131 Deep House DJ Sets
• Nurse with Wound: Walking Like Shadow - 127 Album Discography
• Old Time Radio: X Minus One - 122 Broadcasts (1955-1973)
• Deutsche Grammophon: 111 Years of DG (111-Disc Box Set)
• Lemon Jelly : Going Places - 110-Disc Catalog of All Things Jelly
• Miles Davis: The Complete Prestige & Columbia Recordings - 109 LPs released between 1955-2014
• Daft Punk: Daftendirekt - 104-LP Chronology
• Flea Market Funk - 100-Disc Archive of Funky Soul & Rare Groove
• Frank Zappa: Shut Up 'n Play Yer Guitar - 100-disc Catalog (1966-2006)
• RYM's Top 100 Downtempo & Trip Hop Albums

Playlists with 75-99 Albums

• Franz Liszt: Lisztomania! - 97 LP Archive
• Thelonious Monk: Straight No Chaser - 97 LP Discography
• Good Looking Records: 94-Disc Archive of LTJ Bukem's Intelligent D'n'B Label
• Franklin Mint: The 100 Greatest Classical Recordings - 88 LP Catalog
• Somnium - 87-Album Library of Pure Drone Music
• Aphex Twin: We are the Music Makers - 86 Album Chronology of Richard D James
• Mike Oldfield: Tricks of the Light - 86 LP Discography (1973-2010)
• Jimmy Smith: Jazz Scattin' - 85 LP Discography
• Cinematic Soundscapes - 83-Disc Library of Music for Films
• Old Time Radio: CBS Radio Mystery Theater - The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (83-Disc Box Set)
• Klaus Schulze: I Sing the Body Electric - 81 LP Discography
• Ludwig Van Beethoven: The Bicentennial Collection - 80 LP Complete Works
• Old Time Radio: BBC Radio - The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (79-Disc Set)
• Vangelis: Poem Symphonique - 77 Album Discographic Archive
• Old Time Radio: The Shadow - 75 Original Broadcasts (1937-1954)

Playlists with 50-74 Albums

• Sun Ra: Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy - 74-Disc Catalog (1957-1994)
• John Cage: A Chance Operation - 73 LP Discography
• 2manyDJS - This is Radio Soulwax: 72 Mashup Sessions
• Brian Eno: Strange Overtones - 70 LP Discography (1972-2015)
• Peter Gabriel: Here Comes the Flood - 68-Disc Catalog (1977-2010)
• Ornette Coleman: Change of the Century - 66 LP Discography
• Prayer for the Paranoid: 66 Albums from a Decade of Shoegaze (1993-2003)
• Muslimgauze: The Broken Radio of Istanbul Station - 63 Album Discography
• The Piano Has Been Drinking: The Complete Recordings of Tom Waits - 63 LPs (1973-2011)
• Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers: Just Coolin' - 62 Album Discography
• Karlheinz Stockhausen: Kontakte - 61 LP Archive
• Old Time Radio: The Complete Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks (Unabridged 60-Disc Set)
• Philip Glass: Glasspieces - 60 LP Discography of Operas, Symphonies, Sonatas and Scores
• Cornelius: Out of Phase - 60 Album Discography
• Spacemind: Wonderland Syndrome - 60 Psybient DJ sets
• Cafe del Mar: Step into the Sunshine - 59-Disc Archive of the Sounds of Ibiza
• Throbbing Gristle: 555 Jazz Funk Greats - 56 Album Discography
• DJ Food - Solid Steel - 55 LPs of Classic Jazz Breaks
• Herbie Hancock: One FInger Snap - 52 Album Discography
• Ash Ra Tempel & Manuel Gottsching: Deep Distance - A 40 Year, 50 LP Chronology
• Houdini's Musical Box: Early Experimental Electronic Music (1940-1976) - 50 LP Archive
• Porcupine Tree: Synesthesia - 50 Album Discography (1983-2013)

Playlists with 10-24 Albums

• From Murmur to Monster: 21 Key Albums of the Jangle Pop Era (1983-1994)
• Old Time Radio: Orson Welles Mercury Theater 1938 (20 Program Broadcasts)
• Philips Prospective 21e siecle Label 18-LP Archive (1956-1972)
• RYM: Round Midnight - 18 of the Highest-Rated Cool Jazz Records
• Deutsche Grammophon Avant Garde: 17-LP Complete Recordings (1967-1971)
• Braindance: A 15-LP IDM Chronology of Warp Records
• The Plastikman Arkives: 1993-2010 (14-Disc Box Set)
• Jellyroll Radio - Ragtime, Dixieland & Bluegrass Standards (13-Disc Catalog)
• Claude Debussy - 12-Disc Complete Piano and Orchestral Works
• Kompakt Records: Cirrus Minor - 12 Years of Ambient Music (2001-2013)

Evocation Poème Symphonique
 

Once in a blue moon, (or in this case a blood moon), I shed my polished sophisticate exterior and get a little creative. Tonight is that night, so light the incense, don your beret and check out what's cookin'.

I seldom get into poetry, doing my best to avoid anything with a rhyme scheme or regular meter. But I do fancy a particular strain of poem - nonsense verse and cut-up/plunderphonia.

John Lennon developed his own delightful style of jabberwock in his books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works which inspired my first exercises writing "Lennonish" in college.

And in more recent years I found a fascination with the history of plunderphonics, perhaps best-executed by James Joyce is his masterwork, Finnegans Wake. This evening I tried my own hand at the cut-up method, constructing something of a self-portrait from fragments of my music library. The library will be my legacy and I hope it will survive far beyond my years, so its content seemed well-suited for such a task.

Evocation Poème Symphonique

pulse steady
a chance operation
in and out of phase
from houdini's musical box
deep distance kontakt
and the kosmische braindance
i sing the body electric
strange overtones
intergalactic echowaves
funky breaks and solo flute
one finger snap and the jazz of tomorrow
tricks of the light
cirrus minor
the broken radio of Istanbul station
turn me loose
walking like a shadow
voodoo fusion or synesthesia
a prayer for the paranoid
an index of metals
walkin' the blues
it's wonderland syndrome
tones for mental therapy
justified
ancient
and bird's lament
straight no chaser
alone again with the dawn coming up
we are the music makers
fast 'n bulbous
and the curse of ka'zar
all this and more
tonight at innerspace


Regular readers will undoubtedly pick up on 20-30 references to favorites from my collection. But I think it functions just as well without the cliff notes
Thanks for indulging me. Back to our regularly-scheduled exercises in library management.

Lesson one: Basic hip.
 

https://i.imgur.com/WmuTvX2.jpg

Tonight's scene - Del Close & John Brent: How to Speak Hip. Fall out in your pad and dig this crazy thing. Get me?

Put your ear to it and check out the side.



https://i.imgur.com/jmGeHwh.jpg

DJ Food caught a few samples from this LP on his Kaleidoscope album. Check out "The Riff."



Kaleidoscope also featured Ken Nordine, legendary for his Word Jazz and Colors LPs from the same era.



https://i.imgur.com/rsortKb.jpg

Outta sight.

I know I'm responding to quite an older post of yours but I thought I would anyways. Speaking of Gen-Z inspiration, the only example I could think of is a surprising one. Contrary to her first hit "Whip My Hair", Willow Smith has been experimenting with some ambient Badu-esque sounds. I'm really quite impressed. This tune was freestyled and is a great example of what today's technology and emancipation from a record label can do for a young creative. Though I would not label myself as a fan of her's necessarily, I find myself drawn to this singular track. Let's hope there's more to come?

https://soundcloud.com/dhatu/female-...od-azzi-willow

P.S. "Summary Video of our Top 550 Artists of 2014"

DAMN do you ever put work in..Shit

Thanks, Closer! I enjoyed the Badu-esque track; thanks for sharing and for reading the journal!

Where've you been since 2013?

Oh no, I posted a link to the wrong song in my last message - so here is the real link.
https://soundcloud.com/dhatu/female-...od-azzi-willow


Yes I find your journal brilliant, haven't had the time to sift through it all the posts yet but I'm working through it. As for where I've been.. Sort of just disappeared from the forum for a good two years and just recently started posting again. For a while I actually forgot about this site, so now I'm giving it another go..

Yes I find your journal brilliant, haven't had the time to sift through it all the posts yet but I'm working through it. As for where I've been.. Sort of just disappeared from the forum for a good two years and just recently started posting again. For a while I actually forgot about this site, so now I'm giving it another go..[/QUOTE]

I did the same when I signed up. Glad to have you, and thanks again for perusing my journal!