Some time recently I reached the 50000 plays on Last.fm/Audioscrobbler. It might have been yesterday, but I'm not really sure with the way my track count is updating. If it was yesterday, my 50000th scrobbled track was
Paz Suite 4. I don't really think my 50000 playcount is honest as to what I've actually listened to though, since pretty much every night I make a playlist of music to listen to as I fall asleep. Is that cheating? I don't know.
But what I've decided to to in this journal entry is to go through all my weekly top artists since I first signed up and see if there is anything interesting to say about them. If there is something interesting to say I'll say it. If there isn't I'll say something uninteresting. So I guess I'll start now...
13 February 2005:
Autechre (34)
What is there to say about Autechre. They've been my #1 artist here since day one, and they probably will be forever. Maybe. In my early days here it seemed like Autechre was on the top of the weekly chart a lot more than they are now. I think it's because back then I played music on random mode a lot more (by loading every song on my computer into Winamp just listening to whatever came up), and Autechre probably has the most songs in my collection. Since then I listen to albums and smaller playlists a lot more than I used to, but Autechre's playcound has been increasing fairly consistently.
20 February 2005:
Autechre (31)
I first heard Autechre on their "Radio Mix", back when Warp had it streaming from their website. I think the first track was a remix Autechre did of
Gescom's "Mag". I think. I'm not sure. It's a super track, better than the original (although I've only heard the original once, but I remember thinking that the Autechre mix was better when I heard it). After I listened to the mix from Warp, I went out and bought
Confield at Best Buy. It must have just come out around then. One can imagine that it took me a while to get into it, right after hearing the much more accessible Radio Mix.
27 February 2005:
Tiki Obmar (58)
Tiki Obmar is (was?) a local band (although I've never been to any of their shows; I don't really ever go to any shows). They got to the top on this week because I purchased the CD
Seasons, which is mostly a remix album with a few new tracks thrown in as well.
6 March 2005:
Aphex Twin (25)
Aphex Twin is the artist that got me into IDM. Well, actually it might have been
Mouse on Mars, depending on where you draw the boundary of IDM. When I was first getting into electronic music (or music in general, for that matter), I decided to join the Columbia House Music Club and get some cheap CDs. I was looking for electronic music artists so I just decided to search for "electronic music" in the Yahoo directory (this was back when Yahoo still placed emphasis on the "directory" instead of Google-style searches; remember that?). Two artists that came up were Aphex Twin and
The Prodigy. I ordered Aphex's
Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II and the
Come to Daddy EP, as well as
Music for the Jilted Generation by The Prodigy. A while after that I was at Barnes & Noble with a gift certificate. They had both
Drukqs and The Prodigy's
Experience: Expanded, but I only had enough money to buy one of them, and I chose
Drukqs. I now think of that as sort of a "fork in the road" when I was forced to make a choice that could alter what music I would listen to later in life. Or something. (I did buy that Prodigy album later though. I like it.)
13 March 2005:
Autechre (46)
I've found that with Autechre, I seem to go through "phases" regarding which albums I like best. Recently I've been listening to
Amber a bit more than usual. Until now I haven't really appreciated it as much as I should have.
20 March 2005:
Autechre (141)
Wondering why the Autechre playcount is so high this week? For some reason Audioscrobbler decided to change my total plays for Autechre from about 100 to about -40. So for a day or two this week I just let Autechre play on my computer non-stop to make up for the lost statistics. To this date I have no idea why they just dropped down to a negative number, though.
27 March 2005:
Landau (50)
Landau is a Merck artist or band or something, and I got the album
Thepicompromise this week. It's got some very nice songs on it; I especially like "Independence".
3 April 2005:
Aphex Twin (62)
As time goes on I've found that I'm listening to less of Aphex's later material and more of the earlier stuff. Maybe listening to so much minimal techno lately has had an effect on me because I rarely want to listen to the
Richard D. James Album or
Drukqs, but I still regularly listen to both
Selected Ambient Works albums. I think I might be looking for a more consistent or "pure" sound. Or maybe I'm just boring. That's probably it.
10 April 2005:
Autechre (30)
I'm determined to continue writing something under every week, even if the artist has been repeated several times before. So I'll continute saying random things about Autechre. Last year I missed the opportunity to see Autechre and
SND live, because I'm too scared and shy to go to concerts. And also I don't think anyone I know likes Autechre. I did go to a large concert once... It was a "Weird Al" concert, when I was a younger. I went with my brother and my neighbor's family. It was loud.
17 April 2005:
Lusine (63)
This is the week I got Lusine's
Serial Hodgepodge. It seemed like at the time a lot of people were giving it a lot of praise. I don't really see anything special about it though; it's pretty generic I.D.M. to me.
24 April 2005:
While (121)
I got two CD's by the artist "While" in the mail this week:
Lock and
Even. It's sort of funny because I just complained about Lusine being generic IDM in the week above, but this is just as generic and I still like it a lot. It must be because While seems to be very influenced by something I like a lot (
Autechre's
Tri Repetae album, in particular), while Lusine's music reminds me a lot of
Prefuse 73, who I don't care for that much. I'm not really sure if the whole album sounds like that, but the first song definitely does. Actually that first song almost seems to be directly ripping off a technique used on the
Delarosa & Asora album (the track "Paz Suite 1"). But what am I talking about. It's certainly not While!
1 May 2005:
Autechre (29)
Several years ago I had an "Autechre Week", where all I listened to was Autechre. I must have been such an I.D.M. nerd.
8 May 2005:
Mouse on Mars (95)
Haha. Mouse on Mars is so high here because I accidentally left the track "Mine is in Yours" playing on repeat for quite a long time. I first heard Mouse on Mars when my uncle gave me a burned copy of "Iaora Tahiti", which might have been my first exposure to IDM. I still haven't bought an original copy yet. I probably should sometime.
15 May 2005:
Ilkae (40)
Is this when I got
Bovine Rearrangement? Honestly I didn't like that album much at all. A lot of the remixes just sounded like the original song with some other stuff on top, and longer.
Pistachio Island is much, much better.
22 May 2005:
Autechre (92)
This must be when I finally bought
Untilted. I
still haven't really gotten into that album.
29 May 2005:
Lali Puna (84)
From when I got
Faking the Books. It's a good album, but it gets old quick. I hardly ever want to listen to it now. That's the way it is with most popmusic, though.
5 June 2005:
Autechre (35)
It's getting hard thinking of stuff to write about Autechre. The second Autechre album I bought was
Chiastic Slide. I bought it at Sam Goody at the Mall of America. I used to think that was such an awesome store just because they had a "Techno" section. Eventually I realized they hardly had anything good at all, and it was mostly compilations put out by labels that need to put pictures of naked women on the covers in order to sell records. (Well, that hardly had anything to do with Autechre at all. I'm just tryin to use them as a starting point, then going into some stream of consciousness crap.)
12 June 2005:
Mark Fell (122)
This is the week I received Mark Fell's
Ten Types of Elsewhere from Forced Exposure. I read a lot of good things about this album made by half of
SND on various places on the Internet. I like it a lot, but it's much more experimental than SND's music and not something you listen to every day. I also got
Loop-Finding-Jazz-Records by
Jan Jelinek in the same shipment. Both albums are very good, but I like Jan Jelinek's more. The main reason Mark Fell got on top here is simply because his album has a lot more tracks.
19 June 2005:
Oval (58)
I think this is the week I got Oval's Wohnton. What a strange album. It's different from all of Oval's other stuff because it contains vocals. And the vocals are pretty bad. Still, I like this album. There are some really good tracks on it. It was made in 1993, but parts of it remind me of music indie kids would be obsessed with today.
26 June 2005:
Oval (53)
Oval is on my list of artists I need to eventually buy all the albums from, but I'm not really in a rush to do so because they've all been released on a fairly large label. The first Oval album I bought was
Dok, and to this day it's still my favorite (I only have three albums, though). It's a near-perfect ambient album to me, I'd give it at least a nine out of ten.
3 July 2005:
Them (85)
This week I got the album
Them by Them (from Anticon), who I have retagged as
Themselves now. It was the first time I heard
Dose One. I'm listening to "Directions to My Special Place" now, and it's really amazing. I actually like this stuff that is more closely related to hip-hop more than the more experimental stuff like
Subtle and the collaboration with
Boop Bip. The production is excellent too, it's so quiet, almost alien.
10 July 2005:
Farmers Manual (75)
I must have listened to
Explorers_We this week. It was actually the description of this album that got me interested in Farmers Manual. I read it on the Warpmart site or somewhere: "It's the first glitchwerk masterpiece. The more you listen to it, the better it gets." I agree.
17 July 2005:
Dorothy's Magic Bag (45)
Dorothy's Magic Bag makes 8-bit sounding music. This week I downloaded a bunch of his stuff (legally, of course; most of it is released on netlabels). I first heard is when "Bakkapuru" played on the front page of some site called Micromusic. My favorite release is
What's Inside the Magic Bag?, though. It's right
here.
24 July 2005:
Autechre (68)
Should I just start going in order here? The third Autechre album I got was, well, actually I don't remember. It might have been
EP7, which I bought at a little store called CD Warehouse. It's a chain store that sells used CDs. I don't go there that often, but it's pretty decent. I just like browsing to see if they have anything good. If anyone reading this is from the Twin Cities area and into the Chain Reaction label, the last two times I went to the store in Maplewood they had the somewhat hard to find
Chain Reaction ... Compiled album for seven dollars. Although I already have it, I thought about buying it to sell on eBay for a profit, but decided it wasn't worth the trouble. So now if anyone is reading this and they still actually have the album, you can go there and get a rare album cheap. (I'm not guaranteeing that they still have it in stock, though!)
31 July 2005:
C-Rayz Walz (83)
I bought
Ravipops this week. The production on the album isn't anything to get excited about, but what I really like about C-Rayz is his honesty. It might be called "positive", but tracks like "We Live" are really depressing too.
7 August 2005:
Christophe Charles (21)
I'm not sure how this got here, since I don't think I bought the only album I own by Christophe Charles (
Undirected 1986-1996) this week, but whatever. I never really got into the album until recently though. I bought it because I found it used and it's on Mille Plateaux, and Mille Plateaux albums are sort of hard to find. When I finally sat down and listened to it in detail I realized that it's actually a very nice abstract album. By the way, Christophe Charles is the guy who collaborated with
Oval on
Dok.
14 August 2005:
People Under the Stairs (98)
I bought this one (
O.S.T.) on my last day of Summer work. I actually bought it before I started working for the day, since my professor wouldn't be in until later that day (I worked at my school doing a project over the Summer, mostly sitting at a computer), so I listened to it then. It's a decent album of modern old-school hip-hop, but nothing mindblowing.
21 August 2005:
Curd Duca (138)
After my work ended I went on a short vacation to Duluth and Grand Marais. In Duluth I went to the Electric Fetus and bought some CDs:
Elevator 3 by Curd Duca,
Sea Biscuit by
Spacetime Continuum, and
Underling by
Jake Mandell.
Elevator 3 is an excellent album of really short tracks (I want to call them "sketches"),
Sea Biscuit is a classic (I think) ambient techno-ish album, and
Underling is an album of three ambient drone (or something) tracks. The Curd Duca album was at the #1 spot because it has a lot of short tracks.
28 August 2005:
Claude Debussy (36)
I stole some of my mom's Debussy CDs and copied them to my computer. He's my favorite classical composer.
4 September 2005:
goodhands team (46)
An electronic music artist (or band) that has some music on the Internet. I downloaded a lot of it and listened to it. It's good. I think he (or they) won the Autechre remix contest at Xltronic.
11 September 2005:
Farmers Manual (59)
I was just browsing their
website. There's a lot of stuff, strange connections to other similarly designed sites, etc. Weird.
18 September 2005:
The Conet Project (190)
The Conet Project is recordings from some sort of secret shortwave numbers stations used by spies, or something. The reason the number is so high here is because there are a lot of tracks (4 CDs worth, but I just downloaded the online version). It sort of creeps me out to listen to them at night. During the day they don't really have any effect on me and I usually just skip the tracks when they come up.
25 September 2005:
Random Factor (47)
During this week I went to the "World's Largest Garage Sale" and bought a lot of CDs. The best of them this one
Convergence by Random Factor, aka
Carl A. Finlow, aka
Silicon Scally. When I bought this CD I actually had no idea what it was, I just thought the cover art was interesting. (You can do that when CDs cost $0.125-$2.00.) When I listened to it was surprised that was actually good house music. When I started looking up information on the artist I was even more surprised that it was the same guy as Silicon Scally, an excellent electro artist I'd heard on Last.fm earlier. After I got this album I bought
Electrocide,
Mr. Machine, and
Electrilogy+. I'd love to pick up the earlier Random Factor album (
Too Fast Into the Future), but it's pretty expensive most places I see it on the internet.
2 October 2005:
Adam Johnson (68)
What a surprise it was finding the album by Adam Johnson at a used CD store. I had been thinking about buying it for a while. And I think it was right after the announcement of Merck's closing, too. And he's even a local artist. I first heard Adam Johnson (the track "Traber") on the Warpmart Issue 1 compilation. The music itself is sort of hard to describe; I don't think it fits into any particular genre. He's definitely my favorite artist on Merck, though, along with
Deceptikon. Oh, and I heard somewhere that he'll be taking control of the Narita label when Merck shuts down.
9 October 2005:
Tim Hecker (22)
Not sure exactly how this got here, but I guess the play count is low. Tim Hecker is one of my favorites though, especially
Radio Amor. It would probably be one of my "desert island discs". It's pretty near-perfect.
16 October 2005:
Non Phixion (86)
This week I bought Non Phixion's
The Future is Now (Platinum Edition). It's a pretty good album, but lately I've found that I'm rarely in the mood for this style of aggressive rap.
23 October 2005:
Pan Sonic (102)
What happened this week? I must have bought Pan Sonic's
Kulma. I like a lot of the stuff they've done, but sometimes it's too minimal for me (the
A album, mostly). I recently got the live in New York album, and it's my favorite thing I've heard from them so far. I haven't heard their two latest albums, though (
Aaltopiiri and the four CD set,
Kesto).
30 October 2005:
Audion (62)
I got
Suckfish this week. A great techno album with greater cover art. It was a bit of a coincidence that right before I went to the used CD shop I was reading good words about this album, then when I got there they had it. For cheap!
6 November 2005:
Aphex Twin (21)
It's sort of interesting that when I first started scrobbling Aphex Twin and
Autechre were staying about equal in their positions for a while. I think Aphex even overtook Autechre for a little while. But now they've diverged by more than 400 plays.
13 November 2005:
El-P (76)
I think I purchased the
Cannibal Oxtrumentals album this week. I still haven't heard the vocal versions (OK, I have, but not really as an album). Even alone they are really great though. There should be more people in hip-hop like El-P. I sort of feel guilty or unsure about how I have these songs tagged though. Should they be El-P, or should they be
Cannibal Ox, with "(Instrumental)" slapped on to the end? Well, Freedb had them like I have them, so they'll stay like that for now.
20 November 2005:
Silicon Scally (143)
This must be when I got my two Silicon Scally CDs,
Electrocide and
Mr. Machine. Both are amazing electro albums (I prefer
Electrocide). I got them for really cheap (for being shipped, new, from the UK) from Boomkat. I think they're still on sale there. Another great discovery thanks to Last.fm.
27 November 2005:
Matrix (111)
My first Chain Reaction album. I actually got this from Wal-Mart, of all places. After I got this one I started my quest to buy all the Chain Reaction albums. I'm more than half done now, but most of the remaining ones are the harder-to-find metal box CDs. It was this album that really got me into minimal techno. I'd bet nearly half the CDs I've bought since I got this one fit in to that genre. Or maybe not. I'm not sure.
4 December 2005:
Matrix (125)
Matrix is still on top this week, but just below at 120 plays is
Hallucinator, another Chain Reaction artist. Hallucinator is probably the weirdest of them that I've heard so far. A lot of the sounds are sort of "ethnic", or something. And then there are those experimental "Wipeout" tracks.
11 December 2005:
The Album Leaf (76)
This week I got
One Day I'll Be On Time. I call it "pleasant music", because it's not really challenging or anything, just pleasant to listen to. I don't know. There's some boring guitar stuff here, and also some nice melodic tracks. My favorite is "The MP".
18 December 2005:
Boards of Canada (22)
How did Boards of Canada get here? I don't know. Like getting
Matrix from Wal-Mart, I found Boards of Canada in a pretty unexpected place as well: the Columbia House Music club. They weren't even signed to a really major label (
Music Has the Right to Children was released on Matador in the US, which I always thought was at least sort-of independent, but looking at the history on Discogs, it looks like in 2001 or so, the time I ordered it, Capitol Records had a lot of control over the label; so maybe it wasn't such an unusual place). I guess Boards of Canada is sort of "pleasant music" to me too. I have yet to hear their newest album.
25 December 2005:
Sutekh (79)
Christmas. I got a lot of minimal techno stuff, and it looks like Sutekh came out on top this week. The album is
Periods.Make.Sense. It's all I have from him, but it's a good, dark album. It's very "sparse", I'd call it. On Christmas, I fell asleep at my Grandma's house while listening to this play on the PlayStation and watching the visualizations. I was sort of sick on Christmas, and now I think this album might make me feel ill whenever I listen to it.
1 January 2006:
Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto (18)
I found the album
Insen in a used CD shop right after I was reading good things about it on the Internet. I think it's a good album, but not especially outstanding. I mean, a lot of people before this have done similar things.
Aphex Twin manipulated piano on
Drukqs, and
Tosca did it subtly on the bonus disc of
Dehli 9. And those are just modern examples. I do like this album more than either of those, though.
8 January 2006:
Fluxion (270)
Fluxion was the artist of the first quarter of 2006 for me. I was lucky enough to find both of his Chain Reaction albums online in one day (and they even showed up on different sites!) for less than $15 each. The music is amazing. Underwater ambient dub techno, or something. If I make a "Best Things I Discovered in 2006" list at the end of this year, Fluxion will have to be towards the top. He went from nothing to #4 on my top artists list in three months. I need to buy
Spaces soon.
15 January 2006:
Fluxion (63)
Fluxion on top for the second week in a row. I think that, like many of artists that I have listened to a lot lately, I first heard Fluxion on the Last.fm radio. Actually I think I got into the whole Chain Reaction thing through Last.fm. It's too bad their CDs are so hard to find.
22 January 2006:
SND (41)
SND was able to knock
Fluxion off his top spot this week, and I'm not sure why. I must have been listening to
Tenderlove a lot this week.
29 January 2006:
Vladislav Delay (62)
This was the week of my birthday, and a lot of excellent artists got on the top 10. It looks like Vladislav Delay, with
Demo(n) Tracks got on top. My first exposure to Vladislav Delay was actually through his
Luomo pseudonym, and I still think
Vocalcity is the best thing I've heard from him, but
Demo(n) Tracks is a good album as well. It might not be the best track on the album, but "Demonit" is definitely a standout track. It has a physical effect on me. The way the extremely deep bass comes in over and over and everything else goes out. It changes the pressure in the room or something. It's powerful.
5 February 2006:
Safety Scissors (90)
This week I bought
Tainted Lunch by Safety Scissors. It's very different from everything else on ~Scape. It's fun pop music, but like all pop music I don't listen to it much after listening to it a lot at first.
12 February 2006:
Binärpilot (71)
A netlabel artist gets to the top this week. I downloaded
You Can't Stop Da Funk from Candymind. I don't know much about the artist but I know that these songs are awesome. They're sort of 8-bit-something-or-other, sometimes with vocals. It's rad. Especially "Destroy the Popollution". I tried to burn some Binärpilot tracks to a CD to listen to in the car, the burn failed (what?! Does that
ever happen?). I should try again.
19 February 2006:
Subtle (56)
Dose One and crew make another appearance on the top this week. I bought Subtle's
A New White. My favorite track is still "F.K.O.", which I first heard on the
Lexample Blue sampler CD. I hesitate to call this hip-hop, because it's really not, at all. It's more "music that defies classification", but whatever.
26 February 2006:
Ms. John Soda (29)
I got
Notes and the Like cheap. Honestly I don't really care about it at all. The music's not bad or anything, it's just that I listened to one
Lali Puna album and then got tired of the style. It's sort of a cliché, I think. I like "Outlined View", though.
5 March 2006:
MF DOOM (111)
You know, I'm getting up to the point in time when I feel like I just wrote about this stuff in a previous journal entry. Probably because I did, only about a month or so ago. Anyway, MF Doom is #1 here because I got
Mm..Food. It's a great album. I could write more stuff about how I wanted to buy it but I procrastinated for a while, then it went out of print, then I finally found it used, but I already wrote all that in a previous journal.
Mm..Food is my favorite hip-hop CD I own.
12 March 2006:
Thomas Brinkmann (60)
This week I received a few CDs in the mail, one was
Klick by Thomas Brinkmann and the other was
Makesnd Cassette by
SND. It looks like Brinkmann came out on top, although now I think the SND album is better. Brinkmann is one of my favorite minimal techno artists though. I first heard him as
Ester Brinkmann on the
Clicks + Cuts compilation (the track "Maschine"), many years ago. It's still my favorite track by him. "Erika 2" might be a close second.
19 March 2006:
Biosphere (111)
I got five or six CDs this week I think, Biosphere's
Substrata was #1. I think it deserved the spot, though I do still think it has some sort of weakness. I wrote about it in an older journal that a lot of people commented on. I've put this artist on mental "watch list", or something, where I'll keep an eye out for cheap albums to pick up.
26 March 2006:
Monolake (30)
Monolake must have reached this spot by chance, since I don't think I got any new CDs this week. But since I haven't written anything about Monolake in this huge journal entry yet, I'd better put something here. One thing I regret is not buying most of the Monolake albums when they were pretty easy to find. I remember several years ago they were all (with the exception of
Hongkong, probably, and of course the ones that hadn't been released yet) on Barnes & Noble's top selling albums in the "experimental techno" category. I didn't take much notice of them because they were mixed in with a lot of the boring stuff people call "indietronica", so I just assumed it was the same kind of music. And at that time I was a lot more into the "fucked up beatz" stuff than I am now. So what I'm saying is that it's unfortunate that EFA shut down and seemed to take a lot of German labels with it. Although I don't really know the story about that.
2 April 2006:
Jeff Mills (127)
I got two CDs by Jeff Mills in the mail this week. And another one by
Scan 7. So it was a big week for Detroit techno. It's sort of funny because a lot of artists I listen to use elements of Detroit in their music, but not until recently have I begun getting into the "real thing". My favorite track is "Random Soul" by Scan 7. Oh, and since I haven't made a journal entry about it yet, I will also add that I got the pretty rare CD
Bl_ck B_st_rds by
KMD in the same shipment. And the CD only cost $3.50. And it was pretty much new. I got lucky with that, I guess.
MF DOOM's style has certainly changed a lot since 1994 or whenever it was recorded.
9 April 2006:
Fluxion (73)
For several nights on this most recent week I've just been loading up some Fluxion tracks in Foobar2000 to fall asleep to.
And that's it. Next I'll have to do one for 100000 tracks. I'll start on 16 April 2006.
By the way, these are the albums I bought since my last journal entry:
(Don't think I spend that much on CDs; most were used and the total cost for all was less than $60, and the KMD one probably could fetch about at least half that on eBay, not that I'm going to sell it or anything.)
Adam Johnson
