8 Tracks and Good Omens

I was totally geared up to bounce into some kind of deranged stream of conciousness post about the first Eurovision semi, but fate has raised it's massive, soil-encrusted hand to stop me dead. I came back from work and there are no torrents to be found, no streaming media, nothing but the broken bits and shards, and I have no taste for piecemeal when it comes to Eurovision.

But there was a nice piece of serendipity the other day when the music at work was changed to Abba the day after I found out about Eurovision. Nicely played fate.

And today I find out that my favourite band ever, the Young Fresh Fellows, have a new album out in July. O frabjous day!

Instead, chew on this: remember Muxtape? It was a kind of online mixtape service where you could upload mixes and then people could listen or not or whatever. It was a fun but flawed service, and the fact that they couldn't clear the legal issues and got shut down was a pretty big flaw. 8tracks is a similar but, frankly, better service where you can upload an 8 track mix for people to listen to. Much like last.fm, it's a great way to find new music. You can't choose the order that your songs are played in, and the listener can't see what's coming up, but for me that just adds to the fun. And anyway it's that stuff that keeps it legal and means that it won't just get wrapped up and shut down while you're in the middle of listening to something. The whole site and interface is a lot better too. I've got one j-pop mix up there at the moment and I'll upload a bunch more different things in the future.

MagicSword aka Kumaboshi aka Alex on 8tracks

Hey! Why don't you make a mix too? Then I can listen to whatever crap you like!

Loom

God knows what's gotten into me recently, but I started contributing to a creative-collective blog a couple of weeks ago. We were inspired by this post by Warren Ellis, that observes astutely that there are quite enough link blogs, aggregators and indexes out there, it's about time people started creating their own interesting things. There are five of us in total, so we can keep it rolling and updating every weekday, and we've been going for two weeks now so there's a good amount of stuff there already. The curtain was officially raised today, or possibly yesterday, depending on what time zone you're operating in:

Loom

I'll be contributing every Thursday and so far I posted a couple of songs that you can listen to and download. Our remit is completely unspecified, but this week is acting like a kind of introduction, so you can see who is creating this stuff. My more-than-able co-conspirators have been posting paintings, photos, comics, carpentry, prose and much more. It's pretty exciting really.

Renee's painting.

Ben's loom.