So my beloved Muxtape is off line, whether by RIAA fiat or money troubles or both or whatever, I know not. That news kinda sucked although it was not unexpected, being and how the illegality of it was more or less blindingly obvious.

But a great idea and great for the music industry whether it knows it or not. But hark! In the dust of Muxtape, a new service launched called 8tracks which claims to do the same thing but -- gasp! -- legally. I've seen it called "Stracks" too, but I think the squiggly thing is offically an 8. I've signed up but haven't made a mux-er, a ... mix yet. There seem to be more restrictions that with muxtape -- you can't see the whole list before listening for instance -- which are presumably to keep it within the legal requirements. It does look like you can officially create multiple mixes and have them all up at the same time. Which is good, although I was kinda digging the zen-like process of destroying your mux before you could create a new one.

I'm encouraged that it looks uncluttered and simple, but also adds some functions muxtapes lacked -- I like the simplicity of "following" a user and also the ability to add comments to mixes. Will try and maybe get one up tonight.

Update: Did my first 8tracks mix. Painless process and one improvement on Muxtape is you can queue up all your songs to upload rather than have to do them one by one.

Muxtape, World Youth Day edn.

Further: How awesome is it that Mick/Proddy doctrinal stoushes are back in the papers? Party like its 1953!

There's this new show, see, on Ch.7 tomorrow night at 7.30pm The One: Search for Australia's Top Cold Reader Psychic. I've attended a few of the studio tapings on account of a good friend of mine, Richard Saunders, is one of the judges. I met Richard through the Australian Skeptics and he has taken on the daunting task of being commercial TV token skeptical whipping boy for low rent reality show. Go, Richard! Join our Richard Saunders Fans Facebook page! So I am in the audience for episodes 2 and 4 and watched episode 5 filming from the green room and back of the studio yesterday.

Richard has done an excellent job with a very tough gig, and has managed to institute a few extra controls on the "tests" although even with that they barely rise above parlour game level (except for one which is just deeply full of FAIL on the crass test.) And yes there's a legitimate discussion to be had about doing more harm than good in legitimising the mystery-monging but these shows are going to happen anyway and in Richard they actually had someone capable of, under pressure, quickly breaking down what was happening and really revealing the workings of cold reading on the spot. Of course he only gets a few lines and the vast bulk of logical fallacies, utter non-sequiturs, post-hoc rationalisations and face-palm moments have to go unchallenged. But the lines he gets are good, although its all in the editing, I guess. I took lots of notes in the last two sessions I was at so I might make further comment once I see the edited version. Podblack blog has made a loose comment about live blooging the first show. I hope she does, that should be fun.

I didn't take any of Skeptico's Cold Reading Bingo cards but perhaps you can print out some to play along at home. I guarantee you odds vastly better than the local Lions club version. You can't lose, in fact.

In my time there I saw lots of readings and "challenges" but not a single inexplicable or even particularly impressive thing, I did see a lot of the standard psychological techniques done to varying degrees of inexpertness and the glorious laws of probability at work. Which doesn't mean it won't "make good TV." It was interesting although LONG to sit through an entire day of faffing about for a few minutes of film. That's the glamour of showbiz I guess.

On the other end of the scale of seriousness I've been reading Ray Hyman's The Elusive Quarry: A Scientific Appraisal of Psychical Research and it comes highly recommended.

Here in full is the 2/5 stars "review" by Bernard Zuel of Hayes Carll's "Trouble in Mind" from the Metro this morning:

You can see the attraction for the label. Here's someone who can be a lightweight-but-far-less-troublemaking cross between Ryan Adams and Steve Earle, with alcohol-soaked ballads and punchy mid-tempo country rock. It's easy to digest and has more grit than the Nashville-Tamworth axis but the trouble is when you take away the "troublesome" parts of Adams and Earle, you get by-the-numbers-alt.country.

The SMH reviewers, including BZ, generally do a good job in giving coverage to Music I Like and props to them for it, but I have a serious pet hate about their some of their critical MO. Namely: The constant and utterly unnecessary relating of everything slightly rootys to top 40 country and taking up space with irrelevant comparisons instead of talking about the music. In his excellent jazz reviews, John Shand never feels moved to mention that Mike Nock is not like Kenny G, but the blokes on the country/folk beat can't resist but shoehorn a reference to Keith Urban into damn near everything. Long time readers know I have ranted about this before. End the country critical cultural cringe!

I like this record (review coming this weekend) and he doesn't: fine, I'm not talking about that. The Adams/Earle comparisons while on the surface more appropos than Urban are misplaced too. Firstly, talk about the damn record. You've got about 50 words, why waste two of them on "Ryan" and "Adams", especially if you're not going to provide a meaningful comparison for potential purchasers? Hayes Carll is really very little like Ryan Adams musically, even when Ryan was at his most country. It seems Ryan is only mentioned because he provides a drug abusing songwriter bookend to the Earle reference which is more fitting, but still a waste of precious words. Why are we even mentioning drug abuse again? Ugh, who the hell knows.

Secondly, I strongly doubt the stated motivations apply to Lost Highway. It's just another the imposition of a random narrative that suits a lazy journo. (cf. the political op-ed columns every day of the week.) The easy-too-see attraction for the label is not that he isn't an vainglorious junkie, it is that he had already released a couple of critically acclaimed, award winning and successful Americana records and something of a reputation for being a genuine heir to the Texas country/folk songwriter tradition of Townes Van Zandt. These are the qualities that drew me to Hayes Carll three years ago.

If the new album doesn't live up to the promise, by all means say so. Don't just make shit up.

A further pet hate is the insidious definition creep of the term "alt.country." I see not the slightest reason to call Hayes Carll that, unless "alt.country" now simply means anything that doesn't chart on CMT and if that is what it now means then: over my dead body it does.

Subject line stolen from Phineas. It is too good not to be mine. Mux had a meltdown and my most recent one was lost. But it only nuked the last three weeks of stuff which means my last second account mux is still there. Second accounts breach the TOS, so hush. IMHO, it's rather a tasty collection of country, soul, funk -- old skool, yo.

In addition to Richard Shindell, another muso with his thinking cap on is David Byrne. It has pie charts!

I've made money, and I've been ripped off. I've had creative freedom, and I've been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I'm not the only one who can say that.

What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. At some point it became the business of selling CDs in plastic cases, and that business will soon be over. But that's not bad news for music, and it's certainly not bad news for musicians. Indeed, with all the ways to reach an audience, there have never been more opportunities for artists.

I don't require musicians I like to be rational, sane, compassionate, intelligent, thought provoking and in general good people. But it's awfully nice when one of them turns out to be so. The superb singer/songwriter Richard Shindell has some thoughts here and more here on being an artist in the age of illegal downloading. He speaks sense.

While I think a lot of anti-piracy measures and attitudes have been hamfisted, insulting and obnoxious (and I don't use P2P myself), I don't make my living from music so I can't begrudge those who do their strong feelings on the matter. Still, when he talks about the "better angels" attitude, and respect between consumer and artist, that makes sense to me. I think there are lots of things that can be done to turn pirates into people who support artists -- not least of which is "the passage of time" and "embiggening of musical tastes" since (IIRC) it's teens/uni-aged kids who do it on the grandest and most unthinking scale, and it's mostly directed towards the more top 100 end of things. eMusic's corporate line has long been that it pitches the long tail and independent acts to "mature" music fans who are vastly less likely to fileshare. This was actually borne out when Random House tracked piracy of it's eMusic DRM-free audiobook files and found ... none. (can't dig up the thing I read about this, will add link later.)

Richard still thinks it's important the artist gets paid (in this case, him) but he's actually doing some constructive, realistic things about it. Go, Richard!

Time for a new muxtape. Since Laura alerted me to this particularly witless example of crushingly unfunny and pointless op-ed busy work and since I got a few Google hits in the last week looking for a "jazz muxtape", I thought I'd do a jazz muxtape. And they say bloggers are undisciplined, narcasscistic jerks -- Schembri (practically everytime I read him) more than proves you don't need to be 13 and writing in your PJs in your mother's basement to write like you're 13 and writing in your PJs in your mother's basement.

Hear my muxtape here.

Anyhow. I'm very much a "don't know much about jazz, but I know what I like" and this is pretty much the first 12 things I came to, with some exceptions because a lot of tracks (ie. everything I have by Charles Mingus) is over the Muxtape limit of 10MB in size. Also kept it to instrumentals. Jazz vocals is a mux for another week.

These are the albums the tracks are from:
Robert Mazurek- Playground. This was recommended on a message board thread about "heroiny jazz."
Sonny Rollins-Way Out West "I'm an Old Cowhand" is my fave but I put that on a mux before.
Art Pepper-Art Pepper Meets the Rhythm Section
Irving Fields Trio-Bagels and Bongos
Getatchew Mekurya-Negus of Ethiopian Sax. African jazz is a whole topic by itself.
John Coltrane-Plays for Lovers
Dizzy Gillespie and Machito-Afro-Cuban Jazz Moods
Andre Previn- West Side Story
Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins
Thelonious Monk - Blue Monk
Buddy Rich with Dizzy Gillespie-Monterey Jazz Festival 1958-1980
Cannonball Adderley and Bill Evans-Know What I Mean?

This article was the pits when it was in the New York Times last week, it's even worse now the Herald has recycled it. The story? A couple of men in middle age had heart attacks and a computer geek eats junk food. I do think there are some interesting issues in the bizarro "professional" blogging world, this is a stupidly sensational hook for it.

Thanks to Chris Bertram and Tim Dunlop for sending me this piece on the environmental movement, country music and class. That's like the Chris blogged it. Wouldn't it be fun if I had platoons of bat-winged monkeys like some other blogs who would hoon over there at my command. Mwuh-ha-ha. In a different week I might find something to say about it myself.

Am off to see Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings tonight at the Enmore. In the Dance-2 section, say hi. I will be the one not dancing. Hopefully I can get some far away blurry shots mostly of people's heads (there's a Dance-1 section) to put up later.

I may be able to tie the two themes of this post in one Sharon Jones song:

07 This Land Is Your Land.mp3

Crossposted at Hickory Wind.

This post goes on, like a certain essential muscular organ of some musical fame. In the knowledge clicking on is too much trouble for many, here is your take home message: There is a book called Céline Dion's Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson, part of the Continuum 33 1/3 Series. You want to read this book. His blog is here, one of my favourites for years. Here are lots of reviews and interviews. AFAIK it isn't released in Australia so you can buy it here. If you buy me a glass of house red I will lend it to you, I will probably be too-aggressively pimping it to you even if you don't. You want to read this book.

You want to read this book.

Got it? Ah, but I have trapped you because now you want to know why you want to read a book on Céline Motherfrakinggoddamnareyougoddamnfrakkingkiddingme Dion. Sucked in. Onwards over the fold ...

MP3: Kev Carmody and Paul Kelly -- 2-05 From Little Things Big Things Grow.m4p

I wrote a whole goddamn essay about this last night. I deleted it.

What Kevin08 says today, that's from me -- personally -- too.

And then some.

When I mentioned Bobbie Gentry in the previous post, it reminded me to mention a podcast I listened to of an address by Alice Randall on country music songwriting. She talks about "Fancy" which really is a remarkable song.

Ignore the robot dancing, but dig those sets. I actually don't mind Reba McEntire's version, although the 80s bombast (1990 still counts) has dated much more than the 1969 version ...

I sampled a couple of the lesser legal digital download services last week. OK, I sometimes grab a single song from an MP3 blog and sometimes augment my own posts with music. But I never download whole albums or just go grab whatever I want from bittorrent. Although as this article shows you could P2P every minute of the day for the next thirty years and still not be a fraction of the thief the major record labels have been, I still think you have to support the models that are adapting to the real world. And no, I don't include those dodgy Russian sites. Anyway. I already have two accounts on eMusic for 190 tracks a month and there's nothing out there that competes with it for price and range, but have found some interesting things.

First up, WE7. The model here is that each song can be downloaded free but has a short ad at the beginning. After a month you can go back and download the songs (still free) without the ad, to a maximum of 20 songs a month. Like all these services offering DRM-free tracks and trying to shake up the models, the problem is getting content, especially from the majors or bigger indies. WE7 has a very sparse country selection but a pretty good blues one. My first 20 downloads are below. I really don't get Patty Griffin in any deep way but I'm told the fault is entirely my end so I'll keep trying.

The number of downloads is unlimited, but you can only ad-strip 20 a month. CNET says it's doomed. I don't mind the ads, and they seem a lot shorter than 10 seconds to me. However all the ads thus far are for ... WE7 itself which makes me wonder how they're travelling in the whole "attract advertisers" side of things. Last week they made a show of promoting the capital they have raised so we'll see. Another obvious problem is that it's extremely simple to snip the ads from the tracks yourself. How to assure advertisers they're even being heard? But that is for counters of beans other than my own. Meantime: music free and legal.