Musical Selections

This is a real mixed bag.

I spent a lot of time listening to the Junior Boys this week. I ordinarily don't listen to electronica, but this is really good stuff. Even more surprising these guys are from Hamilton, Ontario. I would have thought that they might be England or something like that. At times the stuff reminds me of Depeche Mode, but its much more stripped done -- kind of minimalist. In any event, its really good. I listen to both of their releases, Last Exit and So This Is Goodbye, with remixes and extra. Of the two I liked the Last Exit more, but both are really good. If you want to check it out I'll make it easier for you. You can get the Last Exit here and So This Is Goodbye here. Just in case you're not familiar with mp3 blogs, the downloads are on a third party server, so there are limits on how much you can download -- so they'll be a wait period in between downloads. Enjoy.

I also checked out part of Charles Mingus's Passions of A Man box set. This is really intense. Its the opposite of the junior boys. The juniors boys stuff is stripped down to the minimum. The Mingus stuff is really layered, you've got the rhythm section in the background, the horns playing the harmonies over top. I checked out Disc 3, which has most of the stuff that shows up on Blues and Roots. This is stuff that should be listened to loud. After listening to this I kind of feel sorry for the people who never have listened to Mingus. But then I suppose a lot of people couldn't appreciate what he did.

On a more mellow note, I listened to Madlib's Blunted in the Bomb Shelter. This is reggae mix that he put together. Its not like he just took the songs and played them, he cuts and splices them together into the mix. So most of the components of the mix are pretty short -- about 1 to 2 minutes. This will give your subwoofer a really good workout.