Heard John Schaffer talk about some new mixtape site, and thought it would be muxtape but it was this site called CassetteFromMyEx - which, I think it’s appropriate to call it Muxtape’s uncle. Instead of new mixtapes, this is a site to which you can upload your OLD mixtapes, yeah, the ones that were made for you by an ex romantic collaborator.

From an interface perspective, it doesn’t have much on Muxtape; it’s in semi-blog format. It’s interesting because each mixtape has a whole story (if you’re interested in that kind of thing), but the especial reason I like it, is because NONE of the music is from today. It’s all from “yesterday”, some of them are labelled as some guy’s name we went to college with. This is like a big old dusty attic. Interesting walk down someone else’s memory lane.

                 

Ok. MuxTape kicks ass. It’s a dead-simple interface, nothing to figure out. You upload 12 songs, and that’s your “mix tape”. Songs are listed in big blocky format. Click and listen. So simple that it was harder for me to describe than for you to go listen.

So I won’t describe its functions, but rather why it’s so damn great.

1) “Gimme a cheeze wit nuthin” .. “Nuthin??” - In such a simple interface, he (Justin, the guy behind muxtape) has managed to irrevocably separate love & sharing of music, from selling & promoting. There’s no way of contacting the person (author? mixtaper?) who created a certain mixtape. The closest to being “marketed to” on the site is when I was listening to one guy’s 12 mashups…well, I have to assume he made them… I googled his long, odd account name, and found some other stuff online about him. But pretty subdued.

I don’t mean to knock “the music industry” - in fact, I think this guy justin could have each song link to Itunes to let people buy songs if they want to - and I’m not knocking the commerce side of music. It’s just that I’ve grown so so so used to love of music and sales/promotion of music to be joined at the hip, that there’s something…relieving to not be able to buy anything on this site.

2) Blind Taste Test - Ok, what else. I like that there’s no voting. No comments. No friends. No networking. Just click on a random colored box, and listen. Your opinion of the music can be influenced by nothing except the music itself. What else do you have to go on? nada.

3) Only The Best - I like that you’re limited to 12 songs. In the same way that the entire interface is elegantly simple, so is the musical philosophy a sparse one (please upload 12 songs) rather than “please upload your ENTIRE 200 GB” - Of course an assumed benefit of only 12 songs is that you’ll choose them very carefully, making the quality of the site’s music OVERALL being extremely high. I’m hearing lots of good stuff here yo.

4) You Can’t Categorize Me! - I like that there’s no genre, category, vertical, horizontal, sounds like, etc, etc, etc. This is similar to what I wrote in #2, but I think it’s worth its own item in this list. Here’s my approach to music: I like good music. Across all “genres” and “categories” - Any genre has its great, and it’s crap. Yes, there are people who only like trance, or heavy metal, etc. But most people I know, when asked “what kind of music do you like?” can’t answer, because their collection spans the gamut. (gamet? gamit?).

Categories help people to more efficiently purchase music. When my friend says “hey you gotta listen to this song” I don’t first ask him what genre it is. It’s not a prerequisite. What I care about is that he chose this song, of all other songs, to claim as “good”. So that’s worth my time.

Same goes for muxtape. If you took the time to upload 12 songs, for absolutely no potential benefit to yourself in any way, then I believe you really think these 12 songs are worth listening to. Damn, every single muxtape I listen to is great. And spanning “genres”

5) Runs On Amazon Elastic Cloud - This last bit of fascination has nothing to do with music. It’s all about hosting. Apparently, he’s using Amazon’s Web Services which means that he only pays for the amount of disk space (and bandwidth) that he uses. Now, I have no idea what his costs are, but the point is, muxtape will literally never run out of server space, beacuse Amazon’s EC2 gives you ever-expanding hosting space (cost per usage, of course).

Ok, that’s it. Go make a muxtape. Oh, and go listen to My Muxtape. Or Hal’s Muxtape

Update 4/16/08: Since I wrote this, muxtape has added a couple of improvements.

1) When you’re logged in, if you like a certain muxtape, you can add it to your favorites. But, in keeping with ‘muxtape tradition’ you can only have 12 favorites

2) Every song now has a “buy from Amazon” which, incidentally, I’ve never used.  Amazon MP3 Downloader is pretty cool… can move your mp3’s directly to Itunes.

                 

I have nothing to say on this topic, except that lionbridge.com uses it in their meta tags, and there are ZERO results for this in all engines.  I wanna see if I can be the first.  Oh, and by the way, what’s up with SEODisplayName?

                 

So, I just got in the mood to mention some of the music I’ve seen lately… First was Takenobu who I caught at the Living Room in nyc… mellow stuff, but I like his use of loop layers on his cello. I was impressed he sounds very similar live as he does on the recordings.

Next show, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, just all out insanity. I love these guys (and gal - Carla Kilstedt is something else altogether). The band who opened for them (I forget the name) was also impressive however, after about midway through the show, my attention started waning. What is it that I can be seeing a band with a very unique compositional style, high musicianship but can leave me feeling drained rather than uplifted? It might something as simple as taste or preference, but whatever it is, the contrast between the opening band and Sleepytime really highlights the difference.

Both bands employ similar approach to musicianship and odd- and unique-rhytmic time signatures, yet the first band seemed to perform the amazing musicianship, while Sleepytime’s high-skill level is just a means to an end, they twist and tweak music to create another world. Really love their stuff.

Onto The Flaming Fire! - I stumbled into their show at Tonic a few months ago, the description just made em sound weird, so that was enough for me. They frikin ROCKED. Blew me away, really one of the most fun I’ve had a show in a while. I loved the interplay between all the vocalists, they were singing together, and then intertwined, but almost always at the same time. I love that stuff. So I’ve been looking forward to seeing them again, and just caught em this past saturday night opening for barbez. And yes, I still enjoyed em, I gotta say I was disappointed. They were much less ‘out there’ than the previous time at Tonic, and also had too many solo songs. From my perspective, Patrick seems to be the driving force of that band, and this show he sat half the songs out, just chugging beers (still putting out tons of great vibes, but put that beer can down bro and get a screamin

The group’s energy can’t be knocked, and I can respect that they want to increase their accessibility, but, at the same time F*%K THAT - you guy are out there, and don’t water yourselves down like that. That first show at tonic that I caught you folks really kicked major ass. Hope to catch your weirder side again soon…

Barbez and Pamelia Kurstin - I would catch Barbez whenever I can, but something about them, just leaves me without anything to say. However, Pamelia well, it’s rare you get to see such a level of viruosity like this on an instrument you didn’t expect could be brought to this level. It really is mezmerising to watch her play that thing. She’s playing again at Tonic on April 28, see ya’ll there!

                 

Saw Little Children last night.  Interesting movie, well made I thought, although damn if that wasn’t some hard stuff to watch at times.  I was just thinking, now, about the title “Little Children” and how its most obvious connection is to the pediphile, and also to all the kids running around the movie (seemed like everyone was a parent in that town).

But on further thought, it seems that the common theme of everyone in the movie, or at least the “flawed” people - the ones whose mistakes were, as the narrator said, ‘forgivable’ - is the temperament of a little child.  “I want it now.”  Just a full dedication to “what I want” - Kate Winslet’s daughter was a great example of it, how Kate had almost no control over her own daughter’s actions which is indicative of how little control she had over her own self.

And this lack of self control was all the more highlighted by her high level of intellect, focused in on during the book reading scene, where she delivers a very powerful defense of her actions.  True, she outlined two separate choices: “Accept your fate or Struggle against it” and at first glance it’s more noble to struggle than to accept.  However, I dont buy that jumping on the first guy she meets counts as “struggling” against her situation.  It’s just another example of a ‘little child’ grasping for what she wants.  The ’struggle’ is simply a rationalization.

The final scene in the park didn’t make sense.  Why would she just voluntarily go into the park at night?  It was too obvious, right?  I think that scene could have been explained better, if they showed them as intending to wait in the car, but the daughter getting all rambunctious saying “I waaant to go the ppaaark!!” until Kate Winslet just took her to the park, against her much better judgement.  This would have explained better why the scene in the park snapped Kate’s fantasy about running away.

She had let her daughter’s desires bring them to a point of near danger, and because of this, she forced her daughter into the car seat, whether or not the daughter accepted it.  And in this final assuming of the parental role, she then turned her new found “power” onto herself, and gave up on the “I just waaant to run awaaay with him” fantasy, and went back home.

The narrator then ended the movie with a summary “we all make mistakes, and we can all start anew” but I felt that it was a lame summary.  The movie is about our childish instincts, and our ability to parent ourselves, to “grow up” and to just assume control of our actions.  Or our inability.

                 

So, of course, living in NYC I’m used to seeing discarded objects on the street.  But usually they’re like a lost glove, a hat, a broken umbrella, etc.  In the last week, I saw three unusual of these things.

The first was on a really cold day, when it was 17 degrees.  Early morning I walked out of my apartment, and on the nearest fire hydrant someone had left a trench coat.  It was hung up, very intentionally (as opposed to accidentally).  A couple days later, I was coming back home middle of the day, and right on the corner, was sitting an empty wheelchair.  And then to complete this series, late night after a concert was left a car seat (ya know, the kind for babies to ride in).

The trench coat I can at least make a bit of sense out of.  It was the coldest in a series of cold days here in NYC, and someone decided to just leave a trenchcoat for someone who needed it.  Ok, that is at least plausible, even though I am curious why not give it, say, to a homeless shelter.  But, I won’t challenge this one.  The other two, though, leave me baffled.  Like, the person in the wheelchair… did he hail a cab and then forget to take his wheelchair into the cab.. “Ooops” ?  And was the baby car seat left alone, or with the child in it, and only the child was rescued/taken?