Archive for September, 2008
Starbucks card = 2h free wireless
Posted on | September 23, 2008 | No Comments
I’m sure everyone else knows about this already, but I’m so delighted that I just had to ‘report’ on it anyway :)
Starbucks Canada is offering 2 hours of free wireless on their Bell Hotspots for Starbucks Card customers who have registered their Starbucks Cards. So not only do you get free soy milk and/or flavour shots if you register your Starbucks Card, but you can also spend a delightful two hours working/surfing at Starbucks if, like me today, you find yourself with an unexpected couple of hours away from your desk between meetings and don’t want to cough up the exhorbitant Bell Hotspot fees.
Apparently, Starbucks is introducing a Stabucks Rewards program this fall, and the free wireless offer will be transitioned into that – I wonder if you’ll have points to spend on wifi access?
Anyway, go get yourself a grande soy latte and some free Internet while it lasts.
Today’s Desert Island Disc: Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, Lifeline
Posted on | September 17, 2008 | No Comments
A review of Ben Harper’s Lifeline (2007)
Ben Harper plays a stylish blend of rock, reggae and old-style r’n'b, like a subtler, less flashy version of Lenny Kravitz. These are well-crafted, well-rehearsed songs, recorded in just seven days in a studio in Paris, directly to 16-track without using any digital tools. The CD sounds open, airy and spacious. It’s sort of like Ben Harper’s ‘unplugged’ album. I’ve been a Ben Harper follower for a long time; in fact, it’s a little hard for me to pick just one Ben Harper record for the desert island batch. So I’ll pick this one because I’m enjoying it right now. There’s a certain honesty in Ben Harper’s music – a lack of irony, a deep understanding of, and reflection on, the history of popular music. I think this is becoming a bit of a theme for me: high quality music, a bit ‘retro,’ that avoids irony… anyway, this is a great record that you should listen to if you can.
Random playlist fun
Posted on | September 16, 2008 | No Comments
I don’t know why I hadn’t discovered this before. ‘Discovered’ may not be a particularly good word, actually. Of course, I knew about it. I just chose not to use it until now.
I’m talking about my MP3 player’s ‘random all’ function. It takes everything I have on it and shuffles it into a random playlist. Of course, you’d imagine that a music guy like me would use this all the time. But I don’t. I think there were two key factors that made me not use ‘random all’ previously:
- I like albums and I think of them as the logical unity of tracks, chosen by the artist to flow in a particular way. Call me old school.
- I don’t like jarring/weird segues in my music, and – before recently – it hadn’t occurred to me to ‘curate’ the underlying selection of albums in any way. Now that I’ve done that, ‘random all’ is interesting and smooth.
So far, I have found my player to be a good digital DJ. This goes to illustrate that it doesn’t really matter that it doesn’t know what it’s doing… its ‘programming’ is no worse than the average satellite radio station’s; in fact, I think it’s slightly better. But maybe I just think that because it’s all my own music that’s being ‘spun.’
Here’s a running list of a sequence today:
- The Detroit Cobras – My Baby Loves The Secret Agent (From: Baby)
- Alejandro Escovedo – Looking for Love (From: The Boxing Mirror)
- Susheela Raman – Mahima (From: Salt Rain)
- Diana Krall – Besame Mucho (From: The Look of Love)
- Alison Krauss & Union Station – Deeper Than Crying (From: So Long So Wrong)
- Regina Spektor – 20 Years of Snow (From: Begin To Hope)
- Vashti Bunyan – Iris’s Song For Us (Version Two) (From: Just Another Diamond)
- Bill Frisell – Nature’s Symphony (From: Gone, Just Like a Train)
- Steve Earle – Hillbilly Highway (From: Guitar Town)
- Nickel Creek – Helena (From: Why Should The Fire Die?)
- Ali Farka Touré – Cousins (From: Niafunké)
- Louis Armstrong – Muggles (From: Hot Fives & Hot Sevens)
- Steve Wonder – Ribbon in the Sky (From: Steve Wonder’s Original Musiquarium)
- Rhonda Vincent – Where No Cabins Fall (From: Back Home Again)
Yes, I have wide-ranging tastes. I listen to all sorts of music. You’ll hate some of it, probably. But I can also passionately talk about why I like each genre, each album, each track. I think that good taste in music has something to do with being able to identify what’s great about any style and committing to it even when (maybe: especially when) others don’t understand. I’m passionate about being eclectic. That either makes me some sort of musical renaissance man, or just plain annoying.
Currently reading
Posted on | September 16, 2008 | No Comments
Today’s Desert Island Disc: De-Phazz, Daily Lama
Posted on | September 14, 2008 | No Comments
De-Phazz is a revolving cast of singers and performers around German jazz/electronica producer Pit Baumgartner. For more than 10 years, De-Phazz has released an interesting and unique blend of jazz, German cabaret music, electronica, hip hop, reggae/dancehall and r’n'b. Baumgartner changes his lineup between albums, and there are very few singers who stay for more than a record or two. The music is sung mostly in English, but there are songs in German and French, too. Everything has a delightfully old-school, continental European touch: a 40s-style cabaret tune here, a 50s Brazilian-inflected German Schlager there. But there’s also some seriously funky, and not-German-at-all soul here: a track like ‘True North’ shows off Baumgartner’s production chops – chops that could grace any contemporary ‘big’ r’n'b artist’s album. The path he chooses, though, is quirkier than that. And it’s a very likable quirkiness, one I find myself returning to time and again. The sound is cultured and aware of the world’s musics in a way that British or American electronica isn’t. And that makes this first-grade pop music that doesn’t become dated.
Commented bookmarks for September 14th, 2008
Posted on | September 14, 2008 | No Comments
Bookmarks for the last few days:
- How To Change Autoplay Default Setting Or Option In Windows Vista – "When connecting devices, such as USB drives or inserting a CD or DVD into Window Vista, Autoplay will display and prompt you to select a default action or setting." Here's how to change it.
- The Home of Janet Klein and her Parlor Boys – Great sounding singer of 20s-style vocal music.
- School of Etheric Healing | Home – Kathy Roseborough is the most amazing spiritual counselor/reader. Visit her if you can.
Today’s Desert Island Disc: Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez, The Trouble With Humans
Posted on | September 13, 2008 | No Comments
Staying with the theme of how country music could be, here’s a favourite record by Chip Taylor and Carrie Rodriguez. Taylor is a singer-songwriter who emerged as a writer of hit songs in the 60s (‘Angel of the Morning’ and ‘Wild Thing,’ for example). Although he was born and grew up in New York, he had a strong predilection for country music from an early age, and that’s where he has now returned. Taylor met Carrie Rodriguez, an Oberlin and Berklee College of Music trained singer/songwriter/fiddler, during an in-store performance she gave at the South by Southwest Music Festival in 2001. The two now perform as a duo. Four albums and an EP into their journey together, their music is a low-key, intelligent kind of country/folk – not entirely dissimilar to, say, the Texas singer/songwriter Townes van Zandt. Anchored by Taylor’s strong rhythm guitar and harmonica and Rodriguez’ fiddle, the songs feature insightful lyrics and a kind of “old time country” feel. They also couldn’t be further removed from the Carrie Underwoods and Jessica Simpsons that seem to pass for country music today. Taylor and Rodriguez have perfectly matching voices – hers a strong cowgirl soprano with a Texas drawl, his a refined baritone with occasional carelessly slurred syllables and frequent moments where he speaks more than he sings. The lyrics are precise and emotionally spot-on throughout – this is material that’s carefully thought out, written to be performed by these two performers, meant to showcase their unique abilities. The Trouble With Humans is a beautiful record about grown-up relationships whose words often manage to encapsulate a core truth in the simplest way possible, yet in a way that we’ve never heard before. ‘Curves and Things’ and the title track should be prescribed material in English class, they’re so good.
keep looking »
Recent Posts on Changebowl, Carsten’s other blog- Playing around with Ontario electoral geography August 11, 2010
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- Facebook privacy & digital NIMBY July 19, 2010
- What we can learn from gear porn May 31, 2010
- Are creativity and intellectual property rights inversely proportional? May 27, 2010
- Comparing the tech giants May 2, 2010
- Corporate applications and content on smartphones March 21, 2010
About
Carsten Knoch
Attentive music listener, reader, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, software and services professional, vision enabler, instigator, product manager, marketer, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992
Teabowl is my blog about music, vegetarian food, books, art and life.
Teabowl's sister blog Changebowl discusses technology, community, design and business.
