Since i've been neglecting my blog here, I have added my twitter feed to the right side of the site. So even when I'm away, you can see some of my randomness.

yay Sox
boo Mets
job is killing me at the moment
enjoying the rainy cooler weather
hockey season has begun again

Got to see Ravi and Jason as The VLA came to NYC to play some shows. It was quite awesome to see them play and bring back the days of HUGE. Now they are back in Los Angeles. If you watch the FX show "Damages", they did the title track for the show.

Because after all of this time... it still makes me laugh.

Electric 6: Danger, High Voltage

Apparently Ravi and Jason no longer need to convince the world they are Huge... first they move to L.A. --- or Jason moves, Ravi prefers being bi (coastal). Now they have changed their name to The VLA and have a new EP on the way. Check out Terra Firma which plays on their homepage. Their sound matures more and more. They had me at Huge.

So I was watching The Office about a week ago and Dwight was talking to Pam about some Russian website that sold mp3s for like $0.10 each. Turns out, it wasn't made up.

allofmp3.com sells digital music for an average of $0.10/song, or a little over $1/album. The actual cost varies slightly based on the length of the songs and what encoding you choose. Yes... you choose the encoding type. They offer the choice of MPEG-1 Layer 3 - MP3, Windows Media Audio - WMA, Ogg Vorbis - OGG, MusePack - MPC, MPEG-4 AAC, and choice of bitrate as well. Most of the newer selections also offer you a choice of lossless encoding as well giving you larger filesizes but audio quality that matched the original CD. Lossless encoding is not available for many older releases.

The selection, while not rivaling iTunes, is certainly impressive. Browsing various genres, I was able to find 9 of 10 artists I was looking for without trying to be too obscure (from DJ Sasha to Dave Matthews to Fela Kuti even some single releases and remixes) and no, they aren't all in Russian...

Ravi and Jason were interviewed about Huge on laist.com (the L.A. version of Gothamist). I tried unsuccessfully a while ago to get them included as part of the Gothamist sponsored Moveable Hype series of shows in NYC. But they're doing quite well out in L.A.

It's been a while since I've seen them live... since they were in NYC in fact. Every time I'm out in LA, it's between shows for them. I did manage to see Jason out there last visit which was fun though. Weird, even though Ravi is stil based in NYC and I talk to him on the phone alot, I don't remmeber the last time I actually hung out with him.

Check out the Huge interview
Visit the Huge website at www.hugeband.com

Today was doughnut day at work... and I got tickets to see Kraftwerk June 1st.

huge fans are getting restless... I'm almost ready to roll out the bare bones version...

preview much will be broken for sure.

Mac Rumors: Billboard Top 100 Now Includes Downloads
This is just another sign that times have officially changed. Of course, the digital charts will be flawed in that they have no way of accurately measuring who is secretly downloading Kelly Clarkson on Kazaa or Bittorrent.

A little late to the game, I have finally integrated myself with Audioscrobbler. The site builds a profile of the music you listen to (provided by free plugins for almost every player out there, iTunes for me). And it now allows me to provide a list of the music I am listening to right now in my "listening to..." block on the right. Not like anyone gives a crap what I listen to.

A bit of bad news/good news. John Peel, the enormously influential DJ who helped the world see such great bands as Joy, Division, New Order, The Smiths, and countless others, passed away this weekend of a heart attack. He was as much of a legend as the bands and artists he helped create and promote.

Unable to smoothly segway to the next point... I was overwhelmed last night when I saw that Depeche Mode had released a remix album. Currently available as a limited edition 3 cd set. Depeche Mode has always been a favorite of mine since both my brother and sister introduced me to them. But besides their creative use of synthesizers and the deep puncturing lyrics Dave Gahan, they had a wonderful talent for remixing their music. I always went to Tower Records to get their 12" singles as soon as they came out because they were loaded with intricate reinterperetations of themselves. Of particular note were the 3 seperate releases of Master & Servant and a version of Everything Counts that would later be included on their next release and help fuel the popularity of the song.

They continue to have an amazing array of remixes of their more current releases as well calling upon Kruder and Dorfmeister, Underworld, Air, DJ Shadow, Renegade Soundwave, Dave Clarke, Timo Maas, and more. Anyway, if you like Depeche Mode but haven't experienced their remixes, check them out now.