A Year of Music

I take an unseemly amount of pride in the breadth of my eclecticism, as well as my fondness for an inordinate amount of crap that nobody else has heard of. At the same time, I recognize that as music weirdoes go I’m actually pretty middle of the road. For example, I have nothing on the crew behind Mutant Sounds, a group MP3 blog. Of the MP3 blogs I read, they’re the ones I think are least likely to ever run into trouble with the law, because of the total obscurity of the music they post. Every so often they’ll post something I’ve heard of (a Brad Laner (Medicine, Electric Company, Savage Republic) project, the utterly fabulous Haruomi Hosono (Yellow Magic Orchestra) & Tadanori Yokoo record I’m listening to right now, the ill-starred final releases from Hirsche Nicht Aufs Sofa, a Wobbly 3” I could have bought at Aquarius if I’d been on the ball), but for the most part these are releases copied from old private pressings, out-of-print CDs from tiny indies in random corners of the globe, and more than occasionally from cassettes, which were the lingua franca of the international music underground before CD-Rs took over.

The posters are driven by a genuine love of the music they post, and while there’s no way I can keep up with the endless flood of their posts, the quality of the stuff I do recognize or have downloaded is exceptionally high. It can be a little intimidating to be confronted with so much completely unfamiliar stuff, but they’re conscientious about providing enough context to help you figure out if it’s your kind of thing or not, and just blindly downloading is likely to get you something good more often than not. Check them out. They’re not out to rip anyone off and they have amazing taste.