27 Tuesday May 2008
Posted in Books, Music, Photography
Wired.com have got a neat little article here about the Hotel Chelsea in NYC. This notorious venue perhaps most famous as the location where Sid Vicious allegedly killed his girlfriend Nancy Spungen, but also the home for a raft of other sordid stories (and a few less sordid such as Arthur C Clarke’s writing of 2001). The hotel is now the subject to a documentary film and photo essay book.
23 Friday May 2008
Posted in Music
Having only recently released his covers album – “On Your Sleeve“, Jesse Malin is now putting out another live album on June 3rd called “Mercury Retrograde“. The album is getting a limited CD release, and will be generally available through iTunes. The album has 16 tracks recorded Christmas last year at New York’s Mercury Lounge.
21 Wednesday May 2008
Posted in economy
The Telegraph a running a campaign with a petition to get the 2p price rise scheduled for October on fuels stopped, and to take actions to slow the rate that fuel prices are increasing. As you’ll have seen by my previous posts fuel costs are increasing at whole percentage points per month (rather than per year) at the moment. PetrolPrices.com have a range of figures reporting fuel prices as high as £1.37 per litre in parts of the country. Although the principal to slowly increase taxation on fuel to help fund public transport and encourage green activity maybe fun, the current rate of change is starting to make a notable impact on inflation, sufficiently so that it has the Mervyn King the head of the Bank of England has identified it as a factor on any number of occasions now.
The campaign includes a petition here which you may wish to sign.
del.icio.us tags: fuel, petrolPrices.com, deisel, prices, inflation, petrol, Telegraph, petition
21 Wednesday May 2008
Posted in Music, Technology
Peter Gabriel is a busy man, quietly helping music in the world of technology, with his work with OD2 (On Demand 2), We7 and now Bowers & Wilkins music club. Bowers & Wilkins are a audiophile speaker manufacturer and wither Peter have indicated that sharing music using MP3s results in a loss of quality. So they have set up a music club through which you can buy high quality music recordings (in the Apple’s loss less audio file format as used in the recording studio) recorded at Peter’s state of the art Real World recording studios. Although not explicitly stated, the indications are from the website’s information is that the music is DRM free. The club costs £33.95 per year for which you get a free album to download every month. You don’t get to choose the artist or album, but initial indications that the artists involved so far are both interesting and diverse in styles so within a year you should get to hear a couple of albums that will appeal to your musical palate, unless you’re exclusively a Spice Girls and Sugababes fan. So far albums have been recorded with blues artist Little Axe (aka Skip MacDonald), Grindhouse and Gwyneth Herbert.
20 Tuesday May 2008
Posted in Music
The next Peter Gabriel release isn’t looking like it will be a new solo album as hoped, but the compilation of a ‘recording week’ sessions over the last 15 years at his Real World recording studios in Box, Wiltshire, England. The album Big Blue Ball (so called because of who the Earth appears from space) gas got some teaser material here.
The recording weeks at the Realworld studios have been like super charged jam sessions with lots of Real World artists past and present such as Peter along with Joseph Arthur, Karl Wallinger and a host of other famous, and not so famous names.
Although we’d hope for a follow on to Up, Big Blue Ball should still prove to be very interesting listening given the names that will appear on the album. But like all Gabriel fans we’re wondering when he’ll get onto the next solo outing.
19 Monday May 2008
Posted in Music
Delays – Southampton Guildhall 17-05-08
We managed to catch the Delays performing their home town gig on Saturday. Some photos of taken with my camera phone are available on our flickr site – http://photos.mp3monster.org
19 Monday May 2008
Posted in Music
16 Friday May 2008
Posted in Music
16 Friday May 2008
Posted in Books
If you’re a music fan then you’ll probably have at least a passing familiarity with the author Nick Hornby who wrote Hi Fidelity (and for the real fans 31 Songs among others). Whilst writing his books he has also written some music articles for the New Yorker magazine, some of these articles can be found on the The New Yorker Archive.
15 Thursday May 2008
Posted in Technology
Google Reader has become my preferred RSS aggregator with its Outlookish and AJAX based interface is very nice to use. The only problem is when on the road, I can’t catch up with checking which feeds are worth further reading when I get online access. Until now that is, Google Code have released ReadAir using Adobe’s Air rich Internet access platform. Although the first release (0.1) doesn’t have all the shortcuts of the proper reader, ReadAir does have a nice clean (Macish) interface that is brilliantly responsive, and whilst online rapidly syncs with your google account.
The 
Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog 