Archives for the month of: August, 2007

David from Low Light Mixes has a very quiet ambient mix called There Will Come Soft Rains that I am really enjoying.

The music in this mix is a collection of tunes I thought would work well with the sound of rain. Most of the rain you hear in this mix was added by me. I hope I didn’t over do it. The listening environment has a lot to do with how the rain is perceived. While mixing in a quiet room I kept worrying about too many rain fx, but then listening in my office at work, I couldn’t hear half of the rain sounds. Hopefully I managed to strike the right balance.

Chas Smith – Santa Fe

Elegi – Despotiets Vesen

Fenton – Neon Giraffe

Max Richter – Harmonium & Time Passing

Julien Neto – Vi

Loscil – Steam

Loren Connors – Airs #6

Rameses III – Night Blossom Written in Sanskrit

Leo Abrams – Scene Memory

Daniel Lanois – Telco

Popol Vuh – Listen He Who Ventures

Rameses III – Theme Three

Lawrence – A Quiet Day

Max Richter – Fragment

Fascinating look at the small but growing market for catastrophe bonds by Michael Lewis in the NY Times Magazine.

Insurance companies, John Seo says, are charging customers too much — or avoiding their customers altogether — instead of sharing their risk with others, like himself, who would be glad to take it. New Orleans, as a result, is slower than it otherwise would be to rebuild. “The insurance companies are basically running away from society,” he says. “What they need to do is take the risk and kick it up to us.” They need to spread it as widely as possible across the investment world and, in the process, minimize the cost of insuring potential losses from catastrophes.

If this means that insurance will get cheaper in the future or that insurers will be able to cover places and situations that they don’t cover currently, I hope this market will grow- it’s in the best interests for almost all of us that this market grows.

W. David Marx, who writes both the not-to-be-missed Neomarxisme blog as well as the not-to-be-missed Clast blog, has a fascinating post on the NBR Forum about the impact of Japanese popular music and why Japanese musicians have never “made it big” outside of Japan. Marx studied the Japanese popular music market for his masters thesis at Keio so you are getting insightful commentary. I was going to write about why I felt that Japanese pop musicians would never cross over outside of Japan but Marx explains this a lot better than I could ever do.

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Very nice mix from Rob Heenan at Deeper.co.za.

ARTIST – TRACK (Remix) – LABEL

Westpark Unit - Blaxrotation Suite Mix – Farside

Karizma – Tech This Out - Hustle

Projam – Into The Groove – Running Back

Telepopmusik – Love Can Damage Your Health – Objectivity

Franck Roger – Rubycube – Real Tone

Figurines – Silver Ponds (Ben Watt dub) – Strange Feeling

Audio Soul Project – Community (Fish Go Deeper vocal) – NRK

Patrice Scott – Raw Fusion – Sistrum

Patrice Scott – Atmospheric Emotions – Sistrum

Vincenzo – We Wait, Right Here (Charles Webster dub) – Dessous

Westpark Unit – Audio Brand – Farside

Outlines – Listen To The Drums (Jazzanova rmx / Dixon edit) – Sonar Kollektiv

The Return – New Day (Reprise) – 4th Floor

Very nice profile of Haruki Murakami in Time.

Though he says he doesn’t want to talk about Japanese politics, he returns to the subject again and again throughout a 212-hour conversation, bushy eyebrows bobbing as he worries about “politicians who rewrite history,” and the growing tendency in Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s Japan to forget about wartime atrocities. Japanese history has always been in the background of his works — and his best novel, 1994′s Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, dissected the groupthink that led Japan into a catastrophic war — but now he wants to act. “Before, I wanted to be an expatriate writer,” he admits. “But I am a Japanese writer. This is my soil and these are my roots. You cannot get away from your country.”

Very glad to hear that Murakami’s politics seem similar to mine.