I’ve been pretty dormant in my music for the past few years, but I have been working on two two mixes in my sparse spare time: Tes Lyric, a weird blend of electronica, classical and rock, and Stage Superior, a progressive house mix. They’re up on my music page now; enjoy!

For all the oldskool Amiga demoscene folks out there, I’ve weirdly had a bit of nostalgia for the classic Jesus on E’s demo from 1992. It was was understandably not featured on Mindcandy Volume 2, although there are videos of it on the Web floating around. It’s somewhat amusing that the MPEG-4 video is around 120MB when the original version fit on two 880k disks.

So, I chopped up the MPEG-4 videos I found floating around on the Web, and exported the soundtrack to MPEG-4 audio files so I could throw them onto my iPod. The tracks are available at:

• http://www.algorithm.com.au/downloads/music/Jesus_on_Es-MP4.zip

If you’re into oldskool techno and rave tracks from the ~1992 era, you can’t beat this stuff. (And if you don’t like oldskool techno and rave tracks, the soundtrack will probably send you completely insane). Have the appropriate amount of fun!

Holy crap, this is excellent music. It’s up there with Yoko Kanno’s fantastic work for Cowboy Bebop and Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and as interesting as Cliff Martinez’s movie soundtracks for Solaris, Narc, and others. No cheesy John Williams stuff here. (Seriously, the themes from Star Wars, Superman and Indiana Jones could all blend into each other and you just wouldn’t notice.)

The Battlestar Galactica soundtrack has also made me fall in love with baroque music again. Oooh, those sweet sweet violas and reeds…

Canadia’s largest independent record label is litigating against the RIAA on behalf of consumers: schweet. (I personally like Nettwerk since they’re the home of some of my favourite artists: Sarah McLachlan, Dido, and the Barenaked Ladies.)

It’s been about a month now since I received an email about this, and I haven’t seen it mentioned anywhere else yet. If you’re into electronica/dance music and have been looking for a decent online music store to buy tracks from, check out godskitchendigital. The name is slightly misleading: they thankfully sell lots of stuff, not just God’s Kitchen CDs. Some interesting bits of information about the site:

• They have a pretty good selection of electronica available, and carry quite a few tracks that aren’t available even at the iTunes music store. I managed to track down some Satoshi Tomiie tracks there that I haven’t seen anywhere else.
• The music file quality is very impressive: pick and choose between 320k (LAME-encoded) MP3, 192k M4A (MPEG-4 audio), or, for another 50c, get the .WAV files instead (!). Note that they have a weird system where if you order a .WAV, you get shipped it on a CD rather than just downloading it. No, I don’t understand that either, but it’s nice to see they offer it as an option. For all the iPod owners, the 192k M4A files work perfectly fine in both iTunes + iPod.
• 100% Flash interface. An interesting idea, though I’m sure it’s going to annoy the living hell out of Mac users, where the Flash plugin is unexplainably slow as molasses.
• The big feature: no DRM. None. At all. If you download a 320k MP3, that’s exactly what you get: a 320k MP3, with properly formatted ID3 tags. No weirdass player you have to use, no iTunes music store-style M4P protected media. This is real nice indeed; I wonder what their legal department had to do to pull this one off.

So, if you like electronica, go check it out. The all-Flash interface might not be that appealing (especially for Mac users), but the selection is good, the price is reasonable (especially for electronic music, where you tend to want singles/EPs more than albums) and the downloads are excellent quality. Oh yeah, and no DRM!