Tom’s End of 2009 indie music mix

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Thomas Purves

Nuit Blanche

Just under the wire for 2009, I bring you my last of my 2009 music mixes. As always, this is a sort of autobiographical best-of mix featuring the songs that made the biggest rotation in my itunes since the last 6 months or so when I last published a mix. Some great tunes on here. But not only that, this mix also features redoubtably one the best lyrics of the year “back up – because the laser beam gets so hot”. Who hasn’t always wanted to say that?

Pictured here Air Heart performing at the Gladstone Nuit Blanche 2009. One MC, one DJ and one PS2 voice-amp controller.

Track listing:

1 Port Royal the photoshopped prince
2 You Say Party! We Say Die! Glory
3 Airheart Mr. Lonely
4 fun. All The Pretty Girls
5 The xx Crystalised
6 The Dutchess And The Duke Hands
7 Fresh Espresso The Lazer Beams
8 Washed Out New Theory
9 Hooray for Earth Comfortable, Comparable
10 Memory Tapes Bicycle
11 Headless Heroes North Wind Blew South
12 Taken By Trees To Lose Someone
13 ZAZA Sooner or Later
14 The xx Islands
15 fun. Be Calm
16 Lightning Dust Never Seen
17 You Say Party! We Say Die! Heart of Gold

 
Note, I downmixed these mp3s slightly to save on file/bandwidth size. If you like em, you should go support the artists by buying the originals in their full glory from itunes/emusic/band-website etc.

but meanwhile, enjoy!

DOWNLOAD as one big-ass zip file of individual files
DOWNLOAD as one single 84 minute mixed-together-fancy mp3 file

This post made possible by: itunes, winamp, emusic, last.fm, mixmeister fusion, cool edit, textpad, notepad, google spreadsheets, filezilla, photoshop, firefox and microsoft windows7

Posted in Archive, music, podcast | 2 Comments

Fax machines, and PDFs, kicking off the deadmedia watch for 2010

Posted on December 29, 2009 by Thomas Purves

fax-smash

The fax machine was obsolete 15 years ago. When someone says “fax it to me,” I always feel like I’m being punk’d. A fax machine is nothing more than a printer, scanner and an obsolete analog mode that work together to waste time, money, paper and electricity. Documents that are faxed usually start out in digital format. So, to send a digital document digitally, it must be converted into a paper format. You insert the document, and the fax machine scans it back into a digital format. It then uses an analog modem from 1993 to convert the digital image into sounds!

LINK: Mike Elgan: 10 obsolete technologies to kill in 2010 – Make the world a better place. Just say no to dumb tech.

When an old media that fade away, sometimes we miss it’s old flavours, it’s eccentricities. Sometimes we don’t. I’m not going to miss fax machines. Frustrating, stupid machines from day one I’d argue. And if there’s (slightly) newer media that fax machines most remind me of it’s gotta be PDF. Damn PDFs are annoying. Take a perfectly good digital document, convert it into a clumsy, uneditable, super-slow to render and a painful to read on a digital screen format just so it can look like a printed page. PDFs are a great way to take all the disadvantages of a printed page (like arbitrary page sizes and header and footer margins between every page of content), almost none of the advantages (like the adequate visible resolution for reading the damn thing) and perpetuating them forever in the digital age. Worst of all, you can’t even take a PDF out back and cathartically beat it down office-space style in the back alley if it’s really getting you down.

Damn you adobe.

photocredits: “analog_chainsaw” on flickr

Posted in Archive, dead media, deadmedia | 10 Comments

It’s back! the 2009 Indie-punk-ass Christmas Mix

Posted on December 21, 2009 by Thomas Purves

nancy-and-T

Long time readers will know what time of year it is. It’s indie-punk-ass music mix time of the year on thomaspurves.com!

Here you go kids, this year’s 2009 compilation. Enjoy =)

01 Stars Fairytale Of New York
02 Barenaked Ladies God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
03 Sufjan Stevens Get Behind Me, Santa!
04 Ramones Merry Christmas
05 No doubt Oi to the World
06 sex pistols 12 days of christmas punk
07 the vandals A gun for christmas
08 Eels everything s gonna be cool this christmas
09 Twisted Sister Oh Come All Ye Faithful
10 The Raveonettes The Christmas Song
11 the knife Reindeer
12 bright eyes little drummer boy
13 Saturday Looks Good To Me Christmas Blues
14 Rufus Wainwright Spotlight on Christmas
15 Casiotone for the painfully alone cold white christmas
16 Sufjan Stevens O Holy Night
17 Aimee Mann God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
18 The pippettes white christmas
19 the go team the ice storm
20 The Bicycles It’s A Magic Christmas new for 2009
21 Bob Dylan It must be Santa new for 2009
22 Pogues Fairytale Of New York
23 Yeah yeah yeahs all i want for christmas
24 Tom Waits (bonus track) Silent Night A Christmas Card from a hooker in St Paul

Link: Tom’s 2009 Christmas mix (105MB)

Instructions, unpack the zip file to a directory where you keep your music and load up the .m3u playlist file to your media player of choice.

Of course, the Christmas video of the year has to go to the year’s creepiest santa Bob Dylan:

Honorable mention for new tracks year goes to “Do they know it’s Christmas Time” by just about everyone in indie rock. Not include here because you are supposed to buy it for charityand because I’m not entirely sure it’s a good song but you can judge for yourself.

Posted in Archive, music, podcast | 2 Comments