The Blog of Tom

Just realised that I haven’t plugged the latest DJ Rubbish album, which is available now from Amazon.co.uk. It’s his best yet - somehow managing to be simultaneously more coherent and more insane. No mean feat.

Via Wired.com

I seem to be posting a lot of music links lately. Anyway, the excellent Soul Sides blog has posted some rare remixes of tracks from Masta Ace’s early 90s master (masta?) piece Slaughtahouse. The first uses samples from Minnie Ripperton’s Les Fleurs, which is great. The second isn’t so good, but still worth a listen.

Look at that cover! “Cheap and nasty” hardly does it justice. Anyway, go here to download the tracks.

Oh, and Jonny - I would like my original copy of Slaughtahouse back some time.

The Brian Jacket Letdown have a new single out called “Eat Your Friends”. Available on iTunes and other e-music retailers. Go get it.

I’m currently going through a period of nostalgic rediscovery of early 90s hip-hop and for some reason The Goats’ Tricks of the Shade album came to mind while I was feeling frisky on Amazon. Shocked to discover that it’s been deleted and is now selling for around twenty quid a pop, I discovered after a little research that it was available for download directly from the Goats’ own website. It costs $12.50 through PayPal (which translates to about £6 at the time of writing) and it goes directly to the band themselves. Go to The Goats official website, plonk your money on the counter and download a weird melange of freaks, beats and satire. Nice.

As well as revamping their website, The Brian Jacket Letdown have also released the first in what will hopefully be a long series of podcasts. This one features all manner of Brazilian wax, with obscure Samba and psychedelic rock a-plenty.

Just a quick nod to Au Revoir Simone, a trio of Brooklyn girls who make lovely songs with old keyboards. The site has an MP3 download of “Backyards Of Our Neighbours” and you can hear more songs on their Myspace page. (I never thought I’d post a link to Myspace, as the whole experience just makes me feel old and befuddled. Still, that’s my problem, not yours. Or theirs.)

Their 2nd album, The Bird of Music is released on February 19th in Europe and the UK.

While trawling the net for weirdness I came across the work of Apocalyptica, a four-piece cello orchestra who cover songs by Metallica, Pantera and other sweaty metal bands. Sounds like a dreadful idea, but it works rather well. Their version of Nothing Else Matters is quite gorgeous and comes highly recommended. Use the Google method for Apocalyptica and look toward the bottom of the first page of search results.

(I don’t want to post a direct link for fear that Lars Ulrich will come round and bash my head in with his drumsticks. I know it’s only a cover version, but still - why run the risk?)

Or, you know, you could actually buy a CD. Just ask at your local crazy-batshit music retailer.

Lifehacker has a good tip for searching for MP3s online. Simply copy and paste the following code into Google’s search box and replace the artist name in quotes (in this case Nirvana) with whoever it is you’re looking for.

-inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3) “Nirvana”

Google then searches the web for MP3s and Windows Media files on web servers around the world - all available for you to download. For nish.