Happy anniversary Plurktown!

I think this day in history is a real milestone. Both for our town and for me. To survive in a twitterish environment like Plurk is an achievement that can only be reached by people who are more then avatars to each other. It’s probably only because of this that even I can still have a good time – I mean, considering that I’m not part of the t61 bubble anymore.

I won’t say that Plurk changed my life, but my life surely has changed while living in Plurktown. A year ago I used to spend a lot of time on the nets. I was still enjoying the fruits of our Max Bumps Awards project when I was invited to Plurk. I was still exchanging a lot of thoughts and opinions about The Sixtyone (t61). Still doing my best to get my little blue reel-to-reel recorder in the Listeners Top 100. Still making new friends with listeners and artists.

I even felt important enough to blog about t61 – what was I thinking! Man, at one point I considered starting a music community by myself (to be honest: this is still in the back of my mind).

But reality finally managed to catch my attention. In real life I was in between jobs, which is an understatement actually, because the last years seemed more like being in between lives. Simultaneously to the introduction of credits at t61 (an innovation that is more old school music industry alike then the founders might want to admit – if you ask me) I was forced to make up my mind about my future and that of my family.

We all know that there’s no life than real life, so it was time for me to move on in the analogue reality of being. My wife needed me because of chronic pains. My kids needed me because we’ve chosen to home school them and as a family we needed a better income. So last summer I’ve chosen to cut back online presence from aprox. 40 hours a week to around 10 hours a week. Nowadays most of this time I can hardly get myself to do anything else than listening to music at The Hype Machine. But sometimes there’s still some energy left to hang out with my friends at Plurk, who I appreciate more than they might know.

Therefore it is my wish that Plurktown will survive at least another year of digital craziness and that overwhelming, hardly to digest amount of textual, visual and aural information that’s part of it. And that I’m still a part of the community, but knowing my friends (who are too far away to be called friends, but also too near to be called strangers) that won’t be a difficult quest at all.

Play Letters From A Voyage To Sweden by Cats On Fire (as long as it’s available)

Music to avoid memories

Music is my medicine. A cliché, I know. Still it really helps to set my stormy, over stimulated mind at ease. Most healing effect is gained while singing along with the tune. Although it can hardly be called singing. It’s more howling what I do but I don’t care if it’s too loud or way out of tune. The howling comes from deep within and I guess that’s why it’s so effective. I refer to the lyrics in Elvis Costello’s Poor Fractured Atlas for that matter: “He’s screaming some words at the top of his lungs, until he begins to feel younger.”

Although I usually don’t bother trying to keep up with the fast evolving society around me, when it comes to music, I’m always looking out for the new, the fresh and the unheard songs. A vast amount of these items find its way from several sharing sites to my headset and I undoubtedly miss out on a lot of the good tracks, but I don’t mind. My goal is not to keep up with the music industry, but to avoid memories. So in the end I always try to find music I haven’t heard before, only to avoid being haunted by the past when listening to music I became too familiar with.

I give you two sites that are great to discover new music. The first is the one that I think I have a hate/love relationship with. I used to be quite addicted to The Sixtyone and probably became a little too involved with it. The more the site changed into what it is now, the less I liked hanging out there. But it helped me discover hundreds of great songs by independent artists in all kinds of genres, plus I made some great musical friends, both artists and listeners. So I guess I owe the site a lot of credit. I think they’re still the best in their kind.

The other one is The Hype Machine. What it does (I explain this in case you haven’t heard about them yet) is collect links to music from a awful lot of blogs that are dedicated to indie music in all it’s forms. Although you can follow other listeners, it’s tough, if not impossible to make friends. Not to mention the impossibility to get in touch with artists through Hypem, which is easy at The Sixtyone.

What both sites have in common, is that every newly added song gets its one minute of fame. Whether or not it stays with that depends on if people like the song enough to ‘heart’ it. The more people vote for it, the more airplay a song gets. If you’re an artist looking for a test panel, I suggest you upload a song to The Sixtyone, but if you want you’re band to become a hype, try to get your song featured on some of the blogs connected to The Hype Machine.

Play New Room by Frenemies (as long as it’s available)

The Perfect Nanny shredded and glued together

The Perfect Nanny, sung by Karen Dotrice and Mathew Garber (Jane and Michael Banks) Is probably my favorite song from Mary Poppins. If it isn’t, than the ingeniously edited light house version (it actually became a whole new song) by Pogo most certainly is. It goes by the title Expialidocious and you really should give it a listen. At the end of the song you can even hear the delightful voice of Julie Andrews.

If you loved it, you can find more songs at Pogo’s last.fm site.