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)
