Look, I’m not a conspiracy-minded guy, but a carefully coordinated effort by the international punk intelligentsia to keep me in the dark is the only explanation I see for why it took 37 years for this incredible album to find its way to me. Nomeansno has been on my radar since the early ’90s, when they appeared on Alternative Tentacles’ Virus 100 compilation, and their committed a cappella cover of Dead Kennedys’ “Forward to Death”… See more →

It bothers me that I can’t remember exactly when and where I met Jack. I’m usually pretty good about that. It was probably 2007-ish, probably at SXSW or An Event Apart. I was going to a lot of conferences back then, meeting all kinds of web people from all over the place, and Jack was a web person, though we didn’t talk about the web all that much once we found other things we had… See more →

After finally completing the gargantuan task of manually adding metadata to thousands of my old tweets so they could be more integrated with the rest of my site, I wanted to keep the momentum going. So I turned to the last large personal data source that was still missing from my site: Last.fm, a service for tracking and sharing the music you listen to. As of a few days ago, I’ve been a Last.fm user… See more →

My first Tortoise show since I very belatedly learned that Doug McCombs’s distinctive secret weapon is the unassumingly mighty Fender Bass VI.

It’s still a sad mystery how the Philly screening(s?) of Eno, a groundbreaking documentary about famed musician and producer Brian Eno, came and went early last year without crossing my radar. I’ve met the filmmakers, Gary Hustwit and Brendan Dawes, on various occasions in the past and would have loved to say hi and get eyes on Brain One, the generative engine they built for the film, with hardware designed by Teenage Engineering. As the… See more →

None of the tunes and few of the faces and stories in this doc will be unfamiliar to thrash aficionados, but as someone who always felt a strong connection to the music and no connection at all to the beer-soaked mayhem that fueled it, I was most interested in the glancing references made to the adults in the room, some of whom were new to me. Metal Blade Records honcho Brian Slagel; Ruthie’s Inn proprietor/promoter… See more →