award tour

Just made some more changes to mux.awardtour. I added my favorite track from Sigur Ros’ latest album, Med Sud I Eyrum Vid Spilum Endalaust, entitled Inni Mer Syngur Vitleysingur. It’s a gorgeous song and I don’t know why I didn’t include it in the original muxtape.

Second is another song by Miniature Tigers entitled Wolf. This one is very radio-friendly. It has the ring of Weezer meets Phantom Planet. Be forewarned, if you listen to this song you’ll probably find yourself singing “Everybody’s looking at you like they want you” for the rest of the day.

I was complaining the other day that I could make a very good muxtape right now but since muxtape was taken down by the RIAA that wasn’t going to happen. I had heard about opentape and this morning I thought I’d give it a try. Installation had 2 steps. One, unzipping a file on my web server and, two, configuring my 1and1 server to work with php5. After that, it works exactly like muxtape. I think I might make some changes to the app so it can include links to band websites (if you care to hear more by a band).

So, I give you mux.awardtour.net. A few comments on the choices…

• I thought the tuning fuzz noise that starts About to Walk was an appropriate opening song.
• Although it’s a year later, I still have the Rural Alberta Advantage in heavy rotation.
• I saw Hooded Fang open for The Rural Alberta Advantage the other day. They looked like they were all about 18 years old. I bought their $5 EP and Land of Giants is definitely their best track.
• I realize the RFK audio track is completely out of place but it’s so damn good more people should hear it.

I just wanted to make a quick comment about CBC Radio. The comment is that it is awesome. I drove from Toronto to Ottawa today and decided to see what makes the Sunday morning program. First up was Sunday Edition which had this amazing piece about Canada’s new “Guest Worker” visa program which basically brings people into Canada to do unskilled labour that no one in Canada will do (like work at Wendy’s or work on farms). Next up was The Late Show which profiled a late author named Martha Blum who resided in Saskatoon and was a Holocaust survivor. The piece on her was phenomenal. Next, Vinyl Cafe did a show about covers which included crazy stuff like William Shatner’s Mister Tambourine Man, some standards like Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah, but the one that really surprised me was a cover of the BeeGee’s Islands in the Stream by The Constantines & Feist. The Debaters was pretty good and then Wiretap was fantastic (I especially loved the bit about Josh trying to “rid himself of his material possessions and hit the road, wandering-hobo style”).

I really wanted to point this out because radio in Toronto is genuinely atrocious and it’s so nice to see that the CBC has such diverse, entertaining, and quality programming.