The Signal Music Weblog

The Signal: EP051 - A final stand against the end of the year. A collection of eclectic sounds that may be pleasing to no one but me. Are you like me?

So what do you need to know? The music is available for a limited time, so download it when you're able. The image above is a detail from a larger work by the very talented Jason Chan, all copyright, etc. reserved by him. I'm hoping some day he makes a print available. You should be sure to take a look at the work on his site, it's amazing.

Notes are under the cut. Tracklisting is in the file's id3 tags. Questions or comments can be left below or emailed to whatever, so long as it ends in @signalstation.com.

Follow up:

1. Continuing my fascination with the sound of drifting inbetween radio stations.

2. I found the samples in this track to be exceptionally spooky. Figured they were from a horror movie or something, but it turns out they're from a videogame. A scary one, from the sound of it.

3. For those of you less fond of bass-heavy, electronic sounds, hold on... you're almost through it.

4. Found out about this track from a DJ who's on YouTube running through his record collection, showing where certain hip hop tracks sampled from. This lady was a protege of James Brown, apparently, and that's his band-- The JBs-- behind her.

5. Obligatory cross-genre cover.

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7. Folk music from Albania!

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9. I've had this album for years. It's a great chunk of pop perfection. One of those bands that you feel, if the right marketing people had gotten behind them, they could have been big.

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13. From one of my favorite soundtracks of all time. And by far, the funkiest. But the movie is to be avoided. Ick.

14. This is a band we've heard in a previous Signal mix, and I linked to some video of them performing live. They're from right across the water and I'd like to hear more of them. Just need to find the album for cheap.

So there's that!

So a few days ago, I managed to tip the entire computer set-up off the desk and on to the floor. In a Christmas miracle, just about everything kept working, including the monitor that landed on its head. But a casualty has been discovered: a portable hard drive I used to keep archived files and music. I've been thinking for the last few days, trying to remember what was on there that I'm actually going to miss.

Some DJ /rupture mixes. Lots of grime and dubstep tracks and mixes. Some spoken word comedy that I can still replace on CD once I have money again. But all in all, I think it could have been a lot worse.

And maybe some day, data recovery will be so affordable that I can have an expert get me my mp3s back. At present, it would probably run between $700 - $1200 to get the data back. Even if I had the money, I'd have to think long and hard about what was so irreplaceable on that drive that I'd need it back.

So back up your stuff, folks. And then back up your back-up. Nothing on computers is permanent, unfortunately. But through redundancy, you can make your data last longer than it wants to last.

Don't go setting any forest fires.

... I think that about covers it.