Cappacino! playlist for 2010-02-27

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 27 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Cappacino!, Show Notes

Maybe it’s nostalgia, maybe it’s the sudden removal of the brief windows of sunlight and return to dreary weather that I once loved (but has now become all to familiar)…

Whatever the reason, I reached back to songs I’ve played before — at least that have been played in the last 5 years I’ve been keeping records! Long songs, full of warm layers of musical exchange, just the right thing to engulf your mind for an hour or so..

  • Sanctuary by Encomiast from the album Havens. A planetful of static mixed with oceans of peace..
  • Proportions in Motion by Christopher Bissonette from the album Periphery. Some complain and say songs like this “don’t go anywhere”. I would simply ask: “Where did you think it was going to go?” Sometimes it is the journey, and not the destination, which is most important..
  • Echoes by Pink Floyd from the album Meddle. Pink Floyd is widely recognized for the sophisticated vocals, but for me the music has always had more impact. The first time I heard Echoes was an awakening for me, and my music collection was truly never the same again.

Cappacino! playlist for 2010-02-13

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 13 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Cappacino!, Show Notes

An ultra low-key start, leading up to an old favourite.. What is it about these scratchy, minimalist spaces that attracts me so?

  • Wing by Pan-American from the album Quiet City. First time play for this artist, although I am familiar with some of his work from Labradford. Something about glitchy static interspersed with drifting and droning notes just satisfies me some days… I suppose it might be a kind of pseudo-nostalgia for the period of records — although I never had any. Perhaps it is really just a rejection of the far-too-perfect down-to-the-note-corrected overproduced music that surrounds us today. This seems almost random, but not; glitchy, but with purpose and without correction. Accidentally on purpose..
  • Anomaly by Mystified from the album Skywatchers. This is how I always imagined space would sound like: swirling, near metallic-sounds with brighter, stronger sounds diving through; the essential, insistent, ever-changing hum of the universe, the music of the spheres..
  • Empire of Light by Friendsound from the album Joyride. Something I haven’t played in quite a while (as much as 4 years!), so I have little context for it. Sometimes, the greatest discoveries I make are within my disturbingly large collection.. There is some kind of deliberate wandering going on in this music, with nothing taking form. There is also something distinctly retro in the feel, with what feel like old-style synths and effects pioneered with tape-loops. Oh: and crickets.
  • Tubular Bells, Part 1 by Mike Oldfield from the album Tubular Bells. Ah, an old, familiar favourite. Long divorced from its Exorcist roots for me, this music just gives me jolts of nostalgia. I first remember being introduced to this album by a former teacher of mine (someone who later became a sort of mentor and friend), and being amazed at it. I had never heard anything like it, and it pretty much began the musical journey that culminated in this show.

Cappacino! playlist for 2010-01-30

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 30 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Cappacino!

I think the cold mornings deserve the slow climb to consciousness afforded by the first two of these tracks, followed by the energetic but still mellow power of the rest of them..

Don’t you?

  • 29 Palms by Tom Heasley from the album Desert Triptych.
  • Even (Out) + by Stars of the Lid from the album and Their Refinement of the Decline.
  • Betula Pendula by Carbon Based Lifeforms from the album World Of Sleepers.
  • Make by Do Make Say Think from the album Other Truths.
  • 20 09 by 35007 from the album Phase V.

Twitter is *not* a marketing platform — it’s a *medium*

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 25 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Geek, General, Random Journal

I think that the latest goldrush to Twitter by desperate sales and marketing teams is another example why they are desperate in the first place, at least with respect to newer media: they just don’t get it.

“New media” is the unfortunate umbrella word that has encapsulated this nebulous yet recognizably distinct set of communications tools. I call it unfortunate simply because besides being catchy, it really doesn’t have any inherent meaning. It holds the same level of informativeness as “modern art”, a term which is now totally meaningless except in a jargonized context. Anyway..

The important feature that seems to be common to all of these “new media” is that they are much more inter-communications media than “traditional” media. It’s not about pushing your message out to the masses, it’s about engaging a smaller yet more dedicated group in a conversation, providing a dialogue which is interacted with rather than a monologue which is consumed.

Twitter is even more exemplary of this “new media”, because it has very little distinction between “producers” and “consumers”: everyone is both, we are all “participants”.

So that’s why, when you stick your painfully ignorant mass-market message in my mass-communications medium, I get cranky.

If you see Twitter as a platform for advertising and consumer marketing, you have missed the point. I didn’t come to Twitter to be marketed to, I came to engage in conversation. I doubt most people came to Twitter to be the target of impersonal messages.

I didn’t buy a phone to receive cold sales calls and telemarketers. No one did. Is there any wonder that they aren’t received well?

I did buy cable television. (Well, I did once, but not anymore..) I expected commercial television to contain commercials — it was part of the deal when I signed up. I accepted it.

Not so with Twitter, my phone, my home mailbox, my email account…

So, am I telling all marketing types or product pushers to go take a leap? To find a hard structure and subject themselves to self-punishment? Well, I’m tempted to, but instead I’ll give them this advise: forget what you used elsewhere. It doesn’t work here, and can in fact make things worse for you. Be informative. Be personal. Be useful. Be responsive. Make people want to come to you. Make yourself attractive to be followed, and don’t abuse that.

TV gave us the ability to change the channel to get away from the marketing message — now we can completely silence you from view.

Get smart — or GTFO.

Cappacino! Playlist for 2010-01-16

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 16 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: Cappacino!, Show Notes

A bit of higher-energy, louder music to start off the new year.

  • Pashupatinath by Painkiller from the album Execution Ground (Disc One).
  • Sea of Tranquillity by 35007 from the album Sea of Tranquillity.
  • Midnight by Moksha Ensemble from the album Lady Sun.
  • The Lighthouse by Amon Tobin from the album Chaos Theory.
  • Lucifer Rising 5 by Bobby BeauSoleil from the album Lucifer Rising.
  • Sensorium by Delerium from the album Semantic Spaces.

Horror Night: Winter is Scary!

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 13 Jan 2010 | Tagged as: horror night

Another successful Horror Night! Tonight, my friend and I indulged in a little frigid film with Dead Snow and The Last Winter.

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Cappacino! Playlist for 2009-12-19: Merry Xmas

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 19 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Cappacino!

I love the Holiday season — for no rational reason, maybe not even a proper irrational one — but didn’t want to contribute to the regular din of the seasonal music. Instead, here’s a playlist with only incidental connections to the season.

Oh, and I break format slightly with the Stan Freberg selections, but it’s audio drama, and that’s one of my other passions.

  • Leaving the Hub by Deepspace from the album The Barometric Sea. Ok, not exactly a holiday song, but for some reason it feels right. When we eventually leave this planet, we’ll be creating all new notions of our traditions and practices. Maybe I’m also imagining Santa leaving his orbital..
  • Little Drummer Boy (Up The Khyber) by Hoodoo Gurus from the album Lump of Coal. Ok, a more traditional song here, but an instrumental version that I’ve always enjoyed. It might be a little too upbeat this early in the show, however..
  • sad dreams, dark trees by bloemfontein from the album the longer now (disc 2). I mentioned last week how I wanted the warm blankets for the cold weather, so here’s another one.
  • Christmas In Paradise by Paradise Lust from the album East Coast Christmas Sampler I. Another actually Christmas-themed song, although hardly so. This album was quite a welcome addition to my list of oddities.
  • Christmas Dragnet (Yuletide) part1 by Stan Freberg from the album The Very Best of Stan Freberg. If you can’t laugh during the holidays, then it doesn’t seem worth it. It’s not riotously funny, but it is rather clever and amusing.
  • Seasonal Seance by The Dry Heeves from the album East Coast Christmas Sampler I. You might blame Dickens for ghosts at Christmas, but the darkness and occasionally sinister, softening shape of snow definitely allows for it.
  • Wish Liszt (Toy Shop Madness) by Trans Siberian Orchestra from the album The Lost Christmas Eve . Perhaps my most explicitly Christmas-y tune, but also a very rockin’ version.
  • The Worst Hotel by Mike Dalager & The Enigmamas from the album An Even Scarier Solstice V2. These Cthulhu-centric alternative carols are always fun to throw in, because for most of us in this tradition, the musical structures are so familiar that we all do a double-take when we realize the lyrics.
  • all of this is true by Do Make Say Think from the album goodbye enemy airship the landlord is dead. Perhaps the most accidental inclusion in the list, as it was originally there just because I like the sound of it, and the start had a vaguely Christmas-y sound… Of course, the “Merry Christmas everybody!” at the end makes it more explicit..
  • Christmas Dragnet (Yuletide) part2 by Stan Freberg from the album The Very Best of Stan Freberg. The conclusion of the story. Keep in mind that Stan Freberg — I think — performs almost all the voices.
  • Mending Holes in a Wooden Heart by Shalabi Effect from the album Shalabi Effect. This time of year should be for heart-fixing, not heart-breaking..

Cappacino! playlist for 2009-12-12

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 12 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Cappacino!, Show Notes

I think it was the sudden plummet of the temperature combined with recent bouts of sick-induced sleeplessness which forced my mind this week into choosing some very warm, very long tracks.

Wrap yourself up in these blankets of calm, sit back and let the world vanish for a while… Nothing is really that urgent… The world will unfold as it should..

Peace..

  • Antarctica by Windy & Carl from the album Antarctica: Bliss Out V.2.
  • December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface by Stars of the Lid from the album and Their Refinement of the Decline.
  • ribbon by bloemfontein from the album the longer now (disc 2).

Cappacino! playlist for 2009-12-05

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 05 Dec 2009 | Tagged as: Cappacino!

I have this weird notion that, by playing music from my collection which primarily consists of the things I haven’t played on the show before, I’ll someday finish the show…

Given that my music collection is ever-expanding — and at a rate which far exceeds the time allotment of my show — this is folly!

Nonetheless, mostly new tracks this week. I select the tracks mostly in a pseudorandom way, first selecting the one or two very long tracks I would like to play, then assembling the rest of the hour inspired by those tracks. The inspiration can get changed a couple of times, resulting in a complete reshuffling of the tracks, or the development of a couple of shows in a row.

I’m not quite ready to start playing Christmas music for the season, so this is, instead, a very eclectic mix. It is largely intended to highlight the wide variety of very odd music that I like which fall under this vast umbrella of “beautiful, wordless music” that I like to showcase.

  • Wyoming by Shalabi Effect from the album Shalabi Effect. A track from one of the earliest CDs I ran into at the station, back when my musical education hadn’t really progressed outside of typical radio or the collections of a few of my mainstream friends. This track is one of those mind-blowingly bizarre compositions that, while I can’t listen to them for an hour, I love in somewhat smaller portions. It is, perhaps, the only time I think a bong has been used as a musical element in any of the music I’ve played — although I won’t swear to that.
  • Lucifer Rising 3 by Bobby BeauSoleil from the album Lucifer Rising. This albums song titles won’t win any awards (they are affectionately titles “1″ through “6″), but this album has been burning a whole in the back of my mind for a while. This song is a whole lot more gentle than you might imagine from the title..
  • Morning Of Balachaturdasi by Painkiller from the album Execution Ground (Disc One). This off-kilter, sometimes-screaming, sometimes deeply lurching song probably best describes many of my mornings. (I don’t like mornings.)
  • Nick’s Boogie by Pink Floyd from the album London 1966/1967. It’s not often that I can whip out a Pink Floyd track that very few will recognize — but any Floyd fan will probably get the impression that they’ve heard it before. The style is so distinctive, and yet the track doesn’t feel like a retread. In fact, it comes before a large part of the finished work we’ve all heard many times, so has a little more rawness to it.
  • Blind Windows/Countervail by Nash The Slash from the album Blind Windows. I only recently heard of this artist — although the source is lost to my mind. I immediately fell in love with this music, despite some of it being tinged with the coal-dust of the 80s. If I had discovered his music back then, what a different person I would have been! Although it’s arguable that I would not have appreciated it until very recently.
  • Pirates Of The Caribbean (Live in Miskolc) by Epica from the album The Classical Conspiracy. I’ve never been a huge metal fan, and the growly lyrics of a lot of death metal just drives me up a wall. Friends of mine have insisted that there are segments that I would definitely appreciate, however, and after running across this Epica album, I have to agree. The album is a live concert that they performed, apparently with their own orchestra, and only the first half of the album is made up of metalicized covers like this one. However, with these songs as a lead-in, the remaining symphonic metal (with lyrics, some of them growled) was much easier to absorb and appreciate.

Organizing Podcast Listening: “podcast” is not a (useful) genre

Posted by the Encaffeinated ONE on 30 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Brain Fart

I listen to a lot of podcasts. No, really.

Take all the podcasts you listen to.

And your buddy listens to.

Double that.

Add some more.

That’s what I get each day.

So, I’m very familiar with the problem I’m calling “organizing podcast listening”.

This isn’t a new problem, really… It happens in any medium where you have a sufficient size of possible items to consume. There are too many TV shows to watch them all, so you figure out the ones you really want to watch, figure out the most convenient times to watch them, catch up on others by TIVO’ing them or buying/borrowing the DVDs later. There are too many books to read, so you pick up some to put on your shelf to read, or make wishlists in Amazon or Chapters, make reading lists or otherwise organize them.

There’s a difference with all this new “digital format” media, of course: it’s much easier to get stuff from just about anywhere, and it’s also a lot cheaper to get it — blogs and podcasts being, for the most part, free to access.

So, it’s a 5 billion channel universe for podcasts, and there’s way too much on.

But wait! There aren’t any channels. There are, in fact, no ways to reliably organize your podcasts. Unhelpfully, the “genre” tag for podcasts is set to — of all things! — “podcast”!

It’s time we start thinking about how to change this, because it’s gotten out of hand. All my podcasts are scattered around in makeshift piles that I had to cobble together out of a combination of manual hackery and wishful thinking. Any resemblance between these piles and useful playlists are purely coincidental..

In fact, the only playlist types which tend to work at all are based on time. There are a number of podcasts which produce daily (or even hourly!), short podcasts. Another set of podcasts in the “medium” range of 10-20 minutes. Another set of dailies which run up to 45 minutes. Beyond that, the reliability tends to vanish.

Ah, but this really sucks! Nothing worse than subscribing to a pod-novel, get a little behind, and then one of the shorter episodes ends up on my medium range list — an episode from the middle of the book somewhere that has no place being listened to just yet.

What am I looking for? I’m looking for something akin to the radio experience, I think.

Radio works for a number of reasons, not least of which because it doesn’t require manual intervention for the listener to organize its content. It builds playlists for you, all you have to do is tune in.

Why not look to have this feature with podcasts? Just because they are a more “on demand” medium doesn’t mean that we have to constantly demand them manually, does it?

Don’t we have all kinds of fancy tools to help us organize things? Or rather, shouldn’t we?

A few years ago, Mevio (then Podshow) started doing something rather interesting: it built podcast channels — or rather, it was building a tool to allow its users to build their own podcast channels. I heard Adam Curry talk about it excitedly on The Daily Source Code, raving about how it had great tools for organizing your podcasts. With this tool, you could organize podcasts into a channel, and then tell it how to organize the channel: all unheard shows sequentially and grouped together, all unheard shows but in order they were released (interspersing podcasts based on release date), only the most recent episodes of each podcast in the channel, only the least recent unheard episode from each podcast, etc. The idea was, it creates a channel RSS feed, and you point your podcatcher at that instead of the individual feeds.

I drooled over this, even back a couple of years ago. When Podshow became Mevio, however, it seemed like this idea got scaled back and eventually neutered. It faced philosophical problems, too, because now you had to move podcasting subscription back behind the tool, rather than subscribing locally on your podcatcher. Podshow shows also had prominence, and were the most easily added to channels, which some felt was an unfair advantage. At the very least, it caused confusion when you added someone else’s feed to your channel at Podshow, and as it played havoc with podcast stats, too, because all the subscriptions would come from the same place — Podshow — rather than from each individual subscriber. If you did subscribe to the channel and to the podcast itself, there was no way to synchronize “marked as played” between the two tools. There were other flaws, but those are illustrative.

It was an interesting idea, one that at least attempted to move things with the backing of a (arguably) major player in podcasting, but suffered from a fatal flaw: it got in the way of things at least as much as it solved a problem. It was a thing between the user and their content, not beside them.

So, what to do?

We can go down this road again, building some fancy tool (web-based or local) which sits between the user and the podcasting world, helping them organize. Everybody either uses the tool and gets the benefits, or doesn’t use the tool and suffers.

Or we can try to do something a little more fundamental, but more broadly applicable. Something like tags.

(An analogous situation can be pointed to here with Twitter and TweetDeck. TweetDeck, I find, is a wonderful tool. It provides some great features beyond what Twitter has, such as a ReTweet button and lists. Twitter recently added these as fundamental features, so that every client can use them. I want the latter solution, not the former, here.)

Genres, as typically used in things like iTunes, are single categories into which an item goes. Anyone who has tried to figure out the genres for music knows how hard it to really pick something — one thing — that is appropriate.

Just try labelling Tom Waits some time.. Sheesh!

So, the “single-label” model of genre tagging seems inadequate for podcast, not only because one word is barely a good descriptor of anything, but also because there are more than one feature you need to describe.

There are at least two: the format of podcast, and the subject of the podcast.

Format is meant here to describe the structure of the podcast, how long it tends to be (not in minutes, but in fuzzy values like “short”, “medium” or “long”, “very long” **), how frequently it is released (”daily”, “weekly”, “monthly”, “randomly”) or what kind of thing it is (”serial”, “standalone”). The WEIRD Show is “long”, “weekly” and “standalone”. A podiobook is (typically) “medium”, “daily” and “serial”.

(** Of course, the length of a podcast is self-evident, so it might even be possible to leave that out and have it automatically interpreted by the clients..)

Subject is the more broad of the two features, meant as analogous to genre. The WEIRD Show is “news”, “weird”, “commentary”, “single host”.

Notice that each of these feature is not a single category, but rather a collection of (non-conflicting) tags. Tags has been used widely as perhaps the most flexible and meaningful way to label something, largely driven, I believe, from the blogging world.

So: if we can establish good practices of labeling podcasts with at least these two features — along with a healthy, semi-standard set of tags for each feature, not restrictive, but usefully suggestive and sufficiently large for most uses — what does that give us? It’s not a mechanism for organizing!

True, but it is a tool for organizing. Once this is established, then it will be possible to build smart lists in iTunes or the podcatcher of choice to take advantage of these tags and organize things better. Once we can say that podcast XYZ is “serial”, we can take action to only put episodes in a playlist in order, perhaps even only 1 per playlist. Once we can say that a podcast is “news”, we can put all “news” podcasts in the same list.

Note that there is an additional problem being addressed there: a rule that says “given X type podcast, I want (least recent/most recent) unheard Y episodes, in order”..

We need these tools if podcasting is truly to survive the incredible growth that it has undergone. Otherwise, it turns into a blurry, unmanageable mess. Television added its TIVO (or before that, the VCR and good schedule); the book industry added Wishlists to online sellers; music has always had a collection of (partially) useful genre descriptions, and radio.

What do you think? Would you do this as a podcaster? Would you as a podcast listener like to organize your podcast playing more easily? Do you have other ways you’d like to organize things?

I’m curious to see what the world can come up with…

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