Dead Man's Bones

album leaked!

reassurance of soul

via YouTube

hates technologies

never trust a brand new computer and its hard drive!!
It cracked this morning, and all my files for the thesis are lost now! Way to ruin your future

love his style

Dani Eglau on Lookbook.nu

und alle so: Buuhh

Begeisterung auch bei den "Gewinnern"

new purchases from last week

as well got a new Topshop Baxter Skinny

all from Ebay

I thought of myself more like a lone wolf...

“I thought of myself more like a lone wolf. But I’ve come to realize that I need friends, that I need people around me.”
- Kristofer Aström @ 99Matters.de

indiepassion

indiepassion is dead - long live we are the sleepy heads!
as well on Twitter

BTW found other blogs as well:

• Bolachas
• Neoteny
• The Siren Sound
  

we define ourselves-- or pride ourselves, or at least "express" ourselves-- via our skills in picking interesting things out of that cloud of options

could as well be said about the whole blogging thing, but originates from a well-written article on pitchfork which summarises the whole "indie" scene, and at the same time shows the affects of the internet on consuming music and its own progress. Nothing ever was written better about it:

So have you heard? Indie rock is the choice of a new generation! Allegedly! Don't let the exclamation points fool you into thinking I'm being sarcastic! Just try selling iPods or straight-leg jeans without knowing what fresh-faced guitar band is the hip new thing; just try telegraphing to audiences that a character on your television show is quite special and interesting. Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight, not often accused of lacking insight into the hearts of America's young, just told the world what her favorite records were this summer-- Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective among them.

[...]

No noise, no sudden moves, just a comfy, private bubble where everything tried to be so clever and cerebral and nice. The Internet only furthered this complaint. The amount of online chatter about music was on a huge upswing, and the sheer variety of viewpoints made it pretty hard not to feel insular and over-comfortable. The sudden availability of mp3s, of just about any sort, also meant there was a lot less excuse for not looking outside your own bubble. And besides, why should "indie"-- which had, at various points, been a joyously weird dumping ground for loads of misfit sounds-- suddenly become codified and narrow? Why should it camp out around music that, increasingly, looked rather settled, timid, and polite? Why should it be so damned nice?

[...]

You heard that complaint a lot back then, and at the start of the decade, certain trends seemed to present as antidotes. Personally, I was totally taken with new electro, which felt like everything mainstream indie was not-- trashy, party-focused, danceable, dumb and simple, vibrant and exciting. So was greasy garage rock, for some people, even in its least greasy, most popular incarnations; I can still remember a summer in Chicago where the nearest cafés all switched from playing post-rock to non-stop White Stripes. The Strokes seemed like a breath of fresh air, and people started leaping at snappy, upbeat, big-tent guitar bands as some kind of Return of Rock moment. This should tell you something: The Strokes were not exactly hard rockers, but in indie's 2001 they somehow came off as surly! Even the Hives presented, in indie-world, as a burst of potential excitement-- nothing against the Hives, who kicked out some killer singles, but this seems like evidence of some kind of very deep psychic need. This was the other kind of indie that got really popular: The snappy guitar bands extroverted enough to shoot for excitement and fans-- Interpol, Strokes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Franz Ferdinand, Bloc Party.

More importantly, those years saw indie types paying more attention to things outside the indie world-- this website's coverage, for instance, widened significantly-- and indie, in its thieving magpie way, started seizing at things, assimilating them. People embraced house acts, got excited about the possibility of "dance punk," dabbled with underground rap. At first, plenty of folks derided these trends as faddish, embarrassing, or somehow even elitist, like the people who went for them were trying to fool someone. But as far as I can tell, things changed. You can see it just visually: Neon t-shirts and skinny pants and fashion and "hipster"ism-- the stuff some indie kids recoiled from when new electro came along-- won out. Daft Punk and M.I.A. have big old parking spots reserved for them in the indie world. All sorts of new things wound up getting absorbed into indie's sensibility, because indie is a superb thief: It gets into things and then picks up their trappings. Electro, minimal techno, French house, the production on hip-hop and R&B singles-- at this point you probably don't think twice when an indie act grabs something from these genres; you don't think twice about whether the result is "indie" or not. It's assimilated, just another option.

[...]

"Indie" got ever more widely adopted as pop music for the "thoughtful" person-- the sophisticated boom-boom. And be honest: Why wouldn't loads of everyday non-music-geek people hear a good Iron & Wine song and think not just "hey, that's really pleasant," but also "hey, that's kinda different and interesting?" Why not, if you put it in front of them? The sheer fact that it was available made a huge difference. I'll spare you a long, old-mannish digression about the things I had to do, pre-Internet, to engage with the music I wanted to hear; it was a constant and hilariously archaic scramble. But these days, these things float past you everywhere, and I'm hard-pressed to think of many acts I'd recommend that you couldn't very casually, within two minutes of web-searching, check out right on your computer. More and more, we define ourselves-- or pride ourselves, or at least "express" ourselves-- via our skills in picking interesting things out of that cloud of options.
We probably shouldn't be surprised that somewhere in this process, "indie" completed its trip from being the province of freaks and geeks to something with cachet-- something that appeals to people's sense of themselves as discerning. Something that is, in some quarters, enough of a staple of "cool" that people begin to feel oppressed by it, to the point where some people's defense of liking it is no longer a defense against being weird, but a defense against being trendy.

via pitchfork.com

The stars get bright when you're close, and when you're too near they'll burn you

But it's not like I got anywhere else to go, anywhere better to spend my affections. So I go back to work, instead.