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I’ve been listening to Imogen for a few years now, and have always enjoyed her work immensely. Last night, though, I stumbled upon this video of her performing “Just for Now” live. My respect for her jumped up several orders of magnitude. In this track, she uses an Electrix repeater module to record and loop each individual part of the song – she makes it look incredibly easy. I’ve tried this sort of thing before with guitar, and believe me – it’s incredibly difficult to pull off.

Enjoy!

…of DRMed digital music distribution.

In case you haven’t already heard, Apple announced today that they will start distributing EMI’s collection sans DRM.  This is really great news.  Until now, I’ve completely avoided purchasing music from the iTMS due to the DRM restrictions they impose.  Yes, you *could* do the burn/re-rip dance to get rid of the DRM, but then the music has to go through two rounds of lossy compression, thereby reducing its quality below my threshold of acceptability.  Going forward, though, I’ll surely consider purchasing EMI records from the iTMS.

First…whomever decided to change Daylight Savings Time (cough, cough, ***head_jerk_towards_washington***) needs to have a stern talking to. I’ve always thought that DST was stupid, and now added on top of that is the fact that poor Sysadmins like myself all across the country are having to scramble to get their systems patched to reflect the changes. Ugh.

Second…because someone at the RIAA didn’t think they were making enough money already, they recently convinced the Copyright Royalty Board to push through a drastic increase the royalty rates for small independent internet radio stations. This increase, which amount to over 100% of the annual revenues of most internet radio stations, will undoubtably serve to kill off all current internet radio stations as well as prevent future stations from starting. Bill Goldsmith, the owner/operator of one of the stations I’ve been listening to for 5 years now, Radio Paradise, has taken the helm on this issue and is advocating on behalf of the hundreds of other internet radio stations that will be affected by this change. Bill has posted a blog entry, where he, in a very detailed post, outlines the details of this decision. It’s not a short entry, but it’s well worth your time. Please go read it.

After you’ve read the synopsis, do something about it. Bill laid out several recommendations as to what you can do to help prevent this. Those recommendations are here. Me personally? I signed the online petition, sent emails to my representatives (Coleman, Klobuchar, and Bachmann), and sent them all snail-mail letters this morning. If you care at all about this, I’d really appreciate if you’d take a few minutes to do the same. The RIAA has pushed consumers/musicians around enough…it’s time to play hardball.

So I’ve had this CD on my Amazon.com wishlist for many months. As you can see, it’s an import from Britain, and as such, is quite expensive. $35 expensive. For one CD. Hence the reason it’s been on my wish list for so long – I just couldn’t bring myself to pay that much for one CD.

This afternoon, I happened to glance at the reviews of the CD that are posted on amazon. One of the reviewers recommended purchasing the disc from the British Amazon site, amazon.co.uk. So I check it out. The CD was available there for £0.14. Yah – that’s $0.27. Add international shipping onto that, and my grand total was about $6.50. It’s being shipped airmail and should arrive late the first week of February. W00t.

Last night we were privileged with the opportunity of seeing Nickel Creek perform in the Great Hall at Bethel. I’ve been listening to Nickel Creek for a crazy long time, and this was my first time seeing them play live. Wow. What a killer concert. Sara, Sean, and Chris were joined by an upright bassist for the evening. They played a great variety of tunes from their three CDs as well as a few unexpected covers as well. Here’s the show setlist (thanks to Chasman on the NC forums for this):

1. Why Should the Fire Die
2. Scotch and Chocolate
3. This Side
4. Reasons Why
5. Ode To a Butterfly
6. Jealous of the Moon
7. Best of Luck
8. House of Tom/Short People/Bach Interlude/House of Tom
9. When in Rome
10. Somebody More Like You
11. First and Last Waltz/Helena
12. Nice Dream (Radiohead cover)
13. Smoothie Song
14. Anthony
15. Toxic (Britney Spears cover)
16. Stumptown
17. Fox/Fiddle Tunes, (with Mark clogging)/Fox

…followed by these six encore numbers:

1. Chris: Solo, Violin Sonata in G moll (J.S. Bach)
2. Sara: Solo, Pony, (Tom Waits cover)
3. Sean: Solo, solo tune – title unk.
4. Mark: Solo, The Falling Waters of Arden (from his new solo cd)
5. All: Dont Fall In Love with a Drifter (Jimmy Martin cover)
6. All: When You Come Back Down

From now on, I’ll be keeping a close watch on NC’s tour schedule and will jump at the chance to see them again. If you’re interested in reading more about the concert, a few reviews are posted over in the NC forums. I also took a few pictures…there up here. Sorry about the poor quality – I realized I didn’t have my SLR set to spot metering like I should have…as a result, the shutter speeds were much longer than they needed to be, causing some blurring in the pictures. Oh well…lesson learned I guess. I normally would have caught this, but I had turned off the LCD on my camera as to not disturb the people sitting behind me.