nemof.org blog

The amazing Beardyman.

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Props to Thom on The Eraser, been listening this weekend and it is truly a marvel. Download, listen, buy.

Just listening to Underworlds latest offering "i’m a big sister, and i’m a girl, and i’m a princess, and this is my horse", the third in their Riverrun project. Available for download from their online shop underworldlive.com along with free downloadable content, this 30 minute long mix enters a dub phat phase of melancholy, like it’s tickled dubnobass with sticky fingers and gone off to play.

For many years now Underworld has been my favourite band, turned onto them first by my sister I have watched as they moved through many spirals of evolution into their current form. Truly, their older stuff was their heyday, but without a doubt also they are producing work that is exciting and fulfilling to listen to.

I remember back in the days of dubnobasswithmyheadman I used to listen to their albums like a broken record, and funnily I find myself sampling their fare rarely these days; However Underworld are not just the music they made but every tune I have ever listened to which they pimped to me. Nothing has inspired my love of music more than listening to and being influenced by their auditory hallucinations, divinations and abandoned melodies. A band of words most sublime, their work is a culmination of design, meandering and lost places made found.

‘i’m a big sister’ features Hyde’s dallow voice, echoing between bars and chasing the beats as it wanders. What I have always found most fascinating about Underworld’s work is the way they associate words and images, if you look at the title of their latest work there is something both melodious and yet unsettling in it, and this is case for many of their works. Words loosely strung together that hang like limbs connected, touching yet unsure where they fit. Perhaps as if reassembled with no prior knowledge of the complete whole.

I’m already a big, big fan of last.fm/audioscrobbler as it stands, but I recently downloaded the last.fm music player and I have to say this is the most awesome thing ever! To quickly explain, last.fm records your music listening habits with a plugin you install for winamp/itunes/ and uploads them to a personal profile so others can see what you listen to, and you can get recommendations based on what you have already listened to. This is my current profile. Below you can see a few tracks that I listened to recently.

Now as I mentioned there is a last.fm player, you can use a flash based version here or download a desktop version here which is available in lots of flavors! The idea is quite simple, you put in a band that you like, and based on that it will play you other similar bands that it streams off last.fm. So for instance I just need to click here to listen to a personalised radio station that sounds like bands similar to radiohead; This kind of functionality is encompassed in the downloadable app you can run on your desktop. The last.fm player is small, compact and nicely made. It would be nice if it had a minimize to system tray option, and a stream buffer length option to stop dropouts, but apart from this it seems most excellent. It would be nice to see some 3rd party versions of this player, with those options. All in all, rather kick ass!