New entry on my personal blogometer: Tape, run by one Mr Soft (and apparently featuring contribs Richard Carnage and Puffin Jack, though their entries seem about as frequent as mine over at House Is a Feeling (sorry, Jess!)), and affiliated with the Bristol party of the same name.
Tape reps all the usual suspects whom we love — Cadenza, Border Community, Andre Kraml, Ewan Pearson, Kompakt, Sender, Mobilee, Trapez etc et al — but he's also out digging for and sending forth more obscure or non-genre stuff, like Todd Terje, Freak 'n Chic, Serge Santiago, and whatnot, often with free MP3s to go with, and seriously whippersmart writing. (Best yet, Tape's not afraid to call a dud a dud — consider it a kind of tough-love approach, exhorting beloved acts to quit laurel-resting and get back to the business of making us rave.)
With the blogosphere becoming increasingly PR-susceptible*, a blog that's not too shy to cast doubt upon Lindstrom's output, tell Headman and Matt Safer to "sort your fucking shit out" and ask DFA and Get Physical to live up to their standards is pretty refreshing indeed.
*Excerpt from an email I received yesterday: "My name is Gina and I work in NYC with addVice Online. We are sister company (sic) of Vice Magazine that handles music marketing and I am in charge of the online end of it. We have a couple of projects that I think you be interested in (sic) based on the current content of your blog. [...] I would love to send you [Run the Road 2] (either digital or hardcopy) and get you to maybe do a review, post news of the release or set up a give a ways (sic), ect. (sic)."
Posted by philip at January 26, 2006 08:32 AMGood news! Vice mag could use some decent music reviewers.
Posted by: Gillsans at January 26, 2006 09:03 AMha! i got that vice mag e-mail too. I'm ignoring it, of course...
Posted by: at January 26, 2006 12:57 PMas someone who is both a publicist and a writer, that kind of cluelessness appalls me. i once had a publicist email me and say, "if you could give me some ink on this, i would really appreciate it." like i owed him anything!!!
i can't believe she actually said "get you to do a review." hey pr lady, blogs exist because they don't like people "getting them to do" anything. clue up.
Cheers Phil! It does seem like I'm a very infrequent writer, but I tend to post up every couple of days. Mr Soft, on the other hand, feels the compulsion to write every 5 minutes! He's a man obsessed! Check the site today for the excellent Todd Terje mix of Lindstrom's distinctly average "Another Station", John Tejada's mix of Christopher Just (on my post, honest!), and Ewan Pearson's constantly mutating beast that is his Goldfrapp mix. My Tape mixes are also still available for download on the site if you look down far enough in the January postings. Keep up the good writing, and we'd love to have you down to play if you fancy it sometime!
Cheers,
Rich
What a great site. Thanks
Posted by: andre at March 10, 2006 04:39 PMGreat reading, keep up the great posts.
Peace, JiggaDigga