Pitchfork

I noticed via spotify-on-tumblr today that spotirama.blogspot.com has been posting weekly installments of Spotify playlists of every available track in our book, The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. There are nine installments planned (one for each chapter), and so far, three are completed. Putting together The Pitchfork 500 was a huge labor of love for us and we worked on it tirelessly— the song selection alone took nearly three months to put together— so it’s pretty affirming to see people being enthusiastic enough about it to assemble it in playlist form. The first three installments are here:

1977-1979 [http] [uri]
1980-1982 [http] [uri]
1983-1986 [http] [uri]

And the complete tracklist is available here.

Spiral Stairs: “we recently had two good weeks of practice in portland. it was the first time some of us had been in the same room together for close to 10 years. i think we all were a little nervous. it started off pretty rough, except for our drummer who probably practiced the most. but… by the time we had finished, most of the 40 plus songs we had rehearsed were sounding pretty good.” (more at Pitchfork News)

Outstanding feature on Joanna Newsom from the Times Online:

As unlikely seating arrangements go, being splodged in between Quentin Tarantino and Joanna Newsom has got to be the unlikeliest. One is a film director who can’t rest until all his characters have blown each other’s brains out; the other a polyrhythmic (the simultaneous sounding of two or more independent rhythms) harp player who composes intricate, beautiful song cycles about constellations and peonies and chalk. But I’m in a restaurant in LA trying to interview the harpist when the director sits down at the next table, and he’s louder than us, telling his friends about the time he fictionalised Hitler. “So I woke up one day and wrote on this piece of paper, just kill him,” he barks. “Just f***ing kill him.” “Damn,” mutters Newsom, grinning conspiratorially at me. “He stole my line.”

From 1980s noise to 2000s chillwave, we look at how cassette culture has evolved— and why it matters.

Cassettes never fell completely out of favor among experimental and noise musicians, but their resurgence underground appears to reflect a confluence of cultural trends. Instant access to almost any recording has left some of us over-stimulated, endlessly consuming without really digesting what we hear. Many children of the 1980s first owned their music on cassette, so for them the format represents a nostalgia for simpler times; younger kids probably never owned cassettes in the first place, so for them tapes don’t have any negative associations. The spread of Internet-enabled smart phones and 24/7 social networking has made work and pleasure increasingly intertwined in our digital existences. Like records, cassettes offer listeners a tangible experience at a time when our jobs, our social lives, and our popular culture are becoming more and more ephemeral. (story via Pitchfork / image via Punkhaus)