Barcelona, Music, Weblogs…

Today I’m in Barcelona.
I’m here until next Wednesday celebrating my wedding anniversary. Well, when it comes to traveling we need little prompting and every little excuse does the trick.
So far the city appears to be everything I expected of it and even though we only had part of the afternoon and evening to wander around, we already got a good grip on it and we now have our bearings and a plan!
Oh and there’s free WiFi in the hotel room. On a three-star hotel! Being a strong tourism-oriented city does have it’s advantages…

On the flight over I had some time to mull over a few things I’ve had on my mind for a while, including the urge I’ve been feeling to get a bit more active regarding music.
Not writing or playing it, that is something I know will not happen during my (so called) “active life”, but the concepts of mp3 blogs, thematic podcasts and so on are really warming up to me.
In fact I’ve already thought of a good concept to get me into in and it was mainly this concept that I developed a bit more on the plane.
Maybe I’ll have something related to music on my site shortly. Or then again maybe not… I’m really undecided about this one. What I do know is that I do like to be regularly active on some level in my “cyber life”.
But the fact remains that even if I sometimes like to write, I can then go long periods of time without posting a thing.
And I like to make photographs most of the time (although these days I post it to flickr only, I haven’t gotten around to integrating my iSpy gallery into this blog as I wanted to do for a long time), but not all the time.
And video is something which I also like to do but which I don’t have the time or energy to do in any meaningful kind of way.
So I guess I should just collect it all (written text, photo, video, audio) into my weblog instead of breaking it up into different “sections” of the site (or, even worse, have it all scattered around the Internet), because that way I will always be kind of active on the same place instead of being really irregularly active on lots of different ones.

Changes they are a-coming, only very slowly, veeery slooowly (as usual).

Finding music, mp3 blogs and the Contrast Podcast

I really like music.

In fact I spend the vast majority of my time listening to it. I’m lucky enough that I can listen to it at work most times and at home or in the car something’s always playing.

When at work (where I have great bandwidth and I’m usually seated at my desk for the whole day) I like to either listen to my Pandora “Radios” or, when I can spare a few brain cycles to do it, I follow my music blogs on my aggregator and read up on and listen to the songs that are posted by the various blog authors.

This process of listening to music from mp3 blogs is something that I find particularly enjoyable. Not only do I get some context or maybe even a story related to each song, but I also get to find out about some real gems which I would never in my life find out about otherwise.

My current mp3 blogroll is getting to be quite extensive and at this time I follow up on these blogs:

• FLUXBLOG
• Spoilt Victorian Child
• Said the Gramophone
• Copy, Right?
• Mocking Music
• music (for robots)
• Music For Kids Who Can’t Read Good
• Two and 1/2 Pounds of Bacon
• Obscure Sound
• Another Form of Relief

I particularly like the most cover-focused blogs, some covers and versions that are out there are simply sublime or outrageously funny.

Anyway a few days ago I had the pleasant surprise of finding out in one of the mp3 blogs that there was a new podcast around with a very intriguing theme.

The Contrast Podcast is a music podcast which has the following rules: each episode has a clearly defined theme; and the author invites other mp3 blog or podcast authors to submit a song each, along with a voice intro about it.
The result is a podcast where one can listen to lots of the types of songs that float around the mp3 blogs I follow and the stories and explanations about each song are also there by the voice of the authors themselves.

I’ve listened to the 3 episodes that are out there and I absolutely loved it. So I thought I just couldn’t let it slip by without a reference. Especially since a few people already asked me for the link (after I’ve evangelized them about it, of course).

Go listen to it. It’s good!