Two bits

Gotta be quick (it's 4 AM, after all), but here you go:

1. lowercase lifestyle recently had an interesting post on P-Music. I'll let you decide for yourself whether the results are worth listening to (I for one enjoyed them), but I can't resist the urge to mention that I have long been skeptical of the old saw that (traditional) recordings (be they LPs, CDs, or whatever) are unchanging artifacts -- that view (often trotted out as a deficiency of recorded music) seems to overlook the (admittedly subtle) ways seemingly stable objects can appear to change depending on the context in which they are consumed. To take a banal example -- most recordings sound different depending on whether they are experienced in a car, via headphones, in the company of others, solo, and so on.

2. I recently relocated an old email in which my friend Alex Tarr pointed me toward this amazing post on X-Ray music (over at Kevin Kelly's blog). Holy cow! Talk about bricolage! Talk about the uncanny! And talk about fascism -- as fucked up as things are with the music industry nowadays, at least we don't have to deal with "music patrols." (Yet.)