Thought I’d get an early handle on my best-of-the-year list this time around. I’ve blogged surprisingly little about music in 2011. That doesn’t mean that I listened any less, or less attentively. In fact, audio-wise, it was just this past year that I finally managed to get my hands on digital playback equipment that allows [...]

Today’s desert island disc: Beck, Modern Guilt
Sometimes, it takes me a while to really start to like an artist. Beck is one of those. I have no excuse, really. This — and quite a few of his other records — is a masterpiece of a kind of modern, hip hop/electronica inflected pop. Beck has the same mastery of song craft that someone like [...]

Listening to: Sinéad Lohan
Sometimes, you just connect with a CD — immediately, powerfully, viscerally. That’s how I reacted when I first heard Sinéad Lohan’s No Mermaid, a 1998 disc that few people heard and fewer bought (her Wikipedia entry claims that No Mermaid ‘enjoyed moderate success’ in Ireland, the UK and the US — which means she sort [...]

Leonard Cohen a lucky man this Christmas
Leonard Cohen in 2008 by Rama. This Christmas, music took a strange turn towards the democratic, at least in the UK. And it did so in a fairly unexpected way: not in iTunes or because consumers voted with their credit cards at retail (music retail sales are down 20% year over year). Music took a [...]

Oliver Schroer dies at 52
Sad news this morning on CBC Radio 1: Toronto fiddler Oliver Schroer died from leukemia on July 3, 2008. I had only recently discovered Oliver’s music and blogged about it at length. Sensitive obits from TheStar.com here and here.

Listening to: Oliver Schroer, Camino
The medieval concept and practice of pilgrimages stretching over months or even years – to Jerusalem, Rome or Santiago de Compostela – sits uneasily with today’s package tours and motorised travel. For the original pilgrims, though the destination (both physical and metaphysical) was important, the journey was the thing, with all its physical hardships, the [...]

Listening to: Dave Matthews & Tim Reynolds: Live at Radio City
Dave Matthews, particularly with the Dave Matthews Band, isn’t recognized enough for his songcraft. It gets lost under the weight of popular perception about Dave’s music, live shows and achievements: touring jam band, incredible musicianship, big sound, long shows, lots of dope smoked at every show, generally appealing to those who once followed the Grateful [...]
Subscriptions
Or, subscribe by email
You can also subscribe to individual categories by selecting the category from the menu above and using the 'RSS feed for this section' link on each category page.
Recent posts by category:
About

Carsten Knoch
Software and services professional, attentive music listener, vision enabler, instigator, reader of books and the web, vegetarian, affordable audio hobbyist, thinker, writer, blogger, tinkerer, Internet dweller since 1992. Human being since 1970.
I blog about music, technology, business, vegetarian food, politics, culture and life.
More about me on the About page.
Me, elsewhere
@carstenknoch on Twitter
- Barbarism is not the inheritance of our prehistory. It is the companion that dogs our every step. (Alain Finkielkraut) 10 hours ago
- Music really is amazing. No matter how deeply you steep yourself in it, or for how long--there's always a fantastic new artist to discover. 13 hours ago
- More world's worst brands: http://t.co/FEgngM6s 1 day ago
- How to accommodate low literacy readers in your web writing. http://t.co/2s1dKV52 1 day ago
- @dybskiy So what — are you staying? 2 days ago
- @joniv Absolutely. No issues. We're having the easiest winter in the history of winters this year... can't complain really :) 2 days ago
- @joniv Great - now I have that song in my head! Hope you're well :) 4 days ago
- It's 5:30pm, and - strangely - things are finally starting to flow (where I've been beating my head against a wall for most of the day). 4 days ago
- How to catch an iPhone thief: Officer knows buttons to push. http://t.co/YHVgl0MS 1 week ago
- I have a nasty, sneaky cold. TGIF. 1 week ago

