On music blogs and websites

Sunday, February 17th, 2008 // Paperhouse

Disquiet (www.disquiet.com)
Disquiet is an excellent blog devoted to ambient and electronic music, as well as the artists behind the sound. It’s a great site to visit for free MP3s from netlabels, record labels who release their music on the Internet. The site is run by Marc Weidenbaum, who writes quite well and devotes equal attention to well known musicians such as Brian Eno and lesser known ones such as Polina Voronova, a Russian ambient artist who many discovered purely through Disquiet.

WFMU’s Beware of the Blog (www.blog.wfmu.org)
WFMU is one of the country’s best freeform radio stations; it is also the oldest. The station’s blog is updated often and contains some of the weirdest music-related stuff you’ll find on the Internet: MP3 downloads of super-rare recordings, as well as various obscure remixes and releases from a variety of genres. For example, one recent entry was an MP3 showdown between two different bands that released albums imitating Beatles material.

The Hype Machine (www.hypem.com)
The Hype Machine isn’t really a blog; it scans many other music blogs and presents links to their songs in a nicely organized fashion. On top of that, the site allows users to listen via an in-browser player, no download required. The Hype Machine is the pulse of the Internet’s electro-mashup-dance-remix obsession — just click on the link labeled “popular” at the top of the page, and the site will treat you to a sampling of what every hipster has on repeat as they update their MySpace.

RCRD LBL (www.rcrdlbl.com)
RCRD LBL is a relative newcomer to the MP3 blog scene, but it’s quickly established itself as favorite for many a surfer. One of the reasons for this is the site’s close connections to a lot of excellent labels (as the name might suggest). A variety of labels contribute music to RCRD LBL, making it a great place to find lots of high quality music. The site provides a genre of music more rock than Disquiet, less dance that Hype Machine, and less obscure than WFMU’s Blog.

UbuWeb (www.ubu.com)
UbuWeb is different from all of the above in that it covers a lot more than just music. The site is a collection of all sorts of experimental art, music, writing, and poetry. It’s definitely worth a visit, as it contains some amazing archived recordings of famous experimental pieces alongside more contemporary sound that’s unlike anything most other websites have to offer. UbuWeb has a section called 365 Days Project, where a new MP3 is posted every day along with a short description.