MmeFLY's Blog

The SXSW Festival in Austin TX wraps up this year on Mar. 18th; in honor of the event, I’ve posted a new set this morning.

According to Google, the Austin TX SXSW festival was first fielded in 1987, which by now equals 30 years of cool & makes it older than many of the attendees.  At some point, NPR (& SPIN in 2011) started making available 100 songs by artists who performed each year; I heard about that bounty in 2009, and occasionally downloaded the SXSW100, but never crafted a set out of those tunes, so I’m correcting that oversight now.

Out of 3 years’ worth of music (2011, 13 & 18), I selected 22 tracks that give an idea of what attendees (and of course, NPR listeners) could hear.  (Each 100 also included some hard rock/shredding for those who would seek it out, but none of that made the cut here.)  Except for Julianna Barwick, there wasn’t an artist I’d heard before, which is odd b/c it’s an impressive bunch … oh & btw, where else but SXSW could you expect to hear a pop tune based on the legend of Orpheus & Eurydice?

Many of the original 100 collections are still available online, if you search.  For the sake of satisfying your curiosity as to which year the tracks in this set came from, here’s the set-list with that info:

01)  Heaven I Know         Gordi    Reservoir             NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
02)  Bridges         Aisha Badru       Bridges single    NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
03)  No Silver      Chris Bathgate   Don’t Mess With Texas: Sxsw 2011 New Music Sampler
04)  Napo’o Ka La              Makana      Ki Ho`alu: Journey Of Hawaiian Slack Key-The Austin 100 (2018)
05)  Turntable    Dead Horses     My Mother The Moon   NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
06)  Where’s My Love    SYML    In My Body EP   NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
07)  The Storm   Collapsing Stars     NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
08)  The Match  The Eastern Sea  Plague  NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2013
09)  Want             Lightouts            Austin Power: SPIN’s Best SXSW Acts 2013
10)  Open Season             High Highs          High highs           2011SXSW
11)   Soak It Up  Houses           All Night                               2011SXSW
12)  Come Meh Way       Sudan Archives          NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
13  The girl who stole my Tamogatchi      Hot Sugar    Austin Power: SPIN’s Best SXSW Acts 2013
14)  Boreal           Hundred Waters             Boreal   NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2013)
15)  Turns Turns Turns    Majical Cloudz   Austin Power: SPIN’s Best SXSW Acts 2013
16)  This City       Adrian Daniel    This City    NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
17)  Whatever Brings You Peace Of Mind     Nassau Heron   NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
18)  The Magic Place       Julianna Barwick        The Magic Place                2011SXSW
19)  Bring You Back          BeaconAustin Power: SPIN’s Best SXSW Acts 2013
20)  Fight For It  Lucy Spraggan  I Hope You Don’t Mind Me Writing-NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
21)  Moments Passed    Dermot Kennedy        Moments Passed single                NPR Music’s The Austin 100 (2018)
22)  The Best of Times    Sage Francis     Li(f)e     2010       2011SXSW

As promised, notice will appear here for new shows uploaded to Mixcloud … the latest being available here: https://www.mixcloud.com/beatconscious/shaking-winter-off/

And let’s get you the widget, too….

Enjoy!

I dislike treating this little WordPress venture like a complete no-self-respect side-piece, but here I am, having gotten kicked out of the house, looking for a place to hang for a while … a way of saying: my long-time web host has gone MIA, and it’s been an interesting ride down over the past five months as whoever has taken over the physical plant has tried to jimmy credit card info — that the REAL admins would already have had — out of me. Reader, they failed.

And, apparently, they failed with everyone else also, since they’ve disappeared … or perhaps someone called the cops, I’ve got no way to know. In any event, my ancient full-featured website is gone for now, and I’ll just be posting here to let you know when new shows appear on Mixcloud (https://www.mixcloud.com/beatconscious/ )

and

eDeejay.com (https://www.edeejay.com/profile-136335/video/ ) — this used to be a subscription-based site, and since I *am* a subscriber, I’m not sure how it works for you if you’re not.  Mixcloud remains free & open to all users, so I have to recommend that.

And of course you can find me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MadameFLY for the occasional music appreciation short-take.  I’ll be over here when I have more complex thoughts to lay out for you.

Guessing that some new readers will arrive here on account of the About.Me page I created this holiday weekend (or perhaps because of a search result) and having a little time to fill waiting for the latest BeatConscious show to upload, I’ll post a fresh ‘hello’ and a brief recap of my time online….

MadameFLY achieved conceptual entityhood in the late 90s, and the online presence followed by about 2000.  Hanging out at a few friendly music sites (Art of the Mix and thedownbeat.org were key) encouraged me to build my own website — BeatConscious.org — and to think seriously about what had been a 20 year habit, making mixtapes.  A music sequencing and production program, MixMeister, gave me the essential tools to do the job properly — but not without some years of practice.  My deepest gratitude goes to those individuals, especially in the MixMeister community, who gave me lessons and encouragement from the outset.

The best explanation to date for what I’m about with BeatConscious was given in a post I did for the GuardianUK blog jam series (http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2013/feb/06/blog-jam-beatconscious).  In a nutshell:

This is a down-tempo shop, for the most part, so it stands apart from the raft of blogs devoted to more commercial sounds, and provides a little relief from the newness obsession that drives most music writing. BeatConscious is dedicated to ensuring that excellent, deserving music stays in play, despite that ‘sell by’ date. Sooner or later, a blogger with one eye on the charts starts to sound like every other blogger; BeatConscious offers an alternative.

After a long stint on Live365, the current broadcast comes courtesy of the two streaming options, Mixcloud and mix.dj … and also my website, BeatConscious.org.  Comments may be left here or on the streaming sites, so let me know how you like the music, and feel free to suggest tunes you’d like to hear on the show.

Today is for mourning the death of Aaron Swartz, if you knew him, or for simply despairing — if you did not — the news of his suicide after having been bullied by the US government through a prosecution that might have resulted in 30+ years of imprisonment for him.  His story will be easy for you to find, as it is being told across the internet by those who knew, admired and loved him, so I won’t recount the details here.  I will just refer to one blog post by Larry Lessig which is available here: http://t.co/jSgrR52U and which includes this reflection:

[Aaron] is gone today, driven to the edge by what a decent society would only call bullying. I get wrong. But I also get proportionality. And if you don’t get both, you don’t deserve to have the power of the United States government behind you.

For remember, we live in a world where the architects of the financial crisis regularly dine at the White House — and where even those brought to “justice” never even have to admit any wrongdoing, let alone be labeled “felons.”

A strange thought occurred to me, reading Lessig’s words … because I’ve also lately been following on Twitter the outpouring of reaction to the NRA and the “gunners” (in Kurt Eichenwald’s phrase) who seek to justify the massive arms presence in this country by evoking the possibility of the common man having to take a stand against the government. 

Set aside for an instant your recognition of how ridiculous a proposition this actually is; because while a gun would never be my choice to settle anything, when I read the story of Aaron Swartz being bullied and threatened with essentially the rest of his life in prison over his release of copyrighted documents to the public, I can, if only for a moment, understand where the gunners are coming from. 

So David explained his reasons for cooking bacon in the microwave and it all came down to “prevents grease spattering  on the oven walls”.  I have let this sink in, and my reaction remains the same — you don’t cook food with the ease of the clean-up being foremost in your mind; you cook food with the quality of the flavor and eating experience foremost in your mind.  Or anyhow, that’s how it works if you’re not Dutch (he would tell you that his Dutch ancestry governs his determination to assess things according to tidyness.)

So I made the bacon again for myself today, on a rack over a pan in the toaster oven.  Hints from Heloise: you can tent the bacon with a square of tinfoil and Oh! Look! No spatters in the oven!  How about that.  Plus you throw away one square of tin foil instead of two pounds of grease-sodden paper towels that were wrapped around the microwaved bacon; the frugal among you will be delighted to be reminded that tin foil can be washed and reused, should you choose.

Now!  Now we have bacon worth the eating: light and crisp.  Remember, you are doing this especially for your taste-buds, since bacon is not recommended at all for any internal organ or bodily system.  So if it doesn’t taste exactly as exquisite as it should, then whatthefuck is the point of making it?  Well, there is no point, obvs.

In all other regards, Christmas dinner was very fine.