Amiina
A friend recently discovered my affinity for sigur rós (I now have purchased a majority of the sigur rós discography), and sent me a few tracks by another Icelandic band called Amiina. Amiina has played regularly with and opened for sigur rós. The musical style is minimalistic yet it is quite lovely. I have discovered that it is wonderful music to put on in the background while I concentrate on programming. Here are several samples of Amiina music to enjoy: hemipode, hilli, kolapot, and rugla. The song "hemipode" is available on the EP "Animanima", and the other three are available on the Amiina album "Kurr". Highly recommended.

LDS Radio Online
About a year ago (or so), the Hallmark Channel pushed back the Sunday morning broadcast of Motab from 8:30am to 6:30am. We haven't watched it since. I guess I could get/build a DVR, but I don't watch (or rather *miss*) enough other TV programs to make the value proposition of a DVR worthwhile. *shrug*

So on a whim, I googled up "LDS shoutcast stream" and found LDS Radio Online which offers a free broadcast stream of Sunday-appropriate audio. Most of the instrumental pieces are quite lovely. But you'll have to wince once or twice (and roll your eyes) for a few of what I call "Josh Groban"-like tunes. It's hard for the music directors to separate the wheat from the chaff I guess.

Lisa Gerrard in Concert
I bought 2 tickets to see Lisa Gerrard in concert on May 24th at the Moore Theater. She is playing a limited 14-venue North American tour this coming spring and fortunately Seattle is one of the locations that she selected. I became a big fan of Gerrard because of her work as a member of Dead Can Dance. Gerrard has since begun a solo career and collaborates actively on many movie soundtracks, such as The Gladiator (for which she won a Golden Globe). I missed the Seattle Dead Can Dance concert two years ago (a fatal blunder... one I still very much regret), so I'm very happy to get these two tickets. Should be a great show.

Sigur Rós: Takk
Between now and the day I discovered Sigur Rós, this marvelous band has released a new album entitled Takk. The free 30-second streams sounded good enough to prompt me to download a few of the tracks to sample. Here is a longer sample of Hoppípolla to enjoy. Excellent, excellent stuff. I'll be buying the album (and maybe a few of the older Sigur Rós albums as well).

Sigur Rós
While driving home after my Monday night softball game last night, I was listening to one of my favorite radio presets... the always unpredictable, yet often quite pleasurable, KEXP 90.3 FM (non-local listening to KEXP is available over the net). Perhaps because I was partially exhausted (or perhaps because the E36-based 328 is possibly the smoothest consumer-level car ever manufactured?), but I became quite entranced by the music KEXP was playing (which seemed to be a set of pieces by the same artist). After the set was over, I learned the artist's name was Sigur Rós, a band that hails from Reykjavik, Iceland.

I've downloaded a bunch of their free, full-length mp3 files and have been listening to them all day while at work. The closest equivalents I can think of are Radiohead or Björk. Be sure to give starálfur, untitled #4 (a.k.a. njósnavélin / the nothing song), and streamside a listen... they are all quite good.

(Update Thu Nov 10 09:42:20 PST 2005 // mirrored songs and updated links)

The Beethoven Experience on BBC
Bryan is giving me all kinds of music tips (see previous post on Magnatune). Last month the BBC aired, on nine successive nights, the nine Beethoven symphonies as performed by the BBC Philharmonic and conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, collectively titled The Beethoven Experience. Not only that, but the BBC made each perforance available on the BBC web site to download for free. Nice.

Well, the one catch is that the downloads were only available for 10 days after their respective original airing. So today only symphonies 8 and 9 are still available. Fortunately, Bryan had a torrent file already googled and passed it along. In just a matter of minutes (okay, maybe half an hour) I was able to download the nine symphonies (all 340+ MB of them). This here new-fangled internet sure does whip the llama's arse!

Magnatune: We Are Not Evil
A while back, Bryan sent me a link to an Internet music web site called Magnatune. I've only explored the classical section; where I found a "Classical Radio Mix" that I've queued up a couple of times when we have entertained guests. It's quite nice. I haven't yet explored the rest of the site.