Fourtet: Rounds

(Reviewed here) In which Hebden refines and outstrips Pause to make an electronic record that actually breathes. I catch something new every time I listen to it. His best work yet.

Xela: For Frosty Mornings…

A modest and wistful album that matches is title. Subtle and evocative; the equivalent of watching frost etch its way across a windowpane.

Postal Service: Give Up

A continuation of last year's Benjamin Gibbard/Dntel collaboration. Some of the catchiest stuff you'll hear this year. Good enough that the few glaring mis-steps (read the lyrics to "Nothing Better") can be easily overlooked.

Notwist: …

Stu dropped me an email that really got me thinking. Interestingly enough, it's about my resent-and-bile filled review of the last Sasha album. I get alot of mail about that, sometimes more than all the other content on the site. Anyhow, on to Stu's letter:

"While my subject line may tip you off concerning my intentions of this
email, may I say that while I don't agree with your review of
Airdrawndagger, I still feel it is an excellent review. Your breadth of
knowledge concerning Electronica's roots are very apparent. You mentioned
the transgendered Wendy Carlos and the decidedly

…

I've put the finishing touches on the initial revision of the Autechre Faq. Since the original has been gathering dust for about four years now, it's quite out of date. I've been concentrating on markup and structure so far, and I haven't had the chance to do much with the content. Let me know what needs to be included.

Put the finishing touches on the initial revision of the Faq. Check it out here. I've been concentrating on markup and structure so far, and I haven't had the chance to do much with the content. Let me know what needs to be included, as the faq I'm basing it on hasn't been updated since before Confield.

Creative has finally released a firmware update for the Nomad series.

Figuring I had nothing to lose, I pulled out my recently deceased NJB3, loaded the firmware, and surprise–it now boots! It would appear that something in the 1.40.06 version fixes the underlying cause of the mysterious EAX freeze. Nice.

There are some welcome interface tweaks, including a clock/screensaver and a second skin for the "Now Playing" screen with artist and title on separate lines. Track-seek and skipping have been sped up to the point that they're almost instantaneous, and I could swear that some of the midrange …

Last year, I got my baby, a Creative Nomad Jukebox 3. I loved this thing. It held 20GB of mp3s, pumped out near-reference quality sound, and had a great suite of recording features to boot. I could live with the fact that I had to use a workaround to access the proprietary interface in Linux. I could overlook the fact that it sometimes froze up, requiring a hard reset, and the fact that it didn't support Ogg. What finally broke me was the dreaded EAX freeze.

Lots of folks reported that their units had …

I've decided to run the Autechre info on a separate page parallel to this one. That's where I've moved the ongoing Draft 7.30 review.

Eventually, I'd like to run it as a sort of central hub for collected Autechre information. As it stands now, Autechre.nu has been stripped of most of its content, and most other sites out there present only small pieces of the whole. This is still in the early stages, and I'm in the process of gathering material and contacting the authors of several other pages.

The first order of business is mirroring and …

It's been awhile since I wrote the Autechre Guide, and I've gotten alot of reactions. Most have been surprisingly flattering, though the critical ones have been even more pointed. Good or not, I must be doing something right.

That said, I've never implied that it's some sort of scholarly treatise, nor have I pretended to any sort of objectivity. The more merit the material under review has, the more divided opinions on it are bound to be, and Autechre fans have some pretty strong opinions! The Guide is just my interpretation, and a highly personal (and …

You'll notice that the sidebar now has a "Site Themes" section. Try it.

Pretty cool, eh? Saturday's rant gave a general idea of how I did it, and this weekend, I'm going to work on a writeup explaining the construction of this site in more detail. There's still no way to make most of the themes look right on Internet Explorer, but at least Windows users have a couple of usable ways to view the page. If you're using Internet Explorer, Sobel and Woody should be fine, though some important effects are lost.

Long-time readers will …

As it turns out, there is easy no way around Internet Explorer's faulty CSS handling. Most of the audience for this page consists of Linux and BSD users, and we all use browser flavors that are almost completely compliant with CSS2, so it wouldn't seem to be that pressing of an issue, but the plain fact is, I've spent alot of time on the design of this page, and the fact that 90-something percent of the world can't view it correctly…well, it bugs me.

The simplest answer is to specify a simpler (read: "dumbed down") alternate stylesheet that Explorer can …

Received an email from Marc Cain, who informs me that the page renders just fine on Apple OSX. He's run it on Camino, Safari, and oddly enough, the Mac version of IE5, and it renders just fine. As in *nix, the Gecko family (Mozilla, Netscape, Galeon) also renders correctly.

There's a bug in Konqueror 3.1.4 that causes the main body to remain stationary while the title and sidebar elements scroll. If anyone knows a workaround, let me know. This is one I'd definitely want to fix.

Basically, the operative element is in the background property background: #333 url(sharp.jpg) …