etnobofin

I am very lucky to live in New Zealand. It’s a beautiful, peaceful place. However, there are some disadvantages living in a thinly populated string of islands a long way from the rest of the world. One of these disadvantages is lack of access to comprehensive record shops. One of the highlights of travelling in Europe, the USA and Japan has been buying music that you can’t get back home. (Of course, we have some great music stores in New Zealand. But my point is that we are a long way from the distribution channels of North America, Asia and Europe, so the variety and depth of stock is often poor.)

So online shopping has opened up a whole new world of music consumption for us kiwis! We can now buy from shops all over the world, while avoiding the need to spend $2000 on an airfare. Last week my latest CD order arrived from Amazon, and I realised that the every single disc I bought was the result of discovering it through audioblogs, or through my own blogging activities. Here’s my shopping list, and the reason why I bought the album:

• Mark Hollis – Mark Hollis. His solo album from 1998. Discovered via david fenech’s blog.
• Charles Mingus – The Great Concert of Charles Mingus. Discovered while researching Mingus for my recent series on Mingus’ orchestral work
• Jacques Coursil – Way Ahead. Discovered via PODvains
• Art Ensemble of Chicago – Live in Paris. I came across this while putting together a post on Lester Bowie which still awaits the light of day…
• Cuong Vu – Bound. Cuong Vu’s first album. I was blown away when I heard this record on Xanax Taxi.

I would not have found any of this music without the aid of the Internet – it is not played on the radio, it is not advertised in magazines. Some of the recordings are 40 years old. Audioblogs seem to provide a great opportunity to breed a more informed and more sophisticated community of music consumers. I can only thing that this must be good for music as an industry in the long term, and more importantly, this must be good for music and musicians.

Mark Hollis- The Gift
From Mark Hollis: Polydor 537 688-2 [Buy]

And if the audio tracks aren’t enough there are some links to two videos from a gig at a club in Belgium (where else?) from 2002 – Again and again and Vinas Lullaby. 30Mb each, but well worth the download.

Darn. This stuff is inspiring. Could I enthuse any more?