Feature
17/10/05
brought to you by Pieman
Captain Planet
Inspiration Information
A modern day super-hero, the good Captain regularly rescues my ears from over-hyped music, by digging unknown gems from the depths of his mp3 Crate.
He has also done us a mix, which you might like to get your ears around before reading on...
Pieman loves mp3 blogs
Okay, so maybe I'm not the first to the party, but I've recently got pretty hooked on the idea of mp3 blogs.
Independent record shops are either dead or clinging on by their fingernails, and my trust of the printed music media is long gone. I like finding music that I haven't heard before. So where does an old cynic like me go for kicks...?
Soulseek? If you know what you want and you are happy to play the game, maybe. Its pretty greasy though... if you allow yourself to think about it properly. I have little sympathy for big record labels but I personally know artists who are trying to break through and make a basic living from their music who are being equally hurt by filesharing. If this doesn't worry you then you also have to see beyond the information deluge... how are you ever gonna broaden your horizons if you simply fill your boots with the things you already know you like? We all need a little inspiration from somewhere.
Of course, maybe that's why you are visiting Futureboogie... I'd like to think it was. And in case you hadn't noticed there are others like us.
And then there are mp3 bloggers. Ignore the greasers who are solely out to generate quick traffic (racing to post tracks from the new Boards of Canada album, for example). I'm talking about people like Captain Planet - serving up carefully selected mp3s each week and writing with sincerity and enthusiasm about the stuff they love.
Free from the traditional restrictions of word-counts, genre-based coverage quotas and dedication to the hype game, which have all but killed off printed music journalism, the good Captain (and others like him) have reintroduced the human element that I thought was lost, bringing soul food to my hungry ears.
Take It Away, Captain
So on the strength of his Gumbo Funk selections and his writing I asked Captain Planet to share his feelings on how and why he got into mp3 blogging. And because he's a DJ as well as a collector, I thought getting him to do us this mix would be a bit of a bonus.
It used to be that I played hip hop, soul, funk, and a little bit of afro/brazilian stuff, but after roughing it in West Africa for 4 months in 2001, I never really truned back.
"I realized that there was so much great music that gets NO play and I felt personally impelled to remedy that situation.
"Even underground hip-hop has its steady audience, but who’s shedding light on ill music from the Ivory Coast or Egypt, or Sri Lanka, and trying to make connections between this stuff?
"So now my show is all international music, with a focus on those places and populations that were colonized/exploited/enslaved in relatively recent history - struggle makes good art.
"Unlike most world music radio programs, I try to play retro funky fusion music at least as much as pygmy nose flutes - know what I mean? Gumbo Funk is an extension of that. Funk & soul have no physical boundaries, and pulling things together from the far reaching corners of the globe has never been possible like it is today (just a couple of clicks and you’ve got yerself a dope piece of wax from India or Turkey), so I’m just trying to give respect where respect is due.
"VIA is me and 2 friends. We’re all djs/artists/designers; where one of us has a weakness, one of the other cats has a strength. We printed our first shirts in… 2003 I think. And we’ve been throwing parties as a crew since then as well. We just try to be creative and active in as many ways as possible. And we’re still just getting our feet on the ground. We want to be doing installations and making films and starting our own radio station, but all good things take time.
"The EP is getting pressed, got a full-length hip hop project to drop this winter, and lots of ideas and collabos in mind...."
Feed me now
If I were you I'd get me (you) an RSS reader and get busy. I've published an OPML file of my RSS subscriptions incase anyone wants to use it as a starting point (you can use it to import my subscriptions to your reader), but you could also just get over to Captain's Crate for a quick dig and follow your nose from there... In classic blog style you can just make your way through each blogger's linkrolls to find sites of a similar taste.
If anyone wants to share suggestions of other good mp3 blogs then feel free to post them in our guestbook, or email me me and I'll add them to the Futureboogie delicious pages.
Food for thought
