WOEBOT

Thanks to being linked by the excellent Voltage Controlled Technicolor I've stumbled into a netherworld of really extraordinarly high-class "whole LP" mp3 blogs. A million miles from the established, tired circuit of mp3-blogs with their piecemeal single-track offerings (Ha, neo-Rockist to the core I'll always love the long-playing 7+ song configuration!) these museums of arcana have grown spontaneously out of the esteemed Soul Strut Boards (a similar turf to the Wax Poetics journal, hip-hop breaks and then some) and the also excellent Vinyl Vultures Forum, in a similar way that ILM spawned authoritative "heavy" blogs like Church of Me and Skykicking.

The phenomenon is extremely recent, most of these sites are only one or two months old. While one's guaranteed some will fall by the wayside quite quickly, with the obscurity and excellence of the music they're sharing it doesn't seem to matter, like the appearance of manna in the desert one is simply grateful. Again unlike most mp3 blogs, where the content is copied from CDs which are commercially available or repackaged from Soulseek forays, these blogs tend to offer music which has been ripped from vinyl from their owner's cavernous record collections and uploaded onto Rapidshare. Nine times out of ten this is music which simply isn't available in any shape or form so how illegal it is to present it is moot. Wasn't there some landmark ruling about works of art no longer available in the public domain being legally distributable in this fashion?

Of the fifty or so blogs I looked at, these were the most excellent (in alphabetical order):

Brazilian Nuggets

Some fascinating stuff here, recently careening out of Prog Rock period and into a folk phase.

Flashing back to some of the remarks about my top one hundred records: "Oh this is just willful obscurantism! etc", comments which made me roll my eyes in exasperation, this ring of blogs should underline the canonic centrality of the choices I made. They *weren't* obscure records! I ought to add, however, that when it comes to the hardcore vinyl culture as it manifests in a purism centered around Library Records, Soundtracks, the most left-field of break samples, Eastern European Progressive Rock Turkish Psych and Brazilian obscurities I'm slightly skeptical. The music I've gravitated towards always enjoys some connection to the rays of the zeit. Often I feel slightly bored by the occasionally hermetic and insular culture of wax and its total failure to grapple with new music. Certainly when I went to one Vinyl Vultures meeting I didn't notice anyone particularly excited to hear my bag of (impossibly rare!) Cold Rush Gloomcore classics (titters). Sniping aside, the opportunity to savour the rarities these collectors are offering up is not to be missed. The price is right, innit.