CD Baby

I placed an order from CD Baby a while ago and got this charming confirmation email.

Your CDs have been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CDs and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CDs into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, March 6th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year". We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Which reminds me to plug some music I've bought there that I love. CD Baby lets you spool out a little taste of the tracks, so you can see if my tastes match yours.

Hands Upon Black Earth

A few years ago a buddy of mine handed me a disc of music he had done. I looked forward to the usual creative challenge of coming up with something nice to say about it. This turned out to be entirely unnecessary: a week later it still hadn't left my CD player at work --- I must have listened to it a hundred times. I don't have the electronic music vocabulary to describe it. The page for it says biomystic . electropysical . digital . audio . magick

Um, okay. I'd say it's spooky, lively, and dense. But writing about music is like dancing about architecture, right? So if that sounds at all appealing, go give a listen to the MP3s.

Biblical Digital

Buying HUBE, I stumbled across this dreamy, structured miracle. The page says "Tribal chants of Sioux warriors, Hasidic Jews, and Tuvan monks are remixed over lush, electronica; at times delicate, at times thunderous." That makes it sound like some limp New Age music.

It isn't.

The Balls (with Storm Large)

In a completely different flavour, I'll just quote what I said about these guys a little bit ago.

Storm is a lead singer
like
The Balls are a cover band
like
nuclear weapons are explosive

So there you have it.