Here at Unblinking Ear HQ, we've noticed over the last couple of months a large amount of music press/internet babble devoted to deluxe reissues of albums that came out 20 years ago*. There's nothing wrong with that as we here at Unblinking Ear celebrate rock history as well and have also been known to have something of a 90s fetish.
However, what use is nostalgia when it overshadows the vital work happening in the here and now? There has been such a deluge of terrific new releases over the past few weeks and months that we've been struggling to keep up. In fact, the amount of fine new records has been so great that we've decided to eschew the past temporarily and devote this edition of the podcast entirely to brand new music. With so much, so good coming out recently, it was actually rather easy to acompliish.
The next podcast will surely feature some fine music recorded many years prior mixed with equally fine music of the present. But for now... dig the now.
*Incidentally, the actual best album of 1991 was Eleventh Dream Day's Lived To Tell.
It seems as though live podcasting all the rage of late. Marc Maron, Julie Klausner and Paul F Tompkins among others have recently hosted live versions of the podcasts to great acclaim and have netted millions of internet dollars in the process.
In my ongoing effort to prove that I can imitate successful people, I'll be doing the same. This Saturday, I'll be hosting the first ever Unblinking Ear Podcast LIVE at the Diamond in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
It will be much like my usual podcast, only instead of it being 45 minutes or so, it will run, I don't know, four to six hours. Other bonuses include:
The songs I select will be played through a full sound system rather than your tiny computer speakers.
Listening to said songs while drinking alcohol in the company of other living humans rather than alone in your dirty apartment, staring into the middle distance.
The possibility of having a conversation with ME! (If you can get past my entourage.)
Another difference is that I won't be talking in between set over looped RZA beats to back announce the songs. The good folks at the Diamond are fans of my podcast but when they play it in the bar, they find the talking distracting.
What's that you say? That this is just a DJ gig and I'm trying to pass it off as something more grandiose and exciting?
You've got a lot of nerve, hypothetical person.
DJ Paul Bruno presents The Unblinking Ear Podcast LIVE! Saturday, November 5th @ The Diamond 43 Franklin St (between Quay St & Calyer St) Brooklyn, NY 11222 10 pm FREE!
I celebrated my 34th birthday last week. Thus, it's my last year in the coveted 18 to 34 target demographic. This means that at this time next year this podcast will become totally irrelevant. It will more closely resemble on CBS procedural crime drama than a place to hear exciting new music. Better listen while you can!
Back to our regularly scheduled programing. After our biannual "punkquinox" edition of the podcast, it's been a whole month since we've rolled out a "normal" podcast. Thus, we've had a lot of new music to catch up on, and there's a whole bunch of it on this podcast. Hear it and know what the kids* are listening to.
*The kids are apparently much more likely to (still) be listening to Alien Ant Farm.
The equinox arrives in just a few days, which means it’s time for one of our special all vintage punk rock editions of the Unblinking Ear Podcast.
I know that even at this late date, some of you still have trouble wrapping your head around the whole punk thing. Hopefully, this report from 20/20 news magazine below help you get a handle on it. No word on if Hugh Downs sold the Lewd and Rude Kids records featured to supplement his social security income. (Via WFMU and Dangerous Minds.)
Earlier today, WFMU's Evan "Funk" Davies (pictured left) commented on the post for my previous podcast that the download link was broken.
I don't know exactly how this went unnoticed for two weeks (a fortnight!) by myself or my loyal listeners. It couldn't be that this podcast doesn't inspire the unmitigated devotion I assume it does, right?
This young lady has dreams about the Unblinking Ear Podcast.
If you dream about this podcast as well, I invite you to please share your dreams in the comments. Leave out no detail, no matter how filthy or freaky.
There's a lesson here. I think it's that if you commit suicide but leave your child with a lot of money, they may wind up using it for cosmetic surgery and awful text tattoos.
This is the first podcast I'll be promoting through posting in Google+, which, as far as I can figure thus far, is like a less user-friendly version of Friendster. But there are circles for some reason. In any case, I'm sure the folks at Google know what they're going and it should be every bit as successful as Google Buzz.
The following Unblinking Ear Podcast is brought to you by antibiotics, without which I'd still be feeling great pain in various unnecessary body parts like tonsils and wisdom teeth. Instead of assembling this podcast, I'd be sick in bed having fever dreams. Granted, said dreams might be more entertaining than this podcast. But until technology gives us a device that allows others to see visual representations of our dreams ala Dr. Hugo Strange, this will have to do.
Yes, after a short hiatus, the Unblinking Ear Podcast is back. Aside from a much needed facelift on the blog itself (hey's it's 2011!), there are a few minor changes to the podcast as well. First and foremost, I won't be doing the podcast weekly anymore. I'm going aim for twice a month. To make up up for the decreased frequency, the podcasts are going to be a bit longer as well. I think it's going to work out well. I already have a bunch of songs picked for the next podcast. More time and more care are probably a good thing.
Anyway, give it a listen at let me know what you think.
This past New Year's Eve, I was on my way home from a night of revelry when I decided on a resolution. I would post a new podcast once a week. Surely, this consistency would yield more exposure for the podcast with listeners knowing they could expect one regularly. Given that my brain was trying to reconfigure itself back to normal functioning after several hours of ingesting Four Loko and hashish, I probably should have known this wasn't the best idea in the world.
By all conceivable measures, the weekly Unblinking Ear Podcast has been an abysmal failure. Downloads have been declining steadily. The podcast I posted last week received about 21% of the downloads of my last podcast of 2010. Perhaps I'm flattering myself here, but I think this may be a case of too much of a good thing. Its frequency devalued the podcast as a commodity (in as much as anything that's free can have value). The weekly arrival made each podcast less an event than part of a routine. At worst, it became a regularly scheduled irritating bit of self-promotion from yours truly. Basically, doing the podcast on a weekly basis had the exact opposite effect that I anticipated. Oh, Four Loko, why did I believe you?
The task of assembling each podcast, which drains more than a few hours of my week and changes the way I listen to music. I find myself listening to new releases less for the experience of an album and more as a survey of the best tracks to play. I'm listening to more records but spending less time on each particular album. I'm absorbing more information but not maximizing my enjoyment of the experience. That's also more or less the reason I haven't been doing any writing on the blog, as some of you have noticed. Superficial listening is not conducive to analysis.
Between my general burnout and its lack of success, there's really no reason to keep doing podcast weekly. So I'm going to take a little break to recharge. The podcast will be back eventually, in all likelihood sooner rather than later, probably a few weeks. Hopefully, it won't be like a Mets injury where one can tack a month on to the projected time. Once it does come back, it will no longer be weekly. I've been considering making the podcast longer to compensate for doing less on them, which is a definite possibility.
In the meantime, enjoy this edition of the podcast. And I will be trying to focus on getting some writing done in the interim, so you can probably look forward to a bit of that.
