for being negligent. lots of work + being sick + shitty internet connection = no blog and roll fun.

i pulled my shit together to get down to the emp pop music conference on saturday though, after having had to miss friday 'cause of two out of the aforementioned three things that have beeen plaguing me lately. i am bummed i had to miss friday's talks, since there were lots of awesome people presenting that i wanted to see... geeta dayal, drew daniel, robert christgau, among others. and i still had (have) too much shit to do this weekend to get down there this morning to see douglas wolk give his "complete and utter history of the numa numa dance" talk, which sucks too, because that sounds completely and utterly awesome.

BUT, sataurday's talks were pretty awesome. the twin highlights by far, of the panels that i went to, were david thomas' "morphic resonances, siberian rock bands, and the brotherhood of the unknown" and mike mcgonigal's "the space cowboy vocoder disco string glories of elo's out of the blue".

david thomas was one of the most intense people i've ever seen, and his talk was ridiculously good (and exactly twenty minutes), and seeing him after falling in love with the modern dance this year was extra cool. mike mcgonigal was probably the funniest person i've ever seen present a paper... i think half the audince was convulsively laughing during his entire talk. the other half was bobbing their heads along to "jungle" or pretending they were space whales. i need to get a copy of out of the blue asap.

also had fun trying to guess which critcs were which without checking their nametags. i think i did pretty well, though ned raggett was such a gimme that i probably shouldn't count him.

oh, and drew daniel was in the urinal next to me when i went to pee. i tried to check out his wang, but to no avail.

digesting/enamoured with:

• the new arthur russell comp
  
• the mobilee catalogue
  
• the ghost box catalogue
  
• the burial ep and recent radio mix (advice: hit up the link for the latter, it's really really great)

still really loving:

• booka shade album and gpm 4th anniv. mix
  
• sci.fi.hi.fi. vol 2
  
• achso

not liking as much as i hoped:

• new jlc remixes
  
• new matmos (i think maybe this one just needs more time though)

offended to the core of my being by:

• nicky siano's "full original arrangement" remix of kiss me again (listen at your own peril! (cf "this tastes so bad. try it!"))

track down the burial album when it comes out.

i was just checking out sasha frere-jones's best of 2006 list (dude needs to stop hosting tv shows and get back to hogging his blog) and followed his link to the mad decent podcasts. so far they are infuriatingly good.

laptop is back, and now that i've had some alone time with the old girl here's the rex the dog remix of röyksopp's beautiful day without you i alluded to in the last post's comments. i still like italian skyline better (shit got slammed in twentyfourhours' comments (actually i think that's where i originally found this song), but those dudes are just so so wrong, italian skyline is pretty damn perfect), but i guess you can decide for yourself.

i can't find any info about this track i grabbed from the old ilx ysi thread. it was posted as a rex the dog track called italian skyline, and it certainly sounds like rex, although discogs.com seems completely ignorant of it.