Friday, March 3, 2017

The Austin 100 Playlist


"Every year, the SXSW [South by Southwest] Music Festival serves a daunting, days-long feast of sounds from around the world. And once again, NPR Music's Austin 100 is here to distill it all down to a digestible meal of music discovery.

Picked from a playlist that spanned more than a hundred hours, these 100 songs represent a broad and exciting cross-section of SXSW's many highlights...."

If you click on the NPR link above, you'll find yourself on a web page containing the "Austin 100 Playlist" -- some of the best new music to be showcased at the South by Southwest Music Festival to be held March 13-17, 2017.

The NPR web page provides three ways in which you can listen to the entire playlist:
  1. You can stream the songs via the "NPR One" app; a link is provided to download the app from Amazon, Google Play, the App Store, and Microsoft.
  2. You can download each individual song on the web page; or use the provided link to grab the 900MB zip file containing all 100 songs. Downloads expire on March 31.
  3. And lastly, if you are a Spotify user, use the provided link to pull up the "Austin 100 Playlist."

Personally, I'd prefer vinyl, but then again, 100 songs -- let's say an average of three and a half minutes per song -- would work out to at least nine LPs! Much easier to tote around a 900MB zip file!

Enjoy the tunes....


Thursday, March 2, 2017

Philip K. Dick on Reality

...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups.... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing....

—Philip K. Dick

From a 1978 speech entitled "How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later." Included in the anthology The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin (Pantheon, 1995).