I like music of all sorts, and with few exceptions, I am listening to music all the time if possible. No, I don't have a iPod or similar gadget...yet. In this one area, I have yet to make it so that I can listen to music even more. But I am being picky. Being someone who favors Open Source (even if I cannot figure out quite how the model can work and have folks like me make a living writing it), I am looking for a player which handles files written using Ogg Vorbis compression. (Yea...Vorbis is a corporation, but they put the specification into the Public Domain! See the Vorbis FAQ for more information. But until I can find a player which handles Ogg Vorbis, and has an open interface which allows me to access it from Linux or NetBSD, I will be a holdout on the music player. However, that may be changing a bit, as my Palm Treo 700p has a player which may understand the format, and which allows me to put music on SD media... This could prove interesting, but the telling point will be how the battery on my Treo holds up. But enough about players... this is about the music itself!

I listen to lots of different genere of music, ranging from Gregorian Chant to some of the newest artists in Electronica, Euro-pop, dance and others I have yet to learn the name for. My favorite genres are Rock (particularly Oldies, and groups like the Go-Gos, Bangles, B-52s and such), Celtic (yes, including highland pipes :) ), Electronica/Dance, and classical. However, I almost never ever listen to Rap, R&B, Blues or Jazz. I am not into music which as a whole glorifies gangs, killing, and such. Nor do I care for music which just flies away from the paper and defies any logic or structure. Jazz, or perhaps I should say "modern Jazz", is the worst of these. I have played a fair amount of music in my time, having been in band, where I played the flute and later some percussion, and I have also played recorders a considerable amount, and own a tenor, alto, soprano, sopranino. However, it has been many years since I have played them, and I never was more than passable. But the reason I bring this up... I can read music (including notations from the middle ages), but for some strange reason, I have difficulty reading and playing at the same time. And so, I memorize songs, including their complexities, and can when in practice, hop into the middle of a song and know exactly what notes to play. On the other hand, modern Jazz almost always jerks me in a totally different way than I expect, and so it is about as pleasurable as listening to someone hit a sour note or scrape something on a blackboard. Or better yet, it is like bouncing off the insides of some vehicle as it dodges, hits potholes and such while racing along... it is almost mentally painful. Now Jazz as in the big bands, Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller... now we are talking.

Now, for me to really really like the music, it has to make me feel it. Something with a beat which pulls me into it is one such instance, given I played percussion. Indeed, rap would possibly be enjoyable if it were not for the lyrics, the attitude of the singers, and the fact that we have idiots driving down our streets with their cars blaring it out at 100+dB setting off car alarms and rattling the windows. This is one reason why I have gotten into listening to the likes of DJ Tiësto, Alice DJ, Miss Kittin and others... they have a beat that gets my heart beating and my feet moving/tapping. Add in great lyrics, particularly ones which play with your emotions, and it gets even better.

In many cases, the real details will be about the groups or artists I listen to. The more I like, or better yet love them, the more likely I will be to write about them... and by love, I mean wear the bits off the disk and put a groove in the platter because I play it all the time.

If you want to see some of the music I like, you can check out the music videos I have rated on Yahoo!. You can also see my recently watched videos as well.

I am hoping I may also be able to soon show what I am listening to in terms of the music I have ripped to a harddrive using Grip and maintain an index for in a database using DigitalDJ. And once I get my streaming audio server up, I will setup the display of my current playlist and song. In the meantime, check this out

Anyways, and finally, here are some of of my favorite bands/artists. The order changes radically with mood, but they are (with links to their home pages if I know them, and my own personal thoughts about them):

• Bangles
• Go-Gos
• Liz Phair
• Cascada
• Paris Hilton (it surprised me when I saw she did "Stars are Blind")
• Moody Blues
• Peter Schilling
• Devo
• A-Ha
• Enya
• B-52s
• Madonna (I have a few CDs/DVDs, which are pretty through collections of her works)
• Britney Spears (yes, I have several CDs/DVDs)
• Cher (yep!)
• Emma Bunton
• Nena
• Blackmore's Night (and my thoughts)
• Altan
• Silly Wizard
• The Chieftains
• The Vapors

(yes... lots of gals and gal bands)