Caveat: Alternate Tracks

I’m not a musician. At all. I’m intimidated by the mere idea of trying to learn to play an instrument – I have hangups about it, even. Sometimes, I think I could have been a musician, though, given a very different childhood, where my parents weren’t so forgiving of my complaints of “it’s too hard” with respect to my brief forays into trumpet lessons or piano lessons. I like music, and I think about it a lot.

I have an acquaintance who was a coworker of mine back in the database days. I respected him hugely for his multitalented approach to solving business problems, and we had worked together some, though not as much as I would have liked, on a few projects.

So… in facebookland, he’s been sending me links to his son’s musical projects. His son seems to be attending the highly reputed Berklee in New England. I know something of this rarefied musical world, 3rd-hand, because of my bestfriend Bob’s musical career as a conductor and professor of music.

Until now, I hadn’t really paid attention to these links – there’s so much in facebookland that I simply don’t pay attention to, at all. But this morning I clicked the link and surfed around this music-for-musicians type website: mostly for people doing “high art” of various contemporary styles of music, such as house, electronica, hip-hop, etc. The site is called indaba.

Here’s the song that sent me there. I’m trying out the embed function for the website.

What I’m listening to right now.

[UPDATE: The embedded music from the site called “indaba,” stopped working. This called “link rot” – a common problem on any long-running blog. I had found replacement link, but THAT link rotted, too. So now, there’s no link.]

Trick Smil3y, “Drenched (Trick Smil3y Remix).” I guess there’s some contest to remix this piece and he’s participating. I know very little about how remixing even works or what it means, artistically. But I enjoy listening to it and many of the various other tracks I surfed across on the site. I didn’t actually “vote,” however – registering a vote required integrating to facebook, which I have resisted for data privacy reasons because I deeply distrust facebook corporation despite using it – the same reasons that I have taken to almost always putting my own images, links and thoughts on this blog rather than on facebook directly. [Update: I confess I finally voted. I’m not very good at sticking by my corporate boicott principles, am I?]

---