Over the past few days I’ve taken a liking to TaQ – Electro Tuned in Dancing Stage Unleashed (on Easy ;)). It’s a song I had positively hated before, but now that I “get” squeaky bits (3 notes / steps in a slightly off-beat fashion), it has become immensely enjoyable. It also does not hurt that the song reminds me of the P.N.03 soundtrack. 😀
I had an extended romp through the newly opened (in England, France and Germany that is — not really an “European” launch) iTunes music store. It is now obvious to me why there is quite a bit of buzz about it. The prices (and more importantly the terms of use) are fair, the selection is decent (by far not perfect — especially the omission of independent labels hurts. Also some artists only seem to feature a subsets of their albums); but what is IMO most important is the ease of use and the excellent integration with iTunes: It is actually fun to buy music. To proove the point, I ended up buying Natalie Merchant’s “Ophelia” album (which I found via the “Thick as Thieves” track in my library)…
Nintendo / Sega ought to get their asses in gear and publish an F-Zero GX soundtrack, the music is awesome! Until that happens, you can get some very nice game-rips here. FilePlanet needed a bit of convincing to give me all the files, but after circumventing their subscription / bandwidth-limitation system (which blatantly tells you that the requested files cannot be found although they are there!) with a bit of URL-fiddling, all is good.
My copy of Yoko Kanno’s “Ghost in the Shell – Stand Alone Complex O.S.T.” arrived, and it is too good to be true… 😉
It contains whole range of styles, one track in particular owes a lot to Björk’s “Hyperballad”, but they all stand very well on their own. The 2nd part of Track 12 – “Silent Cruise” is my absolute favourite though; it mixes strings from the Warsaw Symphony Orchestra with electronic sounds and beats. It’s so good I get a shiver down my spine everytime I listen to it… <sigh>
There are quite a few tracks with English lyrics (even printed in English in the booklet) which are dangerously catchy, so you’ll have to be careful not to get caught singing nonsense-lyrics… 😉
Absolutely recommended!