S q u e e z y t u n e s

Excavated Shellac

Excavated Shellac is the name of a fairly new blog which I've added to my blog roll. Every week (more or less) a new mp3 of a wonderful piece of music from somewhere in the world is posted for our enjoyment. However, this is not a normal "world" music blog, all the music here is taken from ultra rare 78rpm records and hence is a little bit of the old world that in some cases is fast vanishing.

It's quite fascinating to find how many of the tracks thus far posted have accordion or concertina on them. There's some music here from Tahiti featuring accordion, a bouree folkdance from France, a superb piece of concertina playing from South Africa, and some spirited triki-trixa playing from the Basque country recorded in the 1930s.

Every single track is a little gem, and highly recommended.

Link: Excavated Shellac

Clipmarks & Yahoo! Bookmarks

The previous two posts I've made used a web application called Clipmarks to speed-up my posting technique.

As you can probably tell a lot of my posts are from interesting Ebay auctions. However, it's quite a hassle in copy all the pictures to my hard-disk and then uploading them to my blog. It takes so long that I don't post as many as I'd like to.

However, so far using Clipmarks it seems to be a lot, lot quicker. The truth will be told though if I'm able to make a few more postings than I have done recently.

Also, Web 2.0 came to my rescue earlier this week when I suffered a crash which seemed to wipe out all my bookmarks. Fortunately I started storing all my bookmarks on Yahoo! Bookmarks beta a few months ago. I was soon up and running again.

Link: Clipmarks
Link: Yahoo! Bookmarks

MySpace Records

This isn't exactly up to date news, I'm not worried about such things, but I find it interesting that MySpace have announced that they are soon going to allow all the musical artists on their site to sell unrestricted MP3s. This means that we'll be able to download some of the wonderfully obscure acts that we all come across on there.

Here are some of the interesting acts in my bookmarks:

Birdy Nam Nam are a quartet of turntablists from France doing interesting things. Check out the videos to see what I mean.

Los Super Elegantes I love their song 'Sixteen'

Kevin Johansen An Argentinian singer songwriter with a nice sound. Try the song 'Sur o no sur' or 'No me abandones'.

DeVotchKa I love the song 'How It Ends', and it's a free download. 'Such a Lovely Thing' is also great, kind of like a weird circus type sound.

Mareva Galanter check out the song 'Les filles c'est fa...' for some French rock 'n' roll with a sixties sound.

the Surfs play 'xtreme polka' - try Mozart Polka to get the idea. And generously all their tracks are free downloads. Really this lot should go top of the list.

Let me know if you've found any gems out there.

My Blog Roll

I recently discovered that it is considered good etiquette amongst bloggers to have a blog roll displayed on your site.

So here it is, some blogs which are important to Squeezytunes.
Apologies in advance to anyone that I've forgotten. I'm 100% sure that I will have forgotten someone important.

Music Thing
Music Thing was probably the blog that most inspired me to create Squeezytunes, not least of all because it is a based in the UK. At the moment there's a great story about a new range of musical toys coming out soon.

Benn Ioxu Du Taccu
Always an interesting read and some high quality African music here. I love interesting music like this.

Matrix Synth
I've never really mentioned Matrix Synth before, but that's because I just can't keep up with this fast moving blog.
Check these great stories:
Hammond Novachord on Ebay
A circuit bent musical monkey toy
A Psychedelic Philcordia
Raymond Scott's Electronium
Das Subharchord
Orla Piano Drawbar Accordion
DX11 with Accordion Keys 
Synths Accordion
Phew, that's cleared some of my posting backlog !

Theremin World
The only place for Theremin news that you need. There's a story there at the moment about an original RCA Theremin that sold for over $10,000.

Mister Anchovy
Interesting tit-bits and accordion tunes from Canada

Dancas Ocultas
A Portugese blog about a four piece accordion band. Lots of adventures and cool photos here.

Number 1 Song When You Were Born

If you've ever wondered who was Number 1 in the Charts when you were born then the ever brilliant Wikipedia will probably have the answer.

It was Simon & Garfunkel's 'Bridge Over Troubled Water' for me !

Leave a comment if you get something brilliant or awful...

Link: List of Number 1 Singles in the UK
Link: List of Number 1 Singles in the USA