Matt at beatmixed is looking for DJs, mashers and remixers to beta test a very cool new site. I’ve been helping matt out a tad with it and personally, I think this thing could be ginormous.

On the way to guiding you through the Seattle tabla scene (who knew?) Baba James gives you a timely remix of “I Have a Dream” (mp3)

Get edumacated. and check out ohword’s postings of a amazing side-by-side of Willie Hutch originals and remixes throughout the years.

Not always pointing to open music (technically speaking) In-Tune: Your daily electronica connection nonetheless features artists and projects that have lots of free downloads.

Quality underground electronica for you to enjoy, updated every day.

The music is presented without any original commentary but always a “featured track” or two.

Every now and then you just have to believe. There is no guarantee that a single penny of the nearly $5,000 donated to Patti’s Legal Fund will go to anything worthwhile, leave alone changing the way the music business operates.

But of all the reckless, wasteful things I plan to do today, giving her money seems like it’s got the best chance.

At least think about helping Virtual Turntable pass the $100 mark…. donate here.

I’ll tell you what: for the first two people to donate $25 through the VT link above, I will send a fourstones “It’s Just a Tonal Thing” Mug:

After you donate make sure to contact me so I know where to the send the mug.

Coldcut’s new album continues to dribble out in pieces… (you have to keep hitting ‘play’ or in the wav to hear the whole track)

To state the obvious: I don’t know jack about legal stuff.

But what I gather from Fox news and other such reliable outlets is that legal precedence is set in court. Not on blogs or mailing lists.

So for all the continued hand wringing going on about what is “commercial” and what isn’t I can’t help thinking that until the CC licenses are tested in court (that is, somebody, somewhere actually files a suit involving a CC license somewhere in the mix) it’s all a huge mound of hyperbolic hypothetical, which, I’m told can make for quite a rewarding career if not a social life.

My reading of the latest proposal (pdf) is what I was told it would be nine months ago: commercial means “money in exchange for art” and other obvious stuff like “music used to sell stuff.”

As far as I can tell there are two camps at war here: those without children who feel their lives are lacking meaning and use any excuse to busy up their existence and take the rest of us down with them, and those with children who are just trying to get out of this mortal coil thing with as little deep scar tissue and head shrinker bills as possible. Field commanders and parents have to make calls — everything else is just an unexploded IED, no need to approach it, leave alone touch it if all you’re trying to do is make that C24 transport that leaves in 20 minutes. Or, if you like, you can always consult a handy amicus curiae wiki page to help you through it.

CC has a very, very long way to go help sow the seeds of a fertile alternative eco-system in the music business — not the least of which includes gaining a track record of musicians who actually make a living with open music, preferably without a year spent on discussing what it means ‘to make a living’ in blogs and mailing lists.

Just for the record: if a Girl Scout troop wants to use a NC fourstones track in their cookie drive then I will sue their little brownie badges to hell and back.

I recently checked in a new one-click ratings system on ccMixter. For logged in users they can now do the hover-over-stars-and-click on the ratings:

A few months ago when we separated the reviewing from the ratings based on customer’s complaints that they wanted to review without rating and rate without reviewing. In the process we made it just too cumbersome to rate so they stopped doing it all together. In the past few days we’ve had more rated songs that the last few weeks combined so this check in has already paid off.

Coincidentally Lucas has some thoughts on the subject:

In my own rating systems, I finally got code that I was happy with when I stopped thinking about them as measures of goodness. What I started doing instead was use ratings as a probability that a random user in some some well-known context would like something.

Of course most people “like something” when it’s got “goodness” — but I think we all know what he meant.

I still have this fantasy that ccMixter can actually be a place where non-musicians hang out and get good open music, using the edpicks or user picks podcasts as a radio resource. It’s a pretty serious pipe dream because I just can’t imagine Acid Planet or GarageBand is visited by people who aren’t musicians, leave alone ccMixter. For me, ratings is strictly a way to populate those streams.

If you are of a certain age and a certain crowd then you’re supposed to worship Werner Herzog. I am and I don’t. Sorry.

Sundance channel started showing a documentary (hang on) that depicts the making of the music for a Herzog documentary called “Grizzly Man.” The documentary about the music for Grizzly Man is called “In the Edges: The Grizzly Man Session” and is directed by the guy that produced the Grizzly Man.

None of which would be very promising except for one thing: Edges rocks.

The star of Edges is Richard Thomson an amazing musician who does his best to basically ignore the random ramblings of Herzog to do what’s right and create a stunning backdrop for Grizzly. The write up for the film says:

Which is only mainly bullshit. For the most part when the ensemble is playing they are reading from music stands and following the exact same harmonic structure without any other queues. So, yea, they were given leeway, but that’s not quite what “improvis[ing] a musical accompaniment while watching the film” means to me. There are times when this happens (the most impressive when a cellist and bassist are doing exactly that to a fight scene between two bears) but I’m not convinced that doesn’t happen often on smaller movies that use musicians the caliber of Thompson. (I wonder how much more “composing” went into “The Hot Spot” for instance.)

For all of Herzog’s rambling (remember, I am not a fan) every important word, gesture and sound comes from Thompson. He even gives this documentary its title when he says: “Music is the edges.”

The bottom line: forget what you might think about Herzog, or existential hippies, or country folk guitar, or self-congratulating exploitive “documentaries about the making of documentaries” — In the Edges is a great, honest look into the workings of some awesome musicians plying their trade at the top of the field.

Brad has uploaded the “last” of his a cappellas to ccMixter. Actually, this just completes the solo tracks to his “I Don’t Know What I’m Doing” album.

I haven’t done a count recently but at one time he was the most (non-contest-related) remixed artist on the site. Since then we’ve had some phenomenal rap pells by Ms. Vybe (kendra) as well as great rap and R&B stand-bys uploaded by J. Lang and killer spoken word by our resident beat poet eight prime.

Either way, this latest upload (reverse dump?) will no doubt put Brad back in front.