Studio Nibble

Audio Nibble

..."back in the day", we made tapes. Hoo boy, did we ever make tapes. I've got racks of the damned things piled up on top of my record shelves, silently gathering dust in an era of higher-definition formats and online distribution. My friends and I made 'em to share cool music with each other, to show off how we were the first to discover the latest sound, or just to be able to listen to all those records in the car.

SN-NRC33: Nibble 33 I don't think there's any way to overstate the influence that trading tapes with folks from all over with world had on my musical tastes. Yeah, okay, I'm still kind of in love with all that '80s pop crap, still get excited about finding some beat-up 12" dance mix of something by two dorks from Italy that barely got played on Night Flight let alone MTV. But without being part of that insane mix of pop and dance music from around the world I probably wouldn't be listening to music at all anymore. It kicked something off in me that people who shoot heroin can probably relate to. I need to be part of the feed! I need the constant stream of new stuff coming in and out the door seven days a week!

Something happened in the early '90s, I kinda lost the spark on the tape thing. Discovered girls maybe. I root through my drawers of meticulously-labeled compilations now and see where things came to a dead stop: February 1991, SN-NRC33: "Nibble 33". (The titles were definitely getting lame at that point; the days of "Mike Oldfield's Big Twelve Inches" were long over.) I kept on dubbing off CDs to listen to in the car for a few years after that but that doesn't really count...and even those slowed to a trickle after a while as my commute got so short it wasn't worth the trouble of plugging the stereo into the dash anymore.

And soon everyone was losing touch, moving away, stopped giving a shit what everyone else was listening to. One old pal started building MP3 comps in CD-sized chunks but I never was hyped enough about it to join in (no place to host the files, no interest in making a lifestyle out of burning discs for everyone I know...hey, I have a job I like now!)

But...SUDDENLY...I've got the spark again! It's that online thing, kemosabe! One evening I follow a link off the idm list to someone's personal radio station. Seen that before only now there's a twist: a site called live365.com is hosting streaming audio "radio shows" for free! They handle the ASCAP licensing, they pump out the streams, you just play Program Director...build up a list of tracks that get uploaded to their servers and as long as you follow a few "artist-density" rules designed to keep folks from uploading their Smash Mouth collections you're totally legal. I don't know how they make money, and I don't care! Me and my record collection have an audience again! "I feel good...I feel better than James Brown.

Content (You Read This Far, So...)

Audio Nibble 1.0 is my first live365 show. No playlist here yet since one of the "rules" is that you can't distribute one. (ASCAP probably thinks that if people can figure out the next track is the latest Third Eye Blind single, they'll go out of their way to capture a 32kbps MP3 stream of it to their hard drive and never, ever buy the CD. Gee, when you say it that way it sounds almost plausible!) But if I were to describe it to you, I'd say that it's a complete throwback to my old taping days. Lots of stuff that I've been listening to lately, with a few "look what I found!" moments and some older tracks thrown in because I felt like it, dammit! Heavy on the "song" side to open. Modern '80s retro (Les Rythmes Digitales, U2), classic '80s cheez (Happyhead). More beats and energy buildup (Beloved, Adamski's Thing, Yello) but suddenly pow! a dive into trancy pop atmospheres (Shiva, Innocence, Beloved again). Rising out to a steady hip-hop groove (Stetsasonic) we eventually find ourselves in BT & Sasha territory for a few tracks -- even their stab at the Miami Bass sound gets a fair shake! Then inevitably down to the zone of blissy pop to close the playlist (The Buggles, Air, Malcolm McLaren)...and out of the aether, a final surprise.

Audio Nibble 1.0 is low-bandwidth-encoded out of respect to the modem world from whence we came. Ripped by CDRWIN, normalized by Sound Forge, encoded by Xing!, uploaded by The Evil Empire. Shouts to the shoutcasters and the 1-7/8 IPS Posse: Synth, Rip, Sorc, Jeffy, Al, Adam, Cliff, Lars-Ove, Kristian, and "the rest", as we say here on Gilligan's Isle. De-mag your heads every now and then for me.