As a music fan, I’ve always felt it was difficult to follow all the blogs and music sites. I know what you’re thinking, “How hard is it to go to Pitchfork?” Not very. But, it is, however, time consuming to be comprehensive about it. You have Pitchfork, Stereogum, BrooklynVegan, Spinner, SPIN, NME, MTV, Billboard, etc, etc, etc. To go to each site, scan the headlines and click into something can be time consuming.
I solved this.
I created the Ghetto Web Blaster. It crawls a dozen or so of the most important music websites and presents the user with the latest music news.
During the summer of 2009, I took a road trip to Washington DC and Baltimore for a weekend of baseball, beer and crab with some friends. The first stop was in DC at Nationals Park. The ballgame was pretty poorly attended so we found better seats. They just happened to be along the third base line, halfway between third base and the left field pole, four rows back. Awesome.
During the fourth inning a team representative came by looking for volunteers to participate in a dance competition. The winner would receive a recyclable Washington Nationals tote bag for his entire row.
How could I say no?
Demonstrable, Job-Related Skills: A competitive leader that puts his team first and his ego second, no matter how embarrassing the situation may be.
When I was a student at Chico State I DJ’d and later ran the student-run radio station, KCSC, for two years. It was the best experience and I can attribute much of professional achievement to the time I spent at KCSC.
Here are two student-made documentaries I recently rediscovered. Notice the hat…
May 2007:
A great chronicle of KCSC’s long history. Interview and story by Steve Metzger, one of my all-time favorite teachers.
The student-run radio station has endured—and thrived—for more than half a century
Chico State students returning to campus for the spring semester in January 1963 were met, for the first time, with their very own radio station, right [...]
About a year after moving to New York, myself and three friends hailed a cab on our way to a comedy club in Greenwich Village. I like to think we did pretty well for ourselves.
In early 2009, SPIN moved into their new home on Broadway in NYC. We finally had space to bring bands inside the office for intimate, acoustic sessions. Our first was with Metric, who we had filmed six months earlier at Coachella.
For this performance, I set up three Balls from our mic sponsor, Blue, and mixed [...]
In 2008 I was freelancing as an audio engineer for SPIN. We recorded this in the beautiful Indio Valley outside of Palm Springs in the 100-degree heat before day one of Coachella. Jimmy and Emily’s highly intimate performance gave everybody chills – even the birds enjoyed it!
I used just two Shure SM58’s and live mixed [...]
This is an interview I conducted with singer-guitarist Steve Brooks from the metal band Torche for CMJ in 2008. Their LP Meanderthal was epic, heavy and pummeling.
The scalding hot, light-blue flame of a welder’s torch has nothing on the Miami band of the same name (including that final letter “e”). Torche, the unruly pseudo-stoner rock [...]
An interview I did with Paint It Black’s Dan Yemin for CMJ in 2008. Their new album, New Lexicon, was by far my favorite record of the year!
The members of Philadelphia-based hardcore band Paint It Black have had an uncanny knack for being involved in some of the more notable bands of the genre in [...]
This is a feature I wrote in January 2008 for CMJ about the proliferation of watermarked CDs and their effect on the industry.
At the time, it seemed like a huge album was leaking every other day. Today not so much. But, you can’t attribute that to the watermarked CD. I imagine people have become [...]
