Ninja Tune turns 20

Ninja Tunes is one of my favorite labels and home to such mega-talents as Coldcut, The Herbalizer, Mr. Scruff, Kid Koala, Funki Porcini — the list goes on and on. Chakra Chip Cookies is tracking stuff from Ninja Tune almost on a daily basis. One of the vinyl junkie gurus at Ninja Tune found an obscure, but interesting track almost by accident. It’s by a band called “BFI” and was actually recorded in LA in the late late ’60s and early ’70s by the four Dragon brothers. The song appeared on a soundtrack to a long-forgotten surf flick and , after almost four decades, was rediscovered by Ninja Tunes. They even released the previously unreleased record. Check out the category-defying “Food for my Soul” from the Dragon brothers, recorded around 1970 in somebody’s basement. Download your own copy of the track, courtesy of IODA Promonet.
The Dragons
“Food For My Soul” (mp3)
from “BFI”
(Ninja Tune)

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Mashups are not age restricted

Mrs. Teller proves that you’re never too old to work those decks and throw some beats downtown. Take a look at her very cool video here.  Reminds me of Mrs. Miller who covered Pet Clark’s “Downtown” and Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’” back in the mid-’60s. Dig it.

Crawdaddy! Reborn!

The grand-daddy, or more accurately, the grand-crawdaddy of rock ‘n’ roll mags & zines is reborn over at Wolfgang’s Vault and worth a read. Jocelyn Hoppa is the new editor and kicks things off with a somewhat adoring profile of Crawdaddy!’s founder, Paul Williams. Hoppa is an unabashed fan of Williams, but she’s so damned sincere, that’s ok. The other thing to check out is the piece by Jason Thomas, “The Day the Music Dies,” about the imminent demise of internet radio as we know it. Unless we stop it by telling our Congresscritters to support HR 1060 without fail.

Podcast Hotel 3

This event is coming up next week in San Francisco and promises to be fairly awesome. I’m looking at podcasting in a big way right now, because the new royalty payments (also known as corporate extortion) may push all of us independent Internet broadcasters to it. We won’t be able to afford the fees for playing music on live365.com. I truly hope that doesn’t happen, but I’ll keep you posted on the appeals now under way. So it’s off to Podcast Hotel 3 for the feel-good, web 2.0, communal partay! All for professional reasons, of course. Check out details at Podcast Hotel –c u thr, y’all.

No news on the webcasters’ future

Wish there was something to report, but I haven’t heard anything new about the new “deal” for Internet broadcasters. If you have any updates, you can comment here — please!  The cool thing is that there’s been a really big spike in listenership of Chakra Chip Cookies. I’ll try to hang on as long as possible, y’all. Maybe our elected representatives will wake up to this obvious heist being orchestrated by the RIAA. Then maybe they’ll pull the plug on them instead of us. We can only hope.

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Is Internet radio doomed?

RIAA: We want it all! Sorry about the scary title for this post, but an obscure body in Washington dropped something nasty into the punchbowl last week. Let’s hope it doesn’t mean the party’s over for all of us independent internet broadcasters. The party-poopers here are the members of the Copyright Royalty Board — the guys who determine how much internet broadcasters have to pay in artist, composer and performance royalties for the music we play. Up to last week, the rates were set low enough for all of us non-profit broadcasters to afford this hobby. Now they are going to hammer us with a huge increase in the rates. This could spell the end of thousands (yes, thousands!) of small internet broadcasters. That really sucks. But here’s what you can do: Sign a petition here and let congress know that you are very concerned about this issue. You can learn more about what this means by visiting Radio Paradise. They’ve done a very good job of explaining the issues and some things you can do about this latest outrage, courtesy of the RIAA and Corporate Broadcasting Greedheads.