Sunday, April 15, 2012

Website Review: The New Shelton Wet/Dry


YouTube claims that one hour of video is uploaded to their website every second. Apple's fiscal reports show that they sell about 262 iPhones every hour—a figure greater than the world's birth rate. According to Wired, the NSA is building an internet surveillance center capable of storing over one yottabyte of information, which equals about 500 quintillion pages of text.

As the world's internet-using population increases, so does the amount of information on the web. This effect is creating an unimaginable wealth of data and content, inevitably producing a staggering amount of clutter to sort through. Fortunately, a number of sites exist solely for the purpose of providing pertinent, interesting, and relevant information and content. A stunning example is a blog called the New Shelton Wet/Dry.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Album Review: RAJA -- Red (2011)



MegaUpload is gone, FileTram is out the window, and Mediafire isn't far behind. File-hosting websites are now a thing of the recent past, and in their place have spawned a legion of artist-run music sharing sites. Every day, thousands of tracks are uploaded to Bandcamp and SoundCloud not by fans but by musicians themselves. 

From the state of New York, a hip-hop beatmaker by the name of RAJA has signed on to both websites, releasing dozens of tracks to fans at no price. Ironically, RAJA's three-part mixtape series titled The October Series, released on Bandcamp for free, sounds almost entirely analog. 
Part 1, simply titled Red, is a 33-track Frankenstein masterpiece, a hodgepodge assortment of drum kits, synthesizers, samples, samples, and more samples.