Ask The Oracle
Given I tend to listen to fairly alternative stuff it can make finding new music a bit challenging. I can’t get recommendations off my friends, the radio doesn’t play anything remotely close to the genres I like and I no longer go clubbing very often (which was a great source of new bands).
As with most things in life my problem is one that can be solved by the Internet, in this case with last.fm. Bung in an artist or genre you like and it creates your own personalised radio station with similar tracks for your listening pleasure. Links through to iTunes let you purchase any tracks you like and sample other music by the same artist.
One particular track that took my fancy was only to be found on a pretty obscure compilation. Figuring there might be some hidden gems on the rest of the album I bought the whole thing. A wise purchase as it turned out.
One of the tracks that I rated highly on this new album claimed to be Bring Me Violence by Tactical Sekt. Now I’m a bit anal with music and like to have it rated, correctly tagged and resplendent with lyrics so I decide to grab the track lyrics off the web and then investigate Tactical Sekt in more depth.
It’s here I hit a brick wall. It’s not that I couldn’t find the lyrics, it’s that they were completely different. A quick visit to YouTube confirmed that this wasn’t so much a remix but a completely different song. I left it at that and went in search of other artists on the album who were less problematic.
Yesterday during lunch the song popped onto my iPod and I decided to go all out and pin down this track once and for all. Armed with Google I plugged in a quoted search using great chunks of the lyrics. Google returned a result, but for a different band and song entirely: Existence by Solitary Experiments.
Off to iTunes again, turns out that this track is also on the compilation. My search stalled here. I only had part of the album on my phone so I couldn’t tell if it was on the version I’d downloaded.
Fast forward to last night where I was able to sit down in front of the desktop with my master music library and continue the investigation.
First things first, Existence was on the album I had and it was the track before Bring Me Violence. Next I asked Shezam to identify the tracks for me. No luck, too obscure. My next trick was to find Bring me violence on YouTube and compare it against both tracks in iTunes. Bingo! What claimed to be Existence was in fact Bring Me Violence. The track names had been transposed by whoever put the album on iTunes. A further check confirmed the song I like was indeed a heavily remixes version of Existence. Meta data updated I could now rest easy and can now go and instigate Solitary Experiments to see if they have any other ditties I might enjoy.
Shame I hadn’t worked this out before my stag do. The music was such that it would have fitted in nicely if I’d been able to request it. Next time maybe 