Minor backtracking #1: Is beauseless is a word?

I don't know about other bloggers, but I find it difficult enough to keep up with the vast amounts of wonder and stupidity the world throws at me on a daily basis, let alone to then post it online in order to share said discoveries with all those out there in the internets. I try to keep track of various tidbits and webpages in the hope of going back to them at a later date, but this process has now blown out to four word documents and a large section of the to-do list in my diary from two weeks ago. I've decided that now is the time to combat this; that I will retread through my collection of abandoned data, if for no other reason than to finally realise that I really do spend too much time being fascinating by things that aren't really that interesting.

To begin proceedings, I offer you two gems from Wired.com. First of these is a guide to compiling a mix tape, courtesy of DJ Whoo Kid, which will surely come in handy at some point in your life. Secondly, from Wired's How-To-Wiki, is a guide to making a cake shaped like Nintendo's Wii console, which is beautiful. But you can't eat it, which is useless. This is quite annoying, but it's probably just as well; those motion-sensitive controllers would not be pleasant to digest.

Current adventures in pop music: Can you DJ slowcore?

In the midst of the world's craziness, I've found myself listening to Low's album Drums and Guns a great deal over the last couple of months. Definitely one of my favourite albums of the year thus far [no, I can't believe I said that either... let's move along...]. There's lots to like; it's brooding, minimal and epic all at once. It's also mixed in a really strange way that has the majority of the vocals coming out of the right speaker... crazy!

One of the things that has me most interested however, is the video for the song Breaker (which along with the clips for Belarus and a remix of Hatchet, both from Drums and Guns, can be downloaded from their website). A simply designed scene; we see guitarist / vocalist Alan Sparhawk sitting in a kitchen, with drummer / vocalist Mimi Parker and bassist Matt Livingston standing either side of him. In front of a Sparhawk is a piece of cake, the rest of the cake and a glass of milk. A minimal drum line begins, and the band members at the rear begin to clap in time. Once the organ kicks in Sparhawk makes for the uncut portion of the cake, ignoring the slice, and proceeds to make a large mess of things.

Given Alan Sparhawk does all this wearing some sort of military uniform, one could be forgiven for thinking Low are making a none too subtle statement about the political state of their homeland. Sure they might just like cake, but something tells me it's a little bigger than that.

[For the record, despite being so-called pioneers of the slowcore genre, it's a term the band themselves aren't very found of. I'd quote them, but you might as well just read the wikipedia article and be done with it.]