Category Archives: Blog

My Top 10 Tracks: The Pansentient League

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If you read this blog then chances are you love music. Music has inspired me throughout my life: in fact according to my mum, when I was a toddler I pointed my chubby little baby finger at the family record player and spoke my very first word: “ec-cord!” I’ve listened to a lot of records since then. And cassette tapes. And CDs. And MP3s. And Spotify streams. I’ve been to hundreds of gigs, sat through recording sessions, manned the merch stalls and dreamed of being a pop star too. But I always failed completely to learn any musical instrument or write any songs; I’ve learned the hard way that it’s best to leave that to the professionals. So here then are my Top 10 favourite tracks by a few of those talented people. Each one is a song that instils a sense of awe and wonder in me, and a delight that gives me goosebumps and pleasure like only music can. I hope you like them.

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Their Top 10 Tracks: Closing Comments

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Last month, I asked about 60 bands and music folk I admire to send me a list of their Top 10 favourite songs, with a few words to say why that song was especially important to them. I said it was for a feature I had planned for my Spotify-injected music blog. Twenty-four of those musical maestros sent in their lists with commentary that was at turns enlightening, amusing, heart-warming, and above all inspiring.

It really has been a pleasure and honour to feature these guys: I want to thank you all for taking the time to respond and for coming up with such excellent and varied lists. You’ve opened my eyes (and hopefully a few reader’s eyes too) to the range and depth of musical inspiration and admiration behind some of my favourite artists around today. Respect!

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Forthcoming Special Feature: Our Top 10 Tracks!

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Starting this weekend and running throughout August, The Pansentient League will be hosting a very special feature, with contributions from a whole galaxy of stars.

Listening to all the great bands that are making music today I often wonder which artists had inspired them: which songs do they cherish, which songs are special to them and made them want to be musicians, which songs did they think were the best-in-genre. So I thought I’d ask! I got in touch with a bunch of my favourite bands and music types and asked them each for a playlist. “Send me a list of 10 of your favourite songs with a brief line or two about each one,” I said. “Let me know why you like it, when you first heard it, how it influenced you etc.” I’m very pleased to say the response rate was fantastic! Some of the tracks they chose I knew well; others I’d maybe heard but never listened to properly; others were completely new to me — the perfect personal recommendation service!

Over the coming month, The Pansentient League will be posting a daily “My Top 10 Tracks” list from bands such as Tenek, I Monster, Mirrors, Oblique, Kings Have Long Arms and Northern Kind. We’ll also be featuring lists from some respected music sites, record labels, Spotify celebs, radio shows and club nights. And each list will include a Spotify Playlist so that you can listen in while reading what the bands have to say. To kick things off, Chi Ming Lai from The Electricity Club will be here to tell us his favourite songs. Stay tuned!

Pansentient League Top 20 Posts

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The Pansentient League is a blog that’s mostly about music-streaming service Spotify, but I also mix in features on Google Android (my smartphone OS of choice), Apple iPhone (Spotify’s smartphone of choice 😉 ) and my favourite music genres (synthpop, electro, industrial and psytrance). This might seem a bit schizophrenic, but the overall theme of music and technology hopefully ties all this together: there’s nothing I enjoy more than listening to electro music using Spotify on my Google Android smartphone. Well, almost nothing :p

Here’s a self-indulgent list of the Top 20 posts on this blog (based on number of views) since the start of the year, including a look at the most popular categories.

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Entropically Yours…. The Pansentient League Album

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I love music but I’m no musician. I’m constantly in awe at the skill of all the artists featured here on this blog and wish with all my heart that I was half as talented as them. But one day I had an idea for a concept album and thought that perhaps half a talent might just be enough. And so I set about producing my own remix album.

Below is the complete album “Entropically Yours…. The Pansentient League” in a new remastered and remixed form. It features twelve of my Human League remixes, blended and sequenced into a science-fiction adventure that tells the story of a young universe growing up, birthing stars and sentience, then inexorably heading towards oblivion. Will entropy win, or will the league of humans and pan-sentients prevail? Find out in the next hour!

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Pansentient League v3.2

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A few minor tweaks and changes to this blog: I’ve added a few little Google AdSense ads elements that will appear at the bottom of posts and along the side of a couple of other pages. You’ll also see an extended Bookmark & Share widget on posts now, as well as Facebook like buttons.

In other news, I’m now in-between jobs so I’m taking a bit of time off for a holiday. I’ll be soaking up the rays in sunny Portugal for week or two, so stay tuned for fresh updates once I return!

Pansentient League’s Spotify Primer

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To our new Dutch readers and the rest of you new music fans, welcome to the Pansentient League, a blog that’s (mostly) about music-streaming service Spotify. You’ll find all sorts of Spotify-related articles and links on this site, as well as some reviews and news about my favourite music genres and the occasional post on science-fiction books and gadgets.

If you’re new to Spotify, here’s a primer with some of the best links and resources to help you get the most out of Europe’s most awesome music service.

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Pansentient League’s Memetic Growth

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Here’s a bit of self- indulgence: a post about an online linguistic experiment. Normal service will resume shortly!

A few years ago, I made up some new words and seeded them on the Internet to see how much they’d grow. I posted the new words on this blog (here’s the original post) then strategically placed them on a few other sites and forums. At the time, all these words resulted in zero results when searching for them on Google. A few months later I googled the words to see how much they’d spread: not very much at all. I soon forgot all about this little experiment, forgot all about the new words except for one: pansentient.

Today I googled my words again and had a bit of a shock: since the last time I checked, my word “paramementic” has grown by 92% and the word “multifrantic” by a reasonable 487%. But googling pansentient, the number of results has rocketed by an amazing 65,500%!!

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What’s New on Spotify: Resolved! (kinda)

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Here’s a temporary solution to the problem of Spotify’s lack of new-release updates. Following my post about it last week (and the related support thread), reader Steve (digithed) suggested reading Spotify’s metadata API with a query on albums tagged as new. Coding wizard Andy Smith (of spotibot fame) then stepped in to help implement the XML output as a webpage: the result is this auto-generated list of new releases! There are a few caveats though and this is merely a stop-gap solution. Read on for more detail.
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