Seems like when I said my brain wasn't working right, what I meant was the headline-writing portion of my brain was broken

One--my girlfriend and I had the chance to see Devendra Banhart over the weekend, capping off a several week string of concerts that included The Decemberists (awesome), Metric (awesome), and the Fiery Furnaces (awesome). While Banhart and the freak-folkers aren't exactly my "scene"--not that I have a particular scene to which I pledge allegiance, and if I did there wouldn't be much outside of that scene that I would swear off--he put on a good show. Man loves his reverb and his echo, that's for sure. We did miss the opening act, which, we were told, involved strategic, blatant use of cross-dressing and Tourette's syndrome. And maybe a drum. Maybe.

Anyways, this whole scene--which, okay, isn't my scene, but which has, it seems, given us Joanna Newsom, whose song "Peach, Plum, Pear" has elicited basically the exact same reaction from everybody I've managed to turn on to it, namely one of initial confusion, followed by a brief period of dread and shock, which leads directly into an all-consuming heroin-mainline level of pure raw addiction--has a sort of creator--Vashti Bunyan--whose music I haven't heard yet, but whose story is simultaneously dreadful and awe-inspiring. In a nutshell: she puts out this album in 1970 which nobody hears and so she quits making music. Then like 30 years later all the kids find the album, decide it's totally the bomb, and elevate her to near sainthood status. Now she's got a new album out and is loved a lot. Nevermind the fact that she pretty much put together her new album using a computer. Folktronica? Somehow, I doubt it. Interviews can be found at Pitchfork and Tiny Mix Tapes.

...

Two--Indieum might possibly be the coolest toy I've yet to play with. Looks like what it does is, it does the work of tracking down all the hot free legal downloads all the MP3 blogs out there offer up on a daily basis and feeds them straight to you without any of that annoying "writing" to clutter up your impressions of the music. What I think is cool here, is, it looks like you can play the music directly from the page, without having to save the files--could be you could use this to determine whether you want to go to the trouble of figuring out where the hell you want to save the file on your harddrive. I do wish the links to the MP3 blog sources went directly to the posts rather than the blog front page, but I guess the point is you shouldn't need to do that, if you're staying on top of things. Or maybe I'm completely wrong about the page and it's actually all about making sushi. I dunno.